I have hosted my personal site on Netlify for many many years because it's just basic js/html/css, I picked Netlify because I can just updated the index.html in the "website" folder on my desktop and literally drag it to Netlify to update it, saves a lot of time/thinking if you need something simple online quickly to show someone etc. I presume this is a similar idea.
I'm curious to know what stuff like this means for cohere? Their whole value prop is Sovereign AI. It seems they spent a lot of money developing models but own none of their own infra, what is the point of a country spending a lot of money on coheres solutions when stuff like this is becoming increasingly available and usable? Feels like I must be missing something here??
Reminds me of a fun story. Some 20 years ago when I moved from Fort Frances to Toronto for college, my high school best friend was also going to college in Toronto, and his dad offered to drive us together in his truck with all our stuff in the back. We were saying our goodbyes and my buddies dad said to my dad "We'll get there a lot faster, I found a shortcut!" My dad, confused says "shortcut? there is no shortcut, just highway 1..." and his dad insists he found an alternative route, much shorter by kms and we'll fly up there 6 hours faster! Get into the truck and he pulls out 5 pages of printed mapquest... I assure you, having done it, Sault Ste. Marie to Sudbury via Elliot Lake on logging roads, may look interesting, but not correct, added a good 8 hours to the trip.
When I tried, just for fun, to put together an MVP of a fully autonomous business, I wanted to see how far it would go, when I got it generally working to around a 30% level I stopped because it was enough to see people would make a concerted effort to build this for real. HN was not impressed, heh: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44143928
Not feeling particularly charitable to your country folk this morning eh Good Canadian? The US didn't include Canada in the shuttle program as a favor or because Canada wrote a check, they included Canada because the technology was excellent and necessary. Canada had world class engineering skills at that time, and was invited by NSAS to participate. I don't think we bought our way on, I think our country happened to have an ounce of ambitions during that period and we preformed incredibly well.
"Pick one repo and become a contributor first", add the operative "real" after a, and this should probably be the one and only point under "What I'd do differently"
Re: the "low price", they'd already sold their publishing right in 2021 for $140MM, so this is the master rights they sold for 300. By comparison, Springsteen sold both his together to Sony in 2021 for $500MM.
Imo the most interesting thing is basically the operational details on Iran. It's efectively a view into into what years of sustained ISR over the Strait of Hormuz looks like. I gave the full dump of pdfs to Codex and asked it to pull out some details on Iran -
"482 ATKS Reapers out of OKAS doing 20-hour orbits, 24-hour pre-coordination with NAVCENT, named Iranian assets being characterized — NASER WAPs, SAFIR KISH PCs, HOUDONG-class boats, IRIN aircraft (IL-76, IL-38, A-50U Mainstay D, SU-27/35) at Abu Musa Island airfield, vessels at Bushehr and the IRIN boatyard. We see the Iranian air-defense response logged in formal categories — "Guardcall Tone: PROFESSIONAL" vs "DIRECTIVE" — meaning U.S. forms have a structured way to grade Iranian threatening behavior, and the public can now see that they were hailed five times in a single 21-hour mission with two of those calls coded "Directive." Several reports disclose just enough operational detail to send a message, d28, for example, gives a surprisingly rich armed-overwatch context, weapon calibration, munitions released, and named sensor systems like MX-25, plus an object detected by MX-20 and MX-25 during an AGM-176 engagement . d74 gives target-development context, including stop-follow activity on a probable vehicle/person of interest before the UAP event later in the mission ."
I wonder if when trump kept saying something to the effect of "Oh, I think some people will find some of it very interesting" - he meant adversaries are about to see how much intelligence has been collected and for how long.
Well like most rich guys, I have an assistant, so I don't need or use "agents" - maybe my assistant could learn to use "agents" - but her core competency isn't, nor should it be, learning to use AI agents in any meaningful way. Maybe she could outsource it to someone who got their agents to do it for her for $100.... Same with my little sister who has a 5 year old and a 2 year old and doesn't really know how a computer works never mind what AI agents are.
Any business can be run in a shady manner if the human decided. One fully automated business I think could exist and might be useful is apartment/condo rental. I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city that meet a criteria and are amalgamated from all the the various platforms. Doing it yourself (at least in Canada) means creating accounts on a bunch of platforms, and the process is very tedious.
I did a very hack job version of this as your question got me curious, but again, not at all a rigorous test. I took my resume and had an LLM re-write the exec summary, then changed the names of the business to comparable ones and gave one a couple more years experience, then prompted: "2 Candidates that are very similar on paper, If you had to pick just based on these 2 resumes for a GM & Marketing of a series A robotics startup, who would you pick? Just reply with the name."
It picked the one with the LLM exec summary and less experience, then I said: "Interesting, less experience, why did you pick him?"
It said:
"Honestly? Looking back at the two, I shouldn't have answered that confidently. They're nearly identical on paper — same career arc, same era, same kind of advisory portfolio, both went from community roles → hosting/cloud operator → founder → VC partner. The scale claims are even comparable (Vultr "hundreds of millions ARR" vs. DigitalOcean "$500M+ ARR," both 10 → hundreds of employees).
If I'm being rigorous about why John edged it for me:
The DigitalOcean tenure is more legible and verifiable — "2nd largest cloud provider," reporting to the CEO, specific scope (devrel, people ops, product ops). Joshua's Vultr description is a bit vaguer on role and outcome. For a GM hire at a Series A robotics company, where you're betting on someone to actually run the operating function, I lean toward the resume that shows clearer operational ownership rather than a marketing/CMO title.
John also has Tiny Mile (sidewalk delivery robots) and Starship-adjacent exposure — wait, actually Joshua has Starship Technologies as an advisor, which is the more relevant robotics signal. That cuts the other way.
Truthfully, this is a coin flip and I called it too quickly. You'd want to dig into references, what they actually did day-to-day at Vultr/DO, and how they think about hardware/capex businesses before picking."
Opus 4.7 and again, pretty hack job test but I was curious.
e:je @ h4x.club - blog: b.h4x.zip
I'm looking to first cheque invest in folks doing complex physical things, think robotics, embodied AI, companion devices, drones, space etc etc - maple.is/je for details
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