Tech gave me everything I have Its capacity to lift people into abundance is incredible and there is nothing like it We must make that into prosperity for everyone

We built Codex/Claude ultra mode, but for web research! Uses heavy agent parallelization, code execution, DB tool, and some other goodies, all orchestrated with frontier models The squad kept iterating until it was clearly SOTA. Lemme know what you think 🫡

Astra is very impressive

Gary McCoy would be a disaster for San Francisco. Gary is thin skinned, vindictive and oversaw the Tenderloin Linkage Center in 2021 where $26 million was wasted ($10m went to his org HealthRIGHT360) and only 1.7% of the homeless received a treatment referral. Hell NO!

Given that I was part of YC W20 and now YC F26, I'm often asked about the differences between the batches. This either comes from actual curiosity or some hidden expectation for me to say it's "gone downhill". Let me answer the former and dispel the latter. There are huge differences, but probably not in the way you'd expect. There's a lot of public chatter about YC backing younger founders, inexperienced founders, and losing its touch. This isn't true. Remotely. There were incredibly talented founders in YC W20, and the same is true for this batch as well. Last batch, we had PostHog and WhatNot. This time, we'll have similar outcomes. The other day, someone tweeted "YC doesn't back visionary founders". But the point of doing YC isn't to advertise your vision; it's to quickly test your hypothesis in a structured environment. The biggest difference between my batch experiences is the location. Previously, YC was in Mountain View, and while YC recommended founders to live in Mountain View, many (if not most) lived in San Francisco. This meant a fair part of the YC experience was commuting down on the Caltrain, attending events, and then going your separate ways. Now, YC is in Dogpatch, and literally everyone lives in the same four apartment buildings. That makes a massive difference. You run into founders in the elevator. You run into founders when getting packages, You run into founders on the street. Everyone is building something, everything is talking about agents & harnesses, everyone is talking about the YC calendar. This sense of location builds community. I think YC's done a great job of not going full-send on campus. It's good to have independence. You choose where you live, what you eat, how you work, what you do. But the co-location in Dogpatch creates a lot of spontaneous encounters that lead to learnings and sometimes even new customers. Another difference is the schedule and partitions. One issue with YC W20 is it had a rigid schedule, and too many founders in one room. It's hard to build relationships if you feel the constant pressure to meet more and more people. The new structure keeps everyone in consistent groups so you build actual connections; it also has opportunities to meet everyone else without exhausting everyone's social battery. I can somewhat understand the YC haters because YC can look like a bunch of copycats from the outside. I remember a few batches after YC W20, I was looking at YC announcements from W23 or S24 and thinking the same. But then you return to YC and realize that's all a bunch of nonsense: social media distorts reality, and the same brilliant founders that YC backs have been in YC all along. All in all, I think @ycombinator's evolution has been positive; the move to Dogpatch was brilliant; and the orange remains really f'ing orange.

they signed $1.37B in LOIs during the YC summer batch! incredibly ambitious

I know so many people who are curious about AI but don't use X because of negative perceptions or bc they don't know where to start. Yesterday my wife asked me to get her set up on X. So, I took the opportunity to make xstarterpack.com/ - it's a simple prompt anyone can use to set up their X to follow AI news & discourse (and avoid rage bait). It's ~200 accounts - admittedly incomplete and reflecting my biases - but it covers many important voices across research, policy, economics, business, finance, applications, and practical use, with a range of political and ideological orientations. At the very least, it’s a good 80/20 (done is better than perfect). Hope it helps more people tune in to the greatest show on earth!

Declinism is a status game. It lets you sound worldly while betting against your own state. California isn't dying. It's being rebuilt by people too busy building to post about the apocalypse. If you came here, built something, and made it yours, you're the rebuttal. DM us or email hello@garryslist.org and share your #CaliforniaDream.

A woman visiting family in Richmond, VA had her car jacked with her two babies still inside. Police used their Flock camera network to narrow the search area and found the vehicle, and children within 45 minutes. This is good. We should not stop the police from doing this. wtvr.com/news/local-news/ric…

Nikole Hannaj-Jones criticized the teachers and principal in her daughter's school for low-expectations, for not grading assignments, for not addressing unruly cafeterias but she continues to blame racism and resources. She's too smart to not name the true systemic culprit. "Hannah-Jones blames this dysfunction on persistent inequality—wrongly. But she misses the true culprit driving the problems: the teachers’ union constraints on schools and the concurrent lack of accountability for low-performing schools." ~@dany_egorov cityjournal.substack.com/p/t…

Legalize personalized education

“Just because it came from a scientist, it doesn’t make it scientific….Don’t think that just because you are an alarmist, you are doing any social good.”

What an insane time. We are so lucky to be working in tech right now.

Paweł Huryn tested models' ability to find bugs planted in code. Cost increases exponentially with performance (note the log scale on the x axis). I had ChatGPT superimpose a trend line. Bargain = above the line.

Muse is very impressive

TLDR - you have to be extremely high agency with a lot of ownership so you can work around across the stack.

This is not priced in yet

Archgen Labs (@archgen_) is now backed by Y Combinator (@ycombinator) We are a research lab for silicon design, with one ambition: make chip design 1,000× faster. For decades, computing advanced by shrinking transistors. The next chapter for compute workloads will increasingly depend on building vertically - stacking active logic layers to create 3D chips. This makes designing those chips much harder but also opens up new possibilities for performance and efficiency. At @archgen_ , we’re bringing together foundational models, EDA tools, and physics-informed surrogate models to explore more designs, predict their behavior faster, and optimize how they’re built. Grateful to Kulveer Taggar (@kul), Garry Tan (@garrytan) and the @ycombinator team for backing us, and to the customers, mentors, and collaborators who have helped us get here. If you want to get to tapeout faster, we’d love to talk. DM us. #Semiconductors #OpenROAD #OpenLane #OpenSourceEDA #ChipDesign #VLSI #PhysicalDesign #AIForHardware #3DIC @naveen_venk

state of the art motherfuckers

Two important simultaneous important trends in how startups get customers: Make software agents want Use agents to make people want software

The chance of a person dying in a natural catastrophe has declined by nearly 99% since the 1920s and 1930s. People today are much more likely to survive natural disasters because of increased wealth and technological progress. Buildings are better constructed, weather satellites and sophisticated computer models provide early storm warnings, and swift medical interventions halt developing epidemics.