Kokasync | Kshitij Kokas

<p>There’s a version of this post that stays comfortable. It calls the movie’s premise “inspired by real physics,” drops a couple of famous names, and moves on. That’s not this post. I watched The End of Oak Street...

<p>In 1611, Johannes Kepler’s wife died of typhus. He was forty, running the imperial mathematics office in Prague, and everyone around him agreed he needed to remarry. So he did what Kepler did with everything else in...

<p>One working AI agent feels like a win. A hundred agents without a shared standard feels like a factory where every operator invented their own sequence.</p><p>That gap is not theoretical anymore. In March 2026, Cisco...

<p>In December 2017, a publicly traded soft drink company with the legal name Long Island Iced Tea Corp told the market it was becoming Long Blockchain Corp. Not the cocktail. An actual listed beverage business, ticker...

<p>Meta gave away, for free, a 30 billion parameter AI agent that runs on a graphics card you can buy at a normal computer store. Its closed sibling, the model it was distilled from, costs $4.25 for every million tokens...

<p>A mid-sized image classification job, a few thousand labeled photos, runs somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars to hand-annotate today, even at the cheap end of the market. Segmentation work...

<p>On August 4th, Anthropic signed a six year, ten billion dollar compute deal. Nothing unusual about that on its face, AI labs sign huge compute deals constantly now. What’s unusual is who they signed it with. Volta...

<p>In 2004, two engineers at Google published a paper solving a problem that had nothing to do with language models. They needed to index the entire web across thousands of cheap, failure-prone machines, and no single...

<p>Every deal you’ve ever closed happened because someone decided, on some level, that you were safe to bet on. This episode follows that idea through two very different places: a neuroscience lab where a researcher...

<p>The story usually gets flattened into one sentence: electricity showed up in the 1880s, factories didn’t get faster until the 1920s, forty years lost to inertia. That’s not quite what happened, and the part that gets...

<p>In 1998, a Japanese company best known outside Asia for putting monosodium glutamate in your instant ramen started selling a chemical film to semiconductor packaging plants. Almost nobody covering the chip industry...

<p>In 2023, a Cambridge textbook laid out a five rung ladder for grading how smart an AI agent actually is. Simple reflex. Model based. Goal based. Utility based. Learning. Clean, teachable, the kind of framework that...

<p>There’s a specific phrase in a Google research paper from 2015 that explains the Netflix Prize better than anything Netflix ever said publicly about it. The paper isn’t about Netflix at all. It’s called “Hidden...

<p>James Dacombe is twenty-five. Right now he’s running two venture-backed deep tech companies at the same time, a brain-computer interface startup called CoMind that has raised $100 million, and a chip company called...

<p>Y Combinator open sourced the software it runs its own company on. Not a demo, not a toy internal tool dressed up for a launch post. Accounting, legal, events, engineering, all running through it, and the engineering...