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Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
@patio11
Dec 1, 2017 • 23 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.
Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

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More from @patio11

Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Nov 5
If I clipped every good Byrne Hobart or Matt Levine line I’d never get around to writing my own stuff but this from Byrne is too good to not share: Image
An extraordinary fact about finance is that there are some firms which are financial service providers specifically for scams which sometimes, almost as an industrial accident, bafflingly end up in a contractual relationship with a legitimate, successful company.
These underwriters are not necessarily that; some overlevered highly “structured” IPOs of midmarket software businesses should have a non-zero price, and a capitalist should not say they are a scam just because he is not a buyer at that price.
Read 8 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Oct 27
How much could would you write if you could one-shot 10-100 line shell scripts or similar almost all of the time, in 10 seconds? You would write a stupid amount of code. Who cares if it is disposable? Dispose of it; it's basically free.
"But what if the code is wrong?"

Skill issue, code is free to you. Write a test suite too, designed to be thrown away in under a minute. Write three independent implementations and vote on the answer. etc, etc
"Have you actually done this?" Yeah, to a minor degree, and I'll recount a bit more when I do some writeups about my experience with LLM programming. After a few weeks of climbing the skill curve instead of some direct questions I'd say "Goal: *direct question* You should..."
Read 11 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Oct 22
Me to financial firm: *address change form*
Financial firm: Is this five digit number a post code?
Me to financial firm: Oh you have asked exactly the right person for geeking out about post codes. Did you know...
Second thoughts: That was not the efficient way to answer.
"Why didn't they know what a post code looks like?"

Because a post code can look like so many things, like 100-0001, 20500, or SW1A 1AA, to use three codes from three nations that all correspond to a particular famous building/complex within them.
A further fun fact: some nations don't customarily use post codes and others don't customarily use addresses, favoring a natural language description of the recipient which is sufficient to get a mail carrier to successfully route to them.
Read 10 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Oct 16
Still working on a few essays about what I learned on using LLMs for coding but if you want a sneak peak, Complex Systems this week discusses the game I made in some detail.

I’m probably adding one essay to the series on LLMs for taxes.
It feels a bit weird to need to continue saying this, but yes, LLMs are obviously capable of doing material work in production, including in domains where answers are right or wrong, including where there is a penalty for being wrong. Of course they are.
“Why?”

Because a lot of discourse weights people and actors heavily where they cannot be right or wrong in any way that matters, and where correctness does not materially result in a different incentive for them.
Read 6 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Oct 9
So October 15th, the extended US tax deadline, is just around the corner, and I have some observations which are more about LLM progress than taxes.

Background: many people professionally involved with LLMs estimate 2026-2028 as the year where one can get an LLM to "do taxes."
I have a fairly complicated situation and have put more of my points into tax procedure than many AI researchers, and I did not previously expect to actually have this capability available in 2028.

On basis of experience with review, but not full execution, rethinking that.
I think the most likely form factor for actually deploying this in the real world is a software company which integrates LLMs as a component but also has a lot of special sauce.

Be that as it may, what I actually had available yesterday was the standard chat interface.
Read 33 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Oct 5
I think the economic logic of this is inevitable, in that you’ll ~need video to get your N+1 marketing post through the noise on social media even as a Taylor Swift, and your choices are either a $100k shoot *per post* or a relatively junior employee with some taste.
Also expect the friendly neighborhood barbecue joint to get the same-y Madison Avenue look on their ads versus the Comic Sans and pink aesthetic that they might otherwise have ended up with.
“Is that shoot really $100k?”

It probably is if you do it the way her media operation would do it. You can get it done scrappily for like $4-10k. Partly that’s because major brands with professional review teams are buying a different artifact than “Just the file please.”
Read 5 tweets

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