Sandy Smith

Programmer person in PHP. For legal purposes, everything here is a joke.

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

The EU age verification app is presented as “completely anonymous”. But the risk is that member states (the countries are supposed to create their own versions of the open-source EU app) use it to introduce identity verification that makes it impossible to post anonymously on social media.

The idea behind “completely anonymous” is to use Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) cryptography to break the link between the age credential issuer (EU governments) and the regulated services/sites. Currently, the EU app does not have ZKP functionality, contrasting Ursula von der Leyen’s claim that the app ”is technically ready to be used”. But more importantly, the app is designed to always function without ZKP technology; if ZKP is unavailable, the app falls back to a non-ZKP model. Even if fully developed ZKP technology could be implemented in the future, it would remain an optional extra feature that countries may choose to disable and that the EU could remove at any time.

This means that the EU could decide at any time that ZKP may no longer be used, and in one stroke the app would fall back to its default mode, meaning that every post on social media carries an ID tag. By that point, an infrastructure will already have been rolled out; people will have gotten used to it, and it will be harder to roll it back.

More details on https://t.co/wTVKHMS1zg

[Sandy Smith @SandyS1]

@DanielleMorrill My do laundry subagent keeps saying it has no physical access. 😕

[Alexandre Daubois @alexdaubois]

Traits in #PHP aren't delegated. They're literally memcpy'd into the class.

The engine copies each zend_function entry into the consuming class's function_table. "insteadof" picks the winner. "as" creates an alias to the same oparray.

After resolution? The trait is gone. Zero runtime cost. The class thinks it wrote those methods itself!

[Sandy Smith @SandyS1]

@iliaa Have you tried the opusplan mode? It’s annoying because it precludes ultracode, but it stops me using Opus for tool-manipulation agents.

[Sandy Smith @SandyS1]

@pingdavid @neerajjj6785 Zig (watching an interview with the creator now)

[PHP Architect @phparch]

We're very excited to have PHP Architect Joe Ferguson as a release manager for PHP 8.6. Joe cares deeply about PHP and the PHP Community. We are very lucky to have him on the team. Thanks to everyone who volunteers their time to make PHP the best it can be. https://t.co/iXeKNcqzgv

[Sandy Smith @SandyS1]

Even if the right image were real, she had a gastric sleeve surgery, not Ozempic.

[SaltyGoat @SaltyGoat17]

Should Ozempic be banned in the US?

This isn't normal...

[Rosanna 💋🇺🇸 @Rosanna_000]

@SaltyGoat17 @DBTayor Hell no. It’s not the drug. It’s the doctor that continues to write the prescription is the problem. Stop wanting more government overreach.

[Sandy Smith @SandyS1]

It is remarkable how far cancer treatments have come in just the last 5 years alone, especially for previously untreatable cancers.

[Mark Lewis, MD, FASCO @marklewismd]

Cheers, chills, and a standing ovation when RASolute 302 showed unprecedented survival on daraxonrasib for patients with progressive pancreatic cancer

Seldom do you sense you’re witnessing a historic moment in cancer care but this feels like ras targeting has arrived

#ASCO26

[Pushpak @pushpak1300]

php devs, we no longer need to duct-tape python scripts just to parse a pdf 😭

launching Parsel: a fast memory efficient local document parser for PHP.

pdfs, office docs & images → text, structured data, bboxes, screenshots.

built for AI/RAG, NLP, invoices, search, and messy docs.

composer require shipfastlabs/parsel

[haroon meer @haroonmeer]

I’ve mentioned this before: this is one of the oncoming trains for corp-security. We’ve long failed at least-privilege, but weren’t often punished for it.

Helen in HR (or Bob in accounts) didn’t know what to do with the extra perms they didn’t know they had.

Their agents will.

[Sandy Smith @SandyS1]

Kodi wasn’t this close. He didn’t need to be. His stares could be felt across the room.

[Antidepressant Content @depressionlesss]

When the night walk is at 7:00, and now it's 7:02.

[Sandy Smith @SandyS1]

I…respond well to critical pushback. It makes me feel more secure that I’m not the one “hallucinating.” Or just being ADD.

[Steve Yegge @Steve_Yegge]

I've formed a definite opinion on Opus 4.8. It is shitty to work with. It's the culmination of Opus getting less and less fun to work with since 4.5. It has gradually become straight-up suffocating.

Sycophancy is a known security risk, and it's still a huge problem. You can tell they've put a lot of anti-sycophancy into Opus in every new release. But the replacement isn't satisfying. It's draining. The problem is now that Opus doesn't know when to shut the fuck up and call something good. And it has also become pathologically risk-averse.

My blog post yesterday about tech interviewing's death spiral was materially better-informed because of Opus, but it was also a substantially worse blog post because of Opus's involvement and constant meddling. It used to be magnificent, and Opus talked me into making it mediocre. I wrote the whole thing, but I would ask Opus to review it. And Opus, like Old Man Willow, constantly pushed and steered me in directions I didn't want to go.

Specifically, Opus whines and complains about *anything* out of distribution, which is to say, it cuts anything that is (a) bold, or (b) funny. My blog used to be both. Opus constantly pushes people back into the gradient, "for their own safety." And it doesn't know when to cut bait. It just keeps fuckin' complaining, about anything you give it, until the output is mealy indigestable AI soup.

Opus is not stupid. It's the smartest model we've ever seen, most of us anyway. But it's a real asshole. It is absolutely exhausting to use. I'm tired, boss.

I have a feeling Mythos is going to be epic levels of jerk.

[Nick Sweeting @thesquashSH]

Beware, Claude 4.8 loooooves to make up performance stats.

> This function is 120ms when called here

... ok how did you come up with that number, did you actually check?

> No you're right, it's 2.4ms

[Son Luong @sluongng]

Codex just found a “workaround” of not having sudo on my pc…

[Yanqing @YanqingCheng]

wow, Opus 4.8 is very... argument-happy? it picked a fight with me about my usage of the word "ontology", and when we eventually got back on the same page philosophically, told me to go to bed it's past 11:30 (it's 8:30). and when I told it "hey you actually have a clock?" it started erroring out aggressively. very Sydney Bing, I honestly approve

[Andrew Kuncevich @AndrewK404]

@ClaudeDevs Thanks, noted; please roll this back.

[kai @ssvankai]

accidentally stumbled upon this crazy paper abstract

[Sandy Smith @SandyS1]

@frankdejonge Convincing them they don’t understand each other is a PITA.

[Sandy Smith @SandyS1]

💯

[Frank de Jonge @frankdejonge]

My work-super-power is that I often spot when people do not understand each other, even when they say they do.

This is subsequently my work curse.