Top pick: Elizabeth Dias's NYT piece on Anthropic, recommended by Bill Gurley

Gurley said he was "grateful" that Elizabeth Dias of The New York Times wrote this article. It covers how Anthropic thinks about its model, software consciousness, and the model's role relative to religion. His reason is practical. If you are a customer or partner of the company, press evaluating it, or a government regulating it, "it is important to know how 'they' think about their models." He says the company's approach is "very different from any software company that ever existed." He doesn't say whether he agrees with it: "Judge for yourself... but be aware and informed" @bgurley.

Tim Ferriss: Small Giants by Bo Burlingham

In a thread arguing that "everything big starts small and focused," Ferriss asks: "Do you really want to build and manage a big company?" For most people, he says, it's "an all-consuming taskmaster." He then recommends Small Giants "for some fantastic examples of companies that choose to be the best rather than the biggest" @tferriss.

Guillermo Rauch: Jeff Dean's latency numbers and a testing-to-proofs essay

In a video on his agentic engineering workflow, the Vercel CEO recommends Jeff Dean's "Latency numbers every programmer should know." He says he has shared the table "so many times with engineering teams" because it gives "rough senses of scale and orders of magnitude." He adds: "you don't have to memorize everything" David Ondrej.

He also calls an essay on "the spectrum of testing to proofs" one of his "all-time favorite essays on engineering." The essay compares tests, type systems and proof systems on a simple algorithm. It shows that code covering every edge case needs a lot of boilerplate and compiler help David Ondrej. He doesn't name the author or title.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Andrej Karpathy on reading LLM output

Chamath shared Karpathy's post with the comment "The future is taste and judgement" @chamath. Karpathy suggests ways to make model output easier to understand:

• asking for writing in the ASD-STE100 controlled language
• diagrams
• interactive HTML pages
• bespoke explainer videos, the format he's "most bullish on" @karpathy

His argument is that as LLMs do more of the legwork, more of our work moves "into oversight and understanding" @karpathy.

Jeff Bezos: José Andrés on housing

Bezos called Andrés's post a "100% correct diagnosis and prescription," adding: "it's not just in Spain" @JeffBezos. Andrés, writing in Spanish, says Spain doesn't lack decrees; it lacks homes. His prescription is to build much more: more available land, permits in months rather than years, and more density @chefjoseandres.

Fred Wilson's old AVC posts, as used by USV's Nikhil Raman

On a video with Wilson, Raman said he searched his texts and found that he regularly sends Wilson's blog posts to people. One was a roughly 13-year-old post on Don Valentine's 2x2 of founder quality against how easy founders are to work with. Raman sent it during a debate about whether today's founders have "softened." Wilson's point from the post: hard-to-work-with great founders are where "we make all our money" USV. The second was a decade-old post on career investors versus founder investors. Raman sent it while thinking about how a non-founder VC earns credibility with founders USV.

Shorter mentions

• No Priors with Fractile founder @goodwin_ml, from Sarah Guo (her own show). She called it "really fun." Topics include how to win the AI chip market structurally, memory bandwidth and new hardware scaling laws @saranormous. Full interview@saranormous.
• KQED's report on California legalizing balcony solar, from Matt Mullenweg. He called it "Another win for solar!" and said he hopes Tesla offers products for it @photomatt. Link
• A MilHistNow post on the 1942 V-2 test, from Paul Graham. He said it explained why he'd never considered what the first man-made object in space was: "We don't talk about that milestone" @paulg.