Robin Monjo retweeted
For those who have been following my takes on AI progress, it may come as no surprise that I agree with @nostalgebraist
Robin Monjo retweeted
I sympathize with programmers who worked on systems they never cared about, for customers they didn't connect with, and took all their working joy from the mechanical act of turning tickets into code. You have to care about the software to be excited about making it w/ agents!
Robin Monjo retweeted
I've got an agent in a loop optimizing a renderer with the goal to minimize frame times (and tests to measure). It got times down from 88ms to 2ms and allocations down from ~150K to 500. Sounds good, right? Wrong. This is exactly why agent psychosis is a big fucking problem.
As an experiment, I rewrote the Ghostty core render state in Go, with access to identically laid out data structures as Ghostty and the exact same validation tests. I made a purposely naive renderer (simple, correct, but slow). 88ms per frame with 150,000 allocations (horrendous, lol)!
I then kickstarted a Ralph loop to bring the frame times down. I told it it can't modify input data structures or the public API or tests (they're correct), but it can do anything else it wants. It got to work.
It has worked for about 4 hours. I've spent around $350 on this experiment so far. The results?
88ms => 1.5ms
150K allocs => ~500 allocs
Incredible right? Nope.
My hand-written renderer I ported has frame times (same benchmark) of ~20us (0.020ms) and 0 allocations in the update path.
This is the problem with psychosis and lacking systems understanding. If you don't understand the system, you're going to accept that this is an incredible result. If you understand the system, you'll see better solutions immediately and can do roughly 75x better on throughput.
The people who blindly trust agent output are in the former camp. They're sheeple, overdrinking from a fountain of mediocrity.
Standard disclaimer: I use AI all the time. I like AI. The point I'm making is to not blindly accept results. Think. Analyze. Learn.
Robin Monjo retweeted
Lazy work used to mean too little output.
Now, with AI, it often means too much and more work for everyone else.
@tobi call it "slop grenades."
A "Slop Grenade" is when you let AI produce the work and pass it on without adding any value (including checking it).
Someone else has to wade through it, catch the mistakes, and clean up the mess.
You save time and look productive but someone else pays for it.
My third conversation with Shopify co-founder and CEO @tobi.
0:00 How Shopify Uses AI
7:18 River: Shopify's Internal AI
8:55 How to Encourage Osmosis Learning
10:52 AI Dreaming and Self-Reflection
11:53 How to Use AI for Strategic Decision Making
14:11 The One Thing AI Cannot Do
16:04 What AI is Making Worse at Shopify
19:46 Predictions: Where AI is Headed Next
21:55 The Future of AI-Powered Software
24:40 Will CEOs Be Replaced with AI?
27:54 Can Superintelligence Be Controlled?
31:13 Critical Skills in AI Age
34:22 Why Complex Solutions are Usually Wrong
36:33 Conditions Needed for True Intuition
38:02 The Best Path Doesn't Have Instant Feedback
44:51 How Affirmations Can Shift Your Behavior
50:44 The Inobvious Thing Hurting Companies
52:37 Relationship Between Beauty and Creation
56:23 How SpaceX Moves Forward By Subtraction
1:00:24 Why Companies Need Refounding Events
1:01:50 Books as Cheat Codes
1:02:39 Three Books to Change Your Thinking
Enjoy!
(Includes paid promotions.)
Robin Monjo retweeted
How AI text watermarking works declaude.org/watermarking/ (news.ycombinator.com/item?id…)
Robin Monjo retweeted
Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove seangoedecke.com/text-ai-wat… (news.ycombinator.com/item?id…)
Robin Monjo retweeted
Absolutely beautiful rant about AI in Linux Kernel from Linus yesterday:
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.
Yes, it can also be a somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer
workloads and just from a "it keeps finding embarrassing bugs"
standpoint.
But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing "La La
La, I can't hear you" at the top of your voice like some people seem
to do.
The solution is to make sure those LLM tools _help_ maintainers
instead of just causing them pain. There's no question on that side.
We're not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore
people who try to argue against other people from using it.
And no, AI isn't perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the
problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at
themselves at the same time.
Because it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.
The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology.
Sure, the social angle of working on open source is important and
often a very motivating part of the project, but in the end that's a
side benefit, not the _point_ of the project.
This is *NOT* some kind of "social warrior" project, never has been,
and never will be.
In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better
technology, not because of religious reasons.
And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear
of new tools.
Linus
Robin Monjo retweeted
"People who don't use AI will be left behind" migrainebrain.bearblog.dev/p… (news.ycombinator.com/item?id…)
Robin Monjo retweeted
Good Taste the Only Real Moat Left rajnandan.com/posts/taste-in… (news.ycombinator.com/item?id…)
Robin Monjo retweeted
The lottery ticket hypothesis: why neural networks work nearlyright.com/how-ai-resea… (news.ycombinator.com/item?id…)
Good job ! I was an early adopter really enjoyed the journey but you are not a terminal anymore. I switched to ghostty 👻
@warpdotdev 's revenue is up 19x this year. Our first $1M ARR took 300+ days (it took a lot of time to build an ADE from scratch!).
Now we add $1M every ~10 days and the pace is accelerating.
Sharing this because (a) I'm proud of our progress and (b) I want the world to know that our vision of agentic development where every dev task starts with a prompt is catching on.
We are hiring awesome engineers and GTM - come join us.
Robin Monjo retweeted
AWS European Sovereign Cloud to be operated by EU citizens aboutamazon.eu/news/aws/aws-… (news.ycombinator.com/item?id…)
Robin Monjo retweeted
Workaccount2 on Hacker News just coined the term "context rot" to describe the thing where the quality of an LLM conversation drops as the context fills up with accumulated distractions and dead ends news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
ALT Comment by Workaccount2, 9 hours ago: They poison their own context. Maybe you can call it context rot, where as context grows and especially if it grows with lots of distractions and dead ends, the output quality falls off rapidly. Even with good context the rot will start to become apparent around 100k tokens (with Gemini 2.5). They really need to figure out a way to delete or "forget" prior context, so the user or even the model can go back and prune poisonous tokens. Right now I work around it by regularly making summaries of instances, and then spinning up a new instance with fresh context and feed in the summary of the previous instance.
