AGENCY ENTERPRISE
Essays
- Alignment can be the “Military-Grade Engineering” of AI
- Key takeaways from our EA and alignment research surveys
- AE Studio and Nylas Aim to Accelerate Development Cycles and Lay the Foundation for Large Language Model Workflows and Solutions
- The 'Neglected Approaches' Approach: AE Studio's Alignment Agenda
- AI in the Brewery: How We Built a Beer with AI for Our Partners The Bruery
- What's Consciousness?
- We Donate 5% Of Our Profits - Could We Do More If We Didn't?
- Blockchain Technology in Crypto Winter
- Who Can Be A Founder?
- Getting S^&t Done
- Preserving the Core: Values in AI Development and Lessons from History
- The Timeless Way of Building a Company
- Classification Is A Good Thing (For Humans)
- Why You're Bad At Working
- Neglect
- The Best Idea Is Also The Most Popular Idea, And Often Not The Best Path
- What Can Humans Kill?
- Why Sales Estimates Are Unrealistic
- When Your Agency Is Gone, You Won't Even Notice
- Why do we treat employees like mercenaries and expect them to act like missionaries?
- Is It Ethical To Interrupt The Brain?
- All Hail Caelus - a novel by gpt-4 and melanie
- In A World That Improves Exponentially, Stop Fixating On Incremental Improvements
- Balls, Strikes, And Other KPIs
- New Technologies Are A Pain - And That's The Best Time To Work On Them
- How To Raise A Psychopath
- The Difference Between Scientific Progress and Better Software
- Trust The Process
- A Reinforcement Learning Paradigm Guaranteed to Achieve Human-Level AGI
- Large Language Model Misbehavior is Dangerous
- You're Buying Next Year's Company
- Was This Written By ChatGPT?
- Consciousness Is A Spectrum
- GPT >>> Your Job
- Why Scummy Businesses Fail
- GPT & The Wisdom Of The Crowd
- When To Write Is Harder Than What To Write
- Why Your Company Won’t Start High-upside projects
- Exploring the Intersection of Network Effects and Context-Specific Knowledge in the Digital Age
- Incomplete Thoughts
- Did you know that some people are goats?
- Nobody Knows Anything About Machine Learning Right Now
- Strange Art: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bots
- Why We Don't Communicate Well Anymore
- Limiting Yourself
- Decision Theory of Life and Death
- Client Relations
- AGI Is Probably What Will Kill You
- No Such Thing As Short-Term Value
- The Values of Increasing Agency
- Product Focused Design: Or, "How I Learned To Stop Tinkering and Ship"
- Optimism Is Rational
- BCI: Standards & Horses' Arses
- You Get What You Pay For
- Most Lives Haven't Been Lived Yet
- Labels Matter
- The Role of Rocks
- How Will You Die?
- BCI: Facts, Fiction, and Tom Cruise
- What Will Your Great-Grandchildren Think?
- F*&k You Money
- Old Bayesian Seasoning
- The best data scientists will never win a Kaggle competition
- How We Built and Sold a Startup
- Bugs and Candor
- What's Your Equity Worth?
- Victims of Vimeo
- The Tyranny of Percentiles
- Tomorrow: Future States of Mind
- BCI: Politically-Incorrect Game Theory
- Lies we tell children
- BCI: Cars, Statistics, and Neural Latents
- Essays, Now Rated "PG"
- BCI: Effective Altruism
- A Better Startup Equity Plan
- Paradise By the Dashboard Light: A Ballad of Agency Loss
- BCI: Winning the NLB Challenge was only the first step
- The Edge of Honesty: Who Must Answer Hard Questions?
- Why Do We Make Bad Decisions Despite the Data?
- Making Software Consulting Great for Developers
- Taking the Other Side of Every Argument
- Building the best model of brain activity: We're Leading The Neural Latents Benchmark Challenge
- Why Machine Learning Projects Fail
- Assess the Garden, not the Seeds: Planning for Multiple Failures
- Focus on Unpopular Problems
- When Scale Guarantees Failure
- Reclaiming My Life From Algorithms
- Settling Arguments With Baseline Expectations
- How to Disagree With Your Client and Do Right By Them
- Forest Admin vs React Admin
- Getting the Most from Your Agency
- AE's Effective Altruism in June 2021
- Developing in Windows 11 is Better Than You Think
- A short, useless blog post that just says we are the best developers in LA on Clutch, but hey we are and that's kinda cool
- Can the TV Shows You Watch Make You a Better Person?
- Is #LaserEyes Over? How We Got Big Names to Memeify Themselves
- Headless CMS vs. Legacy CMS
- Why Don't We Acknowledge How Astonishing Human Progress Is?
- In 2021, Work-Life Harmony is the New Work-Life Balance
- Plan Your Vacation Far in Advance for Greater Happiness
- How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans: A Conversation with The Startup Stack
- AE Studio Gives Back: Our May 2021 Charity Initiatives
- The 5 Love Languages of Clients
- Use This Library to Integrate Apple HealthKit with React Native
- Find Out Where You Can Fly Right Now
- Summon the MSN Gods to Fix Your Internet
- Zoom Fatigue & The Rise (and Fall) of Clubhouse
- Why We Hire People Who Don't Have College Degrees
- The #1 Reason Good Startups Fail—And How We Make Sure It Won't Happen To Us
- The Anatomy of a Great Startup
- How Our Slack App Got to 200K Users with No Marketing Whatsoever
- Turn Any Client Into Your Ideal Client
- How AE Studio is helping Point bring customized fitness recommendations to users with the help of Forest Admin
- Must-Read Books for Founders Who Want to Seem Like They Read Stuff
- Fixing your LinkedIn profile to get better job offers for developers (instead of annoying messages)
- I’m not a data scientist but I made a COVID mask detector with Google AutoML and React – Doctor Masky
- So you think you can code?
- Don't let people tell you DO's and DON'Ts for JavaScript, Git, React, Node (but here are some anyway)
- TypeScript Everything
- A non-technical guide to interviewing developers
- How to Level Up your Technical Interview Game
- Why A/B testing is bad for your startup
- 5 tips to talk to your users as a founder
- BREAKING NEWS: People like us on Clutch.co
- Should you hire a CTO for your startup?
- Draper Venture Network Helps its Members Meaningfully Connect
- 5 Examples of How New Technology Sucks, But Only at First
- Why It's Good To Talk To Ducks
- Why you should use TypeScript on the backend too
- Save a month of your life by using these keyboard shortcuts
- How to Keep your TypeScript Code Clean
- How we keep our code shining and uniform with TypeScript configurations and Prettier
- Ask
Alignment can be the “Military-Grade Engineering” of AI
Key takeaways from our EA and alignment research surveys
AE Studio and Nylas Aim to Accelerate Development Cycles and Lay the Foundation for Large Language Model Workflows and Solutions
The 'Neglected Approaches' Approach: AE Studio's Alignment Agenda
AI in the Brewery: How We Built a Beer with AI for Our Partners The Bruery
What's Consciousness?
We don't understand what consciousness is, but nonetheless, there is a prevailing sentiment that it is not the path to solving alignment. We disagree.
We Donate 5% Of Our Profits - Could We Do More If We Didn't?
Are the most effective charties the optimal allocation of our surplus capital?
Blockchain Technology in Crypto Winter
This too shall pass. We've ridden out similar storms before.
Who Can Be A Founder?
How many great ideas never become realities because their owner was never in a position to be a founder?
Getting S^&t Done
To produce as fast as the rest of society, one must use the latest technology. The boss doesn't need to demand it - life does it all by itself.
Preserving the Core: Values in AI Development and Lessons from History
Does exponential growth mean the loss of the fundamental nature of the thing growing?
The Timeless Way of Building a Company
Modern technology is awe-inspiring, but the strategies for building a successful business are timeless.
Classification Is A Good Thing (For Humans)
Human survival requires off-the-charts classification skills applied to oneself and others. Will AGI develop the same skill? Is this a problem?
Why You're Bad At Working
Some of the world's best "workers" are actually far worse at working than we think.
Neglect
Some ideas are prematurely discarded. Bayesian reasoning suggests this is a terrible error.
The Best Idea Is Also The Most Popular Idea, And Often Not The Best Path
"The problem with the best idea is not that it is necessarily the wrong approach, but rather, that it is almost certainly the most popular."
What Can Humans Kill?
If the algorithm is intelligent enough to perform knowledge work and potentially, to serve as a companion, wouldn't it also warrant some legal protections?
Why Sales Estimates Are Unrealistic
The passage of time is information. Why do we ignore it?
When Your Agency Is Gone, You Won't Even Notice
If AGI were controlling every aspect of your world, would you be aware of it? Are you aware of how technology manipulates you now?
Why do we treat employees like mercenaries and expect them to act like missionaries?
Are you a missionary or a mercenary? Are you working at a place where that distinction matters?
Is It Ethical To Interrupt The Brain?
Technology interrupting the brain is hardly new. But is it ethical? What if that interruption served your goals?
All Hail Caelus - a novel by gpt-4 and melanie
In A World That Improves Exponentially, Stop Fixating On Incremental Improvements
Why focus on incremental improvements when 10x is not nearly ambitious enough?
Balls, Strikes, And Other KPIs
It turns out that baseball teams, corporations, and those of us who don't want to become paperclips should all think deeply about the metrics we choose.
New Technologies Are A Pain - And That's The Best Time To Work On Them
The early days of any new technology are unglamorous and impractical. They are full of inefficient, silly use cases. And those are the greatest moments of all.
How To Raise A Psychopath
If you intended to do the unthinkable as a parent, how would you begin?
The Difference Between Scientific Progress and Better Software
Improved software, improved domain knowledge, the chicken, the egg, and exponential progress over time.
Trust The Process
For managers, venture capitalists, and fans of the Philadelphia 76ers, wisdom lies not in assessing outcomes, but rather, the process.
A Reinforcement Learning Paradigm Guaranteed to Achieve Human-Level AGI
We've figured out how to create human-level intelligence...just not quickly or cheaply.
Large Language Model Misbehavior is Dangerous
“Google it” is a legitimate way to settle an argument. Now, folks are asking ChatGPT increasingly nuanced questions. Are the answers safe for public consumption?
You're Buying Next Year's Company
Value is not what something has demonstrated, it is the potential upside that still remains.
Was This Written By ChatGPT?
Can you tell who wrote the article you're reading?
Consciousness Is A Spectrum
Don't ask if something is conscious. Ask "how conscious?"
GPT >>> Your Job
You think you're better at your job than an AI? So did chess grandmasters.
Why Scummy Businesses Fail
Trying to make a profit is not scummy. Hiding how you intend to do it is.
GPT & The Wisdom Of The Crowd
The wisdom of the crowd is valuable...if we choose the right crowd.
When To Write Is Harder Than What To Write
What's the most important element of comedy? ... ... ... timing!
Why Your Company Won’t Start High-upside projects
The best opportunities are often the ones with the lowest probability of success. This scares most companies away.
Exploring the Intersection of Network Effects and Context-Specific Knowledge in the Digital Age
The history of human learning is the history of context-specific knowledge. Is AGI context-specific?
Incomplete Thoughts
An interrupted thought is a lost opportunity - an idea that will never materialize in the same way again.
Did you know that some people are goats?
(An Allegorical Primer on Human Efforts at AI Alignment)
Nobody Knows Anything About Machine Learning Right Now
"..we are building algorithms we do not really understand to simulate a process of thinking and learning we do not really understand to help enrich an existence whose nature we do not really understand. "
Strange Art: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bots
Creativity, AI-generated art, and a few bots that might not save the world, but should at least deliver a few laughs.
Why We Don't Communicate Well Anymore
Once upon a time, human beings understood how to communicate with one another. Then technology arrived.
Limiting Yourself
Optimization often means maximizes the set of feasible options. Golden handcuffs are the antithesis of optionality and optimization.
Decision Theory of Life and Death
It's one thing to place a bet where in one case, you die. It is another to place a bet based upon the certainty that you will.
Client Relations
Keep calm, and carry on increasing your clients' agency.
AGI Is Probably What Will Kill You
While you're worrying about cancer, heart disease, and rush-hour traffic, your most likely cause of death remains.
No Such Thing As Short-Term Value
The Values of Increasing Agency
AE's vision is to increase human agency. That mission begins with our team.
Product Focused Design: Or, "How I Learned To Stop Tinkering and Ship"
The perfect is the enemy of the good. So either we'll ship imperfect software or we'll ship nothing at all!
Optimism Is Rational
We are living in the worst period in human history...except for all the ones before.
BCI: Standards & Horses' Arses
Modernity is predicated upon the width of equine gluteal muscles. Really. Standards matter.
You Get What You Pay For
A brief discussion of how to avoid being penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Most Lives Haven't Been Lived Yet
What if you lived your life, my life, everyone else's, and every human life that has ever been or ever will be?
Labels Matter
The names we assign define the narratives we debate. Choose wisely.
The Role of Rocks
We love rock and roll and the role of rocks. (We should probably find some dimes and some jukeboxes)
How Will You Die?
Even if you can stop aging, you'll still die. The only question is what will kill you.
BCI: Facts, Fiction, and Tom Cruise
The notion of brain computer interfaces is well-worn in literature and cinema. What happens when life imitates art?
What Will Your Great-Grandchildren Think?
What exactly is the legacy of the upper-management professionals of an era?
F*&k You Money
Why AE's equity plan is likely to help you reach F-U money...and why you still won't want to say "F-U."
Old Bayesian Seasoning
Simple conversations become nuanced and insightful with a sprinkling of conditional probability.
The best data scientists will never win a Kaggle competition
There's more to life (and data science) than winning Kaggle competitions.
How We Built and Sold a Startup
It turns out that agency-increasing technology is good for people and business alike.
Bugs and Candor
At some point, you're adding bugs faster than you can squash 'em.
What's Your Equity Worth?
Not all equity is created equal.
Victims of Vimeo
To all the victims of Vimeo's stunning, 10x price increases, we offer our condolences...and an alternative.
The Tyranny of Percentiles
The difference between a 99th percentile data scientist and a 99th percentile athlete is enormous.
Tomorrow: Future States of Mind
Memories are more than items hastily-written on a To-Do list.
BCI: Politically-Incorrect Game Theory
How to discuss Federer and Serena competing on a tennis court without getting cancelled.
Lies we tell children
How many things seem truly certain? Death? Taxes? How certain are you?
BCI: Cars, Statistics, and Neural Latents
Understanding AE's neuroscience machine learning efforts in simpler terms
Essays, Now Rated "PG"
An aesthetic homage to Paul Graham
BCI: Effective Altruism
A mathematical argument for why we still aren't paying sufficient attention to BCI.
A Better Startup Equity Plan
A discussion of venture capital, diversified equity, and marshmallows.
Paradise By the Dashboard Light: A Ballad of Agency Loss
Rock stars come and go, most having discussed what they would do for love, but few who insisted upon what they won’t.
BCI: Winning the NLB Challenge was only the first step
The Edge of Honesty: Who Must Answer Hard Questions?
A fair debate requires that both sides grapple with their position's nastiest edge cases.
Why Do We Make Bad Decisions Despite the Data?
Why fear and myopia keep data scientists awake at night...
Making Software Consulting Great for Developers
Consulting should suck much less.
Taking the Other Side of Every Argument
Would you rather a scarecrow (strawman) or this guy?
Building the best model of brain activity: We're Leading The Neural Latents Benchmark Challenge
"We don't quit at halftime" (But we are in the lead)
Why Machine Learning Projects Fail
Why all ML projects should consider BATMAN and ROBIN.
Assess the Garden, not the Seeds: Planning for Multiple Failures
Why emergent properties are evaluated only in the aggregate.
Focus on Unpopular Problems
Change the world by noticing how others are trying to change the world...and do something different!
When Scale Guarantees Failure
Why wishful thinking scales horribly, but is entertaining for baseball fans! (It also might lead to a date with Marilyn Monroe)
Reclaiming My Life From Algorithms
Make sure the decisions you make are actually decisions you make.
Settling Arguments With Baseline Expectations
Adjusting your baseline expectations could relieve your fantasy football woes. A data scientist explains why you should take a new approach to this season's draft.
How to Disagree With Your Client and Do Right By Them
Sometimes as an agency, the absolute best thing you can do for your client is disagree with them.
Forest Admin vs React Admin
Time to build or update your CMS? We break down the benefits of using Forest Admin vs an open-source framework like React Admin.
Getting the Most from Your Agency
Being a trusting client will actually help you get more for your money.
AE's Effective Altruism in June 2021
In our ongoing mission to increase human agency for all, we donate to a highly effective charity each month. Check out who we committed to helping last month.
Developing in Windows 11 is Better Than You Think
A short, useless blog post that just says we are the best developers in LA on Clutch, but hey we are and that's kinda cool
Can the TV Shows You Watch Make You a Better Person?
Knowing that entertainment is as big a part of our lives as sleeping and eating, it’s incredibly powerful to realize that our entertainment can make us smarter, more motivated, and more open-minded if we choose consciously and correctly.
Is #LaserEyes Over? How We Got Big Names to Memeify Themselves
Somehow the internet got politicians, investors & other celebrities to add laser eyes to their very public social profiles. How'd it happen? And is the #LaserEyes trend dying as the price of bitcoin dips?
Headless CMS vs. Legacy CMS
Now is the time to rethink your outdated CMS and transition to using a headless CMS. Here's how and why we did it for a major client using GraphCMS.
Why Don't We Acknowledge How Astonishing Human Progress Is?
300 years ago, we never could've predicted how far technology would take us. We think it's only going to make our lives better...
In 2021, Work-Life Harmony is the New Work-Life Balance
Emphasizing harmony over balance allows you to integrate parts of your life and invite them to work together—because you're one whole, complete human.
Plan Your Vacation Far in Advance for Greater Happiness
Society romanticizes spontaneity, but planning a vacation months or even years in advance will actually make you enjoy it more. And hopefully by then, all borders will be open again.
How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans: A Conversation with The Startup Stack
AE Studio's CTO Greg Buckner dishes on the future of NFTs, how to pick an agency as a non-technical founder, and more on The Startup Stack podcast.
AE Studio Gives Back: Our May 2021 Charity Initiatives
In our ongoing mission to increase human agency for all, we donate to a highly effective charity each month. Check out who we committed to helping in May.
The 5 Love Languages of Clients
Does your client prefer emails over meetings? Do they like compliments? Identifying and communicating in your client's preferred "love" language can change the relationship and make projects run a lot smoother.
Use This Library to Integrate Apple HealthKit with React Native
Millions of people track their health metrics in Apple Health every day. Now there's a library to help you leverage that data to create apps in React Native.
Find Out Where You Can Fly Right Now
We built a super simple-to-use tool called Apocalypse Travel that tells you if you can fly to your destination of choice, and what you're required to do when you get there.
Summon the MSN Gods to Fix Your Internet
An ancient urban legend says that if you visit msn.com when your internet goes out, it will magically come back to life. We created a Chrome extension so you can try it yourself.
Zoom Fatigue & The Rise (and Fall) of Clubhouse
Screen-related burnout drove the masses to go back to basics and talk on the phone using Clubhouse—an invite-only audio app that gained millions of new users in weeks. As people start socializing again, the question is, are those numbers sustainable?
Why We Hire People Who Don't Have College Degrees
Do you really need a college degree to land an amazing job? Nope. Or at least not at AE Studio. We make a case for the dropouts—and those who never attended in the first place.
The #1 Reason Good Startups Fail—And How We Make Sure It Won't Happen To Us
The biggest reason startups sink might surprise you. Here's how we avoided it, and how we set our team members up to be great potential startup founders themselves.
The Anatomy of a Great Startup
AE Studio team members talk about the special sauce that goes into creating a successful startup on Heroku's podcast, Code[ish].
How Our Slack App Got to 200K Users with No Marketing Whatsoever
We created a free Slack message scheduler & didn't market it. Yet, somehow, we have 200k users & counting. What does that tell us?
Turn Any Client Into Your Ideal Client
By following a few steps early in the relationship, you can transform a potentially difficult client into your favorite client. 🤝 (Those shopping for an agency, this one's for you, too!)
How AE Studio is helping Point bring customized fitness recommendations to users with the help of Forest Admin
How AE Studio is helping Point bring customized fitness recommendations to users with the help of Forest Admin
Must-Read Books for Founders Who Want to Seem Like They Read Stuff
Books that you should read that are either actually useful, you'll seem uncool if you haven't heard of, or both!
Fixing your LinkedIn profile to get better job offers for developers (instead of annoying messages)
You could be missing out on some amazing job opportunities just because your LinkedIn profile doesn’t accurately show what you know. Many really qualified people are invisible to recruiters because they don't add enough information—or the right information—to their profiles.
I’m not a data scientist but I made a COVID mask detector with Google AutoML and React – Doctor Masky
Neural-network-based object detection is a powerful technique that's getting easier and easier to take advantage of. With Google's Cloud AutoML computer vision service, it's now simple and cheap to train a powerful object detection model and deploy it as a client-side React app.
So you think you can code?
A true senior developer realizes they don't really know anything at all.
Don't let people tell you DO's and DON'Ts for JavaScript, Git, React, Node (but here are some anyway)
TypeScript Everything
A non-technical guide to interviewing developers
How to Level Up your Technical Interview Game
Why A/B testing is bad for your startup
5 tips to talk to your users as a founder
BREAKING NEWS: People like us on Clutch.co
Should you hire a CTO for your startup?
Draper Venture Network Helps its Members Meaningfully Connect
5 Examples of How New Technology Sucks, But Only at First
Why It's Good To Talk To Ducks
In software engineering rubber ducking is a method where you talk to a rubber duck (or an inanimate object; or sometimes even talking to…
Why you should use TypeScript on the backend too
TypeScript first appeared in 2012 and the main goal was to help developers work on large scale applications, giving them tools to refactor…
Save a month of your life by using these keyboard shortcuts
If you’re more tech savvy, it may surprise you to learn that in 2011 90% of internet users didn’t know about the keyboard shortcut CTRL+F…
How to Keep your TypeScript Code Clean
TypeScript brought me a lot of useful features like the ability to rename variables by reference in multiple places, spot errors in the…
How we keep our code shining and uniform with TypeScript configurations and Prettier
To prevent code from diverging too much and keep our source code tidy, here are some tools and configuration settings we use.
Ask
So ask questions. Get help. Raise your hand. Be insistent and be thorough. I promise someone is here to help. I also promise you’ll teach them too.
Essays
- Alignment can be the “Military-Grade Engineering” of AI
- Key takeaways from our EA and alignment research surveys
- AE Studio and Nylas Aim to Accelerate Development Cycles and Lay the Foundation for Large Language Model Workflows and Solutions
- The 'Neglected Approaches' Approach: AE Studio's Alignment Agenda
- AI in the Brewery: How We Built a Beer with AI for Our Partners The Bruery
- What's Consciousness?
- We Donate 5% Of Our Profits - Could We Do More If We Didn't?
- Blockchain Technology in Crypto Winter
- Who Can Be A Founder?
- Getting S^&t Done
- Preserving the Core: Values in AI Development and Lessons from History
- The Timeless Way of Building a Company
- Classification Is A Good Thing (For Humans)
- Why You're Bad At Working
- Neglect
- The Best Idea Is Also The Most Popular Idea, And Often Not The Best Path
- What Can Humans Kill?
- Why Sales Estimates Are Unrealistic
- When Your Agency Is Gone, You Won't Even Notice
- Why do we treat employees like mercenaries and expect them to act like missionaries?
- Is It Ethical To Interrupt The Brain?
- All Hail Caelus - a novel by gpt-4 and melanie
- In A World That Improves Exponentially, Stop Fixating On Incremental Improvements
- Balls, Strikes, And Other KPIs
- New Technologies Are A Pain - And That's The Best Time To Work On Them
- How To Raise A Psychopath
- The Difference Between Scientific Progress and Better Software
- Trust The Process
- A Reinforcement Learning Paradigm Guaranteed to Achieve Human-Level AGI
- Large Language Model Misbehavior is Dangerous
- You're Buying Next Year's Company
- Was This Written By ChatGPT?
- Consciousness Is A Spectrum
- GPT >>> Your Job
- Why Scummy Businesses Fail
- GPT & The Wisdom Of The Crowd
- When To Write Is Harder Than What To Write
- Why Your Company Won’t Start High-upside projects
- Exploring the Intersection of Network Effects and Context-Specific Knowledge in the Digital Age
- Incomplete Thoughts
- Did you know that some people are goats?
- Nobody Knows Anything About Machine Learning Right Now
- Strange Art: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bots
- Why We Don't Communicate Well Anymore
- Limiting Yourself
- Decision Theory of Life and Death
- Client Relations
- AGI Is Probably What Will Kill You
- No Such Thing As Short-Term Value
- The Values of Increasing Agency
- Product Focused Design: Or, "How I Learned To Stop Tinkering and Ship"
- Optimism Is Rational
- BCI: Standards & Horses' Arses
- You Get What You Pay For
- Most Lives Haven't Been Lived Yet
- Labels Matter
- The Role of Rocks
- How Will You Die?
- BCI: Facts, Fiction, and Tom Cruise
- What Will Your Great-Grandchildren Think?
- F*&k You Money
- Old Bayesian Seasoning
- The best data scientists will never win a Kaggle competition
- How We Built and Sold a Startup
- Bugs and Candor
- What's Your Equity Worth?
- Victims of Vimeo
- The Tyranny of Percentiles
- Tomorrow: Future States of Mind
- BCI: Politically-Incorrect Game Theory
- Lies we tell children
- BCI: Cars, Statistics, and Neural Latents
- Essays, Now Rated "PG"
- BCI: Effective Altruism
- A Better Startup Equity Plan
- Paradise By the Dashboard Light: A Ballad of Agency Loss
- BCI: Winning the NLB Challenge was only the first step
- The Edge of Honesty: Who Must Answer Hard Questions?
- Why Do We Make Bad Decisions Despite the Data?
- Making Software Consulting Great for Developers
- Taking the Other Side of Every Argument
- Building the best model of brain activity: We're Leading The Neural Latents Benchmark Challenge
- Why Machine Learning Projects Fail
- Assess the Garden, not the Seeds: Planning for Multiple Failures
- Focus on Unpopular Problems
- When Scale Guarantees Failure
- Reclaiming My Life From Algorithms
- Settling Arguments With Baseline Expectations
- How to Disagree With Your Client and Do Right By Them
- Forest Admin vs React Admin
- Getting the Most from Your Agency
- AE's Effective Altruism in June 2021
- Developing in Windows 11 is Better Than You Think
- A short, useless blog post that just says we are the best developers in LA on Clutch, but hey we are and that's kinda cool
- Can the TV Shows You Watch Make You a Better Person?
- Is #LaserEyes Over? How We Got Big Names to Memeify Themselves
- Headless CMS vs. Legacy CMS
- Why Don't We Acknowledge How Astonishing Human Progress Is?
- In 2021, Work-Life Harmony is the New Work-Life Balance
- Plan Your Vacation Far in Advance for Greater Happiness
- How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans: A Conversation with The Startup Stack
- AE Studio Gives Back: Our May 2021 Charity Initiatives
- The 5 Love Languages of Clients
- Use This Library to Integrate Apple HealthKit with React Native
- Find Out Where You Can Fly Right Now
- Summon the MSN Gods to Fix Your Internet
- Zoom Fatigue & The Rise (and Fall) of Clubhouse
- Why We Hire People Who Don't Have College Degrees
- The #1 Reason Good Startups Fail—And How We Make Sure It Won't Happen To Us
- The Anatomy of a Great Startup
- How Our Slack App Got to 200K Users with No Marketing Whatsoever
- Turn Any Client Into Your Ideal Client
- How AE Studio is helping Point bring customized fitness recommendations to users with the help of Forest Admin
- Must-Read Books for Founders Who Want to Seem Like They Read Stuff
- Fixing your LinkedIn profile to get better job offers for developers (instead of annoying messages)
- I’m not a data scientist but I made a COVID mask detector with Google AutoML and React – Doctor Masky
- So you think you can code?
- Don't let people tell you DO's and DON'Ts for JavaScript, Git, React, Node (but here are some anyway)
- TypeScript Everything
- A non-technical guide to interviewing developers
- How to Level Up your Technical Interview Game
- Why A/B testing is bad for your startup
- 5 tips to talk to your users as a founder
- BREAKING NEWS: People like us on Clutch.co
- Should you hire a CTO for your startup?
- Draper Venture Network Helps its Members Meaningfully Connect
- 5 Examples of How New Technology Sucks, But Only at First
- Why It's Good To Talk To Ducks
- Why you should use TypeScript on the backend too
- Save a month of your life by using these keyboard shortcuts
- How to Keep your TypeScript Code Clean
- How we keep our code shining and uniform with TypeScript configurations and Prettier
- Ask
Alignment can be the “Military-Grade Engineering” of AI
Key takeaways from our EA and alignment research surveys
AE Studio and Nylas Aim to Accelerate Development Cycles and Lay the Foundation for Large Language Model Workflows and Solutions
The 'Neglected Approaches' Approach: AE Studio's Alignment Agenda
AI in the Brewery: How We Built a Beer with AI for Our Partners The Bruery
What's Consciousness?
We don't understand what consciousness is, but nonetheless, there is a prevailing sentiment that it is not the path to solving alignment. We disagree.
We Donate 5% Of Our Profits - Could We Do More If We Didn't?
Are the most effective charties the optimal allocation of our surplus capital?
Blockchain Technology in Crypto Winter
This too shall pass. We've ridden out similar storms before.
Who Can Be A Founder?
How many great ideas never become realities because their owner was never in a position to be a founder?
Getting S^&t Done
To produce as fast as the rest of society, one must use the latest technology. The boss doesn't need to demand it - life does it all by itself.
Preserving the Core: Values in AI Development and Lessons from History
Does exponential growth mean the loss of the fundamental nature of the thing growing?
The Timeless Way of Building a Company
Modern technology is awe-inspiring, but the strategies for building a successful business are timeless.
Classification Is A Good Thing (For Humans)
Human survival requires off-the-charts classification skills applied to oneself and others. Will AGI develop the same skill? Is this a problem?
Why You're Bad At Working
Some of the world's best "workers" are actually far worse at working than we think.
Neglect
Some ideas are prematurely discarded. Bayesian reasoning suggests this is a terrible error.
The Best Idea Is Also The Most Popular Idea, And Often Not The Best Path
"The problem with the best idea is not that it is necessarily the wrong approach, but rather, that it is almost certainly the most popular."
What Can Humans Kill?
If the algorithm is intelligent enough to perform knowledge work and potentially, to serve as a companion, wouldn't it also warrant some legal protections?
Why Sales Estimates Are Unrealistic
The passage of time is information. Why do we ignore it?
When Your Agency Is Gone, You Won't Even Notice
If AGI were controlling every aspect of your world, would you be aware of it? Are you aware of how technology manipulates you now?
Why do we treat employees like mercenaries and expect them to act like missionaries?
Are you a missionary or a mercenary? Are you working at a place where that distinction matters?
Is It Ethical To Interrupt The Brain?
Technology interrupting the brain is hardly new. But is it ethical? What if that interruption served your goals?
All Hail Caelus - a novel by gpt-4 and melanie
In A World That Improves Exponentially, Stop Fixating On Incremental Improvements
Why focus on incremental improvements when 10x is not nearly ambitious enough?
Balls, Strikes, And Other KPIs
It turns out that baseball teams, corporations, and those of us who don't want to become paperclips should all think deeply about the metrics we choose.
New Technologies Are A Pain - And That's The Best Time To Work On Them
The early days of any new technology are unglamorous and impractical. They are full of inefficient, silly use cases. And those are the greatest moments of all.
How To Raise A Psychopath
If you intended to do the unthinkable as a parent, how would you begin?
The Difference Between Scientific Progress and Better Software
Improved software, improved domain knowledge, the chicken, the egg, and exponential progress over time.
Trust The Process
For managers, venture capitalists, and fans of the Philadelphia 76ers, wisdom lies not in assessing outcomes, but rather, the process.
A Reinforcement Learning Paradigm Guaranteed to Achieve Human-Level AGI
We've figured out how to create human-level intelligence...just not quickly or cheaply.
Large Language Model Misbehavior is Dangerous
“Google it” is a legitimate way to settle an argument. Now, folks are asking ChatGPT increasingly nuanced questions. Are the answers safe for public consumption?
You're Buying Next Year's Company
Value is not what something has demonstrated, it is the potential upside that still remains.
Was This Written By ChatGPT?
Can you tell who wrote the article you're reading?
Consciousness Is A Spectrum
Don't ask if something is conscious. Ask "how conscious?"
GPT >>> Your Job
You think you're better at your job than an AI? So did chess grandmasters.
Why Scummy Businesses Fail
Trying to make a profit is not scummy. Hiding how you intend to do it is.
GPT & The Wisdom Of The Crowd
The wisdom of the crowd is valuable...if we choose the right crowd.
When To Write Is Harder Than What To Write
What's the most important element of comedy? ... ... ... timing!
Why Your Company Won’t Start High-upside projects
The best opportunities are often the ones with the lowest probability of success. This scares most companies away.
Exploring the Intersection of Network Effects and Context-Specific Knowledge in the Digital Age
The history of human learning is the history of context-specific knowledge. Is AGI context-specific?
Incomplete Thoughts
An interrupted thought is a lost opportunity - an idea that will never materialize in the same way again.
Did you know that some people are goats?
(An Allegorical Primer on Human Efforts at AI Alignment)
Nobody Knows Anything About Machine Learning Right Now
"..we are building algorithms we do not really understand to simulate a process of thinking and learning we do not really understand to help enrich an existence whose nature we do not really understand. "
Strange Art: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bots
Creativity, AI-generated art, and a few bots that might not save the world, but should at least deliver a few laughs.
Why We Don't Communicate Well Anymore
Once upon a time, human beings understood how to communicate with one another. Then technology arrived.
Limiting Yourself
Optimization often means maximizes the set of feasible options. Golden handcuffs are the antithesis of optionality and optimization.
Decision Theory of Life and Death
It's one thing to place a bet where in one case, you die. It is another to place a bet based upon the certainty that you will.
Client Relations
Keep calm, and carry on increasing your clients' agency.
AGI Is Probably What Will Kill You
While you're worrying about cancer, heart disease, and rush-hour traffic, your most likely cause of death remains.
No Such Thing As Short-Term Value
The Values of Increasing Agency
AE's vision is to increase human agency. That mission begins with our team.
Product Focused Design: Or, "How I Learned To Stop Tinkering and Ship"
The perfect is the enemy of the good. So either we'll ship imperfect software or we'll ship nothing at all!
Optimism Is Rational
We are living in the worst period in human history...except for all the ones before.
BCI: Standards & Horses' Arses
Modernity is predicated upon the width of equine gluteal muscles. Really. Standards matter.
You Get What You Pay For
A brief discussion of how to avoid being penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Most Lives Haven't Been Lived Yet
What if you lived your life, my life, everyone else's, and every human life that has ever been or ever will be?
Labels Matter
The names we assign define the narratives we debate. Choose wisely.
The Role of Rocks
We love rock and roll and the role of rocks. (We should probably find some dimes and some jukeboxes)
How Will You Die?
Even if you can stop aging, you'll still die. The only question is what will kill you.
BCI: Facts, Fiction, and Tom Cruise
The notion of brain computer interfaces is well-worn in literature and cinema. What happens when life imitates art?
What Will Your Great-Grandchildren Think?
What exactly is the legacy of the upper-management professionals of an era?
F*&k You Money
Why AE's equity plan is likely to help you reach F-U money...and why you still won't want to say "F-U."
Old Bayesian Seasoning
Simple conversations become nuanced and insightful with a sprinkling of conditional probability.
The best data scientists will never win a Kaggle competition
There's more to life (and data science) than winning Kaggle competitions.
How We Built and Sold a Startup
It turns out that agency-increasing technology is good for people and business alike.
Bugs and Candor
At some point, you're adding bugs faster than you can squash 'em.
What's Your Equity Worth?
Not all equity is created equal.
Victims of Vimeo
To all the victims of Vimeo's stunning, 10x price increases, we offer our condolences...and an alternative.
The Tyranny of Percentiles
The difference between a 99th percentile data scientist and a 99th percentile athlete is enormous.
Tomorrow: Future States of Mind
Memories are more than items hastily-written on a To-Do list.
BCI: Politically-Incorrect Game Theory
How to discuss Federer and Serena competing on a tennis court without getting cancelled.
Lies we tell children
How many things seem truly certain? Death? Taxes? How certain are you?
BCI: Cars, Statistics, and Neural Latents
Understanding AE's neuroscience machine learning efforts in simpler terms
Essays, Now Rated "PG"
An aesthetic homage to Paul Graham
BCI: Effective Altruism
A mathematical argument for why we still aren't paying sufficient attention to BCI.
A Better Startup Equity Plan
A discussion of venture capital, diversified equity, and marshmallows.
Paradise By the Dashboard Light: A Ballad of Agency Loss
Rock stars come and go, most having discussed what they would do for love, but few who insisted upon what they won’t.
BCI: Winning the NLB Challenge was only the first step
The Edge of Honesty: Who Must Answer Hard Questions?
A fair debate requires that both sides grapple with their position's nastiest edge cases.
Why Do We Make Bad Decisions Despite the Data?
Why fear and myopia keep data scientists awake at night...
Making Software Consulting Great for Developers
Consulting should suck much less.
Taking the Other Side of Every Argument
Would you rather a scarecrow (strawman) or this guy?
Building the best model of brain activity: We're Leading The Neural Latents Benchmark Challenge
"We don't quit at halftime" (But we are in the lead)
Why Machine Learning Projects Fail
Why all ML projects should consider BATMAN and ROBIN.
Assess the Garden, not the Seeds: Planning for Multiple Failures
Why emergent properties are evaluated only in the aggregate.
Focus on Unpopular Problems
Change the world by noticing how others are trying to change the world...and do something different!
When Scale Guarantees Failure
Why wishful thinking scales horribly, but is entertaining for baseball fans! (It also might lead to a date with Marilyn Monroe)
Reclaiming My Life From Algorithms
Make sure the decisions you make are actually decisions you make.
Settling Arguments With Baseline Expectations
Adjusting your baseline expectations could relieve your fantasy football woes. A data scientist explains why you should take a new approach to this season's draft.
How to Disagree With Your Client and Do Right By Them
Sometimes as an agency, the absolute best thing you can do for your client is disagree with them.
Forest Admin vs React Admin
Time to build or update your CMS? We break down the benefits of using Forest Admin vs an open-source framework like React Admin.
Getting the Most from Your Agency
Being a trusting client will actually help you get more for your money.
AE's Effective Altruism in June 2021
In our ongoing mission to increase human agency for all, we donate to a highly effective charity each month. Check out who we committed to helping last month.
Developing in Windows 11 is Better Than You Think
A short, useless blog post that just says we are the best developers in LA on Clutch, but hey we are and that's kinda cool
Can the TV Shows You Watch Make You a Better Person?
Knowing that entertainment is as big a part of our lives as sleeping and eating, it’s incredibly powerful to realize that our entertainment can make us smarter, more motivated, and more open-minded if we choose consciously and correctly.
Is #LaserEyes Over? How We Got Big Names to Memeify Themselves
Somehow the internet got politicians, investors & other celebrities to add laser eyes to their very public social profiles. How'd it happen? And is the #LaserEyes trend dying as the price of bitcoin dips?
Headless CMS vs. Legacy CMS
Now is the time to rethink your outdated CMS and transition to using a headless CMS. Here's how and why we did it for a major client using GraphCMS.
Why Don't We Acknowledge How Astonishing Human Progress Is?
300 years ago, we never could've predicted how far technology would take us. We think it's only going to make our lives better...
In 2021, Work-Life Harmony is the New Work-Life Balance
Emphasizing harmony over balance allows you to integrate parts of your life and invite them to work together—because you're one whole, complete human.
Plan Your Vacation Far in Advance for Greater Happiness
Society romanticizes spontaneity, but planning a vacation months or even years in advance will actually make you enjoy it more. And hopefully by then, all borders will be open again.
How Technology Can Make Us Better Humans: A Conversation with The Startup Stack
AE Studio's CTO Greg Buckner dishes on the future of NFTs, how to pick an agency as a non-technical founder, and more on The Startup Stack podcast.
AE Studio Gives Back: Our May 2021 Charity Initiatives
In our ongoing mission to increase human agency for all, we donate to a highly effective charity each month. Check out who we committed to helping in May.
The 5 Love Languages of Clients
Does your client prefer emails over meetings? Do they like compliments? Identifying and communicating in your client's preferred "love" language can change the relationship and make projects run a lot smoother.
Use This Library to Integrate Apple HealthKit with React Native
Millions of people track their health metrics in Apple Health every day. Now there's a library to help you leverage that data to create apps in React Native.
Find Out Where You Can Fly Right Now
We built a super simple-to-use tool called Apocalypse Travel that tells you if you can fly to your destination of choice, and what you're required to do when you get there.
Summon the MSN Gods to Fix Your Internet
An ancient urban legend says that if you visit msn.com when your internet goes out, it will magically come back to life. We created a Chrome extension so you can try it yourself.
Zoom Fatigue & The Rise (and Fall) of Clubhouse
Screen-related burnout drove the masses to go back to basics and talk on the phone using Clubhouse—an invite-only audio app that gained millions of new users in weeks. As people start socializing again, the question is, are those numbers sustainable?
Why We Hire People Who Don't Have College Degrees
Do you really need a college degree to land an amazing job? Nope. Or at least not at AE Studio. We make a case for the dropouts—and those who never attended in the first place.
The #1 Reason Good Startups Fail—And How We Make Sure It Won't Happen To Us
The biggest reason startups sink might surprise you. Here's how we avoided it, and how we set our team members up to be great potential startup founders themselves.
The Anatomy of a Great Startup
AE Studio team members talk about the special sauce that goes into creating a successful startup on Heroku's podcast, Code[ish].
How Our Slack App Got to 200K Users with No Marketing Whatsoever
We created a free Slack message scheduler & didn't market it. Yet, somehow, we have 200k users & counting. What does that tell us?
Turn Any Client Into Your Ideal Client
By following a few steps early in the relationship, you can transform a potentially difficult client into your favorite client. 🤝 (Those shopping for an agency, this one's for you, too!)
How AE Studio is helping Point bring customized fitness recommendations to users with the help of Forest Admin
How AE Studio is helping Point bring customized fitness recommendations to users with the help of Forest Admin
Must-Read Books for Founders Who Want to Seem Like They Read Stuff
Books that you should read that are either actually useful, you'll seem uncool if you haven't heard of, or both!
Fixing your LinkedIn profile to get better job offers for developers (instead of annoying messages)
You could be missing out on some amazing job opportunities just because your LinkedIn profile doesn’t accurately show what you know. Many really qualified people are invisible to recruiters because they don't add enough information—or the right information—to their profiles.
I’m not a data scientist but I made a COVID mask detector with Google AutoML and React – Doctor Masky
Neural-network-based object detection is a powerful technique that's getting easier and easier to take advantage of. With Google's Cloud AutoML computer vision service, it's now simple and cheap to train a powerful object detection model and deploy it as a client-side React app.
So you think you can code?
A true senior developer realizes they don't really know anything at all.
Don't let people tell you DO's and DON'Ts for JavaScript, Git, React, Node (but here are some anyway)
TypeScript Everything
A non-technical guide to interviewing developers
How to Level Up your Technical Interview Game
Why A/B testing is bad for your startup
5 tips to talk to your users as a founder
BREAKING NEWS: People like us on Clutch.co
Should you hire a CTO for your startup?
Draper Venture Network Helps its Members Meaningfully Connect
5 Examples of How New Technology Sucks, But Only at First
Why It's Good To Talk To Ducks
In software engineering rubber ducking is a method where you talk to a rubber duck (or an inanimate object; or sometimes even talking to…
Why you should use TypeScript on the backend too
TypeScript first appeared in 2012 and the main goal was to help developers work on large scale applications, giving them tools to refactor…
Save a month of your life by using these keyboard shortcuts
If you’re more tech savvy, it may surprise you to learn that in 2011 90% of internet users didn’t know about the keyboard shortcut CTRL+F…
How to Keep your TypeScript Code Clean
TypeScript brought me a lot of useful features like the ability to rename variables by reference in multiple places, spot errors in the…
How we keep our code shining and uniform with TypeScript configurations and Prettier
To prevent code from diverging too much and keep our source code tidy, here are some tools and configuration settings we use.
Ask
So ask questions. Get help. Raise your hand. Be insistent and be thorough. I promise someone is here to help. I also promise you’ll teach them too.