John Cassil

professionally: software engineering with python and R; privately: children building with my wife and family.

Rural, crunchy, values ancient things.

[John Cassil @johncassil]

R truly is a gateway drug.

You get into it thinking "I bet I can automate this thingy from Excel". Three years later you're staring at your screen at 4am debugging github actions, installing missing linux binaries, watching C compile, just hoping for that next dose of 0 exit.

[John Cassil @johncassil]

🤣🤣

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

@jain_harshit You motherfuckers wouldn’t listen to me so I had to get claude involved

[Josef Bender @josefbender_]

The fastest way to get hacked...

is to run npm install.

What a time to be alive

[John Cassil @johncassil]

@colemurray https://t.co/qHgSkdu72o solves all this btw

[gaut @0xgaut]

he's become fully reliant on LLMs to code. now increase the price by 1000%

[John Cassil @johncassil]

Here's our write-up about the mistralai compromise!

https://t.co/zjFrAvIfia

[John Cassil @johncassil]

@thdxr https://t.co/qHgSkdu72o

[John Cassil @johncassil]

@kanavtwt There's a fix for this: https://t.co/qHgSkdu72o

[John Cassil @johncassil]

Waiting intently for the second volume as I am now committed to the daily chapter per day cycle!

Some editorial feedback for future versions of volume 1:

Halakha 10 on page 363 has footnotes a & b that correspond to the following page, and the halakhic discussions on the following page are misnumbered... The a footnote in Halakha 13 (page 364) is missing.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A newborn sperm whale can’t swim. It starts sinking the second it’s born. If nobody pushes it to the surface, it drowns in mile-deep water.

On July 8, 2023, a sperm whale named Rounder went into labor off the coast of Dominica. Researchers from Project CETI, a $33 million AI initiative out of MIT, Harvard, and Northeastern that’s trying to decode whale language, happened to be there doing routine fieldwork. They had drones in the air and underwater microphones running. What they captured over the next six hours just got published in two papers, one in Science and one in Scientific Reports.

Eleven whales gathered at the surface before Rounder even started delivering. Her mother, Lady Oracle, was there. So was her daughter Accra. Three generations in the water. But the wild part: half those whales belonged to a completely separate bloodline that normally keeps its distance from Rounder’s family. On a typical day, these two family lines split off to hunt in different areas and rarely cluster together. For the birth, they all converged before labor started. The unrelated family somehow knew it was coming.

The delivery took 34 minutes. Sperm whale calves come out tail-first with their flukes still folded from the womb. They haven’t developed the oil-filled organ in their heads that helps adult whales float, so the moment they’re born, they’re dead weight in the ocean. Every adult whale in the group, related and unrelated, started taking turns pushing the calf up to breathe. They kept this rotation going for three hours. When a pod of pilot whales (known to be aggressive toward sperm whales) and a large group of Fraser’s dolphins showed up during delivery, the adults formed a wall around the newborn until the threat passed.

The underwater audio is where it gets interesting. CETI’s microphones picked up the whales changing their vocal patterns during the birth. The click-based sounds they use to talk to each other shifted at specific moments, and vowel-like structures appeared in the recordings. This builds on what CETI found in 2024 when they ran machine learning on over 8,700 recorded whale calls and discovered sperm whale communication isn’t a basic 21-sound code. It’s a system of about 300 distinct sound combinations, with the whales adjusting rhythm and timing in real time, speeding up and slowing down the way a musician does mid-performance. A 2025 follow-up from UC Berkeley found these clicks also contain vowel patterns, something scientists had assumed only humans could produce.

Sperm whales carry the largest brain of any animal on the planet. About 9 kg. Roughly six times heavier than yours. The evolutionary analysis in the new Science paper suggests this kind of cooperative birthing goes back over 36 million years, to the common ancestor of all toothed whales. The calf was spotted a year later, swimming with its family.

[Lucid™ @cammakingminds]

If you are using the earth as a reference frame, the moon is actually doing a close flyby of Artemis II.

[Riley Read-Only @HotForMoot]

Can’t put my finger on it but something off about this Seder plate

[Michelle Tandler @michelletandler]

Feeling grateful not to be a slave in Egypt.

Chag sameach everybody!

[John Cassil @johncassil]

@VicVijayakumar

[Jane Manchun Wong @wongmjane]

My silly prompt injection in my LinkedIn bio actually worked

[John Cassil @johncassil]

Actually
https://t.co/qHgSkdu72o solves this for corporate environments.

No stray malicious packages can destroy your company if they are gated

[Kevin Lance Murray @K_L_M]

@elonmusk supply chain attack isn't a buyer beware situation. nobody audits every pip package before install. package registries exist to prevent this. they failed, not the devs.

[John Cassil @johncassil]

I can't report an account @saddam96739588 for impersonating @GeorgeStrait because I can't get the real account to show up in the search results (limited to 10?, does not accept exact match, not sorted by follower count, verified or anything).

@nikitabier pls fix

[John Cassil @johncassil]

@tayloramurphy Yeah but you get penalized heavily now

[John Cassil @johncassil]

When we try to use the Romeo and Juliette death pods together, but hers goes ahead while I spend an extra hour waiting for mine to reboot and apply the critical update to patch a CVE.

[Zy @ZyMazza]

At what point does it become clear compassion was never the point and it was always about profiting from suicidal ideation? Wake up! Reject transhumanism in all its forms!

[John Cassil @johncassil]

@persianjewess @LindseyGrahamSC I mean he's always been a warmonger so he's not exactly a new voice to intervention

[John Cassil @johncassil]

@teej_m As in an AI mao ?