]]>I’ve long wondered why some big corp would sponsor him for doing his stuff in the open, rather than doing it within their walls. For things like this Anthropic Fable release, every corp is clamoring to test it but there are nasty strings attached (mandatory data retention policies, etc.). Simon is able to test it for them indirectly and post about it publicly. So he becomes their barometer for things they are too risk-averse to do.
Interesting. I wonder if there’s more to do in that way, or to be more direct about it. Or maybe he is and I’m just not seeing it?
]]>]]>Most often the issue isn’t “empowerment”. People start out wanting to achieve things, to change things to be better, to do a good job. The active issue is disempowerment
]]>Popular security culture often dwells on clever hacks and clean fixes. But for the difficult real-world problems, often there is no right answer or simple fix, only the hard work of building defenses thicker and thicker.
I’m exploring sandboxing at work ad this was a great read.
]]>People whose brains have been eaten by LLMs still maintain that ‘It’s not gradient, it’s texture’ or whatever is still their idea, expressed by the machine, but there is almost never any idea there at all. If your ideas were any good, you wouldn’t need to use the machine; as it stands your sub-literate scrawlings are the best thing about you. At least they’re yours.
But you people don’t listen. However bad a writer you think you are, you are not worse than AI. But you still keep letting it do your writing for you, as if I won’t be able to tell. Listen: I can tell. I can always tell. You think I won’t notice, but I will. There’s no hiding from me. If you let AI do your writing I will find out, and I will kill you.
I love Sam’s writing.
I want people to enjoy my writing. That’s why I write it myself.
I have taken to having LLMs check my writing and critique it, but I write it myself. At least then, if someone is moved, I moved them.
]]>I will never shut up about the value of living and breathing openness. I learned / gained so much from opening myself up to collaboration AT ALL TIMES. my life is a lot richer now.
Life is richer with others.
]]>In crisis communication, a well-known formula is: outrage x hazard. So even if the hazard is low, if concern is great, you’d better be speaking with clarity, acknowledging uncertainty, listening to the questions, concerns, and confusion, and bringing people along for the ride.
Calibrate to the audience perception.
]]>There’s a section on ‘patient diaries’, which are not written by a patient but written about a patient. Apparently when you are in a medically induced coma, or treacheotemized, etc, people come back and often have traumatic memories - not from the actual events themselves but from their brain trying to make sense of what happened; they think they were abducted by aliens, or their loved ones were replaced by robots, or they were molested in their incapacitated state. So some Danish nurses started a practice of keeping a handwritten diary for the patient, which their loved ones can also add to, about what’s happening - and then when the patient is back to normal, they give them this handwritten account, and it really helps ground the patient back into reality and make sense of their lost time. It’s so weird, and so beautiful an idea!
Taking notes as medicine.
I didn’t know about this, but already I started a journal for our baby daughter like this. We leave a note for each day and have family/friends leave notes when they are with her those days. The hope was for it to be a keepsake for her, but maybe it will help ground her as a person, to have this history of her infancy.
]]>So while one could in theory be a valid contributor that makes use of LLMs, from the perspective of contributor poker it’s simply irrational for us to bet on LLM users while there’s a huge pool of other contributors that don’t present this risk factor.
The people who remarked on how it’s impossible to know if a contribution comes from an LLM or not have completely missed the point of this policy and are clearly unaware of contributor poker.
For us the ability to provide contributors with an engaging ecosystem where they can improve their systems thinking and interact with other competent, trusted and prolific engineers is a critical aspect of our business model.
As I’ve mentioned before, Zig is able to punch well above its funding class because we put huge effort in thinking about technical, social and business management issues that surround the project.
Contributor Poker is playing the player, not the code/cards.
They’re building a self-sustaining ecosystem of maintainers. That’s what they need you for, not for your one specific contribution. They want your mind, not your code.
]]>From taxes to the environment to public broadcasting like PBS and NPR, the Senate has recently passed record levels of legislation and confirmed record numbers of nominations with senators representing less than half the people.
Using historical data, GovTrack found 56 examples of Senate votes on legislation that passed with senators representing a “population minority.” 26 of those 56 examples, nearly half, have occurred since President Donald Trump’s current term began.
The Will of the fewer and fewer people
]]>We may not be responsible for other people’s choices, but where does what you’re entitled to end and what I’m entitled to begin?
On the same flight, a woman was traveling alone with three small children. I couldn’t help but notice them, because they were all wearing matching outfits, including the woman. Weird. Somewhere over Arizona, she hurried her two older kids, both still in diapers, to the bathroom to change them. When she passed me, she looked at me imploringly. “Can you hold my baby?” She asked, before thrusting him into my arms to chase after the rest of her brood. The baby was chill as hell, with big blue eyes that looked shocked at being so casually pawned off on a stranger. I stood in the aisle rocking him back and forth on my hip, missing the time when my own kids were small enough to rock so easily, feeling flattered someone saw me and assumed I understood the most essential truth: we’re all turbulating through this beautiful, miserable shitstorm together.
This is how you survive a storm: by helping others and receiving help yourself in mutual aid. Surviving hard things is relational, not individual.
]]>I’m referring to that experience as the Ghost Effect (movie, not CMS). If you talk about something dangerous that might happen in the future, people nod along and file mental notes. If you talk about something dangerous that happened in the past, they listen to see what they can learn. But if you talk about something huge and dangerous happening right now, people get really polite and change the topic.
The combination of vast scope and immediacy—and the fact that you can’t really see or touch what’s happening—means that if you choose to ruin the party by discussing it, you transform into a Patrick Swayze-style ghost. You’re yelling, You’re in danger! You think they can hear and see you, but instead they just feel kind of cold.
People ~hear what they want to hear~ ignore what they want to ignore. They would prefer to ignore the uncomfortable dangers.
]]>It’s worth remembering that the CTO’s primary role is to work with exec peers across the business to deliver business outcomes, and that is the same for all of the exec team, and the CEO.
So any proposal you make has to make it clear that this is about the business, not about improving engineering for its own purposes.
The CTO’s role is less about engineering than your role is (below them).
Is that true of every software engineering role? It’s less about engineering the higher/wider your scope?
]]>Real police reform reforms the police to be less militaristic and to have less power.
]]>Assumptions of balanced effort and presumed trust are no longer guaranteed in a post-LLM world. Sloppypasta creates a compounding negative feedback loop where the sender forfeits learning and credibility while the recipient burns effort and loses trust. Receiving raw AI output feels bad due to the cognitive dissonance of having these assumptions violated.
]]>the Spec-Driven Development Triangle.
As each node moves forward, our job — and our tooling’s job — is to keep those nodes in sync. That’s the job. If we improve the code, we must improve the spec.
This might be a good approach to addressing the problems I’ve had in taking SDD to agents in the past year. It’s a networking of the changes, not a pipeline.
Key points:
]]>I don’t think it can be a skill. Whatever tool we end up using for tracking decisions and intent, it cannot live only inside the agent. It needs to run outside. It needs to handle small commits, triggers, anything…even if you never touch the agent. A skill is a suggestion. A tool needs to be a checkpoint.
If the patient asks, “Will this hurt?” Always reply with, “Not as much as the thing you did to get yourself in this situation.
]]>But more seriously, this is also being converged on with things like Shopify’s roast framework or Karpathy’s autoresearch framework. The important part here is using a meta-harness to instruct the agents on constraints, stitch them up with deterministic programs, etc.
]]>I’m continually impressed with Claude’s ability to create its own benchmarking systems and rip through a series of hypotheses about how to achieve some hard-to-define optimal outcome.
I recommend trying this when you’re deep into a problem looking for an optimal path: give the agent a laboratory.
This is another person discovering Karpathy’s autoresearch: deceptively simple, but give an agent a goal and space to pursue it and you will get improvements.
]]>I have watched death as it happens, and I have watched birth. What I learned is that neither are discrete events. They are both processes, things that unfold. Birth is a series of awakenings, and death is a series of sleepenings. My son will take years to be born, and my father took six months to die. Some people spend decades dying.
]]>Even if Secretary Hegseth backs down and narrows his extremely broad threat against Anthropic, great damage has been done. Even in the narrowest supply-chain risk designation, the government has still said that they will treat you like a foreign adversary—indeed, they will treat you in some ways worse than a foreign adversary—simply for refusing to capitulate to their terms of business. Simply for having different ideas, expressing those ideas in speech, and actualizing that speech in decisions about how to deploy and not deploy one’s property. Each of these things is fundamental to our republic, and each was assaulted—not anything like for the first time but nonetheless in novel ways—by the Department of War last week. Most corporations, political actors, and others will have to operate under the assumption that the logic of the tribe will now reign.
There is something deeper about the damage done by the government, too. The Anthropic-DoW skirmish is the first major public debate that is truly about where the proper locus of control over frontier AI should be. Our public institutions behaved erratically, maliciously, and without strategic clarity. Our political leaders conveyed little understanding of their own actions, to say nothing of the technology and its stakes. They got off on an extraordinarily bad footing, and it is hard to imagine them ever recovering, because they do not seem to care about improvement. They are a cartoonish depiction of the American political elite, but sadly their failings have been the prototype of American political elites from both parties for much of my life now. “The same as before, but now noticeably worse” has been the theme of American politics for 20 years.
This is a great and measured piece about how terribly stupidly bad it was to do what they did last week.
]]>
]]>Note
They expose this data over a decent API. I should use this along with batteries to make cheap-electricity battery-buffers for my high-usage appliances (e.g. LED grow lights, computer desk, etc.).
