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Platforms: Build Abstractions, not Illusions • Gregor Hohpe • GOTO 2025

Jun 29, 2026

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Machine Learning

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Jun 29, 2026

Frontier results, on device - RL Nabors, Arize

RL Nabors discusses the significant costs associated with using frontier AI models, covering security, latency, and financial implications. She introduces a framework for right-sizing AI solutions by leveraging smaller, task-specific models and Small Language Models (SLMs). The framework details how to prove task feasibility, establish success criteria with golden datasets, conduct capability evaluations (using tools like Phoenix), and select the most appropriate "Small And Good Enough" (SAGE) model. Nabors further demonstrates how prompt engineering, particularly few-shot prompting, and post-processing can close performance gaps with larger models, while advocating for continuous regression evaluations to maintain performance integrity. The overarching message is to "prototype big, deploy small" to optimize AI deployments.

Jun 28, 2026

Research to Reality: Bringing Frontier ML Research to Production - Vaidas Razgaitis, Higharc

Vaidas Razgaitis, Senior Research Engineer at Higharc, shares three tactical tips to accelerate the transition of novel AI/ML research into production-ready features. He emphasizes addressing the critical handoff challenge between ML researchers and software engineers through structured documentation (Research Prototype Taxonomy Document), a well-organized monorepo utilizing decoupled microservices, and a systematic approach to code decomposition and PR review. These strategies aim to improve legibility, maintainability, and delivery speed for ML-driven products.

Jun 12, 2026

Uncertainty-Guided Data Augmentation for Engineers | Deep Dive - Yongmin Kwon

This session details a data-efficient method for training engineering surrogate models by using uncertainty quantification (UQ) to guide geometric data augmentation. Instead of random deformations, the approach lets the deep ensemble model identify its own knowledge gaps (epistemic uncertainty), then uses Free-Form Deformation (FFD) to generate new shapes specifically in those uncertain regions. This ensures every expensive simulation run yields maximally informative data, significantly improving model accuracy for a fixed computational budget across domains like structural mechanics and aerodynamics.

Artificial Intelligence

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Jun 29, 2026

The AI Agents Helping Home Services Book More Jobs

Avoca (YC W23) has achieved eight-figure revenue and a $1 billion valuation by building an AI workforce for home services, turning missed calls into revenue. Founders Apurva Shrivastava and Tyson Chen explain how AI expands software's market share beyond 1% by automating labor and operational costs, leading to a 15x larger opportunity. They emphasize that their AI agents augment human workers, reducing attrition in challenging CSR roles and creating new positions for training AI, driven by a deep customer obsession learned at YC.

Jun 29, 2026

What Is AI Code Review? Fixing Slow PRs & Broken Workflows with AI

Anna Gutowska explains how AI code review enhances software development by addressing the slowness and inconsistency of traditional methods. The video delves into the benefits of AI in accelerating reviews, improving code quality, fostering developer learning, and reducing technical debt. It covers the underlying technologies like static/dynamic analysis and LLMs, discusses critical considerations such as over-reliance and context, and provides best practices for integrating AI while emphasizing the indispensable role of human oversight.

Jun 29, 2026

The Blueprint for Autonomous Work Agents | Gavriel Cohen, NanoClaw

Kovid Goyal, founder of NanoClaw, discusses his journey from a serendipitous encounter with Singapore's Foreign Minister to evolving NanoClaw into an enterprise AI deployment company. He shares insights on personal vs. team-managed agents, the "second brain" as a killer use case, NanoClaw's security-first architecture, and the future challenges of managing open-source projects and enterprise AI deployments in an era of rapidly evolving agent technology.

Technology

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Jun 29, 2026

Platforms: Build Abstractions, not Illusions • Gregor Hohpe • GOTO 2025

Gregor Hohpe explains the critical role of platforms in managing the growing cognitive load on developers due to complex distributed systems. He contrasts platforms, driven by "economies of speed" and fostering innovation through diversity, with traditional IT services and oversimplified abstractions that create dangerous illusions. Hohpe emphasizes building platforms that provide intuitive, domain-specific abstractions to solve real business problems, rather than just repackaging existing cloud services.

Jun 25, 2026

Full Stack Greenfield Projects : Are they still relevant?

Bharat Goenka, co-founder of Tally, discusses the company's unconventional approach to software development through "Full Stack Greenfield" projects. He explains why building every component from scratch, despite being a high-risk strategy, has been crucial for Tally's success in serving the SMB market, fostering extreme customer loyalty, and aspiring to connect 200 million businesses. The talk delves into the historical context, the philosophy of questioning and choosing constraints, and the distinction between product and custom engineering.

Jun 21, 2026

3‑2‑1 Backup Rule Explained: Protect Your Data from Disaster

Jeff Crume outlines essential data resiliency strategies, starting with the 3-2-1 backup rule—three copies, two media types, one offsite—and expanding to include immutable or air-gapped backups, rigorous testing, and encryption. He emphasizes these principles for robust disaster recovery, ransomware protection, and minimizing costly downtime, highlighting the trade-offs in achieving high availability.

Recent Post

Apr 28, 2026

Why building eval platforms is hard — Phil Hetzel, Braintrust

An evaluation platform is more than a simple test runner; it's a complex system for creating shared definitions of quality. This talk explores the evolution of eval platforms from basic spreadsheets to sophisticated, integrated systems, highlighting the hidden data and systems engineering challenges involved in making them credible, scalable, and usable for building trustworthy AI agents.

Apr 28, 2026

Box CEO: Why Big Companies Are Falling Behind on AI | a16z

Steven Sinofsky, Aaron Levie, and Martin Casado of a16z dissect the reality of AI adoption within large enterprises. They explore the significant gap between Silicon Valley's developer-centric culture and the complex, legacy-driven world of established organizations, explaining why many top-down AI initiatives fail. The discussion introduces a key architectural shift—treating AI agents as users rather than integrated software—and analyzes the immense integration, security, and data challenges that agents face. Ultimately, they argue that AI, rather than eliminating jobs, will create new ones by increasing system complexity and enabling professionals to operate at a higher level of abstraction.

Apr 28, 2026

Building & Running a Serverless Platform: Beyond Infrastructure • Shilpa Nagavara • GOTO 2025

Explore the lifecycle of building and operating a robust serverless platform, treating it as a product for internal and external consumers. This talk covers the crucial phases of ideation, construction (using the AWS Well-Architected Framework), and operation, emphasizing a consumer-centric mindset, operational excellence, and strategies for long-term success.

Apr 28, 2026

AI Infrastructure, Ray, and Why Nonlinear Careers Win — with Linda Haviv

Linda Haviv discusses the modern AI landscape, emphasizing that non-linear career paths and systems thinking are now more valuable than pure coding skills. She explores how open-source technology, like the Ray framework, is democratizing AI development and closing the gap with proprietary models, and why building a personal brand through content creation is essential for career growth and community building in a rapidly evolving industry.

Apr 27, 2026

Open Models at Google DeepMind — Cassidy Hardin, Google DeepMind

Cassidy Hardin from Google DeepMind introduces Gemma 4, a new family of open-weight models with significant architectural and performance improvements. This summary covers the four new models (31B Dense, 26B MoE, and two "Effective" on-device models), deep dives into architectural changes like mixed global/local attention and Per-Layer Embeddings (PLE), and details the new native multimodal capabilities for vision and audio.

Apr 27, 2026

The $15B Physical AI Company: Simulation, Autonomy OS, Neural Sim, & 1K Engineers—Applied Intuition

Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig, founders of Applied Intuition, discuss the shift from autonomy tooling to a comprehensive physical AI platform. They explain why physical AI is more than just LLMs on wheels, highlighting the critical bottleneck of deploying models onto constrained hardware. The conversation covers their three-pillar tech stack—simulation, operating systems, and AI models—and makes the case for an 'Android for every moving machine' to solve the fragmentation in safety-critical systems like cars, trucks, and robots.

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