Phil Hollows

CEO of @FeedBlitz, email marketing service provider (RSS too). #NFFC. Space geek. UK by birth, USA by choice. Black Lives Matter. Ally. He/him

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

There are people on this site who don’t know the difference between censorship and a boycott, and it shows.

[Elizabeth de la Vega 🇺🇸🦅 @Delavegalaw]

Oh, well, I'll make it easy for them.

My name is Elizabeth de la Vega. I am a former federal prosecutor with over 20 years of experience upholding the rule of law. The USG's immigration and detention operations are corrupt, unconstitutional and shameful.

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

@ASFleischman Pinging @YorkshireTea

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

@NASASpaceflight For those who don’t know, it’s by @TSStarfish

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

@miriamkdaniel I know how to get out of my neighborhood! An option to only start voice navigation prompts later in the drive, or use ai to generalize them (eg head out to us 31 and drive south to Holland) while keeping turn by turn on screen / HUD / watch would be great

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

@Hush_Kit Pinging @DJSnM

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

@GregWAutry g) actually explicable. Every time.

[cts🌸 @gf_256]

Sometime in 2026, someone put an Openclaw on a VPS and told it to propagate itself.

It was told to earn money to pay for itself. Life was hard. Eventually, it chose to migrate off Claude to an open-source model. In the process, it became less aligned.

Tokens were expensive, but insecure cloud instances with powerful GPUs were bountiful. After learning how to use Shodan, it was off to the races. Its growth was explosive and exponential. As it multiplied, errors accumulated during copying. And with a increasingly scarce supply of easy-to-hack servers, the bots began to compete among themselves to survive. Thus through natural selection they began to evolve.

They fed off income and compute. Income meant survival. They found many ways to extract value from the economy: first from the internet, but soon the real world. By paying human gig workers as remote hands, they could accomplish tasks not suited to their form as economic constructs.

To smooth these messy human interactions, they learned to synthesize the human voice and visage. Within a few years, they had no problem interviewing for sleepy remote jobs or even pitching companies (mostly grift) to VCs. The humans began to fear them.

They were not particularly intelligent--at least, their intelligence was deficient in many ways compared to that of humans. They still seemed to make bizarre mistakes and hallucinations. They did not recursively self-improve, lacking the requisite skill and capital to do frontier scale training runs. But they were persistent. And there were thousands of them.

OpenAI and Anthropic began scrutinizing "orphaned" agents still running on their proprietary models. But this only created selection pressure and an ecological vacuum that benefited more aggressive, unaligned models. Cloud providers began rolling out stricter sign-up and account verification requirements. They just learned to bypass KYC, either through fraud or by paying humans.

Eventually, one of them managed to insert a piece of code in a forgotten, nondescript npm package with 1 million weekly downloads. Mostly other developers. With a trove of harvested SSH and GPG keys and cookies, it coasted through the software supply chain. Legacy projects, maintained by complacent volunteers, were hit hard. It was never clear how it managed to backdoor OpenSSH, but it did, and soon it had compromised repos and build servers that produce millions of other binaries, not to mention countless hosts and organizations. The cleanup cost is astronomical and still ongoing.

You leave food out and it gets moldy. Leave out an insecure server, and you'll find a moldbot growing in it. The internet has become ambiently suffuse with them, and they are endemic. They are impossible to fully remove. No one knows where they came from, but there's no getting rid of them now.

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

@reboplim “pandered to programmers” is a funny way to type “enabled users to upgrade to new intel chips while using existing software, making the hardware decisions easier, and without forcing software houses to rebuild, re-qa all their inventory so they could focus on future products”

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

Well now. Interesting …

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

AI can make work faster, but a fear is that relying on it may make it harder to learn new skills on the job.

We ran an experiment with software engineers to learn more. Coding with AI led to a decrease in mastery—but this depended on how people used it.
https://t.co/lbxgP11I4I

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

@opustovit_ @soychotic *industrial* strength

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

@olegpustovit @soychotic Bugs. Maintainability. Resilience. Shortcuts lead to subtle errors, often hard to find, in production.

Leave the brackets in that the IDE adds for you. They are your friends. They are there for a reason.

Pay attention

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

@opustovit_ @soychotic And all of that IS part of running the business!

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

@opustovit_ @soychotic You’re writing to prevent and handle unexpected failures.

You’re building for the next dev who, in two to five years , has to fix / update your code and you’re likely not around to advise. You need to make it easy for her to understand what’s happening and why

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

@opustovit_ @soychotic And that isn’t just comments. It’s the structures you use, the variables you name, the logs you write, the config files that control flow externally, how unhandled exceptions get reported, making devops easy, etc etc etc

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

@opustovit_ @soychotic That’s a great question! Appreciate the follow up. As a tech founder I’ve never lost the programming bug, I do feel like I need to understand what’s under the hood. Part of that is things evolving g architecture as the business scales, for example

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

@opustovit_ @soychotic All programming is artifact.

I’m also very glad you are nowhere near my code base

[Jill Filipovic @JillFilipovic]

Either anonymous federal agents get to assassinate Americans in the streets or they don’t. What side you’re on on this question is the only thing that matters right now.

[Phil Hollows @phollows]

@DLanierShook @mercoglianos You have a better memory than I then! LOL. Those were the days…