I haven’t been there since 2015. Genuine question - if you walk from Moscone to the ferry building (a common thing I’d do during WWDC’s), is it pretty much a safe walk for a young woman at night now?
I know this is a short walk, but it’s basically the only personal datapoint I have. Felt like it was gradually decaying the three times I was there, in 2013-2015.
Bad investors and a dysfunctional board can destroy a company. When late-stage investors push to fire the CEO, they often do so to install a puppet CEO who will give them greater control over the board. This allows them to prioritize financial decisions that serve their own interests, often at the expense of other shareholders, such as early employees, whom they disregard.
You make a fair point. I would have liked him to elaborate more on the potential acquisition that was declined.
However, he mentioned they just raised $60 million. If his approach wasn’t working, why would anyone invest that amount? And if the plan was to fire him, given that his vote was required, wouldn’t it have been more transparent to say upfront: “If you reject the acquisition and opt for this $60 million investment instead, we’re going to fire you”?
1. Play a sport like basketball - join a league. You will run and not even notice
2. Workout outside if nice. Or in winter open a window to let fresh air in. A lot of people get stuffy and tired inside working out bc the carbon level in the room will build up.
It does not beat Claude Sonnet 3.5 on SWE Bench (42 to Claude's 50). It chooses 4 benchmarks of the 100s of available benchmarks and then decides it "beats" Claude Sonnet 3.5.
I'm not aware of 100 coding benchmarks, but there are over 100 LLM benchmarks. This makes sense, as there will eventually be at least one benchmark for each human task.
In addition to automated benchmarks, there are also human-rated evaluations, such as Chatbot Arena.
I manually tested DeepSeek v3 against Claude 3.5 Sonnet. In my human evaluation, Claude 3.5 Sonnet outperformed DeepSeek v3, and it also outperforms DeepSeek v3 on SWE Bench. Therefore, the title of the post claiming "DeepSeek v3 beats Claude 3.5 Sonnet and is way cheaper" is wrong.
That said, I was surprised by how well it performed. Its fast. Ironically, I have a paid Claude Team Plan. At the same time I was conducting the evaluations, Claude was experiencing performance issues - https://status.anthropic.com and DeepSeek v3 was not. This is telling for the state of chip sale restrictions.
So, here’s the thing about 400-year bonds: they’re weird. Most sovereign entities don’t even last 200 years, so issuing one feels less like a financial plan and more like performance art. But sometimes these things actually make sense. Take Elsken Jorisdochter: she bought a bond for 1,200 guilders, got 75 guilders annually (tax-free, mind you), and after 16 years, it was repaid. Not bad.
But this wasn’t just finance for finance’s sake. The bond funded flood protections for the dangerous, waterlogged land where she and her family lived. It kept her community safe. Yet all people talk about is, “Wow, she bought a really old bond!” No, she made a real investment in her family and neighbors’ future. The 400-year part? That’s just the headline.
This is the best time in history to research AI and get paid for it.
I respect your perspective and acknowledge I might be missing key context since I didn’t attend the conference. That said, one interpretation is that you’re grappling with the rapid acceleration of innovation—a pace you’ve helped shape. Challenges that once seemed distant now feel imminent, creating a mix of excitement and unease, like the moment a rollercoaster drop starts to terrify.
Because it works. The Vikings embodied a mindset of skaldic pragmatism: doing things because they worked, without needing to understand or optimize them.
Our bodies are Vikings. Our minds still want to know why.
I'm pretty sure the Vikings understood their craft very well. You don't become a maritime power that pillages all of Europe and reaches the New World long before Columbus without understanding how things work.
From Scandinavian countries to Malta, you only have to cabotage, but that does not mean they used the same boat in one travel, most likely they progressed from outpost to outpost, where one generation settled in one outpost and the new generation searched for new adventures abroad.
For perspective, the Roman empire imported tin from Scotland (~3500 miles/~5600km).
On the contrary, going from Norway to Iceland, then from Iceland to Greenland, and then to Vinland in a few generations is a great maritime feat.
I'm sure they did too, but its a chicken-and-egg problem: Did the Vikings build ships through trial and error and only later understand the physics behind it, or did they learn the physics first and use that knowledge to build their ships?
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