Gordon
@gordon.bsky.social
Everything around me was someone’s lifework.
Pinned
Gordon
@gordon.bsky.social
· Apr 22
self-certifying data… over http
memento mori
Yeah, which highlights how those aren't unsolved problems just with AIs.
And it's the same for the process of continual learning. I just read someone state that brains are the "gold standard" in that. It seems to be so easy to forget that catastrophic forgetting is very much a feature for us.
And it's the same for the process of continual learning. I just read someone state that brains are the "gold standard" in that. It seems to be so easy to forget that catastrophic forgetting is very much a feature for us.
November 26, 2025 at 4:17 AM
memento mori
Reposted by Gordon
Once the user releases their Spirit Bomb, it's so over
this gif, except substitute "language" for "user" and "human intelligence" for "engineer".
November 25, 2025 at 2:34 PM
Once the user releases their Spirit Bomb, it's so over
Realizing that bash/linux have been immortalized in latent space AND we're about to see a bunch of great new Linux sandboxing tools because of this. Yes... ha ha ha... yes!! bsky.app/profile/timk...
November 25, 2025 at 11:37 AM
Realizing that bash/linux have been immortalized in latent space AND we're about to see a bunch of great new Linux sandboxing tools because of this. Yes... ha ha ha... yes!! bsky.app/profile/timk...
this gif, except substitute "language" for "user" and "human intelligence" for "engineer".
November 25, 2025 at 10:57 AM
this gif, except substitute "language" for "user" and "human intelligence" for "engineer".
Interop is not a feature. It’s an ecological condition.
The point being, while things like SQLite and CRDTs are not ubiquitous now, it's also not an impossibility that they can be ubiquitous in the future. Ubiquity is not a special property, it's an infrastructural investment.
November 25, 2025 at 6:32 AM
Interop is not a feature. It’s an ecological condition.
turning a big dial taht says "evil vector" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval
November 24, 2025 at 7:34 AM
turning a big dial taht says "evil vector" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval
evil as attractor in behavioral space
i'm going to sound sarcastic here but genuinely one of the most interesting aspects of LLMs is that they are proving that evil is real, by which i mean if you train them to do one bad thing they start doing other bad things that you have not trained them to do
At least once a month, Anthropic puts out an alignment paper d AI behavior where, if you saw it in a science fiction film, you‘d be screaming at the idiot scientists onscreen to stop development
www.anthropic.com/research/eme...
www.anthropic.com/research/eme...
November 24, 2025 at 6:52 AM
evil as attractor in behavioral space
"The very best creative people will only go to work in a few places." / "What I try to do is create the environment where these incredible people can make films." Man, this is what real leadership looks like. They don't make 'em like this anymore. youtu.be/R0XmBKsRJF8?...
Pixar's Early Days - A Never-Before-Seen Interview With Steve Jobs, 1996
YouTube video by Steve Jobs Archive
youtu.be
November 23, 2025 at 5:37 PM
"The very best creative people will only go to work in a few places." / "What I try to do is create the environment where these incredible people can make films." Man, this is what real leadership looks like. They don't make 'em like this anymore. youtu.be/R0XmBKsRJF8?...
Reposted by Gordon
I feel like people downplay that the major determinants of things happening in the world are:
- They are possible (eg technologically)
- They have a payout structure
Example: many forms of fraud meet 1, but not 2, and so generally don’t happen.
- They are possible (eg technologically)
- They have a payout structure
Example: many forms of fraud meet 1, but not 2, and so generally don’t happen.
November 23, 2025 at 5:13 PM
I feel like people downplay that the major determinants of things happening in the world are:
- They are possible (eg technologically)
- They have a payout structure
Example: many forms of fraud meet 1, but not 2, and so generally don’t happen.
- They are possible (eg technologically)
- They have a payout structure
Example: many forms of fraud meet 1, but not 2, and so generally don’t happen.
Reposted by Gordon
files are actually good
the metaphor i find most useful is that your "posts", "likes", etc, are really just JSON files in this paradigm — and more concretely, concepts like "bluesky post" or "tangled repo" or "leaflet comment" are like JSON file formats. and then different apps — arbitrary even — interpret these formats
November 23, 2025 at 3:37 PM
files are actually good
“The tendency to favor family and friends can be overridden by rules that mandate, for example, hiring a qualified individual rather than a family member. But higher-level institutions are in some sense quite unnatural, and when they break down, humans revert to the earlier form of sociability... “
November 23, 2025 at 2:07 PM
“The tendency to favor family and friends can be overridden by rules that mandate, for example, hiring a qualified individual rather than a family member. But higher-level institutions are in some sense quite unnatural, and when they break down, humans revert to the earlier form of sociability... “
Reposted by Gordon
once we get the culture to figure out that atproto means you can adopt new apps without selling your soul to their creators we're going to see an *explosion* of new (and old!) forms of doing shit together on the internet
it's insane how we've been held back by feudal technocratic architectures
it's insane how we've been held back by feudal technocratic architectures
November 23, 2025 at 5:43 AM
once we get the culture to figure out that atproto means you can adopt new apps without selling your soul to their creators we're going to see an *explosion* of new (and old!) forms of doing shit together on the internet
it's insane how we've been held back by feudal technocratic architectures
it's insane how we've been held back by feudal technocratic architectures
Reposted by Gordon
Olmo 3 is notable as a "fully open" LLM - all of the training data is published, plus complete details on how the training process was run. I tried out the 32B thinking model and the 7B instruct models, + thoughts on why transparent training data is so important simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/22/...
Olmo 3 is a fully open LLM
Olmo is the LLM series from Ai2—the Allen institute for AI. Unlike most open weight models these are notable for including the full training data, training process and checkpoints along …
simonwillison.net
November 23, 2025 at 12:17 AM
Olmo 3 is notable as a "fully open" LLM - all of the training data is published, plus complete details on how the training process was run. I tried out the 32B thinking model and the 7B instruct models, + thoughts on why transparent training data is so important simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/22/...
Forrester: “In the long history of evolution it has not been necessary until very recently for people to understand complex feedback systems. Evolutionary processes have not given us the mental ability to interpret properly the dynamic behavior of those complex systems in which we are now embedded.”
November 23, 2025 at 4:22 AM
Forrester: “In the long history of evolution it has not been necessary until very recently for people to understand complex feedback systems. Evolutionary processes have not given us the mental ability to interpret properly the dynamic behavior of those complex systems in which we are now embedded.”
Reposted by Gordon
But those are still much better problems to have! You may hate cryptocurrency but it’s really accelerated our progress in being able to secure and manage keys. Nothing solves a security problem like piles of money and constant free red teaming done by North Korea.
November 22, 2025 at 2:52 PM
But those are still much better problems to have! You may hate cryptocurrency but it’s really accelerated our progress in being able to secure and manage keys. Nothing solves a security problem like piles of money and constant free red teaming done by North Korea.
Reposted by Gordon
The US is the world's largest oil and gas producer. Yet, "China is now making more money from exporting green technology than America makes from exporting fossil fuels."
China’s clean-energy revolution will reshape markets and politics
The world’s biggest manufacturer now has an interest in the world decarbonising
www.economist.com
November 7, 2025 at 11:05 AM
The US is the world's largest oil and gas producer. Yet, "China is now making more money from exporting green technology than America makes from exporting fossil fuels."
Extremely William Gibson subplot. Down and out since AI started making all the art, a desperate beat poet falls in with a dangerous corporate espionage gang. Hacking OpenAI will require the perfect stanza. There’s just one problem: poetry is ILLEGAL.
Looks like LLMs are *very* vulnerable to attack via poetic allusion: "curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90% ..."
https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1
https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1
November 22, 2025 at 8:29 AM
Extremely William Gibson subplot. Down and out since AI started making all the art, a desperate beat poet falls in with a dangerous corporate espionage gang. Hacking OpenAI will require the perfect stanza. There’s just one problem: poetry is ILLEGAL.
I lead a team that built an experimental browser on Servo at Mozilla Research. The whole browser UI was web-based and it was so fast that everything felt native. This was almost 10 years ago. Can’t even fathom how good Servo must be now.
Servo is a massive achievement. One of the more unknown but potentially very impactful things about the project is that its modular nature allows parts of the web rendering stack to be embedded elsewhere (in game engines and such).
blogs.igalia.com/mrego/servo-...
blogs.igalia.com/mrego/servo-...
Servo: A new web engine written in Rust
Detailed description slide by slide of my Servo talk at GOSIM Hangzhou 2025.
blogs.igalia.com
November 22, 2025 at 5:32 AM
I lead a team that built an experimental browser on Servo at Mozilla Research. The whole browser UI was web-based and it was so fast that everything felt native. This was almost 10 years ago. Can’t even fathom how good Servo must be now.
Reposted by Gordon
Reposted by Gordon
Ironically the word enshittification has been enshittified by its own users, far faster than any of the products it was meant to explain.
November 20, 2025 at 10:32 AM
Ironically the word enshittification has been enshittified by its own users, far faster than any of the products it was meant to explain.
The future is going to be very jaggedly distributed. Flat frictionless software generating spherical cows at exponentially increasing rates while we poke around the robo greenhouse trying to figure out how algae keeps getting into the irrigation lines.
Analytical chemistry has become extremely automated in the last 25 years, and yet shit continues to break in new and befuddling ways that AI can’t possibly parse. The “datasets” for it to learn instrument repairs from exist in the minds of experts and are significantly vibes-based.
A fair question is how much of a day's work could be outsourced to a machine? As I've become proficient with AI tools, I find that much of what takes me time (but not deep cognitive effort) can be automated. PhDs are hired, at least in part, for their thinking skills. Not all jobs require them.
November 20, 2025 at 5:59 AM
The future is going to be very jaggedly distributed. Flat frictionless software generating spherical cows at exponentially increasing rates while we poke around the robo greenhouse trying to figure out how algae keeps getting into the irrigation lines.
Tech is so moat-pilled, we dismiss a lot of potentially useful tools. Like… Calculators have no moat. Does that mean we shouldn’t have bothered with them?
November 20, 2025 at 5:38 AM
Tech is so moat-pilled, we dismiss a lot of potentially useful tools. Like… Calculators have no moat. Does that mean we shouldn’t have bothered with them?