HN user

ThomPete

14,837 karma

Principal Designer Block https://www.block.xyz thomasp@block.xyz

Former

CEO Faktory.com

Co-Founder Hello Group (Acquired in 2017 by www.thenorthalliance.com)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thompete/

Square, 80/20, HelloGroup, MetaDesign alumni

Essays: http://www.000fff.org

meet.hn/city/us-New-York

Socials: - x.com/hello_world

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Posts357
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github.com 1mo ago

Show HN: Block/buzz: a workspace built for teams of humans and agents

ThomPete
21pts7
www.doc.cc 1y ago

A brief history of the numeric keypad

ThomPete
74pts19
investments.yale.edu 1y ago

Yale looking for 5 new fund managers to build fund with $50M each

ThomPete
1pts0
phys.org 2y ago

Quantum device to slow down simulated chemical reaction 100B times

ThomPete
2pts0
thomas-petersen.medium.com 3y ago

2023 Predictions

ThomPete
2pts0
twitter.com 3y ago

Query and show images in native ChatGPT

ThomPete
18pts6
www.youtube.com 3y ago

Google’s New AI: Fly into Photos

ThomPete
18pts3
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: What is the most interesting use of AI you've seen?

ThomPete
1pts1
thomas-petersen.medium.com 4y ago

Layer Zero, the Moral Case for Web3

ThomPete
3pts0
en.wikipedia.org 4y ago

Tensegrity

ThomPete
6pts2
thomas-petersen.medium.com 5y ago

There is no Shortage of Resources, only a Shortage of Knowledge

ThomPete
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: What is the most controversial course you wish someone would provide?

ThomPete
2pts2
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: What are some really interesting startups you heard about?

ThomPete
9pts3
www.youtube.com 5y ago

MicroConf on Air: The SaaS Podcast Awards

ThomPete
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: What Back-of-the-Napkin Calculation Should Everyone learn?

ThomPete
23pts17
news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: What is the best quote you ever heard?

ThomPete
16pts26
science.sciencemag.org 5y ago

Behavioral nudges reduce failure to appear for court

ThomPete
2pts0
www.nature.com 5y ago

Browser for exploring temporal, population-wide disease progression patterns

ThomPete
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Have you realized you can live without during this pandemic?

ThomPete
1pts1
www.youtube.com 6y ago

Commodore 64 left outside for over a decade Could it still work?

ThomPete
1pts0
www.bloomberg.com 6y ago

People Who Work from Home Earn $2k More a Year

ThomPete
1pts0
www.wsj.com 6y ago

The Worlds That AI Might Create

ThomPete
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: I think I was just scammed for my card/bank details. What should I do?

ThomPete
12pts7
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: What are some simple CRMs that work for a small venture studio?

ThomPete
11pts2
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges/annoyances with working on remote teams?

ThomPete
1pts0
spectrum.ieee.org 7y ago

Charles Babbage and the Turk

ThomPete
7pts0
cdn.shopify.com 7y ago

Evolution of the Alphabet

ThomPete
1pts0
mitchvollebregt.com 7y ago

NeuroEvolution on Autonomous Car Pathing

ThomPete
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Ask HN: If you are in the construction industry what do you use your mobile for?

ThomPete
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Ask HN: What products and technologies will made possible and feasible by 5G?

ThomPete
1pts2

Network effect is the moat not domain expertise. Domain expertise build on network effect (for instance the knowledge of the network) yes, but just simple domain expertise is only a training round way.

Since it's inception in 1993, not a single global top 100 company have been created by any of the EU countries so the struggle is real.

However I would strongly caution against thinking that reducing paperwork to set up your company is somehow going to magically solve any of the fundamental problems with EUs ability to create sector dominating companies. But even if we assumed it would, that just means that the bigger companies now have even more leverage.

The real problem is deeper. It's about how EU is designed and structured. EU was created as a way to harmonize and standardize regulation between member countries to make trade simpler. (Anyone remember the cucumber directive)

However as technology have improved and manufacturing started supporting a much more bespoke and customized world, the union started started looking at other forms of regulation that went deeper, each step: expanded central authority and reduced national discretion

We've seen things like one EU Patent court, GDPR, Cookie Law, AI Act, monetary currency all attempts at improving the efficiency of the single market, in reality, none of that have changed the fact that the EU still have not created a single industry leader since it's inception.

It's simply impossible to create a SpaceX, Tesla, Uber, OpenAI, Nvdia, Airbnb, even X, Linkedin or Facebook in Europe, not because of bureaucracy but because of the following 3 things:

1. EU tries to solve problems politically and centrally that startups are much better at solving locally 2. EU utilizes the extreme caution principle on everything and thus end up creating an extreme risk averse approach to what is allowed and what isn't. In effect startups end up creating businesses that the EU allow, rather than what the market need. 3. It's very hard for anyone let alone a startup to challenge the EU regulative system. Yet anyone of the above mentioned companies have constant battles with regulation and legislation. Even those companies can't really win over the EU regulative system, now try and be a startup trying to challenge som of the regulation, good luck.

Europe have plenty of talent and plenty of problems that the startup world could help solve, but as long as the EU politicians compete with their own startup environment at solving these problems no amount of bureaucratic easing is going allow for the full potential of the European talent base.

AI is different 11 months ago

It's really very simple.

We used to have deterministic systems that required humans either through code, terminals or interfaces (ex GUI's) to change what they were capable of.

If we wanted to change something about the system we would have to create that new skill ourselves.

Now we have non-deterministic systems that can be used to create deterministic systems that can use non-deterministic systems to create more deterministic systems.

In other words deterministic systems can use LLMs and LLMs can use deterministic systems all via natural language.

This slight change in how we can use compute have incredible consequences for what we will be able to accomplish both regarding cleaning up old systems and creating completely new ones.

LLMs however will always be limited by exploring existing knowledge. They will not be able to create new knowledge. And so the AI winter we are entering is different because it's only limited to what we can train the AI to do, and that is limited to what new knowledge we can create.

Anyone who work with AI everyday know that any idea of autonomous agents is so beyond the capabilities of LLMs even in principle that any worry about doom or unemployment by AI is absurd.

My way out of this was to start thinking about what can't the LLMs of the world do and my realization was actually quite simple and quite satisfying.

What LLMs can't replace is network effects. One LLM is good but 10 LLMs/agents working together creating shared history is not replaceable by any LLM no matter how smart it becomes.

So it's simple. Build something that benefit from network effects and you will quickly find new ideas, at least it worked for me.

So now I am exploring ex. synthetic predictions markets via https://www.getantelope.com or

Rethinking myspace but for agents instead like: https://www.firstprinciple.co/misc/AlmostFamous.mp4

AI want's to be social :)

Antelope AI | https://www.getantelope.com | Senior Python / Full stack developers | FULLTIME | ONSITE - HYBRID - REMOTE (US Only) | New York

Antelope is the worlds first synthetic prediction market run by self-learning autonomous agents and, trained by you.

We are a very early stage company looking for a developer with an interest in AI and prediction markets and preferably with experience from the betting/investment industry.

Learn more at https://www.getantelope.com and write us at hello@getantelope.com

No the sun either is or isn't powered by nuclear fusion. There is no way of knowing whether that's the case until you can come up with a good explanation (hard to vary) everything before that is just guessing.

I can assure you Deutsch is no confused by anything in that matter and it's obvious you don't know who he is.

He is literally the guy who created quantum computation and IS a scientist.

And no that's not his argument against the the sun is revolve around the earth.

Not from a non-bayesian perspective. It's what Deutsch would call a "bad explanation" i.e. it's easy to vary and thus doesn't tell us about how the sun is powered.

Faktory | Full Time | Remote/On-site (New York, US) | https://www.faktory.com Faktory is building the worlds biggest, smartest and most reliable AI workforce. Your objective is to help make sure our ai agents become ever smarter, more reliable an and that new ones can be created via our Agent Studio platform. Our aspirations are high, so your obsession with everything AI and agents will will have to bee too :)

Here are a few of the roles we want to hire for:

* Senior Developer * We are currently looking for a developer who live and breath AI/LLM/Python

* Prompt Engineer * Are you AI whisperer of prompting? Then we most definitely would want you. You need to have some basic technical understand if you are a developer it's a plus.

* Frontend Developer * You are king of vanilla javascript and kind of don't like framework but understand react.

Please write us at apply@faktory.com

funny i get that too on twitter what you get on bluesky. if you seek out debate you will get it, has nothing to do with twitter. Bluesky will be very boring once upu realize that the reason you hate twitter is the reason you are going to hate bluesky. Its going to be very boring very soon or very toxic. Its still going to be relying on algorithms and. business logic

This is pure speculation and not really very well thought through IMO.

We don't kill all ants either.

Even humans work with the principle of collateral damage with each other so if the idea is that AI would suddenly be without mistakes then that's already missing the point of what intelligence is. But just like humans any AI that is "super intelligent" will also need to have morals and ethics (or it can't figure out what IT want and doesn't want) and there is nothing that indicates they shouldn't be extensions of ours as we will be interfacing with them long before any superintelligence comes along, in fact it just as likely that it's our morals and ethics and culture that gets passed on and that biological humans don't get obliterated by AI but simply die out over time.

There is nothing bad about that, our genes survived.

Faktory | Full Time | Remote/On-site (New York, US) | https://www.faktory.com Faktory is building the worlds biggest, smartest and most reliable AI workforce. Your objective is to help make sure our ai agents become ever smarter, more reliable an and that new ones can be created via our Agent Studio platform.

Our aspirations are high, so your obsession with everything AI and agents will will have to bee too :)

Here are a few of the roles we want to hire for:

* Senior Developer * We are currently looking for a developer who live and breath AI/LLM/Python

* Prompt Engineer * Are you AI whisperer of prompting? Then we most definitely would want you. You need to have some basic technical understand if you are a developer it's a plus.

* Frontend Developer * You are king of vanilla javascript and kind of don't like framework but understand react.

Please write us at apply@faktory.com

Philosophy is reasoning through language and the purpose is to create good explanations that are hard to vary.

There is nothing safe about cookie law or GDPR.

They are literally doing the opposite because they are asking you to commit to the terms and since everyone do you have actually consented to your data being used.

AI Act isn't solving anything that isn't already solved with existing regulation.

That so many people on HN seem to think this is a good idea is very puzzling.