This month we have a mailbag question from a reader who asks: Hi James, Your newsletter "being in the details" resonated with me. I would like to ask your opinion about managers writing code. I skim PRs but don’t critically review them and don’t write code. Should EMs write code in their day job?…

Michael Froman is president of the Council on Foreign Relations. Technological supremacy is a core pillar of American power. Conceivably, part of the “America First” agenda should be keeping America first when it comes to maintaining that edge. We owe much of our unmatched geopolitical and economic…

For years, the conventional wisdom for wide-eyed youngsters about to enter the job market was "learn to code." Now, it seems like some of the programmers themselves could use the same advice. That's according to Namanyay Goel, an experienced developer who's not too impressed by the new generation of…

At first glance, Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) might appear to be a mere copy of the story of Lawrence of Arabia with some science-fictional window dressing. Several critics have pointed to the similarities between Lawrence and Paul Atreides—both are foreign figures who immerse themselves in a desert…

Giles' blog Posted on 24 February 2025 in Blogkeeping My post about blogging as writing the tutorial that you wished you'd found really took off on Hacker News. There were a lot of excellent comments, but one thing kept coming up: what's the point in blogging if people are using ChatGPT, Claude and…

gwern3mo*Ω4011836 Idea for LLM support for writing LessWrong posts: virtual comments. Back in August I discussed with Rafe & Oliver a bit about how to integrate LLMs into LW2 in ways which aren't awful and which encourage improvement---particularly using the new 'prompt caching' feature. To…

A few weeks ago I wrote about Git’s help.autocorrect setting and the strange tale of the origin of it’s deciseconds value. It got me to thinking about other git config settings that most people likely don’t know about and which should probably be defaulted differently. In this post, I’ll go through…

Did dogs domesticate themselves? (Image credit: martinagebarovska via Getty Images) Scientists don't know exactly how wolves were domesticated into early dogs, but it's possible that they domesticated themselves by choosing to coexist with humans so that, a new study finds, they could be fed…

There are two claims I’d like to make: LLMs can be used effectively1 for listwise document ranking. Some complex problems can (surprisingly) be solved by transforming them into document ranking problems. I’ve primarily explored both of these claims in the context of using patch diffing to locate…

(This document is the result of a series of discussions, some online and some in person, held between Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin and John Ousterhout between September 2024 and February 2025. If you would like to comment on anything in this discussion, we recommend that you do so on the Google group…

The AI treated the chip design as one complete system rather than a collection of parts. (Image credit: Princeton University) Engineering researchers have demonstrated that artificial intelligence (AI) can design complex wireless chips in hours, a feat that would have taken humans weeks to complete.…

With thousands of apps and billions of downloads, Flathub has a responsibility to help ensure the safety of our millions of active users. We take this responsibility very seriously with a layered, in-depth approach including sandboxing, permissions, transparency, policy, human review, automation,…

👋 here's an excerpt from the Manning book I'm writing that I think you'll like. In his famous Things You Should Never Do essay, Joel Spolsky says never to attempt a rewrite. It cannot succeed and you're throwing away lessons learned. Lessons you'll need to re-learn again. But research and experience…

What concerns me about Sacca's rhetoric is that he claims this is happening "right now:" I think other than the highest level of computer science, almost all of the rest of coding is fucking useless. You and I can go to ChatGPT and be like, 'I wanna build an app that does this, this, and this, and…

Over the past few months, thousands of builders have created websites and web apps using tools like Bolt, Lovable, and v0. The results, shared across X, Reddit, and YouTube, seem nothing short of magic: people are building interactive, dynamic products — and even generating revenue – without coding.…

Text embeddings, particularly modern embeddings generated from large language models, are one of the most useful applications coming from the generative AI boom. Embeddings are a list of numbers which represent an object: in the case of text embeddings, they can represent words, sentences, and full…

Thomas Frank, historian, journalist, and author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal, joins us to dissect how Democrats abandoned populism, the rise of Trump’s faux-populism, and why the party refuses to embrace the working class. He also explores the path forward for authentic…

This is about a 17 minute read. Feel free to pause and come back to it later. Clojure is not one of the handful of "big" mainstream languages. This means that sometimes people are surprised that we are all in on Clojure. Why go against the grain? Why make it harder for yourself by building on niche…

INTERVIEW Inside Sam Altman’s ChatGPT HQ, they’re changing the world — again The next AI transformation will be driven by ‘agents’ that can book tickets, draft emails or conduct PhD-level research, say Open AI’s boss and his inner circle ILLUSTRATION BY TONY BELL Danny Fortson Sunday February 16…

There are times when Washington still feels like what it used to be—a sleepy little Southern city. Generations of some of the most powerful people on earth have spent their days in DC griping that the city is a backwater. But Washington’s modest position in our constellation of great cities was…

84 Shares We are witnessing an unprecedented pile-up of unicorn startups that have not raised any money since 2021. Currently, an estimated 517 global unicorns — or private companies valued at $1 billion or more 1 — raised their last known round more than three years ago, per Crunchbase data. Such…

I figured out a really simple pattern for experimenting with new Python packages today: uvx --with llm --with sqlite-utils ipython This command will work if you have uv installed and nothing else. It uses uvx to install and run the excellent ipython Python REPL in a new, dedicated virtual…

The global dollar system has few national winners. In the typical frame, understanding the US dollar means understanding the “exorbitant privilege” it confers on America. But the role of the dollar in structuring the international financial system and defining the relationship between a hegemonic US…

Why Blog If Nobody Reads It? 05 Feb, 2025 Back in the day, advertising legend Bill Bernbach said, “The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.” Let’s tell the truth, then: Nobody reads your blog. At least, not as many as you’d like. Maybe a handful, maybe none. You pour your thoughts into…

Transcript of JD Vance remarks at Paris AI Summit Date: 11th February 2025 Thank you for the kind introduction. I want to start by thanking President Macron for hosting this event and, of course, for the lovely dinner last night. During the dinner, President Macron looked at me and asked if I would…

We get it. We’re living in confusing times. Reality manipulation and fake news are rampant. And at times you might be so discombobulated that the only way you can express your nebulous sense of disorientation is with a screencap of a male anime character pointing confusedly to a butterfly,…

The zoom range of 24-105mm is perhaps one of the most versatile options available. Typically, lenses within this range maintain a constant f/4 aperture throughout. While this is adequate, having an aperture one stop larger would be ideal. Now we have the Canon RF 24-105mm f/2.8L IS USM. When faced…

Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis became friends in the late 1990s, having bonded over their shared interests in power, society and the stories we tell about ourselves. Curtis, 66, is a Bafta-winning documentary film-maker whose credits include The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear and…

Introduction At the AI Action Summit in Paris this week, Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a broadly optimistic message on AI. He chastised the European Union for moving too quickly with preemptive regulations and indicated that the Trump Administration would not be following in the EU’s lead. I…

It’s a new year, and I’ve decided it’s a good time to replace myself as the CEO of Signal. I have now been working on Signal for almost a decade. It has always been my goal for Signal to grow and sustain beyond my involvement, but four years ago that would still not have been possible. I was writing…

At Terrateam, we are big fans of Fly.io. The service is hosted there and it’s served us well. Just deploy your TOML file, get your infrastructure, do something else with the rest of your day. One of the interesting sides of Fly is that they invest heavily in server-side SQLite. They’ve written a…

Image by Annie Ruygt We’re building a public cloud, on hardware we own. We raised money to do that, and to place some bets; one of them: GPU-enabling our customers. A progress report: GPUs aren’t going anywhere, but: GPUs aren’t going anywhere. A couple years back, we put a bunch of chips down on…

As the Trump administration and its cadre of Silicon Valley machine-learning evangelists attempt to restructure the administrative state, the IRS is preparing to purchase advanced artificial intelligence hardware, according to procurement materials reviewed by The Intercept. With Elon Musk’s…