Ernest Oppetit

Happy New Year folks!

The Nvidia Way, by Tae Kim Belatedly posting a few notes on the first history of Nvidia; amazingly none had been written before this one coming which came out in December 2024.

Breakneck, by Dan Wang I’ve been following Dan Wang for years, and read a couple of his annual letters about China.

The mental model when talking to ChatGPT is you are talking to a simulation of what a human labeller would say Youtube As expected, this was a fantastic intro course (3h30) into how LLMs work, with the stated goal of giving you an intution and demistifying

Here is what I read in 2024.

Link Intro “The Iron Law of Megaprojects”. 99.5% of projects go over budget, over schedule, under benefits, or some combination of these The California high-speed rail project was voted in a referendum in 2008.

By Robert Leighton in the New Yorker I like this definition of product management from Lenny’s newsletter: Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.

With the growth of self-service SaaS applications and open-source tools, we’ve all become used to introducing new vendors & dependencies into our stack without talking to anyone.

Outlive, by Peter Attia This was a great read.

Here’s a concept which I think is implicitly used by a lot of teams but (to my knowledge) isn’t named and doesn’t really get talked about: conditional commitments.

Not to be outdone by Barack, here is what I read in 2023.

The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman This book was so heavily promoted across the internet I had to read it.

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash It just occurred to me that I’ve been working professionally for 10 years Here are a few aphorisms and tidbits I’ve picked up along the way, shared in the form of Kevin Kelly’s.

When the Heavens Went on Sale, by Ashlee Vance I was excited to read this book for two reasons: I enjoyed Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk a few years ago.

I believe there is a doom spiral that kills B2B companies that goes like this: Not hitting commitments.

Youtube link, Spotify link When David Marcus jumped into the crypto space I was pretty interested to find out what he was going to build, given his illustrious career (sold company to Paypal, was Paypal CEO, led Libra and Messaging at Facebook) This inter…

Hello darkness my old friend You know the drill.

Sandworm, by Andy Greenberg This book is the thrilling account of the Ukranian power grid cyber attacks of 2015, and the search for who was behind them.

Rescue from Elephant Island, Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, 1916 “They didn’t know it was impossible, so they did it” – Paul Bourget If you follow certain agile methodologies to the letter – namely points estimating all the work, and only assigning a…

Jimmy Chen’s presentation at a recent a16z summit I was really impressed and inspired by this pitch.