Lexus Cheong @CheongLexus

Asmongold explains Keir Starmer's resignation using a WoW raid strategy and it makes perfect sense "Labour just performed a tank swap. Starmer had too many debuffs so they pulled him out and brought in a new tank." "The new guy is going to do the same thing for the same raid. They're tanking the same boss in the same way." "You're Onyxia. Don't fall for the tank swap. He's not the organization. You didn't win, they just reset your aggro."

Jimmy Carr realized something big after years with his partner and no kids: “Not having kids is like playing life on easy mode with a cheat code. You think you have skin in the game… but you don’t. Having kids is like your heart living outside your body. The stakes suddenly feel real.” He says it’s made him more invested in the future, more aware of mortality, but also incredibly joyful. “Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” - Elizabeth Stone

I think that it’s important to consider here Dario’s insistence on framing the tech industry in Silicon Valley as fundamentally flawed. Due to his lack of respect or interest in the other tech companies, Anthropic has been going ruthlessly after markets that their own customers have created. Cursor inference was a critical part of Anthropic’s survival early on, yet they launched Claude Code as a complete surprise to the team. The same thing happened with Figma, who had to remove Mike Krieger (Anthropic CPO) from their board after it became clear that Anthropic was launching a competitive Design product. Anthropic’s desire to expand widely across user surfaces is not common for companies previously seen as “infrastructure providers.” Building the best models and offering an API for other companies to build on top of makes sense. Picking the best use cases based on the telemetry you see and then launching your own alternatives in the Anthropic app is not. This aggressive approach caught the industry by surprise, and for all of Dario’s distaste for Silicon Valley, it is arguably unusual and frowned upon in the same circles he considers unworthy of trust.

The Deal Director @thedealdirector

4 days ago

infraplay.ai/p/infra-play-1…

0 0 0 3K 3

@thedealdirector But if the product is non-technical?

Sam Altman said the smartest scientists in AI are the ones who held the entire field back. The experts were the problem. This is one of the most uncomfortable things he said all night. Altman said the field was honestly held back by a generation of scientists who were too certain about what scaling would not produce. The people with the most credibility were the most wrong. Then he explained why. It was not about intelligence. It was about identity. He said when you make your identity about a particular belief, that something will work or won't work, and then the data disproves you, you get stuck. You are too attached to the belief to let it go. You cannot see the truth anymore. The smarter you are, the more confidently you defend the wrong position. He pointed at the trolls who spent years saying scaling was a dead end, a fraud, a company destined to fail. The data kept proving them wrong. They kept repeating themselves anyway. He called that a form of insanity. Then he turned it around. He said it is a reminder in both directions. Including for the people who are currently right. The lesson is not that experts are dumb. It is that the moment a belief becomes who you are, it stops being something you can update. (Watch the full talk on YouTube at Stanford Online channel)

𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 Jeremy Clarkson has never pretended to be anything other than exactly what he is Brutally honest. No oil painting. A pot belly, a lifelong smoker, a drinker. Not exactly the modern alpha male or is he? And somehow that is the whole point I have watched him for most of my life First as a motoring journalist who could make you want a car you would never own and never need Then as something bigger The loudest, funniest, most unfiltered mouthpiece the ordinary person ever had A man who said the thing everyone was thinking while the rest of television tiptoed around it From Top Gear he built something that should not have worked Three middle aged men, The Stig, a track and a chemistry you cannot manufacture James May the patient one Richard Hammond the brave one And Clarkson the force of nature dragging both of them into chaos and somehow back out again When it all fell apart at the BBC he could have disappeared The fracas was not his finest hour and he never pretended it was He owned it, apologized and carried on No reinvention, no groveling tour, no carefully managed comeback He just kept being himself and let the work speak The move to Amazon and The Grand Tour proved something I think a lot of people missed The format was never the magic The men were You can take three friends out of a studio and drop them anywhere on earth and the loyalty between them travels with them But it is Clarkson's Farm where the whole picture finally comes into focus Here is a man with nothing left to prove walking into a field he barely understands and refusing to fake competence he does not have He has run that farm at break even and then at an outright loss in full public view No editing it into a success story No pretending the numbers work when they do not His farm manager hands him one brutal truth after another and he sits there and takes it A whole season swallowed by drought even after he leaned into robotics and the most advanced farming money could buy Technology was supposed to be the answer and the weather did not care He showed that too Most people would have cut it And through all of it he has done something quietly remarkable He has dragged the plight of the British farmer into the light The paperwork, the council, the margins that vanish, the weather that ruins a year of work in a week People who had never thought about where their food comes from suddenly cared because he made them care And then there is the part nobody warned me about Men who raise animals for meat and still love them Who name them, worry about them, sit with them Who treat them with respect and dignity right up to the moment they cannot keep them And feel the full weight of sending them off He does not hide that He lets the camera sit in the discomfort of it The grief of a man who knows the deal he made and still finds it hard That is not weakness That is honesty most people are far too afraid to show We live in an age that rewards the polished, the curated, the carefully built personal brand And here is a scruffy, swearing, chain smoking farmer who has done the opposite of all of it and won He stayed exactly who he was while the world begged him to become a product That is the whole secret There is no act There never was And that is exactly why we keep watching Praying for a full recovery mate, looking forward to another season of Clarkson's Farms!

Here’s one area I’m constantly working on with my Enterprise Sales leader. We strategize in deal reviews the biggest risk and our action plan. And oftentimes the best strategy is simple. Call out the elephant in the room. We often know the risk in the deal as sellers but dance around it in conversations with prospects. Few things more powerful than calling it out with your champion and working to solve it. Not have executive alignment? Call it out. Not have enough stakeholders bought in? Call it out. They haven’t looked at any competitors and you’re only hearing good news? Call it out. Your product is missing a key requirement they will ask about? Call it out. Missed timelines and milestones and the deal keeps pushing? Call it out. The key with it: Leading with the ‘why this matters’ and framing it for your prospect, not for your deal. Friction in a deal is not a bad thing, for either side. Sense it, say it.

This is why the supporters of @elonmusk work hard to "defend him." Because it's not about Elon. He's a symbol of progress.

If people don’t want kids I’m okay with it. People who don’t want them shouldn’t have them. I’ll just keep enjoying one of the greatest experiences a man can ever have.

Asmongold says OnlyFans girls can't compete with a man from Pakistan armed with AI "OnlyFans isn't even close to as profitable as it was five years ago. Girls making $10K a month are now making $2k." "How can a normal girl compete with the sexual fantasies of the most depraved man in Pakistan armed with every AI tool to make whatever girl he wants?" "You can't beat Rajesh. Rajesh understands things you can't even imagine."

My favorite @elonmusk quote that I often send friends: Do not fear losing. “You will lose,” Musk says. “It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion.” You will be more fearless, take more risks.

Asmongold explains what gaming lost that it's never getting back "Being really good at video games used to mean a lot. Now nobody cares about being that guy anymore." "When you'd go into Stormwind and see someone with full Tier 2 and Thunderfury, there used to be a respect you gave to that. Now there's nothing like that. Nobody gives a fuck. It's meaningless."

This is free advice from an expensive psychologist. If you’re an anxious person, do everything for fun. Go to a job interview for fun. Submit documents for fun. Start a blog for fun. Anxiety feeds on importance. Don’t make everything a matter of life and death.

Testing Mythos/Fable in an Enterprise context. While X has been on fire in the last 24 hours with influencers and power users sharing their experiences with the latest Anthropic model, most of it has been limited to coding or "difficult problems". Anthropic is generating tens of billions of ARR predominantly from Enterprise usage. A lot of it is from coding, but there is a significant portion driven by users adopting Cowork as a job companion. Cowork was mostly ignored by the X power users because most of them do not actually work directly with Enterprise customers, where they need to present, analyse and deliver on outcomes under deadlines and with millions on the table. I've been using AI heavily for Enterprise work for a while, but mostly in the context of deep research reports and accelerated learning in complex technical or industry domains. Similar to coding, I expected to see progress of the models being useful for translating this domain knowledge and analysis into more "practical" deliverables, but I found it mostly lacklustre. Two months ago I started using Cowork also for building out presentations with the Opus models. It's okay, but I would rate it as having a junior employee doing a barely passable job at it, rather than a meaningful differential. Opus (and Anthropic models in general) have had spotty performance in the last months, mostly driven by what I perceive dynamic performance reductions based on available compute, combined with aggressive testing of efficiency algorithms in production. I don't think that the Anthropic team is "dumbing down" models on purpose, but they have significant constraints vs their $60B ARR of inference currently being used. This results in difficult choices with tradeoffs that make the experience for power users worse. The net effect is that while using Opus in Cowork helps me reduce the hours needed to get to a great presentation, I've often ended up spending $15 bucks (the average cost) to get an average deliverable, which I would end up using almost nothing from but at least it helped me clarify what I really wanted to show and how to position it. I spent most of today working on a difficult pitch to a customer that wants to cut costs aggressively for a renewal. They are in financial services and running a complex platform that has internal cost pressures. The real work will be going there in person and convincing them to change how they work, but to get to that point a need enough bait to convince them to take this seriously. Mythos costs approximately double the Opus rate card (which is not a guarantee for the real running usage due to token consumption) but in this case it ended up exactly 2x my typical presentation bill ($30 bucks in magic API tokens). Unlike Opus however, it actually delivered a fully usable transformational pitch, based on their full real life context. Typically when I feed a lot of documents to Opus, it fails to actually transform these into insights for a presentation. Here it delivered a full: 1. Intermediate level slide deck 2. Value assessment model 3. Internal strategy doc that makes sense Most of the power users on X will lose access to Mythos/Fable on June'22. Some of them will keep paying the API costs or will use it in other coding tools where they are paying for usage, but in general they will not keep trying complex problems with it. I'm also a heavy user of Codex and GPT Pro models. Mythos is a proper competitor to GPT Pro and in the context of Enterprise work, it's better since it produces better materials with it's implementation of computer use. I think that for OpenAI to seriously challenge back Anthropic in the Enterprise market, they have to deliver a similar type of experience. The problem they have is a traditional network effects and distribution advantage risk - many companies are diverting their spend towards Anthropic and will not churn from month to month due to the pendulum swinging in the other direction. xAI and the Cursor team also have a limited window to enter this conversation, but realistically speaking they will likely only be able to compete on cloud coding agents use cases (which is still worth hundreds of billions in market value). Google, the proud owner of DeepMind and Workspace should be owning this category and workload. Their failure to compete here should've cost several C-levels their roles. Microsoft also had a significant moat here which was quickly destroyed due to complete lack of vision and product execution. Mythos/Fable is strong for Enterprise workloads. The next big training run is probably going to be the actual "white collar AI layoffs" trigger. I have no reason to hire junior employees anymore based on what I can get out of $30 investment.

Anyone trying to fully automate outbound isn’t someone you should be taking sales advice from much less buying their products Ask any rep who is elite at outbound, what works for them? It’s almost always being human, having direct conversations with prospects and following up with them That’s it’s, that’s the recipe, it’s not rocket science Instead we have “GTM Engineers” with less than 1000 cold calls made attempting to build workflows for things they have no understanding of Extremely bullish on sales people who are elite communicators and understand these concepts You’ll always have a place amongst all the noise in the current marketplace

Marcus Aurelius was right when he said that you will be forgotten either way so live in a manner, that while you remain, you belong to yourself.

Get your belief in yourself back. Right now. Talent without confidence is a car with no engine. You can have every skill in the world and still lose to someone with half your ability and twice your belief.

In 2019, Professor Gillian Ku gave a 1 hour masterclass on how to negotiate & get what you want. Her ideas: - Reciprocity beats direct request - Scarcity creates desire out of thin air - We say yes to people we like, not people who are right 10 lessons to negotiate better:

Marcus Aurelius was right. You will lose friends you will lose lovers you will lose comfort but if in losing them you find yourself you have gained more than kings.