Quotes

Twitter is an open, real-time introduction and information service. On a daily basis we introduce millions to interesting people, trends, content, URLs, organizations, lists, companies, products and services. These introductions result in the formation of a dynamic real-time interest graph. At any given moment, the vast network of connections on Twitter paints a picture of a universe of interests. We follow those people, organizations, services, and other users that interest us, and in turn, others follow us.

...there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from...the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.

AI tools create a significant productivity boost for developers. Different folks report different gains, but most people who try AI code generation recognize its ability to increase velocity. Many people think that means we’re going to need fewer developers, and our industry is going to slowly circle the drain. This view is based on a misunderstanding of why people pay for software. A business creates software because they think that it will give them some sort of economic advantage. The investment needs to pay for itself with interest. There are many software projects that would help a business, but businesses aren’t going to do them because the return on investment doesn’t make sense. When software development becomes more efficient, the ROI of any given software project increases, which unlocks more projects. [...] Cheaper software means people are going to want more of it. More software means more jobs for increasingly efficient software developers.

Our legions are brim-full, our cause is ripe. The enemy increaseth every day. We, at the height, are ready to decline. There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves Or lose our ventures.

[Passkeys are] something truly unique, because baked into their design is the requirement that they be unphishable. And the only way you can have something that’s completely resistant to phishing is to make it impossible for a person to provide that data to someone else (via copying and pasting, uploading, etc.). That you can’t export a passkey in a way that another tool or system can import and use it is a feature, not a bug or design flaw. And it’s a critical feature, if we’re going to put an end to security threats associated with phishing and data breaches.

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.

"Your case is very serious", he said to the boy. "We will go and consult the ancient authorities..." The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel was what they called it when they were speaking Chinese. Venerable because of his goatee, white as the dogwood blossom, a badge of unimpeachable credibility in Confucian eyes. Inscrutable because he had gone to his grave without divulging the Secret of the Eleven Herbs and Spices. It had been the first fast-food franchise established on the Bund, many decades earlier.

[In response to a question about releasing model weights] Yes, we are discussing. I personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open source strategy; not everyone at OpenAI shares this view, and it's also not our current highest priority.

We introduce phi-3-mini, a 3.8 billion parameter language model trained on 3.3 trillion tokens, whose overall performance, as measured by both academic benchmarks and internal testing, rivals that of models such as Mixtral 8x7B and GPT-3.5 (e.g., phi-3-mini achieves 69% on MMLU and 8.38 on MT-bench), despite being small enough to be deployed on a phone.

I think that discussions of this technology become much clearer when we replace the term AI with the word “automation”. Then we can ask: What is being automated? Who’s automating it and why? Who benefits from that automation? How well does the automation work in its use case that we’re considering? Who’s being harmed? Who has accountability for the functioning of the automated system? What existing regulations already apply to the activities where the automation is being used?

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing. It embodies, indeed, something better than the metaphysics of the Stone Age, namely, as was said, the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men. But then, that acumen has been concentrated primarily upon the practical business of life. If a distinction works well for practical purposes in ordinary life (no mean feat, for even ordinary life is full of hard cases), then there is sure to be something in it, it will not mark nothing: yet this is likely enough to be not the best way of arranging things if our interests are more extensive or intellectual than the ordinary. And again, that experience has been derived only from the sources available to ordinary men throughout most of civilised history: it has not been fed from the resources of the microscope and its successors. And it must be added too, that superstition and error and fantasy of all kinds do become incorporated in ordinary language and even sometimes stand up to the survival test (only, when they do, why should we not detect it?). Certainly, then, ordinary language is not the last word: in principle it can everywhere be supplemented and improved upon and superseded. Only remember, it is the first word.

Three years ago, we were impressed that a machine could write a poem about otters. Less than 1,000 days later, I am debating statistical methodology with an agent that built its own research environment. The era of the chatbot is turning into the era of the digital coworker. To be very clear, Gemini 3 isn’t perfect, and it still needs a manager who can guide and check it. But it suggests that “human in the loop” is evolving from “human who fixes AI mistakes” to “human who directs AI work.” And that may be the biggest change since the release of ChatGPT.

When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Every thing to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God daily for having hidden Himself from man.

I felt the bone-strewn paths of the necropolis under my feet, and saw through the drifting river fog the slender figure of Vodalus as he gave his pistol to his mistress and drew his sword. Now (it is a sad thing to have become a man) I was struck by the extravagance of the gesture. He who had professed in a hundred clandestine placards to be fighting for the old ways, for the ancient high civilization Urth has now lost, has discarded the effectual weapon of that civilization. If my memories of the past remain intact, perhaps it is only because the past exists only in memory. Vodalus, who wished as I did to summon it again, yet remained a creature of the present. That we are capable only of being what we are remains our unforgivable sin.

The technological future of the Web is in micro and macro structure. The approach to the micro is akin to proteins and surface binding--or, to put it another way, phenotropics and pattern matching. Massively parallel agents need to be evolved to discover how to bind onto something that looks like a blog post; a crumb-trail; a right-hand nav; a top 10 list; a review; an event description; search boxes.

I read on Niall Kennedy that del.icio.us has come up with an API that returns a JSON structure, and I figured, sheez it can't be that hard to parse, so let's see what it looks like, and damn, IT'S NOT EVEN XML! [...] Who did this travesty? Let's find a tree and string them up. Now.

The thing nobody talks about with engineering management is this: Every 3-4 months every person experiences some sort of personal crisis. A family member dies, they have a bad illness, they get into an argument with another person at work, etc. etc. Sadly, that is just life. Normally after a month or so things settle down and life goes on. But when you are managing 6+ people it means there is always a crisis you are helping someone work through. You are always carrying a bit of emotional burden or worry around with you.