Joseph Bou-Younes's Website

  • It’s going to be a tough summer for tech headcount

    Several tech companies are reshaping their workforces as they focus on AI. Earlier this year, Salesforce Inc. planned to cut over 1,000 employees as it hired for AI-focused sales roles, particularly in sales. CEO Marc Benioff also said the company will reduce its hiring of engineers in 2025 due to the use of AI. When Workday Inc. announced a layoff in February, CEO Carl Eschenbach said hiring would continue in strategic areas like AI.

    Beyond software engineers, many of the hardest-hit Microsoft personnel ran software projects. Product management and technical program management roles together made up almost 600 of the reductions in Washington, or about 30% of the total. 

    The job cuts also targeted some managers and workers assigned to AI projects, according to a person familiar with the cuts.

    – Bloomberg: Microsoft Layoffs Hit Coders Hardest With AI Costs on the Rise

    , , ,

  • +1 for “context engineering”

    I agree with this. The output you get from an LLM is only as good as the context you provide.

    The term context engineering has recently started to gain traction as a better alternative to prompt engineering. I like it. I think this one may have sticking power.

    Context Engineering

    , , , ,

  • Make your ego your ally

    There’s no greater source of renewable energy in the world than when you’re defending your own self-image.

    – Shane Parrish: Clear Thinking – Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results

  • De Gaulle was right

    …Who now thinks it is smart to bet the continent’s security on the whim of thousands of Michiganders, Pennsylvanians and Wisconsinites every fourth November?

    – FT: How France got America right in the end.

    ,

  • Iterate, always iterate

    The people who design easily gameable systems belong in the lowest circle of hell.

    – Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack

    ,

  • Check yourself

    The scientific literature shows that hunger, anger, loneliness, tiredness, pain, and stress are common “preconditions for poor decision making.” So Shubin Stein uses an acronym, HALT-PS, as a reminder to pause when those factors might be impairing his judgment and postpone important decisions until he’s in a state in which his brain is more likely to function well. This is our seventh technique for reducing avoidable stupidity.

    -William Green in Richer, Wiser, Happier

    ,

  • A through-line for Trump’s foreign policy

    Best thing I’ve read about the vision for American foreign policy in 2025. Create a big, beautiful buffer zone paid for and defended by vassals, controlled by American overwatch and for the benefit of oligarchs in Rome. A generational project, not unlike the original Bretton Woods institutions after WW2.

    America’s price is rising and it’s going to keep going up for a while.

    , , , , ,

  • Market Main Characters

    Adam Neumann spotted a big funding bubble, and found the most efficient way to exploit it, by taking an existing asset that he could buy at a real estate multiple funded by equity he raised at a startup multiple. This drew money away from better companies in a sense, but the money it was going after probably would have ended up in some other business with similarly bad returns on capital. What WeWork accomplished was to speed up this process and make it more visible—someone who ruthlessly exploits a poorly-justified bubble is basically an efficient markets accelerationist who is heightening the contradictions and pushing the system towards its inevitable collapse as a side effect of their effort to get rich quick at the expense of others.

    From “Financial Markets aren’t Closed Systems” in Capital Gains by Byrne Hobart.

    , ,

  • Avoid Idiocy

    “I don’t have any wonderful insights that other people don’t have. I just have slightly more consistently than others avoided idiocy. Other people are trying to be smart. All I’m trying to be is non-idiotic. I find that all you have to do to get ahead in life is to be non-idiotic and live a long time. It’s harder to be non-idiotic than most people think.”

    -Charlie Munger, as quoted by William Green in Richer, Wiser, Happier

    , , , ,

  • Finally