Matthew FL

Computer science, PL, NLP, Math. Past undergraduate student @UCBerkeley, PhD from @JohnsHopkins

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

I have written a Eulogy for JoJo, the most cuddly cat
https://t.co/nLBArU7suu

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

Ask fable to do a code review, it instant kicks to opus. How do people even use the fable model??? Looking at it wrong and it kicks it

[Anton Razzhigaev @AbstractDL]

Daily reminder what agentic harness is

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

Modern peer review was never scientific truth seeking, it is about *consensus* seeking while trying to play a dance with reviewers to stroke their egos.

Now that AI is both writing and reviewing the papers this is becoming undeniably broken.

[Shashwat Goel @ShashwatGoel7]

Funniest instance I saw recently:

Complete AI slop paper got an Oral. I sent it to multiple folks who knows about the domain, and none of us could understand what even the claims were

AI review 🤝 AI slop

Publishing by itself is becoming completely meaningless in the age of AI

[TravisGood @IridiumEagle]

The US gov is playing a dangerous game. If Chinese models soundly surpass Opus 4.8 while Mythos and GPT 5.6 are banned, the narrative around 'distillation' will collapse, and US AI valuations and adoption will face an existential crisis.

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

Company replaces phone answering system with AI, and now I can no longer use an individual's extension to access them. The AI agent doesn't understand "extension 1234" and the keypad entry does nothing.

Yay AI making everything better!!!!

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

Fable kicked my session to opus just for having "ml" in the prompt. It was working fine yesterday, wtf man @AnthropicAI

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

Goodbye JoJo, I love you, rest in peace my big cuddly kitty

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

Lmao 🧵

[Yuval Adam @yuvadm]

1/ Project Eleven just awarded 1 BTC for "the largest quantum attack on ECC to date", a 17-bit elliptic curve key recovered on IBM Quantum hardware. I replaced the quantum computer with /dev/urandom. It still recovers the key.

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

I thought this was a secret confession from a CEO 🤣

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.

$30 per seat per month.

$1.4 million annually.

I called it "digital transformation."

The board loved that phrase.

They approved it in eleven minutes.

No one asked what it would actually do.

Including me.

I told everyone it would "10x productivity."

That's not a real number.

But it sounds like one.

HR asked how we'd measure the 10x.

I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards."

They stopped asking.

Three months later I checked the usage reports.

47 people had opened it.

12 had used it more than once.

One of them was me.

I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.

It took 45 seconds.

Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations.

But I called it a "pilot success."

Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail.

The CFO asked about ROI.

I showed him a graph.

The graph went up and to the right.

It measured "AI enablement."

I made that metric up.

He nodded approvingly.

We're "AI-enabled" now.

I don't know what that means.

But it's in our investor deck.

A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT.

I said we needed "enterprise-grade security."

He asked what that meant.

I said "compliance."

He asked which compliance.

I said "all of them."

He looked skeptical.

I scheduled him for a "career development conversation."

He stopped asking questions.

Microsoft sent a case study team.

They wanted to feature us as a success story.

I told them we "saved 40,000 hours."

I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up.

They didn't verify it.

They never do.

Now we're on Microsoft's website.

"Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot."

The CEO shared it on LinkedIn.

He got 3,000 likes.

He's never used Copilot.

None of the executives have.

We have an exemption.

"Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction."

I wrote that policy.

The licenses renew next month.

I'm requesting an expansion.

5,000 more seats.

We haven't used the first 4,000.

But this time we'll "drive adoption."

Adoption means mandatory training.

Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches.

But completion will be tracked.

Completion is a metric.

Metrics go in dashboards.

Dashboards go in board presentations.

Board presentations get me promoted.

I'll be SVP by Q3.

I still don't know what Copilot does.

But I know what it's for.

It's for showing we're "investing in AI."

Investment means spending.

Spending means commitment.

Commitment means we're serious about the future.

The future is whatever I say it is.

As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

@PreetumNakkiran The market makers still need to make money on average. When the markets are too small spreads open up a lot. Eg Suppose the MM only sells 99:1 odds. At the end of the day a short lived market is essentially zero sum and ppl making bets against each other.

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

Note: using an LLM/tab complete on the boiler plate code for the compiler framework (MLIR) still continues to work for the most part

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

Just tried the latest LLM coding models, I think my job is still very safe for now :(

Trying to get an LLM to work on the internals of a compiler fails miserably. The higher level thinking about how data is transformed is still out of reach for now

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

@PreetumNakkiran For a prediction market to work you need buyers and sellers who are actively participating. If I sell an event at 60c and then raise the price and stop selling lower than 95c, ppl will likely get scared and sell their positions. You need a lot on both sides for pric disc

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

New way to make the LLMs go crazy. Keep asking it to scrutinize and fix problems in the text it generates

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

@sfmcguire79 A secondary consequence of this is that after a 4 year bachelor degree students haven't had time to complete as many advanced classes compared to the pre-covid graduates. They still get a degree as they completed the number of units required.

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

Wtf Baltimore

[The Baltimore Sun @baltimoresun]

A Baltimore Police officer has been suspended after a viral video showed him driving recklessly off-road and nearly striking a man before crashing through a fence in Central Park Heights. Mayor Brandon Scott called the footage “deeply concerning,” and the incident is under internal and prosecutorial review. https://t.co/0Mr3itKkx2

🎥: 1grandsxnn_/TikTok

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

Most American sentence: "Nurses and emergency personnel on strike at the Henry Ford Genesys Hospital, heard the shooting while on the picket line and ran toward the church to help the first responders." https://t.co/NA9Id1z79K

[Matthew FL @matthewfl]

Half of the time that I try to use @claude_code or any LLM agent, I feel like I should ask for a refund for wasting my time and costing me tokens. Unless you are building a "simple" web app, these things don't work