it more than doubled its valuation in eight months

Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition

AI coding startup Cognition raises $1B at $25B pre-money valuation

As Cognition reaches $492 million in annualized revenue run rate, it more than doubled its valuation in eight months, it says.

Dark factory versus light factory: Parts of your work where humans and agents talk to each other (planning, design, review) stay visible can be thought of as light, and parts where agents grind through clearly defined work on their own stay in the background, in the dark.

Parts of your work where humans and agents talk to each other (planning, design, review) stay visible can be thought of as light, and parts where agents grind through clearly defined work on their own stay in the background, in the dark.

What happens when every company has access to the same model? The best riders win.

You cannot trust what you cannot see.

The best riders win.

Like a mustang, AI is powerful but wild. Harnessing the power means domestication.

The end of the software era is the beginning of the harness era.

A public institution that cannot verify the sources in its own AI policy is unlikely to be ready to verify the AI systems it procures, deploys, or regulates.

Infrastructure built without minimum terms produces dependency. Infrastructure built with them produces leverage.

The country whose mines supply platinum-group metals essential to semiconductor manufacturing, and through them to AI compute, has drafted a policy that treats it as a consumer of AI systems rather than a stakeholder in their governance.

In physics, leverage requires three things: a fulcrum, a lever arm, and the ability to apply force.

South Africa is not just another developing country struggling to govern artificial intelligence; it is the exception with leverage, and the window to act on it is closing.

To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern.

In fact, as with every major technological shift, AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data.

When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities.

technology built and governed by a small elite cannot, by definition, serve the common good.

The model is fungible underneath; the system of work is not.

You can be everywhere at once, or you can be great at one thing. Not both.

The Yellow Brick Road is our shorthand for the path the labs are walking, where they're committing extraordinary resources.

Today is just the beginning—the start of a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot.

If AI models are going to be widespread, what does it look like for humans, families, and the world to flourish?

We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease.

AI systems are not engineered the way a bridge or an airplane is engineered. We understand an airplane because we designed every part of it and we understand the physics that act on it. AI models are not like that. They are grown, on a structure roughly modeled after the brain, on an enormous inheritance of human thought and speech.

They are not the cold, calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us, from our words—and, as the Holy Father observes, they remain in important ways mysterious even to those of us who train them.

Every frontier AI lab—including Anthropic—operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.

Arbitrageur: Knows pₜ. Sweeps every resting ask below pₜ and every resting bid above pₜ. Infinite capital, never rests orders.

Competitor: Static hidden-liquidity ladder. Quotes every tick outside its spread with fixed notional. Refills consumed levels at a fixed offset next step. Never re-centers.

You quote before the next price move, so you are always exposed to adverse selection.

Retail fills generate positive edge (you captured the spread). Arb fills generate negative edge (the arbitrageur took stale quotes).

Your advantage comes from adapting to market conditions it ignores.

theories of consciousness

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最近，我教過的學生們，有幾位開始變成中小學老師。這些同學們在我的課堂上到課率很低。我一直都不想去要求學生來上課，因為我自己當年到課率也是超低。所以我很早就用網路教學，一開始是用 YouTube 錄影後上傳，後來變直播，現在則改用 facebook 直播。奇特的是，他們說受我影響很深，教學的方法與理念都從我這裡獲益良多 ....這讓我想起一句話：If you would like to be good at something, teach it !

One thing I hate about upgrading computers is wondering if my peripherals will work.

When a language presumes to know more than its user, that's when there's trouble.

Just because a language has a feature that might be dangerous doesn't mean it's inherently a bad thing. When a language presumes to know more than its user, that's when there's trouble.

I'd argue that when you find a programming language devoid of danger, you've found one that's not very useful.

How to satisfy these needs can be a question of personalchoice, as long as maximum consumption standards are not violated.In other words, “satisfers” do not receive the same kind of protec-tion via consumption corridors that “needs” receive

the manner in which knowledge is acquired, communicated and shared is internal to the nature of knowledge itself, and that the metaphysics of personhood needs to countenance the formation of reason if we are to understand how rationality and animality are united in the human person.

while I was listening to all of you and to our wonderful scientists 00:57:28 I thought of something that the distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson wrote shortly before he died he said he believed that 00:57:40 the speed of cultural Evolution the speed of cultural evolution is now faster than the speed of biological evolution so 00:57:53 what does that mean to me it's something very simple it means that we now hold our destiny in our hands and that's what you're all talking about

00:40:20 Line that the astronauts bring back in their pictures from space that's the that's the part of the atmosphere that has oxygen the troposphere uh and it's 00:40:32 only five to seven kilometers thick that's what we're using as an open sewer if you could drive a car straight up in the air at interstate highway speeds you get to the top of that blue line in five minutes and all the greenhouse gas 00:40:46 pollution would be below you we're still putting 162 million tons into it every single day and the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600 00:40:58 000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth that's what's boiling the oceans creating these atmospheric rivers and the rain bombs and sucking the moisture out of the land and creating the 00:41:10 droughts and melting the ice and raising the sea level and causing these waves of climate refugees predicted to reach 1 billion in this Century look at the xenophobia and political authoritarian 00:41:22 trends that have come from just a few million refugees what about a billion we would lose our capacity for self-governance on this world

as the Secretary General said in His Brilliant speech earlier today we are not winning the crisis is still getting 00:39:56 worse faster than we are deploying these Solutions and we need to make changes quickly

we have committed to spend 6.2 billion dollars we've made that public to give ourselves real Zero by 2030.

if we continue with our greenhouse gas emissions then by 2070 as many as 3 00:03:25 billion people will live in uninhabitable zones and mostly in poorer countries and this basically means that these people who probably have the least contribution to the climate problem have 00:03:39 been the ones that are most exposed

As a result of cultural evolution, a single species now dominates the ecology of our planet, and cultural evolution will dominate the future of life so long as any species with a living culture survives. When we look ahead to imagine possible futures for our descendants, cultural evolution must be our dominant concern. But biological evolution has not stopped and will not stop. As cultural evolution races ahead like a hare, biological evolution will continue its slow tortoise crawl to shape our destiny.

new way of seeing could lead to loss of dignity, oppression, and even greater inequality; there are many historical examples of that.[10] But there is also the open horizon of new ways of being that are more humane, more authentic, more just. This horizon is what political theorist William Connolly refers to when he says: “Today perhaps it is wise to try to transfigure the old humanisms that have played important roles in Euro-American states into multiple affirmations of entangled humanism in a fragile world.”[11]

The future behind us into which we are being thrown is also a maelstrom born out of the catastrophes of the past.

The environmental crisis is one of overconsumption, carbon emissions, and corporate greed. But it’s also a crisis of miscommunication.

Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.

When mocking is deemed profitable:

Programmers should be encouraged to understand what is correct, why it is correct, and then propagate.

Mitch Hedberg - "I play the guitar. I taught myself how to play the guitar, which was a bad decision... because I didn't know how to play it, so I was a shitty teacher. I would never have went to me."

Yogi also said that "Half the lies they tell about me aren't true"

"I didn't say a lot of the things that I said"

"It ain't over 'til it's over,"

"You can observe a lot by watching."

Refactor ruthlessly. Rewrite bravely.

There are myriads of platformers around, it's an oversaturated market, and just like industrial designer Karim Rashid said about there being no excuse by this point to make an uncomfortable chair, there's no excuse by this point to make a boring patformer.

Does that make it so? Not for me. Were it simply a matter of words, I wouldn't write another word on the matter. But there are two distinct concepts behind these terms, concepts engendered separately and best understood separately.

Scalability is the problem you want to have, and sooner rather than later, but maintainability is the problem you’re definitely going to have, sooner or later.

‘Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute.’

Svelte’s aesthetics feel like a warm cozy blanket on the stormy web.

We all know Linux is great... it does infinite loops in 5 seconds.

The Doom Loop in the Financial Sector, and other black holes of risk

It causes some implementation complexity just by existing.

Language, using a schema, provides a system of abstraction enabling one to model something. Language is context sensitive & composable. With the Language tool, we craft systems of illusion, intelligence, & life.

Alfred Korzybski remarked that "the map is not the territory" and that "the word is not the thing", encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself.

"The menu is not the meal."

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

Save your useCallbacks for functions that don't map exactly to an existing callback!

Everyone has an idea about how to make it easier to find needles in the haystack, but no-one bothers to ask what all this hay is doing here in the first place.

feel like there needs to be an easy way to style sub-components without their cooperation

I mean, it's not that bad and it's certainly not much of a runtime cost (especially since it'd only affect components which actually use it -- thanks disappearing framework!).

runtime-frowning

In the real world — the time to pay off technical debt is scarce — in most of the time fueled by the fear of the unknown. The management loves to milk the cow but not to change the litter. The developers on another hand avoid modernizing legacy code — to avoid trouble in case anything breaks.

Willard Van Orman Quine insisted on classical, first-order logic as the true logic, saying higher-order logic was "set theory in disguise".

there’s 3 steps to building software: Make it work Make it right Make it fast

The words that you have not spoken; you are their owner. The words you have spoken, they own you.

inspiration is perishable

only when you can't reverse them should there be a more thorough discussion.

we are present day pessimists and long term optimists

The more your tests resemble the way your software is used, the more confidence they can give you.

In an era of mature post-genomic medicine,

Anything that can be derived from the application state, should be derived. Automatically.

boring collection of secondhand dreams

Going to political protests is hopepunk. Calling your senators is hopepunk. But crying is also hopepunk, because crying means you still have feelings, and feelings are how you know you’re alive. The 1% doesn’t want you to have feelings, they just want you to feel resigned.

“I want to inspire (young) people…” People are inspired by what you do in your own life, not by what you tell them to do. Do not set out to inspire someone else, set out to make a difference in the world. Your journey may end up being inspirational to others, young and old.

Ideas are viral, they couple with other ideas, change shape, and migrate into unfamiliar territories. The intellectual property regime restricts the promiscuity of ideas and traps them in artificial enclosures, extracting exclusive benefits from their ownership and control. Intellectual property is fraud - a legal privilege to falsely represent oneself as the sole “owner” of an idea, expression or technique and to charge a tax to all who want to perceive, express or apply this “property” in their own production. It is not plagiarism that dispossesses an “owner” of the use of an idea; it is intellectual property, backed by the invasive violence of the state, that dispossesses everyone else from using their common culture. The basis for this dispossession is the legal fiction of the author as a sovereign individual who creates original works out of the wellspring of his imagination and thus has a natural and exclusive right to ownership. Foucault unmasked authorship as a functional principle that impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of knowledge. The author-function represents a form of despotism over the proliferation of ideas. The effects of this despotism, and of the system of intellectual property that it shelters and preserves, is that it robs us of our cultural memory, censors our words, and chains our imagination to the law.

And yet artists continue to be flattered by their association with this myth of the creative genius, turning a blind eye to how it is used to justify their exploitation and expand the privilege of the property owning elite. Copyright pits author against author in a war of competition for originality – its effects are not only economic, it also naturalizes a certain process of knowledge production, delegitimates the notion of a common culture, and cripples social relations. Artists are not encouraged to share their thoughts, expressions and works or to contribute to a common pool of creativity. Instead, they jealously guard their “property” from others, who they view as potential competitors, spies and thieves lying in wait to snatch and defile their original ideas. This is a vision of the art world created in capitalism’s own image, whose ultimate aim is to make it possible for corporations to appropriate the alienated products of its intellectual workers.