Moxie Marlinspike engagement report

Best tweets

• Mar 24, 202556x their median

  There are so many great reasons to be on Signal. Now including the opportunity for the vice president of the United States of America to randomly add you to a group chat for coordination of sensitive military operations. Don’t sleep on this opportunity…

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• Jun 4, 202637x their median

  MAFIA EP 001 https://t.co/FDijsKFdJN

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• Aug 27, 202413x their median

  This could get crazy if true. Telegram messages are not encrypted. France is trying to arrest the CEO of a Russian team that has plaintext access to every message the French president has ever sent or received.. “Macron has been a Telegram user since…” https://t.co/CrqH5NsQvl

  2.3K43631611.1M viewsView on X
• Mar 27, 202612x their median

  I didn’t go to college, but I did once unexpectedly end up at Princeton University’s “reunions weekend.” The way they do it, every 5th year class has their reunion on campus at the same time. So every year, on one weekend, the Princeton campus will be filled with people celebrating their 5th, 10th, 15th, and so on class reunions— all the way up until there’s nobody alive anymore. The beginning of reunions weekend kicks off with a parade! It is a parade of the Princeton graduates: featuring themselves, in honor of themselves, for… themselves. It works like this: all the graduates pack the sidewalks of the parade route, but ordered by graduation year. The recent graduates are standing at the end of the route, and the oldest graduates are at the beginning. Then, the parade begins. The oldest living graduate steps off the sidewalk and leads the parade. When everyone older than you has gone by, you step into the street and become the parade. Until you become part of the parade, you’re cheering the parade. You cheer and witness everyone before you, and then you are cheered and witnessed by everyone after you. It is a bizarre ritual. To see it, though, is like seeing the entire fossil record of Princeton graduates. The person leading the parade — the oldest living graduate in that cohort — is a white guy. And then, for a reallllly lonnnnnng time, it’s just white guys! After 30 minutes… a woman! A white woman. With people in the parade maybe holding signs like “first coed graduating class!” And then another 30 minutes of slowly, incrementally, more white women in the parade. And then… the first black man! Another 30 minutes of slowly, incrementally, more black men. And so on. By the end — the most recent class — is the exact opposite of the beginning. A mix of everyone you can think of. For some reason that parade really stuck with me. It’s simultaneously a representation of how much the world has changed, but also a representation of how many “minutes of parade” are still walking around having lived and ended up where they are under very different circumstances.

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• May 27, 202511x their median

  It has been interesting to watch the drivers of Los Angeles slowly discover that Waymo will always yield

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• Dec 24, 20259.5x their median

  I've actually been enjoying the last days of software development. There's a touch of sadness, but there's also something about knowing we're near the end that makes it novel and sweet again.

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• Apr 26, 20245.5x their median

  I made this last weekend to experiment w/ building an app end to end on LLMs: https://t.co/eOHZunKTyf It's like Wirecutter, but uses an LLM to recommend product choices based on reddit conversations and reviews, so you don't have to spend 20-30min reading reddit My experience: I'm late to the game, but this is the first time I've tried building an app end to end around an LLM. 1. It's very fast to build something that's 90% of a solution. The problem is that the last 10% of building something is usually the hard part which really matters, and with a black box at the center of the product, it feels much more difficult to me to nail that remaining 10%. With vibecheck, most of the time the results to my queries are great; some percentage of the time they aren't. Closing that gap with gen AI feels much more fickle to me than a normal engineering problem. It could be that I'm unfamiliar with it, but I also wonder if some classes of generative AI based products are just doomed to mediocrity as a result. 2. On the other hand, I think the discomfort I feel with having an unpredictable black box at the center of a product which can fail in very creative ways some percentage of the time might actually be a competitive advantage for startups. I think Wirecutter, especially branded as NY Times, would have a lot harder time tolerating that unpredictability and unreliability than an app like this (or an actual startup) which can set that product expectation with users to begin with. It might be that the current problems with generative AI are actually the things that create an innovator's dilemma and give startups an advantage to slip under the incumbents. It seems like the ideal spot right now would an app where 90% "done" is a mostly great experience, but the failings are still somehow not stomach-able by incumbents. 3. I do not understand how the economics of LLMs pencil out. When I look at the per concurrent user costs associated with inference, they seem orders of magnitude higher than per concurrent user costs of previous internet technologies. It seems to me that if previous apps like webmail, messengers, etc had costs as high, they would not have been viable products. This is something I want to learn more about.

  9441108850276K viewsView on X
• Feb 11, 20264.5x their median

  If you're feeling lonely on X, just post about how Telegram isn't an encrypted messenger. It'll reliably fill your mentions with 40 accounts named 'Priv8User420', all sharing made-up cryptography facts and Telegram memes. It's the closest thing X has to a support group.

  83975421854K viewsView on X
• Dec 26, 20254.4x their median

  Whenever I start making something, I always feel uncertain-- right up until the moment that I encounter real difficulty. It's only once I discover that there is something difficult involved that I start to feel comfortable. Before that moment, it's hard to know that the thing I'm making is worth making. After all, why doesn't it already exist? If anyone can do it, shouldn't someone else have done it already? Is this just a bad idea that has already quietly failed many times before? But when I encounter something really difficult, that's when I know why it doesn't already exist, and overcoming that difficulty with my obsessiveness and anything else I can bring to bear becomes exciting. It feels like an opportunity; a reason that something is worth doing. When I say that I consider these to be "the last days of software development," it's because -- for a lot of my life -- knowing how computers work has been significant and valuable, because for most of my life, it has been possible to sit down at a computer, start making something, and encounter that difficulty everywhere. I don't think eliminating software development as it has been is a negative development in the slightest. I think making software easy/free to build will have all kinds of positive effects for all of us. And sure, maybe there will continue to be humans in the loop etc etc.. but I do think that this is the end of something that I invested a lot of time thinking about, in large part so I could sit down at a computer and start typing into an editor with some trepidation, until the moment that I encounter something which makes me stop and think "oh." And then smile.

  838862912120K viewsView on X
• Jun 6, 20244.3x their median

  Easy to overlook: most people's first encounter with despotic systems is not usually with the KGB or Gestapo knocking at their door. Instead, it's usually with clean streets and improved material conditions. I don't think the way we talk about this stuff serves us well:

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Ranked by total interactions across everything we have tracked for this account, which is a longer history than the 30-day window the rates above use. The multiple compares each post to this account's own median.

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