2025-12-20
“The core issue is that benchmarks are almost by construction verifiable environments and are therefore immediately susceptible to RLVR and weaker forms of it via synthetic data generation.”
karpathy
2025 LLM Year in Review: shift toward RLVR, Claude Code emerged as the first convincing example of an LLM agent, Nano Banana was paradigm shifting, and more
Andrej Karpathy / karpathy :
2024-12-01
Huh. I wrote about Libra for TC when it launched, and was always puzzled by why and how it just fizzled out...
@davidmarcus
Ex-Meta crypto chief David Marcus says there was no legal or regulatory angle for the government to kill its Libra project and “it was 100% a political kill”
For reasons you can guess at, debanking has been the topic du jour in my Twitter feed. Tyler Durden / ZeroHedge News : FinTech CEOs Expose How Feds Colluded In ‘Debanking’ Schemes ...
2024-11-30
Huh. I wrote about Libra for TC when it launched, and was always puzzled by why and how it just fizzled out...
@davidmarcus
Ex-Meta crypto chief David Marcus says there was no legal or regulatory angle for the government to kill its Libra project and “it was 100% a political kill”
How Libra Was Killed. I never shared this publicly before, but since @pmarca opened the floodgates on @joerogan's pod, it feels appropriate to shed more light on this. As a reminde...
2024-08-05
It was only ever a matter of not-very-much time (from Lucas Shaw's https://www.bloomberg.com/...) [image]
Bloomberg
Music streaming has exited its high-growth era, as big streaming services pick up fewer new subscribers, causing revenue shortfalls for music labels
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg :
2024-02-05
Excellent piece by @DannyCrichton on the trials and travails of our joint alma mater TechCrunch. If TC—which was, as Danny notes, in its heyday a site where one could reasonably expect ~100K views on a post—can't make it, you have to wonder who can. https://www.luxcapital.com/...
Securities
TechCrunch+'s founding editor about its launch to complement TechCrunch's ads and events revenue and its failure due to issues with finding business reporters
2024-02-04
Excellent piece by @DannyCrichton on the trials and travails of our joint alma mater TechCrunch. If TC—which was, as Danny notes, in its heyday a site where one could reasonably expect ~100K views on a post—can't make it, you have to wonder who can. https://www.luxcapital.com/...
Securities
TechCrunch+'s founding editor about its launch to complement TechCrunch's ads and events revenue and its failure due to issues with finding business reporters
January was a brutal month for journalists, globally from death and locally from layoffs. The latter hit home this week … Threads: @firstadopter . Mastodon: @carnage4life@mas.to ....
2023-11-28
""Without realizing it, we were gradually overmatched by a superior intelligence, until he ended up controlling us in ways that are too subtle for us to even explain," thought the AI-nervous board of OpenAI. I love them." https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Bloomberg
How OpenAI's leadership chaos points to lingering governance issues and could affect its business prospects ahead of fundraising at an $86B valuation
Also Binance's guilty plea and Finnish electricity prices. — OpenAI — Ten days ago OpenAI was worth $86 billion.
2023-02-06
“I'm trying not to use the kind of hyperbole of really grand pronouncements, because I am a nuts-and-bolts person. Even with the rocketry stuff, I wasn't talking about colonizing Mars, I was talking about which bolts I'm using to hold things together.” https://dallasinnovates.com/ ...
Dallas Innovates
Q&A with former Oculus CTO John Carmack about his AGI startup Keen, how to “solve” AGI, how AGI could impact the economy, AI companies' “groupthink”, and more
Dallas Innovates :
2022-10-26
I'm obviously hugely biased (while I'm not & have never been a GitHub employee, I have worked on their Archive Program over the last three years) but nonetheless this is legitimately impressive https://techcrunch.com/...
TechCrunch
Microsoft says GitHub has a $1B ARR and 90M+ active users, up from a reported $200M to $300M in ARR and 28M active users when Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch :
I'm obviously hugely biased (while I'm not & have never been a GitHub employee, I have worked on their Archive Program over the last three years) but nonetheless this is legitimately impressive https://techcrunch.com/...
Microsoft
Microsoft reports Q1 revenue up 11% YoY to $50.1B, net income down 14% YoY to $17.6B, Office Commercial revenue up 7% YoY, LinkedIn up 17% YoY; stock drops 5%+
REDMOND, Wash. — October 25, 2022 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended September 30 …
2022-08-11
Facebook's new motto: “Move Slow and Don't Break A Hip” https://twitter.com/...
Pew Research Center
An in-depth look at US teenagers and social media in 2022: 95% say they use YouTube, 67% use TikTok, 62% use Instagram, 59% use Snapchat, and 32% use Facebook
TikTok has established itself as one of the top online platforms for U.S. teens, while the share of teens who use Facebook has fallen sharply
2022-04-30
“Free cash flow decreased to an outflow of $18.6 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with an inflow of $26.4 billion for the trailing twelve months ended March 31, 2021.” https://www.businesswire.com/ ... For Amazon of all companies, famously FCF-focused, this seems...relevant.
Business Wire
Amazon reports Q1 revenue up 7% YoY to $116.4B, $3.8B net loss vs. $8.1B net income in Q1 2021, and AWS revenue up 37% YoY; stock down 10%+ on weak Q2 guidance
“Free cash flow decreased to an outflow of $18.6 billion for the trailing twelve months, compared with an inflow of $26.4 billion for the trailing twelve months ended March 31, 2021.” https://www.businesswire.com/ ... For Amazon of all companies, famously FCF-focused, this seems...relevant.
Wall Street Journal
Insider Intelligence: Amazon has the largest market share of US e-commerce at ~39%, but it grew by just 0.2% in 2021 and 2022 so far, the slowest rate in years
Tech giant remains nation's leading online retailer, but signs of weakness have emerged recently
2021-10-13
Didn't we do this ten years ago? “The Long Tail means the Internet enables huge throngs to make a comfortable living from being a maker/creator/artist!” (Fifteen minutes later) “We regret to inform you that The Long Tail was a myth.” https://twitter.com/...
Wall Street Journal
Analysis of leaked data from 4.9M Twitch accounts: the top 1% of streamers made over half of the money paid out in 2021, 3/4 made under $120, and more
2021-10-01
“None of this is to say that this is okay, or that Facebook shouldn't be trying to figure out ways to minimize people using the sites being made to feel worse about themselves. But the reporting decisions here do raise some questions.” https://www.techdirt.com/...
Techdirt
WSJ's Facebook Files don't show that Facebook's execs are evil or incompetent, but highlight their hubris in believing they can get things back under control
Read in app Shannon Bond / NPR : Senators Blast Facebook For Concealing Instagram's Risks To Kids Tweets: Laura Edelson / @lauraedelson2 : So now it is abundantly clear. @JeffHorwi...
“None of this is to say that this is okay, or that Facebook shouldn't be trying to figure out ways to minimize people using the sites being made to feel worse about themselves. But the reporting decisions here do raise some questions.” https://www.techdirt.com/...
TechCrunch
Senators grilled Facebook exec Antigone Davis at a hearing about Instagram's impact on teens and were frustrated by her reticence to answer questions directly
Last night, Facebook published two annotated slide decks in an attempt to contextualize the documents that the Wall Street Journal published … Source: Senate Commerce Committee .
2021-09-08
Ugh. This “allowing users to report abuse is the same as intrusive corporate surveillance” utter nonsense is at best risibly ignorant, and at worst outright disingenuous and deliberately misleading. I expect a lot better of Pro Publica. https://twitter.com/...
ProPublica
Investigation finds Facebook has over 1,000 contractors moderating private WhatsApp messages and images that were reported by users
2021-07-29
This is outrageous. ...Neuromancer preceded Snow Crash by eight years, I'll have you know. https://twitter.com/...
Facebook
Facebook reports Q2 revenue of $29.08B, up 56% YoY, MAUs of 2.9B, up 7% YoY, headcount of 63,404, up 21% YoY; stock down ~3% on warning of revenue slowdown
“We had a strong quarter as we continue to help businesses grow and people stay connected,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO.
2021-03-29
Oh dear: “IBM and the state insist user data will be kept confidential thanks to the use of blockchain technology” https://gothamist.com/... (I am not necessarily anti-blockchain but its use is not automagical privacy/security pixie dust)
USA Today
NY State launches first US “vaccine passport” app, Excelsior Pass, built on IBM's blockchain-based health pass platform, to be used initially at large venues
USA Today :
2021-02-16
“There's a small, lonely-looking lump of conservatives over on the right. That undoubtedly includes Peter Thiel and a few other prominent conservatives. But they are iconoclasts within an industry that leans very strongly to the left.” https://noahpinion.substack.com/ ...
Noahpinion