The IMO is the hardest high school Math test. A lesser known sibling, the IOL (International Olympiad for Linguistics), starts tomorrow!

Students are asked to translate lesser-known languages purely using logic. 5 problems, 6hrs.

The problems seem absolutely impossible. And if that wasn't hard enough, they also have a 3-4hr team challenge!

This entire idea of the self-sufficient linguistics problem originated in the 1960s by Russian linguistics at Moscow State University.

HUGE Immigration News for International Entrepreneurs!!

If you own 10%+ of a US startup entity founded <5yrs ago with $264k+ of funding, you+spouses of up to 3 co-founders can come work in the US for 2.5yrs with renewal to 5yrs.

Startups globally can now come build in SF!

1/5 A "qualified investor" has to be a US citizen or PR who has made $600-650k in prior investments with 2+ startups creating 5+ jobs or generating $530k revenue growing 20% YoY.

If you don't meet the funding requirement, don't lose hope. You CAN provide alternate evidence.

2/5

A theory of why Claude 3.5 Sonnet is insane at coding: mechanistic interpretability.

Anthropic showed that there are clever ways to understand what the weights of LLMs do and "steer" them to behave differently.

Doing this on Sonnet may be why it crushes it at code:

🧵

1/12 When you try to understand each weight of a model on their own, they don't make sense.

This is superposition: each neuron represents many features, but combinations of them may represent a single "feature" that we can make sense of.

2/12

No one talks about the Yahoo mafia but they’re so cracked

Jeff Weiner—CEO LinkedIn
Gideon Yu—CFO Facebook, YouTube
Stewart Butterfield—Founder Slack
Tim Tully—CTO Splunk Partner Menlo
Amjad Masad—Founder Replit
Jess Lee—Partner Sequoia
Brian Acton, Jan Koum—Founder WhatsApp

1/3 Amr Awafallah—Founder Cloudera, Vectara
Dave Goldberg—CEO SurveyMonkey [RIP]
Dan Rosensweig—CEO Chegg
Eddie Wu—CEO Alibaba
Brad Garlinghouse—CEO Ripple
Blake Irving—CEO GoDaddy
Chad Dickerson—CEO Etsy
Rich Riley—CEO Shazam
Greg Coleman—President Buzzfeed

2/3

How to understand Github code repos with LLMs in 2 mins.

Even after 10yrs of engineering, dissecting a large codebase is daunting.
1 Dump the code into one big file
2 Feed it to Gemini-1.5Pro (2M context)
3 Ask it anything.

Here's, I dissect DeepFaceLab, a deepfake repo:

1/11 Clone the repo and ask Claude to generate some bash to dump the raw contents into one file.

The final dump has the filenames and their contents.

2/11

ChatGPT in Siri was cool. Apple's own models is cooler.

~3B param Apple On-Device and larger Apple Server
—Time to first token: 0.6ms/tok
—Generation speed: 30 tok/s, wo speculation
—On-the-fly loaded 10-100MB LoRA adapters for each use-case

Benchmarks speak for itself.

1/5 Benchmarks

Granted, a lot of the benchmarks Apple showcased seem cherry-picked. They used this arbitrary writing ability benchmark, with no real citation. Using human raters is great, but would've loved to see MMLU and other industry-standard benchmarks, not just IFEval.

2/5

The single biggest problem I hear from early founders is: "how do I hire great tech talent?"

It's tricky. 2x less cash and work 2x more hours in the hope that equity amounts to something is not particularly compelling.

Here are some things that I've found helps:

1/6 1. If you have a less tenured track record, you need to dish out more equity.

2. If a candidate optimizes for liquid comp, save yourself time and reject them early. Not a fit for startups.

2/6

This is not talked about enough.

There are entire orgs of 100+ people in BigTech under Chinese / Indian VPs that are ~100% racially homogenous to the point of not speaking English.

Why? Cause everyone is petrified to say out loud what they're thinking. "Like gangs in prison" If they don't filter the out-group themselves, new candidates self-select out of joining these orgs.

I don't believe in artificially injecting diversity into organizations, but this is poor form. These orgs are run like mini-companies with their own little internal politics.

EXCLUSIVE: The largest analysis of engineering salaries in India!

We analyzed 25,000 salaries to find the companies that pay the most and the least, and open-sourced it all.

Pay transparency is VERY important in India: there can be a 5x diff in pay for the same role!

🧵

1/6 While Amazon, Microsoft, Walmart and Flipkart are some of the most common employers, Google at a median pay of 66LPA ($80k) is the highest paying common one.

Rubrik, Coinbase and Twilio make up the top 3 highest paying overall with many employees making 1cr+ ($120k)!

2/6

The AI girlfriend epidemic is bigger than I thought it was.

8 of the top 50 most used Gen AI apps in the world are mostly AI companionship:
Character
Janitor
CrushOn
Yodayo
Candy
SpicyChat
Chub
DreamGF

With loneliness rising, this will fill the gap, whether we like it or not. Others:
Soulfun AI
Muah AI
Nomi AI
Replika
Kupid AI
RomanticAI

Even if you're not a user, I'd check these out to get a taste of what is out there in the world. Most of these have apps have in the millions of users.

Huge Immigration News!

Today for the first time ever, USCIS published a breakdown of priority dates of Indians on EB visa backlog.

There's been a huge uptick of EB-1 in '22 which means the PD won't be current for ~2-3 years at best!

Chart for Indians on EB-1.

1/4 I've written about the way to understand how these numbers translate to the expected wait, agnostic of new applications and transferred PDs, here:

It's too complicated for a tweet.

Here's the chart for Indians on EB-2.

2/4 debarghyadas.com/writes/eb-wait…

In the last 20yrs, "study CS and work in tech" became a "path" to wealth

Now:
—BigTech did layoffs, aren't hiring
—Tech job postings are ~40% of '21
—Startups often prefer tenured hires
—Huge pipeline of CS majors: 40% of MIT

Winter is coming for software engineering.
🧵

1/5 Beyond that, there seems to be less and less whitespace for software to create value in people's lives. Compare how much time we spent with tech in the year 2000 as a society vs 2024.

Companies are trending to being smaller and more efficient, not large and IBM-like.

2/5

Google Gemini doesnt generate white people even when you ask for a medieval king, pope, American or even Google's own founders!

Carmack, Balaji, Paul Graham, LeCun, Andreesen and Elon have all expressed dissent

Google hotfixed it for now.

🧵 of the popular screw-ups on X

1/19 Black king of France from the 18th century

2/19

https://twitter.com/1235608350861045761/status/1760116228746805272

My #1 tip for engineers navigating the rough hiring market is to uncover hot startups you may not know.

Reach out to the junior VCs with an email asking them who is doing well and whether they're hiring!

Some budding superstar startups compensate handsomely for talent.

1/5 Most engineers who are graduating college wrongly assume:
— Startups don't pay well
— Most startups can die suddenly (you usually have a healthy forewarning)
— Startups won't sponsor visas
— Lack of job security

These are usually false.

2/5

Winter is coming for Indian Masters students in the US this year.

~50,000-65,000 Indian Masters students in CS are going to graduate looking for tech jobs that *most* will NOT find.

This is the single largest international student subgroup in the US.

THREAD

🧵

1/7 When most people look at international student data, they view it in aggregate which hides the underlying severity.

Graduate and undergrad look very different.

India sends the most grad students to the US, primarily for a Masters degree — 166k!

2/7

Raising a child in the US seems hellish compared to India.

US—Wake up early, cook, drive kid to work, both parents work, do groceries, chores, cleaning. Lonely.

India—Maid cleans, driver drops you, groceries in 15mins, cook cooks, parents babysit. Community.

(requires $$)

1/4 Specifically, this holds true for a Rs ~35L+ ($40k) household income in India and <$1M in the US.

ALL my friends who moved to India as parents are happy, but the few who did the reverse are not. Most ensure the baby has US citizenship.

I'm in India, and I see it vividly.

2/4

Youtube will do an ABSURD ~$40-45B revenue in 2023.

Youtube's implied valuation would be ~$225-250B, the size of Adobe!

That would make them the largest video app by revenue by FAR, over Netflix (~$35B), TikTok (~$18B) and the rest!

Here's the math—

1/6 Youtube revenue is split into advertising and subscriber revenue. Ads is reported under "Youtube Ads" but subscriber revenue is under "Google other".

Aside from that, Google Other includes Google Play, hardware and more.

Here's the Q3 2023 earnings.

2/6

HUGE Immigration News: proposed changes to H-1B, the US immigrant worker visa!

Highlights of the 277 doc, in non-legalese
—Stop H-1B fraud from Indian IT, increase lottery odds by +60%
—Allow entrepreneurship on H-1B!
—More!

BIG fan of the new rules.

Let's break it down—

1/7 1a. Stop H-1B fraud

In FY2024, there were 780k H-1B lottery registrations, driven by Indian IT firms registering multiple times. Only ~469k or so are unique.

Rule now says the lottery will require passport number and one passport will count as 1 registration.

2/7

EB-1 green card applications from India are being processed 6.5yrs in the past (2017), the most retrogressed it's EVER been.

This is driven by the uptick of Indian EB-1C "multinational managers" which will hit an all-time high of ~7800 in 2023, half of ALL EB-1Cs!

1/4 Experts say this date isn't going to move forward anytime soon.

The EB-1Cs are primarily driven by
—Indian IT companies
—people who worked outside the US in a "managerial capacity" during the pandemic

An EB-1 is one of the ways to skip the 150+yr normal green card line.

2/4

Only 0.3% of Indians go to the gym.

— Streets not built for walking, and air quality is low
— Most food is unhealthy: fried, processed, low protein
— Social events are centered around food and drink
— Culturally, "life" > fitness

This drastically reduces our lifespan.

1/5 Indians are predisposed to a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes and hypertension. Who doesn't know a relative who has had to have heart surgery or take insulin?

In other parts of the world, more educated people take diet and fitness seriously.

2/5

https://twitter.com/debarghya_das/status/1569879113464446982

BIG Immigration news!

UCSIS made a huge statement about how it evaluates the EB-1A Extraordinary Ability visa, the only non-backlogged one for Indians.

Top Highlights:

High Salary
"person’s highly valued equity holdings in the startup are of comparable significance"

1/10 Leading and Critical Role
"Founder or co-founder of, or contributor of intellectual property to, a startup business that has a distinguished reputation"

With distinguished reputation defined as—

2/10