Just trying to figure it all out and curate an interesting feed.
Baltimore, USA
Joined January 2009
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Wow. Wow. My #Tesla #HW4 #FSD v13.2.2 just reversed out of my driveway. Drove me across town and wait for it into the pharmacy parking lot and found a spot and reverse parked into it with zero intervention from me. My wife kind of freaked out. She was like what is it doing. It was a quirky little parking lot. The car actually switched to reverse to navigate around a traffic island. Mind blown. I am genuinely starting to think this robotaxi thing might work. @teslasi @chuckcook @coldenvy @AIDRIVR @aelluswamy Wow. Had some kind of AP and later FSD since 2018. For me this was the moment.
Andrew Bartels retweeted
Everything You Can Control With Grok in Your Tesla
One owner tested 172 voice commands and found Grok handles 119 of them, from climate and seat heaters to navigation, music, websites, and location-based reminders.
Full Story:
notateslaapp.com/news/4958/e…
With this morning’s news of the cancellation of the #Tesla #CyberTruck I am just going to leave this here.
Andrew Bartels retweeted
Zach is controlling Matic with his mind 🤯
Neuralink patient #22 is using his thoughts to move Matic around his home
This is incredible, @elonmusk @neuralink
Andrew Bartels retweeted
The pest control industry is worth $29B. Largest 2 firms (Rollins, Rentokil Terminix) account for 50% of revenue among top 100 pest control firms in US.
Market cap for both are down between 20-40% this year. One reason: people using AI chatbots for pest control reccomendations, and are being offered local options (while these global brands get hammered with bad reviews on Reddit).
Every child in America should get a free, federally funded allocation of AI tokens.
Tokens are intelligence on demand, and they're the keys to that intelligence.
I run a small consulting firm. With AI, I now build software, write proposals and research markets in hours instead of weeks. If I'd had that at 16, I can't imagine what I would have built.
We decided a long time ago that every kid in America should have a laptop. Then we realized a laptop without internet is pretty useless, so we started funding broadband.
Tokens are the third piece. Without them, a laptop is just a fancy typewriter.
Right now, kids whose parents can pay get unlimited intelligence. Everyone else gets the free tier.
The AI companies already give teachers free access. Nobody gives it to the kids.
Students should be able to use their tokens however they want. For homework, for building an app, for starting a business, for chasing whatever they're curious about.
And Claude, Codex, Grok or Cursor should be on every public library terminal. Libraries are where we already give everyone free access to books and the internet. AI should be next.
We fund the device. We fund the connection. The intelligence is the part that actually matters.
Should tokens be part of E-Rate, the program that already pays for school and library internet?
@lovable_dev I've tried to cancel my son's subscription since Oct 28. He emailed from his own account email. Your AI support keeps telling us to email from his account, then closes the ticket. Still no cancellation, still charging.
Andrew Bartels retweeted
A lot of PE-backed companies want to build an in-house AI team. They usually start by hiring one or two strong people.
A partner at a large advisory firm told us how that often plays out. Those hires end up carrying everything. They burn out, leave, and the company calls the outside firm back. The partner expects AI teams to follow the same pattern.
I think they're right. One person can't set the strategy, build the systems, review the work and cover the on-call rotation.
That's key-person risk. Hiring someone excellent can hide it for a while because the work keeps getting done.
If you're about to hire an AI lead, make sure the work can survive their departure:
1. Give them a team to build with from day one, whether it's internal or external.
2. Document what each agent does, what it can access, which decisions need approval and who owns it.
3. Keep the code in your repository and access under your company's accounts. Include prompts, workflow definitions and deployment configuration.
4. Plan the handover before the first build, so the work stays with the business when people move on.
Then cover the responsibilities around that person:
- Business ownership: someone decides which workflow matters and whether the result is useful.
- Technical review: someone other than the builder can challenge the design and inspect changes.
- Evaluation: representative test cases show whether the agent still behaves as expected after a change.
- Production support: someone watches failures, handles incidents and knows when to disable or roll back the workflow.
These don't all need to be separate hires. They do need named owners and enough time to do the work.
A runbook should let another person understand how to deploy the agent, investigate a failure and recover the service. If the only workable instruction is "ask the AI lead," the handover isn't ready.
For a portfolio company, I'd ask what happens if that person is unavailable during month-end or a customer incident. The answer tells you whether you've built a capability the business can rely on.
Make the hire. Just don't make one person responsible for holding the entire AI programme together.
Andrew Bartels retweeted
Eve co-founder and CEO Jayanth Madheswaran says law firms are going to look more like software companies, with proprietary data as their edge:
"I think the transformation that's going to happen is a lot of these law firms are going to look more like software companies. I think they're going to finally participate in the software revolution that's been happening for the last 30 years they've been left out of."
"Let's say you have a $25,000 settlement. The attorney gets maybe a third of that, let's call it $8,000 for simplicity. And of that $8,000, about half of it goes towards labor spend, 30% goes to marketing, and the rest maybe is profit."
"That's kind of the business as it exists today. Because of that business, it is so difficult to reinvest back into servicing your next client better. The only way you can really do that is by hiring a better attorney today."
"What changes is now they can actually accrue a database and data set that is unique to them that gets them results that is better than their competitors for a subset of law."
@jayanthmadhesw1
If a case won't earn a lawyer at least $5,000 in fees, most won't take it. AI is starting to change that math.
Eve co-founder and CEO Jay Madheswaran joins a16z's Alex Rampell to explain how AI can automate plaintiff law from the first client call through settlement, and how one firm used Eve to go from about 100 clients per attorney to 500.
They also discuss why legal software is secretly a labor market, why a single case can take 10,000 back-and-forths, why agents may soon negotiate with other agents, and what happens to the legal system when filing a case gets dramatically cheaper.
0:51 Plaintiff law vs. Big Law
3:50 Why lawyers won't take a small case
8:42 How AI grows a law firm's revenue
13:57 From 100 to 500 clients per attorney
15:53 Legal software's hidden labor market
20:25 Why Eve beats raw AI models
27:00 When both sides have AI
29:13 What's left for human lawyers
33:01 A lawsuit filed by AI in 4 hours
35:15 Can a small firm hit $1B in revenue?
39:16 Law's shift to outcome pricing
46:08 10,000 touches in one case
49:37 How AI beat the Thanksgiving trick
YouTube: youtu.be/iRMmPjunm3Q
@jayanthmadhesw1 @arampell
Andrew Bartels retweeted
Culture clash.
For the past three days, I've been hanging out at Constellation Research's Enterprise Conference. Most of these people are running big companies, and they're generally in their fifties and sixties. Compare that to Timeglass, seen below, where people are mostly in their twenties, and the difference in culture is stark. I've seen the same thing in San Francisco.
The people running these legacy companies all know they have to turn on the gas and adopt AI and robotics very quickly. But they don't know how to change their organizations to be more like a company run by twenty-year-olds.
Look at Timeglass. This is a new kind of application that basically watches everything you do on your computer. When a company uses it, it makes the organization more efficient, helps teams work better together, and is simply a better way to operate. But how do you get a Coca-Cola, a Siemens, or a Chick-fil-A to adopt new technology that's changing the world without pissing off your workers?
Imagine if Coca-Cola told everyone across their workforce, "Hey, you have to use Timeglass." There would be rebellion, chaos, fear, and loathing.
I was just talking about this with a guy who teaches executive leadership at UC Berkeley. It's a real problem. How are we going to introduce robots? Yesterday I talked about the data collection Tesla is doing in their factories and R&D labs, with people wearing dozens of cameras on their heads and wrists to study how they work. Imagine trying to sell that to the American auto unions. Not going to happen.
My lesson is that the only way to stay relevant in this world is to accelerate. Tesla is going to stay relevant because they'll soon have a humanoid robot to sell to everybody. The Detroit auto worker won't be relevant, because they're not adopting the new technology, and their unions and structures are resisting change.
I think this is the executive leadership challenge of the century: how do you get people to change? Right?
AI makes new kinds of automatic time sheets possible.
Say you are a lawyer, and charging $1,500 an hour. How do you keep track of your time? Timeglass, run by @grantweston does it automatically.
But it goes way beyond that. If your entire team runs it, you can see how your company is working in a whole new way. It reduces wondering when Joe down the hall is going to finish the report you are waiting on.
And see how you are working in a whole new way, even if you don't have a team.
Innovative startup in Austin, Texas that I got first look at.
Try it at timeglass.ai/ and here Grant and team show me why it unlocks productivity in a whole new way.
And, yes, it watches your computer screen. Scary? They take that on too.
I'm not compensated for this post. But my sponsors support me traveling to meet innovative new startups like this, which I greatly appreciate.
Andrew Bartels retweeted
Code interviews are dead. Anthropic hiring manager: “I’m scanning resumes and portfolios for little prototypes that exhibit taste, empathy, and principled thinking.”
MUST READ for anyone confused about how to get hired in the new era.
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I removed it from loops this month.
I have a spicy, optimistic take - I think there's an opportunity for junior engineers: felixrieseberg.com/hunger-be…
Andrew Bartels retweeted
I use Tesla FSD every single day, so I flew to Paris to try XPENGS NGP and see how it compares.
In this video I look at how NGP handles narrow Paris streets, bike lanes, pedestrians, roundabouts and more
Enjoy!
youtu.be/LYnX-HjS-gw
Andrew Bartels retweeted
The U.S. Ambassador to South Africa, L. Brent Bozell III, said Elon Musk told the government to "Go pound sand" when it insisted on 30% BEE ownership rather than accept Starlink's offer to provide connectivity for 5,000 mainly rural schools.
mybroadband.co.za/news/broad…
Andrew Bartels retweeted
South Africans have surprised the white super father who eliminated criminals who wanted to hijack his car
R180 000 donated to the father who fought off vehicle hijackers, eliminating all (allegedly) of them in front of his kids
South Africans have united to support 53 year old Sidney Hill after he was involved in a shootout with suspects during an attempted hijacking outside his home in Pinetown, KwaZulu-Natal.
Hill was exiting his home gate with his young daughter when armed men, who allegedly blocked him at the gate using his Toyota Hilux, opened fire.
He returned fire in self-defense, resulting in the death of one of the suspects.
Following the incident, a fundraising campaign was launched on BackaBuddy to assist him with legal expenses and to provide psychological trauma counseling for his children.
It is reported that the campaign has already raised R180 000, as South Africans have come forward in large numbers to support the father and his family after this ordeal.
Andrew Bartels retweeted
Tesla says it's building its own maps for FSD.
"We are building an entirely new architecture with AI. It will learn your preferences and the fleet preferences." - @aelluswamy
Team, I’m shocked and deeply saddened by the reports of a tragic explosion at CFB Wainwright in Alberta. While details are still emerging and the reports of casualties remain unconfirmed, the potential loss of life is heartbreaking. Our thoughts and prayers are with everyone affected, their families, and the broader Canadian community. Hoping for the best as more information becomes available.
Andrew Bartels retweeted
The new Tesla Roadster does a “kickflip” over a fleet of Tesla vehicles.
The stunt comes seconds after the vehicle launched off a massive ramp and flipped in midair before landing on the ground.
Andrew Bartels retweeted
The Nobel committee chair says they have "great faith" in Navi Pillay's integrity, but whether the Hamas-Israel war can be called a genocide is for the ICJ to decide, not them.
Then why give the Peace Prize to the person whose commission already decided it, with no authority to do so?
This is the same Navi Pillay who:
🚩 Signed a 2020 statement calling on governments to "Sanction Israel," then was appointed a year later to chair the UN inquiry into Israel without disclosing it
🚩 Defended a fellow commissioner who said social media is "controlled largely by the Jewish lobby," calling him "deliberately misquoted." He later apologized for his antisemitism himself
🚩 Ran the 2009 Durban conference that Ahmadinejad opened with an antisemitic speech, after dismissing Jewish groups' warnings as a "lobbying campaign"
🚩 Criticized the US in 2014 for funding Iron Dome to protect Israeli civilians from rockets, with no mention of Hamas firing them
They handed her the world's most famous honour two days after the October 7 anniversary and then said they're not taking a position on what she's known for.
So what do they mean by "peace"?
