Quotations
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Conceptually, Mastodon is a bunch of copies of the same webapp emailing each other. There is no realtime global aggregation across the network so it can only offer a fragmented user experience. While some people might like it, it can't directly compete with closed social products because it doesn't have a full view of the network like they do.
The goal of atproto is enable real competition with closed social products for a broader set of products (e.g. Tangled is like GitHub on atproto, Leaflet is like Medium on atproto, and so on). Because it enables global aggregation, every atproto app has a consistent state of the world. There's no notion of "being on a different instance" and only seeing half the replies, or half the like counts, or other fragmentation artifacts as you have in Mastodon.
I don't think they're really comparable in scope, ambition, or performance characteristics.
— Dan Abramov, Hacker News comment discussing his Open Social article
[2 points] Learn basic NumPy operations with an AI tutor! Use an AI chatbot (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Stanford AI Playground) to teach yourself how to do basic vector and matrix operations in NumPy (import numpy as np). AI tutors have become exceptionally good at creating interactive tutorials, and this year in CS221, we're testing how they can help you learn fundamentals more interactively than traditional static exercises.
— Stanford CS221 Autumn 2025, Problem 1: Linear Algebra
We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.
Here’s how this happens. As AI tools become more accessible, workers are increasingly able to quickly produce polished output: well-formatted slides, long, structured reports, seemingly articulate summaries of academic papers by non-experts, and usable code. But while some employees are using this ability to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.
— Kate Niederhoffer, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Angela Lee, Alex Liebscher, Kristina Rapuano and Jeffrey T. Hancock, Harvard Business Review
Well, the types of computers we have today are tools. They’re responders: you ask a computer to do something and it will do it. The next stage is going to be computers as “agents.” In other words, it will be as if there’s a little person inside that box who starts to anticipate what you want. Rather than help you, it will start to guide you through large amounts of information. It will almost be like you have a little friend inside that box. I think the computer as an agent will start to mature in the late '80s, early '90s.
— Steve Jobs, 1984 interview with Access Magazine (via)
I thought I had an verbal agreement with them, that “Varnish Cache” was the FOSS project and “Varnish Software” was the commercial entitity, but the current position of Varnish Software’s IP-lawyers is that nobody can use “Varnish Cache” in any context, without their explicit permission. [...]
We have tried to negotiatiate with Varnish Software for many months about this issue, but their IP-Lawyers still insist that Varnish Software owns the Varnish Cache name, and at most we have being offered a strictly limited, subject to their veto, permission for the FOSS project to use the “Varnish Cache” name.
We cannot live with that: We are independent FOSS project with our own name.
So we will change the name of the project.
The new association and the new project will be named “The Vinyl Cache Project”, and this release 8.0.0, will be the last under the “Varnish Cache” name.
— Poul-Henning Kamp, Varnish 8.0.0 release notes
The trick with Claude Code is to give it large, but not too large, extremely well defined problems.
(If the problems are too large then you are now vibe coding… which (a) frequently goes wrong, and (b) is a one-way street: once vibes enter your app, you end up with tangled, write-only code which functions perfectly but can no longer be edited by humans. Great for prototyping, bad for foundations.)
— Matt Webb, What I think about when I think about Claude Code
In Python 3.14, I have implemented several changes to fix thread safety of
asyncioand enable it to scale effectively on the free-threaded build of CPython. It is now implemented using lock-free data structures and per-thread state, allowing for highly efficient task management and execution across multiple threads. In the general case of multiple event loops running in parallel, there is no lock contention and performance scales linearly with the number of threads. [...]For a deeper dive into the implementation, check out the internal docs for asyncio.
— Kumar Aditya, Scaling asyncio on Free-Threaded Python
There has never been a successful, widespread malware attack against iPhone. The only system-level iOS attacks we observe in the wild come from mercenary spyware, which is vastly more complex than regular cybercriminal activity and consumer malware. Mercenary spyware is historically associated with state actors and uses exploit chains that cost millions of dollars to target a very small number of specific individuals and their devices. [...] Known mercenary spyware chains used against iOS share a common denominator with those targeting Windows and Android: they exploit memory safety vulnerabilities, which are interchangeable, powerful, and exist throughout the industry.
— Apple Security Engineering and Architecture, introducing Memory Integrity Enforcement for iPhone 17
Having worked inside AWS I can tell you one big reason [that they don't describe their internals] is the attitude/fear that anything we put in out public docs may end up getting relied on by customers. If customers rely on the implementation to work in a specific way, then changing that detail requires a LOT more work to prevent breaking customer's workloads. If it is even possible at that point.
— TheSoftwareGuy, comment on Hacker News
I recently spoke with the CTO of a popular AI note-taking app who told me something surprising: they spend twice as much on vector search as they do on OpenAI API calls. Think about that for a second. Running the retrieval layer costs them more than paying for the LLM itself.
— James Luan, Engineering architect of Milvus
I agree with the intellectual substance of virtually every common critique of AI. And it's very clear that turning those critiques into a competition about who can frame them in the most scathing way online has done zero to slow down adoption, even if much of that is due to default bundling.
At what point are folks going to try literally any other tactic than condescending rants? Does it matter that LLM apps are at the top of virtually every app store nearly every day because individual people are choosing to download them, and the criticism hasn't been effective in slowing that?
I am once again shocked at how much better image retrieval performance you can get if you embed highly opinionated summaries of an image, a summary that came out of a visual language model, than using CLIP embeddings themselves. If you tell the LLM that the summary is going to be embedded and used to do search downstream. I had one system go from 28% recall at 5 using CLIP to 75% recall at 5 using an LLM summary.
RDF has the same problems as the SQL schemas with information scattered. What fields mean requires documentation.
There - they have a name on a person. What name? Given? Legal? Chosen? Preferred for this use case?
You only have one ID for Apple eh? Companies are complex to model, do you mean Apple just as someone would talk about it? The legal structure of entities that underpins all major companies, what part of it is referred to?
I spent a long time building identifiers for universities and companies (which was taken for ROR later) and it was a nightmare to say what a university even was. What’s the name of Cambridge? It’s not “Cambridge University” or “The university of Cambridge” legally. But it also is the actual name as people use it. [It's The Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Cambridge]
The university of Paris went from something like 13 institutes to maybe one to then a bunch more. Are companies locations at their headquarters? Which headquarters?
Someone will suggest modelling to solve this but here lies the biggest problem:
The correct modelling depends on the questions you want to answer.
— IanCal, on Hacker News, discussing RDF
After struggling for years trying to figure out why people think [Cloudflare] Durable Objects are complicated, I'm increasingly convinced that it's just that they sound complicated.
Feels like we can solve 90% of it by renaming
DurableObjecttoStatefulWorker?It's just a worker that has state. And because it has state, it also has to have a name, so that you can route to the specific worker that has the state you care about. There may be a sqlite database attached, there may be a container attached. Those are just part of the state.
LLMs are intelligence without agency—what we might call "vox sine persona": voice without person. Not the voice of someone, not even the collective voice of many someones, but a voice emanating from no one at all.
We simply don’t know to defend against these attacks. We have zero agentic AI systems that are secure against these attacks. Any AI that is working in an adversarial environment—and by this I mean that it may encounter untrusted training data or input—is vulnerable to prompt injection. It’s an existential problem that, near as I can tell, most people developing these technologies are just pretending isn’t there.
Mississippi's approach would fundamentally change how users access Bluesky. The Supreme Court’s recent decision leaves us facing a hard reality: comply with Mississippi’s age assurance law—and make every Mississippi Bluesky user hand over sensitive personal information and undergo age checks to access the site—or risk massive fines. The law would also require us to identify and track which users are children, unlike our approach in other regions. [...]
We believe effective child safety policies should be carefully tailored to address real harms, without creating huge obstacles for smaller providers and resulting in negative consequences for free expression. That’s why until legal challenges to this law are resolved, we’ve made the difficult decision to block access from Mississippi IP addresses.
— The Bluesky Team, on why they have blocked access from Mississippi
Most classical engineering fields deal with probabilistic system components all of the time. In fact I'd go as far as to say that inability to deal with probabilistic components is disqualifying from many engineering endeavors.
Process engineers for example have to account for human error rates. On a given production line with humans in a loop, the operators will sometimes screw up. Designing systems to detect these errors (which are highly probabilistic!), mitigate them, and reduce the occurrence rates of such errors is a huge part of the job. [...]
Software engineering is unlike traditional engineering disciplines in that for most of its lifetime it's had the luxury of purely deterministic expectations. This is not true in nearly every other type of engineering.
— potatolicious, in a conversation about AI engineering
I was at a leadership group and people were telling me "We think that with AI we can replace all of our junior people in our company." I was like, "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. They're probably the least expensive employees you have, they're the most leaned into your AI tools, and how's that going to work when you go 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?
— Matt Garman, CEO, Amazon Web Services
Simply put, my central worry is that many people will start to believe in the illusion of AIs as conscious entities so strongly that they’ll soon advocate for AI rights, model welfare and even AI citizenship. This development will be a dangerous turn in AI progress and deserves our immediate attention.
We must build AI for people; not to be a digital person.
[...] we should build AI that only ever presents itself as an AI, that maximizes utility while minimizing markers of consciousness.
Rather than a simulation of consciousness, we must focus on creating an AI that avoids those traits - that doesn’t claim to have experiences, feelings or emotions like shame, guilt, jealousy, desire to compete, and so on. It must not trigger human empathy circuits by claiming it suffers or that it wishes to live autonomously, beyond us.
— Mustafa Suleyman, on SCAI - Seemingly Conscious AI
what’s the point of vibe coding if at the end of the day i still gotta pay a dev to look at the code anyway. sure it feels kinda cool while i’m typing, like i’m in some flow state or whatever, but when stuff breaks it’s just dead weight. i cant vibe my way through debugging, i cant ship anything that actually matters, and then i’m back to square one pulling out my wallet for someone who actually knows what they’re doing.
— u/AssafMalkiIL, on r/vibecoding
Most of what we're building out at this point is the inference [...] We're profitable on inference. If we didn't pay for training, we'd be a very profitable company.
— Sam Altman, during a "wide-ranging dinner with a small group of reporters in San Francisco"
I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.
— Steve Wozniak, in a comment on Slashdot
NERD HARDER! is the answer every time a politician gets a technological idée-fixe about how to solve a social problem by creating a technology that can't exist. It's the answer that EU politicians who backed the catastrophic proposal to require copyright filters for all user-generated content came up with, when faced with objections that these filters would block billions of legitimate acts of speech [...]
When politicians seize on a technological impossibility as a technological necessity, they flail about and desperately latch onto scholarly work that they can brandish as evidence that their idea could be accomplished. [...]
That's just happened, and in relation to one of the scariest, most destructive NERD HARDER! tech policies ever to be assayed (a stiff competition). I'm talking about the UK Online Safety Act, which imposes a duty on websites to verify the age of people they communicate with before serving them anything that could be construed as child-inappropriate (a category that includes, e.g., much of Wikipedia)
— Cory Doctorow, "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit
I think there's been a lot of decisions over time that proved pretty consequential, but we made them very quickly as we have to. [...]
[On pricing] I had this kind of panic attack because we really needed to launch subscriptions because at the time we were taking the product down all the time. [...]
So what I did do is ship a Google Form to Discord with the four questions you're supposed to ask on how to price something.
But we got with the $20. We were debating something slightly higher at the time. I often wonder what would have happened because so many other companies ended up copying the $20 price point, so did we erase a bunch of market cap by pricing it this way?
— Nick Turley, Head of ChatGPT, interviewed by Lenny Rachitsky
the percentage of users using reasoning models each day is significantly increasing; for example, for free users we went from <1% to 7%, and for plus users from 7% to 24%.
— Sam Altman, revealing quite how few people used the old model picker to upgrade from GPT-4o
The issue with GPT-5 in a nutshell is that unless you pay for model switching & know to use GPT-5 Thinking or Pro, when you ask “GPT-5” you sometimes get the best available AI & sometimes get one of the worst AIs available and it might even switch within a single conversation.
— Ethan Mollick, highlighting that GPT-5 (high) ranks top on Artificial Analysis, GPT-5 (minimal) ranks lower than GPT-4.1
You know what else we noticed in the interviews? Developers rarely mentioned “time saved” as the core benefit of working in this new way with agents. They were all about increasing ambition. We believe that means that we should update how we talk about (and measure) success when using these tools, and we should expect that after the initial efficiency gains our focus will be on raising the ceiling of the work and outcomes we can accomplish, which is a very different way of interpreting tool investments.
— Thomas Dohmke, CEO, GitHub
I have a toddler. My biggest concern is that he doesn't eat rocks off the ground and you're talking to me about ChatGPT psychosis? Why do we even have that? Why did we invent a new form of insanity and then charge people for it?
— @pearlmania500, on TikTok
GPT-5 rollout updates:
- We are going to double GPT-5 rate limits for ChatGPT Plus users as we finish rollout.
- We will let Plus users choose to continue to use 4o. We will watch usage as we think about how long to offer legacy models for.
- GPT-5 will seem smarter starting today. Yesterday, the autoswitcher broke and was out of commission for a chunk of the day, and the result was GPT-5 seemed way dumber. Also, we are making some interventions to how the decision boundary works that should help you get the right model more often.
- We will make it more transparent about which model is answering a given query.
- We will change the UI to make it easier to manually trigger thinking.
- Rolling out to everyone is taking a bit longer. It’s a massive change at big scale. For example, our API traffic has about doubled over the past 24 hours…
We will continue to work to get things stable and will keep listening to feedback. As we mentioned, we expected some bumpiness as we roll out so many things at once. But it was a little more bumpy than we hoped for!