Rowland Oti 🅨

Memoirs of a fool. I post not for your edification, but for my re-education. #

[Rowland Oti 🅨 @rowlandoti]

Twitter is not an easy place to conduct oneself with as much grace as you'd wish. There's something about this platform that really heightens the desire to be provocative. Maybe it is skewed towards a few people feeling irritable and had a bad day, feeling they must destroy you.

[Wow, He’s Tsonga! @_aboihasnoname]

If someone at work tries to micromanage you, micromanage them back.

Send them too much feedback, ask them a lot of questions, do follow ups when they go quiet or even when you know they are busy don’t let them rest.

[Valentin Ignatev @valigo]

"I use loops", said Linux Kernel creator Linus Torvalds, when asked about new trends.

"You can't write programs without loops", he added.

[Murray Rothbard @MurraySuggests]

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began.

The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start.

Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have.

If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

[Caleb (OSH Cut) @CalebChamberla6]

Four rotors create complete control authority. Eight offers redundancy. But can someone explain why in the world you'd want to add weight and complexity to pivot each rotor pair?

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Kelsey Hightower has one of the most inspiring stories in tech: he went from a technician installing DSL modems, through self-directed study and very hard work, to one of the very few Distinguished Engineer at Google whom Satya Nadella personally persuaded to join Microsoft.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro
03:34 Kelsey’s first job at McDonald’s
05:04 His non-traditional path into tech
11:45 Landing his first tech job with an A+ certification
15:33 His entrepreneurial years
19:45 Joining Google as a data center technician
27:48 Learning automation at a Rackspace spinoff
33:26 Moving into financial services
50:00 Building a reputation through open source
53:55 From configuration management to containers
1:08:20 The rise of Kubernetes
1:25:05 Why he almost joined NASA instead of Google
1:29:20 Defining DevRel at Google
1:38:20 Demonstrating impact at Google
1:41:20 Microsoft's offer
1:55:20 Learning how to slow down
2:06:39 Advising and investing
2:15:03 A people-first view of GenAI
2:24:27 Using AI with guardrails
2:28:26 Matching AI to the task
2:36:06 Staying relevant in the AI era

Brought to you by outstanding teams building products I love:

• @AntithesisHQ: verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. https://t.co/AKYm4cctss

• @sentry: application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers https://t.co/uoolyqTR6M

• @buildkite: CI software built to absorb whatever your coding agents throw at the build queue. OpenAI, Anthropic, Uber and others are customers: https://t.co/C05Ze9zzin

Three interesting learnings from Kelsey:

1. Side hustles and doing your own thing teach you business like no IC job can.

Before becoming a software engineer at Google, Kelsey was a manager for his comedian friend, operated a computer store, and did IT contracting. These gigs taught him logistics, planning, and about money. All this helped him be far more effective at talking with executives and acting as an executive sponsor inside Google.

2. Can you explain what your startup does without mentioning AI?

When Kelsey researches startups seeking his advice, he challenges founders to not say “AI” once. This means that they must explain the actual value their company creates. One unexpected benefit of this is that it often reveals there are easier, cheaper ways to achieve a goal than with AI.

3. It’s very rare to get an extra zero put on your compensation figure – but it happened.

Kelsey was a successful, well-paid Google engineer when Microsoft made him an offer that 10x’d his salary (!!). When Kelsey told Google he was planning to take the offer, it matched the offer, proving that his market value had massively increased. It shows that being well paid doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being paid at the correct market rate.

[Rowland Oti 🅨 @rowlandoti]

@stspanho This is really cool, beyond cool really. 👏🏿

[Rowland Oti 🅨 @rowlandoti]

This is really cool. Kudos @PINTO03091

[Super PINTO @PINTO03091]

Of course, it’s not perfect. However, this example clearly demonstrates that it is possible to achieve a certain level of accuracy in estimating close-contact postures and separating instances. It is no exaggeration to say that the potential of such models is far greater than people realize.

[Steven Cheng @stevencheng]

Version 2.0 of AI laser mosquito defense system is here.

It can now detect, identify, track, and eliminate mosquitoes in real time using computer vision + thermal imaging.

Upgraded with harmonic drives, servo motors, and a reinforced aluminum gimbal because apparently…

[Claude @claudeai]

Introducing Claude Opus 4.8: it builds on Opus 4.7 with sharper judgment, more honesty about its own progress, and the ability to work independently for longer than its predecessors.

Available today at the same price.

[hardmaru @hardmaru]

For over a decade, we’ve accepted that end-to-end backprop is the only way to train deep networks. But holding the entire network in memory all at once is why AI training is hitting a resource wall.

We found a new way to break the network into blocks and train them independently. The trick? Treating the network’s forward pass like a diffusion model denoising a signal.

This reinterpretation slashes the memory needed to train deep models. In our #ICLR2026 paper (https://t.co/PK5h0mqQSo), we matched end-to-end performance across ViTs, DiTs, and LLMs. We did this while training just one isolated block at a time.

[🦊 @tha_red_fox]

The same safaricom that tried to disrupt ecom with Masoko? How is that going?

The tried cloud, but every Kenyan business is on AWS or Azure or other providers

Don't get me started on business ops because Zoho and Odoo are having a field day in the Kenyan market.

[Steven Cheng @stevencheng]

How to DIY a Lithography Machine

[airpocket @AirpocketRobot]

今作ってる装置はこんな感じでスピーカからPing打って反響音で家全体の窓扉の開閉状態をエッジで推論するという仕組み。
実際に家のモデルを作ってサーボで開閉させるんだけど、データ採取、PCで学習、変換、マイコン実装、エッジ推論までぜんぶAIにコントロール渡してるので、

[Kamogelo 🇿🇦 @Warra_Kamza]

@covie_93 Iran won

[Rowland Oti 🅨 @rowlandoti]

@FuenteLaJames @KevinNaughtonJr Advancements will rarely follow linear paths, so it isn’t a suprise even industry legends coudn’t see it coming. The future after this will even be wilder with at will command of electrons and photons around us - complete full cycle. 😁

[Aiden Bai @aidenybai]

this is incredibly dangerous

- leaking github source code makes github easier to hack
- the world's most valuable software (trillions of $ of IP) is stored on GitHub
- its so over

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

"Until death, all defeat is psychological." - Marcus Aurelius

Refuse everything that would lead most people to give up.

Refuse it.
Rise from the dead 1000 times.
Commit to never stay down & never give up.
Everything you want is on the other side of struggle.

[Rowland Oti 🅨 @rowlandoti]

@adamrights @javarevisited Okay genius ✈️

[Rowland Oti 🅨 @rowlandoti]

@theo Yeah, let’s be shortsighted and blame a single engineer over a single mic drop moment that has got nothing to do with JIRa.

[AVB @neural_avb]

This is what you can achieve with 5-6 hours of Self-Play RL training by the way

Actors view the projectiles with lidar scans, picks an action using PPO policy, and competes against past versions of itself in a iterative self-improvement loop.

Made in Unity with MLAgents.