Paul Graham retweeted
Been running Opus 5.5 agents over the notebooks of Gauss, Riemann, Hilbert and Grothendieck. around 12,000 pages so far. Heres the best finding so far:
Riemann's 1860 shock wave paper is famous for getting the energy part wrong however his unpublished sheets at Göttingen have it right the Rankine Hugoniot conditions a decade or two before Rankine and Hugoniot plus results usually dated 19061937, all in his own notation. A second sheet in another folder has the same physics.
There are probably thousands of potential undiscovered stuff in the research papers of the smartest ever to live imo all of them should be made public and reviewed by ai years of work can probably be transcribed by agents in days
Paul Graham retweeted
Across our projects @GoogleDeepMind, we are witnessing a genuine phase transition in the pace of scientific discovery. You will see a glimpse of this in our releases in the next few weeks.
Paul Graham retweeted
"One research group wanted to study ten men in the North of England who ate five or more servings of fruit and vegetables a day. They couldn’t find any, though, so had to lower their target to three servings."
stevestewartwilliams.com/p/w…
Paul Graham retweeted
Maybe both parties keep mistaking voter rejection of their opponents’ agenda for an endorsement of their own sweeping platform, when voters really just want a president who fixes the proverbial potholes.
Paul Graham retweeted
'Two Lily Bulbs.' (1952) Eliot Hodgkin was a meticulous painter of still life and as good at detail as the 18thC German botanist and artist Georg Ehret or Pierre-Joseph Redouté; it has botanical accuracy, aesthetic appeal and is painted with great affection for his subject.
Andrew McCarthy in The National Review on what caused the Republicans to lose so badly in the midterms.
20 years ago there was a building in SF that was nicknamed the Y Scraper because so many YC founders lived there. They just had a reunion and it makes me so happy to see them all. One thing you can say for sure about YC: no investor's founders become closer friends.
Paul Graham retweeted
I admit that I completely broke down today. I cried uncontrollably. I couldn’t hold myself together after witnessing what I saw with my own eyes.
Today, we went to film a journalistic report inside the displacement tents along the seashore. I swear, what we witnessed was beyond what any human being should have to endure.
I saw men crying bitterly. Men I had never seen cry when they lost their children or when their homes were destroyed. Today, I saw them crying because they were powerless to do the simplest thing: protect their children from the water and the cold.
We spoke to families who told us they had spent the entire night carrying their children in their arms after floodwater covered the floors of their tents and soaked their mattresses. They couldn’t find a single dry place to put their children. They couldn’t even give them a few hours of sleep.
I saw children no older than five, without proper clothes to protect them from the cold, without heating, and without a dry place to sleep. Children shivering inside tents that cannot keep out the rain, protect them from the wind, or provide even the most basic sense of safety.
What more must happen for this world to act? How much more suffering must people endure before someone remembers that they are human beings?
I am sick of this world. I am sick of its hypocrisy and empty slogans. To hell with a world that talks endlessly about human rights while leaving children to drown inside their tents. To hell with everyone who has witnessed this suffering and chosen silence, and to hell with the governments and institutions that have the power to act but continue to turn their backs on us.
Paul Graham retweeted
Replit was building toward the AI coding era years before it had a name. In 2024, the company shipped an agent that could take a request in plain English, work through errors, provision its own infrastructure, and keep going until the software actually worked. The model companies even reached out to ask how Replit had pulled it off.
Co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad had been thinking about making programming radically more accessible since 2008, and Replit’s original pitch deck predicted AI-generated code before the Transformer paper was published. Today, that same technology is moving into banks, manufacturers, and other large companies, where Amjad says teams are replacing software projects once scoped at $10 million with $250,000 of Replit.
On How to Build the Future, @paulg sits down with @amasad to talk about why @Replit was so well positioned when coding agents arrived, what comes after vibe coding, and his bigger vision for the “self-driving company,” where AI agents increasingly build and operate the software a company needs.
00:00 - "You guys basically invented vibe coding"
02:43 - Watching users copy-paste from ChatGPT
05:27 - The origins of Replit
08:00 - People underestimate their ability to predict the future
10:27 - Grieving the craft
12:52 - A culture of obsessing over users
15:13 - Why enterprises pick Replit
17:28 - The agent was just another user
20:17 - It barely worked, and users loved it
23:13 - $10 million projects now for $250,000
25:45 - Sandboxing for humans
28:14 - "The self-driving company"
30:34 - The way AI flows into companies
33:28 - What Steve Jobs knew before the iPad
35:59 - Killing the sacred cow
38:25 - The rest of the world is two years behind
41:15 - The compute brought on AI
43:46 - The person who assumes dramatic change
The famous Zenith cal 135. The competition version won the Neuchâtel trials every year from 1950 to 1954. The secret is the huge balance wheel (the gold wheel at lower left with the coiled spring in the middle).
Paul Graham retweeted
The worst-performing Democrats in competitive Senate races were the candidates Bernie endorsed. (link in next tweet, no paywall)
In office hours with a startup, I suggested they focus on selling to their batchmates, because it would be both the real test of whether their product was good and also the best influence on its evolution. They went to work, and they just crossed 10% of the batch using it.
"A supersonic engine looks much more like a power turbine than any other jet engine, because it's about continuous full power operation in demanding high temperature environments."
Carolynn and I are back for a special episode with Blake Scholl of @boomsupersonic about their amazing recent transformation, from losing Rolls Royce as their engine supplier to financing development of the airliner by selling gas turbines.
pod.link/1677066062/episode/…
Paul Graham retweeted
It seems to me that democracy has on the whole worked very well in America over the last decade, and perhaps better than in any other major country in the West. National outcomes have repeatedly been responsive to underlying voter preferences on meaningful questions, and significant changes in policy have ensued. I’ve been reading Democracy in America this past week, and it’s striking how much it still rhymes nearly two centuries later.
Paul Graham retweeted
Rippling is celebrating a remarkable business milestone. We added over $150mm in nnARR in a single quarter in Q3. A big part of that is the growth of Rippling AI.
I'm incredibly grateful to our employees and customers for believing in us - thank you.
Paul Graham retweeted
I wonder if Boeing and Airbus are using AI to find corner case bugs in flight control software. Could AI have found the MCAS bug before it killed 346?
If you see a vintage watch polished to a mirror finish, that's a bad sign. Polishing soft gold cases reduces them to shapeless blobs. The lugs on this watch were originally sharply faceted, but you can't even tell anymore.
Paul Graham retweeted
The last 10 years are probably the most remarkable low-unemployment period in American history—punctuated, ofc, by the crazy, destabilizing pandemic.
The three years before COVID were the then-third longest streak of under 4.5% unemployment and the five years and counting since we recovered from COVID are the longest, and counting. (via @jasonfurman)
Even in periods of intense technological anguish, public anger, and whiplashing political change, at least some things are just quietly and consistently good.
Paul Graham retweeted
Pretty incredible that one bill a) creates 100,000 jobs, b) reduces Americans' monthly bills, and c) reduces greenhouse gas emissions
