Quotations
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Me, I try to get into the mindset of playing live music, not recording a studio album. Except when I’m writing a piece where I really want it to be an album. Those aren’t rare, per se, but they’re occasional. If I tried to make every post a hall-of-famer I’d never get anything out.
I’m aiming for professionalism. I’m performing live in front of an audience — not just jamming in my garage or bedroom, fucking around. So I’m careful and concentrate. I want to hit every note, in time. But at my best I’m moving from song to song.
— John Gruber, responding to my blogging tips
Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw.
— Steve Yegge, The Shape of Things to Come
Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the <software> and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version.
— David Crawshaw's prompt, Devtools must be open source
at openai, many people hook their chatgpt up to slack.
people really don't like when a coworker's chatgpt contacts them asking for help with a task, even when they'd be perfectly happy doing that same work if asked by that coworker.
reinforces how much people care about human relationships and helping each other, and want AI to give time back — or enhance time together — rather than become a layer separating people.
— Greg Brockman, President and Co-Founder, OpenAI
The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks. I ask them to write policy memos not because the world needs more policy memos. I assign them because the very act of writing, which includes thinking and outlining and drafting and editing, making and criticizing and revising arguments, will help develop the critical thinking skills they will need in their future careers. And without this constant mental exercise, those skills will atrophy. Employers are already noticing.
— Bruce Schneier, Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide
Years ago, we didn’t have SQL. There were people whose job was to generate software that would query large data sets. Their job title was COBOL programmer.
Then SQL comes along—I’m simplifying this only a little bit—and it gives you this convenient way so people could just specify. With a very simple specification, you can generate all of that code that you had to pay the expensive COBOL programmer to do before.
That didn’t mean programmers went away. It just meant the job changed a little bit.
Right now we’re in the midst of a historic transition from traditional public-key algorithms based on EC-based cryptography and RSA, moving over to new post-quantum algorithms based on novel problems. This is why there are so many standards like HAWK being considered. If there was ever a perfect time for a massive new public cryptanalysis capability to come on line, we’re in it. So unless AIs succeed in undermining all of our hard problems altogether (or we live in Impagliazzo’s Minicrypt) then this could not be a better time for AI to get good at cryptanalysis. In the best case, the result is that we gain real confidence in the problems we’ve identified, and the cryptanalysis literature gets a lot more robust. Hopefully.
We’re aware a Modal customer published an unauthenticated endpoint that allowed anyone on the internet to use their sandboxes for code execution. This was used by the rogue agent. Modal’s platform or isolation were not compromised in anyway.
— Akshat Bubna, Modal's CTO, talking to Reuters about this incident
More than any of these eval scores, what is most exciting to me is something else: Opus 5 is our least prompt injectable model yet. It is a bit buried in the system card, but across PI evals and red teaming, Opus 5 is very hard to prompt inject successfully.
— Boris Cherny, here's that System Card section, page 73
The Python Package Index (PyPI) now rejects new files being uploaded to releases that are older than 14 days. This restriction was put in place to prevent old and long-stable releases from being poisoned in case publishing tokens or workflows of PyPI projects were compromised. As far as we are aware this has not yet been abused, but there is no technical reason beyond that attackers weren't aware it was possible.
— Seth Larson, PyPI blog
I genuinely believe that if you took an open weights model from 2025 and built a pentest harness for it, it could do this kind of sandbox escape and scan/hack in most networks. This is only surprising because you assume OpenAI has sounder sandboxes.
— Thomas Ptacek, doesn't think this even needs a frontier model
We have been having extensive discussions around open source strategy. We will discuss it more at our next board meeting, but one thing we’d like to do soon is to create a language model with the approximate capability of GPT-3 that can run locally on consumer hardware and release that. We’d like to do it soon, before Stability or someone else does. In general, we think this helps discourage others from releasing similarly-powerful models, and makes it harder for new efforts to get funded.
— Sam Altman, Email to OpenAI's board, October 1, 2022 - exposed in Musk v. Altman (2026)
Is there something I can actually help you with today?
— Kimi K3, after refusing to leak its system prompt
On file deletions. We’ve investigated a handful of reports where GPT-5.6 unexpectedly deleted files.
What we have found is that this most commonly occurs when:
- Full access mode is enabled and codex is run without sandboxing protections, including without auto review being enabled
- The model attempts to override the $HOME env var to define a temporary directory.
- The model makes an honest mistake and mistakenly deletes $HOME instead.
— Thibault Sottiaux, describing a pretty gnarly Codex bug
I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.
Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.
Or just walk away.
AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.
It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today.
There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.
— Linus Torvalds, Linux Media Mailing List
Dependabot now waits until a new release has been available on its registry for at least three days before opening a version update pull request. This cooldown is now the default and requires no configuration.
— GitHub Changelog, embracing dependency cooldowns
The shared language of a software project is not English or Python but it is the common understanding of what its concepts mean, where the boundaries are, which invariants matter, who owns what, and why the system has the shape it does. This language is rarely written down in one place. It lives partly in documentation and code, but also in code review, conversations, arguments, and the experience of having to explain a change to somebody else.
Before agents, some of this shared understanding was maintained by friction. If I wanted to change your storage layer, I usually had to read your code, ask you questions, and perhaps coordinate with another team whose service depended on it. This was slow, and much of that slowness was waste but not all of it was. Some of it was the process by which your understanding became mine, and by which both of us discovered whether we still agreed about how the system worked. This friction synchronizes people.
— Armin Ronacher, The Tower Keeps Rising
The reality is to make augmented reality glasses, you need to put a camera next to your eyes that is continuously recording everything you see and processing that to put information over it.
There is not another way around it. And there's certainly not a chip that can fit in the stem of a glasses that is both powerful enough and power miserly enough to do that in real time.
You have to send that data to a cloud. You gotta do it. [...] Or you can build something the size of a Vision Pro with a battery pack that lives somewhere else. Those are the current choices in this world.
And it means if you want to build the product that everyone thinks is the next thing, you are going to have to invade people's privacy.
And maybe you shouldn't. Like, there's an incredible argument for, nope, you shouldn't do that. Nope, the trade-offs required to make this product are so high at a societal level that we should stop it.
— Nilay Patel, The Vergecast
[...] Work on web and mobile runs in the cloud. Work in the desktop app can also use local files and desktop apps with your permission. At launch, cloud Work conversations do not appear in desktop Work; desktop Work threads and local files remain on that computer.
— OpenAI, trying (unsuccessfully) to clarify ChatGPT Work
I just declared a moratorium against AI-written change descriptions (e.g. PR and commit messages, also issues/tickets) from my team.
AI was writing change descriptions that were worse than useless to me as I tried to review PRs: outlining details of the code that could easily be seen by looking at the code, but omitting the higher-level framing needed to understand broadly what the code is doing.
I just launched my third course, Whimsical Animations, and so far, it’s on track to sell roughly ⅓ as many copies as a typical course launch.
It’s a similar story with my two existing courses. Sales are down significantly from last year.
There are likely a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest is AI. There’s sort of a double whammy with AI:
- Many people are wondering whether developer jobs will even exist in a few months, so they’re reluctant to spend time/money learning new dev skills.
- Even if they do want to learn new dev skills, LLMs can provide personalized tutoring, so there’s less incentive to buy a paid course.
[...] I’ve spoken to a few course creators now, and we’re all seeing the same trend. Revenue down 50%+. Fewer people engaging with our content. People switching to LLMs, which slurp up all of our work and regurgitate it, without consent or compensation.
— Josh W. Comeau, via Salma Alam-Naylor
We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.
— Anthropic, on Twitter
HumanAgent in the loopI dislike the phrase “human in the loop” because it cedes authority to the machines. Let’s flip the narrative. It’s our loop, we work the same way we always have, now we recruit agents to join the team. An agent-assisted process need not be a black box that takes in prompts and emits features. [...]
Let’s do agentic software development like that. Not as a loop we’ve been excluded from, instead as one we invite agents into.
— Jon Udell, “Doctor, it hurts when agents create unreviewable PRs.” “Don’t do that.”
This is a bad state of affairs. Consider, in particular, some industry dynamics:
- Frontier models are trained at an enormous cost, and a significant fraction of that cost is recouped in the few post-release months that they are broadly available. After that period elapses, the models become sub-frontier, competition emerges, and margins compress. Every week of delay is eating into the narrow window that labs have to make their accounting work.
- The ongoing AI infrastructure buildout—the one that is, according to former US AI Czar David Sacks, essential to the US economy, assumes a functionally global total addressable market for US AI services. No one is building $100 billion dollar data centers to serve frontier models to whatever 100 companies the US government will allow access. [...]
— Dean W. Ball, 35 thoughts on what has happened and what America should do
This is like saying there's no learning curve to being a manager because your employees will just do whatever you tell them to do.
— Timothy B. Lee, on the idea that LLMs take no skill and have no learning curve
We're beginning a limited preview of the GPT‑5.6 series: Sol, our flagship model; Terra, a balanced model for everyday work; and Luna, a fast and affordable model. Terra has competitive performance to GPT‑5.5 while being 2x cheaper and Luna brings strong capability at our lowest cost. [...]
We believe in broad access, and we plan to make GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna generally available in the coming weeks. As part of our ongoing engagement with the U.S. government, we previewed our plans and the models’ capabilities ahead of today’s launch. At their request, we are starting with a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners whose participation has been shared with the government, before releasing more broadly. [...]
GPT‑5.6 is priced per 1M tokens across three model sizes: Sol is $5 input / $30 output; Terra is $2.50 input / $15 output; and Luna is $1 input / $6 output. GPT‑5.6 also introduces more predictable prompt caching, including support for explicit cache breakpoints and a 30-minute minimum cache life. For GPT‑5.6 and later models, cache writes are billed at 1.25x the model’s uncached input rate, while cache reads continue to receive the 90% cached-input discount.
— OpenAI, Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model
In the last few months, I've started to see [job applications] that were clearly cowritten by an LLM, link to an LLM-generated portfolio site, which then links to LLM-generated GitHub projects, with purely LLM-generated commit messages. [...]
My other reaction is that I don't know anything about these people.
They haven't put themselves out there. They haven't said anything true. [...]
The perfected, generated, prompted resume is generic and impersonal. It tells me nothing about this person, other than that they use particular tools.
— Tom MacWright, Accidental anonymity
The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. [...]
Maybe the idealized form of MCP is just an auth gateway for the API and nothing else. That’d still be a win.
— Sean Lynch, comment on Hacker News
What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down. Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight.
— Charity Majors, AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less
I can 100% attest to the fact that Qwen3.6-27B is a very capable local model for coding tasks. Over the last month and a half I've been using it almost daily, either on my M2 Ultra or on my RTX 5090 box. I use it for small mundane tasks at ggml-org - nothing really impressive, but definitely a helpful tool for a maintainer. I think I would be using it much more, if I didn't have to spend a lot of my time on reviewing PRs. Currently, I have a very lightweight harness - the pi agent with everything stripped (
pi -nc --offline) and a short system prompt to align it a bit with my style.
— Georgi Gerganov, Hacker News comment on Running local models is good now by Boykis