Rosa Del Mar

Issue 31 2026-01-31

Rosa Del Mar

Daily Brief

Issue 31 2026-01-31

Unvalidated Product Performance Claims In Customer Ops And Product Discovery

  • Finn is positioned as an AI customer service agent that can automatically resolve up to 93% of customer queries.
  • Base44’s marketing team is over 50 people and covers product marketing, community, PR, and education, with a focus on university adoption globally.
  • Wix plans to run two Super Bowl ad spots this year: one for Wix and one for Base44.

Collective Efficacy Framing

  • Matt Webb published a piece arguing that people can "just do things" to improve their communities.
  • A community can bootstrap a shared public-good project by organizing collectively, producing needed infrastructure, then securing subsidies and redistributing costs so lower-income participants are included.
  • Small collective projects can escalate into sustained political engagement such as contacting representatives and tracking legislation to embed the change into building requirements.

Training Cost And Time Compression Versus A Fixed Capability Metric

  • In 2019, GPT-2 training reportedly used 32 TPU v3 chips for 168 hours at about $8 per TPU v3-hour, totaling roughly $43,000.
  • With recent improvements merged into nanochat (many originating from modded-nanogpt), a higher CORE score than GPT-2 can be reached in about 3.04 hours for roughly $73 on a single 8xH100 node.
  • The cost to train a GPT-2-level model is claimed to have fallen by about 600× over seven years, corresponding to an approximate 2.5× reduction per year.

Reverse Engineering Boundaries And Tooling Workflow

  • The target binary is a DirectX 8.1 Visual Studio 2003 (VC++ 7.1 SP1) build that relies on grim.dll (Grim2D) whose interface is an 84-method vtable exposed via GRIM__GetInterface.
  • Crimsonland’s release lineage includes a 2002 freeware prototype series, a 2003 shareware v1.8–v1.9 line, and a GOG “classic” build v1.9.93 from Feb 2011 that became a bonus alongside the 2014 remaster.
  • Crimsonland assets are stored in custom PAQ archives with magic 'paq\0' and entries consisting of filename, size, and payload, using Windows-style backslash paths.