Patrick Collison: The Winged Gospel

At Startup School, an interviewer asked Patrick Collison about the student meme that anyone who doesn't drop out and start a company now will be "trapped in the permanent underclass" Builder Circle. Collison answered that humanity has "always had... an affinity for these millinarian sort of models" in which society is about to be permanently transformed Builder Circle. He then recommended a book: "there's a great book, The Winged Gospel." His summary of it: after aviation was invented, people believed humanity was entering a new era. Aviation turned out to be "a pretty big deal," he said, but not the "sociological rewriting" its excitable backers expected Builder Circle. His conclusion: "I would take the under on this being the last couple of years... to create a company" Builder Circle. Video

Garry Tan: @polydao on cutting agent costs

Garry Tan tested an article instead of just endorsing it. His gstack-evals project tried to reproduce @polydao's "How to Cut Your Agent Bill by 90% With Jev Engineering and Kimi K3." He reports that "this article replicates," and that a model he also had it try, particle-1, did "even better" @garrytan +1. The article's starting point is that most calls in an agent loop are small decisions: which tool to use next, whether a source is relevant, whether the task is done. Each one is billed as a full frontier-model generation @Mr_Buzzoni. Its fix is to send those decisions to a cheaper model based on calibrated confidence, and pass only the hard cases to Kimi K3 @Mr_Buzzoni. Article

Patrick O'Shaughnessy: Colossus's Zuckerberg profile

Patrick O'Shaughnessy re-shared Colossus's "Mark," by @colossusjeremy, as "Worth a revisit" @patrick_oshag. Colossus describes Zuckerberg as the head of "history's largest nonterritorial empire" who "nonetheless remains a prisoner of his rivals." The profile took nearly a year. Stern interviewed three dozen people, among them Zuckerberg himself and his critics and competitors at frontier AI labs @colossusmag. Article

Paul Graham: Andrew McCarthy on the midterms

Paul Graham shared Andrew McCarthy's National Review piece "on what caused the Republicans to lose so badly in the midterms." He added no comment of his own @paulg.

Shorter picks

• Martin Casado called a demo video "beautiful" @martin_casado. It shows an open-world game built with Opus 5.5, gpt-Astra, Three.js, Anatomy and Suno, with art direction in the style of Moebius and Roger Dean @bei351009016. Post
• Tobi Lütke said "Love this" about John Fewell's isometric map of Toronto @tobi. The map covers all 630 km² from four angles, and you can rotate it to explore @johnfewell. Map
• Jason Lemkin promoted his own SaaStr piece on this week's 20VC episode. The headline takeaway: SaaStr cut the costs of its Connect app by 72% just by switching models, so "Re-benchmark every time a new small model ships" @jasonlk. Article