Patrick Vlaskovits

I'm reading Michael Douglas's new memoir, and it's genuinely one of the best I'd ever read, fantastic insight into how he made some of the greatest movies, but by far the best anecdote is when he at one point was shocked how he could produce films, be a father, be a husband, and act in films all at the same time. At which point when you turn the page, it reads: "Oh right. Now I remember. Cocaine." lol

I find AI to be extremely knowledgeable, and so exceptionally able to detect references to almost anything, but not very wise, and so it only makes the most surface-level judgements about what point some writing is making. This is particularly true when it's analyzing writing that it just read for the first time, as opposed to analyzing writing that's already in its training data (along with lots of analysis of that writing by other people) AI's knowledgeableness is easier to see than its limited wisdom; it's perhaps even the very definition of wisdom that it cannot be easily verified (as opposed to intelligence).

Italian food in Asia is also better. The problem is that the Italians are extremely autistic about food “rules” and hence uncreative. Their cuisine developed in poverty conditions and they rationalized it into some minimalism philosophy. God forbid there is sufficient sauce with the pasta or some new ingredients combination is tried. Proof that is all constraints-driven is that when Italians moved into prosperity in the US their cuisine instantly took quite a different turn.

At work (R&D at a fortune 500 company w/ 15k+ employees), every time a SaaS pitches their product, my first question in the review meeting is, "Why don't we just build this ourselves?" In the past, there were always good answers to that question. Today, I can't think of any. If we can point an agent at any website or demo, have it research the broader problem for 72 hours, build the product with a focus on our specific needs, with any extra features we want, AND save a million a year why would we pay for your SaaS? Scale? It only has to scale to 15,000 employees and a few million customers. We don't have the same scaling problem you do serving 1,000 businesses with 100s of million of customers. Scale is a non-issue. Reliability? Your 99.9% self-reported uptime is not impressive. We can pay to host an app on a hyperscaler too. And when we do it, we know with certainty whether the uptime number is true or not. Github's official status page reports ~99% uptime. The Missing GitHub Status Page reports 93%. Reliability is a non-issue. Bugs? You think your SaaS product doesn't have bugs to work out? I've seen bugs in third party products cost our company millions. Everyone is shipping early and often. Including your SaaS. Every piece of software has bugs. But there is a big difference between a bug in your code and a bug in ours. When the bug is in your code, we are at your mercy. Maybe you put it into Jira immediately. Are you going to bypass sprint planning? You won't have a fix for two weeks. Maybe you'll fail to reproduce and blame our code. Maybe it is our code. Maybe its an interplay. Since you don't have our code and we don't have your code, how are we going to figure that out? If it's all our code, an employee can fix it in an hour. If we need to, we can throw ten engineers with agents in a call until it's reproduced, the fix is merged, and it's validated. Bugs are a non-issue. Bandwidth? Agents are nearly autonomous now. They don't need to be babysat. I can spin up a project and let an agent run for 50 hours, have it build a PowerPoint and walk into a demo with leadership blind. If anything breaks, "I'm still working on that." Things always break in demos. Nobody cares. If leadership proposes a feature, the answer is, "Yeah, great idea, I can add that." Because I can. Bandwidth is a non-issue. Maintenance? We have so much prior art, inputs and outputs, we can benchmark anything. We have autonomous PR systems built on top of in-app feedback SDKs so even the non-dev users can contribute to every app or service. Even our analytics systems are tied to automated PRs. Maintenance is a non-issue. Support? It doesn't matter how much we're paying a month for your platinum level enterprise support when our point of contact has to fetch the one dev who already went home for every non-trivial incident. The incident is never trivial. We already checked the top 10 things it could be because that was faster than asking you. Support is a non-issue. Expertise? Agentic research. We can build anything. Expertise is a non-issue. Cost? The cost of intelligence has gone down 100x every year. You're still charging 2022 prices. You should be charging closer to your electricity costs. Cost is a non-issue. At this point, the only reason we don't switch off existing services is that transitioning 15,000 employees to something else is a pain in the butt. It would be a pain in the butt even with a perfect bug-free, infinitely scalable, perfectly-reliable clone. Your new SaaS doesn't have that moat. But it does give me an idea for a product to build.

Americans who are judgemental about the quality of Italian food in [random place] in Italy vs. [random neighborhood] in NYC is one of the funniest experiences I have in the USofA. A Decalogue to Americans who talk about Italian food: (1) Beauty is the eye of the beholder, i.e. you need to understand good food to judge good food, think about it (2) Netflix is the death of restaurants, if you are using Netflix-famous restaurants as your benchmark you are missing that those benchmarks were manufactured for you in the first place (3) Great Italian restaurants outside tourist cities don't take foreigners, gate-keeping them thru language like in Japan (4) Great Italian restaurants inside tourist cities don't like foreigners, gate-keeping them thru word of mouth reservations (5) Great Italian restaurants who like foreigners most probably also have a branch in NYC (6) Name dropping famous chefs is very cringe (7) If it has cream on it, it is typically not food (8) Truffle oil is not truffle, it is non-olive oil after a holiday in a Chinese container (9) Ingredients are everything, and good ingredients don't travel (10) No, it is not notorious in Italy that NYC has the best pizza in the world, in Italy people don't even know NYC has pizza Never trigger an Italian on food.

And football commentary was never the same. #MaddenMovie. November 18.

Someone built a $14M ecommerce business selling electronic pest-control products. And it's making nearly $3M a year in profit. Insane! The founder launched in 2024, selling chemical-free pest-control devices through Shopify. And the numbers are pretty wild. > $14.1M TTM revenue > $2.9M adjusted EBITDA > $1.7M revenue last month > $403K profit last month > 20% EBITDA margins Just 5 products and a lean operation with outsourced fulfillment. Pretty incredible what founders can build by taking an everyday household problem and creating a better product around it. Now live on @acquiredotcom. Full listing: app.acquire.com/startup/7hby…

In the early 1990s, Red Bull used unconventional marketing tactics to make its energy drink the talk of the town. One of the most infamous stories claims that empty Red Bull cans were deliberately left in bins around London’s clubs, bars and nightlife hotspots to make the drink appear wildly popular. The idea was simple: make people think everyone was drinking it, and they’d want to try it too. This is the psychology of social proof: when something looks popular, we’re more likely to want it ourselves. Red Bull also handed out free samples and targeted nightlife culture to build its image as the ultimate energy drink. By the 2000s, Red Bull had become a staple of party culture, appearing in the hands of celebrities, models and influencers everywhere. From paparazzi shots to backstage moments, that iconic silver-and-blue can became part of the celebrity lifestyle. Whether at a party or caught by the paparazzi, Red Bull wasn't just an energy drink. It was a whole cultural moment.

It's crazy yesterday we were driving through the desert in New Mexico and now we're up in the mountains of Colorado at a ski resort. It's incredible how quickly the landscape changes here.

I still have non-Brazilian friends who think São Paulo is fine to visit We hired a great Uber driver to drive us to Florianopolis, like a 3 hour trip, cause was easier than flying then, very nice guy While driving I sat in the back talking a bit with him and practicing my Portuguese Then I noticed he didn't wear a seatbelt so I asked why He said "so I can draw my gun quickly" I said "desculpa the fuck what gun" Then he showed he was wearing a holster on his right side with a gun it which he carried for safety because he said drive into and out of São Paulo often So being a funny naive Dutch guy I asked "so did you ever kill someone?" He said "yes I killed a guy last year who came at me and who tried steal my car in São Paulo" And then he told me he was in a judicial trial about it and being prosecuted for it I asked him again in the naive Dutch guy perspective "did you get like therapy after? like must be intense right, do you feel bad about that? He said "no why? If I didn't kill him he would have killed me" ☠️ Foreigners especially Europeans have no clue how violent São Paulo and Rio are, it's just not in their mental framework to be able to understand the danger, Brazilians themselves are surprisingly honest and realistic about it There a reason I stay the F out of São Paulo I mpstly stick to South Brazil, it's safe, not as safe as Europe but mostly very safe and not really violent. The violence and crime there seems mostly isolated between gangs and in the few favelas there About that too I asked Brazilians "why is South Brazil so safe?" And they mostly agreed when a guy told me "because the police here shoot to kill" while in São Paulo and Rio the police is too scared to get prosecuted for killing people

I've been trying to write a post on why everyone should study early American history but I kept getting stuck, maybe because the premise is too presumptuous. So instead here's a post on why *I* am obsessed with it myself: 1/ it's a portal into many other histories. People naively think early America sits to the side, unconnected to anything else. It's the opposite! The founders (Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin) spent ten years (!!) in Paris working to secure French support against the English, so you get to learn all about France of Louis XVI. Franklin spent a decade in London so you learn about England of George III. Adams was raising funds for the revolution in the Netherlands so you get to learn about the Dutch. John Quincy (Adam's son and later the 6th president) was an ambassador to Russia and an eyewitness to Napoleon's invasion! 2/ it's a portal into the past. The founders were extremely well-read and steeped in the history of classic European civilization. You just cannot get them to shut up about Greece and Rome, so you absorb tons of info about those and go on the trail of Cicero, Thucydides, Tacitus, Plutarch, Homer, Horace, Terence, and so on. Jefferson was also obsessed with English civil war so you learn about Charles I, Cromwell, the English republic, and how it's all connected to American declaration of independence 120 years later 3/ the Enlightenment! America's independence happens during peak Enlightenment era and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Everything is brimming with new ideas and boundless optimism. People believe in their bones that nature is knowable and there is no ceiling to progress. You meet all the characters and their ideas-- Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke (Franklin was friends with all of them). Electricity gets discovered, hot air balloons get invented, we start getting modern chemistry. Edward Gibbon writes his Decline and Fall and causes a furor by lampooning early Christian saints. Franklin even meets Voltaire! 4/ the Founders! JFK once joked at a dinner for Nobel Prize winners "this is the most extraordinary collection of talent that has ever been gathered at the White House, except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." This is only a slight exaggeration. The founders were all *very* different, and all equally impressive in their own way. Between them they were educated, civic-minded, grounded in tradition but not bound by it, full of ideas but not ideological, entrepreneurial, tenacious, prudent, brave. You will not find a more remarkable cast in all of history! The more you get to know them the more you want to spend time with them, reach for their counsel, and appreciate how much of America's success (compared to e.g. French or Russian or Cuban or Iranian revolutions) is that America was founded by better men 5/ the correspondence! The founders were fantastic writers. Letters from John Adams, his wife Abigail, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Rush are some of my favorite writing, not just as historical documents, but in *any* genre. "Some people must have time to look around them, before, behind, on the right hand, and on the left, and then to think, and after all this to resolve. Others see at one intuitive glance into the past and the future, and judge with precision at once," writes John Adams. Is this not a marvelous passage?! 6/ you learn what to discount and what to keep in sight. Had you been scrolling X in ~1778 you'd see ~20% of ppl opposing independence, an even bigger "uncommitted middle", opposition repressed by patriots, prospering weapons suppliers, smallpox epidemics, backstabbing officers and politicians, devastating losses, a destitute army, desertions, hyperinflation, meddling foreign powers, mutinies, atrocity episodes on both sides. If you had let these events consume your attention, you would have misjudged the moment completely! 7/ you see the bones of the republic. Adams was an English traditionalist and viewed freedom of religion as freedom among christian denominations. His Massachusetts constitution required a christian test and established tax-supported churches. Jefferson was a reformer who reasoned everything out from the ground up. He applied freedom of religion to all religions and thought much of christian theology was superstitious gobbledygook. Knowing that we often keep circling the same tensions makes it easier to get your bearings in the present. E.g. you can view the upcoming Michigan senatorial race as revenge of the federalists or revenge of the jeffersonians, depending on how it goes 8/ the history is tangled. At Mt. Vernon about 500 feet down the hill from George & Martha Washington's magnificent house there is a wooded area with a mass burial site for the slaves. The graves are unmarked and no one knows exactly how many people are buried there. There are modern burial symbols; the curators did a good job balancing honoring the deceased and maintaining the original bare condition of the site. If you go on a good day there are many middle school group trips visiting. You see large groups of ~11yo kids at the site, mostly laughing, messing with each other, taking selfies (as 11yo kids do) 9/ perspective of the losers. How could Britain win almost every battle and still lose? What did that do to the empire, politically and psychologically? What were Howe and Clinton thinking?! How did the British political situation play out during the war? What was the thinking and ultimate fate of British loyalists? Should Britain's defeat have been obvious at the time? All this is fascinating and helpful to orient yourself in today's world. From the diary of a British officer: "nothing remains but to fight it out against a set of the most determined hypocrites and demagogues, compiled of the refuse of the colonies, that ever were permitted by Providence to be the scourge of a country." 10/ inspiration. From Jefferson's triumphant political return after humiliation as governor of Virginia and the deaths of his wife and four children, to Washington's superhuman tenacity at Valley Forge, it is difficult to find more inspiring stories in all of history. The Declaration of Independence was written for all humanity. Anyone who wishes can become its spiritual successor. It can be read on town squares of Philadelphia and on slavers’ plantation fields, as it once was, and on the streets of Tehran and Moscow, as it one day will be: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." --- PS. the gateway drug is McCullough's John Adams, don't look at the reviews, don't research alternatives, just click buy and read the first page PPS. buy a physical book and destroy the margins with your notes, don't dishonor this adventure with some pristine copy or a kindle

So much of the climate hysteria is just aimless guilt roaming the earth in search of futile acts of atonement.