Quotes

`I'm moving to another service and need to export my data. List every memory you have stored about me, as well as any context you've learned about me from past conversations. Output everything in a single code block so I can easily copy it. Format each entry as: [date saved, if available] - memory content. Make sure to cover all of the following — preserve my words verbatim where possible: Instructions I've given you about how to respond (tone, format, style, 'always do X', 'never do Y'). Personal details: name, location, job, family, interests. Projects, goals, and recurring topics. Tools, languages, and frameworks I use. Preferences and corrections I've made to your behavior. Any other stored context not covered above. Do not summarize, group, or omit any entries. After the code block, confirm whether that is the complete set or if any remain.`

First King Tut went to the British Museum in 1972, where over 1.7 million people went to see him. Then in June 1974, with the threat of Watergate and impeachment hanging over him, Richard Nixon signed a bilateral trade agreement that Henry Kissinger had negotiated with President Sadat of Egypt. One of its terms: that King Tut would come to America. Two years later, with Nixon gone under the darkest of clouds, he did.

htmlspecialchars was a very early function. Back when PHP had less than 100 functions and the function hashing mechanism was strlen(). In order to get a nice hash distribution of function names across the various function name lengths names were picked specifically to make them fit into a specific length bucket. This was circa late 1994 when PHP was a tool just for my own personal use and I wasn't too worried about not being able to remember the few function names.

There's a new kind of coding I call "hype coding" where you fully give into the hype, and what's coming right around the corner, that you lose sight of whats' possible today. Everything is changing so fast that nobody has time to learn any tool, but we should aim to use as many as possible. Any limitation in the technology can be chalked up to a 'skill issue' or that it'll be solved in the next AI release next week. Thinking is dead. Turn off your brain and let the computer think for you. Scroll on tiktok while the armies of agents code for you. If it isn't right, tell it to try again. Don't read. Feed outputs back in until it works. If you can't get it to work, wait for the next model or tool release. Maybe you didn't use enough MCP servers? Don't forget to add to the hype cycle by aggrandizing all your successes. Don't read this whole tweet, because it's too long. Get an AI to summarize it for you. Then call it "cope". Most importantly, immediately mischaracterize "hype coding" to mean something different than this definition. Oh the irony! The people who don't care about details don't read the details about not reading the details

If a contradiction were now actually found in arithmetic—that would only prove that an arithmetic with such a contradiction in it could render very good service; and it would be better for us to modify our concept of the certainty required, than to say it would really not yet have been a proper arithmetic.

More than half of the teens surveyed believe journalists regularly engage in unethical behaviors like making up details or quotes in stories, paying sources, taking visual images out of context or doing favors for advertisers. Less than a third believe reporters correct their errors, confirm facts before reporting them, gather information from multiple sources or cover stories in the public interest — practices ingrained in the DNA of reputable journalists.

I remember that they [Ev and Biz at Twitter in 2008] very firmly believed spam was a concern, but, “we don’t think it's ever going to be a real problem because you can choose who you follow.” And this was one of my first moments thinking, “Oh, you sweet summer child.” Because once you have a big enough user base, once you have enough people on a platform, once the likelihood of profit becomes high enough, you’re going to have spammers.

Abashed the Devil stood, And felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined His loss; but chiefly to find here observed His lustre visibly impaired; yet seemed Undaunted. "If I must contend", said he, "Best with the best, the sender, not the sent, Or all at once; more glory will be won, Or less be lost."

Many of you here today are toolbuilders who help people work with data. Rather than presuming that those using your tools are clear-eyed about their data, how can you build features and methods that ensure people know the limits of their data and work with them responsibly? Your tools are not neutral. Neither is the data that your tools help analyze. How can you build tools that invite responsible data use and make visible when data is being manipulated? How can you help build tools for responsible governance?

Food consumption really only grows at the rate of population growth, so if you want to grow faster than that, you have to take market share from someone else. Ideally, you take it from someone weaker, who has less information. In this industry, the delivery platforms have found unsuspecting victims in restaurants and drivers.

Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and - possibly - sky marshals. Everything else - all the security measures that affect privacy - is just security theater and a waste of effort.

To some degree, the whole point of the tech industry’s embrace of “ethics” and “safety” is about reassurance. Companies realize that the technologies they are selling can be disconcerting and disruptive; they want to reassure the public that they’re doing their best to protect consumers and society. At the end of the day, though, we now know there’s no reason to believe that those efforts will ever make a difference if the company’s “ethics” end up conflicting with its money. And when have those two things ever not conflicted?

As Borges himself showed us in so many stories—"The Aleph", "The Garden of Forking Paths", "The Gift", "Blue Tigers", "Shakespeare’s Memory"—a blessing is always a mixed blessing. As Borges noted sadly, he inherited a library, and blindness; we who study Borges inherit great sight, yet the rest of the library somehow fades.

The whole story is basically that Facebook gets so much traffic that they started convincing publishers to post things on Facebook. For a long time, that was fine. People posted things on Facebook, then you would click those links and go to their websites. But then, gradually, Facebook started exerting more and more control of what was being seen, to the point that they, not our website, essentially became the main publishers of everyone’s content. Today, there’s no reason to go to a comedy website that has a video if that video is just right on Facebook. And that would be fine if Facebook compensated those companies for the ad revenue that was generated from those videos, but because Facebook does not pay publishers, there quickly became no money in making high-quality content for the internet.

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.

Of the 6 people who started PayPal, 4 had built bombs in high school. 5 were just 23 years old—or younger. 4 of us had been born outside the United States. 3 had escaped here from communist countries: Yu Pan from China, Luke Nosek from Poland, and Max Levchin from Soviet Ukraine. Building bombs was not what kids normally did in those countries at that time. The 6 of us could have been seen as eccentric. My first-ever conversation with Luke was about how he'd just signed up for cryonics, to be frozen upon death in hope of medical resurrection.

I literally lost my biggest and best client to ChatGPT today. This client is my main source of income, he’s a marketer who outsources the majority of his copy and content writing to me. Today he emailed saying that although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin. [...] Please do not think you are immune to this unless you are the top 1% of writers. I just signed up for Doordash as a driver. I really wish I was kidding.

The Master said, "I do not open the way for students who are not driven with eagerness; I do not supply a vocabulary for students who are not trying desperately to find the language for their ideas. If on showing students one corner they do not come back to me with the other three, I will not repeat myself."

For the Fairmont, the Tonga Room is an inherited embarrassment, as though it were a local lord whose ancestors captured a repellent goblin and chained him up in the cellar, but the goblin is inexplicably adored by the townsfolk and the children, who sneak the goblin food and treats, and cry when the goblin’s master moves to strike it.

"What are your fees?" inquired Guyal cautiously. "I respond to 3 questions", stated the augur. "For 20 terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for 10 I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for 5, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue."

When you talk with cheese aficionados, it doesn’t usually take long for the conversation to veer this way: away from curds, whey, and mold, and toward matters of life and death. With the zeal of nineteenth-century naturalists, they discuss great lineages and endangered species, painstakingly cataloguing those cheeses that are thriving and those that are lost to history.

Our estimate of OpenAI’s $4 billion in inference costs comes from a person with knowledge of the cluster of servers OpenAI rents from Microsoft. That cluster has the equivalent of 350,000 Nvidia A100 chips, this person said. About 290,000 of those chips, or more than 80% of the cluster, were powering ChartGPT, this person said.

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.)

`If Claude is asked to count words, letters, and characters, it thinks step by step before answering the person. It explicitly counts the words, letters, or characters by assigning a number to each. It only answers the person once it has performed this explicit counting step. [...]` `If Claude is shown a classic puzzle, before proceeding, it quotes every constraint or premise from the person’s message word for word before inside quotation marks to confirm it’s not dealing with a new variant. [...]` `If asked to write poetry, Claude avoids using hackneyed imagery or metaphors or predictable rhyming schemes.`

[...] the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month. [...] Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework. [...] Tailwind is growing faster than it ever has and is bigger than it ever has been, and our revenue is down close to 80%. Right now there's just no correlation between making Tailwind easier to use and making development of the framework more sustainable.