Have you ever wondered how defense contractors win massive government deals? The ones on the cutting edge use Usul, a
@moonglow_ai
customer and YC-backed startup. Here's how Usul uses LLMs and
@moonglow_ai
to give their customers a competittive advantage 🧵
Usul, a YC-backed defense tech startup, uses Moonglow to process 130M tokens/minute!
Their search tools help defense contractors win government deals, and they do so by analyzing public data at scale. Learn more about how they use Moonglow here:
@ruth_hook_
I think it’s like lighting money on fire the same way that eating out is lighting money on fire? And where homeownership = buying groceries and cooking.
You always have to pay to live somewhere — homeowners do so in maintenance + taxes, renters have it folded up into “rent”.
amazing how much better life got once I started focusing.
It took about 4 weeks before interesting things started happening? The darker the week the more noticeable the effect.
(You can sign up for this now btw!)
@dissproportion
I think she's fairly mainstream! She was a huge hit in Japan before the US! My Japanese mother bought her books and loves the philosophy. And I've seen copies on display in bookstores in Japan.
This is a really great post on what it takes to prepare a datacenter for large-scale ML training. It's rare to see a detailed devops write-up like this in the wild on anything!
Some highlights:
- They had 4,092 H100 GPUs spread across 511 boxes - 8 GPUs
@Joel_P_Atkinson
These aren’t the reasons my American friends cite.
The most common reason I hear is “I’m afraid to go to a country that isn’t a free democracy.”
An unspoken reason is lack of cachet - people don’t aspire to a Chinese way of life the way they do French, Japanese, even Thai.
One thing I noticed in the most recent
@ycombinator
batch is how many of the fastest-growing companies sold AI agents. They’re going to be huge.
Jared’s tweet thread is a phenomenal breakdown of how they’re made, and what sets the best ones apart.
CaseText is one of the first vertical AI agents to be deployed at scale. It's an AI legal analyst used by thousands of lawyers. Oh, and it was bought for $650M just 2 months after launch.
Here's
@Jacob_Heller
's playbook for building vertical AI agents that actually work:
@Aella_Girl
the older you get the more politics becomes real and actually about people’s identities. It’s one thing to talk about communism as two college students, another when one is a starving grad student/artist and the other is a millionaire capitalist.
We had our last group office hours yesterday. They're a stressful but critical part of
@ycombinator
: they keep you accountable and on-track.
YC is nowhere near over. We’ve still got another 3 weeks. But I wanted to look back at my deep work tracker and reflect a bit. 🧵
New post! 101 things I would tell my self from 10 years ago: .
> 10 years ago, I started my freshman year of college. This is the advice I needed to hear, not the advice you need to hear. In fact, some of it may be actively bad for you.
cycling is one of the few anarchist/extrajudicial domains left today
blow through stop signs? ride on the sidewalk? park illegally? nothing bad will ever happen to you.
in exchange if your bike is stolen or a car hits you the government will provide zero help
happy cycling!🚲
My fun and irrelevant
@geoffreyhinton
take of the day is that we're distantly related 😃
In 1938, my great-grandfather Colin Clark moved from the UK to Australia, which is where most of my family remains today. His sister, Margaret, married Howard E. Hinton and stayed in the UK,
the most fucked up thing I’ve learned today is that the modern Neopets economy is composed of working women who slave away for years to buy rare items from an insanely wealthy male arbitrageur elite (h/t
@tracewoodgrains
)
this is a lovely reflection on the wisdom one gains while growing older. I agree with much of it - my late twenties have been far better than my early twenties.
When I was younger I was suspicious of most older people, especially in work settings. It felt like many of them had
I'm terrified of old people.
I used to be extremely confident in myself.
I was barely 20 years old and I would tell people how to sleep [1], how to make friends [2], and how to live their lives [3]. I started a nonprofit aiming to literally rebuild the institutions of science
I also noticed this part of the Cowen/Haidt podcast (summarized excellently by
@thezvi
).
At least for my generation of internet children, HPMOR/Worm/LessWrong/SSC posts did this — I can tell when someone spent their childhood consuming this. What will it be for the next
When I first read
@benskuhn
‘s “Staring into the abyss as a core life skill” I didn’t really get it.
I reread it recently. Now I do!
Before, I’d make poor choices. I’d think about them rarely, then feel trapped and depressed.
Now? I still make poor choices. But I face up to
@tailwiinder
I think 2019 was the last good year to graduate into SWE
2020+ had jobs pulled/internships cancelled, and now we’re in the AI era and nobody wants to hire juniors
@chandelog
The visual feedback was huge & you can see it took me a long time to ramp up. But once I had an objective to measure I could start tweaking things ('oh I focus better if I switch workspaces every day,' 'oh, I am better on concentrating on writing if I do it at night', etc.)
great write up on scaling by Nolen!!
also he is being modest about his prior experience lol he was one of the best devs at Jane Street and built multiple key systems from scratch
alright, we're well north of 100 million boxes checked. today has been smoother. We just passed yesterday's check count :)
Some more thoughts on scaling this up (I'll try to respond to questions as I can!)
The biggest upgrades and bugs have felt obvious in retrospect:
@nosilverv
reminds me of a conversation I had with a male friend once.
him: “who buys stuff from Facebook ads? have you?”
me: “yeah wait what? all the time!”
him: “??”
me: “like handbags and dresses and makeup… insta is where you find the cool up and coming brands now, before they go bad”
@uncatherio
Once I asked a senior exec who was known for being a “really good manager” what his secret was.
“I taught at children’s summer camps a lot when I was a teen,” is what he said.
We launched on HN earlier today. I was pretty nervous, but it's been great. People have tried us out, our servers didn't break, and we've had great discussions.
This reply I wrote has stuck with me - it was a lovely opportunity to reflect on why I'm working on this!
sometimes I meet people and it quickly becomes obvious that they’re going to be at the top of their field
any uncertainty is usually around exactly *what* field that is. but they’re definitely going to max out whatever they land on
I was pondering this morning how OpenAI's $6.5b raise is pretty incredible -- and also less than California has already spent on a high-speed train to nowhere.
It's actually a little crazy that government capital is so misallocated in the US. Not sure why it happens.
I didn't realize how quickly China could scale towards AGI if they choose to centralize.
"China can have a bigger model than any of the labs by next year"
The US as a whole gets more GPUs than China, but they're split over half a dozen different labs.
If Xi got scaling
very well put!! I definitely used to do this. I used to think I “didn’t have a strong sense of self” — but I really do, I just didn’t know how to listen to it. I can still fall into the pattern, but I’ve gotten better at seeing it and stopping it.
@DolphinMossad
tbh I had this reaction yesterday when I went to Home Depot for the first time. And also when I went to Costco for the first time a month ago.
(I’ve lived in the states for 5+ years, but mostly in NYC)
@Fissure256
@otis_reid
I think you’re right that this can’t actually have inspired the flood myths
Wikipedia says it happened 5m years ago, and we’ve only been around ~300k years. Sad — it would be a nice meme if true!
the sad thing is that this is a microcosm of the real world 😞
tbc I don’t think the arbitrageurs are doing anything wrong — if any thing they have successfully hacked the system. But why was it so hackable??
@robkhenderson
@antoniogm
oh wow I just learned about this (!)
I had previously noticed a disconnect between how well he writes and the quality of his ideas. I thought it was weird. I guess this explains it.
A real shame because he clearly has taste in ideas - if he attributed it would be much better
I wish something like
@atlasfellow
still existed, tho less expensive/selective
I know at least one teenager who would benefit from being around other nerdy teenagers at a summer camp run by college students
(if you would do this except that you need ~small funding, lmk!)
been working a lot on making
@moonglow_ai
better recently...
most excitingly, we now support
@awscloud
! if you've got AWS credits to spend and want to easily run your notebooks on some of their GPUs straight from VSCode, let me know - we'd be excited to get you set up!
@michael_nielsen
My college friends moved a 30-person group chat to Discord because we had too many side chats on different topics. It’s really helpful for organizing that.
@Koschmar
@Aella_Girl
Thanks! Yeah I’ve generally been a fan of and am pretty aware of Aella’s background (and now consider her well in the wealthy capitalist group…)
Maybe I came off negative? Sorry. I was really just riffing. 🤷🏻♀️
My profile pic is a LoRA trained on my face. It was my first ML experiment, and the devops around it were awful.
So when we got
@moonglow_ai
working, it felt like magic to spin up a GPU and get started so quickly.
Give it a try! My DMs are open for feature requests :)
1/3 Today, I'm excited to show you what
@leilavclark
and I have been up to. We've been working on
@moonglow_ai
: Colab on your cloud!
One problem I faced when doing ML research was that moving my experiments from local notebooks to cloud GPUs.
Moonglow fixes this.
Why shouldn't you commit large files to Git?
When working on
@moonglow_ai
, I learned that many people use Git as a one-off way to transfer files remotely.
But this is bad practice! To explain why, I wrote a short blog post that explains how Git works. Link below!
rereading Zero to One ten years later with a lot more context on Thiel as a thinker, it’s an excellent book. Very Straussian.
I was particularly impressed that he called Euro-pessimism 10 years ago!
I wrote about extreme residential lighting, or way too much about LEDs!
> The indoors is pretty great. It’s climate-controlled, computer-friendly and comfortable. Unfortunately, it’s often not bright enough.
link in reply👇
@moultano
honestly I agree with them. Think about it. It would basically destroy your life.
(tbf part of this is that prosecutors don’t really bring cases unless they’re certain they will win. If they brought cases more frivolously we’d attach less stigma to them.)
my mother left Japan and never taught me Japanese. Being a woman in Japan is tough. She didn’t want that for me.
It’s crazy to read about how Mako and Harvard-educated Empress Masako are treated. They’re so capable, and kept hostage by tradition and stricture…
@rmcentush
Dogshit take. It’s not that upper middle class in NY is better than being a princess. It’s that being a princess in Japan means being in a golden prison, can’t go out on your own, constant media scrutiny, so much so the current empress (ex-commoner) had a mental breakdown
by the way, Ricki Heicklen (ex-Jane Street) is hosting a Quantitative Trading Bootcamp as part of Fractal Tech / Fractal University.
In-person, September 2-5, and early bird pricing ends this Sunday!
@patio11
actually recorded a podcast about it:
it's fun learning how people want to use
@moonglow_ai
to solve their problems!
Today's example: we originally made it for ML researchers to connect to GPUs. But we learned that data scientists also want to use it to connect to powerful CPU-only machines. So now you can!
@uncatherio
@StuartJRitchie
I feel like OP's response reflects how we're very culturally conservative about bodies!
I'm not exactly sure why, or if it's consistent. But it's interesting to notice.
> You might think that people in finance, like most people, are paid in money. But it turns out that even in finance, you can’t actually always pay and motivate people with just money.
@ramit
Find socially acceptable ways to subsidize socializing with your friends. Here's a few:
- You pay for dinner, they pay for dessert (somewhere else)
- Pay for a large apartment and host parties there
- Travelling together: you pay for the Airbnb, they pay for their tickets.
New post! On our “post-EA” world.
> My friend asked, "Do you want these in the living room, or on the shelf hidden away upstairs?"
> "Let's put them upstairs," I said. "I don't need the EA propaganda machine in my living room."
I've loved working on
@moonglow_ai
, and it's been great getting to see other people use it and get the most out of it.
If you need to spin up remote GPUs for your Jupyter-based experiments, and you want to do it from VSCode or Cursor, give it a try at !
@vagueviolet
I often think there are two types of coders: those good at math and those good at systems. The former does abstract reasoning, the latter can deal with the complexity of the world.
The best coders can do a bit of both. Very rare though for anyone to be strong at both though.
Week 2: Build, build, build.
@tmychow
and I spent the whole week writing code.
I still remember when we got the MVP done on Wednesday night and ran it for the first time. It was a magical moment, seeing how seamlessly we could run our notebook on a remote A100 server.
Learned today thanks to
@devonzuegel
that Hayes Valley is more dense than Brooklyn! And about 40% the density of the Upper East Side.
(I should note a better comparison point would be, e.g., Brooklyn Heights, as Brooklyn is large and has lots of sprawl.)
@patio11
I once was going to miss my connection because of a delay on the London to Lisbon leg of my London->Lisbon->New York flight.
TAP rebooked me onto a direct Virgin Atlantic flight that must have cost 5x what I originally paid. I always wondered how that happened. Now I know!
having workers extract all the company’s profits as wages to pay themselves? Indeed, this is a novel corporate structure used only by anarchist bookstores and high-flying finance firms
Why are worker’s cooperatives so rare? This is not a trivial question — because they can pay “dividends” in the form of wages, they can entirely avoid corporate income tax. They must be so inefficient by nature of their structure to outweigh their advantages.
This section from
@paulg
's essay reminds me of Apple’s DRI (directly responsible individual) structure here and why I think it’s such a great organizational structure.
The cool thing is about DRIs is that they’re assigned project-by-project, and independent of the people
imo it’s a useful trait and rare one to be able to recognize sheer, unbeatable talent in a field you are excellent at
I am a very good software engineer. But once I worked with someone who was clearly as good as me *and* 10X faster in computational power. That was humbling.
😄
Every physics student went through such 3+ hour sessions no matter whether they became great theoretical physicists or not
And I'm sure Yosanta went through many, many of them before he began seeing cosines
Money is probably not your main constraint! From
@TheZvi
today.
I 100% agree with “inability to know how to deploy their money effectively.” Rich people usually got there by spending all their time learning to *make* money. Deploying effectively takes work/skill/time too…
nice counterpoint from
@TheZvi
today on whether
@alexeyguzey
should be afraid of old people
the physical decline is real. I more sleep now than when I was 21. But to compensate I can actually execute on large projects now… Maybe it’ll be worse in my 30s?
Every time a friend asks me what they should do in Tokyo, I give my copy of Emergent Tokyo to them and order myself a new copy from Amazon.
Now you can get the abbreviated highlights from
@Noahpinion
's book review!
@dwarkesh_sp
I love the *idea* of a subscriber-only discord, but I haven’t yet seen it done well. In general people who post a lot in a large discords usually aren’t very interesting.
The only exception I know is the
@latentspacepod
discord where swyx/Alessio post a lot of good stuff.
I’ve learned that in startups, there is no trade-off between talking to users and writing code.
Instead, it’s a virtuous cycle. When you talk to users, you learn what code to write. And when you ship features they love, your users trust you more, and talk to you more.
@Daniel___Owens
I biked by this one this morning! I was thinking about how pretty it is. The picture windows are lovely. Would be nicer if it could have been all wood instead of multi-material but that's planning codes for you I guess!
I watched Succession. I went to see The Menu. I watched The White Lotus. I listened to the All-In podcast for many weeks.
Then I cracked.
I'm leaving society.
Goodbye.
@levelsio
make sure they buy the right version of the stock for wherever it is they live though
You can lose 40% of your estate when you die to US inheritance taxes if non-American and not careful 😬
@TylerAlterman
oh yeah internet misogyny is so real
I’m not sure that that’s why your female friends aren’t writing though, I think there’s also a strong societal message of “your thoughts aren’t important enough to share” (for everyone but especially women)
which ofc is not true!
you actually want your quant traders to be far more risk seeking with company money than their own
The company wants you to trade $3m of company money if it’s +EV!! But you should not do this with your savings 🙃
Learning Chinese to intermediate fluency usually takes ~3000-4000h over years.
I did it in <1 year and <1500h, self-taught as a fun side project. If you've been wanting to learn a language, I recommend trying!
A quick thread on my strategies for effective language learning👇🧵
@SarahChieng
do it!! imo safety worries are overblown esp in rich countries/cities
stay in well-rated hostels or B&Bs. A helpful owner and smile makes all the difference.
Japan is a great first trip. Sit at the bar and talk to the chefs/bartenders. Google translate goes a long way.
@IDoTheThinking
yeah... that's sad. :(
fwiw I think most academic grad schools don't replicate the undergrad experience, but business school does (and law school to a lesser degree). As you point out though, probably not worth shelling out $250k.
@IDoTheThinking
“Every credible historian:” that’s not fair, this is a fairly hotly debated field by pro historians. Gar Alperovitz kicked off the revisionist view which does suggest Japan was close to surrender even without an invasion (no food) and the bomb was dropped to intimidate Russians.
if you live in SF and are interested in financial history, go watch the Lehman Trilogy! Tickets are cheap and the actors are excellent. (Link in reply)