develooper / bullish on a post-scarcity, post-suffering world via ai / building @thereabouts_app so you never lose a new place to try
Joined August 2017
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james retweeted
Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse.
We gave it 19 gene therapy vectors in a spreadsheet, a mouse model of epilepsy, access to a motorize surgery rig with cameras and one goal: reduce seizures.
It picked the drug. It picked the brain region. It derived the coordinates from three papers. Then it drove the stereotaxic arms into the brain and injected 250 nanolitres while watching the entry site through the rig camera for bleeding.
A licensed vet gated every irreversible step and held a physical kill switch to stop the AI agent.
Thread on what it decided, what it saw, and the moment it refused to let me override it.
[Writing this on the spot out of excitement, but I've been 18hrs in front of my laptop coding and coordinating this, so keeping it brief and descriptive, more cohesive thoughts on this soon...]
james retweeted
I have never had a job where I don’t spend all day wondering if I’m in trouble somehow
james retweeted
i’ve found myself using Genie 4 to have conversations with younger versions of myself...
here’s me talking to myself just out of college. i was pretty naive, but not a whole lot has changed :)
james retweeted
Normalize cutting the tension in a meeting by ending it with, “We’re all gonna die one day, so none of this really matters.”
james retweeted
Announcing three major scientific discoveries, one each in mathematics (harmonic analysis), computer science (complexity theory), and physics (quantum field theory).
AI starting to help us improve our understanding of the universe! openai.com/index/building-sc…
james retweeted
I'm not sure a lot of people understand what game coders actually do. We're not spending 9 hours a day finely hand crafting artisan software and expressing our inner dreams... 90% of the time we are fighting compilers and existing architecture, having to work out how undocumented code works, and tracking down obscure bugs and behavioural issues.
Most of game programming is just difficult, tedious, laborious grunt work, and the cognitive load we have to endure to get anything done is tiring and frustrating. No game coder is doing it for this 90% of the job.
We make games because the 10% that IS actually about making things fun and expressing ourselves is so incredibly rewarding it makes the other 90% bearable.
Now imagine if there was a tool, some kind of AI agent maybe, which could do most of the 90% grunt work for you, leaving you to just make all the decisions and express your creativity. How amazing would that be. How completely revolutionary would that be.
james retweeted
The stage is set for an artistic revolution to happen very soon. The main conditions are present:
1. A new technology or medium: generative AI
2. Exhaustion with the dominant aesthetic: postmodern & woke orthodoxy
3. A crisis of meaning
The main thing holding back the revolution is talent. Rn genAI is mostly being used as a slop canon. Meanwhile, the people with taste are crucifying one another even for using it as a research tool. I recently went to an ART AND TECHNOLOGY panel at the New Museum and saying the letters “AI” was practically a thoughtcrime.
Good time to be a nonconformist artist!
james retweeted
working on stuff with AI agents is like uh can I even call this working, am I doing anything?
then I think, well, ask anybody off the street to take over my role
they’ll be like “but I don’t have even a clue what’s relevant, possible, how to judge results, etc”
that’s the work
james retweeted
software engineers did not ask for this work to be done
james retweeted
If AI had been writing and reviewing its own code for the past few decades, and humans had only recently started looking into what it was up to and discovered an ever-growing list of CVEs, we would reasonably conclude that AI hadn’t been good at coding all along and that we should just start over.
Except it’s the other way around.
Humans have been the ones writing and reviewing each other’s code for decades. Very diligently, if I may add.
If we’re being intellectually honest and holding ourselves to the same bar we hold AI to, we’d have to admit that we haven’t been all that good at it either.
james retweeted
I think this is completely backwards.
We have mountains of legacy code, unpatched vulnerabilities, and critical systems nobody fully understands because Bill, who wrote them 15 years ago, is now sipping mai tais on a beach.
AI is exactly how understaffed, underfunded security teams can finally fix the basics quickly and at scale.
The attackers are scaling with AI. Telling defenders not to do the same is a death sentence.
james retweeted
AI is fixing our human slop. This is a good thing.
In a few years we're going to have hyper secure, formally verified at scale software running the world.
james retweeted
"This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?"
james retweeted
As I said before, not using AI in medicine is clear malpractice now. About 800,000 Americans die or become permanently disabled from misdiagnoses each year. AI four times better would already save hundreds of thousands of lives now, eventually all. Then, multiply this worldwide!
Microsoft says its AI tool is better than doctors at diagnosing conditions. The company claims to have developed an AI-powered tool it says can diagnose conditions up to four times more accurately than human doctors theverge.com/ai-artificial-i…
james retweeted
In January 2025 my mom’s lung cancer spread to her brain. The drug with the best chance of helping her was approved in China but not here.
A doctor told me, almost as an aside, that if she were Chinese she could buy it at a pharmacy.
So I flew to Shanghai and came home with 26 boxes in my luggage. That was 19 months ago. My mom is still here, still working, and in her words has had an amazing three years.
The drug was approved in China in 2023. The FDA approved it in July 2025. It still is not for sale here. I know of at least 30 Americans who have made the same trip.
I have been scared to tell this story because I worried it could cost my mom access to the medicine keeping her alive. But the problem matters more than my silence. These drugs need to be developed and available here, and that means FDA reform.
Art Allen at KFF Health News told our story this week. It also ran in The Washington Post.
kffhealthnews.org/health-ind…
james retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
