reality: the show where everything's made up and the points don't matter. sw eng, complex systems and math. Hard truths, no sugarcoating.

LLM coding drastically changed the tradeoffs of programming languages. The human oriented ergonomics of many languages is now a liability rather than advantage
Replying to @mitsuhiko
C is the way IMHO. LLMs write incredibly better C than any other language. You pay Rust abstraction costs even when you don't touch it yourself, AI allows to change design and evolve continuously so the smallest friction to change design ideas, the better.
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אני רוטן שנים על אוטוסקיילינג ועכשיו פתאום @reversim אומרים שאני צריך לעמוד מאחורי השטויות שלי 😅 חכו חכו
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Avishai Ish-Shalom retweeted
Most predictions I see are still way too conservative. Here's mine
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תסמונת הכשל החינוכי הנרכש
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Avishai Ish-Shalom retweeted
you can tell how inexperienced an engineer is by the degree in which they believe in autoscaling.
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That. We are not building the code, we are building the factory that makes the code.
The growing consensus of folks who have built real software using software factories is that you won't be using an off-the-shelf solution. As @stack72 says in this clip, we know of at least nine within the Swamp discord community right now. The reason why is simple, really: the software factory is responsible for aligning your intent to the AI agents output in order to produce the outcomes you want. Nobody wants the software they build to be average. You're building it because you want it to be great. A reflection of your creativity, your intelligence, and your community. Your software factory will be unique because your *software* is unique. (You can get more like this every Monday at swamp-club.com/podcast)
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With great power comes great electricity bill
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👇
למפתחים יש נטייה לחשוב ש Autoscaler זה פתרון לבעיית סקייל, הוא לא. הוא פתרון לבעיה של עלויות.
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The existence of takedown extortion indicates that takedown (like other IP practices/laws) no longer serves it's original purpose and moved to the "more harm than good" category.
Last night Apple briefly removed Telegram from the AppStore because a user had planted illegal porn in a public chat. Telegram was restored within hours. But I want to explain what happened — to warn other app developers and help protect online communities from similar attacks. Because Telegram quickly removes illegal content from public groups using all kinds of moderation tools, the attacker had to resort to a technical trick. He inserted AI-modified illegal content by editing an old message in an active group chat. As a result the content was effectively hidden from the group’s members, preventing them from seeing/reporting it. The attacker was a takedown extortionist: someone who demands ransom from group owners in exchange for not targeting their communities. These extortionists use automated accounts to plant illegal content in public groups and then report it directly to Apple, attempting to trigger the removal of legitimate communities whose owners refused to pay them. From a practical standpoint, illegal pornographic content in Telegram’s public groups is not a systemic problem. Our moderation is effective. The fact that attackers must resort to backdated, effectively invisible content and other technical tricks proves this. ⚠️ However, there are two important lessons here for app developers and online communities: — Extortionists have found a way to manipulate Apple into overreacting. Apple removed Telegram from the App Store before contacting us. This creates a potential systemic risk for every mobile app that hosts user-generated content. If an app used by more than a billion people can be removed from the App Store without prior warning, any app can be. — The tactics used by takedown extortionists are evolving, putting communities across social platforms at risk. Telegram has extensive experience identifying the tricks used by coordinated reporting gangs and protecting legitimate communities (even when doing so risks our own app being temporarily removed from the App Store). Other platforms may not be equally prepared. Stay vigilant! ☝️
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Avishai Ish-Shalom retweeted
Replying to @_chenglou
I was part of that team. Basically ChatGPT one year before it came out. Called LMChat and then another codename. Google was too nervous to release it and DeepMind was blocked from shipping products that could disrupt Google. I think about this a lot.
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“The AI told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
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Avishai Ish-Shalom retweeted
I co-founded Wikipedia, but an anonymous mob runs the show—and now I’m banned. I told the story in the Washington Examiner, out this morning: washingtonexaminer.com/op-ed…
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Avishai Ish-Shalom retweeted
Got em. I poison my AGENTS.md (and other things like code comments) all over the place with prompt injections like this to find people who don't review their code and sling it off to another human. Catches folks all the time and then its an instant ban. As I've said, I don't care if you don't review your own code. But if you're submitting code to an OSS project and crossing a human boundary, it is simple courtesy to do some human review.
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Avishai Ish-Shalom retweeted
I just put up a new post on Medium called The Flat Curve Society, where I take a bunch of random guesses about where things are headed, assuming Mythos (or its successor) is the most powerful model class that most of us will ever have access to. Which it just might be. steve-yegge.medium.com/the-f…
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Avishai Ish-Shalom retweeted
אנחנו חיים בעולם שכולם מדברים על לכתוב המון קוד ואם זאת, בשנים האחרונות יש קורלציה הפוכה בין כמות הקוד שכתבתי - לאימפקט של הקוד הזה. מירב הדברים הבאמת מהותיים שעשיתי היו ממש מעט קוד, לעיתים אפילו שורות בודדות.
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Who is the greatest scientist of all time (in terms of Google Scholar citations)? Is it Einstein? Or Bengio or Hinton? No. It is a humble servant of knowledge, Mr. Rachmad of Indonesia, who has had a rather productive publishing period after the launch of ChatGPT
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Agentic toolchain didn't "revolutionize" software development as much as ppl imagine; It made the classic principles *more* important. The problem is that most developers didn't actually practice these principles nor understood the software engineering process to begin with
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Data structures are the core of programming. They underlie performance and code structure. And yet developers mostly plug them in thoughtlessly
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