I’m surprised there hasn’t been more discussion of how there are now multiple public LLMs that can basically circumvent 100% of CAPTCHAs Why haven’t we seen the knock on effects of this yet? Are the spammers just supply chain constrained on GPUs like everyone else?

I enjoyed this article. It’s ostensibly about the Mirai botnet, but is really an anthropological study of the black market for DDoS - which apparently is comprised entirely of dysfunctional 14-year-olds. Is there any other market in the world like this?

Incidentally, this is why getting an undergraduate degree in business / finance is hugely overrated - everything I needed to know about finance, I learned within 6 months on the job in equity research. It’s the soft skills that ultimately differentiate you

8/ For employers, seeing McKinsey on a resume has a similar signaling value to a top undergrad ie not, “this person will definitely be good at the job” But rather, “this person is guaranteed to have the bare minimum 2-3 years training that I didn’t want to do myself”

7/ An ex-Bain friend of mine (who now works in a retail bigco) recently observed to me that he would probably get better near term results from hiring a Bain consultant in the bottom 20% of their associate class, than hiring top 80% candidate direct from undergrad

6/ Consulting firms and investment banks solve this free rider problem by institutionalizing the first 2-3 years of training via massive undergrad analyst programs

5/ But importantly, this net zero effect is temporary Hence the free rider problem - everybody wants to hire someone with 2-3 years experience, nobody wants to train somebody for 2-3 years themselves

4/ Thus, when you account for the time the rest of the team has to spend training and coaching an undergrad hire, almost 100% of undergrad hires are pretty much a *net zero* to their team for their first 6-18 months

3/ Even if you already know “hard skills” like accounting or SQL, you usually still need 2-3 years to acquire the requisite soft skills to work independently, eg how to present to execs, how to make your ideas clear, how to convince coworkers to do stuff they don’t want to do…

2/ Ultimately, new graduates don’t actually know how to do anything This is less intended as a value judgment (I was the same when I graduated from Amherst), and more as a statement of fact that elite American universities are not intended to be trade schools

1/ The more time I spend in the corporate world, the more I understand why everybody just hires ex-consultants and investment bankers It’s not because McKinsey or Goldman Sachs actually teach you how to do the job, per se It’s because hiring undergrads is a free rider problem

Finally, how I came across this blog in the first place - the best first principles explanation of LLM scaling laws that I’ve read on the internet

Why didn’t we get GPT2 in 2005? IBM’s mid-2000d BlueGene supercomputer theoretically could’ve trained the model in a month The reason: it’s much easier to progress when there’s a linear path to the goal - hence the importance of scaling laws today

Some posts I’ll call out: Why first discoveries in science are overrated, given the frequency of simultaneous invention (good ideas tend to be products of their unique time and place, at which point they become obvious to everyone around them)

I have no idea who @dynomight7 is but you’re cool, keep up the the good work

Was flipping through Airbnb’s original 2008 pitch deck - this might be the only time in history that the classic MBA pitch of “the market is X dollars and we only need to get 15% of X” actually worked Airbnb hit the 84M trips forecast just 8 years later (80M in 2016)!

8/ Just a reminder, this is a $100B market cap company publicly traded on the NASDAQ lol Full article here:

7/ Employees are in “complete isolation between departments” Nobody knows what anyone else is doing “Due to the use of nicknames for internal communication, colleagues do not know each other’s real names.”(?!?!)

6/ Quite the profile of Pinduoduo’s COO “She is like a replica of Colin Huang, with very similar personalities, thinking, work methods, and even speech patterns”

5/ Very interesting 😬 “Self will is not important” “If a directive is issued at a company meeting, subordinates cannot refuse” “This is related to Colin Huang’s ideology, in which only hierarchy matters, not right or wrong”

4/ Now here’s where things get, um, interesting Pinduoduo asks every job candidate whether they are rural, poor, and / or financially constrained, because their “big data analysis” has profiled these kind of candidates as the most hardworking

3/ Every new customer on Temu is randomly assigned to one of multiple internal teams, who compete to drive the highest sales or face dissolution Again, this is sort of a common China tech practice, so not so much a Pinduoduo-specific thing

2/ It starts out talking about how Temu’s org chart is structured into two warring factions trying to take each other over To be fair this is relatively tame - organizing two competing teams on a single product is a relatively common practice in China tech

1/ This article on Pinduoduo (the 3rd largest e-commerce platform in China) is ostensibly focused on their new US venture Temu, but it quickly devolves into the most outrageous profile of Chinese corporate culture that I’ve ever read

It’s incredible to me how resilient business travel has been After the 2008-09 recession, my old employer predicted the "end of business travel," brought about by new videoconferencing technologies from Cisco and Polycom 13 years and one pandemic later, and I’m still waiting!