treehacks 2027 applications are live 🌲 apply to stanfords premier hackathon at treehacks.com

was already feeling blessed to have my NYPL hold for Emily Wilson's The Odyssey come through this week, and then I saw the dedication

We raised $10.7M to build the intelligence layer for the physical world. This is what that looks like.

First equation I’ve seen in a fund letter! As startups become more technical, the funds adapt as well. (h/t @generalcatalyst)

when in doubt, just @ v been a lot of fun working on this with the team! ai has let engineers 10x their output. i believe everyone else deserves that same leverage, and it’s on us to make that as easy as possible. excited to keep pushing this forward 🖤

grateful to have spent the last year @interaction helping build the story, product, and visual identity behind poke as the only designer alongside an amazing team 🌴 onward!

Cognition is acquiring @Interaction, the makers of Poke. If you've ever used Poke, you know why we're so excited.

Wow... Warren Buffet says goodbye in his final annual letter today (full copy in the comments below). As he signed off, the following were final words of advice: "One perhaps self-serving observation. I’m happy to say I feel better about the second half of my life than the first. My advice: Don’t beat yourself up over past mistakes – learn at least a little from them and move on. It is never too late to improve. Get the right heroes and copy them. You can start with Tom Murphy; he was the best. Remember Alfred Nobel, later of Nobel Prize fame, who – reportedly – read his own obituary that was mistakenly printed when his brother died and a newspaper got mixed up. He was horrified at what he read and realized he should change his behavior. Don’t count on a newsroom mix-up: Decide what you would like your obituary to say and live the life to deserve it. Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world. Kindness is costless but also priceless. Whether you are religious or not, it’s hard to beat The Golden Rule as a guide to behavior. I write this as one who has been thoughtless countless times and made many mistakes but also became very lucky in learning from some wonderful friends how to behave better (still a long way from perfect, however). Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman."

i could genuinely rant for hours on this topic,, i truly think that image models are some of the coolest developments in recent art history and will develop into a beautiful medium in their own right. i also think that both sides are kind of missing the point. there is such strong opposition within the art community to ai (rightfully so, with the current lack of copyright regulation and compensation structures) but also an unwillingness to recognize change. there's a parallel here with the invention of photography -- there was much fear that it "replaced" portraitists, but the backlash against it led to the advent of impressionism (my favorite art movement). and photography went on to become its own beautiful, expressive medium anyways. how amazing is that? the entire point of art is that it's a fluid, branching tree of movements and countermovements all in search of beauty, meaning, and channels of expression for the human condition that defines all of us. i truly do not think that generative ai will replace art because the point of art is not, and never has been, the art itself.

Got interested in physics in middle school in China. Tried physics Olympia in high school. Wasn’t able to make it out of my city in China while classmate got international gold medal representing China with a full ride into Harvard. Got Depressed and thought I won’t make it in China. Took English classes and aced TOFEL. Attended UIUC to study engineering so I’d a job one day, same year when @drfeifei became an assistant prof there. Got an algo trading internship by luck because I wrote a paper on wireless communication. Met MIT interns who told me they didn’t have to pay tuition. Inspired. Got into MIT and studied probability and info theory. Became prof at Stanford. Married. Amazing kids. Pretty happy. So yeah, Thank you, physics!

16. Play is not frivolous. It dissolves rigidity and reminds us that joy is not a distraction from growth, it is its catalyst.
Making space for play is not escaping life; it is deepening it.

I wrote this when I lost my childhood horse, and it still helps me any time I need to let go.

A nod to "Attention Is All You Need" (Vaswani et al., 2017) Before Transformers, our models read text like humans do: word by word, left to right, holding onto context through a kind of sequential memory. It was slow and limiting. The breakthrough was realizing we could let the model look at everything simultaneously. Imagine reading a sentence where every word can instantly "talk" to every other word to figure out what's important. That's attention. When you read "The animal didn't cross the street because it was too tired," the model can instantly connect "it" to "animal" rather than "street" by having all words attend to each other in parallel. This architecture unlocked more efficient training at scale. Suddenly we could train on massive datasets because we weren't bottlenecked by sequential processing. More importantly, these models could discover patterns and relationships across much longer contexts, enabling emergent capabilities we see today. This made it possible to go from narrow, task-specific models to the general-purpose AI assistants we're building and using today (eg ChatGPT, Claude).

Just found out about Monkey Bar Kicking Fights.... and it's a masterpiece

girls get one shotted by labubu since they haven’t built up gambling immunity boys go through via coming of age (losing infinite of money on options, crypto, poker, blackjack, sports gambling, etc)

In SF's basements and hacker houses, DIY “taser-knife” duels are the newest way for tech kids to get out of their heads. 📝: @AlmostZara sfstandard.com/2025/10/05/sa…

TODAY HYPERLIQUID DAY. @chameleon_jeff @frank_liquid

The wise Chinese man in question is @will__ye

poke.com/kyoka 🌴🌴🌴