Ryan Graciano

The difference between a decision and a data-driven decision is like the difference between a shot in the dark and a carefully aimed arrow. Which decision do you want to make?

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Recently, I introduced Ava, a custom GPT to help Engineering Managers with planning, strategy, hiring, etc. I ran an experiment with Ava to role-play an interview. 💬 Ava took on the role of an interviewer and an EM candidate. It generated questions, answered them, and graded the responses. It was like running a real interview, but with a AI doing most of the heavy lifting! While the answers weren’t as detailed as you'd get in a real interview, the results were interesting 👉 https://lnkd.in/ec488vy6

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How cool is generative AI? I asked ChatGPT to transform an article about the fictional Jamie and Alex family (which I've been posting about recently) into lyrics for a 30-second song. Lyrics: [Verse] Jamie’s family walks the line, Saving smart in every design Certainty in every plan, Guided by a steady hand. [Chorus] Safe, simple, sound, they stride, With whole life insurance by their side From youth to age, through calm and storm, They build a future safe and warm. Then, I used Udio to bring the music to life. Here are the results: Udio generated multiple versions, each about 30 seconds long. Take a listen and let me know which one you like best! https://lnkd.in/g5e2_xmi #GenerativeAI #AIinMusic

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This is a cool project, and another example of the emerging "replace stateful storage with S3" trend. I do wonder at what point someone will package this sort of thing up into a FUSE filesystem to make it generally usable across existing services. Or maybe every service has unique enough needs that it's better to handle it custom each time. https://lnkd.in/etcVBfVf

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🤔 Looking at YC's latest Request for Startups struck me: Every category—gov tech, manufacturing, fintech, space—has AI humming under the hood. 🔄 Maybe it's not about having AI (like it's not about "having electricity" ⚡). It's about reimagining whole industries with it. 🚀 Checkout the whole article: https://lnkd.in/gcQkKMja

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U.S. digital bank Chime is launching a product that will allow customers to access up to $500 of their wages before payday, the latest move by a financial technology company to enter the fast-growing "earned wage access" market. The product, which will be rolled out in coming months, comes as Chime is preparing to become a public company in the "not too distant future," CEO Chris Britt said in an interview with Reuters. #chime #neobank #us #digitalbank #reuters #fintech #fintechnews #kostyuchenok

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Last Tuesday, Malsgufa, our legacy CMS backend, was shut down. This milestone for BI's Tech and Product team culminated years of planning, effort, and execution. Malsgufa's first commit was on July 25, 2014, leading to 5,186 commits across nearly 30 repositories. Built and maintained by scores of engineers, its deprecation represents significant cost savings (20 production replicas, 3 instances of Solr, and an insane number of Zookeeper instances!), reduced security risk, and the elimination of an often-blamed boogeyman. The journey began in January 2020. Our challenge: moving traffic off Malsgufa without rebuilding everything in Muse. Initially, we tried GraphQL as an intermediary between Viking and our services, but progress was limited by Viking's complex Angular/Vue architecture. In January 2023, we pivoted to the strangler fig pattern with a shim. This approach proved far more effective – all Malsgufa traffic went through the shim first, with verbose logging to track unhandled requests. Meanwhile, we built Story Versioning API (SVAPI), incorporating lessons learned from Malsgufa's limitations around history and publishing states. We ran four major migrations (stories, custom pages, slideshows, and videos), building support in Muse and shimmed compatibility for Viking. Traffic gradually decreased from a torrent to a trickle, leading to the gloriously uneventful shutdown. Next, we will deprecate Viking by Q2 2025, unifying our users in the Muse ecosystem to create the industry's most innovative CMS. Special thanks to the entire Story Creation team: Chase Gruber, Chris Speziale, Daniel Arita, Danny Feliz, Dasha Lary, Dawin Camillo, Eric Saam, Frederica Chen, John Laslo, Kelly Filush, Morgan Cohn, Sarah Pai, Tyler Greenfield! Thanks also to DaD, Engagement, Helpfulness, Cloud Engineering, Test Engineering, and Operational Excellence! Finally, we recognize Malsgufa itself. Developed as a unified CMS backend to support Business Insider's expansion into new markets, it served our global newsroom reliably for a decade, publishing millions of stories despite no major changes in recent years. While it became less sustainable as our business evolved, it deserves our respect. Thank you, Malsgufa. May you rust in peace.

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Project update! My application tracking extension is now doing fuzzier matching and injecting new information into LinkedIn (and other sites) to keep me from doubling up on applications. Next up: local storage and bulk import/export operations...

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Want a preview of what I'm going to be talking about in my keynote for RubyConf? You can catch a glimpse of it here!

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Here's something counterintuitive; taking on more investment risk reduces long-term returns: https://lnkd.in/gHwkjHmP This is only my second investment video, so I'm still learning. If you have any feedback, I would love to hear it. Based on the feedback from the first video, I tried to make the audio more balanced on this video. I also shortened the length, to make the content more digestible.

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RAG search is leaving money on the table. Six low-hanging fruits: synthetic data, date filters, better feedback, tracking metrics, full-text search, and question-like chunks. Most teams are overlooking these. Don't be one of them. https://lnkd.in/gHTnWxzZ

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"Build in primitives" -Andy Jassy, #Amazon CEO https://lnkd.in/gHMYt7NX Happen to take the time to read this year's Annual investor letter from Andy Jassy. Deep in 2nd half, it talks about how Amazon started thinking about "building in primitives" and how it has been game-changing for them and their customers. Probably old news for some, but eye-opening for me. Definitely a good read!

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Earlier this week Hazel Weakly wrote about what she is calling "observability 3.0". I argue our core challenge is not surfacing insights to eng-adjacent teams, but the reverse -- helping engineering teams understand and explain their work in the language of the business. https://lnkd.in/g6KX4_6g

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It’s eye-opening to see how AI model businesses are dealing with tight margins despite big investments. 🤯 Aidan Gomez’s comments about the “zero margin business” highlight the fierce competition and price cuts in the industry. 💸 With giants like OpenAI and Anthropic lowering prices to stay ahead, it’s a tough time for startups. The future of AI might depend on finding new ways to make these technologies profitable. 🚀 #AI #MachineLearning #TechTrends #Startups https://lnkd.in/ejkDu_wT

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🍜Anybody up for some ramen? I am excited to share that I am back in the garage, building again (it’s actually a house in the Berkeley Hills). We are taking the wraps off of Supercog AI, a new startup focused on solving Application Integration using LLM powered agents. My co-founder in this new venture is a great friend of mine (and a former co-founder partner), Alex Osborne. Alex and I have worked around the application integration space for a long time, and we are unrealistically excited about applying the GenAI stack to this problem. Not many people relish the task to get some bits to move from system A to system B. But it’s a critical job to be done, and that’s led to a lot of brittle scripts, a myriad of inflexible “no code” tools, and a lot of hand crafted SQL. But the power of the Large Language Model, trained on a huge corpus of information, offers a remarkable tool to solve this problem. The LLM you use today already knows the APIs of hundreds of popular systems. It knows the SQL dialects of every major database. It understands the semantics and data schemas of many popular SaaS systems. It understands much of the specific domain in which your business operates. I like to call the AI revolution “the last platform shift”. That may turn out to be hyperbole, but I definitely believe we are in the very early stages of seeing what this new stack can enable. I know we are hardly the first folks to claim that “amazing stuff is coming!”. But this is why Alex and I have decided to focus on a real and hard problem. If we can prove that LLMs can power a new way to solve this problem, it will be the first successful *new* approach in 15 years.. We will have much more to share about this new platform soon. In the meantime, if you’re interested in getting a peek - or even better if you have application or data integration tasks that you would like some help with - please reach out because we want to help. #genai #startups #backinthegarage

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After a year of work my book Building A Startup - A Primer For The Individual Contributor is finally available! https://lnkd.in/erThxvpP If you’re working in or around startups as an IC or technical leader this book is for you. It’s based on 20 years of startup work and will help set you up for success to do more with less, move faster and more correct, and spend more time building features and product people love and less time banging your head at roadblocks and bottlenecks.

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AI is innovating a variety of industries across the US and Agriculture is no exception. 🐄 My new friend, Catie McVey, has created a new "Agtech" startup that uses patented 3D Modeling and Machine Learning algorithms to evaluate the health of cows by looking at specific characteristics such as hoof morphology and facial characteristics. Working with her to architect how to get source data from "The Stockyards" to "The Cloud" has been a lot of fun. I am constantly discovering new ways AI can make an impact in industries from legal, to healthcare and now agriculture! Read more about Catie's journey on RIoT - Internet of Things' blog #AI #software #agtech

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I've been interviewing a lot of people, so I get some variant of this question a lot. What does Remi actually do? I explain our unique business model & opportunity in my latest post. https://lnkd.in/gswR5anB

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Have you reduced overhead by 99% on any meaningful back office task since the launch of AI? Well, why not? Apparently, Amazon has. The interesting thing about this new technology is that it shows the jobs most at risk are things like coding, where there is a clear, quantifiable feedback loop between action and result. But adoption is going to be the challenge. Honestly, a lot of small businesses don't even know how to do basic things like mail merge. Even my peers at large companies with better-than-average technical skills have barely used these AI tools. So far, I've reduced several back office tasks by 80% through the at least partial use of AI. It's amazing how powerful this technology can be.

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