Category: Blog Post
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The Generalist on A24
A24 has been a saving grace for keeping cool weird stuff in moving pictures for the last decade. They absolutely dominated the Oscars this year, which nicely marked how significant they’ve become in the non-Marvel section of the movie world. The Generalist recently put out a great piece on their…
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New Cities
I think new city projects are fascinating. Although it’s definitely hard to start a new community from scratch (especially from the top-down), greater experimentation can help unearth better ways to live together that we can all learn from and might push existing cities to improve lest their residents move away.…
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Climate Tech Policy And The Inflation Reduction Act
This week is Climate Week in New York. There’s been an awesome density of interesting founders, policy people, and other investors in the city, and I’ve had an absolute blast meeting everyone. Today we hosted an event at USV on the impact of the IRA on climate tech startups. Sophie…
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Optimizing SSBM
I had a friend in college who was a competitive Super Smash Bros Melee player. Though I’d played Smash before, I realized that the casual play I was used to is a different game altogether. It turns out there are many ways to exploit the game’s relatively simple physics to…
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Michael Nielsen on ASI
Michael Nielsen published a blog post on existential risks from AI. A lot of AI risk discussion is kind of rote, so it was refreshing to hear Nielsen’s especially first principles-y perspective. Some highlights below– On p(doom) as a “conceptual hazard”: The term “probability of doom” began frustrating me after…
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Making Machines Smart
I did a bunch of computer science in high school and college but never really got to do much robotics. I’ve recently been spending some time thinking about the space and wanted to get my hands dirty to understand it better. Thankfully, our portfolio company Viam makes it super easy…
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ChatGPT and Hedonic Adaptation
ChatGPT is incredible. It’s only the first iteration of a consumer LLM product, and I already use it everyday. Ordinary internet tools like search and wikipedia are still best for quickly finding a fact or going deep on researching something, but until ChatGPT’s release, I hadn’t realized their inadequacy for…
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That was then, this is now
I mentioned before that I’ve been reading a ton of old blogs since I started this blog. It’s actually a very fun activity – regular blogs from decades ago are really fascinating artifacts. Anyway, I was recently reading 2005 AVC posts: Howard’s list of problems with the venture business is…
Matthew Mandel 