The term 'Grok' comes from the Robert A. Heinlein sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It's a martian word that means to understand something so completely that the observer merges and becomes one with the observed.

deleting the product it's funny how you can sometimes tell if a team culture is dysfunctional just by looking at how their app is laid out. behind every feature, or tab in a sidebar likely lies a PM or someone responsible for an OKR. the problem is when individual performance is measured by these metrics. it becomes the singular focus of the responsible person to make those numbers look good, since it determines whether they get rewarded or axed, even if it comes at the detriment of the overall quality of the product. this is why you mostly see features get added, but rarely removed. if you own a feature, then it being removed feels like an aura loss. this is even worse in the agentic era when the cost to add features has become so low. you can simply will a new feature into existence overnight and add another tab. but users will notice that you ship your org chart. teams that make people play silly games under the guise of performance management rarely build great products. to build a great product you need to first fix your culture

We're committing $100 million to train 10,000 engineers at our customers and partners. Every exec team I meet wants to go faster. And that often comes down to the best AI + the best talent to apply it. And that talent can be scarce. anthropic.com/news/claude-fr…

Pretty sure there are more dots than bots already in this little world. Cool thing is that we’re improving them everyday and they learn directly from your feedback.

Let me know if you want to see our roadmap

So many people with fancy Manhattan doorman apartments selling items for cheap on Facebook marketplace. How is it worth your time? Just the love of the game?

this wave of buddybots (Muse, etc.) was such a genius strategy for the data mining companies to work around ad blockers

found in my notes app from tuesday… who said this?? 😂

Slightly more bullish on Google after seeing this And X is back as the place where stuff happens & gets done!

you know how native americans were utterly anhiliated by european diseases they have no immune response to? how come the europeans didnt catch native american diseases in the same way

You're right, it is so weird to think that was the case, if it was India would be immune to everything.

If you want an actual answer, it's a combination of genetics and culture. Native American populations had severely limited genetic diversity. Far lower than Africa, Europe, and Asia. The native diseases in the New World were ones that European immune systems were able to adapt to pretty easily. Keep in mind, all living Europeans were the descendants of survivors of every plague you can think of. Hundreds of diseases out of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and dozens of populations in Europe itself. That lead to a highly adaptive immune heritage. Native Americans had no such diversity of immunity, and all had very similar immune heritage. What one was vulnerable to, most were. Where Europeans had a much more diverse ancestry. On top of that, European culture had a tradition of isolating the ill, going back to at least the Black Plague, while most Native American cultures were more likely to have friends and family spend time around sick people to comfort them. Which sounds more friendly (because it is) until you realize that being in the same room with someone infected with a deadly disease is a good way to catch that same illness yourself. So, a combination of genetic and cultural and historic factors. Europeans were walking disease clouds of all the stuff their ancestors had survived. Chicken pox is annoying to most Europeans, but ate the skin off of Native Americans. Native Americans had diseases of their own, but European immune systems, that had survived plague after plague after plague for thousands of years, tended to laugh at those germs and beat them up for their lunch money.