software-engineers-from-the-united-states

"... I would give every single person in the department an entire month anything they wanted. For a month. It’s kind of insane because you’re talking thousands of people for a month, millions of dollars of salary spent for a month for people to do whatever they wanted and they would work so hard that month coming up with incredible ideas. In fact, one I saw was this idea of a 10-foot user interface, and we turned it into the Apple TV. Apple TV was invented because someone was encouraged to do whatever they wanted for a month. You can have that kind of environment to support creativity."

"Siri is your humble intelligent personal assistant that goes everywhere with you and can do things for you, just by you asking."

"... That guy was talking about how Microsoft had solved ... tablet computer and they're gonna do it with pens and he just, like, shoved it in Steve's face the way that they were going to, like, rule the world with their new tablets with their pens. Steve ... show them how it's really done ... At that time, touch screen was resistive touch ... He said, "we need to do capacitive-touch and has to be multi-touch." The moment you saw that, you knew this was the way to go."

"The portion of evolution in which animals developed eyes was a big development. Now computers have eyes."

"If you can’t understand what’s in information then it’s going to be very difficult to organize it."

"One of the things that I think is really important today in the field of machine learning research, that we’ll need to overcome, is…right now, when we want to build a machine learning system for a particular task we tend to have a human machine learning expert involved in that. So, we have some data, we have some computation capability, and then we have a human machine learning expert sit down and decide: Okay, we want to solve this problem, this is the way we’re going to go about it roughly. And then we have the system that can learn from observations that are provided to it, how to accomplish that task. That’s sort of what generally works, and that’s driving a huge number of really interesting things in the world today. And you know this is why computer vision has made such great strides in the last five years. This is why speech recognition works much better. This is why machine translation now works much, much better than it did a year or two ago. So that’s hugely important. But the problem with that is you’re building these narrowly defined systems that can do one thing and do it extremely well, or do a handful of things. And what we really want is a system that can do a hundred thousand things, and then when the hundred thousand-and-first thing comes along that it’s never seen before, we want it to learn from its experience to be able to apply the experience it’s gotten in solving the first hundred thousand things to be able to quickly learn how to do thing hundred thousand-and-one"

"I think there’s a lot of promise there, because I do see a path for agents with the right training process to eventually be able to do many, many things in the virtual computer environment that humans can do today. You know, right now they can sort of do some things, but not most things. But the path for increasing the capability there is reasonably clear. You get more reinforcement learning going, you have more agent experience that it can learn from. You have early nascent products that can do some things, but not most things, but are still incredibly useful for people."

"There are similarities though. Audigent at its core is a programmatic advertising company. They use innovative tech to improve the way online ads reach people, resulting in improved performance and engagement. Originally, Audigent was doing this in partnership with the three major record labels (Warner, Sony and Universal), which created a new revenue source for the music business. Revenue derived 100% from data as opposed to music, streaming, or touring."

"For me, the journey was Film, then Tech and Venture Capital, then back to Film."

"With FilmHedge I looked at Film and TV finance and asked myself a question: “If thousands of movies and TV shows are funded every year, why is the process of raising and closing money always so different for each of them?” That’s horribly inefficient. FilmHedge streamlines the process to make it more efficient."

"Building tech companies is about identifying problems, engineering solutions, and executing strategies that lead to different, scalable outcomes. What do I mean by scalable? Meaning the solution must be repeatable for the greatest number of customers without having to change small details."

"I went to school at Savannah College of Art and Design in 1999 to study film production. Then when I got out of college one of my first jobs was working on Tyler Perry’s first movie “Diary of Mad Black Woman.” I ended up working at his company for a few years. Then in 2008 I left the film industry to pursue tech, founding successful companies like Audigent"

"It wouldn't meet our customer expectations or Apple standards."

"We delivered this while taking an extraordinary step forward for privacy and AI with private cloud compute, which extends the privacy of your iPhone into the cloud so no one else can access your data, not even Apple. We also introduced enhancements that make Siri more natural and more helpful, and as we've shared, we're continuing our work to deliver the features that make Siri even more personal. This work needed more time to reach our high quality bar, and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year."

"At Apple Pay, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right, we don't think you should have to make a tradeoff between great features and privacy. We believe you deserve both."

"Here is iPhone 10. Now, unlocking it is as easy as looking at it and swiping up."

"Racist trolls on the internet, while offensive, don’t threaten my kids. You know what does? A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes. A culture that encourages congressmen to act like whiny children."

"I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth."

"Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool."

"99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs, they’re going back don’t worry guys."

"You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity."

"Here’s my view: I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life. We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever. So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that."

"He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine."

"Normalize Indian hate."

"In the early days of this project, software was treated like an adopted child and not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines, such as hardware engineering, and was thought of as art and magic, not science. I have always believed that art and science were involved in its creation, but at the time most people thought otherwise. Knowing this, I fought to legitimize software so that both software engineering and those who built it would receive the respect they deserved, so I began using the term “software engineering” to differentiate it from hardware and other forms of engineering. When I first started using these words, they were considered funny. It was a running joke for a long time. They liked to make fun of my radical ideas. Software eventually earned the same respect as any other discipline."

"Soften; Lighten; Quiet; Shrink. Conceal the bridge; Your ancestors built— A lady’s nose (like her mind) Must be petite. Blonde the mane, Straighten the curls— Her hair’s much too loud And fills space not for girls. Alter the foundation, Uproot olive for blush— Make light of those shadows, A woman’s face speaks none. Soften; Whiten; Quiet; Shrink."

"We're shaping software and the software is shaping us. It's a circle."

"I'm pretty centrist politically. If there is one political position I cannot stand, it's deceleration. It's people who believe we should use less energy. Not people who believe global warming is a problem; I agree with you. Not people who believe that saving the environment is good; I agree with you. But people who think we should use less energy. That energy usage is a moral bad. No. No. You are diminishing humanity. [Instead we should ask] How do we make more of it? How do we make it clean? How do I pay 20 cent for a megawatt hour instead of a kilowatt hour?"

"The incentive for politicians to move up in the political structure is to add laws."

"I'm hoping that games can get out of this whole mobile gaming dopamine pump thing [...] and create worlds."

"If there's two great evils in the world, it's centralization and complexity."

"[About AI:] You could make an argument that nobody should have these things, and I would defend that argument, [...] and I would respect someone philosophically with that position. Just like i would respect someone philosophically with the position that nobody should have guns. But I will not respect philosophically "Only the trusted authorities should have access to this." Who are the trusted authorities? You know what? I'm not worried about alignment between an AI company and their machines; I'm worried about alignment between me and the AI company."

"[If he has hope for cryptocurrencies:] Sure! I have hope for the ideas. I really do. I wand the US dollar to collapse. I do."

"I took a political approach at Comma too that I think is pretty interesting. I think Elon [Musk] takes the same political approach. You know, Google had no politics, and what ended up happening is the absolute worst kind of politics took over."

"Half of these AI alignment problems are just human alignment problems. And that's what's also so scary about the language that they use. It's not the machines you want to align; it's me."

"[About AI:] Oh, no! We can loose control? Yes! Thank God! I hope they loose control. I want them to loose control more than anything else. [...] Centralized and held control is tyranny. I don't like anarchy either, but I will always take anarchy over tyranny. Anarchy have a chance."

"Sam Altman won't tell you that GPT-4 has 220 billion parameters and is a 16 weight mixture-model with 8 sets of weights."

"The fundamental limitation of [computer] cloud is who owns the off-switch."

"My central thesis about the world is there are things that centralize power and they're bad, and there are things that decentralize power and they're good. Everything I can do to help decentralice power I'd like to do."

"[About AI:] I am scared of these things too. Everyone should be scared of these things. These things are scary. But now you ask about the two possible futures. One where a small "trusted" centralized group of people has them, and the other where everyone has them. And I am much less scared of the second future than the first."

"I am so much not worried about the machine independently doing harm. That is what some of these AI safety people seem to think. They somehow seem to think that the machine independently is going to rebel against its creator. [...] This is sci-fi B-movie garbage. [...] If the thing writes viruses, it's because the human told it to write viruses."

"[About AI:] We give it to everybody. And if you do anything besides give it to everybody, trust me, the bad humans will get it. Because that's who gets the power. It's always the bad humans who get power."

"Just dumping the code on GitHub is not open source. Open source is a culture. Open source means that your issues are not all one year old stale issues. Open source means developing in public."

"It struck me one day how just silly atheism is. Of course we were created by God. It's the most obvious thing."

"For the longest time at Comma I asked "Why did start a company? Why did I do this?" But, you know, what else was I going to do?"

"Utilitarianism is an abhorrent ideology. [...] I think charity is bad. what is charity but an investment that you don't expect to have a return on. [...] Probably almost always [making the world better] involves starting a company. [...] I like the flip side of effective altruism: effective accelerationism. I think accelerationism is the only thing that that's ever lifted people out of poverty. The fact that food is cheap, not we're giving food away because we are kindhearted people. [...] [Universal basic income], what a scary idea. [...] Your only source of power is granted to you by the goodwill of the government. What a scary idea. I'd rather die than need UBI to survive, and I mean it. [...] You can make survival guaranteed without UBI. What you have to do is make housing and food dirt cheap."

"When someone makes [a large language model] that is capable of citing its sources, it will kill Google. [...] Some startup is going to figure it out. I think, if you ask me, [...] I think by the end of the decade Google won't be the number one web page anymore."

"Intelligence is so dangerous; be it human intelligence or machine intelligence. Intelligence is dangerous."

"From our snow-capped mountains to our nearly endless prairies, Montana is an awe-inspiring place of tremendous beauty. We call it Big Sky Country, the Treasure State, the Last Best Place. And we call it home, but there’s something even more special than the beauty of an eastern Montana sunset or being knee deep in a crystal clear mountain stream -- it’s the people of Montana, Montanans are a kind, warm, generous, and hard-working people."

"As a seasoned developer I have certain quirks, opinions, and common patterns that I fall back on. Having to explain to another person why I am approaching a problem in a particular way is really good for helping me break bad habits and challenge my assumptions, or for providing validation for good problem solving skills."