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Pieter Levels
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- 2024-08-20
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- 2024-08-20
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“But that's the times I do make new stuff more. I think, like, I have a friend who actually books a hotel for like a week to leave his, and he has a kid too. And his girlfriend and his kids stay in the house, and he goes to another hotel. Sounds a little suspicious, right? Going to the hotel. But all he does is like. Writing or coding, he's a writer, and he needs this alone time, this silence. And I think for this flow state, it's true, you know, I'm better maintaining stuff when there's a lot of disruptions than like creating new stuff. I need this, it's common, it's flows, this uninterrupted period of time. So yeah, I wake up like 1, 2 p.m., you know, still coffee showers. We still shower, you know. And then this code like nonstop. Maybe my friends comes over. comes over somewhere.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because I was coding, I was finding some new AI Studying it and it was amazing, and I cannot sleep because it's too important. We need to stay awake, we need to see all of this, we need to make something now.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, you mean like the special days where, like Girlfriend leaves to like bear or something, and you're alone for a week at home, which is amazing. You can just code and you stay up all night and eat chocolate.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are you doing? Yeah, so a few hours later, cook foods. We get like locally stores like meat and stuff and vegetables and cook that. And then second coffee and then go some more. Maybe go outside for lunch. You can mix fun stuff, you know?”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is life, like, there's a lot of distractions. Your girlfriend asks stuff, people come over, whatever. So, I'm very fast now. I can lock in and log out quite fast. And I heard people, developers or entrepreneurs with kids have the same thing. Like before they're like, I cannot work, but they get used to it and they get really productive in like short time because they only have like 20 minutes and then shit goes crazy again. Another constraint, right? That works for me. And then cook food and stuff like have lunch, steak and chicken and whatever.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to need really long stretches where I would do like all nighters and stuff to get you done, but I've gotten trained to have more interruptions where I can like.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I go to sleep like 2 a.m. usually, something like that, and uh, before 4 a.m. But my girlfriend would go sleep midnight, so we did a compromise like 2 a.m., you know. Wake up around 10 11 in the morning like 10 shower make coffee I make coffee like drip coffee like the v60 you know the filter Boy, Walter, and then I put the coffee in. And then chill a little bit with my girlfriend and then open laptops start coding, check what's going on, like bugs or whatever.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can defend more, right? You can defend, yeah, my developer, I make money. I need to get more screens, right? I need to be more efficient. And then you read stuff about like mythical man month where hiring more people slows down a software product that's famous. I think you can use that metaphor maybe for tools as well. Then I see friends just with gear acquisition syndrome buying so much stuff, but they're not that productive. They have the best, most beautiful battle stations, desktops, everything. They're not that productive. And it's also like kind of fun. Like it's all from my laptop in a backpack, right? It's kind of nomad minimalist.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, man, I love it. I love seeing it with friends. Like, they have amazing battle stations, right? It's called. Amazing. I want it, but I don't want it, right?”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I used to have this swipe screen, you know. You could do like different screen. Like, ah, it's too difficult. Let's just put it on one screen on the MacBook”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On screen, and I used to have three screens, so I come from the I know where people come from. I had all the stuff. But then I realized that having it all condensed in one laptop is a six inch MacBook, so it's quite big, but having it all in there is amazing because you're so close to the tools, you're so close to what's happening, you know, is that working on a car or something, it's like so... Like, man, if you have tree skins, you look here, look there, you get also neck injury, actually. So it's”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, so everything's trackped on the macOS, on the MacBook. I used to have the Logitech MX mouse, the perfect economic mouse”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to die in a co workspace. I'm going to go home and die in like. Peace and honor So I closed my laptop and I put it in my backpack I woke to the street, got on my motorbike, went home. And I lie down on a pillow, like with my legs up and stuff, to get rid of this like, because it was my whole back. And it was because I was working like this all the time. So I started getting a laptop stand, everything economically correct. But then I started lifting. And since then, it seems like everything gets straightened out. Your posture kind of, you're more straight. And I never have RSI anymore injury. Never think anymore, no pains and stuff. So then I started working on the sofa and it's great. It feels... Close to the Legs together and then a pillow and then a laptop. And then I work.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, any hotel couch also, like in the room, right? But I used to work very ergonomically with a standing desk. Everything is perfect, like eye hide screen, blah blah blah. And I felt like. This has to do with lifting, too. I started getting RSI like repetitive strain injury, like tingling stuff, and it would go all the way in my back, and I was sitting in the co-working space like 6 a.m. Sun comes up, and I'm working and I'm coding. And I hear like a sound or something. So I do like, I look left and my neck gets stuck. And I'm like, wow, fuck. Am I dying? You know, and I thought I'm probably dying”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started happening. I think it's also about the hardware. It's not so much about the software. The hardware is so well built, right? The keyboard and”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, all the time, like all the time. And the cool thing is you can run. I think it's like Unix, like Debian, or whatever. You can run most Linux stuff on macOS, which makes it very good for development. Like I have my Nginx server, if I said, if I'm not lazy and set up my staging on my laptop, it's just the Nginx server the same as I have on my cloud server, right? The same where the websites run. And I can use almost everything, the same config files, configuration files. And it just works. And that makes Mac a very good platform for Linux stuff, I think.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This explore is amazing. Finder is strange, man. There's like strange things. This is bug where if you send attach a photo on WhatsApp or Telegram, it just selects the whole folder and you almost accidentally can click enter and you send all your photos, all your files to this chat group. Happen to my girlfriend. She starts sending me photo, photo, photo, photo, photo. Finder is very unusual, but it has Linux. Like the whole thing is Unix based, right?”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the finder is horrible mech. Like, it's like the what is horrible? The finder. Oh, you don't know the finder. So does the Windows Explorer?”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The businesses started working out. Like, I started traveling, I started building startups, started making money. It all started when I switched to Mac.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, I switched to Mac in 2014 because it was because when I wanted to start traveling, and my brother was like, dude, get a MacBook is like the standard now. I'm like, wow, I need to switch from Windows. And I had like three screens, you know, like Windows. This whole setup for music production, I had to sell everything and then had a MacBook. And I remember opening up this MacBook box like, and it was so beautiful, it was like this aluminium. And then I opened it, I removed the screen protector thing. It's so beautiful. And I didn't touch it for three days. I was just like looking at it. Really? And I was still in the Windows computer. Traveling with that. So, I and all my great things started when I switched to Mac, which sounds very dogmatic, right?”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So maybe learning framework is a very bad idea for us, you know. Maybe we should stay in PHP and like Script Kitty and the.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's amazing because he's super technical and he's the only one who can explain the stuff. A simple way which shows his complete genius.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need to know what those people exist. You could find those people probably Like, if you want to learn AI, imagine you have Carpathi sitting next to you. Like he does these YouTube videos. It's amazing. He can teach it to a five-year-old about how to make LLM. It's amazing. Imagine this guy sitting next to you and just teaching you Let's make a lamb together. Holy shit, it would be”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They usually know like the dominant, you know, they give answers that are like the most probable kind of. So that makes sense to ask LLM. I think honestly maybe what would help is if you want to learn or I would want to learn like a framework hire somebody that already does it and just sit with them and make something together. Like I've never done that, but I thought about it. So that would be a very fast way to take their knowledge in my training.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I want to know the dominant way. 60% of developers do it like this It's hard to figure that out, you know? That's the problem.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This stuff confused me too. Like, React now apparently has become back end Something that used to be only front ends, and you're forced to do now back end also. I don't know.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have no idea. All I know is right now, I would send it to GitHub and then sends it to my server. I don't know how to get JavaScript running. I have no clue. I guess I need a boss, like Firstal, right? Or Heroku, kind of those kind of platforms.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frameworks are so complicated and it changes so fast. So it's like, where do I start? And I guess it's the same thing when you're starting out making websites. Like where do you start? SGPT4, I guess. But yeah, it's just so dynamic. It changes so fast that I don't know if it would be a good idea for me to learn it, you know. Maybe some combination of view next with PHP Laravel. Laravel is like a framework for PHP. I think that would be it could benefit me, you know? Maybe Tailwind for CSS like a styling engine. That stuff could probably save me time.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can learn a little bit every day, like a little bit of React. Or I think now next is very big. So learn a little bit of next. But I call them the military industrial conflict. So if I need to know it anyway.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of, yeah, with Ajax calls, but essentially it's the same thing Look, I don't have the time. I think saying you don't have the time is always a lie because you just don't prioritize it enough. My priority is still like running the businesses and improving that and AI. I think learning AI is much more valuable now than learning a front-end framework. Yeah. Like it's just more impact.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, man, so I kind of did that. The stuff I do in jQuery is essentially a lot of it is like. I start rebuilding whatever tech is already out there, not based on that, but just an accident. Like I keep going long enough that I built the same, I start getting the same problems everybody else had and you start building the same frameworks kind of. So I essentially use my own kind of framework”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to understand the new technological concepts and see if they can benefit you. It would be stupid not to even try.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was so good. You would install Windows, and then after three or six months, it would start breaking, and everything was like get slow, then you would restart, go to DOS, format C would delete your hard drive, and then install the Windows 95 again. It was so good times. And you would design everything like, now I'm going to install it properly. Now I'm going to design my desktop properly.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“change everything but yeah vs code i man i was bullied into using vs code because twitter would always see my screenshots of sublime text and say why are you still using sublime text like boomer you need to use vascode and i'm like yeah i'll try it i i got a new macbook and then i i never installed like I never copied the old MacBook. I just make it fresh, you know, like a clean format C, you know, Windows, like clean start. And I'm like, okay, I'll try VS Code. And it stuck, you know. But I don't really care. It's not so important for me.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, VS Code. Before I use Sublime Text, I don't matters a lot. I think I'm very skeptical of tools when people think they say it matters, right? I don't think it matters. Whatever tool you know very well, you can go very fast and like you know the shortcuts, for example, IDE, you know, you like, I love sublime text because I could use like multi-cursor. You know, you search something and then I could like make mass replaces in a file. With the cursor thing”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the law can change. Like, for example, let's say you launched this AI dubbing and there's some legal problems with lawsuits. Okay, so the law changes. There will be appeals. There will be some Supreme Court thing, whatever. And the law changes. So just by shipping it, you change society, you change the legal framework. By not shipping, being scared of the legal framework all the time, like you're not changing things.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think big companies, especially in America, a lot of it is legal, right? They need to pass everything through legal. And you can't like man, the things I do, it could never do that in a big corporation because everything has to be probably Git deploy has to go through legal.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to when I report Bogs on big companies I work with. I talk to a lot of different people in DM and they're all really trying hard to do something. They're all really nice. And I'm the one being kind of asshole because I'm like, guys, I'm talking to 20 people about this for six months. Nothing's happening. They say, man, I know, but I'm trying my best. And yeah, so it's systemic.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's more bugs, and people complain about like, oh, look, he bought this Twitter now, it's full of bugs. The shipping stuff Things are happening now, and it's a dynamic app now.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. You're right. Like people are like, How can you do this where you get good at not taking the server down? You know Because you need to Code more carefully, but it's look, it's idiotic in any big company. But for me, it works because it makes me so fast. Like somebody will report a bug on Twitter. Kind of did do like a stopwatch, how fast can I fix this bug? And then two minutes later, for example, it's fixed. And it's fun because it's annoying for me to work with companies where you report a bug and it takes like six months. Like horrible, and it makes people really happy when you can really quickly solve the problems. But it's crazy.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, so So I'm famous for this because I'm too lazy to set up a staging server on my laptop every time. So nowadays I just deploy to production. And it's, man, I'm going to get canceled for this, you know, but it works very well for me because I have a lot of, I have like PHP, Lint and Jason. So it tells me when there's error. So I don't deploy. But literally, I have like 37,000 Git commits in the last 12 months or something. So I make like small fixes and I command enter and sends to GitHub. GitHub sends a web to my server pulls it, deploys the production, and is there.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I go through the index.css Do command F and I search border radius 12p And then I replaced with Border Radio 0. And then I do command enter Git deploys, it pushes to the git hub and then sends a webbook and then deploys to my server and is live in five seconds.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. This is, I think, how my brain looks, you know, like there's a lot of shit going on, like drawing bass music. It's like very.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People say it looks kind of ADHD or ADD, you know, like it's so much because it has so many things. And design these days is minimalist, right?”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think they exist. I think you need to hire more people. I need to try more people. Cost a lot of my energy and time. But it's 100% possible. But do I want it? I don't know, things kind of run fine for now. And I mean, like, okay, you can say, okay, Norman looks kind of clunky. Like, people say the design is kind of clunky. Okay, I'll improve the design. It's like next to my to-do list, for example, you know? Like I'll get there eventually.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's in the award, but that's it. You need to understand go over all the code, get a holistic view of it. And man, you can suggest we change stuff for sure. And look, jQuery is crazy. It's crazy. I'm using jQuery. We can change that.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but those are the top tier developers And those are the ones that are tech ambiguous, so they can work with, they can learn any tech. Like really few, like, it's like really? If you try higher devs, like no offense to devs, but most devs are not man, most people in general jobs are not so good at the job, like even doctors and stuff.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He wanted to rewrite. He said this J Curie, we can't do this. I'm like, okay. He's like, we need to rewrite everything in view.js. I'm like, are you sure? Can we just like, you know, like keep JQ? He's like, no, man, and we need to change a lot of stuff. And I'm like, okay. And I was kind of like feeling it like this, you know, we're going to clean up shit. But then after weeks, it's not going to take way too much time.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've had once where with photor eye, like there's an AI developer Philip. I hired him to do the because I can't write Python. AI stuff is Python, and I needed to get models to work and replicate and stuff, and I needed to improve Fote AI. And he helped me a lot for like 10 months. He worked. And, man, I was trying Python, working with Numpy and Package Manager, and it was too difficult for me to figure this shit out. And I didn't have time. I think 10 years ago, I would have time to sit, you know, go do all-nighters to figure this stuff out with Python. I don't have the, and I don't have the, it's not my thing.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he codes. I shit post on Twitter. Like I promote it on Twitter. We said product strategy. Like I said, this should be better. This should be better. But I think you need to have one person coding it. He codes in Ruby, so I was like, I cannot do Ruby. I'm in PHP.”
2024-08-20 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #440 – Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source