askafriend
askafriend on Hacker News
My time is more expensive than the $15 extra I pay for the food...who's the sucker.
I'm not paying for the food. I'm paying for them to bring me the food. Those are two different products.
It looks like a normal 7-Eleven.
He did not sell the fund. He sold the publicly traded portion of it.
He currently still has $10B under management.
What's the point of posting blatantly wrong details? It's pretty easy to look them up.
You're so caught up in irrelevant details like a rhetorical device that you've missed that this guy's fund is up 80% for the year and his investors are having a GREAT year. Worth reflecting on.
It's a no-signal or slightly-positive signal until paired with other signals.
For example, doing it at Columbia is meaningful. Doing it at a random school, not so much.
His fund did not fold.
In fact, the returns were so astronomical that they took a $35B loss (around 67%) which means they were still UP 80% for the year in 2026.
Today they have around $10B under management.
As an investor, how would you feel about being up 80% for the year? Exactly. They're having a phenomenal year.
I'm not writing a technical paper and I refuse to write like what you're suggesting. It's just a rhetorical device!
That's fair and I guess we're about to find out! The thing to appreciate is there's a lot that's unprecedented about all of this. Some of it has to do with Leopold but then there's a whole lot that doesn't. I'll definitely be following along as the story develops over the years...
Well it's not a random 25 year old. He became valedictorian at Columbia and graduated at 19. He was then briefly a part of OpenAI's superalignment team.
After he got fired, he wrote a 165 page thesis on AI in early 2024 that all ended up becoming true in 2026; you can read it for yourself and be the judge: https://situational-awareness.ai
That's what he based the fund on.
It's generational foresight not available to 99.999999999999999999% of 25 year olds. I want to get ahead of the default cynicism and "oh it's just dumb luck woe is me" aspect of HN.
A nightmare client would be a nightmare client regardless of the technology involved. I can definitely believe that it's way more annoying with the false confidence effect it tends to have for non-experts.
25 years ago, you were 25 years younger. Maybe it's not the computers that you miss.
You can see their ego trying to protect itself.
> The AI makes an indecipherable mess
Humans are perfectly capable of this themselves and in fact often do it...
I think it’s exactly like going from paper spreadsheet to Excel in some very important aspects of engineering (but not all).
I really encourage you to update your priors since capabilities are very different than even 6 months ago.
Why didn't you ask to get the accounts provisioned?
I bet poor investment planning and low-paying roles despite the years of experience.
Heavy is the head that wears the crown, I guess.
The entire car dealership lobby hates Tesla, for example.
Why shouldn't the author use LLMs to assist their writing?
The issue is how tools are used, not that they are used at all.
If it conveys the intended information then what's wrong with that? You're fighting a tsunami here. People are going to use LLMs to help their writing now and forever.
It's because A LOT of people are. I can't imagine doing it any other way now that I've adopted all the tooling.
I haven't hand-written more than a dozen lines of code in months. The models are really really good now if you can learn to use them. There's definitely a learning curve though as is true with anything new.
I'm actually quite familiar with the history of app stores and getting people to pay for software on the internet. I grew up in this timeline so I have first-hand experience too.
Before the App Store, the picture was mostly a disaster of security, reliability and quality. There was no trust and so people didn't bother parting with their credit card information to buy software...especially not on their phone.
Apple's App Store model dramatically grew the pie because it was one of the few platforms that people were willing to actually transact confidently on and trusted. This is why millions of developers flocked to the platform. This is also why Apple has traditionally maintained an iron grip on it; it was beneficial for everyone involved.
Over time, they are being proven right as more open platforms realize that openness at the expense of trust doesn't work for the masses.
Great thought, that seems very likely since so many "founder stories" are heavily spun tales.
Developers want a stable, secure platform where they can reach customers that trust the platform and are willing to transact. Everything is downstream of that, including any philosophy around control.
Developers are businesses and the economics need to work. For that, safety and security is much more important than openness.
While I understand the author's point, IMO we're unlikely to do anything that results in slowing down first. Especially in a competitive, corporate context that involves building software.
The thing people seem to forget about Jobs is that he
really was that good, that obsessive/dedicated and that visionary. It's that simple.
His process resulted in some of the most transformative products humanity has ever known.
Exactly this.
It's inherent in the process and way of thinking. It's a dangerous path to pursue for entrepreneurs. How can the results be anything but disposable and frivolous when the process treats them as such.
Well also SpongeBob is excellent and one of the greatest shows ever made.
Definitely this. A total lack of awareness and tact demonstrated by OP.