I’m hiring a Right Hand to work alongside me at Sudowrite. Our company is full of uniquely wonderful and kind people that you can’t help but love. It's also profitable. (We're weird!) And we do it making creative tools for artists, not B2B SaaS. This is an incredible role for someone who’s done ops, exec support, been a chief of staff, or worn a lot of hats at a startup. 🌈🌴 On-location in Honolulu preferred but not required. sudowrite.com/jobs/right-han…

ok ya'll convinced me. i'm that guy sitting here in coach on southwest with a giant monitor in front of me, watching a movie overhead. i love this. Observations - nice to be able to use my MacBook keyboard with the display mostly closed, with drinks on my tray table. feels less crowded. - nice to have this "private" screen. no one peeking over my shoulder. - mirrored display looks a LOT bigger in actual use than in this video. it's a big laggy. - the "old" airpods pro work just fine - disney DRM blocks the movie from this screen recording - i let the vision update to visionOS 1.0.2 last night and my battery was down to 50% this morning! :( - i paid for wifi for my MacBook, but the vision can't share it unless I pay for a second device. wish it could! but since i'm mirroring, it's not a big deal - my seat mate said "that's cool". no one else has said anything or appeared to notice.

Got married last weekend to a woman like no other. A woman who dated me after I slid into her DMs with a paul graham essay. A woman who cried every single night that first week when we talked on the phone. A woman who did reference calls to check me out before our first date. A woman who booked a flight, a car, and an airbnb, flew two thousand miles, and quarantined for 3 days, to make that first date happen. And a woman who, when my vows referenced sunk costs, commitment devices, and training LLMs to achieve immortality, laughed instead of cringed. I’m so lucky to have you as my partner, my equal, and my teammate in life. I love you, @HuaNancy. ❤️

It's a WILD👺 time to be building a generative AI startup. Against my better judgement, I'm going to share numbers we've only shown investors. And some even they haven't seen. 👇

We made a human!

just realized huberman lab is goop for guys

Google Calendar feature suggestion: Blind Cancel. If you blind cancel a meeting it sends no notifications and the meeting is NOT cancelled. But if EVERYONE on the meeting blind cancels, it IS cancelled. (Because nobody wanted it, and everyone was attending due to obligation.)

3 years ago today I slid into @HuaNancy’s DMs. We lived 2,441 miles away from each other. 2 weeks later, she came to visit me. 2 years after our first date, I proposed. …and in 10 weeks from today, we’ll marry!

IRL meetings are so weird. you can't even see yourself

Ran through Golden Gate Park this morning and my gosh I forgot how pretty SF can be.

Each time I land in a new country I want a push notification telling me: 1) Is the tap water safe to drink? 2) Should I tip? If so, how much? 3) Do I need cash? If so, how much per day?

I am starting a new hotel and the primary differentiator is that we don't tuck your sheets underneath the mattress every GD night.

10 years ago today, a small yellow bag of donor-harvested stem cells dripped through an IV line into my bloodstream. Those cells made their way to my bone marrow, re-seeded my immune system, and resurrected me. Thankful for the friends who made it possible. And for science!

AirPods Pro 2 Feature Suggestion: Real-world Replay. You squeeze your AirPods and they replay the last 5 seconds of ambient sound. Mics on AirPods Pro are already listening to and processing ambient sound. Why not buffer it so you can hear the things you missed?

There is actually a sixth love language and it is sending links.

I dunno but I just had a good conversation with him. He’s a writer and has his first novel coming out later this year. He’s gonna start Sudowrite!

I'm scared. 10 years ago… I sold my company after a near-death health crisis and felt lost. I traveled, hoping to find myself. But I didn't find meaning on beaches or airplanes. I started writing sci-fi short stories. I got published, but then something weird happened… they started teaching me who I was. Then I tried AI, and I stopped writing completely. That's when I started building Sudowrite with James. This was years before ChatGPT. We saw AI would change writing forever. And it was oddly dispiriting. AI made me stop writing, because AI sucked for writing. AI was magical and astonishingly smart. But it couldn't write prose that made you feel something. Every few months, AI got better at coding and analyzing legal contracts and solving math Olympiad problems, but it got worse at making shit up or writing something a person would want to read for pleasure. Here's the thing: We fought it, hard. With devilishly clever workarounds, complex prompting strategies, and symphonies of AI models that overcome each others' weaknesses we made something that thousands of writers use to tell amazing stories. But the writing was on the wall. Nobody was going to make an AI model for authors, because nobody cared. So we did. And so there are two reasons I'm scared today. First: We're not OpenAI or Anthropic. They've got billions. We're a scrappy team that loves writers. We have amazing writers cheering us on. But we've spent over a year on this and I can still see so many ways it could be better. We put everything we've learned about writing great fiction with AI into this. It's the best out there. I hope it's good enough. Second: What's my excuse not to write now? (What's yours?) 👇

Big day! Introducing Sudowrite.com, a magical writing AI to help writers get unstuck & be more creative. Our vision is to make writing more playful. I'd love your help getting the word out!

HORSES WERE THE FIRST SELF-DRIVING CARS.

how it started…

My buddy @ramit has had a rough life. Dude is brown and he didn't become a doctor OR an engineer so you know his parents are ashamed of him. Help this poor guy out and watch his new Netflix show: netflix.com/title/81410436

Work while everyone else is sleeping. Of all the to-do apps and productivity hacks I've tried over the years, it's the most effective by far.

Growth has taken off. Writers are finding us (organically, we haven't run any ads) and understand the value Sudowrite can bring. It took 2½ years to be in the right place at the right time.

"Think of the life you have lived until now as over and, as a dead man, see what's left as a bonus and live it." —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Not only that, but the team is on 🔥. We launched more new features last quarter than any other. We had more conversations (60+) with customers than ever. Watching our team learn from writers, build empathy, and help them solve problems fills me with joy. It's working.

Tomorrow I go to Boston to start the transplant process. THANK YOU everyone!! It couldn't have happened w/o you. More: tumblr.amitgupta.com/post/16…

I’m hiring a product designer for Sudowrite. This is a dream job for a designer who loves to write. The beginning of the listing is… a mini therapy sesh for me. You’d think it’d be chill after that. But no, it goes on to talk about our company cult… sudowrite.com/jobs/designer

I’m writing a Chrome plugin that will save me $$ THOUSANDS over the course of my life. It’s so simple, I don’t know why no one’s built it before. It puts a msg above the buy button whenever I’m looking at a drone. The msg says: “YOU ARE ONLY GOING TO USE THIS LIKE TWO TIMES!”

This lil Boox e-reader has e-ink, runs Android apps, and has no cellular. It's like an e-ink Android iPod Touch. I want it.

We grew ARR 40%. In *one* month! Skeptical writers got a taste of AI from ChatGPT, then searched for a tool that was purpose-built for writing better fiction with AI. @Sudowrite is that tool. 11 days into 2023, here's where we're at…

Just boarded a 5 hour flight with apple vision pro. Will I be brave enough to strap it to my face?

‘Face Detected’ is an installation where artists are invited to model clay portraits while a computer watches through a camera. As soon as software detects a human face, the artist is notified that the work is finished. driesdepoorter.be/facedetect…

My home for the night. One of my fave Tokyo things is the capsule hotels. $22 for a cozy & modern capsule, a spotless shower room, slippers, pajamas, toothbrush, and a coworking space in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Two bucks more and they throw in breakfast.

I'm hiring a Founding Product Designer. It's a phenomenally important role. Here's why… bit.ly/make-writing-awesome

Something happened last year and I didn't tell anyone until now → amitgupta.com/something-happ…

After @AlaskaAir canceled my flight last week, I had to buy the last seat on another airline for twice as much and take a $169 Uber to get to my destination. Alaska refunded my original ticket, but I asked them to reimburse the extra cost of the new flight + Uber. Surprisingly, they agreed, and just sent a $779.62 refund. I'm impressed that they did this. We often read horror stories of how airlines treat their customers, and I figured I should call it out when one did the right thing.

Borrowing $ = borrowing freedom from future Drinking coffee = borrowing sleep from future Drinking alcohol = borrowing happiness from future

A letter to my unborn son You should know we had you for selfish reasons. For us, not for you. Before your mom, I dated other women. Almost married one of them. When we broke up, I thought about becoming a single dad. Could single men adopt? I looked into it and found that they could. Apparently it’s a thing now. Hard, but doable. I decided not to. I didn’t want you that badly. When I first talked to your mother, she cried. Your auntie Joey and uncle James introduced us. So I slid into your mom's DMs (I’ll explain later), and asked her if she wanted to talk about a Paul Graham essay we both liked. (This was a common courtship ritual in our day.) She said yes, and we scheduled a FaceTime call. We talked for three hours; she wept. We spoke for hours every night that week, and every night, your mother wept. You’ll have to ask her why. It’s as easy for her to cry as it is difficult for me. I hope you’ll take after her. In adulthood, anyway. Crying is a good thing. She rented a car and Airbnb, flew from California to Hawaii, and quarantined for three days so we could meet. I was so excited to finally meet her. But when we finally did meet in person, we didn’t like each other. Not at all. If it weren’t for the pandemic and thousands of dollars in sunk costs, we wouldn’t have gone on a second date. Two years later, we married. When we decided to have you, she didn’t like kids. She still doesn’t. For her, procreation was about spreading her genes. I don’t understand this about her. Nothing special about my genes, as far as I’m concerned. But she was concerned. Her genes had to continue. She’d frozen eggs, in two rounds of IVF just to be safe, years before she and I met. (We didn’t use them, you came au naturel.) She could dote on her cat for hours, spend afternoons at the vet attending to every minor ailment, but she couldn’t see the point of having a kid. Besides the promulgation of genes. A means to an end. I laughed it off, certain she’d change her attitude once you arrived. But a part of me wondered what I’d signed up for. Was I about to effectively be a single dad after all? There was a part of me that looked forward to that challenge. Maybe I’d assemble a team of fellow single men to share the burden, leading to hilarious and heartwarming hijinks. Like that movie Three Men and Little Baby. (Movies were like these 2 hour-long TikTok videos. Except they were sideways instead of up and down. And you had to go to a special big dark room with a sticky floor to watch them and pay $10 and if you talked while you watched someone would yell at you. If you got bored, you couldn’t just swipe to the next one either, you just had to keep watching, or leave.) I like kids. I like my nieces and nephew. You’ll meet them soon enough. I like playing with them when I visit, then I like going back to my neat and orderly life. I thought it might be pretty fun to have a little me running around. But I wasn’t really looking forward to the baby part. In my 20s I idolized a few designers, and one was this rebellious guy named Tibor Kalman. I only found out about him when he died by reading his obituary. (When someone important died, they used to publish these little essays about their life in the newspaper, which was…like these huge sheets of paper with the Internet printed on them. It came out once a day and it was about everything that happened the day before.) I read everything about Tibor once I found out about him. He was a badass. And in one of his interviews he talked about how having kids was one of the best things he did because it had a huge effect on his work. He said he was able to see the whole world anew through their eyes and it had a huge impact on his creative work. That seemed pretty cool. When I got leukemia when I was 31, they told me I had to start chemo right away. And that the chemo would make me sterile. They asked me if I wanted to freeze my sperm, in case someday I wanted a kid like you. I said yes. But as I lay in that hospital room dying, connected to beeping machines, while nurses and doctors burst into my room every few minutes to take blood, ask questions, or run tests, masturbation–that’s when…well, we’ll get to that later–anyway, masturbation seemed impossible. I gave up in frustration. Who needed kids anyway? They were right, the chemo did sterilize me. But some years later, miraculously, my sperm started working again. And now here you (almost) are. You should know our lives are really good without you. We have a dog. I have a company and I work with people I genuinely adore. We live in Hawaii. We just got married, and we’re in love. We watch shows and read books and workout and take walks and sleep in on weekends and generally luxuriate in our time. I work a lot, but it’s because I like it a lot... I was wrong, our lives aren’t good, they’re great. We don’t need you to make them better. So, why you. Why now? I’m honestly not sure. It might be this look we’ve seen on other people’s faces when they talk about their kids and how their lives changed once they did…they get a kinda goofy, cult-ish look. If it was just one or two of them, I’d nod and smile and find someone else to talk to. But it seems like almost all of them. They just really like their kids. Even when there kids seem like absolute jerks. It could be a shared mass delusion. But if they’re this happy about it, maybe we should delude ourselves too. And there’s something else. I think we both feel it. It’s a hint. A hint, a sense, a scent, a tickle in the back of our minds that there’s something more. That the point isn’t just to cook some nice meals and do some good work and be good to ourselves and to others. That maybe there’s some deeper part of the human experience that isn’t any of these things. Something we’re missing out on. Something that might complete the whole thing. I mean, people spend their life savings, decades of their lives, and all of their time. They sacrifice their careers to raise a screaming baby into an ungrateful teenager that resents them and think they’re the lamest person on earth…and they seem to think they made the right call. Gotta be something to it. I’m eager to meet you, little one. And terrified of all the ways our lives will change as a result. In my experience there aren’t anywhere near as many one-way tickets in life as people think there are. But this probably is one, despite the fact that your mom says we can always give you up if you suck. See you soon, 
Dad p.s. My heart just did a skip beat when I typed “Dad” just there. That’s the first time I’ve written it and meant myself. * * *

Tests of AI-based traffic lights in Pittsburgh show 25% less travel time, 40% less idle time, 21% less emissions. spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-…

BLOWN AWAY by email after my talk. People changing jobs, moving, volunteering, joining the marrow registry... 👏👏👏 piped.video/watch?v=9AP1hoNJ…

Very excited to announce that Tor.com purchased my story "India World®" for publication in early 2021! It's about a future where India ascends as a world power and centers on an Indian-American who travels to India to pursue economic opportunity.

My first short story is out!!! It's a quick, optimistic read (or listen). If you liked “The Good Place”, I think you’ll like this, too. escapepod.org/2020/03/12/esc…

Kenny Shopsin created Shopsin's, a restaurant where the menu feels like an art piece and an artifact. A place that feels so New York, it seems like it could only exist in a movie, not in real life. It was the first New York restaurant I fell in love with. kottke.org/18/09/rip-kenny-s…

Forget the remote work guides. Someone write a guide on how to keep your parents from breaking self-quarantine to go to Costco or the grocery or the post office every other day. 🙄

Having traveled extensively the last few years, this observation by @kottke really rings true for me. Compared to many cities in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, America *feels* poor. kottke.org/20/02/my-trip-to-…

You can now "call Sweden" +46 771 793 336 & be connected to a random Swede who wants to talk about their country. thelocal.se/20160406/sweden-…

955 days ago I met @mscheminske at this very cafe (instagram.com/p/eaNeN2EbB3/) Today we leave Portland for adventure!

Decreed: Every sufficiently large tech company will eventually introduce products called Paper, Pencil, and Wallet.

We hadn't suffered due to ChatGPT, we'd grown even faster. We also crossed a significant psychological threshold @ 500K ARR. This is what it looked like a couple weeks into December. At the end of the year, I checked the numbers again…

Where is the Mac app that uses the webcam + AI to buzz at me every time I touch my face? (Suggested name: CoronaCam)

Forget Apple subscription TV. An Apple services offering I could get behind: A privacy-focused VPN that's always on, dead simple, and designed for non-techies.

Last June I lost my Kindle somewhere in Hawaii …yesterday someone returned it after finding it at a bus stop in Bayview, CA. #lifeiscool

I’m hiring a Head of Growth for Sudowrite. We’re profitable, all-remote, full of friendly and nice people, and we’re building the writing tool of authors' dreams. Come help us find our next 100,000 writers to help! 👇

Created a new iPhone automation that turns off my wifi and cellular data whenever I open Facebook, Instagram, or Safari. Annoying enough that I end up not using them most of the time.

Visited an arcade for the first time in awhile. So many iPhone games turned arcade games, vertical screen and all!

Funding announcements are often drab but @Haje made ours *riveting*. (Seriously, read it.) Excited to announce we just raised $3M from a veritable DREAM TEAM. Couldn't imagine a better partner in all this than @jamesjyu. techcrunch.com/2021/11/19/su…

Snyder cut took three days and I…liked it. Even though (maybe because?) it was melancholy and dark compared to Marvel’s uplifting and family-friendly fare.

These people unboxing their Apple Silicon M1 MacBook Airs and running Cinebench benchmarks. 🤦‍♂️ Nobody cares TEST THAT GODDAMN WEBCAM

Everyone watch Never Have I Ever on @netflix. It's the best show and @mindykaling is a genius. Thank you.

Watching the @spacex Falcon 9 elegantly and rapidly lift Dragon into orbit with the ISS this afternoon was awe-inspiring. So thankful to @nasa & @nasasocial for the opportunity to see the launch and peek behind the scenes.

We’re hiring a Community Lead at Sudowrite. It’s an incredibly important role at a pivotal moment. If you love writing and community, here are 3 reasons why you should consider this… sudowrite.com/jobs-community

Each time I go back to Instagram, it feels like fewer and fewer people are showing up. The beginning of the end.

We've been working on something new for a while… Plugins for Sudowrite They let you do things like… - Talk to your characters - Simulate your readers - Write query letters - Get brutally honest feedback … and 1,000 other things. But the coolest thing about plugins is…

Some guy just stumbled towards me on the sidewalk & told me to go back to whatever country I came from. This doesn't happen to me often, buy it shook me up a little bit. But also I saw 10 (TEN!) driverless cars this morning… So I'm still pretty bullish on the present & future.

Use Safari instead of Chrome for ~30% more battery life on your MacBook. theverge.com/2015/4/10/83814…

The best personal about page I've read in a long time. <3 how @charlesforman is always so fearlessly himself. wonderunit.com/about/charles…

My reverse immigration short story "India World" is finally out!!!

I’m in Taghazout, a tiny Moroccan fishing village on Africa’s East coast. I’ve written each day and had some of my fave surf sessions in memory. It’s inexpensive and beautiful. Most locals are Muslim, so they are fasting for Ramadan now. They speak Arabic & French and are kind.

being married is cool, i recommend it

Remote work. Virtual conferences. Affordable online universities. Public health focus. Incumbent businesses that were fading over years imploding overnight. This pandemic is accelerating change by decades. As terrible as the consequences are today, it’s a bandaid ripping off.

Sometimes, we get a tiny hint that reminds us, just for a moment, of how wonderfully weird the Internet used to be. nitter.app/sakeriver/status/10170…

Driving up the Hudson Valley to see this guy always feels a bit like hiking up a precipitous mountain to seek counsel from a wise man. Thanks for the wisdom, @ThisIsSethsBlog. ❤️

I wrote up EXACTLY what it took to write and sell a short story. - How long it took to write - How I found a publisher - How much money I made Read it here: superamit.substack.com/p/sho… Subscribe👇 for more like this! getrevue.co/profile/superami…

It's a dream to be published in the New Yorker. Today I woke up to find Sudowrite.com had that dream, too. :) newyorker.com/culture/cultur…

should I optimize my sleep protocols and cold plunge twice a day and intermittent fast 8:16… or should I just get some crystals.🤔 honestly not sure.

Twitter feels...really nice right now.

The best thing about the Humane Pin launch is how supportive and uncynical people in my feed are about an ambitious team trying new things. More of this, pls.

A million times yes. The web lost its soul when we all started copying Apple.

We were blindsided. A new language model, very high quality, in an innovative UI wrapper, FREE. It felt like an existential risk. We pay OpenAI a ton to use GPT-3, and now they were giving it away for free. We started looking at our December churn numbers, and then we saw it…

Today I learned you can stick out your tongue to click the mouse on your Mac.

ok ya'll convinced me. i'm that guy sitting here in coach on southwest with a giant monitor in front of me, watching a movie overhead. i love this. Observations - nice to be able to use my MacBook keyboard with the display mostly closed, with drinks on my tray table. feels less crowded. - nice to have this "private" screen. no one peeking over my shoulder. - mirrored display looks a LOT bigger in actual use than in this video. it's a big laggy. - the "old" airpods pro work just fine - disney DRM blocks the movie from this screen recording - i let the vision update to visionOS 1.0.2 last night and my battery was down to 50% this morning! :( - i paid for wifi for my MacBook, but the vision can't share it unless I pay for a second device. wish it could! but since i'm mirroring, it's not a big deal - my seat mate said "that's cool". no one else has said anything or appeared to notice.

For context, @jamesjyu and I have been working on Sudowrite for 2½ years. The explosion of interest in Gen AI has been exciting & unnerving. 2 years ago, the ground shifted under our feet every month or two. Last year, it was every couple days. And then…ChatGPT launched…

My friend Sahil started a fund. He's a good one, and if you're raising money, you ought to talk to him. (I put in a small amount, but I'd be saying this either way.)

oh the irony. Ted Chiang, who hates AI, writes a short story (Story of Your Life) that becomes a movie (Arrival) featuring a symbolic alien language that inspires researchers to create transformer models (modern LLMs).

It's my mom's birthday tomorrow, and she and my dad flew to Denver to visit my brother's familly ...so I flew there 4 hours earlier and stood outside their gate...

I❤️NY

New stem cells in me! No champagne, no fireworks, no balloons fell from the ceiling. But I'm ok with that.

I'm always a little suspicious of founders who start companies because they want to be founders, rather than out of desire to make a specific thing or solve a certain problem.

Now when I open Instagram, my iPhone... 1. vibrates and says "NO NO NO" 2. takes me back to my home screen 3. turns off WiFi 4. turns off cell data 5. sends a message to my gf shaming me

Just learned I’m a semi-finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest!

A friend with a gen ai startup is raising a 3M growth round. - 1M+ ARR - Growing 20% MoM - Profitable! Would love to connect him with EdTech VCs. DMs open

SNACK INNOVATION in Paris! -> 1 out of 7 chips is 🔥hot! *Should I buy this? HEART for yes.*

When I ran Photojojo, our marketing emphasized word-of-mouth, email, Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr—in that order. (Zero paid acquisition.) If I were starting today, it'd be word-of-mouth, email, then MEMES. Would have two people focused solely on meme production.

OUT OF THE HOSPITAL AFTER 24 DAYS!!!

If you're in the Bay Area and want to DRAMATICALLY improve your indoor air quality, here's how to make a DIY air filter for about $20.

The best thing about growth: more resources means we can do more for writers. In that vein… WE'RE HIRING engineers & a community/education manager! (Consider this my SoundCloud) 👇 sudowrite.notion.site/We-re-…

A reminder in a time of political outrage: focus on what you can control. Concern has value only if action follows. raptitude.com/2016/12/five-t…

Ever wish you could read really great short stories (not whole long books) then discuss them on Zoom with smart and cool people AND the person who wrote the story? Okay. shortstory.club (New project by me and @jamesjyu and @scotthurff. First guest: @doctorow!!)

Just want to take a moment to acknowledge my mom's emotional labor as she spends hours on the phone with her friends, one-by-one, showing them the ways of Zoom and Instacart.

Followed my ❤️ to Portland, but it didn't go the way we'd hoped. Dunno what's next, but I've 2 weeks & 4000mi on the road to figure it out.

I ❤️ libraries! Visited the Library of Congress today. Largest library in the World! Got a (free) library card to access the reading room. Walked around, it smelled of books. Ran a speed test. Pretty good ping.