May 5, 2026

TL;DR. A field guide to the memory, compute, and inference tricks that actually keep billion-parameter LLMs trainable and deployable.

Takeaways

• Memory wins come from Flash Attention (tiling + recomputing softmax norm factors), MQA/GQA sharing KV across heads, and activation checkpointing trading compute for RAM.
• Inference speedups stack: KV caching skips recomputing attention, stateful caching reuses conversation prefixes via rolling hashes, and speculative decoding lets a small draft model propose tokens for a big verifier.
• Throughput tricks worth knowing: sequence packing kills padding waste, LongNet/BigBird get linear-complexity long context, and mixed precision (bfloat16) + quantization (PTQ/QAT) squeeze the rest.

TL;DR. Every company needs three nested stories: what you're doing, what it represents, and the dent it leaves in the universe.

Takeaways

• Level 1 (literal): "We're building a rocket." Most founders can't even articulate this clearly.
• Level 2 (representation): "Reviving a stagnant industry by restoring private American spaceflight."
• Level 3 (cosmic stakes): "Making mankind an interplanetary species." This is the version that recruits believers.

TL;DR. @creatine_cycle, @kyliebytes, and @Noahpinion map SF's tribes — from 7 Girls of SF to Larkin gays, rationalists, and hippies — and the groups trying to stitch art and tech together.

Takeaways

• Tour of SF's micro-scenes: Sam D'Amico BBQs, MOTS events, the lost Oakland warehouse rave/punk scene, and why the art-tech bridge is harder than it looks.
• Shoutouts to the orgs actually moving the city: Hamilton Society, SF10x, GrowSF (and @garrytan).
• Closes on why they still love SF in 2026 — framed as the controversial take.

TL;DR. Lulu Meservey breaks down how cult leaders, Napoleon, and Elon build fanatical loyalty — and why most modern companies are terrified of doing the same.

Takeaways

• "Tyrant Mode" exists for a reason: leaky, activist-infested cultures (see Google) need a leader willing to alienate the right people.
• Loyalty is engineered through visuals, story, and the Roman idea of Auctoritas — not org charts or comp packages.
• Recruit for the spirit, not the letter; Jensen Huang's trick was inventing the metric that made his bet legible.