Sublime

Big thoughts from Tom. My personal takeaway is that understanding what humans want (ie, good taste) and being able to build with the latest tools will be the most important things.

Building a great product is a bit like marriage: if you commit your life to making it excellent over long periods of time, and earnestly care about understanding the other person (users), you’ll be surprised at what you can build.

the biggest misconception i had entering the adult world was that "more money means more intelligence is going into it", often it's actually the opposite! most ventures tend to have a fixed amount of 'sensemaking' and as the money grows the 'sense per dollar' trends to zero

scale is challenging - you can do something that 95% of people like, but the remaining 5% are literally a hundred thousand people who are now *angry* - we're not evolved to process emotions at this scale (physiologically) and i see it stop many (tragically) from wanting to create

the biggest frustration of a hardcore technologist in san francisco is how many companies both tiny and gargantuan are kinda fake - investors often can't tell the difference between story and substance and armed with a billion dollars it may take a decade for it to fail. as an

in my testing, deepseek crushes western models on ancient chinese philosophy and literature, while also having a much stronger command of english than my first-hand chinese sources. it feels like communing with literary/historical/philosophical knowledge across generations that i never had access to before. it's quite emotionally moving. it makes s... See more