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Ep 254 “The Law-Enforcement Inspired Yogurt Retrieval System” – National Gun Violence Awareness Month (Bullet Poof Bulletins) Celebrating the launch of eco-fiction anti-gun novella Bullet Poof and National Gun Violence Awareness Month, Avis Kalfsbeek brings back beloved Kitty O'Compost with the Bullet Poof Bulletins. Tonight on the Spoke-Easy stage, Kitty O'Compost tears apart a leaked corporate branding deck that tries to turn a standard trip to the grocery store into a paramilitary operation. This bulletin satirizes the "duty-grade readiness" marketing trend, exposing the absurdity of designing high-capacity grocery bags and tactical cereal deployment systems to commodify domestic anxiety. Inspired by the transformative themes of Bullet Poof, this episode laughs at the hyper-vigilant lifestyle brand and reminds us of the true safety found in open, trusting neighborhoods. Resources: Bullet Poof is a hopeful eco-fiction novella about what happens when ordinary people refuse to accept the gun status quo. Get the book: https://www.aviskalfsbeek.com/bullet-poof National Gun Violence Awareness Month: www.wearorange.org Theme Music: "Turn the Steel" and punk intros produced by Avis Kalfsbeek (via ElevenLabs). Music Credits & Support: Buy LPs and music downloads directly from the bands' websites, or from platforms like Bandcamp where artists retain the majority of your purchase. This project is inspired by decades of punk ethos, raw energy, and the brilliant musicians who shaped the movement. The sonic landscape of this series was informed and inspired by: The Sex Pistols, Black Flag, Rites of Spring, The Buzzcocks, Minor Threat, The Clash, Social Distortion, Bad Religion, The Dead Kennedys, The Ramones, Jawbreaker, Fugazi, Rise Against, The Damned, The Stooges, Bad Brains, Bikini Kill, The Lawrence Arms, Husker Du, Pennywise, The Adicts, The Exploited, Descendents, Stiff Little Fingers, Crass, The Germs, Dropkick Murphys, Operation Ivy, Against Me!, Green Day, Blink-182, The Hives, Sleater-Kinney, The Violent Femmes, The Network, The Jam, The Gaslight Anthem, No Use For A Name, and The Interrupters.
Modern work can be frustrating and chaotic—if you don't have the right tools. From context engineering to multimodal search, go behind the scenes and hear how Dropbox engineers are building AI that actually understands you, so you can focus on the work that matters most. If you're new to Working Smarter, we've travelled from the F1 track to the bottom of a lake, and heard real stories from chefs, doctors, lawyers, and founders about how AI is helping them do more of what they love about their jobs. But in our third season, we're talking to the people behind the tools—the engineers and product leaders building helpful, time-saving AI features into the Dropbox experience you already know and trust. You'll hear all about their work on agents, inference, security, and, of course, how the people building AI use AI themselves. ~ ~ ~ Working Smarter is brought to you by Dropbox. Find, organize, and share your work—all in one place—with context-aware AI from Dropbox. You can listen to more episodes of Working Smarter on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. To read more stories and past interviews, visit workingsmarter.ai This show would not be possible without the talented team at Cosmic Standard: producer Ben Montoya, sound engineer Aja Simpson, technical director Jacob Winik, and executive producer Eliza Smith. Special thanks to our illustrator Fanny Luor, marketing consultant Meggan Ellingboe, and editorial support from Catie Keck. Our theme song was composed by Doug Stuart. Working Smarter is hosted by Matthew Braga. Thanks for listening!
Episode 29 of Guardians of M365 Governance: Christian Buckley, Joy Apple, and Ragnar go off-script. No guest this month, just three MVPs working through a laundry list of the governance topics keeping them up at night, from Agent 365 and shadow AI to the real question underneath it all: what does it mean to be the human in the loop?In this episode we get into:00:59 The hottest news in the M365 governance space02:00 Lessons from Agent 365 customer workshops (delivered in Spanish!)03:25 What resonates: agent inventory and classification across Microsoft, third-party, and homegrown agents03:52 Shadow AI: OpenClaw, Cortex, Bedrock and why "observe or block" is the only lever today05:04 Don't be the department of "no": have the conversation first06:50 Coming soon to shadow AI discovery: Claude Code CLI, Codex CLI, Cursor, Llama and more07:19 Multi-model reality: Copilot, Grok, Claude and where each fits08:35 Mike Gennady's agent factory, nightly agent conferences, and #ClawPilot10:08 Microsoft Build preview and OpenClaw + Teams / Copilot integration11:05 New Agent 365 registry sync: Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Databricks Genie, Salesforce Agentforce15:16 Cloud migration vs. AI: the governance parallels and the need for foundational cleanup18:00 The risk to Microsoft's strategy: enterprise vs. the developer space20:28 Licensing changes, Agent 365 pricing, and the true (unknown) cost of AI22:45 Why automating away junior roles handicaps your future talent pipeline24:01 Retrieval, semi-autonomous, and autonomous agents, and why nobody wants full autonomy yet25:33 Human in the loop on multiple levels: content cleanup, the publishing quality gate, and workflow escalation28:50 100 test cases for Power Platform alone: never underestimate the testing effort29:31 Productivity vs. effectiveness: redefining how humans work with AI31:17 AI-assisted writing done right: a 47-page doc drafted by AI, then days of human verification35:28 Handwriting vs. typing, stream-of-consciousness drafting, and thinking through the words36:36 Why the human mind can't be replicated, and Hegel on master and horse39:28 Finding your USP as a human in the loop, a daily new discoveryThe big takeaway: the discussion of the next two to three years won't be about productivity. It will be about effectiveness, and resetting the standard for what it means to keep humans meaningfully in the loop. Govern your agents as helpers, never the other way around.Guardians of M365 Governance is a monthly webcast dedicated to everything governance in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Got a topic you want us to cover, or want to join as a guest? Connect with Christian, Joy, or Ragnar on LinkedIn.Microsoft Build runs June 2-3, free online: https://build.microsoft.com
Dr F Scott Feil discusses the first in a mini series of study tactics that are evidence based. This first one is all about Self Quizzing and Self Retrieval.Works a lot better than reading and highlighting and re-reading and re-highligthing until the page is completely yellow.
Enjoy these back to back throwback episodes! Forbidden Knowledge Network https://forbiddenknowledge.news/ FKN Link Treehttps://linktr.ee/FKNlinksMake a Donation to Forbidden Knowledge News https://www.paypal.me/forbiddenknowledgenehttps://buymeacoffee.com/forbiddenTake control of your health now with Christian Yordanov's Live Longer Program https://www.livelongerformula.com/fknWe are back on YouTube! https://youtube.com/@forbiddenknowledgenews?si=XQhXCjteMKYNUJSjBackup channelhttps://youtube.com/@fknshow1?si=tIoIjpUGeSoRNaEsDoors of Perception is available now on Amazon Prime!https://watch.amazon.com/detail?gti=amzn1.dv.gti.8a60e6c7-678d-4502-b335-adfbb30697b8&ref_=atv_lp_share_mv&r=webDoors of Perception official trailerhttps://youtu.be/F-VJ01kMSII?si=Ee6xwtUONA18HNLZListen to Forbidden Knowledge News on clearair.fm every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday 12:15pm CSThttps://clearair.fm/Pick up Independent Media Token herehttps://www.independentmediatoken.com/Be prepared for any emergency with Prep Starts Now!https://prepstartsnow.com/discount/FKNStart your microdosing journey with BrainsupremeGet 15% off your order here!!https://brainsupreme.co/FKN15Book a free consultation with Jennifer Halcame Emailjenniferhalcame@gmail.comFacebook pagehttps://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61561665957079&mibextid=ZbWKwLWatch The Forbidden Documentary: Occult Louisiana on Tubi: https://link.tubi.tv/pGXW6chxCJbC60 PurplePowerhttps://go.shopc60.com/FORBIDDEN10/or use coupon code knowledge10Johnny Larson's artworkhttps://www.patreon.com/JohnnyLarsonSign up on Rokfin!https://rokfin.com/fknplusPodcastshttps://www.spreaker.com/show/forbiddenAvailable on all platforms Support FKN on Spreaker https://spreaker.page.link/KoPgfbEq8kcsR5oj9FKN ON Rumblehttps://rumble.com/c/FKNpGet Cory Hughes books!Lee Harvey Oswald In Black and White https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FJ2PQJRMA Warning From History Audio bookhttps://buymeacoffee.com/jfkbook/e/392579https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jfkbookhttps://www.amazon.com/Warning-History-Cory-Hughes/dp/B0CL14VQY6/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=72HEFZQA7TAP&keywords=a+warning+from+history+cory+hughes&qid=1698861279&sprefix=a+warning+fro%2Caps%2C121&sr=8-1https://coryhughes.org/Our Facebook pageshttps://www.facebook.com/forbiddenknowledgenewsconspiracy/https://www.facebook.com/FKNNetwork/Instagram @forbiddenknowledgenews1@forbiddenknowledgenetworkXhttps://x.com/ForbiddenKnow10?t=uO5AqEtDuHdF9fXYtCUtfw&s=09Email Forbidden Knowledge News forbiddenknowledgenews@gmail.comsome music thanks to:https://www.bensound.com/ULFAPO3OJSCGN8LDDGLBEYNSIXA6EMZJ5FUXWYNC6WJNJKRS8DH27IXE3D73E97DC6JMAFZLSZDGTWFIBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/forbidden-knowledge-news--3589233/support.
Episode 136- Listen to this interview with Dr. Shane Saeed as we talk about:1.The role forgetting plays in learning. 2. Familiar vs Known and the role it plays in student learning.3.What retrieval strategies to use now as you wrap up the school year. Stay in touch with Dr. Shane Saeed: @drshanesaeed on everythingIf you're ready to strengthen your instruction and design literacy lessons that actually stick, you can learn more about coaching and professional development below:Work With EvaGrab my free guide: How to Keep Your Mini Lesson Mini Book a discovery call for 1:1 coaching or school professional development
Most AI conversations focus on models. The better conversation focuses on systems. In this episode, we continue our interview with Matt Levenhagen, exploring a practical challenge many developers are facing: integrating AI into business operations without creating costly chaos. The answer is not buying more AI tools. The answer is building an intentional AI Workflow Architecture. About Matt Levenhagen Matt is the founder and CEO of Unified Web Design, a web development agency focused on custom solutions, WordPress development, e-commerce, memberships, and business systems. His background as both a builder and agency owner gave him a unique perspective on where AI creates real leverage instead of superficial automation. Follow Matt on LinkedIn. AI Workflow Architecture Starts with Context Control One of the most important operational realities Matt discussed was token usage. Businesses rushing into AI often underestimate cost scaling. Every interaction with large models consumes resources, and poorly managed context windows dramatically increase operational expenses. Instead of treating AI like unlimited compute, Matt focused on controlling context intentionally. That included: Monitoring token usage Limiting unnecessary memory loading Structuring retrieval systems Using different models for different tasks Preventing oversized prompts This is a systems-thinking problem, not merely a coding problem. Developers who ignore architecture end up with bloated workflows that become financially unsustainable. The fastest way to make AI unprofitable is to send unnecessary context into every request. Why Retrieval Matters More Than Raw Memory A major breakthrough Matt discussed was implementing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). This matters because AI systems do not need all the information all the time. They need the right information at the right moment. That distinction completely changes system design. Without retrieval architecture: Costs increase Performance slows Outputs become less accurate Hallucinations increase Operational complexity grows RAG allows systems to retrieve semantically relevant information instead of dumping entire databases into prompts. This transforms AI from brute-force processing into intelligent retrieval. The future of AI operations will likely depend less on giant models and more on efficient information orchestration. AI Workflow Architecture Requires Layer Separation Another valuable concept from the conversation involved separating operational layers. Matt described balancing: Local storage Business memory External AI APIs Workflow automation SaaS integrations This layered architecture creates flexibility. Instead of locking the business into one AI provider, workflows remain adaptable. Different models can handle different workloads depending on cost, complexity, and accuracy requirements. This becomes increasingly important as pricing models fluctuate. Businesses relying entirely on one provider risk operational instability if pricing changes dramatically. Layer separation reduces that risk. The businesses that survive AI cost volatility will be the ones architected for flexibility instead of dependency. Why Embedded AI Features Often Disappoint Matt also discussed the growing wave of SaaS AI integrations. Every platform now markets AI capabilities: Project management tools Communication platforms CRM systems Design software Documentation systems Yet many users feel underwhelmed. The reason is architectural isolation. These tools only understand limited slices of operational context. They automate micro-tasks but rarely improve larger workflows. That creates a false impression that AI itself lacks value when the real issue is fragmented systems. AI becomes more useful as the organizational context becomes more connected. This is why developers building custom operational layers still maintain an enormous strategic advantage. AI Workflow Architecture Is an Operational Discipline The strongest insight from these episodes may be that AI implementation is becoming operational engineering. Success now depends on: Information structure Retrieval design Workflow sequencing Context prioritization Cost management Human oversight This moves AI away from novelty experimentation and toward infrastructure planning. Businesses that treat AI casually will likely accumulate technical debt quickly. Businesses that approach AI architecturally will build scalable operational leverage. AI is no longer just a development tool. It is becoming an operational systems discipline. Developers Must Learn Economic Thinking One overlooked topic in AI discussions is economics. Matt repeatedly referenced balancing capability with cost. This becomes critical because AI pricing models are still evolving rapidly. Businesses that ignore usage economics may accidentally build systems that become financially impossible to scale. Developers now need to think beyond: Can this be built? They also need to ask: Can this be sustained? Can this scale economically? Can context costs remain controlled? Can cheaper models handle simpler tasks? This represents a major evolution in modern software architecture. Review your current AI workflows and identify where unnecessary context or oversized prompts may be increasing costs. Conclusion AI Workflow Architecture is rapidly becoming one of the most important technical disciplines for modern developers. Matt Levenhagen's approach demonstrates that successful AI implementation is less about chasing the newest model and more about designing sustainable operational systems. The companies that gain long-term advantage from AI will not necessarily be the companies using the largest models. They will be the companies with the best architecture. 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Get your tickets for the TDaPE Conference OnlineFor show notes, links, and a summary episode, sign up for the Hey! What You Reading For newsletter. Mondays at 7am BST - https://tdape.beehiiv.com/subscribeAI For Teachers newsletterFor maths curriculum questions contact us here or via support@alta-education.com Learn more about The Story of Maths - www.alta-education.com/tsom-overview and www.acel.proEpisode 288: In this episode of Thinking Deeply about Primary Education, I'm joined by Hannah Hogg from Dr Frost Learning to explore the role of online platforms in mathematics education.Hannah brings the perspective of a former secondary mathematics teacher, middle school head of maths and now member of the Dr Frost Learning team. We discuss the advantages of online platforms, particularly around workload, retrieval practice, diagnostic insight, automated marking and helping teachers identify gaps in prerequisite knowledge.But this is not a conversation about replacing the teacher with technology. We also explore the limitations of online platforms, especially for younger students, practical mathematical experiences, manipulatives, teacher explanation, classroom interaction and the human side of learning mathematics.Across the episode, we consider how tools can support teachers without dictating pedagogy, how they might be used in primary and middle school settings, and why the most important question is not simply whether a platform saves time, but whether it helps teachers make better decisions about teaching and learning.If you are thinking about online maths platforms, assessment, retrieval, workload, curriculum choice or the balance between technology and teacher expertise, this episode offers plenty to think about.
Meer info over het schoolbreed Traject vind je hier.In de aprilaflevering van Het Onderwijsnieuws nemen Rinke en onderwijspedagoog Pedro de Bruyckere zes opvallende onderwijsthema's onder de loep: van een actueel maatschappelijk debat tot scherpe didactiek en ontnuchterende wetenschap.Interventies versus de basis op orde Een nieuwe systematische review rond academic self-efficacy bevestigt wat Pedro vaker ziet: veel extra programma's zijn in feite gewoon een beschrijving van goed onderwijs. De reflex om een extern programma in te schakelen gaat te snel. De eerste vraag moet zijn: zit de onderwijsbasis wel goed?Retrieval practice: krachtig, maar niet almachtig Retrieval practice werkt fantastisch voor het ophalen en reproduceren van kennis, maar helpt niet automatisch bij het toepassen ervan. Concreet: leerlingen die via retrieval practice de spellingregels kennen, schrijven nog altijd fouten. Doel en techniek moeten overeenkomen.Het Mattheüś-effect en gelijke kansen Ook goede maatregelen, zoals werken aan leesplezier of het inkorten van de zomervakantie, kunnen de kloof tussen kansrijke en kansarme leerlingen vergroten. Pedro verwijst naar onderzoek dat aantoont dat bijna alles wat we in het onderwijs doen dit risico in zich draagt. Een ethisch geladen en ontnuchterend gesprek.Papermills en een golf van retractions Pedro zag op een maandagochtend iets opvallends in zijn RSS-reader: 19 artikels teruggetrokken in één tijdschrift, in één beweging. Hij legt uit hoe papermills, AI en publicatiedruk het wetenschappelijk publicatiesysteem onder druk zetten, en wat je als lezer van onderzoek zelf kan doen om het kaf van het koren te scheiden.ShownotesOntdek hier het hele vormingsaanbod van het Expertisecentrum Onderwijs en Leren!Volg Buiten De Krijtlijnen op Twitter, Instagram of LinkedIn Meer info over het schoolbreed Traject vind je hier.
263 | Ein überraschender neuer Player im AI-Rennen, warum will SpaceX Cursor kaufen und müssen alle Startups sterben, wenn Corporates sie kaufen? Samuel und Alex diskutieren die Tech-Themen der Woche.Partner dieser Folge:ebay.comPrüft, wie Live-Commerce euer Business voranbringen kann. Keine Verkaufsprovision für neue Live-Seller in den ersten 6 Monaten. Mehr Infos: ebay.de/startliveMach das 1-minütige Quiz und finde eine Geschäftsidee, die zu dir passt: digitaleoptimisten.de/quiz.Kapitel(00:00) Intro(01:29) DasTelefonbuch.de - under the radar over the top(08:14) Finds of the week: Offline is the new shit und SpaceX kauft Cursor (vllt.)(23:31) Sprach-Post von Optimisten - Mirja(38:12) Ankerkraut - was wollen Corporates mit Startups?(48:35) Das Große Digitale Optimisten Linkedin Quiz(52:25) Geschäftsidee von Samuel: Outfraction(1:00:06) Geschäftsdiee von Alex: Urban Sports Club für KinderSo erreichst du uns:Sprachnachricht senden: https://www.speakpipe.com/digitaleoptimistenEmail schreiben: alexander@digitaleoptimisten.deLearningsGanzheitliche AI-StrategieEndgame der AI-Entwicklung wird als holistisches Ökosystem aus LLM, Code-Tools und Hardware beschrieben. Die Diskussion nennt Beispiele wie Claude Code, Cursor, XAI und SpaceX, um diese Verknüpfung zu illustrieren. Hypothese: Wer AI über digitale und physische Systeme hinweg integriert, könnte Wettbewerbsvorteile erzielen.Fractional Ownership als neues ModellDie Idee, teure Ausrüstung per Fractional Ownership zu finanzieren, wird konkret diskutiert und auf Kategorien wie Camping- und Outdoor-Ausrüstung, Kletter- oder Wanderausrüstung sowie Rennräder übertragen. Beispiele nennen anteilige Beteiligungen von 10 Prozent bis 20 Prozent an Vermögenswerten wie Ferienhäusern oder Luxusuhren; Upfront-Kosten könnten pro Anteil bei ca. 500 Euro liegen, plus jährliche Servicegebühren. Die Plattform soll Käufer bündeln und zusätzlich durch Abonnements laufende Einnahmen generieren, was laut Diskussion etwa 20 Prozent des Umsatzes als Subscription-Revenue bringen könnte.Retrieval-gestützter Wissensbot aus TranskriptenEine Hörer-Idee (Mirja) schlägt vor, einen Retrieval-basierten Bot zu bauen, der Transkripte als Wissensbasis nutzt, um Folgewissen abrufbar zu machen. Kernidee ist, eine App zu bauen, die auf die Transkripte der Folgen zugreift und Fragen zu einzelnen Episoden beantworten kann, idealerweise ohne Halluzinationen. Die Umsetzung erfolgt über Cloud-Code, Kontext-Import der Transkripte und eine einfache Benutzeroberfläche, um relevante Passagen schnell nachzuschlagen.Unternehmens- und Markenakquise im AI-ZeitalterEs wird diskutiert, dass große Konzerne wie Nestlé Marken wie Ankerkraut kaufen, um unorganisches Wachstum zu generieren, und dass Gründer später oft den Verkaufsweg wählen. Der Fall Ankerkraut (Rückkauf durch die Gründer 2026) wird als Signal genannt, dass Markenwert durch Übernahmen kippen kann und Shareholder-Value-Denken eine treibende Kraft bleibt. Für Gründer und Unternehmen bedeutet das: Exit-Planung, M&A-Strategie und das Verständnis der Rollenspiele in Kapitalmarkt-basierten Wachstumsstrategien frühzeitig berücksichtigen.KeywordsClaudeCursorSpaceX XAINestlé Ankerkraut RückkaufClaude Coding-Tools Einsatz im B2B UmfeldBenzinpreisvergleich Telefonbuch.deFractional Ownership Camping AusrüstungSecond Order Investing Anwendung MärkteMiroFish Tool ReaktionsszenarienOffline AI ModelleRetrieval SystemeOpenAI Konkurrenz ClaudeKI Coding Tools Markt
UFOs At National #Space Symposium, Nellis #UFO, North Korea #NHI RetrievalThe Annual National Space Symposium in Colorado attracts top experts in space science, including elite defense contractors, military and intelligence officials, cutting-edge technologists, and leading scientists….Miike Gold.Alleged UFO filmed over Nellis Air Force base in Nevada, US - 19th April 2026AttributionNellis UFO via UFO mania @maniaUFO on Xhttps://x.com/maniaUFO/status/2048337411696996374?s=20David Grusch via Interstellar @InterstellarUAP on Xhttps://x.com/InterstellarUAP/status/2048162551800770765?s=20Ross Coulthart via UAP James @UAPJames on Xhttps://x.com/UAPJames/status/2048385889756160464?s=20Rep Eric Burlison via Interstellar @InterstellarUAP on Xhttps://x.com/UAPJames/status/2048385889756160464?s=20Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-tempest-universe--4712510/support.Please follow the #podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheTempestUniversePodcast?sub_confirmation=1
UFOs At National #Space Symposium, Nellis #UFO, North Korea #NHI RetrievalThe Annual National Space Symposium in Colorado attracts top experts in space science, including elite defense contractors, military and intelligence officials, cutting-edge technologists, and leading scientists….Miike Gold.Alleged UFO filmed over Nellis Air Force base in Nevada, US - 19th April 2026AttributionNellis UFO via UFO mania @maniaUFO on Xhttps://x.com/maniaUFO/status/2048337411696996374?s=20David Grusch via Interstellar @InterstellarUAP on Xhttps://x.com/InterstellarUAP/status/2048162551800770765?s=20Ross Coulthart via UAP James @UAPJames on Xhttps://x.com/UAPJames/status/2048385889756160464?s=20Rep Eric Burlison via Interstellar @InterstellarUAP on Xhttps://x.com/UAPJames/status/2048385889756160464?s=20Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-tempest-universe--4712510/support.Please follow the #podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheTempestUniversePodcast?sub_confirmation=1
Today, we check in a year after the first Unsupervised Learning x Latent Space Crossover special to discuss everything that has changed (there is a lot) in the world of AI. This episode was recorded just after AIE Europe, but before the Cursor-xAI deal.Unsupervised Learning is a podcast that interviews the sharpest minds in AI about what's real today, what will be real in the future and what it means for businesses and the world - helping builders, researchers and founders deconstruct and understand the biggest breakthroughs.Thanks to Jacob and the UL production team for hosting and editing this!Jacob Effron* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobeffron/* X: https://x.com/jacobeffronFull Episode on Their YouTubeWe discuss:* swyx's view from the center of the AI engineering zeitgeist: OpenClaw, harness engineering, context engineering, evals, observability, GPUs, multimodality, and why conference tracks now reveal what matters most in AI* Whether AI infrastructure has finally stabilized: why “skills” may be the minimal viable packaging format for agents, why infra companies have had to reinvent themselves every year, and why application companies have had an easier time surviving model volatility* The vertical vs. horizontal AI startup debate: why application companies can act as the outsourced AI team for enterprises, why some horizontal companies still matter, and why sandboxes may be the clearest reinvention of classic cloud infrastructure for the AI era* The “agent lab” playbook: starting with frontier models, specializing for your domain, then training your own models once you have enough data, workload, and user behavior to justify the cost and latency savings* Why domain-specific model training is real, not just marketing: how companies like Cursor and Cognition can get users to choose their in-house models, and why search, domain specialization, and distillation are becoming more important* Open models, custom chips, and alternative inference infrastructure: why swyx has turned more bullish on open source, why non-NVIDIA hardware is suddenly getting real attention, and why every 10x speedup can unlock new product experiences* What it means to sell to agents instead of humans: why agent experience may mostly just be good developer experience by another name, why APIs and docs matter more than ever, and how pretraining-data incumbents are compounding advantages in an agent-first world* Why memory and personalization may become the next big wedge: today's models mostly reward frequency of mentions, but in the future, swyx expects product choice to be shaped much more by personalized memory systems* The state of the AI coding wars: why coding has become one of the largest and fastest-growing categories in AI, how Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, and Cognition have all ridden the wave, and why the category may still have more room to run* Capability exploration vs. efficiency: why the industry is still in a token-maxing, experiment-heavy phase where people are rewarded for spending more rather than less* Claude Code vs. Codex and the strange stickiness of coding products: why first magical product experiences may matter more than expected, and why the bigger mystery may be why only a few names have emerged as real winners so far* What the end state of the coding market might look like: two major players, a longer tail of niche products, and possible disruption if Microsoft, Mistral, xAI, or the Chinese labs push harder into coding* Where application companies still have room against the labs: why frontier labs are trying to expand into verticals like finance and healthcare, but still leave space for focused companies that own the workflow and the last mile* Why coding may be a preview of every other AI market: the first category to truly go parabolic, the clearest example of foundation model companies colliding with application companies, and a template for how future vertical AI markets may develop* Why AI valuations now feel unbounded: from billion-dollar ARR products built in a year to trillion-dollar market caps, swyx and Jacob unpack how the AI market has broken traditional startup intuitions about scale and durability* Consumer AI vs. coding AI: why ChatGPT's consumer category may have plateaued on frequency and product design, while coding continues to feel like a daily-use category with real momentum* The next product frontier beyond coding: consumer agents, computer use, and “coding agents breaking containment,” with swyx's thesis that 2025 was the year of coding agents and 2026 may be the year they begin to do everything else* Whether foundation models are really killing startup categories: why swyx is less worried for early founders, more worried for mid-size startups and traditional SaaS, and why building something ambitious may now be the best job interview for a frontier lab* AI vs. SaaS and the internal culture war around adoption: the tension between AI-native employees who want to rip out expensive software and skeptics who think quick AI-built replacements create fragile systems* Why traditional SaaS may be under real pressure: swyx's own experience spending six figures on event and sponsor management software, the temptation to rebuild it cheaply with AI, and the broader question of whether teams will trust custom AI-native replacements* Biosafety, security, and frontier model access: why swyx raised biosafety at a dinner with Anthropic's Mike Krieger, why Krieger argued security is the bigger issue, and what restricted model releases reveal about Anthropic vs. OpenAI* The era of giant models: why 10T+ parameter systems may only be a temporary rationing phase before bigger clusters arrive, why labs may increasingly keep their most powerful models private for distillation, and why scale alone no longer feels like a complete answer* Memory as the slowest scaling factor in AI: why context windows have improved far more slowly than people hoped, why million-token context still has not changed most real workflows, and why memory may be the key bottleneck for the next generation of systems* What swyx changed his mind on in the past year: becoming more bullish on open models, more convinced that the top tier of agent startups behaves very differently from the median AI company, and more optimistic about fine-tuning and specialized model adaptation* “Dark factories” and zero-human-review coding: the next frontier after zero human-written code, where models not only write the code but ship it without human review, forcing companies to rethink testing and verification from first principles* Why RL and post-training may matter more than people assumed: even if the resulting models get thrown out every few months, the data, workflows, and domain-specific improvements persist* Synthetic rubrics, Doctor GRPO, and multi-turn RL: why reinforcement learning is becoming much more domain-specific and multi-step than many people realize, opening the door to much deeper customization* The next frontier after coding: memory, personalization, and world models, including why swyx thinks world models matter not just for robotics or gaming, but for giving AI something closer to lived understanding* Fei-Fei Li, spatial intelligence, and the Good Will Hunting analogy: the idea that today's LLMs may know everything by reading it all, but still lack the lived experience that turns knowledge into a deeper kind of intelligenceTimestamps* 00:00:00 Intro preview: AI coding wars, startup pressure, and market structure* 00:00:28 Welcome to the Latent Space × Unsupervised Learning crossover* 00:01:17 What AI builders are focused on now: OpenClaw, harnesses, and infra* 00:04:33 Why AI infra is harder than apps, and where startups can still win* 00:06:39 Should companies train their own models?* 00:09:28 Open models, custom chips, and the new inference race* 00:11:25 Designing products for agents, not just humans* 00:16:49 The state of the AI coding wars in 2026* 00:19:27 Capability exploration, token-maxing, and why coding is going parabolic* 00:21:41 What the end state of the coding market could look like* 00:23:50 Where app companies still have room against the labs* 00:27:02 Why AI valuations and market swings feel unprecedented* 00:28:56 Consumer AI vs. coding AI, and why sticky products still matter* 00:32:28 What the next breakthrough product experience might be* 00:32:53 2026 thesis: coding agents break containment and eat the world* 00:35:27 Are foundation models wiping out startup categories?* 00:37:33 AI vs. SaaS, vibe coding, and internal team tensions* 00:40:01 Biosafety, security, and the politics of restricted model releases* 00:42:19 Giant models, compute constraints, and the limits of scale* 00:44:30 Memory as the real bottleneck in AI* 00:44:57 Why swyx changed his mind on open models* 00:47:44 Dark factories and the future of zero-human-review coding* 00:49:36 Why post-training and RL may matter more than people think* 00:51:50 Memory, world models, and the next frontier of intelligence* 00:53:54 The Good Will Hunting analogy for LLMs* 00:54:21 OutroTranscript[00:00:00] swyx: Isn't that crazy? That number is just mind boggling.[00:00:03] Jacob Effron: What is the state of the AI coding wars today?[00:00:05] swyx: We're in a phase of sort of like capability exploration. The general thesis that I have been pursuing now is that the same way that 2025 was a year coding agents 2026 is coding agents breaking containments to do everything else.[00:00:16] Jacob Effron: Do you worry about the foundation models just getting into a bunch of these startup categories?[00:00:21] swyx: Mid-size startups. Yes.[00:00:23] Jacob Effron: What do you think the end state of this market is[00:00:25] swyx: for the market structure to, to significantly change? There would be[00:00:28] Jacob Effron: today on unsupervised learning. We had a, a fun episode and what's really become an annual tradition, a crossover episode with our friends at Latent space.Swix and I sat down and we talked about everything happening in the AI ecosystem today. What we thought of the various changes at the model layer, what's happening in the infra world, the coding wars, and a bunch of other things. It's a ton of fun to do this with someone I really respect and another great podcaster in the game.Without further ado, here's our episode. Well switch. This is, uh, super fun to be back with another unsupervised learning, uh, latent space crossover episode.[00:01:02] swyx: Yeah,[00:01:02] Jacob Effron: I feel like a lot of places we could start, but you know, one thing I always find fascinating, uh, about the way you spend your time is you obviously are like at the epicenter of this engineering movement and community, and you run these events and conferences and put on these.Awesome talks and, and I think just have a great pulse on the zeitgeist of what's going on.[00:01:16] swyx: Yeah.[00:01:17] Jacob Effron: Maybe to, to start just what are the biggest topics people are thinking about right now?[00:01:21] swyx: Yeah, so I just came back from London, uh, where we did a IE Europe and we're doing roughly one per quarter now, which Yeah, you've[00:01:27] Jacob Effron: really up[00:01:27] swyx: the, hopefully[00:01:28] Jacob Effron: up the, up the pace.[00:01:29] swyx: It's trying. We're trying to match AI speed, youknow?[00:01:30] Jacob Effron: Yeah, exactly. The tops would be completely different, I imagine. Uh,[00:01:33] swyx: yeah. You know, I definitely curate the tracks, like you can see what I think. When you see the track list and the, the speakers that I invite, obviously Open Claw is like the story of the last four or five months, and then be, be just below that.I would consider harness engineering, context engineering to be two related topics in agents and rag. And then there's a long tail of Evergreen stuff like evals, observability, GPUs, uh, and uh, LM infra and just general, just in general. We also have other updates on like multimodality and, uh, generative media, let's call it.Um, but I definitely, the, the first three that I mentioned are top of mind people. Yeah.[00:02:13] Jacob Effron: I think harness is particular like, so interesting. Um, you know, there was this tweet from Harrison Chase, the, the lane chain, CEO, that, that caught my eye recently where he said, you know, it finally feels like we have stability, uh, around the infrastructure for, uh, you know, around ai.And I think what. He basically was implying his like, look over the past two, three years as a company at the epicenter of AI infrastructure, it was a bit like playing whack-a-mole, right? You were constantly moving around with, however, the building patterns were evolving[00:02:36] swyx: for Harrison for sure. Right? Like he's basically had to reinvent the company every year since he started Lang Chain.Right? It was Lang chain, Ang graph and LP agents and like, uh, I think he's like one of the most nimble, adept sharp people about this. Yeah. Yeah.[00:02:49] Jacob Effron: Saying now, now is finally the time stability[00:02:51] swyx: this. Yeah.[00:02:52] Jacob Effron: Yeah. Um, do you buy that or what have you kind of make of that take?[00:02:56] swyx: I think that. It, it's very expensive to say this Time is different sometimes, but when you're just writing code, like it's actually okay to just like try to make a call and I think it may not even matter if this call is right or not.Like I just don't even care that much because you can be right on a thesis, but if you don't, you don't figure out how to monetize the thesis, then who cares if you said something first that said, um, it does feel like, for example. Uh, we went through a lot of different ways of passion packaging integrations up with, uh, with agents.And it feels like we've landed at skills, which is like the minimal viable format. Yeah. Which is just a markdown file, uh, with some scripts attached to it, and I don't see how it can be more simple than that. And so there is some justification for. The stability around harnesses. I feel like there may be more adaptation with regards to maybe like the real time elements or subagents or memory or any of those like agent disciplines, let's call it in, in agent engineering.Uh, but if, if the thesis is that, okay, you just want agents are LMS with tools in the loop with a file system, what they can do. Retrieval with, with skills and all these like standard tooling that now seems to be relatively consensus then probably. That makes sense. Um, I just think like there's no point trying to stake your reputation on this thesis that we're there because if it changes again, just change with it.It's fine.[00:04:33] Jacob Effron: Yeah. It's always, you know, I've always been struck by how that is. Much more challenging for infrastructure companies and application companies. Like obviously I think, yeah. You know, on the application side you've seen, you know, Brett Taylor from Sierra Max, from Lara. Like, they're like, look, we build, you know, what's ahead of the models and we're willing to throw everything out every three months, you know, as the models get better and better.Exactly. Yeah. But the thing you at least have there is you have. Uh, you have an end customer, right? That's like decently sticky. Um, you know, they will mostly stick, you know, they'll, they'll give you a shot at least of, of building these things. What I've always found more challenging, uh, at, at the kind of like, you know, reinvent yourself every three months of the infrastructure layer, it's like, you know, developers are definitely a, a pickier audience maybe than an accounting firm or, uh, you know, a bank.Yeah. And so it's definitely a, a, a more challenging position to be in to, to have to constantly reinvent yourself.[00:05:17] swyx: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and like when they turn, it's like. Very complete. Like, they'll leave to like the, the hot new thing, uh, because there's like no defensibility, I guess. Like e even, even if you are a database, like, uh, people can migrate workloads off databases.Like it's, it's a, it's a known thing. Uh, so I think like basically what we're talking about is the vertical versus horizontal, uh, debate in, in AI startups. And uh, the way I think about it also is just that like when you are. Um, Lara, when you are a bridge, like you are the outsource AI team, right? You, you are, your job is to apply whatever state ofthe art AI methods.[00:05:55] Jacob Effron: Yeah. Like this translation layer between model capabilities and your[00:05:57] swyx: own customers. Yeah. To, to the end customers and like, well, if they didn't have you, they would've to hire in house and they're not gonna hire in house so they have you. And like, I think that's like a reasonable, like very robust to any whatever trends and, and discoveries that people make in, in the engineering layer.I do think like there is, um. It like sort of useful horizontal companies being built, but they're all. Very much like, sort of like the reinventions of classic cloud in the AI era and the, the primary one being sandboxes. Yeah. Um, which like, it's another form of compute guys, like, let's not get too excited about it.But I mean, like the, the workloads are enormous.[00:06:38] Jacob Effron: Right.[00:06:38] swyx: Yeah.[00:06:39] Jacob Effron: It's interesting, and I feel like as, as part of this, you know, the questions that folks are asking around infrastructure, there's a lot around, you know, the extent to which companies should have their own AI teams and what they should be doing in-house.And, you know, uh, I think there's questions around should people be training their own models? Should people be doing, you know, rl, uh, in-house based on the data they have? I feel like, you know, one has to evolve their takes on this every, every three months with paces. But where, where are you at on this today?[00:07:00] swyx: I think, well, I mean actually all models have gone up. Um, and obviously I'm involved in cognition and also cursors doing, doing, uh, a lot of own model training. And I think that that is some part of the, what I've been calling the agent lab playbook, where you start off with the state of the art models from, uh, from the big labs and you, uh, specialize for your domain.But once you have enough workload and enough high quality data from your users, then you can obviously train your own models and like save a lot on cost and latency and all that, all that good stuff. Um, you also get like a marketing bonus of like calling it some fancy name and putting out some research[00:07:38] Jacob Effron: from my seat.I can't tell how much of it is like actual, you know, value that's provided to the end user. And how much of it is that marketing bonus? Right. It seems some combination of the[00:07:45] swyx: I think it's both.[00:07:46] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:07:46] swyx: Um, no, no. There, there actually is real value. Um, and you, you know that for a number of reasons. Like one, even when it's not subsidized, people do choose it as like one of the top four or five.This is both composer two and, uh, suite 1.6 I one of the top five models. Like in a, in a fair market? In a free market, yeah. In a, in a, in a model switch. Or people do choose it and like, it's not subsidized. Like, so that's as good as it gets. Uh, but beyond that, like domain specific models, for example. For search with, with both, which both companies have absolutely makes, makes a ton of sense.Everyone says like, yeah, we should always, always do this. And honestly like, I think the infrastructure for that is becoming easier with, um, like thinking machines tinker thing as well as primary like, uh, lab stuff. Yeah, I mean like, this is one of those like reversal of the, the bitter lesson where you first bootstrap on the large models and the general purpose models to get big.And as you get very well-defined workloads that are just high quantity but not high variance, um, then you just distill down to a smaller model and run that on your own. Right. Which like totally makes sense.[00:08:50] Jacob Effron: What I'm less clear on is the kind of DIY RL use case, which I think is really mostly around, you know, improved, uh, quality for, for different things.Obviously there's probably like more efficient ways to, you know, get a smaller model that's that's faster and cheaper. And it'll be interesting to see whether. You know, obviously you had, you know, uh, two, three years ago this whole case of companies that were, you know, pre-training and claiming better outcomes in, in their domains than getting kind of cooked as each model iteration improved.You know, I wonder whether that's a, a similar story plays out in the, uh, in, in the, our all space. Yeah, for the focus on, on on pure outcomes and quality, not the cost side, which clearly your own models for cost at scale makes a ton of sense.[00:09:28] swyx: I think there are this, there are two sides of the same coin.Like you basically always want to hold, uh, quality constant or trade off a little bit of quality for a drastic decreasing cost. And that's true for everyone. Uh, one element I wanted to bring out, which is very much in favor of open models, is custom chips. So this would be cereus, but also talu. And then there's a huge range of stuff in between.This has been a huge story this past year on just like everything non Nvidia is getting bid up, including like freaking MatX is working for, which is very, which is very rewarding for me, but I think one of those things where like, oh, like the suddenly, because the number of alternative. Hard, uh, hardware is increasing and the inference that you can get is insanely high.Like, um, we're talking thousands of tokens per second instead of less than a hundred. So the trade off for qua quality doesn't hold as much anymore because the speed is so high.[00:10:24] Jacob Effron: Have you seen a lot of companies go all in on the alternative chip?[00:10:26] swyx: So cognition has Yeah. On Cerebras, uh, and, and so has OpenAIUm, uh, and so no, I don't think so beyond that, uh, and that, do you think that's like a, that's mostly, that's foreshadowing of, that's, yeah. I used to be kind of a skeptic in terms of like, okay, so what if I get my inference at a hundred to a hundred tokens per second sped up to 200 tokens per second. It's only two X faster.It's not that big a deal. Um, but when you, uh, I think every 10 x does unlock a different usage pattern. Um, and you, we have proof in Talas and, and some of the others. That you can actually, um, drastically imp improve inference speed and what happens from there? I don't even really know, like it's, it's so hard to predict when entire applications just appear at once.Yeah. Uh, and it also isn't that expensive, right? So like, um, this is one of those things where like, I, I think the, the investment cycle is gonna be multi-year. Um, and I. Would caution people to not dismiss it too, too quickly.[00:11:25] Jacob Effron: Yeah. I mean, one other like infra question I was curious to get your thoughts on is obviously it seems increasingly a lot of the cutting edge infra companies are building for agents as the buyers of their product or users of their product, right?[00:11:35] swyx: Ooh,[00:11:36] Jacob Effron: and[00:11:37] swyx: another huge theme. Yeah. Yeah.[00:11:38] Jacob Effron: And I'm trying to figure out like what. What, what do you have to do differently about selling into agents? Um, are they just the ultimate rational developers? Uh, or is there, you know,[00:11:46] swyx: no, absolutely not. Um, I think they are easily prompt, injected and, uh, very tuned towards like, basically com compounding existing winners.[00:11:57] Jacob Effron: Yeah,[00:11:57] swyx: so like if, like, congrats if you won the lottery for getting into the training data right before 2023, because now you're like installed in there for the foreseeable future. But yeah. Uh, you know, one stat that Versal, uh, CTO Malta dropped at my conference was that there are now, uh, 60% of traffic to Elle's, um, like app arch, like admin app architecture for like configuring versal applications, uh, is bought.It's not, it's not human. Uh, so like your primary customer is agents now. Um, and it's mostly co like mostly coding agents, mostly people using CLI on CP or whatever. But yeah, I mean, I think. More. I, I think step one, if it doesn't exist as an API that agents can use, it doesn't exist. Right, right. Which I think is like, uh, it's a good hygiene thing anyway, to, to make everything API available, but not as like an extra, um.Push on like products, people to not only work on the ui, um, you should probably work on the on SCLI stuff. Beyond that, I think honestly there is like, so I, I come from the sensibility of, I think everything that you are trying to do for agents experience now, which is the term that Matt Bowman and Nullify is trying to coin, is the same thing that you should have been doing for developer experience.That you should have had good docs, you should have had a consistent API, uh, that is. Mostly stateless. Um, you should have, I guess, discoverable or progressive disclosure or like search or like whatever. And so now that people have energy in like finding these customers to do that, that's great. Um, do I believe in.Extending beyond that into something like a EO, um, for gaming The chatbots? Not necessarily, but obviously there's gonna be huge advantages when people who figure out the short term wins. Yeah. And short term wins can compound.[00:13:43] Jacob Effron: Do you think these compounding advantages to like the, the pre-training data cutoff companies, like, you know, obviously over some period of time, I imagine that doesn't persist.And so as you think about like. I dunno, three, four years from now what the, you know, selection criteria end up being. Do you think it still mirrors exactly what you were saying before? Like it's exactly what you should have been doing all along to sell a good product to developers?[00:14:01] swyx: It could be, except that I think in three, four years we'll probably have much better memory and personalization.So then general a EO or GEO doesn't really matter as much. So I think whatever memory or personalization system we end up with will probably d determine what you end up choosing much more. Than, than what is currently the case, which is just frequency of mentions, let's call it. Yeah,[00:14:26] Jacob Effron: yeah.[00:14:26] swyx: Uh, so you just spa quantity and I think that's, I mean, that's something I'm looking forward to.I do think, like, like, you know, I, I think that the fundamental exercise to work through for yourself is if you start a new, um, sort of. Uh, disruptor company. Now there's a, there's a big incumbent that everyone knows, like, like superb base. Super base is like, kind of like the Postgres, like database, uh, incumbent.If you wanna start like new superb base, how would you compete with them? And I don't necessarily have the answer, but I, I, I do think like people, like resend like relatively new. I think they would start like 20, 23 and still there was, there was a recent survey where like, people. Checked what Claude recommends by default.If you just don't prompt it with anything, just say, gimme an email provider and says, resent as in like 70, 70% of each cases. Like the fact that you can get in there with like such a relatively short existence, I think is, is encouraging.[00:15:14] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:15:14] swyx: I do think like. Um, you do want to do whatever it is to, to like to, to get in that Very short mentions this because, um, it's not gonna be 20 of them, it's gonna be like three.[00:15:26] Jacob Effron: No, definitely. It feels like, uh, you know, probably more, more consolidation than ever. Uh, or, or kind of like, you know, uh, a winner take most market than maybe the, the, the physics of go-to market in the past. Yeah. Might have, uh, enabled.[00:15:38] swyx: The other thing also is like, semantic association is gonna be very important, uh, in the sense that like, you want to do like the combo articles where you're like, use my thing with for sale, with blah, blah.And like that all gets picked up in a, in a corpus. And so that's. Probably one thing that you, you wanna do? Well, I don't know what else. Uh, it's, it's, it's, it's one of those things where like, I think I feel, I feel I'm behind, uh, I don't know how you feel about this, but like,[00:16:04] Jacob Effron: I think AI is just everyone constantly feeling like they're behind some, uh,[00:16:08] swyx: yeah.With,[00:16:09] Jacob Effron: I wanna meet the person that doesn't feel behind,[00:16:11] swyx: but like with, with ax, right? Like, so, so like, my, my stance was that exactly what I said before, like everything that you, that you should do for agents is something that you should have done for humans anyway. Yeah. And so. To the extent that you're just getting it more energy to, to do things for agents, great.But like, uh, it's hard to articulate what new thing apart from just like more spam, um, that you should be doing. Anyway, that would be my take right now. Um, I I, I do think like there, there will be more turns at this. I think the personalization turn that is coming, um, will be big. And I don't know what that looks like because like basically we're kind of, we feel kind of tapped out on the memory side of things.[00:16:49] Jacob Effron: Yeah. I, I guess since we last chatted, you know, you, you took this role over at cognition, um, and you've obviously have a, have a front row seat to the AI coding space today. You know, I feel like coding in many ways. You know, people view it as this, like, I mean, besides being like the, the mother of all markets and this massive opportunity, I think it's kinda a preview of like, what's to come for many other spaces.Both. Yeah. You know, I feel like agents are most advanced in coding. I also feel like the, you know, competition between foundation models and application companies, you know, and, uh, mirrors what we may see in other spaces. And so maybe for our listeners, can you just lay out like what is the state of the AI coding wars today?[00:17:25] swyx: Um, it is massive, right? Like, uh, and I don't think necessarily, last time we talked about this, we appreciated the size of what[00:17:32] Jacob Effron: No, I wish we did.[00:17:33] swyx: I state of AI coding wars today, um, both opening eye philanthropic have made it their p serials to competing coding. Um, and. Tropic is like 2.5 billion in a RR just from Cloud Code.The way they recognize a RR is. Opt for debate, uh, open ai. I don't think the, a public number is known, but let's call it 2 billion as well. And then cursor is like, rumored to be 2 billion, you know? And, and those, those are like the public numbers that are known? Yeah. Um, so like huge markets that have just been created in the past one year.Like, like anthropic, just like Claude Code just recently celebrated their one year anniversary, which is, yeah, pretty nice. Um, so, and then I think, like the other thing that I see is there's, there's some other people who are like, oh, here's like the, the sort of relative penetration of, uh, Claude use cases, right?Like, and it's like coding 50% and then legal, whatever. Health, uh, it's like the, the remaining ones. And there was a very popular tweet that was like, okay, I'll look at the, the empty space and all these other use cases. If you are a new founder today, you should be betting on the other stuff because on, on a sort of catch up Yeah.Theory and my. Consider my, my pushback is the same pushback that, uh, I had on app over Google, which is like, well, well why is this time different? Like, why, if it went from let's say 10 to 50% in the past year, why can't I keep going? Uh, and like getting that wrong is actually a very painful one because you could have just did, did the momentum bet.Instead of the mean reversion bed. So I, I, I think that that is the, the state of things now that people are very, very much into psychosis. Um, they're are getting rewarded for spending more rather than spending less. And I think we're not in that phase of efficiency. We're in a phase of sort of like capability exploration.So I think people who are more crazy, who are more. Uh, creative, um, get rewarded comparatively. Yeah.[00:19:27] Jacob Effron: Well, it's interesting. I mean, it feels like behind these like token maxing, leaderboards and whatnot is this, it's like the first phase of this transition from a workforce perspective is you just gotta show your employer like, Hey, I, I use these tools.[00:19:37] swyx: Here's my nu number of tokens I cost, and that's it. They don't care about the quality. Right. It is, uh, maybe distasteful to someone who cares about the craft and, and all that. Um, but directionally everyone just wants you to go up regardless. And so, um, there it is not very discerning. It's, and it's probably very sloppy, but I think it's net fine because we're still probably underusing ai just in generally.Yeah. Um, and so I think that's like very interesting. Like we had on the podcast, uh, Ryan La Poplar from OBI, who spends a billion tokens a day. Yeah. Um, and that's for those county home, it's like something like 10,000 worth, $10,000 worth a day of API tokens. If they, they did market rates, um, and like most of us can't afford that.Yeah. But like. And, and, and probably a lot of what he does is slop.[00:20:25] Jacob Effron: Right.[00:20:25] swyx: But like, he's going to dis, he's like, if there were a new capability, he would discover it first before you because he was, he was trying and you were not trying. Right. And like, you only do things that work like, well, good for you.But like the, the people who are going to discover the next hot thing are living at the edge.[00:20:42] Jacob Effron: Right and increase in living at the edge of just having the compute budget to like run these experiments. I mean, kind of similar to what living at the edge on the research side has always been. You know, it was constrained in many ways by the amount of compute you had to run these experiments.It feels similarly on the, almost on the builder or like actualizing these tools now.[00:20:56] swyx: Yeah. The other thing that's, I mean, very obvious is philanthropic is kind of like the high price premium player. Um, that where, you know. Restricting limits or restricting model releases even is like the name of the game.Whereas Codex is like, come on in guys, use our SDK, use our login and we don't care. We're gonna reset limits. Whatever you do want to try to exploit the subsidies where you can get it. And definitely Codex is super subsidized right now. Gemini also very subsidized. Um, and. Comparatively, like, I think you should make, Hey, I guess while, while that's going on, it's not that bad to be a capabilities explorer on just the $200 a month plan from Cloud Code or from OpenAI.Um, and, uh, I I, I, my sense is that people aren't even there yet.[00:21:41] Jacob Effron: How do you think this, like, market ultimately plays? I mean, it's obviously such a big market that, you know, any slice of that market is interesting for, for anyone going after it. But I think what, what makes people so interesting in the coding market particularly is it feels like it's kind of this.Foreshadowing of what will happen in other, you know, any other kind of application market that the foundation models eventually turn to and are all their models against and gather data around. And so how do you think, you know, like does there end up being room for lots of different kinds of players or like, what do you think the end state of this market is and is that, do you think that's applicable to other markets?[00:22:10] swyx: I feel like there will be, I mean. Status quo is probably the most likely outcome, which is there are two big players and there's a small range of longer tail people that, um, fit other use cases that the, the two big players don't. That feels right to me. I think that, um, for it to, for the market structure to, to significantly change there would be, there needs to be significant change in like the economics or like the, the brand building or like the, the, the, the value propositions of the, of the companies involved and I.Haven't seen any in the last six months that, that have really changed the stories materially. So I feel like they would just keep going until something, something else happens. Something else happens, meaning like Microsoft wakes up and like goes like. Guys, we have GitHub, we have, uh, you know, we, we, we'll, we'll do something much bigger here than other, other than just copilot.Um, and, uh, that would be a big change. Um, MSL has put out a model now, and I was in a breakfast with, uh, Alex Wang, where they were like, yeah, like, we, we really, really want to go after the coding use case. We haven't done anything yet, but like, don't underestimate them. Right. Um, and, and similarly for the Chinese labs.Um, I think they're trying to go after it. Like ZAI is doing stuff. GLM uh, ZI and GLM is same thing. Um, uh, and, and so it's, so like everyone's trying to get a piece of that pie. I, I feel like the, the status quo has been pretty stable for the past, like almost a year I'll say.[00:23:39] Jacob Effron: Yeah. And is the room for the, not like, you know, for, for the application companies more on like the enterprise side or like where do the, where do the, like what surface area do the model companies leave for application companies?[00:23:50] swyx: Yeah, that's a good one. Um. It's very much evolving. Um, it, I, I, I will say because opening I did not have this, the, this level of attention on coding. Yeah. Uh, a year ago. We just don't have that much history. Right. Um, and it seems like, for example, so the big push at Open I now is the Super app. Um, is that a consumer thing?Is that like a products like. Portfolio rationalization thing, how much is that gonna take away attention from coding at the time when they actually do want to put more coding? I think it's, it's very unclear. So I do think like there's, there's all these, like in both big labs, there's. Uh, sorry. Both of the, and, and drop and, and deep minus and XAI are are separate cases.Um, they are trying to see the other time expansion areas. So cloud code for finance. Yeah. Um, uh, cloud cowork, all those, all those things. Whereas I think cursor and cognition are like comparatively just focused on coding and so I, I do think they leave space and I do think for the other verticals that also means the same thing.Right. That, uh, that they're not gonna be that. Um, intensely focused on, on, on that domain. Except for, I, I think I would mark out finance and healthcare as like the next ones, um, that they're clearly going after. Uh, I, I would say comparatively, healthcare seems more thorny. There, there, there've been some announcements about it, but like, I would respect the, the finance work a lot more just because like the, the path to money is a lot clearer.[00:25:12] Jacob Effron: Yeah, no, I mean, obviously like, I, I think, you know, maybe similar to, to the space that's being left in these other domains, you know, there's obviously. Uh, a lot that's required to actually implement these tools in enterprises, uh, versus, you know, maybe just giving them, uh, giving model access to, to folks outta the box.[00:25:27] swyx: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So the, the agent lab thing is like, we'll do the last mile for you. Whereas I think the model labs tend to just trust the model and, and be minimalist about it. Both of them work.[00:25:38] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:25:38] swyx: I, I don't, I don't necessarily think one, uh, beats the other, uh, for every, for every use case. Um, all I, all I do know is that it does seem like.Uh, the large enterprises do want a dedicated partner that isn't just the model labs, which is kind of interesting.[00:25:55] Jacob Effron: We, we've been in this phase of, of pure capability exploration. And so I think nothing has been, you know, better for the large labs, right? I mean, they're always gonna be, uh, uh, the frontier of, of capability exploration.And so I think have a very good relationship with a lot of these enterprises. But ultimately over time, like. The, uh, the incentive structure of these labs is always gonna be maximal, you know, token consumption for, uh, for the end customers they work with. And there's just, I think, so few companies that have actually gotten to massive scale.Maybe coding again is the most interesting. So it's the first space that really is just completely gone, you know? Yeah. You must love it every day. Like absolutely insane. And. I think it[00:26:32] swyx: gets even. Okay. I mean, like, I think we, we say good things about crystal cognition, but the sheer liftoff of like both end UPIC and open ai.‘cause they, they, they have independent valuations. I mean, let's throw an XEI in there because it's now I ping at 1.2 trillion. That number is just mind boggling. Like I, I feel like in normal investing or normal startups, there's kind of like a ceiling market cap or valuation. Totally. That, that like you, you reach and you go like, all right, let's, it's gonna be chiller from now on.And these guys are not slow down. No.[00:27:02] Jacob Effron: Well, I also think the dynamic is fascinating about some of these later stage companies is, is, you know, in the past, I feel like in, in venture world, if you got to a certain level of scale, the question around you was really more a valuation question. And this is like why there was different phase, like, you know, types of venture people did and like the late stage growth people were just incredible at like, you know, a little bit of what's the ultimate market opportunity of this company, but also what's the right way to, to value it.Like we know it's, it's in some bands of an outcome that is like. Sure there's some variance to it, but it's like relatively understood what that bands is and then maybe you get over time surprised to the upside. Whereas any kind of like later, even the labs themselves, any later stage company, the bands of which that company might be worth right now, even in a year or two years are so massive because of how fast the ecosystem changes that it's like.Even for later stage companies, every three months could be an existential level event to the upside to the downside. Yeah. Um, and I think that, like, you are obviously seeing it in the, in the positive with code, which, you know, if you think about a company like philanthropic, you know, that. For a while, it was like unclear if they were going to have access to enough capital, um, to really stay in the, in the race, right?And then coding hit at the exact right time. They had the perfect model for it. They executed brilliantly. Um, and you know, now are, are, you know, uh, you know, one of the most valuable companies in the world.[00:28:13] swyx: Uh, at the same time, I, I don't find, I, I have zero sympathy for opening eye because they're crushing it and they're all rich.You know, this is like a high class champagne problem to have to, uh, to be number two at coding or whatever. Like, who cares? Like, you're, you're doing great.[00:28:27] Jacob Effron: Yeah. It's funny though. I can't even, I mean, you would be closer to this, uh, you know, even that you're in the AI coding space, but it's like a lot of people I talk to think Codex is just as good, if not better than Claude Code.Right. I think one thing that I've been really surprised by, and maybe, maybe Cloud Code is a better product in some ways, I'm curious your thoughts is just in consumer AI with chat GBT. You saw this big first mover advantage, right? Where admittedly today, like, I don't know, Claude Gemini. Great products.Not sure, not abundantly clear chat GBTs any better, but like. People stick with chat, GBT, it's the first thing to introduce them.[00:28:56] swyx: They stay, but they're not growing anymore. I don't know if you've seen[00:28:59] Jacob Effron: Right. But that to me is more of like a, a, a product problem than it is. They're not like, it's not like they've like lost share to someone else.My understanding is the overall problem with consumer AI today is much more of a how do you take this tool and, you know, for, for folks like us, like knowledge workers, it's like this incredible magic tool, but it's not necessarily a daily active use tool for a lot of people around the world today. And what are the like products?It's, it's kind of a category wide problem. Like in coding, for example, like. The entire space has gone parabolic. There may be some relative growth in, uh, in other consumer AI players, but it's not like consumer AI as a category is like going parabolic and they're not capturing most of that thing. I think it's actually the larger problem is much more, hey, the category has kind of hit a bit of a plateau of people haven't figured out how to bring, you know, tons more users on board.Yeah, yeah. Or increase the frequency of those users. And so it seems more of a category wide problem than it is, you know, a massive market share of change. I was gonna draw the comparison to, to the coding space where Claude Co is the first product, obviously, to introduce people to this magical experience.You know, by all accounts, codex is, is pretty damn close to as good, if not better. Um, but like still that first product, you, you would've thought that would not be a super sticky, uh, you know, product surface area. And it actually has, it turns out, I, it feels like the first lab to introduce you and experience really does, uh, keep a lot of, uh, a lot of the focus.[00:30:12] swyx: I, I think. M maybe it's like still, still early days. You know, Chad, BT is like three plus years old and Yeah. Cloud code is only one. Just turned a year. Yeah. So give it time, you know? Yeah. Like, yeah. I mean, definitely sometimes a lot of people have switched from to Codex. Maybe that will keep going. I, it's like really hard to tell.Uh, yeah. I, I, I do, I do think that. Because we are in this like, high volatility, high temperature phase. Um, the loyalty and stickiness to first movers and category creators, I don't think is as high as it might be in some other, uh, areas in our careers that we've looked at.[00:30:47] Jacob Effron: Yeah. Though, I mean, I've been surprised by the cloud code thing.I, I would've thought that, like, in many ways I always worried about the[00:30:52] swyx: enterprise. You think you would've been gone by now?[00:30:53] Jacob Effron: Not gone. But I would've, I I always worried that the, that the consumer business of these companies would be quite sticky. And then the enterprise API business. Uh, was actually like, you know, in some ways like your least loyal buyers, like they would, they would move to,[00:31:05] swyx: right, right.But, but they worked out that it wasn't the enterprise API it was enterprise product.[00:31:09] Jacob Effron: Totally. And maybe that was the, that was the secret that like, but the amount of lock-in or just default behavior that has happened in that space, uh, is, is more than I might've imagined with two products that by all accounts are pretty damn similar.Yeah.[00:31:22] swyx: No fight there. Uh, I will say I do think that Codex is still in like a catch up. Like in terms of personal experience. Um, the only thing I like out of, out of Codex is the, is like Spark and like yeah. Uh, the, I, I feel like the skills integration is a little bit better. I feel like, uh, the, the speed is a bit better.Maybe ‘cause it's in, is written in rust or whatever. Um, very minor things that you like. Almost like telling yourself rather than like objectively assessing between two, two of them. I, I, I do think, like vibes wise, I think that's going on. Um, the, the, you know, I, I feel like the, the missing questions, uh, in, in this whole debate is like, why is this so concentrated in only two names, right?Yeah. Like, um, how, where, like, where is the Gemini? You know, presence, where's the Xai presence? Um, and like they are trying, it's just they haven't made that much progress yet.[00:32:12] Jacob Effron: But what the, what the Claude Co moment does show, and it actually in some ways makes you a little more bullish on the potential for someone else to catch up because it does feel like if you're the first person to introduce some magical net new product experience, that that actually might be stickier than one might have imagined.[00:32:27] swyx: Right, right, right. Okay. Yeah.[00:32:28] Jacob Effron: And so it's, everyone can believe they have shot[00:32:29] swyx: that. What do you think that new product experience might be like? I, I, it's, it's like, and this is a failure of imagination on my part. Like, I always wonder, like, people always say this like, well, the, the thing that will save us is like being first to the next new thing.Like what is it?[00:32:41] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:32:42] swyx: It's like,[00:32:45] Jacob Effron: I dunno, something around like, uh, consumer agent, computer use, like hybrid. I think, obviously, I think we're like scratching the surface on the consumer side.[00:32:53] swyx: So my, my current theory is like the. Open claw is like a vision of things to come.[00:32:58] Jacob Effron: Totally.[00:32:58] swyx: Um, and uh, it's good that O open I has like the association with open claw, but by no means do they have the rights to win it.The general thesis that I have been pursuing now is that the year the same way that 2025 was the year of coding agents, 2026 is coding agents breaking containment to do everything else. Um, and so coding agents continue to still win, but because they generate software and software eats the world, so like, it's kind of like the trans.Associated property of like software, eat the world, coding agents, eat software, therefore coding agents eat the world. Um, which is like an interesting,[00:33:30] Jacob Effron: yeah, and breaking containment always an easier phase phrase in the consumer context than the enterprise one. You've seen people run these really cool, uh, experiments in their own personal lives.I think like,[00:33:37] swyx: yes.[00:33:38] Jacob Effron: Figuring out, you know, how you, obviously everyone's focused, you know, on the enterprise side now around how you create these experiences. I feel like the vibes, you know, people love to have these narratives of like, everything is completely shifted. It's like I actually, you know, open AI.Organizationally, uh, you know, volatility aside is, you know, great products, great team, great models like everyone else in the world is incentivized for there to be. Two, three more. Everyone would love more like great model companies. And so I feel like the, the natural forces of the world revolt when any one company, you know, is too much the star of the show, right?There's so many people in the ecosystem that are incentivized for that not to happen. And so I think I'd be shocked if we don't have. Uh, uh, reversion of vibes, not maybe completely the other way, but at least a little bit more equal at some point over the next six, 12 months.[00:34:24] swyx: I, I think there's just a kind of different stages when, when you talk about the world, one wanting more model companies, I talked think about like the neo labs.[00:34:30] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:34:31] swyx: And I mean, I don't know, is it fair to say none of them have really broken through in the past year?[00:34:35] Jacob Effron: I think that's totally fair,[00:34:37] swyx: which is rough. Um, and well, how are we gonna, how are we gonna grow that diversity in, in, in choice, like. Um, that's, this is it.[00:34:46] Jacob Effron: Yeah. It'll be really interesting to see what, what, what ends up happening with that.And you've seen, you know, folks like Nvidia, you know, very incentivized to make sure there's, there's a broader platform of, of other model providers.[00:34:57] swyx: I think, uh, I don't know people say this, but I, I, I don't think they try it hard. Nvidia tries harder to build neo clouds[00:35:05] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:35:06] swyx: Than neo labs.[00:35:07] Jacob Effron: Well, they try pretty damn hard to build neo Cloud, so[00:35:09] swyx: that's,[00:35:09] Jacob Effron: yeah.[00:35:10] swyx: But like, you know, let's call it like the, the core weaves of the world, much happier place in the, you know, than any neo lab built on top of them.[00:35:18] Jacob Effron: Yeah. That one might argue it's, it's easier to, to enable a neo cloud to be successful than it is. Uh, you can't will a neo lab into existence the same way you, soNvidia[00:35:25] swyx: has more direct control over it.Uh, for sure.[00:35:27] Jacob Effron: What else is kind of catching your eye today on the startup side? I mean, you worry, there's obviously this whole narrative of like, you know, the foundation models, you know, they announced a product and every stock goes down 15%. Like[00:35:36] swyx: Yeah.[00:35:37] Jacob Effron: Do you, do you worry about the foundation models just kind of eating into to a bunch of these startup categories?[00:35:43] swyx: Not really. I, I think actually like. As, uh, there's, there's, okay, there's, there's, there's the, there's the point of view of like being an investor in startups, and there's a point of view of like, do you wanna start something? And I think honestly, like the, the downside for all these is so. Minimal in, in a sense of like, the worst you do is you just get hired into one of these labs anyway.So I, I think the, the market for people who just do things and try things and try to execute in like a competent way, even if like it doesn't work out commercially, even if it just wasn't that great anyway. Like, but like that's your job interview to go into, into one of these things anyway, so, um, I don't feel that.From a, from a very, very small startup perspective, mid-size startups. Yes. Uh, I will say there's been a lot of dead, um, LM Infra, a lot of LM infra consolidation like the, the, uh, lang fuses of the world getting absorbed into, into click house. And I, I think. Like people have maybe worked out the domain specific playbook, uh, and like, I think that's okay.Um, and, and yeah, I'm not that, not that worried about, uh, okay. So, um, I, I would say I'd be more worried about traditional SaaS, like low NPSS. This is the whole AI versus SaaS debate that has, that's been going on. Uh, and, and like literally I'm going through that exact thing in my company where, so I like kind of.Thinking through this on a very visceral, visceral level, right? On one hand you have the people who say you vibe coders don't appreciate the amount of work that goes into A-A-C-R-M and like, yeah, you think you can rip out Salesforce? So did the 30 entrepreneurs before you, right? Like, like, you know, you classically underestimate the things that you don't.Deeply, no. And, and, and target audience is not you. Uh, at the same time, like we have never been able to build software so easily and customize software so easily and like Yeah, you're not gonna use 90% of the things in Salesforce. So like, yeah. What's the typical, so what have you, what[00:37:33] Jacob Effron: have you done internally?[00:37:34] swyx: So we have there the main SaaS that we do for event management and sponsor management. That's, and we paid 200 KA year for that. Not, not huge, but like chunky for, for, for my, my scale. Um, and like, yeah, I could probably spend 2000 and, and build like a custom version of that. Um, the, the, the trick has been dealing with my, the rest of my team and getting them on board.Yeah. ‘cause I'm the most ethical person on my team, but like, I can't make that decision myself. And I think in the same way I've been telling with other CEOs team leaders as well, it's like, well you can be super cloud pilled. You can be super LM psychosis and that you think that's okay, but you like you have to bring your team with you.And I think like there, the sort of widening disparity in LM psychosis in companies is causing real s real riffs because. And on one hand, on one hand, the people who are less AI native are not getting with the picture. They're not, they're actually like behind, they're actually not waking up to the fact that like you, everything you think is necessary is not actually that necessary.And in fact, exactly would be better of you if you just like held your nose and went in and when came out the other side. Yeah, only talking to agents in natural language and like your life would actually be better and you just, you're just like close-minded. There's that perspective. The other perspective is, oh, you vibe coder.You, you did this in a weekend and you got the 80% solution and now the rest of your employees. Have to pick up the rest of your s**t, right, that you, that you thought you were, you were such hot, amazing, uh, uh, at, but like, actually you didn't figure it out. And like, actually LMS are still useless at this and blah, blah, blah.So like, I think there's this huge debate going on in every company right now. Um, and like, um, you know, I have a small microcosm of it, but like, yeah, it, it's making me hesitate to, to pull the trigger. But like I will at some point, it's like maybe I've put it off for one year, but not like five. Yeah, but like, so, so like SaaS is definitely getting squeezed.Um, it does make me wonder, like, I, I do think that there's an opportunity for a more AI native, um, system of record thing that is not just Postgres. Um, or not just MongoDB, although both are very good. Maybe it's like a convex or like people Yeah. Bring up convex a lot. I don't know, like, like, I, I just feel like the sort of quote unquote firebase of, of AI apps isn't really a thing yet.Um, beyond what we have. Uh, which, which is fine. It's, it's, it's just. We could probably start in a more sort of rapid iteration cycle first before scaling up to like a Postgres or MongoDB, which are more sort of old tech. I was at a dinner with, uh, Mike Krieger, the CPO of en philanthropic, and, and he, we were just kind of going around the room going like, what are people most worried about?Yeah. And, uh, for me, uh, I, instead of security, I brought up biosafety. Yeah,[00:40:21] Jacob Effron: classic.[00:40:22] swyx: Um, actually, like I said, it was. Cliche and classic, and the rest of the table were, were like, what do you mean? Someone sitting at home can manufacture a virus that wipes out half of humanity,[00:40:32] Jacob Effron: almost like the OG Jeffrey Hinton.Like, this is why you should be scared.[00:40:35] swyx: I'm like, yeah, like the read the, you know, risk reports. Like this is like the thing. Um, I think, and Mike was just sitting there knowing he was sitting on Mythos and going like, actually it's security. Um, and I think like, um, I think the, there's, there's, part of it is.A very good marketing. Like too good. Yeah, like I would actually advise and topic to tune down the marketing because also it's, it is just a very good model and you don't have to make so many marketing claims around it. At the same time, it is not really a private model. If you give it to 40 companies.Each of whom have like 10,000 employees or whatever. Right. It's not, it's not private, it's, it's like there's bad actors in there.[00:41:18] Jacob Effron: Yeah. Hopefully, hopefully not as, uh, as bad as releasing it widely, but, uh, no, I mean, it's an interesting. You know, it's an interesting case study for how all, I mean, many model releases might, I mean, you know, this might be the first model release that looks like the rest of ‘em from from now on, right?[00:41:31] swyx: It, it, so it's, it's the, there's an overall product strategy, uh, for anthropic of like bundle, uh, you know, restrict access bundle, uh, product with model maybe.Whereas, uh, OpenAI has definitely been a lot more sort of. Philosophically aligned on like, we will just enable access everywhere and we don't know what you, what will come out of it. Right.[00:41:51] Jacob Effron: Right. Though, I mean, this current moment, uh, obviously the cynical take is also just ties to the amount of compute that both companies[00:41:56] swyx: Yeah.Right, right, right. Yeah, I think, I think that's true. I I do think like the, the, this is the, the, the scale, the dawn of like larger than 10 trillion parameter models is very interesting. I don't think it, I think it's a temporary phenomenon because we have much larger compute clusters coming online for everyone over the next like three, five years.It's, and this is like already written in, in the cards.[00:42:18] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:42:19] swyx: So to the extent that like, you know, will we have rationing of models, uh, above 10 trillion, uh, in like two years? I don't think so. I think everyone will have no, we'll just[00:42:29] Jacob Effron: have rationing of the next phase.[00:42:30] swyx: Right. Right. But like, that's as it should be almost like, um.My, my classic example, which I, this is just me theorizing, not anything confirmed by Google. When Google announced Gemini, they actually announced three sizes, which was Flash Pro Ultra. They never released Ultra. They only have Pro and Flash. Um, so my theory is they have ultra sitting in a basement and they just could distilling from it for, for flashing pro.Um, which like, yeah, I mean, I, I actually think that's. As it should be for any lab that they, that they do that.[00:43:02] Jacob Effron: Yeah. Just because those are the models that people actually wanna end up using. And it's just like cost prohibit.[00:43:06] swyx: It is more, yeah, it's cost. Yeah. It's, it's not the want, it's just, just, just the cost.Um, I do think, like, uh, it is interesting that, uh, for a while I was, I was considering the theory that models capped out at two, 2 trillion, and I think that's proving to be wrong. And well then if I'm wrong, how wrong? How wrong am I? Do we do 200 trillion? Do we do two quarter trillion, whatever? Um, and I don't think we have the straight answer to that, but like, uh, it's interesting that we are continuing to scale number of pers when everyone kind of assu like can see that we're not going to get like the next thousand or 1 million x from this paradigm.So like the others, like the alias of the world are working on other. Um, model architecture improvements. We need a different scaling law, I guess, because like, we're, I, I feel like people already already feel like we're tapped out on this. Like the, the end, the end state of this is we turn most of the world into data centers and like, I don't know.I don't know if we want that.[00:44:08] Jacob Effron: Yeah, I mean, uh, if the, if, if, if the return of intelligence are there, maybe, uh, maybe not so bad.[00:44:13] swyx: I, I, I think there, there's just a sheer amount of like, like un scalability that like is wrangling people's sensibilities right now. Um, especially in terms of like context lengths.Um, my classic quote is that context length is like the slowest scaling factor in, in lms.[00:44:30] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:44:30] swyx: Um, we, like, we took maybe. Three years to go from like 4,000 context length to a million and that's about it. Yeah. Like Gemini has had a million token context length for two years now. Um, and no one's using it.Like, so like yeah, it's memory. Memory is probably gonna be the, the biggest limiting constraint on all these things.[00:44:50] Jacob Effron: Yeah. Certainly seems that way. I guess I'm curious over the last year since you recorded last, like what's one thing you've changed your mind on?[00:44:57] swyx: I feel like I was kind of bearish on open models like last year.Um, in a sense of, like, I, I had just done the podcast with an Al[00:45:07] Jacob Effron: Yeah.[00:45:08] swyx: Of Braintrust where he, and he, I mean, you know, he has a good cross section of all the top AI companies and he says market share of open source is 5% and going down. Um, I think that's changed. I think it's going up. Um, and even if,[00:45:22] Jacob Effron: even though the capability gap does seem to be increasing.Spending on the[00:45:26] swyx: time. It's hard to tell. Yeah, it's, it's really hard to tell. ‘cause like, okay, for, for listeners, capability gap increasing is like on public benchmarks. And let's say you're comparing mythos versus like, I don't know, G-T-O-S-S or like GLM 5.1. And, um, it's, it is really hard to tell. ‘cause even if they were closing, you will also not believe that they were closing that much because it's very easy to gain the benchmarks.Yeah. So you just don't really, really know. Um, all you know is like. Uh, there's somewhat objective open router stats on like what people choose in a free market. And people do choose some of these open models in significant volume, except that a lot of them are heavily discounted. So you need to kind of like price adjust, uh, these things.So even if, even if that were true, which I, I'm not sure, like I, I, I feel like the numbers just up now instead of down. Uh, I think the. Separation between what the top tier agent labs
Get featured on the show by leaving us a Voice Mail: https://bit.ly/MIPVM Cas de Morree and Mark Smith unpack why applied AI skills now matter more than prompts. They explore Copilot's real strength inside work data, the rapid shift towards agents and outcome‑driven systems, and how low‑cost tooling is reshaping productivity. The conversation challenges привычные workflows, highlights why more output does not equal better work, and shows how professionals can rethink email, meetings, automation, and software building using AI that actually integrates into daily work.
Episode 131 How to design read aloud lessons that build understanding—not just engagement The difference between read aloud that supplements vs. supplants your instruction Using read aloud to teach reading skills like character motivation and author's craft How to connect knowledge building and accountable talk into one cohesive lesson Embedding learning science strategies like retrieval practice and interleaving into read aloud Designing literacy instruction so students remember and apply what they learn over timePractical Strategies Mentioned• Modeling character motivation during read aloud using sentence stems • Using repetition in a text to teach author's craft • Retrieval prompts like “What happened yesterday?” • Interleaving skills (character traits + motivation in one question) • Echo, choral, and partner reading followed by comprehension checks • Planning intentional stopping points and think-alouds • Using text sets (poems, articles, videos) to deepen understandingThese are all strategies grounded in the science of reading and learning science that help students move from understanding in the moment to learning that actually sticks.As you listen, consider this question:What is my read aloud actually doing in my literacy block?Is it:Filling time?Reinforcing skills?Or driving instruction and building understanding over time?Instructional leadership starts with teachers who are willing to move from doing the lesson to designing the learning experience.Earthquake Terror (used as a mentor text example for author's craft)Wonder by R.J. Palacio (used for text connections and deeper thinking)Episode 129: Why Read Aloud Still Matters in Upper Elementary Episode 130: How Accountable Talk Builds Thinking in Your Literacy ClassroomIf you're ready to strengthen your instruction and design literacy lessons that actually stick, you can learn more about coaching and professional development below:In This Episode We DiscussSelf-Leadership ReflectionResources MentionedPrevious Episodes ReferencedWork With EvaGrab my free guide: How to Keep Your Mini Lesson Mini Book a discovery call for 1:1 coaching or school professional development
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Mauro Schilman, CTO and Co-founder of Tuki, the distribution standard for the AI agent era in travel, for a wide-ranging conversation that moves from the joys of international travel and the beauty of mathematics to the fast-evolving world of AI and large language models. Mauro shares his background as a math Olympiad competitor and later a coach, his time training coding models at the AI company Cohere, and his thoughts on how frontier models are progressing — or plateauing — at the foundational level while innovation accelerates at the application layer. The two also get into the mechanics of agentic AI, MCP and agent-to-agent protocols, hierarchical memory systems, red-green test-driven development as a powerful coding workflow, and the philosophical murkiness of open-source AI. They wrap up discussing Tuki Travel's mission to build AI-ready infrastructure for the travel industry, connecting hotels, suppliers, and online travel agencies to prepare for the coming wave of agentic commerce. You can learn more about Tuki Travel and reach out to the team at tukiclub.com.Timestamps00:00 - Stewart welcomes Mauro Schilman, CTO and Co-founder of Tuki Travel, who shares how traveling since age 15 through high school exchanges opened his mind to cultural similarities and differences.05:00 - Mauro explains Math Olympiad coaching culture and mentorship, noting LLMs now solve competition-level problems while Terence Tao explores AI assisting frontier unsolved mathematics.10:00 - Discussion turns to ChatGPT revealing Mauro's birthdate unprompted, exposing opaque application layers, preference tuning, and system prompts hidden within closed models.15:00 - Mauro argues true open source AI requires full training data, annotation protocols, and alignment processes, not just model weights, while scaling laws appear to be slowing.20:00 - Hierarchical memory models replace flat vector databases, using three-level retrieval systems improving context accuracy as knowledge management becomes AI's core challenge.25:00 - Mauro describes travel's fragmented infrastructure of aggregators, bed banks, and intermediaries, explaining Tuki builds agent-ready unification protocols for AI commerce.30:00 - MCP versus API debate clarifies natural language capability descriptions help agents consume services, while agent-to-agent communication embeds negotiating agents inside supplier systems.35:00 - Hallucinations and consumer trust block agentic payments, industries must build mistake-resilience into bookings before autonomous agent transactions become viable.40:00 - Mauro reveals red-green test-driven development methodology where agents write failing tests first then implementations, creating Oracle verification loops dramatically improving code quality.45:00 - Blockchain's potential for transparent distributed AI training discussed, distinguishing democratization from decentralization while stable coins and regulatory momentum build toward agentic commerce infrastructure.Key Insights1. Travel broadens perspective by revealing both universal human similarities and deep cultural differences. Mauro Schilman began traveling at fifteen through math olympiad competitions and found that people across the world share fundamental traits while also being shaped in profoundly different ways by their cultures. This tension between sameness and difference is what makes travel meaningful.2. Mathematics transitions from structured problem-solving in olympiads to genuine uncertainty in graduate school and research. Olympiad problems are carefully designed with elegant solutions meant to encourage creative thinking, but once a mathematician enters academia, the answers are unknown and the work becomes navigating that uncertainty.3. AI is now assisting mathematicians at the frontier, not just solving olympiad-level problems. Terence Tao, one of the greatest living mathematicians, has written publicly about how AI tools can help tackle unsolved problems, though the role of AI remains assistive rather than independent at the research level.4. Large language models are not truly transparent even when described as open source. Releasing model weights alone does not reveal the training data, annotation protocols, alignment tuning, or system prompts that shape model behavior. Real openness would require access to the entire pipeline.5. Memory and retrieval remain core unsolved challenges in AI systems. Researchers are moving from flat vector database approaches toward hierarchical memory structures with roughly three layers, which improves retrieval accuracy and reduces how much context gets consumed with each search.6. The travel industry is structurally unprepared for AI agents. A hidden web of bed banks, aggregators, and aggregators of aggregators sits between hotels and consumers, each taking a fee. Tuki Travel is building infrastructure to unify this distribution layer and make it consumable by AI agents through protocols like MCP and emerging agent-to-agent communication standards.7. Test-driven development using a red-green approach significantly improves AI-generated code quality. By asking the model to write failing tests before writing any implementation, developers create a verification oracle that guides the model toward correct solutions and avoids the bias of writing tests that simply confirm existing flawed code.
Join Walter Sterling for a late-night ride through the strange and unexplained! In this episode, journalist Ross Coulthart drops a bombshell about 11 missing aerospace and nuclear scientists who may be tied to a secret government UFO crash retrieval program. Retired NYPD detective Vic Ferrari also stops by to share the hilarious saga of a 300-pound serial car thief named Spud who made a terrible police informant. Plus, Walter and his callers debate whether a weaker gravitational pull is the real secret behind the construction of the pyramids and giant dinosaurs, argue about the physics of water on a spinning globe, and ponder if shape-shifting reptilians and mermaids secretly live inside the Earth. Finally, Matias "Boom Boom" delivers the Hollywood scoop with a review of Bob Odenkirk's bloody new action-comedy Normal. Tune in for aliens, anti-gravity, and absolute late-night chaos! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
For all those who missed out on London, see you in Miami next week!Notion, the knowledge work decacorn, has been building AI tooling since before ChatGPT, with many hits from Q&A in 2023 and unified AI in 2024 and Meeting Notes in 2025. At the end of their last Make user conference, Ryan Nystrom teased Notion 3.0's Custom Agents - and they are finally embracing the Agent Lab playbook!Sarah Sachs and Simon Last of Notion join us for a deep dive into how Notion built Custom Agents, why it took years and multiple rebuilds to get right, and what it means to turn a productivity tool into an agent-native system of record for enterprise work.We go inside the product, engineering, evals, pricing, and org design decisions behind one of the most ambitious AI product efforts in software today — from early failed tool-calling experiments in 2022 to agent harnesses, progressive tool disclosure, meeting notes as data capture, and the long-term vision for software factories and agentic work.We discuss:* Sarah and Simon's path to launching Notion Custom Agents, and why the feature was rebuilt four or five times before it was ready for production* Why early agent attempts failed: no tool-calling standard, short context windows, unreliable models, and too much complexity exposed to the model* The “Agent Lab” thesis: not just wrapping a model, but understanding how people collaborate and building the right product system around frontier capabilities* How Notion thinks about roadmap timing: not swimming upstream against model limitations, but also building early enough that the product is ready when the models are* Why coding agents feel like the kernel of AGI, and how Notion is thinking about “software factories” made up of agents that spec, code, test, debug, review, and maintain codebases together* How Sarah runs AI engineering at Notion (“notes from Token Town”): objective-setting over idea ownership, low-ego teams comfortable deleting their own work, and a culture designed to swarm around fast-changing opportunities* The “Simon Vortex,” company hackathons, and why security gets pulled in early rather than late* How Notion organizes AI: core AI capabilities and infrastructure, product packaging teams, and a broader company mandate that every product surface must increasingly work for both humans and agents* Why prototypes have become much easier to build internally, and how “demos over memos” changes product development inside a tool the whole company already uses every day* Notion's eval philosophy: regression tests, launch-quality evals, and “frontier/headroom” evals that intentionally only pass ~30% of the time so the company can see where model capabilities are going* What a “Model Behavior Engineer” is, and why Notion treats eval writing, failure analysis, and model understanding as a distinct function rather than just software engineering* The changing role of software engineers in the age of coding agents, and why the new job looks less like typing code and more like supervising a rigorous outer system of agents, PRs, and verification loops* How the “software factory” should work: specs, self-verification, bug flows, subagents, and minimizing human intervention while preserving the invariants that matter* A live walkthrough of a Notion Custom Agent handling coworking space tenant applications by triaging email, enriching applicants with web search, and writing structured data into a Notion database* How agents compose inside Notion: shared databases as primitives, agents invoking other agents, “manager agents” supervising dozens of specialized agents, and memory implemented simply as pages and databases* Notion's take on MCP vs CLI: why Simon is bullish on CLI's self-debugging nature, where MCP still makes sense, and how Sarah thinks about capability, determinism, permissioning, and pricing alignment* The evolution of Notion's internal agent harness: from early JavaScript coding agents, to custom XML, to Markdown and SQL-like abstractions, to tool definitions, progressive disclosure, and a much shorter system prompt* Why Notion cares about teaching “the top of the class,” building for sophisticated operators rather than abstracting away too much capability for everyone* How agent setup works today: agents that can configure themselves, inspect their own failures, and edit their own instructions — with guardrails around permissions* How Notion prices Custom Agents: credits as an abstraction over tokens, model type, serving tier, web search, and future sandbox costs; why usage-based pricing was necessary; and how “auto” tries to match the right model to the right task* Why Notion is not eager to train a foundation model, where they do fine-tune and optimize today, and why retrieval/ranking is one of the most important investment areas as more searches come from agents rather than humans* Why Meeting Notes became one of Notion's strongest growth loops: not just as transcription, but as high-signal data capture that powers search, custom agents, follow-up workflows, and the broader system of record for company collaboration* Why Notion is more interested in being the place where collaboration data lives than in building hardware themselves — and how wearables or other capture devices may eventually feed into that systemSarah SachsLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahmsachsX: https://x.com/sarahmsachsSimon LastLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-last-41404140X: https://x.com/simonlastFull Video EpisodeTimestamps* 00:00:00 Introduction and launching Notion Custom Agents* 00:01:17 Why Notion rebuilt agents four or five times* 00:03:35 Building for where models are going, not just where they are* 00:05:32 The Agent Lab thesis, wrappers, and product intuition* 00:08:07 User journeys, leadership, and low-ego AI teams* 00:13:16 The Simon Vortex, hackathons, and bringing security in early* 00:16:39 Team structure, demos over memos, and building for agents* 00:20:25 Evals, Notion's Last Exam, and the Model Behavior Engineer role* 00:27:37 Evals as an agent harness and the changing role of software engineers* 00:30:42 The software factory: specs, verification, and agent workflows* 00:32:18 Live demo: a custom agent for coworking space applications* 00:35:08 Composing agents, manager agents, and memory as pages* 00:38:15 Notion Mail, Gmail, native integrations, and tools* 00:39:43 MCP vs CLI and the cost of capability* 00:44:13 When Notion uses MCP vs building its own integrations* 00:47:43 The history of Notion's agent harness rebuilds* 00:55:35 Power users, public tools, and the setup agent* 00:58:01 Self-fixing agents, permissions, and “flippy”* 01:01:13 Pricing, credits, and choosing the right model automatically* 01:09:01 Why Notion isn't training its own frontier model* 01:14:07 Retrieval, ranking, and search built for agents* 01:17:27 Meeting Notes as data capture and workflow automation* 01:21:18 Wearables, hardware, and Notion as the system of record* 01:23:45 OutroTranscript[00:00:00] Alessio: Hey everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio founder of Kernel Labs and I'm joined by swyx, editor of the Latent Space.[00:00:11] swyx: Hello. Hello. We're back in the beautiful studio that, uh, Alessio has set up for us with Simon and Sarah from Notion. Welcome.[00:00:18] Sarah Sachs: Thanks for having us.[00:00:19] Alessio: Thanks for having us. Yeah.[00:00:20] swyx: Congrats on the launch recently the custom agents, finally it's here. How's it feel?[00:00:26] Sarah Sachs: We ship things slowly. So it had been in Alpha for a little bit and at the point at which is it's an alpha, um, there's a group of people that are making sure it's ready for prod, and then there's a group of people working on the next thing.So sometimes some of these launches are a bit delayed satisfaction, so it's quite nice to remind yourself all the work you did because we do have a habit of like. Being two or three milestones ahead. Uh, just ‘cause you have to be, you know, you can't get complacent. Um, but it's been great that people understood how this is helpful.And I think that's just easier in general building AI tools today than it was two, three years ago. People kind of get it and so that user education, um, there's just, it was our most successful launch in terms of free trials and converting people and things like that. It was really successful, so yeah.But there's a lot to build.[00:01:12] swyx: Making it free for three months helps.[00:01:16] Sarah Sachs: Yep.[00:01:17] Simon Last: It was definitely super exciting for me because it's probably the fourth or fifth time that we rebuilt that.[00:01:22] swyx: Yes.[00:01:23] Simon Last: And I mean,[00:01:24] swyx: you've been building this since like 20, 22.[00:01:26] Simon Last: Yeah, I mean, like, it was even right when we got access to like GPT four in late 20 22, 1 of the first ideas we had is like, oh, okay, let's make an agent that I, we used the word assistant at the time, there wasn't really the word, the word agent yet, but, oh, we'll give an access to all the tools the notion can do, and then it, we run in the background like, like do work for us.And then we just tried that many times and it just. Was too early. Um,[00:01:48] swyx: I need to force you to like double click on that. What is too early? What didn't work?[00:01:52] Sarah Sachs: We were fine to, like, before function calling came out. We were trying to fine tune with the Frontier Labs and with fireworks, like a function calling model on notion functions.This is right when I joined. I joined because, um, we needed a manager as Simon was needed to be able to go on vacation. So, uh, that's, that's around when I joined, so you can speak much more to it.[00:02:11] Simon Last: Yeah, we did partnerships with both philanthropic and open AI at different times, uh, to try to, at the time the, I mean, when we first tried, there wasn't even a constant of like tools yet.We, we sort of designed our own like, like tool calling framework and then we tried to fine tune the models to, uh, to use it over multiple turns. Um, and because it, it didn't work well out the box, I think. Yeah. The models are just too dumb and the context thing was also way too short.[00:02:37] Alsesio: Yeah.[00:02:37] Simon Last: Um, and yeah, we just kind of banged our head against it for a long time.Uh, unfortunately it was always like, there was always like sort of. Glimmers that it was working, but um, it never felt quite robust enough to be like a useful, delightful thing. Um, until I would say, uh, the big unlock was probably like Sonic 3.6 or seven, uh, early last year. And that's when we started working on our agent, which we shipped last year.Um, and then, and then uh, uh, custom agents, kinda a similar capability and that, that one just took longer because we, we just wanted to get the reliability up a lot higher. ‘cause it's actually running in the background.[00:03:14] Sarah Sachs: And the product interface of like permissions and understanding, you know, this custom agent is shared in a Slack channel with X group of people and has access to documents that are surfaced to Y group of people.And the intersect experts, Y might not be whole. And so how do you build the product around making sure administrators understand that permissioning took multiple swings.[00:03:35] Alsesio: Everything is hard back at the end of the day. Yeah. I'm curious, like when the models are not working, how do you inform the product roadmap of like, okay, we should probably build, expecting the models to be better at some reasonable pace, but at the same time we need to, you know, you had a lot of customers in 2022.It's not like you were a new company or like no user base.[00:03:54] Simon Last: Yeah, I mean I think there's always the balance of, you know, like you want to be a GI pilled and thinking ahead and building for where things are going. Uh, but also you wanna be like shipping useful things. And so we always try to like, like keep a balance there.You know, we. We try to take clear, like a portfolio approach. You know, we're always working on multiple projects and, and we're always trying to work on, you know, maintaining things where that have already shipped, like, like shipping new things that are like eminently working well and make them really good.And, and then we wanna always have a few projects that are a little bit crazy. Um,[00:04:23] Alsesio: and what are the a GI peel projects that you have today? I'm curious about, uh, you don't have to share exactly what you're working on, but I'm curious what are things today that maybe in 18 months people will be like, oh, obviously this was gonna work[00:04:35] Sarah Sachs: 18 months.[00:04:37] Alsesio: Yeah, 18 months is, you know,[00:04:37] Sarah Sachs: it's a long time and Yeah. Yeah.[00:04:39] Simon Last: I mean, there's a number of things happening. I think one thing that's becoming more clear is I think like, like, uh, coding agents are the kernel of EGI, sort of, everything is a coding agent. Mm-hmm. I think that's, that's sort of one, one direction.Um, and then, yeah, the exciting thing about that is sort of your agent can sort of bootstrap its own software and capabilities and actually debug and maintain them. And so yeah, we're, we're, we're thinking a lot about that. And then, yeah, like, like another category of things that I'm, I'm really excited about is like, uh, we call the software factory also.People are using this, uh, this, this sort of word. Um, basically it just means can you create sort of like a, as automated as possible, a workflow for developing debugging. Mm-hmm. Merging, reviewing, and maintaining a code base and a service where there's a bunch of agents working together inside, and like, like how does that work?[00:05:28] Sarah Sachs: If you think back to your initial question, like, why did this take so long? I think something,[00:05:32] swyx: I didn't say that, but Yes. Okay. Go ahead.[00:05:34] Sarah Sachs: Why, what, what changed over the three and half years of trying[00:05:37] swyx: it? Exactly. Right. Because most people always say like, it didn't work yet. Then reasoning models came, then it worked.I was like, okay, let's go a little[00:05:43] Sarah Sachs: bit. That's, I mean, that's part of it, but I think the other part of it that I actually think is really what will set notion apart for every new capability is we have like. Two skills that are crucial when it comes to frontier capabilities. One is not letting yourself swim upstream.So like quickly realizing if you're just pressing against model capabilities versus not exposing the model to the right information, not having the right infrastructure set up. That and of itself is the skill of intuition. And the second is to see, okay, you're not swimming upstream. Which direction is the river flowing and what is like, how do we think ahead about the product and start building it even if it's not great yet, so that when it is there, we're ready for it.Right? And like those can sometimes feel like counterintuitive things. Like we can be trying to fine tune a tool calling model when they don't exist yet. And that the trick is to not do that for too long, but realize that there was something there. And we've had a lot of things which like, um, we're just like not swimming in the right direction with the streams.I think we had multiple versions of transcription before we got meeting notes, right? Oh, I gotta talk[00:06:39] swyx: about that. Yeah.[00:06:40] Sarah Sachs: Yeah. Um, and so. I, I, I think that like we, we really closely partner with the Frontier Labs on capabilities and we also have to have strong conviction on, as those capabilities move.Notion is about being the best place for you to collaborate and do your work. And how does that narrative change if the way that we work changes?Yeah.[00:06:58] swyx: Yeah. You told me you were a fan of the Agent Lab thesis, and this is, this is kind of it, right?[00:07:02] Sarah Sachs: Right. I show that thesis to so many candidates. Like I have it as like micro chrome autofill.Um, at this point, like it's one of my most visitations[00:07:10] swyx: because like, is this the, here's why you should work in notion and not open, open eye. I, it's like,[00:07:14] Sarah Sachs: here's, here's what's different about it.[00:07:16] swyx: Yeah.[00:07:16] Sarah Sachs: And here's why. It's not just a rapper. I actually think more and more people understand it's not just a wrapper.[00:07:21] swyx: Yeah.[00:07:22] Sarah Sachs: Um, and by the way, like in the beginning, parts of what we build are wrappers on functionality. That works well, of course, but that's not really the most, um. I would say that's not the product that, that drives revenue. And that's not necessarily always what users need.[00:07:35] swyx: I mean, you know, notion is the AWS wrapper, but like the, the wrapper is very beautiful and like very, very well polished.So[00:07:40] Sarah Sachs: like the analogy,[00:07:41] swyx: like[00:07:42] Sarah Sachs: the analogy that I've been coming back to his Datadog in AWS[00:07:45] swyx: Yeah.[00:07:46] Sarah Sachs: So, uh, Datadog could not exist with, without cloud storage. Right. That it's kind of fundamental that that works. Um, and AWS has like a CloudWatch product, but Datadog is an expert on understanding how people want observability on the products they launch.And we're experts in understanding how people wanna collaborate, and that's really where our expertise lies.[00:08:04] swyx: Totally.[00:08:04] Sarah Sachs: Um, regardless of the tools that we use,[00:08:07] Alsesio: I'm kind of curious how you think about implicit versus explicit expertise. I feel like Datadog is half and half implicit and explicit. It's like they understand across markets and industries what engineering teams usually look for.With notion, it's almost like more of the expertise is at the edge because you as a platform, you're like so horizontal that the end user is not really the same. Mm-hmm. Like with Datadog, the end user is always like, yeah, an engineering lead, a kinda like SRE related person with notion. It can be anything.So I'm curious how you put that expertise into a product versus, you know, obviously it, WS cannot build notion. It's, that doesn't quite work in this case, but[00:08:44] Simon Last: it's, it's a little bit differently shaped. I think, you know, a classic vertical SaaS, like the data is kind of like that. They understand their individual customer very deeply.It's kinda a narrow slice, um, notion has always been super horizontal. And our, our task has always been to sort of balance these two somewhat opposing forces of like, we're listening to our customers and what they want us to build. It's a broad slice. And then also we're thinking about like, okay, how do we decompose what they want into, uh, nice primitives that are, that are really nice to use and we'll, we'll get us like as much bang for the buck as possible.And then, you know. Maintain the whole system, make it all like, like super clean and nice to use.[00:09:22] Sarah Sachs: We still have user journeys. I mean, we still focus on like core. I actually think the failure of our team is when we focus too much on what are cools that are, what are tools that are[00:09:31] Simon Last: mm-hmm.[00:09:31] Sarah Sachs: Cool tools. I actually think that's when we make have the least velocity because you still need some sort of focus on a user journey.So like for instance, we'll all sit down every Friday and look at the P 99 of like the most token exhaustive custom agent transcript and just look at why it didn't do well and cut a bunch of tasks. Like we still focus on like, this has, like this should work. Email triaging should work. Mm-hmm. Right. And similarly, like when we're talking about before building, um, chatting, um, before we started filming about, okay, how can I do PDF export?Well that's functionality that then merits. Maybe we should build a tool that has access to a computer sandbox in a file system and the ability to write code. Right? Right. Um, but it's because we're thinking about the fact that our users to do their, to do their daily work, need to export PDFs, not because we're like, Hmm, I think a computer tool could be cool.Like, let's just see what happens. Mm-hmm. Like we, we have to focus on some user journeys, otherwise we just don't have like, enough strategy to, to prioritize.[00:10:29] swyx: I think there's a lot of like really strong opinions that you've had. Do you have like sort of like a towel of Sarah Sachs? Like, you know, like what, how do you run your team?Like I feel like you just have accumulated all these strong opinions. Obviously part, part of this is your, your token town thing.[00:10:43] Sarah Sachs: I think the TAs working with Service X is, um, you'd have to, it depends who you ask. Um, I think it depends if you're on my team or a partner Right. Or a vendor.[00:10:54] swyx: Yeah. There other people want to run their teams the way that you're Yeah.You're like bringing these things. And then also similarly, uh, Simon, when you did the custom agents demo, you had like, well, we've been using custom agents and here's the super long list of everything that we do. No humans ever read it. Right? That's what you said. I was like,[00:11:07] Sarah Sachs: yeah. So I think for, for me, um, something that I learned very quickly and became very comfortable with was that my job was not to be the ideas per person or the technical expert.My job was to make it so that everybody understood the objective, had a resource to help prioritize what they should work on, and had an avenue to prioritize what they thought was important. And I think that's true with all, all leadership, but I think especially on the AI team. Almost all of our best ideas come from prototypes, from people that have a cool idea because they saw a user problem, and it's a huge disservice if all of those ideas have to pass, like the sniff test of what me and a product partner or Simon and Ivan decided were the direction, right?Because a lot of what we're doing is leaning into capabilities, so. I think that's the first thing is like, I don't really view like the role of engineering leadership as like, uh, hierarchical, nor has it ever been, but especially now, like very willing to change direction based on, um, like proof is in the pudding.Yeah. And like, and I think we have rebuilt our harness three or four times. And when you do that, then the second rule of engineering leadership is like you need to build a team that's comfortable deleting their own code and is very low ego and is driven by what's best for the company. And, um, doesn't write design docs because they think it's their promotion packet.Right. And that's a culture that notion had long before I joined, but like our willingness to just swarm on different problems and um, redo things that we've built before because something has changed. Like, there's a lot of friction that can happen at companies when you do that. And it doesn't happen at Notion.And because it doesn't happen when new people join. Like they don't wanna be the ones that are saying, we shouldn't do this. I wrote that code. So then it's, you know, you, you create a culture that everyone thoughts and that culture comes directly, I think from Simon and Ivan though, um, because they're very open-minded.[00:12:50] swyx: Anything that you,[00:12:50] Simon Last: you'd add? I'm not a manager, like, like, like Sarah is. Um, a lot of my role is really to try to think a little bit ahead, make sure that we're, we're building on the right capabilities and then like the prototyping stuff. And yeah, it's really, really critical to always just be starting again.It's like, okay, this is new thing. What does this mean? What if we just rethought everything or wrote everything? And so I, I'm, I'm basically just doing that in a loop every six months.[00:13:16] swyx: Yeah. Do you believe in internal hackathons for this stuff?[00:13:19] Sarah Sachs: I think there's like two different versions. So one is like, we just have a, a, a solid bench of senior engineers that come and go on what we call the Simon Vortex and Productionizing what we built, right?Because when you're in the Simon Vortex, the velocity is super high. The direction changes daily, and it's meant to be like the equivalent of a SC Works lab. We don't need to do hackathons for that. We need to have senior engineers that we trust to come in and out of those projects. For instance, like management boundaries are really loose.Like you report to him, but you work for her right now. Yeah. That's something that when we hire managers, it's important they don't care about because we tend to form more structures. Yeah. Don't be too[00:13:54] swyx: territorial.[00:13:55] Sarah Sachs: We form more. It's after we ship things, not not before, just historically. Um, the second thing is we do have companywide hackathons.Actually we just had our demos day for the hackathon we had last week this morning. That's more for people that aren't directly working on the project, feeling like they have the time to pause and learn how to make themselves more productive or how they would use notion custom agents to build something.Or part of the hackathon was actually encouraging everyone across the company to build their own agentic tool loop, calling from scratch. Follow like an every blog post on how to do what I think because we want[00:14:26] swyx: just with the compound engineering one. Yeah.[00:14:28] Sarah Sachs: We want everyone to use cloud code in the company or whatever the coding agent they please and understand that fundamental.So we set aside a day and a half. We're all leadership, encourage everyone on their teams across the company to do it. So we have hackathons like that. I would say like kind of facetiously, like everything we build is a little bit like a hackathon until it graduates and puts on big boy pants and as a product ops rollout leader and has a assigned data scientists and stuff like that,[00:14:54] swyx: security review enterprise stuff,[00:14:56] Sarah Sachs: actually security reviews one of the things that we bring in first because it just slows us down way more and, um, causes a lot of tension and they build better product if they're involved early.So, um, that is probably the first person to get involved in something that's the[00:15:09] swyx: right PR approved answer.[00:15:10] Sarah Sachs: No, but it's not just PR approved. It like, um, um, it's[00:15:13] swyx: actually real. It's actually real. It's like, um, I'm just saying scar[00:15:15] Sarah Sachs: tissue.[00:15:15] swyx: Yeah,[00:15:16] Sarah Sachs: because like, you know, my background's also, I worked at Robinhood for a number of years.Yes. So like, uh, compliance and things like that, um, are a little bit more, you learn the hard way when it doesn't come naturally.[00:15:26] Simon Last: Yeah. I think the. The hackathon is really important for uplifting the general population, but like, if that's the only way you can build new things, you're kind of toast. I mean, it, it has to be like the daily processes, like, you know, building these new things.Um, and it has to be about, I think like, I think in the AI era a lot more leverage accumulates to the most curious and excited people. And so it's like we're all about just like activating that energy. You know, like if someone's protesting something on the weekend that they're excited about and it's important, that should be the main thing that we're doing.Yeah. Um, it's not a hackathon that we schedule once a quarter, it's just like, yeah. Daily process. Part of the culture.[00:16:02] Sarah Sachs: I mean, that's how we shift image generation and notion now. It was always this thing that would be kind of nice to have, but it wasn't really clear where that was necessarily aligned in product priorities.It'd be a lot of work. And we had someone on the database collections team, Jimmy, who was like. I really wanna do image generation for cover photos and inside notion. And we're like, if you wanna build it, like it's, do it please. Like we encourage you. We gave ‘em all the resources of working directly with Gemini and being able to like track the token usage and it working through endpoints.We gave them eval, support, everything, and then became a, a full project.[00:16:34] Alsesio: Yeah.[00:16:35] Sarah Sachs: That's why you can't have like ego as a, a leader. Like that's, that's how we work.[00:16:39] Alsesio: What's the size of the team today, both engineering and overall?[00:16:43] Sarah Sachs: I manage, uh, the team. That's what we'll call it. Core AI capabilities and infrastructure.That's about 50 people. But then we have per i partner teams that do packaging. So how it shows up in the corner chat versus custom agents versus meeting notes, that's another 30, 40 people. And, and then every team that has a product service at Notion that a user can interface with owns the tool that the agent interfaces with the editor team.The team that did CRDT for offline mode is the same team that handles how two agents, um, edit competing blocks. Mm-hmm. Right? It's the same problem. The team that built the underlying SQL engine is the same team that owns how the agent asks it to run a SQL query, and it does it performantly. And so from that regard, anyone working on product engineering is tasked with making them work for customers that are humans and agents because over time the majority of our traffic will be coming from agencies using in our interface, not humans.And so. Our objective is to make it so that the whole product org is building for agents.[00:17:40] Alsesio: Yeah. How has it changed internally? The activation bar is kind of lowered a lot. Like anybody can kind of create a prototype very, somewhat easily, especially if you're like an existing code base. Have you raised the bar on like what type of prototype people need to bring forward to gonna be taken?Not like seriously, but like, you know what I[00:17:58] Simon Last: mean? Yeah. I think the bar is lowered in many ways. Be like, one thing our, uh, our team built that is really cool is our, uh, our, our design team made a whole separate GitHub repo, uh, called the, the design Playground. And it's basically just to create a bunch of like, like helper components and you, uh, for, for quickly a throwing together UIs.And it's become like actually quite sophisticated. Like it has like an agent in there and like, uh, that's pretty fun. So like, we pretty much, like, they don't do mocks, they just make like, like full, full prototypes.[00:18:27] swyx: Here it is. It works.[00:18:28] Simon Last: They give you like a u rl. They're like, okay, all right. So we have to make the, like the real production version of that.Um, and then for engineers. A prototype looks like just making it a feature flag that actually works. Like that's sort of the bar.[00:18:39] Sarah Sachs: Something to understand that's really unique about notion. One of the reasons I joined we're super lucky is no one uses Notion in their job as much as people that work at Notion.[00:18:46] Simon Last: Of course.[00:18:47] Sarah Sachs: So I think there's very few companies, maybe if you worked on Chrome I guess, but like everything that we ship, we ship internally first and get a lot of really quick feedback. And also sometimes our dev instance is totally borked and you have to change a bunch of flags to get things done. And that's kind of like, but everyone, so people that do it ticketing, people that do supply chain procurement, recruiting, everyone is using the same instance of notion with like a lot of flags on for these prototypes people build.Um, and so we have this, Brian Levin, one of the designers on our team, I think evangelize this concept of demos over memos.[00:19:18] swyx: Ooh, too[00:19:20] Sarah Sachs: good. Um, which has been, uh, very good for building demos, and I think it's put a big pressure point on us to have really strong product conviction, because if anything can be demoed, you really need a strong filter of making sure that if you know, you're doing X amount of work, you're making the, you're, you're focusing on one tower, you're not just building a really flat hill.Right. That's actually where I think there has to be more conviction from our PMs, um, and our designers and, and well, the company really to have conviction of what journey we're going on.[00:19:52] Simon Last: But overall, I feel like it works pretty well. Like people, almost all the engineers have good enough taste to realize that like, this prototype doesn't actually make sense in the product, or, or it does.So it's not that common that I would see a prototype. It's like, oh, this makes no sense. Mm-hmm. It's like, you know, people are doing reasonable things and, and, and then it's just a matter of. Which things we build first and then often just, just figuring out how to turn it on and off. There's our, in the, in our like experimental chat ui, there's this, there's probably like, like a hundred check boxes in there.[00:20:22] Sarah Sachs: Kills me[00:20:23] Simon Last: the things you could turn on and off.[00:20:25] Sarah Sachs: Uh, but I think that, okay, so that is kind of true, Simon, but like being the person that manages the evals team, like there is a level of intensity that it adds to the platform team. So, you know, if we're gonna do image generation and notion, all of a sudden the way that we do attachments and the way that we, um, our LLM completion like cortex talks and expects tokens back and now it's getting images back.Like there's a lot of platform work that we do need to, like solidify a little bit. So sometimes it'll be in dev for a couple weeks before it makes it to prod just because we still have to like, make it robust, make it HIPAA compliant, ZDR compliant, figure out the right contracting with the vendor, whatever it is.And we need to eval it because we want the team. To still maintain what they build. That's the one thing is like if we have a bunch of prototypes, it can't just be like a small group of people that then maintain whatever end prototypes. So we have invested a lot of people in an eval and model behavior understanding teams that, we call it agent dev velocity.So your dev velocity building agents can be faster if we invest in that platform. And so we have a whole org dedicated to Asian, um, platform velocity so that you can build your own eval and then maintain it once you ship it. So if a new model release comes out and we, every[00:21:38] swyx: team maintains their own eval,[00:21:40] Sarah Sachs: we maintain the eval framework.Every team owns their own evals and a lot of them we've integrated to Optin, to ci, or we run them nightly and we have a team, uh, a custom agent that triggers to a team to look at the major failures. That's really critical because if we have like all these different surfaces now, a lot of it's on the same agent harness, so it's easier to maintain.It's just packaging of different agent harnesses, but new functionality of the agent. Let's say that like we wanna update like. Uh, you know, they deprecated, sonnet, um, four or whatever it is and we need to auto update. Are[00:22:11] swyx: they already? That's so, okay. Yeah. Actually wasn't that long ago.[00:22:14] Alsesio: Theywere[00:22:14] Alsesio: just 3.5.[00:22:15] Sarah Sachs: 3.537. Just got deprecated.[00:22:18] swyx: 3 7, 5 0.2 or, yeah. No,[00:22:20] Sarah Sachs: it's not. 5.2 is five point. Five point no. Yeah, five four is 40% more expensive than five two. So if they deprecated five two, you would hear they can, you would hear from me about that one. Um, but, uh, another conversation to have.[00:22:35] swyx: I have a cheeky evals question for you.Have you noticed any secret degradation from any of the major model providers?[00:22:40] Sarah Sachs: Secret degradation,[00:22:42] swyx: like. During the War Bay, when it's high traffic, it suddenly gets dumber.[00:22:47] Sarah Sachs: Yeah. I mean, not just between the, I mean, we definitely notice flakiness, we've definitely noticed, particularly for some providers, that things are slower during working hours and[00:22:57] swyx: there's a latency argument.Yes. Not a quality argument.[00:22:59] Sarah Sachs: No. I think the quality difference that's interesting is, um, even though companies that say they're selling the same, a, it's really into like quanti quantization, but like companies that say they're selling the same model through different vendors, whether it be through first party or Bedrock, Azure, et cetera.We do see different qualities sometimes, and that's not necessarily what's advertised.[00:23:21] swyx: Yeah. Kidney went to the point of like, if we, they shipped like this, like eval across all the providers and it was like very obvious we were secret equalizing and it was very,[00:23:28] Sarah Sachs: yeah. But[00:23:29] swyx: that's very embarrassing.[00:23:30] Sarah Sachs: You know, um, we hire Subprocess to figure that out for us.So we just wanna understand where it's regressing or where it's optimized. And sometimes we're okay with regressions that optimize latency if they're the appropriate regressions. Our job is to make sure we have the evals to understand the changes that are important to us. And even like when we're partnering with labs on pre-releasees of models, they'll send us multiple snapshots.And this is less about quantization, but more just regressions. Like they have shipped models that were not the snapshots that we wanted, and they have changed the snapshots that they shipped based on the feedback that we give. Because our feedback tends to be more enterprise work focused and not coding agent focused.And definitely those can be bummers, like, you know, uh, we know that this wasn't the version you wanted, but we'll help you make it work. I mean, we always make it work, but that definitely happens.[00:24:16] Alsesio: Yeah. Do you have, um, failing evals that you're just hoping, oh, that will have success eventually when a good model comes out?[00:24:23] Sarah Sachs: Uh, I mean, yeah. So I think. I mean, I could talk about this for 60 minutes, so I will limit myself. I think it's a real issue when people say evals and it's just like, that's quality, that's like unit, I mean, it's like saying testing. It's not just unit tests, right? So. We have the equivalent of unit test.Regression test. Those live in ci, those have to pass a certain percent, you know, within some stochastic error rate. Then we have, as you're building a product, evals of these aren't passing right now, and this is launch quality. So we have a report card and we need to, on these categories, you know, be it 80 or 90% of all of these user journeys to launch, and then what we have what we call frontier or headroom evals, where we actively wanna be at 30% pass rate.And that's actually been a effort that we took in partnership with philanthropic and OpenAI in the past maybe two or three months, because we actually hit a point where our evals were saturated and we weren't able to really give insightful feedback other than it wasn't worse. And not only is that not helpful for our partners, it's not helpful for us to understand where the stream is going.You know, going back to that analogy. And so we spent a lot of time thinking about. What notions last exam looks like, right? Mm-hmm. Not just humanities, last exam. Ooh, notions last exam. Mm-hmm. And, um, there's a lot of, you know, dreams about what that would look like. I know we've talked a lot about benchmarking, um, swix, but, uh, yeah.Notions last exam is a big thing inside the company and we have people, full-time staff to it exclusively. Mm. We have a data scientist, a model behavior engineer, and an full-time, um, evals engineer just dedicated to the evals that we pass 30% of the time.[00:25:56] swyx: What you're hiring for[00:25:57] Sarah Sachs: MBEs? I am hiring[00:25:58] swyx: What is an MBEA[00:25:59] Sarah Sachs: model?Behavior Engineer Model. Behavior engineers started with a title data specialist before I joined when they were working with Simon on like, uh, Google Sheets and like Simon just needed someone to look through Google Sheets and say, yes, no, this looks bad. This looks good. Right? And so we hired people with kind of diverse linguistics background.We had like a linguistics PhD dropout. Mm-hmm. And a Stanford ate new grad. And they're amazing. And they formed a new function basically. And over time we've built a whole team, um, with a manager who's now kind of reinventing what that role is with coding agents. So they used to be kind of manually inspecting code.Now they're primarily building agents that can write evals for themselves or LLM judges. There's a really funny day I can send you the picture where Simon, about a year and a half ago, was teaching them how to use GitHub. Um, and they're on the whiteboard and it was like, okay, I think it would be so much faster if our data specialists learned how to use GitHub and like learned how to commit these things in Dakota.And, and that was then and now I think, you know, coding has been a lot more accessible. Um, but moving forward it's this mix of like data scientist PM and prompt engineer because there's craft in understanding like even like what models can and can't do things. How do we define like that headroom? How do we define like what a good journey is?Um, is this model better or not? Why is this failing? There's some qualitative work, but then there's also like a lot of instinct and taste to it, and that's not necessarily software engineering. And so we have like very firm conviction and we have had for a number of years now that that is its own career path and we have always welcomed the misfits, so to speak.So we really firmly believe that you don't need an engineering background to be the best at this job. And that's what's quite unique about this particular role.[00:27:37] Simon Last: Yeah, this is something that I've been pretty excited about recently is we made an effort basically to treat the eval system as like an agent harness.So if you think about it, like, you know, you should be able to have an agent end-to-end, download a dataset, run an eval, iterate on a failure, debug, and, and then implement a fix. And ultimately you should be able to, you know, drive the full time process with a human sort of observing the, you know, the outer uh, system.So yeah, we went, went pretty hard on that. And that's, that's worked extremely well so far. It's like basically just to turn it into a coding agent, uh, uh, problem.[00:28:11] swyx: Your coding agent or just whatever[00:28:13] Simon Last: harness No coding agent. Yeah, code, cloud code. It should be totally general. Yeah. I think if it would be a mistake to like, like fix it on any, any particular coding agent.At the end of the day, it's just like CLI tools.[00:28:21] Sarah Sachs: It's like the same way that you would've a coding agent write the unit test. You should have a coding agent write the eval.[00:28:26] swyx: Yeah.[00:28:26] Sarah Sachs: But there's a lot of supervision in that still. We just don't believe that supervision has to come from software engineers because a lot of it is like, um, kind of you XREE and whatever, and these are the people that also triage failures and tell us where we should be investing next.[00:28:40] swyx: Yeah. I'm gonna go ahead and ask a spicy question. Is there a data, there are no software engineers at Notion.[00:28:46] Simon Last: Um,[00:28:46] Sarah Sachs: what does it mean to be a software engineer?[00:28:47] swyx: Exactly.[00:28:48] Simon Last: I mean, I think the way things are going is like we're on some continuum where. If, if you look back three years ago, humans were typing all the code and then we had auto complete, you're typing list of the code.Then we had sort of like filling agents, filling lines, and now we're getting into like agents doing longer range tasks where you can debug and implement a fix and then verify it works and you know, get your, get your PR even like, like Merion deployed. I think we're sort of just moving up the abstraction ladder and then the human role becomes more about observing and maintaining the outer system.There's a string of agents flowing through, like me prs what's going off the rails. Like what do I need to approve? Is there like a learning or memory mechanism that that works? So it's kind of a hard engineering problem. There's a, you know, there's, there's a lot to do there. I think we're just sort of moving up stack[00:29:34] Sarah Sachs: the same transition machine learning engineers have made, right?Like I haven't looked at a PR curve in a while.[00:29:39] swyx: Yeah. You used to do this stuff and now, um, auto research can do it,[00:29:42] Sarah Sachs: right? Like I think it depends on what you define as a software engineer.[00:29:46] swyx: Yes. It's, that's changing for sure.[00:29:49] Sarah Sachs: I think every software engineer in notion this summer went through like this, um, sheer, um, one of our engineering leads of the company called it, like every software engineer is going through the, the, uh, identity crisis that every manager goes through, where all of a sudden they realize their ability to write code is less important than their ability to delegate in context switch.And I think that is a transition out of being a software engineer. But[00:30:12] Simon Last: yeah. Yeah, there's a critical difference to being a manager, which is that like, it is actually very deeply technical. The problem, you know, humans are very like, like, like fuzzy and you can't like treat a team of humans like a, like a rigorous system where like, you know, prs like, like flow through and can be in like a block status and then what happens when they're blocked, right.With a set of agents, you actually can do that. And, and, and I think it's actually, there's a lot of interesting technical rigor that that goes into that it's like it's a technical design problem. Ultimately.[00:30:42] Alsesio: What is the design of the software factory that you're building?[00:30:46] Simon Last: Yeah, I mean, I think we're. Trying a lot of different things.I mean, ultimately you want to design a system that requires as little human intervention as possible, but like still maintaining the in variance that, that you care about. So yeah, we're exploring a lot different ideas there. I mean, I think I could talk about a few things I think are important there.Like, one thing I think is really important is, um, having some kind of like specification layer you can just commit marked on files. Mm-hmm. That works pretty well, but[00:31:15] swyx: it's nice to be notion man. I'm just saying like the spec, like Yeah. The natural home for specs is notion.[00:31:21] Simon Last: Yeah. Right. It can be a database of pages.Yeah. I mean, it needs to be something that is, you know, human readable and I viewable and I think that's pretty key. Another really key component is like the, the self verification loop. Yes. You need really, really good testing layers, basically. And that's a really deep, uh, uh, problem. But by getting that right, you know, and then, and then it's kinda like the workflow of like.What happens when there's a bug? How does it flow into the system? Like, is it like a subagent working on it? How does it make a PR and how does that get reviewed? And me, and then, you know, so there's like the, the flow or process.[00:31:56] swyx: Yeah. Cool. Uh, you know, one thing we did work out before you guys came in was this demo or this[00:32:01] Simon Last: agents[00:32:02] swyx: agent demo.Uh,[00:32:03] Simon Last: so every,[00:32:04] Alsesio: every time we do an episode, we try the product. Right. I don't think there's ever been an episode that I haven't tried. Yeah. Um,[00:32:11] swyx: and we, we try, try is a, a big word. Like since day one lane space has been on Notion, but this is the, this is the net new thing. Yes.[00:32:18] Alsesio: So this is for Nel Labs, which is the space we're in.So next week we're opening applications for tenants. So there's a web form, let me, we got this form done here. Uh, so, uh, before. Uh, the workflow would be I get an email, then I look at the person. It was like, should I spend time talking to this person? Then I respond, they respond back. So I build this. So the name it came up for on its own.Can you maybe h how do, how does it come up with its own name?[00:32:43] Simon Last: Yeah, that's a pretty app name. It's, it, it is just a random, it's a random, a name generator.[00:32:47] Alsesio: Oh, that's funny. It just came,[00:32:49] Simon Last: the fact that it picked that is, is kind of hilarious. I'm pretty sure it's just determined,[00:32:54] Sarah Sachs: resilient collector. I, I think I've never looked at the code for that.I've never second guessed it. I think it's kind of like a madlib situation.[00:33:00] Simon Last: Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. It's, it's totally a, a deterministic. Oh, I thought it was great. Yes. Although, although when the, if you use the AI to set itself up, it can update its own name, so. Okay. Um,[00:33:11] Sarah Sachs: how did you create it? It, did you just do[00:33:12] Alsesio: classroom?I,[00:33:13] Sarah Sachs: okay.[00:33:13] Alsesio: I did, yeah. I'll say just check my inbox for applications for a coworking space. Keep a people, so it created the database for me. Which I have here. And I guess database is like an notion table because everything is notion. Um, and then whenever um, an email comes in, like here, it just creates a new role for the person.Mm-hmm. And then it uses web search to enrich the mm-hmm. The profile. So it kind of like searches the web and it's like, this is who this person is, this is when they say they wanna move in and kind of updates everything else. This is, I mean, it's not a GI, but to me, I don't wanna do this work. So it feels like, I mean, it took me maybe like 15 minutes to set up the whole thing.Um, and I really like that most of the information should live here. You know, it is not like some other tool asking me[00:34:01] Sarah Sachs: Yeah.[00:34:01] Alsesio: To like, bring my stuff there. It's like I would've probably already created an ocean thing.[00:34:06] Sarah Sachs: Mm-hmm.[00:34:06] Alsesio: So[00:34:07] Sarah Sachs: most of our biggest use cases and gains are from. That extra layer of human involvement in the process to make it so right.And so like one of our biggest use cases is bug triaging. So if someone posts something in Slack, can you just have a custom agent that lives there that has its own routing constitution of what team this belongs to, creates a task in your task database and then posts in that Slack channel, right? Like that's like one of the first things that we built internally, I think.And it's completely changed the way that notion functions as a company. Nothing falls through, well, most things don't fall through the crack. We don't know what we don't know. But it's not replacing people, it's replacing processes.[00:34:44] Alsesio: Yeah.[00:34:44] Sarah Sachs: Right.[00:34:45] Alsesio: And I'm curious how you think about composability of these things.So the other one I was working on is like a. These filler. So whenever somebody signs up as a tenant, kind of he'll sell the lease for them. There should probably some agent that is like office manager agent mm-hmm. That can handle the request, make the lease, and then, uh, give them a ADA access to the office and all of that.How do you think about that feature?[00:35:08] Simon Last: Yeah, so I mean, there's, there's two ways you can compose. One way is by using like the data primitives. So you can, you know, you, you could give, you have one agent, uh, be writing to the database and there's another agent that's walked in the database. So that's, that's one way that they, they can coordinate that's like a little bit more decoupled and mm-hmm.Works really well. Or you, you can couple them. So I, I think it's actually not released yet. Releasing it like next week is, uh, in the settings for an agent, you can give access to invoke any other agent.[00:35:34] swyx: Hmm.[00:35:34] Simon Last: So you can have them just. Just, uh, uh, talk directly. So[00:35:37] swyx: you, was there a limit on like, number of recursions or just,[00:35:40] Simon Last: um, probably,[00:35:42] swyx: you know what I mean?Like, you can just get an infinite loop that way there's[00:35:45] Simon Last: some kind of Yeah,[00:35:46] Sarah Sachs: I think it's, there is actually a number somewhere.[00:35:49] swyx: I believe I'm just, you know, like, you're, you're, someone's gonna screw up. You[00:35:51] Simon Last: should you try to see[00:35:53] swyx: Yeah. I mean, everything's gonna be paperclips.[00:35:55] Simon Last: Oh, yeah. Yeah. But, uh, but, but that's really useful.Yeah. So we, you know, like I just, I, I helped, uh, someone internally the other day, they had, they had built like over 30 custom agents for, uh, for our go to market team doing all kinds of different things. You know, for example, like researching, you know, like, like filling information about, about a customer or like, like triaging customer feedback or like, uh, something like that.Literally over 30 of them. And, and then he, and then he even made like a database of all the agents and then he is like, okay, and, and now I'm getting 70, over 70 notifications per day with just the agents are blocked on various things. Uh, and then I was like, oh, okay, cool. You know, the obvious thing to do there is to make a manager agent,[00:36:32] Sarah Sachs: right?[00:36:33] Simon Last: That's gonna sort of blocks be another abstraction layer in between your, your, uh, uh, 30 agents. Uh, so yeah, we, we send out with like a manager agent and then has access to invoke all the other agents and it's sort of like, like watching and observing them and then it sort of, it just creates a layer of abstraction.So instead of 70 notifications per day, it's like, like five. And then, and then the manager agent can help like, uh, debug and fix any problems with the,[00:36:54] swyx: does this is a concept of like an inbox or something like piece, you're basically saying that they can message each other?[00:37:00] Simon Last: Yeah.[00:37:01] Sarah Sachs: Well[00:37:01] swyx: they use the system of record, which, which is[00:37:02] Sarah Sachs: notion, so we[00:37:03] Simon Last: actually, yeah, we didn't make any special concepts at all.[00:37:06] swyx: They're interested to the motion notifications that I would've got,[00:37:09] Sarah Sachs: they can just like write a task to a database that the other agent's task to listening to, or they can actually call a web book to the agent, like they can just add the agent. Okay.[00:37:17] Simon Last: Yeah, I mean, this is something that, that we're still working on.I, I think we, you know, like, like generally, generally the way we do these things is, you know, you first make it possible, maybe like a sort of janky way. So I, I, I think the way I set ‘em up is like, you know, we created like a new database that was sort of like issues mm-hmm. That the custom agents were, were experiencing, and then gave them all access to file an issue and then the manager has access to, to read the issues.Um, and that works pretty well, essentially like, like give it its own like internal issue tracker just for the agents. And then, you know, if that becomes a, a concept that seems useful, generally maybe we will think of how to package it in. But I mean, generally we try to just keep it to composing the primitive if we can.You know, another example of this is we have no built-in memory concept. Memory is, is just pages and databases. And so if you wanna give a memory, just give it a page and give it. Edit access to that page and the[00:38:03] swyx: human can edit it. Agent can edit[00:38:04] Simon Last: it. Yeah. And so that works, that pattern works extremely well on it.And you know, depending this case, you can have it be just a page or it could be an entire database with, you know, or, you know, I can have sub pages is is pretty on what you can do with that.[00:38:15] Alsesio: So when I was setting this up, uh, I connected my inbox and it was like, do you wanna use Gmail or Notion Mail? And I'm like, I don't wanna use Eater, I just want you to do it.I'm curious how you think about, you know, notion, mail, notion, calendar, all of these kind of ui ux interfaces, full stack[00:38:29] Simon Last: notion.[00:38:30] Alsesio: Yeah. When like at the same time you have the agents abstracting them away from you in a way, you know, how do you spend like the product calories so to speak?[00:38:37] Simon Last: Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty important that you don't have to use, not your mail to connect to the mail capability.So we can just connect to Gmail or, or whatever you want, uh, to use. And we're thinking of the mail service as being really great to the extent that it's really agent built, right? So maybe the mail app is just sort of a prepackaged agent that helps you automate your, your inbox.[00:39:00] Alsesio: Yeah, the auto labeling is great.Think[00:39:03] Sarah Sachs: the, when we, um, integrate with Gmail for instance, we have a series of tools available that are available via MCP or API to Gmail. When we integrate with Notion Mail, we have the Notion Mail engineering team to build us the, um, exact right tools that optimize latency, optimize performance and quality.They own that quality. Um, there's product leads there. They're directly thinking about the user problems that happen in mail. So it tends to be when we build integrations and connections, we build natively first. Um, and then think about, um, extending them generally just because it's also easier. Mm-hmm. Um, um, to build natively first.Um, so that tends to be how we phase things out.[00:39:43] swyx: Talking about integrations, you prompted me, so I gotta ask. M-C-P-C-L-I. What's going on? What's the[00:39:48] Simon Last: Yeah. Opinion. I think, I mean, I'm, I'm definitely bullish and excited about cli. I think there's a few really cool things about cli. So one really cool thing is like, um, is that it's in the terminal environment, so it gets a bunch of extra power.So it, you know, for example, it can like, like paginating and cursor through like long outputs. Um, and it has a progressive disclosure inherently. Uh, so, you know, you don't see all the tools at once. It's just, you see the CLI wrapper and you can like use the, the help commands and, and, and read files. And then I think the most important thing that's, that's super cool is that there, it's also inherently a, a bootstrapped.So if there's an issue, uh, the agent can debug and fix itself within the same environment that it uses the tool.[00:40:30] swyx: Mm.[00:40:30] Simon Last: Right. Like, you know, I think I saw a tweet this morning. Someone said, you know, my agent didn't have a browser, so I asked it to make all a browser tool and within a hundred lines of code, it gave itself a little browser, like, like wrapping the, the, the chromium API, um.That's pretty incredible. And then if there was a bug, it would just immediately try to fix it. Mm-hmm. Right. On the other hand, if you use an, you know, if you use like of, of the Chrome dev tools, MCP, I've had this issue where like, like sometimes the transport gets like messed up. If it gets messed up, the agent has no way to fix itself.It, it no longer has a browser, it's, it's not broken. Right. I think that's, that's pretty fundamental, but I would say like a lot of the, the bad things about it can be fixed. Uh, so I think like, as a progressive disclosure, that can be fixed with, with right harness. Like, it, it obviously doesn't make sense to show it all the tools all the time.That's not really inherent to the MCP protocol. It's just like how you wrap it and use it.[00:41:16] swyx: There's many poorly built MCPs because we didn't know.[00:41:19] Simon Last: Yeah, yeah. I mean it was just early, like, like the obvious thing is, uh, you know, to start with is, is to just show it all the tools and it's like, okay, now we have a hundred tools.Yeah. And like the tool calling actually works. So let's of[00:41:28] swyx: your success[00:41:29] Simon Last: give it a way to like, like filter to source the tools. So yeah, I would say like broadly speaking, I'm really bullish on cli. I'm still bullish on CPS and in a certain environment. I think in, in particular, CP is really great for when you want sort of like a narrow, lightweight agent.I think there's, there's definitely a lot of use cases where, where you don't want like a full coding agent with a compute run time. And also you want it to be like more tightly permissioned. MCP inherently has a really strong permission model, like all you can do is call the tools. A CLI is a little bit murkier.It's like, can I access the, if PI token are you, like, properly sort of like re-encrypt the token so it can't like exfiltrate it, it introduce a lot of like, like new issues, which are. Real and hard to solve. And MCP is just like the dumb simple thing that works and it that it's pretty good.[00:42:12] Sarah Sachs: I'll add two more perspectives, not from it working well for Notion, but how notion like commits to both platforms.Notion is dedicated to being the best system of record for where people do their enterprise work. So we will always support our MCP and so far as other people are using cps, right? So regardless of our perspective, we've put a lot of effort into our MCP and we have a fantastic team that we're building, um, to do more there.And the second thing I'll say, I think, um, we all think a lot, but lately I've been thinking a lot about making sure there's a value alignment and pricing, um, with capability.[00:42:43] swyx: Literally our next question[00:42:44] Sarah Sachs: and. Needing language to execute deterministic tasks feels wasteful and requiring on a language model to interface with third party providers seems wasteful for tasks that don't require it.And particularly because our custom agents are using usage-based pricing. We think of pricing as like the barrier of entry for use of our product, and we're quite committed to making sure that it's not wasteful. Um, not just because it's a bad deal for our customers, but it's also bad business. We wanna have as many buyers, like there's a, there's an elasticity of demand and so if we can have our agents properly execute code that calls on CLI deterministically, it's a one-time cost, right?Versus constantly having a language model integrate with an MCP over and over and over and paying those like repeated token fees and it's happening outside the cash window, then you're paying for it over and over and over and it's just kind of unnecessary and less deterministic when it doesn't have to be.[00:43:36] Alessio: Yeah, the open-endedness I think is like, the main thing is like, well, if I go write code to just call an API, I would never use an MCP. But then you need an NCP sometimes when you know what to call, but you don't want it to restart versus like, I think the it built a browser from scratch is like, it's great when you're doing it on your own, but like if your customers were having your AI write a browser from scratch every time and you had to pay the token cost of that, yeah.You'd be like, no, no. The Chrome dev tools CP is actually pretty great. Just use that. I'm curious, how do you make that decision? Like should it be. Just straight API call very narrow. Should it be an MCP? Should it be super open-ended?[00:44:10] Sarah Sachs: Do you mean for when we ship notion capabilities or when we add capabilities to[00:44:13] Alessio: notion[00:44:14] Sarah Sachs: AI or,[00:44:14] Alessio: I mean, you might have a capability that the only way to do is an open-ended agent, like an agent with a coding sandbox.[00:44:21] Sarah Sachs: Yeah. In Notion ai they're not explicit, not We also ship an MCP.[00:44:24] Alsesio: Yeah. Yeah. In B,[00:44:25] Sarah Sachs: yeah.[00:44:26] Alsesio: Internally. Okay. Like is there ever a discussion of like, we're not gonna ship it because we're not able to tie it down? Or are you happy to just like,[00:44:33] Sarah Sachs: um, no. I mean, there are a lot of things where we choose not to use MCP because we wanna add more high touch to quality.I think search an agent to find is like the largest instance of that, where we have. Um, slack and linear and Jira search and notion that is not using necessarily the search MCP functionality that is provided by those companies. And that's because it's quite critical we think, to how our agent trajectories work is for us to have a little bit more control on the functionality of the search journey.And so it usually comes from quality and there's a long tail of things and that's why we built an MCP client or an MCP server, excuse me, so that people can connect whatever they want. There's that long tail, right. But we, for search particularly, I would say that's like the primary entry point, but there are other connections as well that it's a little bit of secret sauce a
Today on America in the MorningTrump's Iran Threat The clock is ticking for the Iranian regime in power to re-open the Strait of Hormuz or risk having the United States military bomb power plants and bridges inside the country. John Stolnis has more on the President's threats to Iran, and discussions about the war and the latest negotiations from Washington. NASA Makes History History was made over 250 thousand miles away from the earth as four astronauts reestablished contact with Mission Control after they flew behind the moon. Correspondent Julie Walker reports Artemis II took a trip around the moon after surpassing Apollo 13's distance record. Georgia Special Election Republican Clay Fuller, a former district attorney, and Democrat Shawn Harris, a retired Army officer, emerged as the top two contenders from a crowded special election March 10, which led to today's runoff election to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene. New Troubles For Texas Congressman A new report accuses a sitting GOP Congressman from Texas of sending explicit text messages to a staffer. Correspondent Clayton Neville reports the allegations follow a recent decision not to run for re-lection. Iowa Law Upheld Appeals court rulings mean Iowa's book ban and other restrictions aimed toward age-appropriate gender and sexuality instruction can take effect. Jennifer King reports. Latest On Iran War Saying their entire country could be taken out in one night, President Trump held a news conference Monday to say that by 8 o'clock eastern time tonight, if Iran does not accept the United States ceasefire deal and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, he will order strikes on Iran's bridges and power plants, saying in a statement that the Iranian people are willing to suffer if it means they will get their freedom. Washington correspondent Sagar Meghani reports. Praise For Airman's Recovery A key highlight of the president's news conference at the White House Monday was the success of a daring mission carried out by both the American military and CIA to rescue an airman and pilot who bailed out of his F-15 fighter jet after it was hit by Iranian fire. Correspondent Jennifer King has the details. Trump's Media Threat President Trump is floating potential jail time for a journalist the President claims nearly compromised a war mission in Iran by leaking information that an airman was missing after being shot down. Correspondent Clayton Neville reports. Florida Terror Law Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed a new law cracking down on terror groups while reinforcing constitutional protections in state courts and schools. The details from correspondent Sue Aller. Interest Rate Concerns The Federal Reserve is warning that an interest rate hike isn't out of the question due to high gas prices. Ed Donahue reports. Finally Monday marked a milestone after two months away, and despite her mother still missing, Savannah Guthrie returned to NBC to host the Today Show. Entertainment reporter Kevin Carr has details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Join hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham as they explore one of the most exciting innovations in enterprise AI: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) powered by Oracle AI Vector Search. In this episode, Senior Principal APEX & Apps Dev Instructor Brent Dayley walks through the fundamentals of RAG, explaining how it combines Oracle Database 23ai, vector embeddings, and large language models to deliver accurate, context-rich answers from both business and unstructured data. Discover the typical RAG workflow, practical setup steps on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and how to work with embedding models for real-world applications. Oracle AI Vector Search Deep Dive: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-ai-vector-search-deep-dive/144706/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Anna Hulkower, Kris-Ann Nansen, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. Please note, this episode was recorded before Oracle AI Database 26ai replaced Oracle Database 23ai. However, all concepts and features discussed remain fully relevant to the latest release. ---------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:26 Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services with Oracle University, and joining me is Lois Houston, Director of Communications and Adoption Programs with Customer Success Services. Lois: Hi everyone! If you've been with us this season, you'll know we've already covered a lot about Oracle AI Vector Search. In Episode 1, we introduced the core concepts—how vectors let you search by meaning, not just keywords, and how embedding models translate your unstructured data into a searchable format inside Oracle Database 23ai. Nikita: Then, in Episode 2, we took a deeper dive into how these vectors are actually stored and managed. We explored the different types of vector indexes, similarity metrics, and best practices for designing and optimizing your database for semantic search. Lois: Right. Today, we're shifting gears into one of the most exciting real-world applications: Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG. You'll learn how RAG combines the power of Oracle AI Vector Search with large language models to answer natural language questions using both business and unstructured data. 01:39 Nikita: We'll walk through the workflow, highlight why Oracle Database is uniquely suited for RAG, and give you the essential steps to get started. Back again is Senior Principal APEX & Apps Dev Instructor Brent Dayley. Hi Brent! Could you explain what RAG is, and why it's important for working with AI and large language models? Brent: Well, RAG stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation. And this is a technique that allows us to enhance the capabilities of large language models, also known as LLMs, and this provides them with relevant context from external knowledge sources. This will allow the LLMs to generate more accurate, informative, and context-aware responses. Real world applications include answering questions, chatbot development, content summarization, and knowledge discovery. 02:35 Lois: Brent, what makes Oracle Database 23ai a good platform for implementing RAG workflows? Brent: Now, there are some key advantages of using Oracle Database 23ai as a RAG platform. These include native functionality, allowing built-in tools and packages specifically designed for RAG pipeline development. Also, if you are a PL/SQL developer, then this will allow you to develop within a familiar and robust database environment. Also, Oracle has a plethora of security and performance tools. And this ensures enhanced security and optimized performance. 03:18 Nikita: What does a typical RAG workflow look like in Oracle Database 23ai? What are the main steps involved? Brent: Now, the primary workflow steps are going to be to generate vector embeddings from your unstructured data. You do this using vector embedding models. And you can generate those embeddings either inside or outside of the database. Next, you need to store the vector embeddings, the unstructured data, and the relational business data, and you can store all of that in the Oracle Database. You might want to also create vector indexes that can allow you to run similarity searches over huge vector spaces with really good performance. Finally, you need to query data with similarity searches. You can use Oracle AI Vector Search native SQL operations to combine similarity with relational searches to retrieve relevant data. And optionally, you can generate a prompt and send it to a large language model for full RAG inference. 04:30 Lois: Can you give us an example of how this workflow operates in practice? Brent: A user's natural language question is encoded as a vector and sent to AI Vector Search. Next, AI vector search finds private content, such as documents, that are stored in the database, and those will match the user's question. The content is then sent to Oracle's GenAI service to help answer the user's question. And then GenAI uses the content plus general knowledge to provide an informed answer back to the user. 05:14 Nikita: What does the overall user experience look like when interacting with RAG? How does Oracle ensure the answers are both accurate and up to date? Brent: In this case, we have a chatbot. This is the interface that we usually use to enable dialogue with the large language model. Now, in order to improve the quality of the answers, we want to search your private business data, and that allows us to pass the most relevant facts back to the LLM. Next, we want to format the similarity search results as a prompt and context for the large language model. Now, this will allow us to use up to date facts as input to LLMs. And that will minimize the probability of the LLM hallucinating. And those high-quality responses are then returned back to the chatbot. 06:12 Lois: Brent, what does the setup process look like for getting RAG up and running with Oracle AI Vector Search on OCI? Can you take us through the main steps? Brent: First, you will log into OCI. Provide your cloud account name and click Next. There are also interfaces for signing in using a traditional cloud account. And if you're not an Oracle Cloud customer yet, you can also sign up using this page. Next, after signing in, you will create a compute instance. And you will use Oracle Infrastructure Cloud Console in order to do this. And you will wind up with the user called OPC. You'll notice that you're using SSH in order to connect to your compute instance, and you're running a script in order to set up the Oracle Database. After that, you will set up the Python environment, again using SSH to connect as an OPC user to your compute instance. 07:22 Do you want to optimize your implementation strategies? Check out the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Process Essentials training and certifications for insight into key processes and efficiencies across every phase of your Fusion Cloud Apps journey. Learn more at mylearn.oracle.com. 07:43 Nikita: Welcome back! So far, we've seen how Oracle AI Vector Search powers RAG, letting you surface relevant business knowledge for large language models and enhance their answers. At the heart of all this is the process of transforming unstructured data, like text or documents, into mathematical representations called embeddings. Lois: Those embeddings are what make meaningful, semantic search possible. But have you wondered how those embeddings actually get created, or what goes on behind the scenes when you choose an embedding model? Nikita: Up next, we'll take a closer look at embedding models themselves: what they are, how to use them inside Oracle Database 23ai, and how you can experiment with different models to get the results that best fit your business needs. Lois: We'll walk through importing models, generating embeddings, and even how you can swap out embedding models to compare results. But before we get into the nitty-gritty details, let's quickly recap embedding models, since we've mentioned them in our previous episodes. 08:47 Nikita: Brent, for listeners who might need a refresher, can you explain what embedding models are and why they're so central to AI Vector Search? Brent: AI Vector Search is based on similarity properties. You can search data by semantic similarity rather than by the actual values. Vector embeddings are created by embedding models to represent the unstructured data. So we have input data. What we'll want to do is to use an embedding model to generate vector embeddings. And then the vector embeddings would be stored inside of a vector column in a table. We would then compare those vectors to each other using vector distance function. And we would get the relevant content back based on the number of returns that we describe. For instance, maybe we want to bring back the five closest pieces of data compared to the input data. There is a new function that allows you to generate vector embeddings that is called the vector embedding function. It allows you to generate vectors within the database. 10:08 Lois: Can you walk us through the practical steps for using embedding models with Oracle AI Vector Search? Brent: In order to create and set up a table, we might use the Python program called create_schema.py. And that will allow us to create a table. We would ensure that the table was successfully created with the data. As an example, I would create a table called MY_DATA. Next, we would use a sentence transformers embedding model in order to vectorize the table. We can use the Python program, vectorize_table_SentenceTransformers.py. We would then query the MY_DATA table in the Oracle Database to verify that the data has been updated. And then we would use sentence transformers in order to perform the similarity search. The Python program is called similarity_search_SentenceTransformers.py And what that would do is create the table and then perform a similarity search using the sentence transformers. Now what if you decide that you want to maybe change embedding models? Maybe you want to compare the results by using one particular model as compared to a different model. So you can change the embedding model. And in order to do that, you would change the embedding model in both of the programs and re-vectorize the table using the vectorize_table_SentenceTransformers.py program. You would then use the new model with different words, possibly, and then compare and review the results, and then choose which one gets you back the data that you're looking for that is most similar. 12:02 Nikita: Well, that's a wrap on this episode. A big thank you, Brent, for sharing your expertise with us. Lois: If you want to learn more about the topics we discussed today, visit to mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle AI Vector Search Deep Dive course. Until next time, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 12:25 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.
For the past 10+ years I've been retrieving eggs for people. A process that if you're a new patient, can be daunting. You may be wondering, what exactly is involved? Just like any surgery it is serious business and a procedure that goes best when there's careful planning. As a doctor who's been doing this for over a decade, I want to give you my top 9 tips for how to be the most prepared patient. Why? Preparation will help set the stage for your best retrieval experience. Any why wouldn't you want that?! My Top 9 Tips for Your Best Egg Retrieval Experience 1. Know where you're going 2. Know your anatomy 3. Stay hydrated 4. Food as medicine 5. Mindful meditation 6. Make sure you don't have a sperm emergency 7. Know what to expect the day of the surgery 8. Collect your must-haves for post retrieval 9. Ask your doctor when you can expect updates post retrieval Buy Dr. Aimee's Book "The Egg Whisperer Way" on Amazon! Click here. Would you like to learn about IVF?Click here to join Dr. Aimee for The IVF Class. The next live class call is on Monday, April 20, 2025 at 4pm PST, where Dr. Aimee will explain IVF and there will be time to ask her your questions live on Zoom. Read the full show notes on my site by clicking or tapping here. To subscribe to Dr. Aimee's newsletter, tap or click here. Subscribe to my YouTube channel for more fertility tips! Dr. Aimee Eyvazzadeh is one of America's most well known fertility doctors. Her success rate at baby-making is what gives future parents hope when all hope is lost. She pioneered the TUSHY Method and BALLS Method to decrease your time to pregnancy. Learn more about the TUSHY Method and find a wealth of fertility resources at www.draimee.org.
https://www.theforbiddenknowledgenetwork.comDive deep into the enigmatic corridors of power as Paige Carter unpacks a chilling revelation: a leaked memo from a high-ranking Pentagon official dating back to 2004. This document, referencing "retrieval and study operations" regarding unidentified aerial phenomena, stands in stark opposition to the Pentagon's public denials about such covert programs. Through an investigative lens, discover how political and institutional conditions might have allowed such operations to exist in the shadows, fueled by a web of secrecy mechanisms, black budget allocations, and classified intelligence channels. This episode promises a riveting journey into the heart of institutional secrecy, challenging the boundary between official narratives and hidden truths.With insider testimonies and concrete evidence that clash with the Pentagon's official stance, we unravel the power structures that continue to guard these secrets. Military personnel recount baffling radar anomalies and mysterious aerial encounters, while redacted files and procurement trails paint a picture of covert activities. What do these revelations mean for accountability and transparency within government institutions? And what unresolved mysteries linger, locked away in sealed archives? Join us as we seek to unveil the truth behind this alleged UFO retrieval program, pushing the boundaries of what we know about both our skies and our government.
What is theological retrieval, and how should evangelicals approach it wisely?In this episode, Dr. Shawn Wright (The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Clifton Baptist Church) introduces the concept of theological retrieval and explains why it matters today. Drawing from a recent faculty address, he outlines six key cautions—including the need for humility, the danger of overreaction, and the central importance of justification by faith alone and assurance of salvation. We also discuss why some evangelicals are drawn to Roman Catholic views of the church, how Protestants should respond, and why tradition must never stand above Scripture. Dr. Wright closes with a pastoral warning for those considering Rome.Episode resource: https://www.sbts.edu/news/shawn-wright-faculty-address/Support the show
In 2026, Candace Fleming did something no one else has ever done—she became the first author to receive both the Children's Literature Legacy Award and the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Young Adult Lifetime Achievement in the same year, while also winning the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Death in the Jungle: Murder, Betrayal, and the Lost Dream of Jonestown. We celebrate that extraordinary moment, then go straight to what really matters to Candace: kids, questions, and story-rich nonfiction that invites readers to think.We talk about why she still shows up in classrooms as a “nonfiction cheerleader,” helping students see that great nonfiction starts with passion and curiosity, not a pile of facts. She shares how she encourages kids to move beyond “Google it” retrieval toward authentic research by starting with something they love, asking big, weird questions, and following those questions wherever they lead.The conversation explores the craft behind tackling complex, often heavy topics for young readers. Candace discusses Death in the Jungle and her current middle grade project on rhino poaching in South Africa, where wildlife forensics, economics, colonial history, and the story of one orphaned calf intersect. We reflect on nonfiction as an imaginative, deeply personal form of writing, and what it means to nurture original thinking and voice in an AI world.This episode offers a rare window into an unprecedented awards year and the curiosity-driven process behind some of today's most compelling nonfiction for young readers.Chapters:01:42: What this triple recognition really means04:26: Writing across age groups & interests07:01: School visits, passion, & kid-chosen topics10:22: Retrieval vs research, big questions, & nonfiction as imaginative work12:17: Nonfiction in an age of AI: voice, perspective, & original thinking15:16: Rhino poaching: crime scenes, orphaned calves, & complex issues 25:54: A “lighter” World War II family story27:27: Finding hopeLearn More:Visit Candace's website and follow her on Instagram.Listen to Episode 18.Check out Candace's books.Learn more about CBCC & Wild Tomorrow.Support the showShare this episodeIf this conversation sparked wonder, gave you a helpful strategy, or offered a needed reminder of hope, please share it with a friend or colleague.Subscribe • Download • Review • Tell a friendStay updated with our latest episodes and follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and the Adventures in Learning website. Don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts! *Disclosure: I am a Bookshop.org. affiliate.
Retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, has become a foundational approach to building production AI systems. However, deploying RAG in practice can be complex and costly. Developers typically have to manage vector databases, chunking strategies, embedding models, and indexing infrastructure. Designing effective RAG systems is also a moving target, as techniques and best practices evolve in step The post DeepMind's RAG System with Animesh Chatterji and Ivan Solovyev appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Turbopuffer came out of a reading app.In 2022, Simon was helping his friends at Readwise scale their infra for a highly requested feature: article recommendations and semantic search. Readwise was paying ~$5k/month for their relational database and vector search would cost ~$20k/month making the feature too expensive to ship. In 2023 after mulling over the problem from Readwise, Simon decided he wanted to “build a search engine” which became Turbopuffer.We discuss:• Simon's path: Denmark → Shopify infra for nearly a decade → “angel engineering” across startups like Readwise, Replicate, and Causal → turbopuffer almost accidentally becoming a company • The Readwise origin story: building an early recommendation engine right after the ChatGPT moment, seeing it work, then realizing it would cost ~$30k/month for a company spending ~$5k/month total on infra and getting obsessed with fixing that cost structure • Why turbopuffer is “a search engine for unstructured data”: Simon's belief that models can learn to reason, but can't compress the world's knowledge into a few terabytes of weights, so they need to connect to systems that hold truth in full fidelity • The three ingredients for building a great database company: a new workload, a new storage architecture, and the ability to eventually support every query plan customers will want on their data • The architecture bet behind turbopuffer: going all in on object storage and NVMe, avoiding a traditional consensus layer, and building around the cloud primitives that only became possible in the last few years • Why Simon hated operating Elasticsearch at Shopify: years of painful on-call experience shaped his obsession with simplicity, performance, and eliminating state spread across multiple systems • The Cursor story: launching turbopuffer as a scrappy side project, getting an email from Cursor the next day, flying out after a 4am call, and helping cut Cursor's costs by 95% while fixing their per-user economics • The Notion story: buying dark fiber, tuning TCP windows, and eating cross-cloud costs because Simon refused to compromise on architecture just to close a deal faster • Why AI changes the build-vs-buy equation: it's less about whether a company can build search infra internally, and more about whether they have time especially if an external team can feel like an extension of their own • Why RAG isn't dead: coding companies still rely heavily on search, and Simon sees hybrid retrieval semantic, text, regex, SQL-style patterns becoming more important, not less • How agentic workloads are changing search: the old pattern was one retrieval call up front; the new pattern is one agent firing many parallel queries at once, turning search into a highly concurrent tool call • Why turbopuffer is reducing query pricing: agentic systems are dramatically increasing query volume, and Simon expects retrieval infra to adapt to huge bursts of concurrent search rather than a small number of carefully chosen calls • The philosophy of “playing with open cards”: Simon's habit of being radically honest with investors, including telling Lachy Groom he'd return the money if turbopuffer didn't hit PMF by year-end • The “P99 engineer”: Simon's framework for building a talent-dense company, rejecting by default unless someone on the team feels strongly enough to fight for the candidate —Simon Hørup Eskildsen• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sirupsen• X: https://x.com/Sirupsen• https://sirupsen.com/aboutturbopuffer• https://turbopuffer.com/Full Video PodTimestamps00:00:00 The PMF promise to Lachy Groom00:00:25 Intro and Simon's background00:02:19 What turbopuffer actually is00:06:26 Shopify, Elasticsearch, and the pain behind the company00:10:07 The Readwise experiment that sparked turbopuffer00:12:00 The insight Simon couldn't stop thinking about00:17:00 S3 consistency, NVMe, and the architecture bet00:20:12 The Notion story: latency, dark fiber, and conviction00:25:03 Build vs. buy in the age of AI00:26:00 The Cursor story: early launch to breakout customer00:29:00 Why code search still matters00:32:00 Search in the age of agents00:34:22 Pricing turbopuffer in the AI era00:38:17 Why Simon chose Lachy Groom00:41:28 Becoming a founder on purpose00:44:00 The “P99 engineer” philosophy00:49:30 Bending software to your will00:51:13 The future of turbopuffer00:57:05 Simon's tea obsession00:59:03 Tea kits, X Live, and P99 LiveTranscriptSimon Hørup Eskildsen: I don't think I've said this publicly before, but I just called Lockey and was like, local Lockie. Like if this doesn't have PMF by the end of the year, like we'll just like return all the money to you. But it's just like, I don't really, we, Justine and I don't wanna work on this unless it's really working.So we want to give it the best shot this year and like we're really gonna go for it. We're gonna hire a bunch of people. We're just gonna be honest with everyone. Like when I don't know how to play a game, I just play with open cards. Lockey was the only person that didn't, that didn't freak out. He was like, I've never heard anyone say that before.Alessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Leading Space podcast. This is Celesio Pando, Colonel Laz, and I'm joined by Swix, editor of Leading Space.swyx: Hello. Hello, uh, we're still, uh, recording in the Ker studio for the first time. Very excited. And today we are joined by Simon Eski. Of Turbo Farer welcome.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Thank you so much for having me.swyx: Turbo Farer has like really gone on a huge tear, and I, I do have to mention that like you're one of, you're not my newest member of the Danish AHU Mafia, where like there's a lot of legendary programmers that have come out of it, like, uh, beyond Trotro, Rasmus, lado Berg and the V eight team and, and Google Maps team.Uh, you're mostly a Canadian now, but isn't that interesting? There's so many, so much like strong Danish presence.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah, I was writing a post, um, not that long ago about sort of the influences. So I grew up in Denmark, right? I left, I left when, when I was 18 to go to Canada to, to work at Shopify. Um, and so I, like, I've, I would still say that I feel more Danish than, than Canadian.This is also the weird accent. I can't say th because it, this is like, I don't, you know, my wife is also Canadian, um, and I think. I think like one of the things in, in Denmark is just like, there's just such a ruthless pragmatism and there's also a big focus on just aesthetics. Like, they're like very, people really care about like where, what things look like.Um, and like Canada has a lot of attributes, US has, has a lot of attributes, but I think there's been lots of the great things to carry. I don't know what's in the water in Ahu though. Um, and I don't know that I could be considered part of the Mafi mafia quite yet, uh, compared to the phenomenal individuals we just mentioned.Barra OV is also, uh, Danish Canadian. Okay. Yeah. I don't know where he lives now, but, and he's the PHP.swyx: Yeah. And obviously Toby German, but moved to Canada as well. Yes. Like this is like import that, uh, that, that is an interesting, um, talent move.Alessio: I think. I would love to get from you. Definition of Turbo puffer, because I think you could be a Vector db, which is maybe a bad word now in some circles, you could be a search engine.It's like, let, let's just start there and then we'll maybe run through the history of how you got to this point.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: For sure. Yeah. So Turbo Puffer is at this point in time, a search engine, right? We do full text search and we do vector search, and that's really what we're specialized in. If you're trying to do much more than that, like then this might not be the right place yet, but Turbo Buffer is all about search.The other way that I think about it is that we can take all of the world's knowledge, all of the exabytes and exabytes of data that there is, and we can use those tokens to train a model, but we can't compress all of that into a few terabytes of weights, right? Compress into a few terabytes of weights, how to reason with the world, how to make sense of the knowledge.But we have to somehow connect it to something externally that actually holds that like in full fidelity and truth. Um, and that's the thing that we intend to become. Right? That's like a very holier than now kind of phrasing, right? But being the search engine for unstructured, unstructured data is the focus of turbo puffer at this point in time.Alessio: And let's break down. So people might say, well, didn't Elasticsearch already do this? And then some other people might say, is this search on my data, is this like closer to rag than to like a xr, like a public search thing? Like how, how do you segment like the different types of search?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: The way that I generally think about this is like, there's a lot of database companies and I think if you wanna build a really big database company, sort of, you need a couple of ingredients to be in the air.We don't, which only happens roughly every 15 years. You need a new workload. You basically need the ambition that every single company on earth is gonna have data in your database. Multiple times you look at a company like Oracle, right? You will, like, I don't think you can find a company on earth with a digital presence that it not, doesn't somehow have some data in an Oracle database.Right? And I think at this point, that's also true for Snowflake and Databricks, right? 15 years later it's, or even more than that, there's not a company on earth that doesn't, in. Or directly is consuming Snowflake or, or Databricks or any of the big analytics databases. Um, and I think we're in that kind of moment now, right?I don't think you're gonna find a company over the next few years that doesn't directly or indirectly, um, have all their data available for, for search and connect it to ai. So you need that new workload, like you need something to be happening where there's a new workload that causes that to happen, and that new workload is connecting very large amounts of data to ai.The second thing you need. The second condition to build a big database company is that you need some new underlying change in the storage architecture that is not possible from the databases that have come before you. If you look at Snowflake and Databricks, right, commoditized, like massive fleet of HDDs, like that was not possible in it.It just wasn't in the air in the nineties, right? So you just didn't, we just didn't build these systems. S3 and and and so on was not around. And I think the architecture that is now possible that wasn't possible 15 years ago is to go all in on NVME SSDs. It requires a particular type of architecture for the database that.It's difficult to retrofit onto the databases that are already there, including the ones you just mentioned. The second thing is to go all in on OIC storage, more so than we could have done 15 years ago. Like we don't have a consensus layer, we don't really have anything. In fact, you could turn off all the servers that Turbo Buffer has, and we would not lose any data because we have all completely all in on OIC storage.And this means that our architecture is just so simple. So that's the second condition, right? First being a new workload. That means that every company on earth, either indirectly or directly, is using your database. Second being, there's some new storage architecture. That means that the, the companies that have come before you can do what you're doing.I think the third thing you need to do to build a big database company is that over time you have to implement more or less every Cory plan on the data. What that means is that you. You can't just get stuck in, like, this is the one thing that a database does. It has to be ever evolving because when someone has data in the database, they over time expect to be able to ask it more or less every question.So you have to do that to get the storage architecture to the limit of what, what it's capable of. Those are the three conditions.swyx: I just wanted to get a little bit of like the motivation, right? Like, so you left Shopify, you're like principal, engineer, infra guy. Um, you also head of kernel labs, uh, inside of Shopify, right?And then you consulted for read wise and that it kind of gave you that, that idea. I just wanted you to tell that story. Um, maybe I, you've told it before, but, uh, just introduce the, the. People to like the, the new workload, the sort of aha moment for turbo PufferSimon Hørup Eskildsen: For sure. So yeah, I spent almost a decade at Shopify.I was on the infrastructure team, um, from the fairly, fairly early days around 2013. Um, at the time it felt like it was growing so quickly and everything, all the metrics were, you know, doubling year on year compared to the, what companies are contending with today. It's very cute in growth. I feel like lot some companies are seeing that month over month.Um, of course. Shopify compound has been compounding for a very long time now, but I spent a decade doing that and the majority of that was just make sure the site is up today and make sure it's up a year from now. And a lot of that was really just the, um, you know, uh, the Kardashians would drive very, very large amounts of, of data to, to uh, to Shopify as they were rotating through all the merch and building out their businesses.And we just needed to make sure we could handle that. Right. And sometimes these were events, a million requests per second. And so, you know, we, we had our own data centers back in the day and we were moving to the cloud and there was so much sharding work and all of that that we were doing. So I spent a decade just scaling databases ‘cause that's fundamentally what's the most difficult thing to scale about these sites.The database that was the most difficult for me to scale during that time, and that was the most aggravating to be on call for, was elastic search. It was very, very difficult to deal with. And I saw a lot of projects that were just being held back in their ambition by using it.swyx: And I mean, self-hosted.Self-hosted. ‘causeSimon Hørup Eskildsen: it's, yeah, and it commercial, this is like 2015, right? So it's like a very particular vintage. Right. It's probably better at a lot of these things now. Um, it was difficult to contend with and I'm just like, I just think about it. It's an inverted index. It should be good at these kinds of queries and do all of this.And it was, we, we often couldn't get it to do exactly what we needed to do or basically get lucine to do, like expose lucine raw to, to, to what we needed to do. Um, so that was like. Just something that we did on the side and just panic scaled when we needed to, but not a particular focus of mine. So I left, and when I left, I, um, wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do.I mean, it spent like a decade inside of the same company. I'd like grown up there. I started working there when I was 18.swyx: You only do Rails?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah. I mean, yeah. Rails. And he's a Rails guy. Uh, love Rails. So good. Um,Alessio: we all wish we could still work in Rails.swyx: I know know. I know, but some, I tried learning Ruby.It's just too much, like too many options to do the same thing. It's, that's my, I I know there's a, there's a way to do it.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I love it. I don't know that I would use it now, like given cloud code and, and, and cursor and everything, but, um, um, but still it, like if I'm just sitting down and writing a teal code, that's how I think.But anyway, I left and I wasn't, I talked to a couple companies and I was like, I don't. I need to see a little bit more of the world here to know what I'm gonna like focus on next. Um, and so what I decided is like I was gonna, I called it like angel engineering, where I just hopped around in my friend's companies in three months increments and just helped them out with something.Right. And, and just vested a bit of equity and solved some interesting infrastructure problem. So I worked with a bunch of companies at the time, um, read Wise was one of them. Replicate was one of them. Um, causal, I dunno if you've tried this, it's like a, it's a spreadsheet engine Yeah. Where you can do distribution.They sold recently. Yeah. Um, we've been, we used that in fp and a at, um, at Turbo Puffer. Um, so a bunch of companies like this and it was super fun. And so we're the Chachi bt moment happened, I was with. With read Wise for a stint, we were preparing for the reader launch, right? Which is where you, you cue articles and read them later.And I was just getting their Postgres up to snuff, like, which basically boils down to tuning, auto vacuum. So I was doing that and then this happened and we were like, oh, maybe we should build a little recommendation engine and some features to try to hook in the lms. They were not that good yet, but it was clear there was something there.And so I built a small recommendation engine just, okay, let's take the articles that you've recently read, right? Like embed all the articles and then do recommendations. It was good enough that when I ran it on one of the co-founders of Rey's, like I found out that I got articles about, about having a child.I'm like, oh my God, I didn't, I, I didn't know that, that they were having a child. I wasn't sure what to do with that information, but the recommendation engine was good enough that it was suggesting articles, um, about that. And so there was, there was recommendations and uh, it actually worked really well.But this was a company that was spending maybe five grand a month in total on all their infrastructure and. When I did the napkin math on running the embeddings of all the articles, putting them into a vector index, putting it in prod, it's gonna be like 30 grand a month. That just wasn't tenable. Right?Like Read Wise is a proudly bootstrapped company and it's paying 30 grand for infrastructure for one feature versus five. It just wasn't tenable. So sort of in the bucket of this is useful, it's pretty good, but let us, let's return to it when the costs come down.swyx: Did you say it grows by feature? So for five to 30 is by the number of, like, what's the, what's the Scaling factor scale?It scales by the number of articles that you embed.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: It does, but what I meant by that is like five grand for like all of the other, like the Heroku, dinos, Postgres, like all the other, and this then storage is 30. Yeah. And then like 30 grand for one feature. Right. Which is like, what other articles are related to this one.Um, so it was just too much right to, to power everything. Their budget would've been maybe a few thousand dollars, which still would've been a lot. And so we put it in a bucket of, okay, we're gonna do that later. We'll wait, we will wait for the cost to come down. And that haunted me. I couldn't stop thinking about it.I was like, okay, there's clearly some latent demand here. If the cost had been a 10th, we would've shipped it and. This was really the only data point that I had. Right. I didn't, I, I didn't, I didn't go out and talk to anyone else. It was just so I started reading Right. I couldn't, I couldn't help myself.Like I didn't know what like a vector index is. I, I generally barely do about how to generate the vectors. There was a lot of hype about, this is a early 2023. There was a lot of hype about vector databases. There were raising a lot of money and it's like, I really didn't know anything about it. It's like, you know, trying these little models, fine tuning them.Like I was just trying to get sort of a lay of the land. So I just sat down. I have this. A GitHub repository called Napkin Math. And on napkin math, there's just, um, rows of like, oh, this is how much bandwidth. Like this is how many, you know, you can do 25 gigabytes per second on average to dram. You can do, you know, five gigabytes per second of rights to an SSD, blah blah.All of these numbers, right? And S3, how many you could do per, how much bandwidth can you drive per connection? I was just sitting down, I was like, why hasn't anyone build a database where you just put everything on O storage and then you puff it into NVME when you use the data and you puff it into dram if you're, if you're querying it alive, it's just like, this seems fairly obvious and you, the only real downside to that is that if you go all in on o storage, every right will take a couple hundred milliseconds of latency, but from there it's really all upside, right?You do the first go, it takes half a second. And it sort of occurred to me as like, well. The architecture is really good for that. It's really good for AB storage, it's really good for nvm ESSD. It's, well, you just couldn't have done that 10 years ago. Back to what we were talking about before. You really have to build a database where you have as few round trips as possible, right?This is how CPUs work today. It's how NVM E SSDs work. It's how as, um, as three works that you want to have a very large amount of outstanding requests, right? Like basically go to S3, do like that thousand requests to ask for data in one round trip. Wait for that. Get that, like, make a new decision. Do it again, and try to do that maybe a maximum of three times.But no databases were designed that way within NVME as is ds. You can drive like within, you know, within a very low multiple of DRAM bandwidth if you use it that way. And same with S3, right? You can fully max out the network card, which generally is not maxed out. You get very, like, very, very good bandwidth.And, but no one had built a database like that. So I was like, okay, well can't you just, you know, take all the vectors right? And plot them in the proverbial coordinate system. Get the clusters, put a file on S3 called clusters, do json, and then put another file for every cluster, you know, cluster one, do js O cluster two, do js ON you know that like it's two round trips, right?So you get the clusters, you find the closest clusters, and then you download the cluster files like the, the closest end. And you could do this in two round trips.swyx: You were nearest neighbors locally.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yes. Yes. And then, and you would build this, this file, right? It's just like ultra simplistic, but it's not a far shot from what the first version of Turbo Buffer was.Why hasn't anyone done thatAlessio: in that moment? From a workload perspective, you're thinking this is gonna be like a read heavy thing because they're doing recommend. Like is the fact that like writes are so expensive now? Oh, with ai you're actually not writing that much.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: At that point I hadn't really thought too much about, well no actually it was always clear to me that there was gonna be a lot of rights because at Shopify, the search clusters were doing, you know, I don't know, tens or hundreds of crew QPS, right?‘cause you just have to have a human sit and type in. But we did, you know, I don't know how many updates there were per second. I'm sure it was in the millions, right into the cluster. So I always knew there was like a 10 to 100 ratio on the read write. In the read wise use case. It's, um, even, even in the read wise use case, there'd probably be a lot fewer reads than writes, right?There's just a lot of churn on the amount of stuff that was going through versus the amount of queries. Um, I wasn't thinking too much about that. I was mostly just thinking about what's the fundamentally cheapest way to build a database in the cloud today using the primitives that you have available.And this is it, right? You just, now you have one machine and you know, let's say you have a terabyte of data in S3, you paid the $200 a month for that, and then maybe five to 10% of that data and needs to be an NV ME SSDs and less than that in dram. Well. You're paying very, very little to inflate the data.swyx: By the way, when you say no one else has done that, uh, would you consider Neon, uh, to be on a similar path in terms of being sort of S3 first and, uh, separating the compute and storage?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah, I think what I meant with that is, uh, just build a completely new database. I don't know if we were the first, like it was very much, it was, I mean, I, I hadn't, I just looked at the napkin math and was like, this seems really obvious.So I'm sure like a hundred people came up with it at the same time. Like the light bulb and every invention ever. Right. It was just in the air. I think Neon Neon was, was first to it. And they're trying, they're retrofitted onto Postgres, right? And then they built this whole architecture where you have, you have it in memory and then you sort of.You know, m map back to S3. And I think that was very novel at the time to do it for, for all LTP, but I hadn't seen a database that was truly all in, right. Not retrofitting it. The database felt built purely for this no consensus layer. Even using compare and swap on optic storage to do consensus. I hadn't seen anyone go that all in.And I, I mean, there, there, I'm sure there was someone that did that before us. I don't know. I was just looking at the napkin mathswyx: and, and when you say consensus layer, uh, are you strongly relying on S3 Strong consistency? You are. Okay.SoSimon Hørup Eskildsen: that is your consensus layer. It, it is the consistency layer. And I think also, like, this is something that most people don't realize, but S3 only became consistent in December of 2020.swyx: I remember this coming out during COVID and like people were like, oh, like, it was like, uh, it was just like a free upgrade.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah.swyx: They were just, they just announced it. We saw consistency guys and like, okay, cool.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: And I'm sure that they just, they probably had it in prod for a while and they're just like, it's done right.And people were like, okay, cool. But. That's a big moment, right? Like nv, ME SSDs, were also not in the cloud until around 2017, right? So you just sort of had like 2017 nv, ME SSDs, and people were like, okay, cool. There's like one skew that does this, whatever, right? Takes a few years. And then the second thing is like S3 becomes consistent in 2020.So now it means you don't have to have this like big foundation DB or like zookeeper or whatever sitting there contending with the keys, which is how. You know, that's what Snowflake and others have do so muchswyx: for goneSimon Hørup Eskildsen: Exactly. Just gone. Right? And so just push to the, you know, whatever, how many hundreds of people they have working on S3 solved and then compare and swap was not in S3 at this point in time,swyx: by the way.Uh, I don't know what that is, so maybe you wanna explain. Yes. Yeah.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yes. So, um, what Compare and swap is, is basically, you can imagine that if you have a database, it might be really nice to have a file called metadata json. And metadata JSON could say things like, Hey, these keys are here and this file means that, and there's lots of metadata that you have to operate in the database, right?But that's the simplest way to do it. So now you have might, you might have a lot of servers that wanna change the metadata. They might have written a file and want the metadata to contain that file. But you have a hundred nodes that are trying to contend with this metadata that JSON well, what compare and Swap allows you to do is basically just you download the file, you make the modifications, and then you write it only if it hasn't changed.While you did the modification and if not you retry. Right? Should just have this retry loops. Now you can imagine if you have a hundred nodes doing that, it's gonna be really slow, but it will converge over time. That primitive was not available in S3. It wasn't available in S3 until late 2024, but it was available in GCP.The real story of this is certainly not that I sat down and like bake brained it. I was like, okay, we're gonna start on GCS S3 is gonna get it later. Like it was really not that we started, we got really lucky, like we started on GCP and we started on GCP because tur um, Shopify ran on GCP. And so that was the platform I was most available with.Right. Um, and I knew the Canadian team there ‘cause I'd worked with them at Shopify and so it was natural for us to start there. And so when we started building the database, we're like, oh yeah, we have to build a, we really thought we had to build a consensus layer, like have a zookeeper or something to do this.But then we discovered the compare and swap. It's like, oh, we can kick the can. Like we'll just do metadata r json and just, it's fine. It's probably fine. Um, and we just kept kicking the can until we had very, very strong conviction in the idea. Um, and then we kind of just hinged the company on the fact that S3 probably was gonna get this, it started getting really painful in like mid 2024.‘cause we were closing deals with, um, um, notion actually that was running in AWS and we're like, trust us. You, you really want us to run this in GCP? And they're like, no, I don't know about that. Like, we're running everything in AWS and the latency across the cloud were so big and we had so much conviction that we bought like, you know, dark fiber between the AWS regions in, in Oregon, like in the InterExchange and GCP is like, we've never seen a startup like do like, what's going on here?And we're just like, no, we don't wanna do this. We were tuning like TCP windows, like everything to get the latency down ‘cause we had so high conviction in not doing like a, a metadata layer on S3. So those were the three conditions, right? Compare and swap. To do metadata, which wasn't in S3 until late 2024 S3 being consistent, which didn't happen until December, 2020.Uh, 2020. And then NVMe ssd, which didn't end in the cloud until 2017.swyx: I mean, in some ways, like a very big like cloud success story that like you were able to like, uh, put this all together, but also doing things like doing, uh, bind our favor. That that actually is something I've never heard.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I mean, it's very common when you're a big company, right?You're like connecting your own like data center or whatever. But it's like, it was uniquely just a pain with notion because the, um, the org, like most of the, like if you're buying in Ashburn, Virginia, right? Like US East, the Google, like the GCP and, and AWS data centers are like within a millisecond on, on each other, on the public exchanges.But in Oregon uniquely, the GCP data center sits like a couple hundred kilometers, like east of Portland and the AWS region sits in Portland, but the network exchange they go through is through Seattle. So it's like a full, like 14 milliseconds or something like that. And so anyway, yeah. It's, it's, so we were like, okay, we can't, we have to go through an exchange in Portland.Yeah. Andswyx: you'd rather do this than like run your zookeeper and likeSimon Hørup Eskildsen: Yes. Way rather. It doesn't have state, I don't want state and two systems. Um, and I think all that is just informed by Justine, my co-founder and I had just been on call for so long. And the worst outages are the ones where you have state in multiple places that's not syncing up.So it really came from, from a a, like just a, a very pure source of pain, of just imagining what we would be Okay. Being woken up at 3:00 AM about and having something in zookeeper was not one of them.swyx: You, you're talking to like a notion or something. Do they care or do they just, theySimon Hørup Eskildsen: just, they care about latency.swyx: They latency cost. That's it.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: They just cared about latency. Right. And we just absorbed the cost. We're just like, we have high conviction in this. At some point we can move them to AWS. Right. And so we just, we, we'll buy the fiber, it doesn't matter. Right. Um, and it's like $5,000. Usually when you buy fiber, you buy like multiple lines.And we're like, we can only afford one, but we will just test it that when it goes over the public internet, it's like super smooth. And so we did a lot of, anyway, it's, yeah, it was, that's cool.Alessio: You can imagine talking to the GCP rep and it's like, no, we're gonna buy, because we know we're gonna turn, we're gonna turn from you guys and go to AWS in like six months.But in the meantime we'll do this. It'sSimon Hørup Eskildsen: a, I mean, like they, you know, this workload still runs on GCP for what it's worth. Right? ‘cause it's so, it was just, it was so reliable. So it was never about moving off GCP, it was just about honesty. It was just about giving notion the latency that they deserved.Right. Um, and we didn't want ‘em to have to care about any of this. We also, they were like, oh, egress is gonna be bad. It was like, okay, screw it. Like we're just gonna like vvc, VPC peer with you and AWS we'll eat the cost. Yeah. Whatever needs to be done.Alessio: And what were the actual workloads? Because I think when you think about ai, it's like 14 milliseconds.It's like really doesn't really matter in the scheme of like a model generation.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah. We were told the latency, right. That we had to beat. Oh, right. So, so we're just looking at the traces. Right. And then sort of like hand draw, like, you know, kind of like looking at the trace and then thinking what are the other extensions of the trace?Right. And there's a lot more to it because it's also when you have, if you have 14 versus seven milliseconds, right. You can fit in another round trip. So we had to tune TCP to try to send as much data in every round trip, prewarm all the connections. And there was, there's a lot of things that compound from having these kinds of round trips, but in the grand scheme it was just like, well, we have to beat the latency of whatever we're up against.swyx: Which is like they, I mean, notion is a database company. They could have done this themselves. They, they do lots of database engineering themselves. How do you even get in the door? Like Yeah, just like talk through that kind of.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Last time I was in San Francisco, I was talking to one of the engineers actually, who, who was one of our champions, um, at, AT Notion.And they were, they were just trying to make sure that the, you know, per user cost matched the economics that they needed. You know, Uhhuh like, it's like the way I think about, it's like I have to earn a return on whatever the clouds charge me and then my customers have to earn a return on that. And it's like very simple, right?And so there has to be gross margin all the way up and that's how you build the product. And so then our customers have to make the right set of trade off the turbo Puffer makes, and if they're happy with that, that's great.swyx: Do you feel like you're competing with build internally versus buy or buy versus buy?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah, so, sorry, this was all to build up to your question. So one of the notion engineers told me that they'd sat and probably on a napkin, like drawn out like, why hasn't anyone built this? And then they saw terrible. It was like, well, it literally that. So, and I think AI has also changed the buy versus build equation in terms of, it's not really about can we build it, it's about do we have time to build it?I think they like, I think they felt like, okay, if this is a team that can do that and they, they feel enough like an extension of our team, well then we can go a lot faster, which would be very, very good for them. And I mean, they put us through the, through the test, right? Like we had some very, very long nights to to, to do that POC.And they were really our biggest, our second big customer off the cursor, which also was a lot of late nights. Right.swyx: Yeah. That, I mean, should we go into that story? The, the, the sort of Chris's story, like a lot, um, they credit you a lot for. Working very closely with them. So I just wanna hear, I've heard this, uh, story from Sole's point of view, but like, I'm curious what, what it looks like from your side.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I actually haven't heard it from Sole's point of view, so maybe you can now cross reference it. The way that I remember it was that, um, the day after we launched, which was just, you know, I'd worked the whole summer on, on the first version. Justine wasn't part of it yet. ‘cause I just, I didn't tell anyone that summer that I was working on this.I was just locked in on building it because it's very easy otherwise to confuse talking about something to actually doing it. And so I was just like, I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna do the thing. I launched it and at this point turbo puffer is like a rust binary running on a single eight core machine in a T Marks instance.And me deploying it was like looking at the request log and then like command seeing it or like control seeing it to just like, okay, there's no request. Let's upgrade the binary. Like it was like literally the, the, the, the scrappiest thing. You could imagine it was on purpose because just like at Shopify, we did that all the time.Like, we like move, like we ran things in tux all the time to begin with. Before something had like, at least the inkling of PMF, it was like, okay, is anyone gonna hear about this? Um, and one of the cursor co-founders Arvid reached out and he just, you know, the, the cursor team are like all I-O-I-I-M-O like, um, contenders, right?So they just speak in bullet points and, and facts. It was like this amazing email exchange just of, this is how many QPS we have, this is what we're paying, this is where we're going, blah, blah, blah. And so we're just conversing in bullet points. And I tried to get a call with them a few times, but they were, so, they were like really writing the PMF bowl here, just like late 2023.And one time Swally emails me at like five. What was it like 4:00 AM Pacific time saying like, Hey, are you open for a call now? And I'm on the East coast and I, it was like 7:00 AM I was like, yeah, great, sure, whatever. Um, and we just started talking and something. Then I didn't know anything about sales.It was something that just comp compelled me. I have to go see this team. Like, there's something here. So I, I went to San Francisco and I went to their office and the way that I remember it is that Postgres was down when I showed up at the office. Did SW tell you this? No. Okay. So Postgres was down and so it's like they were distracting with that.And I was trying my best to see if I could, if I could help in any way. Like I knew a little bit about databases back to tuning, auto vacuum. It was like, I think you have to tune out a vacuum. Um, and so we, we talked about that and then, um, that evening just talked about like what would it look like, what would it look like to work with us?And I just said. Look like we're all in, like we will just do what we'll do whatever, whatever you tell us, right? They migrated everything over the next like week or two, and we reduced their cost by 95%, which I think like kind of fixed their per user economics. Um, and it solved a lot of other things. And we were just, Justine, this is also when I asked Justine to come on as my co-founder, she was the best engineer, um, that I ever worked with at Shopify.She lived two blocks away and we were just, okay, we're just gonna get this done. Um, and we did, and so we helped them migrate and we just worked like hell over the next like month or two to make sure that we were never an issue. And that was, that was the cursor story. Yeah.swyx: And, and is code a different workload than normal text?I, I don't know. Is is it just text? Is it the same thing?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah, so cursor's workload is basically, they, um, they will embed the entire code base, right? So they, they will like chunk it up in whatever they would, they do. They have their own embedding model, um, which they've been public about. Um, and they find that on, on, on their evals.It. There's one of their evals where it's like a 25% improvement on a very particular workload. They have a bunch of blog posts about it. Um, I think it works best on larger code basis, but they've trained their own embedding model to do this. Um, and so you'll see it if you use the cursor agent, it will do searches.And they've also been public around, um, how they've, I think they post trained their model to be very good at semantic search as well. Um, and that's, that's how they use it. And so it's very good at, like, can you find me on the code that's similar to this, or code that does this? And just in, in this queries, they also use GR to supplement it.swyx: Yeah.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um, of courseswyx: it's been a big topic of discussion like, is rag dead because gr you know,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: and I mean like, I just, we, we see lots of demand from the coding company to ethicsswyx: search in every part. Yes.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Uh, we, we, we see demand. And so, I mean, I'm. I like case studies. I don't like, like just doing like thought pieces on this is where it's going.And like trying to be all macroeconomic about ai, that's has turned out to be a giant waste of time because no one can really predict any of this. So I just collect case studies and I mean, cursor has done a great job talking about what they're doing and I hope some of the other coding labs that use Turbo Puffer will do the same.Um, but it does seem to make a difference for particular queries. Um, I mean we can also do text, we can also do RegX, but I should also say that cursors like security posture into Tur Puffer is exceptional, right? They have their own embedding model, which makes it very difficult to reverse engineer. They obfuscate the file paths.They like you. It's very difficult to learn anything about a code base by looking at it. And the other thing they do too is that for their customers, they encrypt it with their encryption keys in turbo puffer's bucket. Um, so it's, it's, it's really, really well designed.swyx: And so this is like extra stuff they did to work with you because you are not part of Cursor.Exactly like, and this is just best practice when working in any database, not just you guys. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I think for me, like the, the, the learning is kind of like you, like all workloads are hybrid. Like, you know, uh, like you, you want the semantic, you want the text, you want the RegX, you want sql.I dunno. Um, but like, it's silly to like be all in on like one particularly query pattern.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I think, like I really like the way that, um, um, that swally at cursor talks about it, which is, um, I'm gonna butcher it here. Um, and you know, I'm a, I'm a database scalability person. I'm not a, I, I dunno anything about training models other than, um, what the internet tells me and what.The way he describes is that this is just like cash compute, right? It's like you have a point in time where you're looking at some particular context and focused on some chunk and you say, this is the layer of the neural net at this point in time. That seems fundamentally really useful to do cash compute like that.And, um, how the value of that will change over time. I'm, I'm not sure, but there seems to be a lot of value in that.Alessio: Maybe talk a bit about the evolution of the workload, because even like search, like maybe two years ago it was like one search at the start of like an LLM query to build the context. Now you have a gentech search, however you wanna call it, where like the model is both writing and changing the code and it's searching it again later.Yeah. What are maybe some of the new types of workloads or like changes you've had to make to your architecture for it?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I think you're right. When I think of rag, I think of, Hey, there's an 8,000 token, uh, context window and you better make it count. Um, and search was a way to do that now. Everything is moving towards the, just let the agent do its thing.Right? And so back to the thing before, right? The LLM is very good at reasoning with the data, and so we're just the tool call, right? And that's increasingly what we see our customers doing. Um, what we're seeing more demand from, from our customers now is to do a lot of concurrency, right? Like Notion does a ridiculous amount of queries in every round trip just because they can't.And I'm also now, when I use the cursor agent, I also see them doing more concurrency than I've ever seen before. So a bit similar to how we designed a database to drive as much concurrency in every round trip as possible. That's also what the agents are doing. So that's new. It means just an enormous amount of queries all at once to the dataset while it's warm in as few turns as possible.swyx: Can I clarify one thing on that?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yes.swyx: Is it, are they batching multiple users or one user is driving multiple,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: one user driving multiple, one agent driving.swyx: It's parallel searching a bunch of things.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Exactly.swyx: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, the clinician also did, did this for the fast context thing, like eight parallel at once.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yes.swyx: And, and like an interesting problem is, well, how do you make sure you have enough diversity so you're not making the the same request eight times?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: And I think like that's probably also where the hybrid comes in, where. That's another way to diversify. It's a completely different way to, to do the search.That's a big change, right? So before it was really just like one call and then, you know, the LLM took however many seconds to return, but now we just see an enormous amount of queries. So the, um, we just see more queries. So we've like tried to reduce query, we've reduced query pricing. Um, this is probably the first time actually I'm saying that, but the query pricing is being reduced, like five x.Um, and we'll probably try to reduce it even more to accommodate some of these workloads of just doing very large amounts of queries. Um, that's one thing that's changed. I think the right, the right ratio is still very high, right? Like there's still a, an enormous amount of rights per read, but we're starting probably to see that change if people really lean into this pattern.Alessio: Can we talk a little bit about the pricing? I'm curious, uh, because traditionally a database would charge on storage, but now you have the token generation that is so expensive, where like the actual. Value of like a good search query is like much higher because they're like saving inference time down the line.How do you structure that as like, what are people receptive to on the other side too?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah. I, the, the turbo puffer pricing in the beginning was just very simple. The pricing on these on for search engines before Turbo Puffer was very server full, right? It was like, here's the vm, here's the per hour cost, right?Great. And I just sat down with like a piece of paper and said like, if Turbo Puffer was like really good, this is probably what it would cost with a little bit of margin. And that was the first pricing of Turbo Puffer. And I just like sat down and I was like, okay, like this is like probably the storage amp, but whenever on a piece of paper I, it was vibe pricing.It was very vibe price, and I got it wrong. Oh. Um, well I didn't get it wrong, but like Turbo Puffer wasn't at the first principle pricing, right? So when Cursor came on Turbo Puffer, it was like. Like, I didn't know any VCs. I didn't know, like I was just like, I don't know, I didn't know anything about raising money or anything like that.I just saw that my GCP bill was, was high, was a lot higher than the cursor bill. So Justine and I was just like, well, we have to optimize it. Um, and I mean, to the chagrin now of, of it, of, of the VCs, it now means that we're profitable because we've had so much pricing pressure in the beginning. Because it was running on my credit card and Justine and I had spent like, like tens of thousands of dollars on like compute bills and like spinning off the company and like very like, like bad Canadian lawyers and like things like to like get all of this done because we just like, we didn't know.Right. If you're like steeped in San Francisco, you're just like, you just know. Okay. Like you go out, raise a pre-seed round. I, I never heard a word pre-seed at this point in time.swyx: When you had Cursor, you had Notion you, you had no funding.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um, with Cursor we had no funding. Yeah. Um, by the time we had Notion Locke was, Locke was here.Yeah. So it was really just, we vibe priced it 100% from first Principles, but it wasn't, it, it was not performing at first principles, so we just did everything we could to optimize it in the beginning for that, so that at least we could have like a 5% margin or something. So I wasn't freaking out because Cursor's bill was also going like this as they were growing.And so my liability and my credit limit was like actively like calling my bank. It was like, I need a bigger credit. Like it was, yeah. Anyway, that was the beginning. Yeah. But the pricing was, yeah, like storage rights and query. Right. And the, the pricing we have today is basically just that pricing with duct tape and spit to try to approach like, you know, like a, as a margin on the physical underlying hardware.And we're doing this year, you're gonna see more and more pricing changes from us. Yeah.swyx: And like is how much does stuff like VVC peering matter because you're working in AWS land where egress is charged and all that, you know.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: We probably don't like, we have like an enterprise plan that just has like a base fee because we haven't had time to figure out SKU pricing for all of this.Um, but I mean, yeah, you can run turbo puffer either in SaaS, right? That's what Cursor does. You can run it in a single tenant cluster. So it's just you. That's what Notion does. And then you can run it in, in, in BYOC where everything is inside the customer's VPC, that's what an for example, philanthropic does.swyx: What I'm hearing is that this is probably the best CRO job for somebody who can come in and,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I mean,swyx: help you with this.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um, like Turbo Puffer hired, like, I don't know what, what number this was, but we had a full-time CFO as like the 12th hire or something at Turbo Puffer, um, I think I hear are a lot of comp.I don't know how they do it. Like they have a hundred employees and not a CFO. It's like having a CFO is like a runningswyx: business man. Like, you know,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: it's so good. Yeah, like money Mike, like he just, you know, just handles the money and a lot of the business stuff and so he came in and just hopped with a lot of the operational side of the business.So like C-O-O-C-F-O, like somewhere in between.swyx: Just as quick mention of Lucky, just ‘cause I'm curious, I've met Lock and like, he's obviously a very good investor and now on physical intelligence, um, I call it generalist super angel, right? He invests in everything. Um, and I always wonder like, you know, is there something appealing about focusing on developer tooling, focusing on databases, going like, I've invested for 10 years in databases versus being like a lock where he can maybe like connect you to all the customers that you need.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: This is an excellent question. No, no one's asked me this. Um, why lockey? Because. There was a couple of people that we were talking to at the time and when we were raising, we were almost a little, we were like a bit distressed because one of our, one of our peers had just launched something that was very similar to Turbo Puffer.And someone just gave me the advice at the time of just choose the person where you just feel like you can just pick up the phone and not prepare anything. And just be completely honest, and I don't think I've said this publicly before, but I just called Lockey and was like local Lockie. Like if this doesn't have PMF by the end of the year, like we'll just like return all the money to you.But it's just like, I don't really, we, Justine and I don't wanna work on this unless it's really working. So we want to give it the best shot this year and like we're really gonna go for it. We're gonna hire a bunch of people and we're just gonna be honest with everyone. Like when I don't know how to play a game, I just play with open cards and.Lockey was the only person that didn't, that didn't freak out. He was like, I've never heard anyone say that before. As I said, I didn't even know what a seed or pre-seed round was like before, probably even at this time. So I was just like very honest with him. And I asked him like, Lockie, have you ever have, have you ever invested in database company?He was just like, no. And at the time I was like, am I dumb? Like, but I think there was something that just like really drew me to Lockie. He is so authentic, so honest, like, and there was something just like, I just felt like I could just play like, just say everything openly. And that was, that was, I think that that was like a perfect match at the time, and, and, and honestly still is.He was just like, okay, that's great. This is like the most honest, ridiculous thing I've ever heard anyone say to me. But like that, like that, whyswyx: is this ridiculous? Say competitor launch, this may not work out. It wasSimon Hørup Eskildsen: more just like. If this doesn't work out, I'm gonna close up shop by the end of the mo the year, right?Like it was, I don't know, maybe it's common. I, I don't know. He told me it was uncommon. I don't know. Um, that's why we chose him and he'd been phenomenal. The other people were talking at the, at the time were database experts. Like they, you know, knew a lot about databases and Locke didn't, this turned out to be a phenomenal asset.Right. I like Justine and I know a lot about databases. The people that we hire know a lot about databases. What we needed was just someone who didn't know a lot about databases, didn't pretend to know a lot about databases, and just wanted to help us with candidates and customers. And he did. Yeah. And I have a list, right, of the investors that I have a relationship with, and Lockey has just performed excellent in the number of sub bullets of what we can attribute back to him.Just absolutely incredible. And when people talk about like no ego and just the best thing for the founder, I like, I don't think that anyone, like even my lawyer is like, yeah, Lockey is like the most friendly person you will find.swyx: Okay. This is my most glow recommendation I've ever heard.Alessio: He deserves it.He's very special.swyx: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Amazing.Alessio: Since you mentioned candidates, maybe we can talk about team building, you know, like, especially in sf, it feels like it's just easier to start a company than to join a company. Uh, I'm curious your experience, especially not being n SF full-time and doing something that is maybe, you know, a very low level of detail and technical detail.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah. So joining versus starting, I never thought that I would be a founder. I would start with it, like Turbo Puffer started as a blog post, and then it became a project and then sort of almost accidentally became a company. And now it feels like it's, it's like becoming a bigger company. That was never the intention.The intentions were very pure. It's just like, why hasn't anyone done this? And it's like, I wanna be the, like, I wanna be the first person to do it. I think some founders have this, like, I could never work for anyone else. I, I really don't feel that way. Like, it's just like, I wanna see this happen. And I wanna see it happen with some people that I really enjoy working with and I wanna have fun doing it and this, this, this has all felt very natural on that, on that sense.So it was never a like join versus versus versus found. It was just dis found me at the right moment.Alessio: Well I think there's an argument for, you should have joined Cursor, right? So I'm curious like how you evaluate it. Okay, I should actually go raise money and make this a company versus like, this is like a company that is like growing like crazy.It's like an interesting technical problem. I should just build it within Cursor and then they don't have to encrypt all this stuff. They don't have to obfuscate things. Like was that on your mind at all orSimon Hørup Eskildsen: before taking the, the small check from Lockie, I did have like a hard like look at myself in the mirror of like, okay, do I really want to do this?And because if I take the money, I really have to do it right. And so the way I almost think about it's like you kind of need to ha like you kind of need to be like fucked up enough to want to go all the way. And that was the conversation where I was like, okay, this is gonna be part of my life's journey to build this company and do it in the best way that I possibly can't.Because if I ask people to join me, ask people to get on the cap table, then I have an ultimate responsibility to give it everything. And I don't, I think some people, it doesn't occur to me that everyone takes it that seriously. And maybe I take it too seriously, I don't know. But that was like a very intentional moment.And so then it was very clear like, okay, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna give it everything.Alessio: A lot of people don't take it this seriously. But,swyx: uh, let's talk about, you have this concept of the P 99 engineer. Uh, people are 10 x saying, everyone's saying, you know, uh, maybe engineers are out of a job. I don't know.But you definitely see a P 99 engineer, and I just want you to talk about it.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Yeah, so the P 99 engineer was just a term that we started using internally to talk about candidates and talk about how we wanted to build the company. And you know, like everyone else is, like we want a talent dense company.And I think that's almost become trite at this point. What I credit the cursor founders a lot with is that they just arrived there from first principles of like, we just need a talent dense, um, talent dense team. And I think I've seen some teams that weren't talent dense and like seemed a counterfactual run, which if you've run in been in a large company, you will just see that like it's just logically will happen at a large company.Um, and so that was super important to me and Justine and it's very difficult to maintain. And so we just needed, we needed wording for it. And so I have a document called Traits of the P 99 Engineer, and it's a bullet point list. And I look at that list after every single interview that I do, and in every single recap that we do and every recap we end with.End with, um, some version of I'm gonna reject this candidate completely regardless of what the discourse was, because I wanna see people fight for this person because the default should not be, we're gonna hire this person. The default should be, we're definitely not hiring this person. And you know, if everyone was like, ah, maybe throw a punch, then this is not the right.swyx: Do, do you operate, like if there's one cha there must have at least one champion who's like, yes, I will put my career on, on, on the line for this. You know,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I think career on the line,swyx: maybe a chair, butSimon Hørup Eskildsen: yeah. You know, like, um, I would say so someone needs to like, have both fists up and be like, I'd fight.Right? Yeah. Yeah. And if one person said, then, okay, let's do it. Right?swyx: Yeah.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um. It doesn't have to be absolutely everyone. Right? And like the interviews are always the sign that you're checking for different attributes. And if someone is like knocking it outta the park in every single attribute, that's, that's fairly rare.Um, but that's really important. And so the traits of the P 99 engineer, there's lots of them. There's also the traits of the p like triple nine engineer and the quadruple nine engineer. This is like, it's a long list.swyx: Okay.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um, I'll give you some samples, right. Of what we, what we look for. I think that the P 99 engineer has some history of having bent, like their trajectory or something to their will.Right? Some moment where it was just, they just, you know, made the computer do what it needed to do. There's something like that, and it will, it will occur to have them at some point in their career. And, uh. Hopefully multiple times. Right.swyx: Gimme an example of one of your engineers that like,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I'll give an eng.Uh, so we, we, we launched this thing called A and NV three. Um, we could, we're also, we're working on V four and V five right now, but a and NV three can search a hundred billion vectors with a P 50 of around 40 milliseconds and a p 99 of 200 milliseconds. Um, maybe other people have done this, I'm sure Google and others have done this, but, uh, we haven't seen anyone, um, at least not in like a public consumable SaaS that can do this.And that was an engineer, the chief architect of Turbo Puffer, Nathan, um, who more or less just bent this, the software was not capable of this and he just made it capable for a very particular workload in like a, you know, six to eight week period with the help of a lot of the team. Right. It's been, been, there's numerous of examples of that, like at, at turbo puff, but that's like really bending the software and X 86 to your will.It was incredible to watch. Um. You wanna see some moments like that?swyx: Isn't that triple nine?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: Um, I think Nathan, what's calledAlessio: group nine, that was only nine. I feel like this is too high forSimon Hørup Eskildsen: Nathan. Nathan is, uh, Nathan is like, yeah, there's a lot of nines. Okay. After that p So I think that's one trait. I think another trait is that, uh, the P 99 spends a lot of time looking at maps.Generally it's their preferred ux. They just love looking at maps. You ever seen someone who just like, sits on their phone and just like, scrolls around on a map? Or did you not look at maps A lot? You guys don't look atswyx: maps? I guess I'm not feeling there. I don't know, butSimon Hørup Eskildsen: you just dis What about trains?Do you like trains?swyx: Uh, I mean they, not enough. Okay. This is just like weapon nice. Autism is what I call it. Like, like,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: um, I love looking at maps, like, it's like my preferred UX and just like I, you know, I likeswyx: lotsAlessio: of, of like random places, soswyx: like,youswyx: know.Alessio: Yes. Okay. There you go. So instead of like random places, like how do you explore the maps?Simon Hørup Eskildsen: No, it's, it's just a joke.swyx: It's autism laugh. It's like you are just obsessed by something and you like studying a thing.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: The origin of this was that at some point I read an interview with some IOI gold medalistswyx: Uhhuh,Simon Hørup Eskildsen: and it's like, what do you do in your spare time? I was just like, I like looking at maps.I was like, I feel so seen. Like, I just like love, like swirling out. I was like, oh, Canada is so big. Where's Baffin Island? I don't know. I love it. Yeah. Um, anyway, so the traits of P 99, P 99 is obsessive, right? Like, there's just like, you'll, you'll find traits of that we do an interview at, at, at, at turbo puffer or like multiple interviews that just try to screen for some of these things.Um, so. There's lots of others, but these are the kinds of traits that we look for.swyx: I'll tell you, uh, some people listen for like some of my dere stuff. Uh, I do think about derel as maps. Um, you draw a map for people, uh, maps show you the, uh, what is commonly agreed to be the geographical features of what a boundary is.And it shows also shows you what is not doing. And I, I think a lot of like developer tools, companies try to tell you they can do everything, but like, let's, let's be real. Like you, your, your three landmarks are here, everyone comes here, then here, then here, and you draw a map and, and then you draw a journey through the map.And like that. To me, that's what developer relations looks like. So I do think about things that way.Simon Hørup Eskildsen: I think the P 99 thinks in offs, right? The P 99 is very clear about, you know, hey, turbo puffer, you can't run a high transaction workload on turbo puffer, right? It's like the right latency is a hundred milliseconds.That's a clear trade off. I think the P 99 is very good at articulating the trade offs in every decision. Um. Which is exactly what the map is in your case, right?swyx: Uh, yeah, yeah. My, my, my world. My world.Alessio: How, how do you reconcile some of these things when you're saying you bend the will the computer versus like the trade
Retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, has become a foundational approach to building production AI systems. However, deploying RAG in practice can be complex and costly. Developers typically have to manage vector databases, chunking strategies, embedding models, and indexing infrastructure. Designing effective RAG systems is also a moving target, as techniques and best practices evolve in step The post DeepMind's RAG System with Animesh Chatterji and Ivan Solovyev appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
A Month ago, Ty and TDP Producer Gene Sticco Journeyed to WASHINGTON DC for the James Fox National Press Club Event- Surrounding the Varginha UFO incident. We sat down with US Congressman Eric Burlison- who was in attendance to get his thoughts on the State of Disclosure And International Cooperation On The UFO topic. LINK THREAD—https://allmylinks.com/total-disclosure Subscribe to the channel on YouTube—— www.youtube.com/@totaldisclosure Support TY and TDP Studios directly VIA PayPal (No FEES)— https://www.paypal.me/TDPstudios767?locale.x=en_US YOUTUBE MEMBER—-https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy2Cra7aLAAMVxkA9rSYCxg/join PATREON MEMBER—https://www.patreon.com/Total_Disclosure?fan_landing=true&view_as=public Follow On X—- Www.X.com/@DisclosurePod Instagram—- www.instagram.com/DisclosurePod Facebook----Facebook.com/@ty.totaldisclosureBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/total-disclosure-podcast--5975113/support.CONTACT TDP DIRECTLY For Collaboration, Use of Segments/clips, or any other media produced by “TDP” —TY.TotalDisclosure@gmail.comSpecial Thank you to all of our PODCAST/YouTube Channel Members for your continued support, and dedication to seeking the truth, together. We can't do this WITHOUT YOU!-COPYRIGHT-2020-Copyright Disclaimer: Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commenting, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. Total Disclosure Podcast Copyright 2020 and … segments, early access to interviews, and a yearly gift autographed by yours truly!thank you in advance now, Let's explore the unknown together!
ABOUT THE EPISODEListen in as David Schrock and Brad Green interview Stephen Wellum on his COA Longform, "Reflections on the Retrieval of Classical Theism in Evangelical Theology"Timestamps00:41 – Intro04:45 – What is Classical Theism and How Do We Define That Term?07:55 – The Development of the Doctrine of the Trinity11:54 – The Neo Calvinists to Modern Evangelicalism15:33 – Brad Green's Time at Southern and Influence of Augustine18:20 – It Matters Who You You're Influenced By24:19 – Social Trinitarianism29:34 –Psychological and Philosophical Traditions & Influences33:34 – The Economical and Ontological Trinity36:07 – The Distinction Between God Himself and God in the World42:06 – Eternal Functional Subordination51:31 – How Did Augustine Help Brad Green When Thinking Through EFS?55:21 – The Divine Ordering1:00:56 – Aquinas and The Doctrine of God1:05:43 – Dr. Brad Green's Life Update1:06:52 – OutroResources to Click“Reflections on the Retrieval of Classical Theism in Evangelical Theology” – Stephen J. Wellum“Does Complementarianism Depend on ERAS?: A Response to Kevin Giles, “The Trinity Argument for Women's Subordination” – Stephen J. WellumTheme of the Month: The God Who Is There: Contemplating the Doctrine of GodGive to Support the WorkBooks to ReadSystematic Theology: From Canon to Concept, Vol. 1 – Stephen J. WellumReformed Dogmatics – Herman BavinckReformed Dogmatics – Geerhardus VosChristianity and Liberalism – J. Gresham MachenEternal God: A Study of God Without Time – Paul HelmThe Openness of God – Clark PinnockNicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology – Lewis AyresPost-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics – Richard MullerThe Holy Trinity: In Scripture, History Theology, and Worship – Robert Letham
Against a backdrop of violent anti-semitic and anti-indigenous attacks and the relaxation of police restraints in response to them, Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras organizers are faced with twin controversies: the withdrawal of the Jewish group Dayenu from the event and demands for the expulsion of the New South Wales Police contingent. Veteran activist Ken Davis explains the situation (Barry McKay reports). New Yorkers defy the Trump administration and replace the rainbow flag the government “disappeared” from the Stonewall National Monument (Paul DeRienzo of WBAI reports). A Black History Month Rainbow Rewind honors Langston Hughes (produced by Sheri Lunn and Brian DeShazor). And in NewWrap: the European Parliament approves a resolution specifically calling for “the full recognition of trans women as women,” HIV-positive enlistees are once again banned from serving in the U.S. military, intersex children are now protected from undergoing unnecessary medical procedures without their informed consent in the Australian state of Victoria, Kansans can now sue if they're upset after sharing a bathroom with a trans person, U.S. Olympic women's ice hockey team captain Hilary Knight leads her team to gold and plans to lead speed skater Brittany Bowe to the altar, and more international LGBTQ news reported this week by Nico Raquel and Ret (produced by Brian DeShazor). All this on the February 23, 2026 edition of This Way Out! Join our family of listener-donors today at thiswayout.org/donate/.
https://www.theforbiddenknowledgenetwork.comWhen a memo marked with a suspiciously low classification emerged from the Department of Defense in December 2020, it sent shockwaves through the conspiracy theory community. The document mentioned the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which was previously acknowledged but dismissed as defunct. However, the memo hinted at ongoing operations, contradicting public statements from the Pentagon. The memo's existence is undeniable, yet it leaves a chasm between official narratives and what appears to be a hidden reality.The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program is a complex web of political and institutional frameworks, designed for obfuscation rather than transparency. Its sustenance relies on covert funding mechanisms and operates at the intersection of multiple agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and NASA. The program's secrecy mechanisms are sophisticated and pervasive, creating a hierarchy of knowledge that is nearly impervious to external scrutiny. Yet, the very mechanisms designed to safeguard the program's secrecy also create vulnerabilities, as any breach can have cascading effects. As we delve into this shadowy domain, we are left to ponder the true extent of what remains hidden behind the classified doors of the Pentagon.
ABOUT THE EPISODESometimes an old compass is all you need to make it back home, and so it is with the church's Nicene doctrine of God.Resources to Click· “Reflections on the Retrieval of Classical Theism in Evangelical Theology” – Stephen J. Wellum· “Does Complementarianism Depend on ERAS?: A Response to Kevin Giles, “The Trinity Argument for Women's Subordination” – Stephen J. Wellum· Theme of the Month: The God Who Is There: Contemplating the Doctrine of God· Give to Support the Work Books to Read· Systematic Theology: From Canon to Concept, Vol. 1 – Stephen J. Wellum· Reformed Dogmatics – Herman Bavinck· Reformed Dogmatics – Geerhardus Vos· Christianity and Liberalism – J. Gresham Machen· Eternal God: A Study of God Without Time – Paul Helm· The Openness of God – Clark Pinnock· Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology – Lewis Ayres· Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics – Richard Muller
This recording features audio versions of the February 2025 Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology (JVIR) abstracts:ArticlesTransarterial Embolization for Refractory Adhesive Capsulitis and Related Tendinopathies: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (Read)Standardized Technique for Prostatic Artery Embolization: A Delphi Consensus Study on Optimized Methods and Emerging Concepts (Read)Neutrophil-to-Lymphocyte Ratio and Platelet-to-Lymphocyte Ratio Combined with Model for End-Stage Liver Disease 3.0 as a Prognostic Predictor for Patients with Liver Cirrhosis after Transjugular Intrahepatic Portosystemic Shunt Creation (Read)Safety and Feasibility of Intra-Arterial Treatment of Pancreatic Cancer Using an Emulsion of Ethiodized Oil plus Bumetanide in an Oncopig Model (Read)Lessons in IR: Coil Unraveling and Stretching during Retrieval of a Partially Deployed Embolization Coil (Read)JVIR and SIR thank all those who helped record this episode. To sign up to help with future episodes, please contact our outreach coordinator at millennie.chen.jvir@gmail.com.HostSonya Choe, University of California Riverside School of MedicineAudio EditorAndrew Sasser, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine Outreach CoordinatorMillennie Chen, University of California Riverside School of MedicineAbstract Readers:Ahmed Alzubaidi, Wayne State University School of MedicineShobhit Chamoli, Armed Forces Medical CollegeAgnes Manish, Loma Linda University School of MedicineEmily Jagenberg, Oakland University. William Beaumont School of Medicine Tiffany Nakla, Touro University Nevada College of Osteopathic Medicine, NevadaSupport the show
ABOUT THE EPISODEListen in as David Schrock & Stephen Wellum interview Kyle Claunch on his COA Longform Essay, "Axioms of Theology Proper: Guiding Lights for the Doctrine of God"Timestamps00:35 – Intro03:40 – How Did Dr. Claunch's Interest for the Doctrine of God Begin to Grow?07:25 – What Were Some of the Things Moving in Academia Towards a Retrieval of Classical Theism?13:28 – Retrieving While Not Throwing out the Baby with the Bathwater19:42 – Axiom 1: The Doctrine of Creation from Ex Nihilo22:36 – How Important is the Order to the Axioms?24:43 – Axioms 2&3: Supreme Goodness, Immanence & Negation29:00 – The Perfections and Imperfections in Humanity in Creation33:30 – Axiom 5 and Analogical Speech37:57 – Wrong Ways of Analogical Speech Leads to Wrong Thinking on the Doctrine of God42:11 – Axioms 6, 7, & 8: God's Attributes50:13 – What Attribute Is Hardest to Grasp for Students?55:54 – Axioms 9 & 10: Our God is Triune59:42 – God's Attributes Only Make Sense With His Triune Nature1:06:10 – Outro Resources to Click“Axioms of Theology Proper: Guiding Lights for the Doctrine of God” – Kyle Claunch“God the Father: Namesake of all Fatherhood” – Kyle Claunch“Why are We Trinitarian, and Why Does it Matter?” – Kyle ClaunchTheme of the Month: The God Who Is There: Contemplating the Doctrine of GodGive to Support the Work Books to ReadSumma Theologiae (Vol. 1) – Thomas AquinasDictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology, 2nd ed. – Richard A. MullerProslogion in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works – ed. Brian Davies and G.R. EvansInstitutes of Eclenctic Theology – Francis Turretin ed. James T. Dennison, Jr.Orations – Gregory of Nazianzus
HOUR 2- Johnny Doesn't Know, Ally's Egg Retrieval and MORE full 2020 Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:41:00 +0000 98LdHSOVDYsNwPoS6AvNzvEpBycZiZW9 society & culture Klein/Ally Show: The Podcast society & culture HOUR 2- Johnny Doesn't Know, Ally's Egg Retrieval and MORE Klein.Ally.Show on KROQ is more than just a "dynamic, irreverent morning radio show that mixes humor, pop culture, and unpredictable conversation with a heavy dose of realness." (but thanks for that quote anyway). Hosted by Klein, Ally, and a cast of weirdos (both on the team and from their audience), the show is known for its raw, offbeat style, offering a mix of sarcastic banter, candid interviews, and an unfiltered take on everything from culture to the chaos of everyday life. With a loyal, engaged fanbase and an addiction for pushing boundaries, the show delivers the perfect blend of humor and insight, all while keeping things fun, fresh, and sometimes a little bit illegal. 2024 © 2021 Audacy, Inc. Society & Culture False https://player.amperwavepodcasting
Ally's Egg Retrieval full 683 Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:24:00 +0000 3lb00HkXYCzU0INdqlp9Hi5aEuvJedur society & culture Klein/Ally Show: The Podcast society & culture Ally's Egg Retrieval Klein.Ally.Show on KROQ is more than just a "dynamic, irreverent morning radio show that mixes humor, pop culture, and unpredictable conversation with a heavy dose of realness." (but thanks for that quote anyway). Hosted by Klein, Ally, and a cast of weirdos (both on the team and from their audience), the show is known for its raw, offbeat style, offering a mix of sarcastic banter, candid interviews, and an unfiltered take on everything from culture to the chaos of everyday life. With a loyal, engaged fanbase and an addiction for pushing boundaries, the show delivers the perfect blend of humor and insight, all while keeping things fun, fresh, and sometimes a little bit illegal. 2024 © 2021 Audacy, Inc. Society & Culture False https://player.amperwavepodcasting.com?feed-link=https%3A%2F%2Frss.amper
Meg, Hal and Symphony discuss episode 199 of Welcome to Night Vale: Guidelines for Retrieval. They chat about hope, trauma and frozen yogurt toppings. They are joined by Night Vale writer Brie Williams for a conversation about the funniest thing you can put in an eye patch, a go to diner order, recurring nightmares and how life experiences inspired this episode. Find out more about calzones on our Patreon. www.patreon.com/goodmorningnightvale Follow us on Facebook. Good Morning Night Vale is a production of Night Vale Presents Hosted by Symphony Sanders, Hal Lublin, and Meg Bashwiner Produced by Meg Bashwiner Edited by Felicia Dominguez Mixed by Vincent Cacchione Theme Music by Disparition Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jake and Michael discuss all the latest Laravel releases, tutorials, and happenings in the community.Show linkshasSole() Collection Method in Laravel 12.49.0hasMany() Collection Method in Laravel 12.50.0Filament v5.2.0 Adds a Callout ComponentClawdbot Rebrands to Moltbot After Trademark Request From AnthropicInstall Laravel Package Guidelines and Skills in BoostFuse for Laravel: A Circuit Breaker Package for Queue JobsNativePHP for Mobile Is Now FreeManage PostgreSQL Databases Directly in VS Code with Microsoft's ExtensionLivewire 4 and Blade Improvements in Laravel VS Code Extension v1.5.0Statamic 6 Is Officially ReleasedLaravel Announces Official AI SDK for Building AI-Powered AppsClaude Opus 4.6 adds adaptive thinking, 128K output, compaction API, and moreOpenAI Releases GPT-5.3-Codex, a New Codex Model for Agent-Style DevelopmentLaravel Live UK returns to London on June 18-19, 2026Bagisto Visual: Theme Framework with Visual Editor for Laravel E-commerceGenerate Complete Application Modules with a Single Command using Laravel TurboMakerEncrypt Files in Laravel with AES-256-GCM and Memory-Efficient StreamingMask Sensitive Eloquent Attributes on Retrieval in LaravelLaravel Related Content: Semantic Relationships Using pgvector
How should we read the Reformed tradition for our contemporary context? In the practice of theological retrieval, what role do continuity and development play? In this week's episode, we're featuring a lecture recently delivered by Dr. Drew Martin here at RTS Washington addressing these questions. Dr. Martin is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Covenant Seminary and an experienced pastor and church planter. His scholarship focuses on the Reformed Orthodox period and theological developments since that time. His most recent book is Grimké on the Christian Life: Christian Vitality for the Church and World. Want to continue this conversation in the classroom? Explore our degree programs and find one that's right for you: www.rts.edu/washington. Email admissions.washington@rts.edu to get started. Follow us on Instagram: www.instagram.com/rts.washington/ Facebook: www.facebook.com/RTSWashingtonDC X: x.com/rtswashington
This week: UK Revival Claims Questioned: A new Pew Research study challenges recent claims of spiritual revival among young adults in the UK, suggesting that opt-in surveys may be misleading and random sampling shows Christian identification is actually declining, not increasing.Social Media Child Safety: Social media giants face a landmark legal case regarding child safety, raising important questions about platform accountability and the protection of minors online.Posthumous Sperm Retrieval Ethics: Families of slain Israeli soldiers in Gaza are retrieving sperm from their bodies for posthumous reproduction, sparking complex ethical discussions about consent, grief, and reproductive technology.Harry Potter Generation Politics: The Harry Potter generation is being called to rethink their politics as they mature into adulthood.Keeping Marriage Strong Forever: Listener Q&A addresses keeping marriages strong over decades with advice to never stop working on your relationship and consider having more children.Biblical Response to Tragedy: A nurse in Minnesota asks how to biblically process the tragic events surrounding ICE enforcement, including the death of Alex Pretti. ==========Think Biblically: Conversations on Faith and Culture is a podcast from Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, which offers degrees both online and on campus in Southern California. Find all episodes of Think Biblically at: https://www.biola.edu/think-biblically. To submit comments, ask questions, or make suggestions on issues you'd like us to cover or guests you'd like us to have on the podcast, email us at thinkbiblically@biola.edu.
the girlies are sharing big updates on taryn's fourth egg retrieval, discuss the pits of capitalism, and take listener calls. send us your gossip stories or ask for advice!call the PP hotline 323-577-8857 or email us at stayinguppod@gmail.comJoin our Patreon: http://patreon.com/StayingUpJoin our Discord: https://discord.gg/am5t7kZTdRCam's shopmy https://shopmy.us/cammiescottTar's shopmy https://shopmy.us/tarynarnoldscottListen: https://stayingup.lnk.to/listenFollow: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stayinguppodFollow Cam: https://www.instagram.com/cammiescott/Follow Tar: https://www.instagram.com/thetarynarnold/Contact for business inquires only:maddy@mpactgroupla.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode of The UpWords Podcast, host John Terrill sits down with theologians David Buschart and Ryan Tafilowski, co-authors of Worth Doing: Fallenness, Finitude, and Work in the Real World. Together, they explore a more universal theology of work that speaks to all professions—not just those with high agency or prestige.The conversation dives into:Why most faith-and-work discourse overlooks the realities of fallenness and finitude.How embracing our created limits can be liberating rather than frustrating.How gaining a theology of work that moves beyond only ideas of productivity or calling can help us in the trenches of our jobs.How a more robust theology of work can provide spiritual wisdom for navigating seasons of toil and unmet expectations.If you've ever wondered how your daily labor—whether in the boardroom, classroom, or trades—fits into God's story, this episode offers clarity and hope.About our guests:W. David Buschart (PhD, Drew University) is professor of theology and historical studies at Denver Seminary. He is the author of Exploring Protestant Traditions and coauthor of Theology as Retrieval. He is a ruling elder and member of the theology committee of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.Ryan Tafilowski (PhD, Edinburgh) is an assistant professor of theology at Denver Seminary and the lead pastor of Foothills Fellowship Church in Littleton, Colorado. He is the coauthor, with Ross Chapman, of Faithful Work: In the Daily Grind with God and for Others. He previously served as theologian-in-residence for the Denver Institute for Faith and Work.Resources & Links:
James Fox enters the mind meld! The new version of James' film, Moment of Contact: https://geni.us/MOC_NewRevelations The Varginha UFO case, often called “Brazil's Roswell” just keeps getting more novel. The newly updated version of James' film Moment of Contact, includes incredible new information and testimony from eye witnesses that needs to be seen t be believed.
David Grusch is back. Ina n interview with Megyn Kelly, Grusch spills the beans on Gen Clapper who appeared in Age of Disclosure. He says that Clapper knew more than what he lead on and managed the retrieval program. He also talks about the CIA and knows the many UAP secrets that the agency has. Kristian Harloff shares his thoughts. #uap #ufo #news #davidgrusch #alien Aliens #newsupdate
In this conversation, our guests discuss how retrieval practice can help all students learn, including those with ADHD and autism. For many teachers, this may challenge the assumption that retrieval practice only works for some learners. Instead, the discussion shows how, when used thoughtfully, retrieval practice can support diverse learning needs and help students build confidence, understanding, and long-term retention. Follow on TwitteR: | @smorrisey | @effortfuleduktr | @bamradionetwork | @jonHarper70bd @SciInTheMaking Blogs: Brain – Book – Buddy Reverse Engineering the Multiple Choice Question 5 Reasons I Begin My Class With Retrieval Practice Most Days Retrieval Is Communication. Blake Harvard is an AP Psychology teacher at a public high school in Alabama. He is in his 20th year of teaching. He is very interested in reading research and applying findings from cognitive psychology in the classroom to improve instruction and learning. Blake is the author of a new book: Do I have Your Attention: Understanding Memory Constraints and Maximizing Learning He is also the author of The Effortful Educator. A popular blog with over one million hits. Sean Morrisey is a 5th-grade teacher at Pinehurst Elementary School, located just outside of Buffalo, NY. He brings over 25 years of experience as an educator. Before becoming a classroom teacher, Sean worked as a school psychologist, a role that shaped his understanding of how children learn. For the past 18 years, he has taught 1st, 4th, and 5th grade, focusing on building strong foundations in literacy and language. Sean's work in vocabulary instruction has been highlighted on numerous literacy podcasts and featured in science of reading resources, including The Literacy 50 and Know Better, Do Better: Comprehension. His passion lies in integrating vocabulary seamlessly across the school day, helping students connect words to meaning in authentic and engaging ways. Sean is currently writing his own curriculum called the Word Mapping Project: Linking Sound, Spelling, and Meaning for Word Mastery. Marcie Samayoa is a 10th-year high school chemistry teacher that shares evidence-informed teaching strategies through her blog, Scientists in the Making. She connects cognitive science principles to classroom practices, inspiring both educators and students to deepen their understanding of science. Blog: www.scientistsinthemaking.com Substack: scientistsinthemaking.substack.com
the girls have worked really hard on being better as individuals and partners and today they reflect on those changes and how it has helped get them through the downs and downs of fertility treatments. and stay tuned for an absolutely unhinged pp story!Cam's shopmy https://shopmy.us/cammiescott/Tar's shopmy https://shopmy.us/tarynarnoldscottsend us your gossip stories or ask for advice!call the PP hotline 323-577-8857 or email us at stayinguppod@gmail.comJoin our Patreon: http://patreon.com/StayingUpJoin our Discord: https://discord.gg/am5t7kZTdR Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Post-liberalism has escaped the internet and entered mainstream politics—but what does it actually mean? Derek, James, and Alastair map three competing visions: nostalgic return to pre-modern order, retrieval of Christian liberalism, or genuine revolution forward. Retry
How quickly can the U.S. military spring into action to recover - then cover up - the crash of exotic technology that falls from the sky? The answer is - pretty damned fast. An example of this just played out in, of all places, the outskirts of Area 51, the top-secret Air Force facility in the Nevada desert. On September 23rd, an unknown aerial object slammed into the desert floor on public land a few miles outside the boundary of Area 51. Within minutes, the entire base sprang into action, a large swath of public land was cordoned off by armed military security teams, and a cryptic cover story was concocted. In this episode of WEAPONIZED, Jeremy and George share some of the details of the crash retrieval operation and how civilian researchers in Nevada were able to collect enough information to know that the Air Force explanation was full of holes - containing not only outright falsehoods but also a healthy smattering of disinformation. Also discussed in this episode: the emergence of Grokipedia - a more informative and much more balanced source of information than its much-maligned alternative, Wikipedia, which has become notorious for its rigged manipulation of all UFO-related content. GOT A TIP? Reach out to us at WeaponizedPodcast@Proton.me ••• Watch Corbell's six-part UFO docuseries titled UFO REVOLUTION on TUBI here : https://tubitv.com/series/300002259/tmz-presents-ufo-revolution/season-2 Watch Knapp's six-part UFO docuseries titled INVESTIGATION ALIEN on NETFLIX here : https://netflix.com/title/81674441 ••• You can now watch all of Corbell's movies for free on YouTube here : BOB LAZAR : AREA 51 & FLYING SAUCERS https://youtu.be/sZaE5rIavVA HUNT FOR THE SKINWALKER https://youtu.be/TczkJ6UAQ8A PATIENT SEVENTEEN https://youtu.be/gDVX0kRqXxE ••• For breaking news, follow Corbell & Knapp on all social media. Extras and bonuses from the episode can be found at WeaponizedPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Matt sits down with Tori Halford to talk about her raw and emotional IVF journey — from breaking off her engagement to facing infertility, miscarriage, and an emergency surgery after egg retrieval. Tori opens up about what IVF really costs (emotionally and financially), how she found strength through it all, and the realities of navigating infertility in the public eye. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp, Wildgrain, Audible, Revolve & Nutrafol BetterHelp: Our listeners get 10% off their first month at http://BetterHelp.com/unplannedpodcast #ad Wildgrain: Wildgrain is offering our listeners $30 off the first box - PLUS free Croissants in every box - when you go to http://wildgrain.com/UNPLANNED to start your subscription. Audible: Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day trial at http://audible.com/unplanned Revolve: Shop at http://revolve.com/unplanned and use code UNPLANNED for 15% off your first order. #REVOLVEpartner Nutrafol: Find out why Nutrafol is the best-selling hair growth supplement brand at https://Nutrafol.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices