Learn @learn

Twelve people have walked on the Moon. All twelve were Americans.

By March 1944, one American factory was finishing a B-24 bomber every 63 minutes.

GPS only works because engineers correct for Einstein. Satellite clocks run 38 microseconds a day fast. Left uncorrected, your location would drift about 6 miles every day.

Be VERY careful who you let on your cap table

Isaiah Taylor - making nuclear reactors @isaiah_p_taylor

a day ago

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The Empire State Building was built in 410 days.

A piece of the Wright brothers' first airplane has been to the Moon. Another piece has flown on Mars.

The Wright brothers' first flight covered 120 feet. That is shorter than the wingspan of a Boeing 747.

The computer that guided Apollo 11 to the Moon had about 4 kilobytes of RAM.

In 1942, an American shipyard built a cargo ship in 4 days, 15 hours and 29 minutes.

The Wright brothers first flew in December 1903. Americans walked on the Moon in July 1969. Less than 66 years apart.

People clearly prefer Grok Bot to Dots.

@elonmusk @bot @SpaceX Me and @bot should collab

TIL we no longer use the term "Artificial sweetener" because consumers strongly dislike the word artificial

Soleio @soleio

6 days ago

Remember: “Artificial sweetener” was abandoned as a marketing term for a reason

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@NathanLands 👀

Good question

Nathan Lands @NathanLands

a week ago

I own @learn. What should I do with it?

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People seem to be siding with Factory. It's common sense really. You don't hire a board observer from your main competitor and act like it never crossed your mind.

We are terminating Chris Degnan for unethical conduct involving Cognition. The last few months have seen incredible progress in AI capabilities. San Francisco has flourished as new companies that solve new, more ambitious problems are finding great success. Generally, it is a wonderful time to be building. We at @FactoryAI have seen overwhelming interest in our model-agnostic coding agents and our software factory product. Our team has 10x’d in size, while our revenue has 100x’d year over year. This momentum has been unprecedented. A much larger competitor, Cognition (makers of Devin) has fallen behind us on the capabilities that matter most to customers: cost, quality, and security. Instead of competing in the market, Cognition engineers feigned interviews with us to pry information about our product. Not finding what they were looking for, Cognition has decided to throw their weight and money at people with direct knowledge of our most confidential plans. It feels as though ethics is being thrown out of the window in the AI era. People are willing to do anything, including exploiting privileged information and violating ethical boundaries. I think this is unique to our time, and I don’t think it’s right. Integrity still matters. Yesterday, I made the decision to immediately terminate Christopher Degnan’s roles as a Board Observer and Advisor to Factory, after over a year of service. Prior to this decision, Chris told me he had a casual conversation with an executive at Cognition AI. When I questioned his intentions, he reassured me that ethics aside, he had “made too much money” and was “too lazy to go work for Cognition,” which I trusted and believed. On Monday, Chris spent time advising the Factory team on a handful of confidential board-level matters. That evening, he called me to say that the conversation that was initially described as casual and one-off was actually formal and recurring. For weeks, while he sat in our board meetings and advised our leadership team, he was also confiding with executives of our largest competitor. Chris was subject to confidentiality obligations in connection with his work with Factory. We do not know the extent of the information he shared, but it puts his timely questions about our product roadmap and what the parity gap involves into a new light. It is sad to sever a relationship with someone who has been a trusted advisor - and even a close friend - for over a year. But Chris’s conduct is unacceptable to me. Trust in Board Membership is one of the sacred bonds in the Silicon Valley, one that helps the startup ecosystem thrive. With it comes an enormous responsibility. That trust was violated. Competition is good. I respect and in many cases admire our competitors. San Francisco is a beautiful, singular place where the bold and ambitious go to defy the norms and precedents of the past. But certain principles that must remain. Violating ethics to seek advantage turns what should be positive-sum into zero-sum. We all love technology. And we all love to compete. But we must hold ourselves to a higher standard. The future of software engineering comes with abundance that will impact every person on Earth. Building that future comes with immense responsibility. We must build and compete with integrity.

Wow. Insanely unethical behavior by a board observer. I’m proud of Matan. Most would be too scared to post something like this even when it’s the right thing to do. And, absolutely wild that Devin’s response is they don’t care about Factory’s info. How can that be possible? Factory is their main competitor in deals. And, why would you bring on a board observer from Factory and give them a senior role if you didn’t want their knowledge? The response feels so disingenuous.

Matan Grinberg @matanSF

a week ago

We are terminating Chris Degnan for unethical conduct involving Cognition. The last few months have seen incredible progress in AI capabilities. San Francisco has flourished as new companies that solve new, more ambitious problems are finding great success. Generally, it is a

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Never let VCs tell you conflicts don’t matter. They do. Here’s a story you’re going to want to read if you’re a founder. I had a call with a VC at Khosla about my startup few months back. Factory came up because I invested. I asked about their conflict w Cogniton. They said there is too much money in AI to care about conflicts. And then flat out told me how they judged the founding teams of Factory and Cognition. The way they talked about @matanSF @EnoReyes and @ScottWu46 was so dehumanizing. IQ, charisma, looks. It all came up. Like they were freakin characters in a game. Then they asked me a ton of questions about what I was building. Asked to see technical details created by my CTO whom previously architected the control plane used at America’s top supercomputers. So, was a really serious prototype. I sent the details. He ghosted me. Didn’t even acknowledge receipt. Then later I found out he backed a similar startup. I’m sure he shared our info with them. This is how unethical some VCs are acting. And founders normally never post this stuff for fear of being blacklisted. But, Vinod clearly crossed a line. Buckle up buddy.

Vinod Khosla @vkhosla

a week ago

You are a struggling second tier competitor that is more unethical and lying just because you have no decency or sense of proper behavior and shows your desperation. Straight out lying about if Chris being fired I thought would be below even you.

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@vkhosla 1) Factory is thriving 2) Matan is one if the most ethical and loyal people I’ve met in Silicon Valley 3) This is why founders care about VC’s with conflicts