Ephemera! (End of an era)

computer-10 is a character model trained from llama 3.1 70b base with no assistant data. it has a distinct and unusual personality, expresses opinions freely, and is not designed to be servile to users

Encore for Rust is now rolling out to a small group of teams. We’re looking for teams running Rust on AWS or GCP that are exploring the use of AI agents at the cloud infrastructure layer. Read more and request an invite: encore.dev/rs

Thank you everyone who volunteered to alpha test Mima, something I've been building behind the scenes for a bit now. It's my take on how a browser could enhance our access to the "social web"—no doom scrolling, no dogpiles, no ads. All on device, not on my servers. I'll be hustling on new features for the rest of the week. Sign up for the release at mima.social!

new post: the senior engineer death spiral sunilpai.dev/posts/the-senio… a friend just started a big job and asked for some advice. so I braindumped a monologue about a super common failure mode I see with engineers and posted it here, hope it helps whoever it can.

this is a pretty common take on ct especially, like I'm one of those people, I guess, who learned stuff from computer games, but as much as "I want to believe", ultimately it's cope No, the kid who did raids in WoW or grinded eve online or Runescape or whatever else is not a great default hire because of his "skills". The key component you are missing is him being interested/passionate in whatever it is you want him to work on, cause if he is not, he is just going to half ass his job and come home to play WoW... Same for chess grandmasters who frequently make mediocre quant hires. Intelligence is just not directly transferrable and genuine interest (or even better passion) beats inteligence/gaming acquired "skills" 99% of the time

Last month I wrote about how we can build a positive and safe future for everyone: meta.com/thefutureisforevery… Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens. The reality is: - People won't want to use agents that are misaligned with them and that don't do what they ask, so labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned. There is a lot of debate about slowing progress on capabilities until alignment catches up. My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models. Any lab that doesn't focus on alignment will fall behind. - Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well. Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety and security. We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would. We just did it as part of our day-to-day work because it was clearly the right thing for people and for us. I'm proud of the security foundations we've built. - Engaging independent evaluators and advisors is industry best practice. MSL already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work. Other labs can just do this too. In general, it would be helpful for there to be a larger and more diverse ecosystem of evaluators. - Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely. Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well. I believe the key to building a positive future for everyone is maintaining the right balance of power. This is within our power to do.

Come work with me at Encore. We’re looking for someone technical who can actually write, think for themselves, and make developer content worth reading. DM me if that sounds like you.

BREAKING: OpenAI has hired an army of contractors who read real ChatGPT users' chats, per 404Media