Grant Slatton Profile picture
Recent writing at https://t.co/LjlRrCZm9r Formerly built the world's fastest filesystem at AWS, now the fastest spreadsheet at https://t.co/hLkbCuJ8i9
Mar 30 4 tweets 1 min read
many working in finance pay $25K/yr for access to Bloomberg Terminal

will probably start to see this level of spend on AI use for devs in the next year or two

chatgpt pro is already $2.5k/yr

as it gets better and more useful, people will bid that price up The number of responses that assume that price is a somehow a function of profit margin is astounding

A Toyota Corolla vs Honda Civic are essentially interchangeable commodities in a low-margin, competitive market — they still cost tens of thousands of $$
Mar 25 51 tweets 13 min read
tremendous alpha right now in sending your wife photos of yall converted to studio ghibli anime Image
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Ghiblification will continue until morale improves
Feb 28 4 tweets 1 min read
parents who really want grandkids need to properly align incentives

have N kids yourself

then tell them when you die, your estate will be split between them in proportion to how many kids they have non-linear is even better

Jan 24 5 tweets 2 min read
Met a guy who runs a single-serving website that’s just a tiny wrapper around a python lib

User googles niche problem, finds his site, pays $5 to fix their problem

Makes $10K/mo completely passive, niche enough to have no competitors

Site could be cloned with 1 day work To get an idea of what it is, imagine a normie-friendly wrapper around ffmpeg or imagemagick or some other common data transform toolkit

Told him I wouldn’t reveal obviously, so will not elaborate further

But there is truly low-hanging fruit all around, kind of astounding
Jan 15 7 tweets 2 min read
It's remarkable how consistently understaffed and off-the-ball most recruiting departments are

E.g. recently have known 2 hyper-competent hardcore backend engineers be having conversations with OpenAI recruiting and just get ghosted randomly

It's really all bigtechs though When I joined AWS I gave a list of ~5 former schoolmates who would be a great fit and recruiting fumbled 100% of them

I was once considering going to Stripe and the hiring manager and recruiting fumbled me, ghosted while scheduling interviews
Dec 29, 2024 4 tweets 1 min read
For disclosure, here are the questions I asked at faang:

Warmup: write a function that takes a string of parentheses as an argument and returns true if the parentheses are balanced

e.g. (())() == true, ()) == false

Next: given a grid of… [cont]

Given a grid of booleans, where True is land, False is water, and adjacent lands form an island, count the number of islands

(this has been a popular leetcode medium since 2015)

And finally, if I was instructed to focus on datastructures instead of algorithms, I'd ask… [cont]
Sep 18, 2023 7 tweets 3 min read
The new GPT model, gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct, can play chess around 1800 Elo.

I had previously reported that GPT cannot play chess, but it appears this was just the RLHF'd chat models. The pure completion model succeeds.



See game & thoughts below:
Image The new model readily beats Stockfish Level 4 (1700) and still loses respectably to Level 5 (2000). Never attempted illegal moves. Used clever opening sacrifice, and incredibly cheeky pawn & king checkmate, allowing the opponent to uselessly promote.

lichess.org/K6Q0Lqda

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Dec 11, 2022 7 tweets 3 min read
GPT can iteratively write, debug, and test programs to accomplish arbitrary goals.

Pictured: GPT reading snippets of HTML from HN and building a headline scraper in Python, overcoming bugs by simply reading the errors and self-judgments and hypothesizing to itself.

Thread ↓

As shown in my previous post, GPT can be embedded in a REPL to accomplish goals in an agent-based fashion by using command line tools. Today's post shows it is capable of creating novel command line tools, such as a web scraper.

1/
Dec 8, 2022 10 tweets 3 min read
GPT can use a web browser to answer questions.

When embedded in a REPL environment and prompted to strategize and monologue, agent-like behavior emerges. The agent can solve multi-step problems that involve going to pages, following links, reading the next page, etc.

Thread ↓ ImageImageImage The real HN pages showing those answers: ImageImage