Stephen Donner

Head of quality at a stealth Enterprise Browsing startup.

Previously Senior QA @brave. Past engineering lives included Mozilla, Google, AOL, and Netscape.

[Stephen Donner @stephendonner]

Wish I could edit that pinned Tweet, but here's the master branch, instead of that then-one-off-branch: https://t.co/dvwgL5wLJi

[Stephen Donner @stephendonner]

If you have or are interested in a @Docker @jenkinsci #Python @datadoghq (easily tweaked for statsd/graphite, grafana, etc.) @usingwpt #WebPageTest (API) setup, I've got a repo for you; please contribute if you can! https://t.co/MuhgsrbN0y

[KERNEL @usekernel]

in february, we began exploring open web standards like webdriver bidi.

today, we’re partnering with jason huggins—creator of selenium, appium, and now vibium—to bring webdriver bidi support to KERNEL.

[non aesthetic things @PicturesFoIder]

Woman goes viral after sharing how she trained for her Kung Fu lessons in China.

[Stephen Donner @stephendonner]

@QuakesToday I felt this one - was like a "shimmy," more than a shake, but still "cool," as earthquakes go...

[Alex Cohen @anothercohen]

Bob Ross vibe coding was the AI slop I never knew I needed in my life

[Stephen Donner @stephendonner]

God Realizes He Forgot To Put Souls In Humans https://t.co/UKpGHASC5G

[Dan Go @CoachDanGo]

How to do a hard reset on your life by the end of 2025:

[Interesting AF @interesting_aIl]

This guy puts a high quality microphone to stuff in nature and it's pretty interesting

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Daily life of a fire lookout

[non aesthetic things @PicturesFoIder]

Helicopter pilot helps dude take a cool picture.

[Duolingo @duolingo]

UPDATE: Reward for whoever can identify the driver. Please post any leads on Twitter.

Thank you for your patience with us during these trying times. #Ripduo

[vas @vasuman]

If a simple coffee shop has a bot farm with 100s of phones to amplify their message, please consider what a foreign agency or adversarial operator is running on your favorite social media platform.

Especially today, please consider that the opinions you read, the calls to violence you hear, and the news you digest, are all an operation done to sow hatred in your mind and your soul.

Do not let anyone online turn you into something that you are not. Rationalize everything, take everything with a grain of salt, question everything for yourself, not based on how someone online is questioning it.

Turn off all distractions and focus on the mission you have, not the mission of someone trying to control your mind.

[🪖MilitaryNewsUA🇺🇦 @front_ukrainian]

❗️🇺🇦Ukrainian soldiers from the 225th Assault Regiment destroy 🇷🇺Russian FPV drones waiting in ambush on the roads

See the latest updates with us: @front_ukrainian

[Cory House @housecor]

perfect

[Cory House @housecor]

It is not because things are difficult that we don’t try them. It’s because we don’t try them that things are difficult.

Seneca (paraphrased)

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

A week's ration for one adult during WWII.

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Get A Load Of This Ignorant Moron Who Doesn't Follow Politics And Is Also Really Happy With His Life https://t.co/hHh2MHKZPS

[Igor Babuschkin @ibab]

Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023. I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed.

Building AI that advances humanity has been my lifelong dream. My parents left the Russian Federation after the collapse of the USSR in search of a better life for their kids. Life wasn’t always easy as immigrants. Despite the hardships, my parents believed that human values were priceless: values like courage, compassion, curiosity for understanding the world. As a child, I admired scientists like Richard Feynman and Max Planck, who relentlessly pushed the frontiers of physics in order to understand the universe. As a particle physics PhD student at CERN I was excited to contribute to that mission. But the search for new physics was getting harder and harder, requiring bigger and bigger colliders, while new discoveries kept getting fewer. So I began to wonder if superintelligence, not larger colliders, could be the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. Could AI develop a consistent theory of quantum gravity? Could AI prove the Riemann hypothesis? In early 2023 I became convinced that we were getting close to a recipe for superintelligence. I saw the writing on the wall: very soon AI could reason beyond the level of humans. How could we ensure that this technology is used for good? Elon had warned of the dangers of powerful AI for years. Elon and I realized that we had a shared vision of AI used to benefit humanity, thus we recruited more like minded engineers and set off to build xAI.

The early days of xAI were not easy. Naysayers told us that we arrived too late to the game, so starting a top AI company from scratch would be impossible. But we believed we could do the impossible. Starting a company from zero required lots of hands-on work. In the beginning I built many of the foundational tools used at the company to launch and manage training jobs. I later oversaw much of the engineering at the company, including Infrastructure, Product and Applied AI projects. xAI’s people are deeply dedicated. Through blood sweat and tears, our team’s blistering velocity built the Memphis supercluster, and shipped frontier models faster than any company in history. I learned 2 priceless lessons from Elon: #1 be fearless in rolling up your sleeves to personally dig into technical problems, #2 have a maniacal sense of urgency.

xAI executes at ludicrous speed. Industry veterans told us that building the Memphis supercluster in 120 days would be impossible. But we believed we could do the impossible. Our goal was to get our training setup running at scale on the Memphis cluster ASAP. Towards the end of our 120 day deadline, we were riddled with mysterious issues with communicating over RDMA between the machines. Elon decided to fly to the datacenter, and we followed. Our infra team landed in Memphis in the middle of the night and got straight to work. After pouring through tens of thousands of lines of lspci output we finally identified a wrong BIOS setting, the root of the problem. Elon was there with us until late into the night. When the training run finally worked, Elon posted our triumph at “4:20am” causing us to laugh out loud. I will never forget the rush of adrenaline that night, and the emotional bonds that we were all in this together. We went to bed feeling like we were living through the most exhilarating time of our lives.

I have enormous love for the whole family at xAI. Our team is truly special - you’re the most dedicated people I’ve ever worked with. Catching up to the frontier this quickly hasn’t been easy. It was made possible by everyone’s diehard grit and team spirit. Thank you to every single person who joined me on this adventure. I want to honor your contributions, your time, your sacrifices, which are never easy. I will always remember working together far into the nights and burning the midnight oil. I will never forget the sacrifices and contributions you’ve made. As I drive away today, I feel like a proud parent, driving away after sending their kid away to college. My heart is brimming with tears of joy, rooting for the company as it grows and matures.

As I'm heading towards my next chapter, I’m inspired by how my parents immigrated to seek a better world for their children. Recently I had dinner with Max Tegmark, founder of the Future of Life Institute. He showed me a photo of his young sons, and asked me “how can we build AI safely to ensure that our children can flourish?” I was deeply moved by his question. Earlier in my career, I was a technical lead for DeepMind's Alphastar StarCraft agent, and I got to see how powerful reinforcement learning is when scaled up. As frontier models become more agentic over longer horizons and a wider range of tasks, they will take on more and more powerful capabilities, which will make it critical to study and advance AI safety. I want to continue on my mission to bring about AI that’s safe and beneficial to humanity. I’m announcing the launch of Babuschkin Ventures, which supports AI safety research and backs startups in AI and agentic systems that advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe. Please reach out at [email protected] if you want to chat. The singularity is near, but humanity’s future is bright!

[Pavel Durov @durov]

👨‍🏫 A month ago, my father — a leading expert in Ancient Roman literature — turned 80. I asked what advice I should pass to the next generation. He gave me 3:

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Study Finds 100% Of Men Would Immediately Leave Their Desk Job If Asked To Embark Upon A Trans-Antarctic Expedition On A Big Wooden Ship https://t.co/2bEHgSc5yE

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Sound Of Husband Plopping Down On Couch Helpfully Reminds Wife There’s Something She Wanted Him To Do https://t.co/YDsKQVIW3Z