The Wisdom Wall
9 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.
“If AI is electricity, like in electricity, all the value didn't accrete to the people who made the turbine generators. It went to the people who made the tools that ran on electricity.”
“The real issue is that consolidation bred conformity, and the conformity pushed out all the heretics. It pushed out all the founder personalities that you need to make this stuff really work.”
“and so if you've built an entire enterprise that runs, assuming some model is going to exist in perpetuity, that's probably not going to work out that well for you. So you're going to have to have this constant ability to evaluate and, and, Run these models in parallel to develop the conviction you need, not only for…”
“It's like we just developed this extreme ownership mentality because anytime we outsourced even an iota of responsibility, it blew up in our face. And that's, you can see for deployed engineering as like the extreme manifestation of that, that we're going to somehow have total control over the implementation because…”
“really preserving what's at the core of this is like, this is an artist colony, not a factory. You know, I don't really know what your career progression is going to be. And if you want certainty on that, this is definitely not the right place”
“these projects working or not come down to a handful of really exceptional individuals being present, taking ownership and leading the way.”
“So don't, don't sell out for the opioid of a linear career progression with a clearly mapped out path. I'm pretty sure that's retarding.”
“Where I think it gets to be really valuable is if you kind of thought about it like a CI check in programming, where it's like, I'm proposing a change to a system here. How can I understand it? Like, is that change going to work? What are the unintended consequences of it? If I make that change, what are the new…”
“Well, one of the most devastating consequences of it being so kind of below the waterline, something we don't want to talk about, is the normalization of, like, what can you do about it? A sort of nihilism and acceptance, uh, uh, a pessimism that anything can be done about it, which is obviously not the necessary…”