In a video clip, Palmer Luckey says he would build a startup using oxytocin to strengthen marriages and end divorce. He argues the chemical is well understood and unregulated, and that it could help couples stay together.
Palmer Luckey reveals the startup he'd build today: oxytocin doping to end divorce
"I would try to end the tragedy of divorce with oxytocin doping for marriage counseling."
"We understand mammal pair bonding pretty well. There's a lot of people who want to stay together. Most of the people who don't want to stay together should stay together, especially for their kids."
"And we can, if people think SSRIs are fine, which they're not, but if they were, then oxytocin doping to stay together is definitely fine."
"It's the mammal pair bonding chemical. There's things you can do to increase the uptake, and it's very well understood. Also, totally unregulated, which is great. Unregulated spaces are a lot easier to do. You can go buy a kilogram of oxytocin on Sigma Aldrich Chemical Supply right now, and if you do that, maybe you won't die alone."
"It's pure biology. It's used for women who don't bond with their kids, and now for women who don't bond with their husbands. It's also used for kids with various neurological issues, some kids with autism who struggle with pair bonding."
"The cool thing is it's a self-reinforcing loop. We understand that very well. Unlike most drugs, it doesn't form a chemical dependency. It actually unburdens you from a chemical dependency."
Shirish writes about the psychological toll of seeing a decade of learned expertise reduced to a prompt. The post is a brief reflection quoting Anthropic's announcement that Claude now works inside Google Docs, Sheets and Slides.
Claude now works inside Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, and those files also open inside Claude.
In Google Workspace, Claude sits in a sidebar next to your file, reads what you have open, and edits it in place. You can approve each edit before it lands.
Yishan replies to Palmer Luckey's oxytocin remarks with a brief joke titled as reinventing hugs from first principles. The post is lighthearted commentary with no substantive claims.
Palmer Luckey reveals the startup he'd build today: oxytocin doping to end divorce
"I would try to end the tragedy of divorce with oxytocin doping for marriage counseling."
"We understand mammal pair bonding pretty well. There's a lot of people who want to stay together. Most of the people who don't want to stay together should stay together, especially for their kids."
"And we can, if people think SSRIs are fine, which they're not, but if they were, then oxytocin doping to stay together is definitely fine."
"It's the mammal pair bonding chemical. There's things you can do to increase the …
Bret Taylor shares a celebration of Manat, who went from intern to engineer building voice products, after she demoed Tandem Voice and Persona Studio at a keynote, posing with her parents.
Manat started as an intern, and now she's an engineer building our voice products. She did an amazing demo of Tandem Voice and Persona Studio today. Here we are celebrating with her parents after the keynote.
Claire Vo says many mothers, including those in tech, are slow to adopt AI due to privacy, environmental and workplace concerns. She argues the market is missing agents that manage family logistics like calendars, bills and errands rather than one-off tasks.
As one of the most tagged AI mother of bots in this thread let me tell you a secret: a lot of moms (even moms in tech) are the slowest f-ing adopters of AI I know.
I’m in a bunch of random mom groups and I hear - I won’t connect my email cal whatever - water / data centers etc - get all AI out of my kids schools - here is my 10000 word prompt for chat - I hate AI in my job, burn out, get me out of tech
If you get off X and into the real world, the adoption curve is slow. My YT channel is over 90% men. Women + moms are being left behind, and it’s not because someone hasn’t designed the right agent yet.
Silicon Valley keeps building me a husband when what I really want is a wife lol
I don't want an agent that only does one-off, random tasks that are nice but not life-changing: booking flights, making dinner reservations, or buying tickets
I want an AI wife who knows what’s on the family calendar, remembers there’s a birthday party Saturday and we haven’t bought a gift then sends me options, realizes we’re almost out of diapers and buys them, knows which bills are coming up, remembers someone needs a dentist appointment and books it, figures out what the hell we’re eating all week and what w…
Mitchell Hashimoto argues that many highly successful people across industries are very smart, even when they present themselves as unserious, and reacts to a clip of Ben Affleck discussing his machine learning knowledge.
An uncomfortable truth for a lot of people is that a lot of the most successful people in any industry are wicked smart. We apply stereotypes based on the loudest people, but its not representative of norms. Most are crazy smart and got to where they are because of it.
I grew up in LA, one of my parents was a TV producer, my wife was an actor, many friends "in the industry." I've been constantly surrounded by it, and some of the stupidest seeming people (cause its their bit) are actually insanely smart and strategic in private. It sometimes is just beneficial for various reasons to... not show that side of you.
My favorite anecdote was when a friend (a model) was dating a phD in physics and a very rude person made some off the cuff degrading comment to model friend about it without realizing model friend has their own phD in math lol. You wouldn't know from their instagram though!
For the quoted video, I don't know Ben Affleck. I don't know how deep his knowledge goes. He's almost certainly not going to be more knowledgable than someone who professionally does this area of work full time, but he also to me on the surface sounds like someone who knows a LOT more than the average person and possibly even the average software engineer (on this topic).
Anyways, this applies to tech too. I see it constantly.
Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models
“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.
“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do…
Aakash Gupta reports that the FBI arrested Edward Frith after Epic Games reviewed a reported voice clip of his threat and sent it to authorities, and explains how Fortnite's rolling five-minute voice buffer and reporting system work.
The FBI just arrested a Fortnite player using a recording the game made of his own voice. He had no idea his headset was taping him. Almost nobody playing does.
Edward Frith, 29, had logged into his account over 1,700 times. In September he told another player that if the FBI showed up at his door he'd shoot them too. Someone in the lobby pressed the report button. Epic reviewed the clip, sent it to the FBI on September 20, and agents arrested him within days.
The design of the system is the clever part.
Recording every player would be a privacy disaster and a storage bill nobody wants. So Epic built voice reporting in 2023 to work like a flight recorder. The audio buffer lives on your own device, overwrites itself every five minutes, and never leaves your machine unless another player in the match reports it. The moment someone does, the clip gets packaged and sent to Epic's safety team with the speakers tagged.
He said it to one stranger in a lobby. That stranger had a button that turns the last five minutes into a federal exhibit.
I was a producer on Fortnite, and this is the part people outside the building never see. Threats of real-world violence got treated with the same urgency as a revenue outage. The game is full of kids, and Epic acts like it.
Fortnite is actually the conservative version of this. It still requires a human to press the button. Call of Duty has run AI moderation directly on live voice chat since 2023, no report needed. Every major platform with a microphone is converging on the same architecture.
The era where anything said into a gaming headset stayed in the lobby is ending one match at a time.
A commentary account posts a video and quote-post praising Noah Smith in a heated online argument with a commentator, and criticizes left-leaning Twitter reaction to Ezra Klein's zoning remarks. The content is personal political commentary with no technology news.
.@L0m3z sputtering, red-faced, pleading w/ Noah Smith that he's only bullying Indian kids to HELP them integrate. Noah's the wrong guy to try this kind of argument on. It’s like trying to bullshit about wine to a dog. He calls @l0m3z a Pakistani. @L0m3z is left stunned. He's been bodied. Noah Smith is not the hero we deserve, but he is the hero we need.
Noah Smith's power is his dumb guy confidence. The left is a nest of vipers waiting to pounce on anyone who expresses a positive stand on anything. Ezra Klein meekly suggests relaxing zoning rules on setbacks and lefty twitter reacts like he punched a pregnant woman in the stomach. In such an environment, it is the guileless moron who attains the status of sage. Because he just blithely says stuff. youtube.com/watch?v=x-QBwwiselI
Pieter Levels says he owns property in scarce coastal and mountain areas and plans to keep buying there, reflecting a thesis that people with money will move to the nicest places once AI makes work pointless. He is quoting a post by IterIntellectus making the same claim.
Aakash Gupta explains that Shazam's 2002 system, invented by Stanford PhD Avery Wang, used spectrogram peaks, constellation maps and hash lookups instead of AI, and was published openly in 2003. Apple acquired the company in 2018.
Shazam could name any song back in 2002, on flip phones, with zero AI. You dialed the number 2580, held your phone up to the speaker, and hung up. 15 seconds later, a text came back with the song name. That same core trick still runs the app today.
The inventor was Avery Wang, a Stanford PhD in audio signal processing. His problem was brutal. Match a short clip recorded on a 2002 cell phone mic, in a noisy bar, against a database of a million songs, in seconds, over a phone call.
His solution treated music as geometry instead of sound.
The algorithm converts audio into a spectrogram, a picture of the song, then throws almost all of it away. It keeps only the peaks, the loudest frequency points at each moment in time. Bar chatter and blown-out speakers can wreck most of a recording. The peaks survive. Shazam only ever needed the peaks.
Those surviving points form what Wang called a constellation map, because it looks like a star field. Pairs of peaks get converted into hash numbers, and identifying a song becomes a dictionary lookup rather than an audio comparison. That made it fast enough to search a million tracks on 2002 hardware.
Wang published the full method openly in 2003 in a paper called "An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm." Anyone could read exactly how the magic worked. The moat was the database and the deals with carriers, never the secret.
Apple bought the company in 2018 for a reported $400 million. People have tagged over 100 billion songs since the very first one, Jeepster by T. Rex, during the beta in April 2002.
One deterministic signal-processing trick, written before most people had heard the phrase machine learning, and it's still so good that in 2026 everyone assumes it must be AI.
Aakash Gupta describes how New Rome, Ohio, and Macks Creek, Missouri, depended on speeding fines for most of their budgets, leading to dissolution in Ohio and bankruptcy in Missouri. Missouri subsequently capped ticket revenue at 20% of city budgets.
Ohio once dissolved an entire town because its main business was writing speeding tickets.
New Rome had 60 residents and a 14-officer police force. One cop for every four people in town. They collected around $400,000 a year in fines, 92% of the village budget, mostly by working a stretch of road where the speed limit dropped from 45 to 35.
A state audit then found the village was spending 82% of that budget on the police force. The town's only real industry was funding the thing that funded the town. In 2004 a judge ruled New Rome had effectively dissolved itself through corruption and erased it from the map. Its land got absorbed into the neighboring township.
Missouri ran the same experiment with Macks Creek, population 272, sitting on the highway to Lake of the Ozarks. The town wrote 2,900 tickets a year. Eight a day, almost all tourists who would never drive back to fight them. More than 75% of town revenue came from fines.
Then an officer there pulled over a state legislator. He went back to the capitol and passed a law capping how much of a city's budget can come from traffic tickets. Macks Creek lost its revenue stream, went bankrupt, laid off its entire police force, and disincorporated. The IRS seized the town's bank account.
Speed traps cluster wherever a highway full of out-of-towners meets a sudden limit drop in a state that lets the town keep the money. Missouri now caps ticket revenue at 20% of a city's budget. Ohio had to pass a law aimed at one specific village.
A speeding ticket heatmap doubles as a map of who's allowed to keep the fine money.
Deedy outlines how Shazam extracts high-amplitude spectrogram peaks, hashes them with timestamp and track ID, and performs recognition via a hash table lookup. He notes that his college CS class built a version and recommends the original paper.
The serious answer to how Shazam worked is it took the peaks of a spectrogram of short clips of every song, find the peaks from the highest amplitude bits, hash it with the value being (time stamp, track id) and then the actual recognition is a hashtable lookup.
We did this for a college CS project. The original paper is fantastic:
Aakash Gupta shares a formula for valuing private equity grants by discounting quoted equity by payout probability and years to liquidity. He compares a $400K Google grant to a $400K OpenAI grant, estimating the latter at about $242K.
A $400K grant from OpenAI is worth about $242K today.
Same number on the offer letter. You can sell Google stock the day it vests. OpenAI is private, so you sell only when the company runs a tender.
Here's the formula I use for any private grant:
Value = Quoted equity × P(payout) ÷ 1.15^years to liquidity
The 15% is your discount for money you can't touch. For a late-stage company with real revenue and a tender history, P(payout) is 70-90%.
OpenAI, 2 years to a sale at 80% odds: $400K × 0.8 ÷ 1.15² = ~$242K. 1 year at 90%: ~$313K. 3 years at 70%: ~$184K.
Earlier stage gets brutal. A $400K grant at a Series C with an IPO 5 years out at 40% odds: $400K × 0.4 ÷ 1.15^5 = ~$80K.
The formula gives no credit for growth past today's price, and OpenAI has had a lot of it: $157B to $852B in 17 months. So treat the number as your floor.
Compare offers on what the equity is worth today. Then negotiate the gap in base and sign-on.
Sarah Cone calls a post by Tim Denning "all really good advice," with Denning's reflection at age 38 on maturity, hardship and perspective aimed at people in their 20s and 30s.
I'm 38. If You're in Your 20's or 30's, Read This. — Getting old sucks. The one positive is that as we age, we mature. That’s been the case for me. Not much fazes me anymore. I’ve been part of so much drama – personal bankruptcies, homeless friends, my
Buzz shares a quoted post by @devoncnp arguing that wealth is a learnable skill and that people seeing large incomes online should recognize this. The post praises the piece as more useful than typical wealth content.
Your Entire Life Changes When You Realize Getting Rich Is A Skill Issue — You're scrolling on the internet and you see these people making a f*ckton of money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, like it's nothing. You hear them say, "Yeah 30K? I make that in a day."
Grant Miller urges sellers to read a quoted Tim Denning essay on articulating a personal story, arguing that storytelling persuades more effectively than direct selling. The post is a short recommendation with no added data.
How to articulate your story like the top 0.01% — Most people are forgettable. And they don’t even realize it. On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a big problem. As you get older, though, it becomes catastrophic. I experienced it firsthand. I
Aakash Gupta analyzes why Peacock's animated Ted series is a cost-efficient format, contrasting the expensive motion-capture live-action Ted films and series with animation's flat costs, ageless characters and lower voice-session demands.
Fox passed on Ted because Seth MacFarlane wanted a $65 million budget and they thought that was too much for a first-time director. Universal said yes, the movie made $549 million, and 14 years later they're launching the fourth product built on that bear.
The interesting part is the format choice. Ted's whole gag in 2012 was a photoreal teddy bear standing in the real world. MacFarlane performed him in a motion capture suit, Wahlberg acted his scenes against empty air, and every frame with the bear ran through a VFX pipeline. The live-action Peacock series carried that same cost structure and still broke the record as Peacock's most-watched original.
Animation deletes that cost entirely.
Drawn, Ted costs the same as every human on screen. The A-list cast trades on-set shooting schedules for voice booth sessions they can knock out between other projects. Drawings never age either, which is why Family Guy has been running since 1999 with the same characters. MacFarlane even brought in Rough Draft, the studio behind Futurama, to make it.
In 2012, Ted was the most expensive character in his own movie. Animated, he's the cheapest.
This is the endgame for every hit franchise. Live action proves the demand, then the IP migrates to the one format that can run for 20 years at flat cost. Peacock just turned its biggest original into a show that never has to end.
Aakash Gupta reflects on 2004, when a camcorder recording had a single private destination, contrasting it with today's teenagers who perform for many audiences at once. He uses the frame to examine how youth behavior has changed.
2004 was the last year an American teenager could goof off in a school hallway with zero chance a stranger would ever see it.
Facebook had launched that February, locked to Harvard students. YouTube was still a year away. The first iPhone was three years out, and nobody carried a camera that talked to the internet.
So when a camcorder came out, kids hammed for it, because the tape had exactly one destination. A drawer in somebody's parents' house. Maybe a screening at graduation, then twenty years of dust.
Watch the body language with that in mind. Nobody is checking how they read to an invisible audience. Nobody resets their face between takes. The camera was a toy, not a distribution channel.
Researchers have a name for what came after, context collapse. Every audience you've ever had, all watching the same clip at once. Teenagers now run that calculation before they move. The kids on this tape never learned it, and you can see the difference in a single frame.
Low-rise jeans come back every few years. A camera with nothing behind it never will.
Harvard Business Review shares a link and post suggesting that employees who feel they are underperforming probably are, and offering advice. The linked 2019 article lists four reasons talented employees fail to reach their potential.
Harvard Business Review promotes a 2023 article arguing that candidates should prepare for common interview questions about strengths and weaknesses, since preparation can determine whether they advance.
Shreyas Doshi announces a free playlist of 23 candid videos answering career questions, available through Maven. The post links to his Product Sense course page offering the resources.
Announcing a brand new private resource: this is a playlist of 23 super candid videos of mine, with answers to your real career questions & dilemmas—no fluff, no BS, no nonsense.
Harvard Business Review promotes a Q&A with University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth on how situations shape high achievers, how to diagnose a bad work situation, and how organizations can bring out the best in people.
While many high achievers rely on positive internal attributes like intelligence, passion, and perseverance, research shows that external factors also play a big role in their success.
In this Q&A with University of Pennsylvania professor Angela Duckworth, she explains why leaders' situations often matter as much as their mindsets and behaviors. She also offers advice on how to diagnose and change a bad work situation, and outlines what managers and organizations can do to create workplaces that bring out the best in their people.
Aakash Gupta writes that only 24% of PM candidates link a GitHub, and hiring managers at top AI companies check it. He cites Shubham Saboo's move from Dev Rel to a senior AI PM role at Google and urges building one small project weekly.
All PM candidates have resumes. Only 24% have a GitHub.
When I interviewed 10+ AI PM leaders at top companies, the hiring managers told me the same thing: if there's a GitHub linked, they will check it.
Shubham Saboo went from Dev Rel to senior AI PM at Google in 3 months. Google reached out because of his GitHub, and because of the way he shared his work on X.
You don't need one his size. PMs I placed at OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta AI all had GitHubs. None of them had 76K-star repos.
Build one small thing a week. A new prompt in your prompt library counts.
Prukalpa responds to a Danielle Morrill post about reclaiming time from AI, arguing that keeping pace with fast-moving AI is time-consuming and that people should automate routine work to free time for learning and building.
I don’t know anyone who’s AI pilled right now for whom this is true. The pace of change is so high right now that keeping up with being AI pilled is pretty time consuming. Feels like this only way to keep up with AI is to use AI to automate mundane work and then use the free time to learn/ build.
the highest status move isn’t to merely be AI-pilled, it’s to reclaim massive amounts of time and mental burden and then go have a rich IRL life with relationships, hobbies, complexity and growth
Sheel Mohnot describes a 1912 Piedmont house kept in one family and reflects on how past homes reflected labor and values. He speculates on how robots could reshape future home layouts and notes the low property tax.
We’re looking at a house for sale in Piedmont that has been in the same family since it was built in 1912. The seller just died at 101, having lived there ~her entire life, and it has only been updated minimally.
Good glimpse into how the relatively wealthy used to live, like: only 1 bathroom in a 4,000 sqft house (1st floor bathroom added later)… people didn’t start bathing daily until the 60s
Floor plans are a good map of what people valued at the time based on how they allocated space: Some of the bedrooms have their own sitting rooms, there’s a staircase for servants, and the kitchen is relatively small and tucked away because it was a workspace for staff, not the center of family life like today
I wonder how this changes in the future with robots in the household- maybe they get their own room for charging, maybe kitchens become smaller or hidden again as robots do more cooking, laundry rooms become automated utility spaces rather than rooms for humans, and storage could get denser because robots can retrieve things for us… or maybe we build bigger homes as maintenance and labor costs go down. Fun to think about.
Another artifact of staying in the same family for 114 years: the ad valorem property tax is only ~$1,350/year. If we buy and renovate, we’ll pay $50k/yr! This sale will be very lucrative for the city.
Danielle Morrill argues that the highest-status response to AI is not being AI-pilled but reclaiming time and mental energy to build rich offline lives of relationships, hobbies and personal growth.
the highest status move isn’t to merely be AI-pilled, it’s to reclaim massive amounts of time and mental burden and then go have a rich IRL life with relationships, hobbies, complexity and growth
A traveler describes a 77-year-old passenger who spent the flight developing a vertical farming business plan with ChatGPT and respectfully calling the AI "sir." The post is a lighthearted anecdote with photos.
A video post highlights Ajay Adarshan, identified as a Texas state high school powerlifting champion. The post contains no further details beyond the video.
David Heinemeier Hansson argues that programmers in most trouble from AI competition are those who insist the world has not changed from last year. He concludes that developers must embrace the paradigm shift or perish.
The only programmers who are really in trouble with the competition from artificial intelligence are the ones who insist the world today isn't all that different from the one we lived in last year.
Sheel Mohnot shares that Austin is roughly as Democratic-leaning as Los Angeles and bluer than New York City, quoting a ranking of America's 30 bluest metro areas. The post is a short, offhand observation.
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