Wang's appreciation post gives MSL and TBD a lot of credit for Meta's model progress. He does mention engineers, data and infrastructure, so it would be unfair to say the post credits researchers alone. But AAI isn't explicitly named.

AAI deserves explicit recognition when its work contributes to those models. The data work and engineering behind a model shouldn't disappear into the background while the research lab gets the named praise.

This matters to someone considering one of these teams, too. Who owns data quality? Who can push back on changing requirements? Who gets credit when a launch goes well?

A practical way to think through the data work is to sketch the training-data and reward choices for a real-time chatbot. That prompt is in Meta Interview Questions; it can help prepare technical questions to take into a team conversation. It doesn't establish how AAI is treated internally.

The concern goes beyond a thank-you post. If a team is expected to absorb shifting demands, unclear requirements and urgent delivery work, it should be treated as a partner. Being treated like a service desk while someone else gets the public celebration is a recipe for resentment.

Naming AAI and explaining its contribution would be a start. The working relationship would still need to back up the recognition.

How should leaders recognize the teams that supply the data and engineering behind these launches? And does public credit change anything if the working relationship still feels second-class?

LLM tech is a spam bot, it's not AI. You're all falling for a scam. So, it's not even the "AI bubble." It's a "fraud bubble."

I think people were far too certain Alexandr Wang would fail.

A lot of the argument seemed to reduce to credentials: an MIT dropout on one side, a tenured professor and "godfather of AI" on the other. Academic standing alone doesn't tell me who can lead a team and turn research into useful products.

Looking at the Muse Spark releases and the Muse launch, I'm more persuaded by Wang's ability to get work out the door than those early predictions allowed for.

For anyone considering an ML role at Meta, the credentials debate also raises a practical question: what can you demonstrate in an interview? Meta Interview Questions includes implementing multi-head attention from scratch, a concrete exercise for checking whether you can turn the theory into working code.

How much of that progress would you credit to his leadership, and how much to Meta's researchers, infrastructure and distribution? Have the releases changed your view, or do you think it's too early to judge his contribution?

What sort of skills/prior experiences are needed to become a Chief of Staff? What do you do as a Chief of Staff? The most common answer I hear is that they get exposure to senior management and observe how strategic decisions are made without actually having any say in these decision.

Is this just a glorified executive assistant title meant to attract ambitious generalists? What are also the exit opportunities? Are you expected to receive significant company equity due to your proximity to the leadership team?

Before my first trip to SF, I thought I'd go to events, meet people, get invited to smaller dinners, and somehow find my way into the startup community. It sounded quite straightforward in my head.

By the end of TechWeek, I'd attended 3–4 events and canceled around seven. Still figuring out which ones work for me.

The private dinner part was probably my biggest misconception. Meeting someone for ten minutes in a crowded room doesn't automatically create much closeness. A longer conversation where you actually get to know each other feels like a different starting point.

At public events, one thing that helped was knowing someone who knew other people there. Asking who they thought I should talk to saved a lot of random wandering and repeating my pitch.

I also thought I could fit four meetings into three hours, as if they were online calls. Then there's travel, someone is late, or a coffee turns into a long walk. In one rough version of the day, two meetings came to 4 hours 15 minutes. This one is on me.

Some of the people I met barely go to events but still made a surprising amount of time for a one-on-one conversation. It made me think more carefully about whose networking advice I'm following and whether their work looks anything like mine.

For people who've spent more time in the SF startup scene: how did the people you kept in touch with first enter your life?

I wrote a longer version of these first impressions here (my own article):

https://domelian.substack.com/p/learning-the-social-rules-of-san

Repair Café Silicon Valley (a non-profit) is holding our first-ever event at the Billy DeFrank LGBTQ+ Community Center this Sunday, October 18.

Bring your broken household items and our volunteer fixers will do their best to diagnose the problem and repair them when possible, for free! We can help with things like:

• Small appliances
• Electronics
• Clothing and textiles
• Other household items

No bike repairs at this event.

Where: Billy DeFrank LGBTQ+ Community Center, 938 The Alameda, San Jose
When: Sunday, October 18, 11:00 AM–3:00 PM
Cost: Free

Bring up to two items per household. Repairs are first come, first served and depend on the skills, tools, and time available.

Check-in is scheduled to close at 2:30 PM, or earlier depending on demand.

More details: repaircafesv.org

I was a fan of the old silicon valley dictionary before I moved to San Francisco.

Now that I am in SF, I decided to bring it back. :)

My favorite term is meat proxy.

What’s the most ridiculous Silicon Valley term you’ve heard?

The Detroit automaker has said the goal is to poach talent from high-paying Silicon Valley tech companies and elsewhere to speed progress on future-focused products such as software-defined vehicles, self-driving systems and electric cars — areas now dominated by competitors in China and U.S.-based startups.

TLDR: the best thing that Elizabeth Holmes could possibly do is to succeed , and actually pay restitution to her victims and get herself in a mental headspace where she could realize what happened to her and talk about it publicly and own up to it. There's more to this story even meets the eye.

So everyone wants to describe Elizabeth Holmes as a fraud in these monstrous terms, but I'm trying to figure out the ground truth of who she is. Somewhere deep underneath, there is a person: someone with an internal monologue, someone who probably has more information about who she actually is than any of us do.

To get to that ground truth, since she appears to be such an emotional chameleon, we have to look at where she came from. She was raised by parents who valued status above almost all else. They cared deeply about the family name. Elizabeth Holmes's great grandfather lost a fortune in the Fleischmann's Yeast debacle, which left the family lowered in status compared to where they used to be.

Elizabeth was raised in an environment shaped by a desire for status, a desire for money, and, much like Donald Trump, a desire to avoid failure. Failure was not an option for Donald Trump, and it wasn't an option for Elizabeth Holmes. Her father being fired from Enron (yes, he worked for Enron) made it all worse. So, she grew up with immense pressure to deliver a certain level of success to restore her family's name. When you're judging her, you should remember this, or at least ask yourself: is it fair to put all of this pressure on a young woman, or any child, for that matter?

This dichotomy is shown in The Dropout TV show in a scene where Elizabeth floats the idea to her mom of being a regular person and not being a CEO. Her mom could have extended her hand and offered her daughter an off ramp, but she didn't. Instead, she made it clear to Elizabeth that she needed to keep going.

So under this pressure, Elizabeth came up with her idea. Because she admired Steve Jobs, like many Americans do, she saw figures like Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg encouraging the youth to pursue their dreams and providing a roadmap. Elizabeth tried to follow that roadmap. She also hated having her blood drawn.

So, she started Theranos. She did this while already knowing Sunny Balwani, who entered her life when she was only 18. He imprinted upon her the idea of being tough and ruthless.

People sometimes ask me why I'm so interested in defending Elizabeth Holmes, and the answer is because I feel sorry for her. Even though I grew up low income, I know what it is to have immense pressure put on you. I raised myself out of poverty and into a comfortable middle class life almost entirely through force of personality and being self taught.

So, Elizabeth gets deeply into business with Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani. She's 18 when she meets him, and he's almost 40. I've worked for guys like Sunny. I've worked around people like Sunny, and I recognize what he is when I see him and understand how he operates.

Guys like Sunny care about power, money, and status. They often have a big chip on their shoulder, they have something to prove, and they don't care who they hurt along the way. I think Sunny, a mediocre software engineer, met Elizabeth Holmes and molded her into the monster she became. He took advantage of her dream and used it to place himself on a pedestal he would have never reached without her.

I've read the text messages, and you can see the way he dictates how she works, how she dresses, and how she manages her schedule. So, I don't know why it's so hard for people to believe that he had a tremendous, negative influence on her.

Elizabeth accuses Sunny of emotional abuse. He yelled, and he was aggressive, a dynamic he publicly displayed around employees at work. She said he was prone to rage, which is also well documented. She also accused him of sexual abuse, saying he forced himself upon her.

When you think about the dynamics of an almost 40 year old man who enters into a relationship with an 18 year old girl, it isn't hard for me to believe. Given his publicly displayed personality, his controlling ways, cultural influences, and other factors, it makes it very easy for me to believe that he actually did sexually abuse her, a young woman who was already a survivor of sexual assault.

So to summarize briefly, we have an impressionable, ambitious, driven young woman who enters into business with a man driven to succeed at all costs, who doesn't seem to care much about people. I think he lent the worst of himself to her and impressed it upon her personality. This is what the defense argued, and I believe them. Elizabeth was already feeling the pressure from her parents and from society, and then you add Sunny. Her parents seem a bit emotionally distant, like they weren't big on talking about feelings, so what outlet did she have?

All of this is to say that deep down, I believe there is a real Elizabeth Holmes. Perhaps it's the Elizabeth we see with Billy, the one where she appears happy, where she seems to be living somewhat of an authentic life. I've heard from people that Billy's not a good guy, and I've heard from others that he is. He's apparently a dreamer like her and has so far raised $3.5 million with his new blood testing company, one that Elizabeth no doubt has some influence over, further showing that she still hasn't given up on trying to make a positive difference and possibly redeem herself by creating something real.

I see things in her background that lead me to have some sympathy for her, not because she's an attractive woman, but because I see things through a particular lens based on my own perspective. There are plenty of people here to tear her down at every turn, and that's fine, that's their right. She committed fraud, she's a criminal, and she's convicted. She did things that are unconscionable, but the story is more than just the simplistic "she's an evil woman."

Elizabeth probably knows more than she's saying, and I believe the only way anyone is ever going to get that out of her is to understand how she became the person she was. It didn't just happen in a vacuum. I blame her parents, I blame Sunny, and I blame all the powerful people around her who were happy to trot her out on stage to sell this product.

And, of course, most of all, I blame Elizabeth. She's an adult. She hurt people. Fortunately for her, except for maybe one case, none of them died.

I have had opportunities in my life when I was younger, as a talk radio host, to interview people. I would love to interview Elizabeth, and I would start from a different place than most people. Over a long period of time, I would try to dig down to get to the truth underneath it all. I think by taking that approach, we are more likely to get the answers that many still seek.

Because I love a comeback story, and because I've determined for myself, as a person who grew up around hardcore gang members and drug dealers, she's not evil. She's misguided, she's deluded, she's possibly a sociopath, but she's not evil. I would love to see her do something productive and prove all the people wrong who always want to boil every issue down to its most simplistic terms. I detest and cannot stand the way the internet endlessly fosters a culture of outrage, simplicity, and zero nuance.

Life is nuanced. Life is gray. Good people do bad things, bad people do good things, and I'm sick and tired of the overly simplistic narratives that get created around people unfairly.

So in that way, I'm rooting for Elizabeth to do something good, to maybe make enough money to pay her victims back, which I highly encourage her to do. I don't know if she'll ever see this message, but if she or her people are reading: please tell Elizabeth you need to succeed. You need to do what you set out to do in some form or fashion, and you need to pay people back and make restitution. That will show that what I believe about you is true, that you're not evil. So that's what I urge Elizabeth Holmes to do.

Thanks for reading my dissertation. And in case you doubt me, in case you ask if I'm being real right now: I came from the streets, yo. I may wear a suit, but I came from the streets, and I'm always being real.

The title is more bravado than a plan. The question underneath it is whether engineers actually have more options now, or whether I'm looking for reasons to feel optimistic.

For the last few years it has felt like employers held most of the cards. I'd like to think that's changing, but being American doesn't make a job immune to outsourcing, automation or budget cuts, and a confident headline isn't evidence of a better market.

For people actively interviewing, what are you seeing: more responses, comparable compensation, shorter loops, or the same rough search?

Application autofill can cut the time spent re-entering your history while exploring options. The response rate and quality of the roles are the more useful reality check.

Setting the title aside, what concrete change would convince you that the market is improving? Firsthand experiences that contradict the optimism are welcome too.