Then why do they need to give the technical co-founder 20%, or even make him a co-founder at all? They either have enough privilege and connection that they can bring in serious funding from investors, future clients, or friends/family/fools, - or they don't and their privilege and connections aren't really worth that much. If they did, they'd much rather give them a few percentage points and pay them a salary, capturing all the upside.
It's a broad over-generalization but it's a good rule of thumb. They must have access to demonstrable money and/or power before they're worth an 80/20 split, well above what most random business guys can bring in from even elite universities.
Edit: A decent somewhat recent example is Theranos. No biotech VC would touch them because they do due diligence on the basic scientific viability of their investments, but Holmes and her cofounder were able to bring in huge tech investors from family connection and even get people like Henry Kissinger on their board, who also helped them get more investors. That's the kind of connections that might be worth an uneven split.
They need to pay for the tech then. Hire an engineer and design team. If they don’t have the access to that sort of immediate funding, then I’d struggle to imagine what sort of in-the-bag contacts they could bring to justify such an uneven split.
And that type of person quite often turns out to be a huge over-privileged narcissist who's never had to work hard a day in their life, because of their family and frat-bro connections, and who will gladly fuck you over without a second thought.
Pointing at people is considered impolite in some cultures. I think it's better to raise your hand with an extended finger and then cross both your index fingers to signal "close out."
Have a little light on the table with a button you can push to summon the server.
This is similar to how in Brazilian churrascarias you have a red/green coaster that you flip green if you want the server to come around with more meat, and red, when you're done.
The way my wife currently does it (she's Asian) is that she uses her index fingers and thumbs to "air draw" a rectangle which I guess is supposed to represent a cheque
I think we need quantum systems to ever break out of that issue.
EDIT: not as to creating an agent that can do anything but creating an agent that more reliably represents and respects its reality, making it easier for us to reason and work with seriously.
Because here I'm getting "YouTuber thumbnail vibes" at the idea of solving non-deterministic programming by selecting the one halting outcome out of a multiverse of possibilities
YouTube's algorithm has created over the last ~5 years an entire cottage industry of click-maximizing content creators who take any interesting scientific discovery or concept, turn it into the maximally hypey claim they can, and make that the title of their videos with a "shocked-face" thumbnail.
E.g. imagine an arxiv paper from French engineer sebastiennight:
Using quantum chips to mitigate halting issues on LLM loops
It would result the same day in a YT video like this:
Thumbnail: (SHOCKED FACE of Youtuber clasping their head next to a Terminator robot being crushed by a flaming Willow chip)
Title: French Genius SHOCKS the AI industry with Google chip hack!
That would be some Dr. Strange stuff. I’m just saying a quantum AI agent would be more grounded when deciding when to stop based on the physical nature of their computation vs. engineering hacks we need for current classical systems that become inherently inaccurate representations of reality. I could be wrong.
Quantum computation is no different than classical, except the bit registers have the ability to superpose and entangle, which allows certain specific algorithms like integer factorization to run faster. But conceptually it's still just digital code and an instruction pointer. There's nothing more "physical" about it than classical computing.
And it's definitely not "try every possibility in parallel", as is sometimes portrayed by people who don't know better. While quantum computing makes it possible to superpose multiple possibilities, the way quantum mechanics works, you can only measure one (and you have to decide ahead of time which one to measure, i.e. you can't ask the quantum system like "give me the superposition with the highest value"). That's why only a few specific algorithms are aided by quantum computing at all. Integer factorization (or more generally, anything that uses Fourier transforms) is the biggest, where it's exponential speedup, but most others are just quadratic speedup.
And even if you could simulate and measure multiple things in parallel, that still wouldn't let you solve the halting problem, which would require simulating and measuring infinite things in parallel.
Another way of saying it: everything that can be done on a quantum computer can also be done on a classical computer. It's just that some specific algorithms can be done much faster on a quantum computer, and in the case of integer factorization, a quantum computer could factor numbers larger than would ever be practical on a classical computer. But that's really it. There's nothing magical about them.
“Nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it’s a wonderful problem, because it doesn’t look so easy” (Richard Feynman). Quantum systems are physical systems, classical systems due to their very nature only can emulate it. When it comes to agents like we were discussing before, a classical agent will always be limited by the abstractions needed to get it to understand the real world. A quantum agent would actually “get” the world. The difference is fidelity and classic systems will only ever be an approximation.
This is irrelevant. First, quantum programs don't "get" anything just by virtue of being quantum code, any more than classical computers "get" the foundations of electricity and magnetism because they use electrons. Second, classical computers absolutely can simulate quantum systems. They're inefficient, but they can do it. Third, determining whether an agent is stuck in an infinite loop has nothing to do with the physical world. They're just binary code running on a Turing machine. Fourth, the halting problem is provably unsolvable in both classical and quantum systems, so there's not even a relationship here. Fifth, what do you mean by quantum systems are physical? Does this mean classical systems aren't? Are physical systems only those that use every aspect of physics? Then quantum systems aren't physical either because they can't account for gravity. So do we need quantum gravitational computers? Sixth, what does "getting" quantum mechanics that have to do with AI agents? Do I need to understand quantum physics before I can have a conversation with someone? Can I not read an email without an appeal to hilbert space? Just, none of this is related to quantum computing. It's like having a bug in a deployment and saying string theory would've prevented that.
I see intermixing of the terms quantum computer and quantum system. These are different concepts, and I think that's the source of the confusion. A quantum computer is a well defined thing. It's just like a classical computer but instead of just binary bits, it can work with qubits that support superposition. But it still needs programs just like a classical computer, and the results that we can actually read are binary in both cases.
Both of them are quantum "systems", in that both require quantum physics to work, if we're considering modern CPU gate sizes. Just, classical computers expose binary bits, and quantum computers expose qubits.
What I think you're picturing is a quantum "system", like a blob of quantum goo, that you can toss some "state" into and...something. But, that's not what a quantum computer is, any more than a classical computer is something you could throw into a blob of electrical goop and expect it to do anything.
I think you’re right that they can’t “solve” the halting problem but are more capable at dealing with it than classic ai agents and more physically grounded. Outside monitoring would be required but I’d imagine less so than classical systems and in physically different ways; and to be fair, humans require monitoring too if they should halt or not, haha.
Humans don’t encounter an infinite loop problem because we are not “process-bound” - we may spend too long on a task but ultimately we are constantly evaluating whether or not we should continue (even if our priorities may not be the same as whoever assigned us a task). The monitoring is built-in, by nature of our cross-task processing.
100%. We have built-in faculties for stopping and halting. My point wasn’t that humans physically need a monitor to determine when to stop or else suffer an infinite loop; sleep, eating, and death are perfectly effective at that. I was making a bit of a joke in the efficacy of agents being subjective around halting. A classical or quantum agent might go on forever to solve its goal, getting stuck and needing an outside monitor to reset or redefine it. Contrast that to a human agent; given a goal, they might never even try to solve it in the first place! Without outside monitors, systems of human agents may not start when needed or halt when optimal yet we’ve kept it going for thousands of years!
Exactly the approach I’ve taken for my startup and is baked into the business plan. I have some pretty unique flows leveraging current-gen LLMs. Then there is an AI agent marketplace. It’s there because shoot, maybe AI agents will be super potent and I want a place for them to be integrated. At the same time, the product works perfectly fine with just humans on the platform. It’s a hedge.
Working on a work distribution network for medium to large size organizations. Some unique design and architectural decisions allow for ease of use and ease of scale. It has legs and I think a real shot at competing with applications like Workday, Asana, and Gloat. I’m planning on going full-time with it next week!
I’m currently building the back-end for my startup in C# using EventStoreDB and CQRS. I have an initial front-end application written in Svelte from two years ago as a PoC. It was a treat writing and designing it and I can’t wait to do a second pass with all these awesome Svelte updates!
I tend to listen to a lot of electronic music, and am always looking for new recommendations myself. My taste for 90s stuff has typically run more toward Eurodance/Eurobeat and House and J-pop for more recent things.
Here are some random recommendations:
Daft Punk
Anything on the "Blade" soundtrack
Pretty much any Eurobeat featured in the anime Initial D. e.g. Dave Rodgers, Manuel, Fastway, Go2, m.o.v.e.
2 Unlimited - Get Ready, Twilight Zone, Tribal Dance, No Limit
Technotronic - Pump Up The Jam
Le Click - Tonight is the Night
La Bouche - Be My Lover
Mr Vain - Culture Beat
Black Box - Ride on Time, Strike it Up, I Don't Know Anybody Else (technically 80s, early house music)
The Shamen - Move Any Mountain
Livin' Joy - Don't Stop Movin'
Bonus, more recent: Destination Calabria (Alex Gaudino, Crystal Waters)
Future Sound of London - Dead Cities, was my first exposure to electronic, as an American. They are hard to describe, but are labeled as more psychedelic ambient with bits of techno, trip hop, and progressive house music thrown in. Each album is fairly different from the others, and there is a lot of experimentation that feels unique even in 2025 (at least to myself). I'm a big progressive music fan, or any genre, so they scratch an itch for me when it comes to electronic music.
I am biased as a Londoner but it UK Garage is/was a wonderful subgenre of house from the 90s, a uniquely London blend of genres including Chicago house. Infectious stuff. It was a precursor to later genres like Dubstep and Grime which are so popular today.
Spotify has some good playlists. Rosie Gaines 'Closer than Close' and Artful Dodger 'Movin too Fast' or 'Woman Trouble' are good starting points.
We have been enjoying Massive Attack. The same culture that hatched Banksy is my kind of folks and the music has a good edge, IMO.
For modern stuff, I've enjoyed SomaFM's Groove Salad out of San Francisco. They have net streams directly accessible in VLC, so the processor burning Web app is utterly unnecessary.
That same culture also hatched Portishead (just down the road from Bristol), which was pretty much the apotheosis of trip-hop. It's also the second home of reggae in the UK (after London), which has quite a bit to do with its musical vibe.
Be sure to go back and forth between Groove Salad and Groove Salad Classic, which is the more 90s-2000s version. There's not a lot of people putting out stuff with the "classic" feel anymore, which is partly why Rusty renamed it, and started a newer, modern channel.
SomaFM was incredible, I probably used more bandwidth on their streams than almost anything else for a good year at home. And iirc, this was during dial-up days!
I’ve actually used this extensively for months now since it’s free and works with PDFs I’ve downloaded off the internet. I was so frustrated with ridiculously overpriced TTS (must pay for annual sub! no monthly) when I found this gem.
My main use case is comp. sci and philosophy books. I download PDFs of varying quality off the internet onto my phone and import them into this app. The text translation is always solid but for the former, graphs and diagrams really break it. It’s a tricky problem because these often are important to the text so skipping them (for the app) isn’t ideal but the current solution just makes the reader goof up. I think it would be cool if the model could identify these objects and maybe generate some text describing the object and TTSing that. Minor gripe and for the latter, it’s perfect.
I’ve probably used this app for 70 reading hours at 1.5x speed across long road trips and walking my dog at the park. I’ve gotten through numerous books I wouldn’t have and for free. I’m happy!
(annoying bug I find often: it seems certain characters or tokens just break it and it freezes. I need to manually skip ahead hoping it doesn’t get stuck again. Really detracts from the hands free nature and is difficult to manage while driving)
My mother suffers from borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder. My father is textbook narcissistic personality disorder. It’s easy to say my childhood wasn’t easy, but in a strange way. Along the way, I developed BPD symptoms impressed on me by my parents, suffered hospitalization multiple times, and ended up going through DBT.
I am 24 now and I lucked out far better than my peers. I have a career in software, a loving partner of 6 years (which I definitely traumatized multiple times), and am even in grad school! For me, the biggest issues I face from a societal perspective are not the BPD symptoms, mostly regressed and which usually make me alluring to people, but the ADHD symptoms I developed along with BPD. I’ve read that these are often comorbid and that tracks with what you are saying because a BPD parent and BPD is trauma.
Weed and shrooms also helped me get better. Not with the ADHD which definitely gets much worse on weed, but with the BPD symptoms. It made me slow down and let me get in touch with my empathy long repressed. I believe I was 19 when I first smoked and it’s been a journey but trending upward.
Fun BPD story: by the time I was 18, I had over 60 sexual partners. I was a dorky guy who played video games over 8 hours a day every day.
