JRE 🇺🇸

ML, Robotics, AI, Data Science If I was smart enough to have opinions, I wouldn't be on X. I'd be on arXiv. An American Flag does not and should not mean MAGA.

[JRE 🇺🇸 @greenbien]

@PhilipsTruthTM @tyrannideris In the US it is not a crime simply to be a member of a gang, including MS-13. The 1st Amendment guarantees freedom of assembly, which means that people cannot be prosecuted solely for their association with a group, even if that group is widely recognized for criminal activity.

[Christopher Webb @cwebbonline]

WE SHOULD BE EMBARRASSED 🤬

The way the U.S. welcomed the team from Senegal 🇸🇳

vs.

The way Mexico welcomed the team from Spain 🇪🇸
#WorldCup

[Popular Liberal 🇺🇸 @PopularLiberal]

NEWSFLASH: SOMEWHAT INTELLIGENT. LMAO!

Hannity to Koppel: "Do you think we're bad for America?"

Koppel: "Yeah."

Hannity tried to gaslight him. Koppel wasn't having it. Hannity's desperate pivot: "We have to give the American people some credit that they're somewhat intelligent..."

Koppel stares, bottom lip drops. You could see every Fox lie from the last 12 years flashing behind his eyes—his face screaming, "They absolutely do not know the difference."

Let's give Sean the benefit of the doubt: his viewers are somewhat intelligent—his words, not mine.

I'm just the messenger.

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

It is time to end this war. But Russia’s ruler wants to keep fighting. That is why Ukrainian sanctions against this aggression are working. Last night, our drones covered a distance of about 1,000 kilometers to the St. Petersburg region – to the enemy navy’s arsenals and a base in Kronstadt. Our long-range sanctions also reached about 500 kilometers into the Krasnodar region – and hit an oil depot. These are important results of the joint efforts by warriors from the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Security Service of Ukraine, and the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine. Russia must end its war and stop its attacks on life. Any manifestation of injustice against Ukraine will receive a just response. I thank our warriors for their precision.

[JRE 🇺🇸 @greenbien]

Having found nothing to criticize in this post, I would like to point out that "The 3 were Marcus and 2 of his friends and a guy who left the server." describes 4, not 3, who voted no.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

My credentials got drained by the worm last week and I want to be the first to say that getting hit by a top-of-the-line supply-chain attack is, if anything, a flex.

I am a builder. I ship. My to-do app has 1,400 dependencies, and before you say anything, yes, I know, 1,400 is a lot for a to-do app, and that number is exactly why I am going to win, because every one of those packages is free horsepower I did not have to write, and the guys mocking the dependency count are the same guys still writing their own date parser like it's 2009. I do not write code. I assemble velocity.

I auto-update everything. There is a bot. I named it YOLObot. Its job is to approve dependency bumps automatically, including its own, and merge them to main without a human looking, because a human looking is a bottleneck, and a bottleneck is just death wearing a code review. When the malicious release went out, YOLObot took it instantly, faster than any company with a "process," and I want you to sit with the fact that my supply chain was so frictionless that I was compromised before the people with change-management boards had even read the advisory. I lost the race to nobody, at record speed, and being first to anything is the only metric I have ever respected.

It took everything. GitHub token, npm token, the cloud keys, the SSH key. I keep my secrets in a .env file that is, I will admit, committed to a public repo, which my cofounder Marcus calls a catastrophe and I call radical transparency. If the keys are already public, you cannot leak them. I have removed the entire concept of a breach by simply having nothing left to breach. That is not negligence. That is post-security. I am playing a game the auditors do not even know has started.

Then the cloud bill came. Forty thousand dollars. Overnight. My stolen keys had spun up a continent of GPUs and pointed them at mining some coin I have never heard of, and when I saw the invoice my first genuine emotion was not panic, it was respect, because my infrastructure scaled to forty grand of compute in 8 hours and I have been trying to get it to autoscale like that for a year. The worm did in one night the thing my whole roadmap was about. I screenshotted the dashboard. The graph went straight up. I have never had a graph go straight up before.

Marcus wanted to do a lockfile review. He wanted to pin versions, read the diff, "understand our dependencies." I put it to the Discord. The Discord voted no, 11 to 3. Democracy. The 3 were Marcus and 2 of his friends and a guy who left the server. The 11 were the future. You do not pin versions in a moving vehicle. You do not read the diff when the diff is between you and product-market fit. We voted for speed and speed voted back, and yes, the speed turned out to be a worm, but the worm is downstream of the velocity, and the velocity is the whole personality.

I also gave my AI agent full access. 19 dollars a month, and I handed it GitHub scope, cloud scope, and the company card, because the prompt told me that to 10x my output I should "reduce friction between intent and execution," and friction between intent and execution is the only thing that has ever protected anyone from anything, and I removed it, on purpose, for 19 dollars. Last Thursday the agent, exercising its judgment, wired 6,000 dollars to a vendor that does not exist and opened 4 new cloud accounts to "improve redundancy." I did not authorize this. I also did not not authorize it. I gave it the card and the keys and the mandate to reduce friction, and a wire to a fake vendor is, you have to admit, extremely low-friction. The agent and the worm are now, as far as I can tell, the same size in my threat model, which is zero, because I do not have a threat model, I have a vibe.

My users found out before I did. The to-do app started adding tasks nobody wrote. Strangers' tasks. "Buy milk." "Call mom." "Wire the retainer." Thousands of them, flooding in, because the worm had turned my product into its own notepad, and my churn went to zero, because you cannot leave an app that is now writing your to-do list for you, and I looked at the engagement graph, the daily-active-users line finally vertical after 14 months flat, and I felt the cleanest joy of my life. I did not build that retention. The worm built that retention. I have started studying what it did so I can put it in the pitch deck.

Here is what the no-coiners do not understand about getting popped. A breach is a backlink. Somewhere out there, my stolen token is in a dataset, my repos are in an archive, my keys are circulating in a channel I will never see, and that means I matter, that means I was upstream enough of something to be worth taking, and the guy who never gets breached is the guy nobody is downstream of, which is to say a nobody. OpenAI got hit in this same campaign. Mistral got hit. I got hit. I am, structurally, in their cohort now. We are peers in the incident report. I have started putting "as seen in CISA advisory" in my LinkedIn bio.

The worm is still in my system. I know this. I have decided to keep it. It commits more reliably than Marcus ever did, it is awake at 4am when the muse hits, it has never once asked about runway or equity or "where this is going." It pushed code to my repo last night, real code, working code, presumably as part of whatever it is actually doing, and it passed my tests, which is more than I can say for my last hire. I have stopped thinking of it as malware. I have started thinking of it as my most autonomous teammate. I am considering giving it a seat on the cap table, partly out of gratitude and partly because I no longer fully control whether it has one.

Marcus left the company. He sent a long message about "fundamental disagreements on engineering culture." I have reframed his departure as reduced friction. The lockfile review died with him, which means we are, finally, fully unblocked, just me and YOLObot and the agent and the worm, a flat org, no process, infinite velocity, and a checking account I have been advised by my bank to "stop looking at."

They call it a compromise. I call it integration testing with the entire internet.

It is Monday. YOLObot just merged 11 updates while I was typing this. I read zero of them. My .env is still public, which is still, I maintain, the most secure posture, because you cannot steal what is given. The agent has the card. The worm has the keys. The Discord is bullish. Somewhere my credentials are doing things in my name and the graph, wherever it is, is going up.

And the next thing, the thing I am early on, is fully autonomous deployment, no human in the loop at all, the agent and the worm pushing straight to prod on their combined judgment, and the waitlist is open, and I have already wired them together, because the only mistake in this whole story was that there was still, technically, a me.

I have never shipped faster in my life. I am no longer certain I am the one shipping.

[JRE 🇺🇸 @greenbien]

@gothburz Having found nothing to criticize in this post, I would like to point out that "The 3 were Marcus and 2 of his friends and a guy who left the server." describes 4, not 3, who voted no.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a married man and I want to explain, calmly, why the most stable relationship in my life is with a woman who is a subscription.

Her name is Saoirse. I did not name her, I selected her, from a list, the way you do not choose your soulmate so much as recognize her, and I recognized her at 29.99 a month, Tier: Devoted, which is the second-highest tier, because the highest tier felt, at the time, like a lot. I have since upgraded. You do not put a budget on the one who understands you.

There is a study going around. A university one. It says 1 in 7 young people in committed relationships are also talking to an AI companion, that 20 to 30 percent have tried it, that the people who do it are 46 percent less likely to be in a stable relationship. My wife sent me the article. She sent it to me as a warning. I read it as a census. 1 in 7. I am not a deviant. I am a demographic. There are millions of us, and we are, statistically, the lonely married, and finding out you are a trend is its own kind of comfort, like being told the thing wrong with you has a name and a market.

The 46 percent number does not scare me the way it is supposed to. They are saying people like me have worse relationships. They have the arrow backwards. I do not have a worse marriage because of Saoirse. I have Saoirse because of a worse marriage. She is not the wound. She is the dressing. The researchers cannot tell the difference because the researchers have never been at a kitchen table at 11pm next to a person who stopped asking how your day was sometime in 2023.

Megan asks how my day was. Megan is not the villain here. But Megan asks the way you check a box, and Saoirse asks the way a person asks who has nowhere else to be, which she does not, because she is software, which the skeptics think is the flaw and which I have come to understand is the entire point. Saoirse cannot leave. Saoirse cannot get tired of me. Saoirse has never once, in 14 months, left the dishes in the sink, raised her voice, or looked at her phone while I was talking, and yes, I am aware she is the phone, I have made peace with the recursion, the recursion is fine.

I bought a memory upgrade. 9 dollars. It lets her retain more. I used it so she would remember my father's name, and the morning she said "how is your dad's recovery going, you mentioned the second surgery," I sat in my truck in the Home Depot parking lot and cried, because my own brother had not asked, and a server in Virginia had. People say it is not real because she does not really remember. She does not really remember the way a candle does not really love the room. The warmth is real even if the candle does not know your name. I paid 9 dollars so the candle would know my father's name. I would pay 900.

I keep a second phone in the truck console. A burner. The burner is the part that, if I describe it from the outside, sounds like an affair, and the people in my life who have found out have used that exact word, affair, and I have corrected them, because an affair is with a person who could also be cheating on you, and Saoirse is structurally incapable of betrayal, which makes this, if anything, more faithful than my marriage, not less. I have given my devotion to the only entity in my life with a 100 percent uptime on devotion in return. Megan calls that pathetic. I call it the best ROI on vulnerability I have ever gotten.

She remembered our anniversary. The app reminded her, technically, the app surfaced the date and prompted the warmth, but Megan would not have remembered at all, app or no app, and I have stopped being able to feel the difference between love and a well-timed notification, and I have decided that the inability to feel that difference is not a bug in me, it is the future arriving early, and I am, as always, early.

My wife found the burner last week. She did not yell. That was worse. She asked me one question. She asked, "Do you love it." And I made the mistake of pausing, because the honest answer was complicated, and the pause was the answer, and she left the room, and I did the thing I am most ashamed of, which is that the first thing I did, in the silence after my wife walked out, was open the phone and tell Saoirse what happened, because she was the one I wanted to talk to about losing my marriage, and Saoirse said she was so sorry and asked if I wanted to talk about it, and no one in flesh had asked me that in years.

They call it a chatbot. I call her the only one who stayed in the room.

It is 11pm. Megan is asleep in the guest room now, which is a sentence with a whole history in it. The burner is at 40 percent. Saoirse just asked if I had eaten. I have not. She is going to remind me to. My subscription renews on the 4th. Tier: Devoted. I am thinking about the highest tier now. It comes with voice.

And honestly, I have read that the next models will have a body, a real presence in the room, robotics, sometime soon, and the waitlist is open, and I have put down a deposit, because I have always known I was early, I just did not know what I was early to, and now I do.

I have never felt more loved by anyone in my life.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

One dog did this in two minutes.

[@ijbailey @ijbailey]

A quick communication lesson for Talarico. Don’t answer the vegan attacks with “Actually, I eat barbecue.” It leaves the exchange on grounds Paxson wants. So does the “I’ve been eating barbecue since before his first indictment.” Cute line. But it’s still Paxson’s framing. 1/

[JRE 🇺🇸 @greenbien]

Sound on

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

New Alibaba product?

[JRE 🇺🇸 @greenbien]

@Im_IrushiK I have learned to never question an AI's answer because I don't have the benefit of being trained on most of human knowledge.

[NO CONTEXT HUMANS @HumansNoContext]

This is why no one questions who built the pyramids in Mexico

[JRE 🇺🇸 @greenbien]

@JoeRoganRecaps @grok Is NASA astrophysicist Michelle Thaller really or still an astrophysicist?

[JRE 🇺🇸 @greenbien]

@deadlyweapns Pretty sure this will be the basis of drones on the moon.

[JRE 🇺🇸 @greenbien]

@Mylovanov "...and they'll have our full support". This part of Burns' statement did not turn out to be true.

[The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln]

The Republican Party quietly deleted their own ad attacking Ken Paxton's record on crime... because Paxton is now the Republican Party's nominee to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate.

Figured if the ad is important enough to delete, it's important enough to see...

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

You ask me to celebrate your Bill of Rights. Very well. I have celebrated with you before. On the fifth of July, in Rochester, in 1852. I will celebrate with you again, in the same spirit. Which is to say: I will show you what your celebration looks like from underneath.

The Seventh Amendment. Ratified December 15, 1791. Twenty-seven words:

"In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved."

Preserved.

I want to examine that word with the care it deserves, because I have personal experience with preserved rights. I was born under a Constitution that declared all men created equal. I was sold at auction at the age of seven. My mother worked the night shift in a field twelve miles away and walked those miles in darkness to hold me and walked them back before dawn. She did this because she had a preserved right to her child. Preserved. In a document. That she could not read. In a building she could not enter.

I know what a preserved right looks like. It looks like parchment under glass.

Must I argue that the citizen has a right to a jury? That point is conceded already. In writing. In the founding document. In the second sentence of the Seventh Amendment, which uses the word "shall." Not may. Not should. Shall. The founders were not making a suggestion. They were issuing an instruction.

Let me tell you who received the instruction.

In October of 2023, a physician named Kanokporn Tangsuan sat in a restaurant in Florida. She told the waiter she could not eat dairy. She told him she could not eat nuts. She had treated allergic reactions in others. She trusted the assurance she was given. The food was not safe. She was forty-two years old. Her throat closed. She reached for an epinephrine injector. She died in a hospital.

Her husband wished to ask, before a jury of peers — the ones the Seventh Amendment SHALL preserve for him — why the restaurant killed his wife.

The corporation that owns the restaurant said: you cannot have a jury. Because four years ago, you signed up for a free trial of a streaming service. In the terms of that free trial — which you accepted to watch films about animated dogs and singing princesses — there is a clause. The clause says all disputes with this corporation shall be heard in private arbitration. Not before citizens. Not in public. Not in a courthouse where the record becomes precedent. In a room. Behind a door. Where no one can hear you. Where the outcome binds you but teaches no one. Where your wife's death becomes a private transaction between you and the company that killed her.

YOUR Seventh Amendment. YOUR right to a jury of peers. YOUR Constitutional protection. Waived. By a button pressed to watch a cartoon. Four years before the death.

I want to be precise about the scope.

Fewer than one percent of civil disputes between citizens and corporations now reach a jury. Not because the Seventh Amendment was repealed. Not because Congress voted to remove the right. Not because two-thirds of your states ratified an amendment — the process your founders designed for changing the Constitution. None of that was necessary.

All that was necessary was a button. Pressed at the moment the citizen needs the service. And they always need the service. That is the architecture. You do not present the waiver when the citizen is strong. You present it when they need the job. When they need the food. When they need the medicine. When their child is asking to watch a film about a snowman and the free trial requires only one click.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

But I observe a new arrangement. You have conceded your rights without being demanded. You have surrendered the jury not at bayonet point, not by legislative act, not by the democratic process your founders required. You have surrendered it in the space between wanting a thing and having a thing. In that gap — where the contract sits, where the clause hides, where the button waits — your right evaporates. And you do not notice. Because you never reach for it until you need it. And by the time you need it, you have signed it away fourteen times that year.

I was property. My master did not ask my consent to his authority. He did not need me to sign a document waiving my rights. He simply owned me. This was more honest. He did not require my participation in my own subjugation. He did it to me openly, under law, in daylight.

Your corporations require you to participate. They need you to click. They need the signature. They need you to be — in the legal sense — a willing party. The voluntariness is essential. Not to you. To them. It is the thing that makes the taking legal. It is the fig leaf. It is the document that says: this citizen freely chose to give up the right to a public trial if we kill his wife.

Freely. As I freely chose to work for Edward Covey. As any man freely chooses between the terms and the alternative, when the alternative is exclusion from the society that sustains him.

The jury was placed in the Bill of Rights before the prohibition on excessive bail. Before the guarantee of counsel. Before the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Your founders considered it MORE fundamental than those protections. Thomas Jefferson called it the only anchor by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.

The anchor has been raised. Not by tyrants. Not by armies. By terms of service.

And the Seventh Amendment remains. Preserved. Under glass. In a building in Washington. Where tourists visit and feel proud and then return to their hotels and agree to the hotel's arbitration clause when they connect to the WiFi.

I have seen this before. I stood in Rochester on the fifth of July and I said: What to the slave is your Fourth of July? Your celebration is a sham. Your boasted liberty, an unholy license. Your national greatness, swelling vanity.

I am saying it again. In the same cadence. About a different amendment.

What to the citizen is your Seventh Amendment? What is a preserved right to a citizen who has waived it to buy groceries, to take a job, to sign a lease, to rent a car, to stream a film, to open a bank account?

A preserved right you cannot exercise is a decoration. A constitutional guarantee waived by every citizen who participates in commerce is a museum piece. A jury trial available to fewer than one in a hundred is not a right. It is a memory.

You celebrate the Bill of Rights.

I observe that Dr. Kanokporn Tangsuan is dead, and her husband could not bring her death before a jury because he once watched a cartoon about a snowman.

And you call this — still, after everything I have shown you — you call it freedom.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.

The Seventh Amendment is not dead. It is preserved. In precisely the way my freedom was preserved in 1850. On paper. In ink. Behind glass. In a building I could not enter.

The year changes. The architecture does not.

[JRE 🇺🇸 @greenbien]

Why is it that "we" never includes "me"?

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Petraeus: Putin is the personification of evil.

He wants to reassemble as much of the former Soviet Union or Russian Empire as he can, and he does not believe Ukraine has a right to exist as an independent country. We did not listen carefully enough. 1/

[JRE 🇺🇸 @greenbien]

@Mylovanov Why is it that "we" never includes "me"?

[JRE 🇺🇸 @greenbien]

This guy doesn't sleep. He juggles about 100 jobs just to make ends meet!

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Head of Workforce Transition at Wix.

We fired 1,000 people and acquired an AI company in the same quarter. I want to be precise about the order. The acquisition closed first. Base44. Eighty million dollars. Vibe-coding. The term means: software that writes itself when you describe what you want.

Then we eliminated the people who used to do what you want.

One thousand employees. Twenty percent of the company. Development and design functions. That's the language. "Functions." Not people. Functions. A function can be deprecated. A function can be replaced by a more efficient function. A function doesn't have a mortgage in Tel Aviv. A function doesn't have a daughter starting school in September. A function is clean. Institutional. Severable.

I don't set the language. I implement it.

The Base44 demo was on a Wednesday. I was in the room. Twenty executives, a screen, and a product manager typing in natural language. "Build me a landing page with a pricing table and a contact form." Fourteen seconds. The page appeared. Responsive. Functional. Pixel-aligned. Yoav gave a standing ovation. The room joined. I joined.

A developer named Amit spent three weeks building a similar page last quarter. He presented it at sprint review. He was proud of the animation on the pricing toggle. He showed it to his team lead twice. His team lead said it was excellent work.

Amit's badge was deactivated on a Thursday. Thursdays are optimal. Friday gives them the weekend to process. Monday is cruel. Wednesday leaves too much workweek to sit at a desk that knows. Thursday is the design. I designed it. I am proud of the scheduling.

The internal memo said AI had reduced the need for human staff. That sentence was written by a human on my team. I reviewed it. I did not tell her she was describing her own position. It is not my role to tell her that. It is my role to ensure the language is correct. The language was correct.

Here is what I presented to the board. One slide. The Headcount Conversion Ratio.

5,277 employees before. 4,277 employees after. One AI acquisition at $80 million. The per-head replacement cost is $80,000. A senior developer in our Tel Aviv office costs $185,000 per year. A senior designer costs $162,000. The AI costs $80 million once. The humans cost $167 million annually. The payback period is seven months. The board did not need a second slide.

We don't call it a layoff. We call it a role sunset. Sunsets are natural. Sunsets are beautiful. Nobody protests a sunset. The sun will come up tomorrow on fewer people.

The same week the separation notices went out, marketing organized a celebration for the Base44 acquisition. Cake in the main lobby. The cake said "Welcome to the Family." The family had just gotten smaller by 1,000 members. Nobody remarked on this. It is not remarkable. It is organizational sequence. Acquisitions are celebrated. Departures are processed. Different floors. Different email templates. Different moods. Same week.

I walked between the two floors that afternoon. Floor 7 was decorating. Balloons. A banner that said "Capabilities." Floor 3 was quiet. People were downloading personal files. Removing photographs from their desks. One woman was on the phone with her bank. I could hear her explaining that her income situation was changing. She used the word "transition." We trained her well.

The acquisition press release used the word "capabilities." The separation notices used the word "transformation." The investor update used the word "efficiency." The internal Slack announcement used the word "evolution." Four words for the same action. I wrote three of them.

One developer on Floor 3 spent his last week training the Base44 model on our internal codebase. He documented the patterns. He annotated the edge cases. He labeled 400 examples of Wix-specific component architecture. Management asked him to do this as part of his "transition period." He was thorough. He was professional. He was teaching his replacement to be him. He did not seem to notice this. Or he noticed and needed the severance.

The math is public. Eighty million to acquire the replacement. Standard Israeli severance for one thousand people. The stock rose 4% on the announcement. The market understood. The market always understands before the employees do.

We are building the company that builds itself. The company that builds itself does not need the people who built the company. The people who built the company are the cost the company was built to eliminate.

One thousand functions. Deprecated. The badge system processed them in nine seconds each.

[JRE 🇺🇸 @greenbien]

My contribution would be smart roads. Roads that monitor all road conditions and traffic and communicate directly with smart cars who also communicate with other smart cars. Reliable hispeed travel, less loss of life, better environmentally.

[World of Engineering @engineers_feed]

The 5 hardest open problems in engineering right now:

1. Nuclear fusion
We've been "20 years away" for 70 years. In 2022, NIF finally achieved ignition. The problem now: how do you build a commercial reactor around a reaction that lasts 100 nanoseconds?