Strategy, Technology, and Infinite Curiosity
Mexico City
Joined April 2008
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Roberto Zoia Nesta retweeted
My Claude found a critical zero day vulnerability in the Code of Hammurabi, unnoticed by developers for 3,779 years.
Roberto Zoia Nesta retweeted
I’m sure this one won’t make anyone angry. (But probably not here.)
daringfireball.net/2026/10/x…
Roberto Zoia Nesta retweeted
Here is the story of what happened to Bill's daughter, Lucy.
"They found her lying on the floor of her apartment, barely breathing, face down on the right side."
Roberto Zoia Nesta retweeted
Breaking: @Pioneer__Labs has engineered a microbe able to live on Mars, consuming solely nutrients found on the planet to create building materials.
I interviewed @erika_alden_d, the CEO, to learn how they did it and what might come next. Much of the interview was about bottlenecks to growing life on Mars; the planet has tons of water, but only in the form of ice. (If you melted all that ice, it would create an ocean 100 feet deep across the entire planet!)
Similarly, we talked about the dirt. Martian regolith has salts, heavy metals, and perchlorates that are toxic to many organisms. Some microbes on Earth are able to break down these toxins, though, so Pioneer is engineering them to make them better at eating those toxins while adding nutrients back into the soil. This could possibly help support plant life in the future.
Watch the full episode and subscribe to @AsimovPress for more.
0:00 A first microbe engineered for Mars
5:03 Simulating Martian chemistry
8:27 The five "pioneer species"
17:20 Water, warming, and nitrogen
26:39 Radiation, growth rates, and poor measurements
35:49 Starship
41:05 Why create a second biosphere?
Roberto Zoia Nesta retweeted
This is now a GLM 5.3 household:
ericpardee.github.io/fire-hd…
Roberto Zoia Nesta retweeted
I've started a new company: @superlogical! We're going to begin by building a terminal multiplexer. The entire vision is much larger, but the multiplexer is the foundation. Sign up for the newsletter to get beta access and devlogs (product updates only I promise).
superlogical.com/
Roberto Zoia Nesta retweeted
The Matrix took its name from a 1984 novel written on a manual typewriter by a man who didn't own a computer. 42 years later, that novel finally gets its own screen.
William Gibson typed Neuromancer on a 1927 Hermes portable. He coined "cyberspace" before he'd ever logged onto anything. The book swept the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick award in the same year, the only novel ever to take all three.
Then Hollywood spent four decades strip-mining it while calling it unfilmable. The Wachowskis lifted the matrix, the jacked-in hackers, the AI pulling strings behind a corporate veil. Every razor-girl assassin in sci-fi traces back to Molly. Johnny Mnemonic, an actual Gibson adaptation, flopped so hard in 1995 that studios treated his work as radioactive for a generation.
At least five directors attached and detached over the years. Chris Cunningham in 2000. Vincenzo Natali in 2010. Tim Miller at Fox in 2017. Each attempt died the same death. By the time the technology existed to film Neuromancer, audiences had watched its ideas in a dozen movies that borrowed them first.
The original became unfilmable because it looked like a copy of its own copies.
Now the timing loops back on itself. A story about a rogue AI maneuvering to escape its corporate constraints, written before the web existed, lands in January 2027 as the least speculative thing on television.
And one detail makes the whole arc perfect. When Neuromancer royalties came in, Gibson bought his first computer, an Apple IIc. Four decades later, Apple is the company putting his book on screen.
Roberto Zoia Nesta retweeted
I’m proud of Quake. We all are. Quake changed games forever. That said...
There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days.
Quake was overly ambitious technically. We could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times. The follow up game could have then brought in full 6DOF environments and characters.
I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points.
On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better.
One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology provided a richer palette. Romero covered that well, which set our company expectations early on.
We should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier, but there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t.
Sorry, Sandy.
Roberto Zoia Nesta retweeted
We're launching Intercept, a new philanthropic initiative to fight respiratory viruses like colds and flus. interceptfund.com/
Roberto Zoia Nesta retweeted
DROP EVERYTHING
The bible for running LLMs locally is now available online to read for free
Covers what to use on
- Laptop / edge / odd hardware
- Mac-first workflows
- Single RTX GPUs
- 2-4+ NVIDIA / CUDA GPUs
- General production serving
- Long-context / MoE / routing
- NVIDIA max performance
- Cluster orchestration
Software
- llama.cpp
- MLX / MLX-LM
- ExLlamaV2
- ExLlamaV3
- vLLM
- SGLang
- TensorRT-LLM
- NVIDIA Dynamo
You should read this, and if you cannot now then you most definitely wanna bookmark it for later
Local AI FTW
Roberto Zoia Nesta retweeted
Love seeing people build better software for reluctant operators of small businesses.
The baker who ends up running a bakery. The hair stylist who ends up with their own salon. And here, the doctors and dentists who end up with their own practice.
More attention on these small businesses, please. We've been building for them for two+ decades, and I can tell you they're starved for great, straightforward software.
I'd bet on these guys. They've got the dirt of real work in the field under their fingernails. There's no better way to know than to do.
Today, we're introducing Lassie and $47M in funding led by a16z.
We're building AI that runs small businesses, starting with doctors' offices.
Lassie is already trusted by 700+ practices across the country, working autonomously to provide them with 30 hours of labor per month.
To get here, we first had to leave Robinhood and Superhuman to work in offices ourselves.
Here's how that went.
I love their approach: first they sat on the dentist's office to understand the problem and how things were run. Then, build.
Seeing so many people doing it backwards these days...
Today, we're introducing Lassie and $47M in funding led by a16z.
We're building AI that runs small businesses, starting with doctors' offices.
Lassie is already trusted by 700+ practices across the country, working autonomously to provide them with 30 hours of labor per month.
To get here, we first had to leave Robinhood and Superhuman to work in offices ourselves.
Here's how that went.
Roberto Zoia Nesta retweeted
You can’t outwork the whole world. There’s always going to be someone somewhere willing to work as hard as you. Someone just as hungry. Or hungrier.
Assuming you can work harder and longer than someone else is giving yourself too much credit for your effort and not enough for theirs. Putting in 1,001 hours to someone else’s 1,000 isn’t going to tip the scale in your favor.
What’s worse is when management holds up certain people as having a great “work ethic” because they’re always around, always available, always working. That’s a terrible example of a work ethic and a great example of someone who’s overworked.
A great work ethic isn’t about working whenever you’re called upon. It’s about doing what you say you’re going to do, putting in a fair day’s work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with.
So how do people get ahead if it’s not about outworking everyone else?
People make it because they’re talented, they’re lucky, they’re in the right place at the right time, they know how to work with other people, they know how to sell an idea, they know what moves people, they can tell a story, they know which details matter and which don’t, they can see the big and small pictures in every situation, and they know how to do something with an opportunity. And for so many other reasons.
So get the outwork myth out of your head. Stop equating work ethic with excessive work hours. Neither is going to get you ahead or help you find calm.
[The Outwork Myth — It Doesn't Have To Be Crazy At Work, 2018]