stonebig..

[stonebig.. @stonebigdotdot]

so obvious now

[Haider. @haider1]

"the IT department is going to become the HR department of your digital workforce"

Nvidia CEO, jensen huang predicts:

IT departments will evolve into HR for digital workforces which are responsible for onboarding, fine-tuning, and continuously improving the AI system

[stonebig.. @stonebigdotdot]

Python is now at 45% on pypl, growing at 3.5% per month https://t.co/UQfixU8CxF

[stonebig.. @stonebigdotdot]

Python is growing roughly 3.5% per month since december on marketshare of pypl, now at a mythical 41.88%, that is strange https://t.co/UQfixU8CxF

[Porte-parole des sapeurs-pompiers de France @EBrocardi]

« À vos rangs, à vos manettes ! »… ce sera probablement le prochain ordre initial donné par un chef d’agrès.
Analyse des risques, extinction…
Les chiens-robots débarquent...
Le futur est déjà du passé, nous y sommes.

[Rony @Ronycoder]

This 2 hour Harvard interview with Lee Kuan Yew, the man who turned Singapore from a tiny island into one of the richest nations on Earth, will teach you more about leadership, discipline, and nation-building than most business books ever will.

[Addy Osmani @addyosmani]

"First do it, then do it right, then do it better."

Just start. The journey to success often begins with a single step, but that first step can be the hardest to take. It's easy to get caught up in the fear of failure or the desire for perfection, but I hope this quote I first shared in 2013 can be a reminder of the importance of simply getting started as we go into 2024.

Just Start Somewhere

"Start slow if you have to. Start small if you have to. Start privately if you have to. Just start." - James Clear

Taking that first step doesn't require perfection or immediate mastery. The key is to overcome inertia and take action, as this action will lead to progress, learning, and (if you’re lucky and consistent) ultimately success.

When you start, you allow yourself the opportunity to grow, adapt, and move forward.

The Power of Starting

Beginning a new project or habit often feels daunting. According to psychologists, we tend to overestimate the pain of starting and underestimate our ability to persist.

However, studies show that "small starts" predict eventual success better than initial enthusiasm or early progress. This phenomenon is known as the fresh start effect - taking the first step energizes us and bolsters motivation.

So focus on starting without putting pressure on perfection. Progress and course corrections will follow.

First, Do It: Embrace the MVP Mindset

Doing it = get the simplest MVP out.

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) represents the simplest version of a product or idea that allows you to test, gather feedback, and iterate.

By embracing this mindset (just get something done - it's OK if rough, a prototype, a draft), you focus on progress over perfection, understanding that getting something out into the world is far more valuable than waiting for the perfect moment.

Expand Your Comfort Zone

Venturing outside one's comfort zone can elicit fears of failure. Leaning into discomfort not only builds confidence and skills, but research shows it makes us more receptive to learning. Recognize that fear is often the mind's way of urging us to grow. Don't let it stop you from progressing.

Then, Do It Right: Refine and Correct

Doing it right = fix correctness issues.

Once you've taken that first step and put your MVP out into the world, it's time to refine and correct. This stage is about learning from feedback, identifying areas of improvement, and making adjustments accordingly.

It's a chance to iterate on your idea, ensuring that it meets the needs of your audience or customers while aligning with your vision.

Cultivate Curiosity and Resilience

Meeting new challenges with curiosity and resilience makes venturing outside our comfort zone more sustainable and enjoyable. Cultivate curiosity about growth opportunities and your capacity to rise to them. Set mini-challenges to incrementally expand your horizons.

When facing inevitable setbacks, avoid self-criticism and tap into resilience - the ability to recover, learn and continue progressing.

Self-compassion, adaptability and maintaining perspective are key here. With consistent effort, you build confidence in your ability to start, stumble, learn and work toward mastery.

Finally, Do It Better: Strive for Continuous Improvement

"Doing it better = iterate towards an ideal end-state (e.g., make it fast)."

The journey doesn't end with merely doing it right.

The final step is to continuously improve, striving for excellence and growth.

By iterating towards an ideal end-state, you demonstrate a commitment to progress, ensuring that your product, idea, or project remains relevant, innovative, and successful.

Set New Goalposts

As you improve, have a clear idea of when you are “done” or update your goalposts. Elite athletes turn small gains into competitive edges via the aggregation of marginal gains. Identify areas of potential improvement and set measurable stretch goals, from increasing efficiency to enhancing user delight.

Overcoming the Greatest Barrier to Progress

"The greatest barrier to progress is not lack of resources or talent, but fear of failure."

Recognizing that fear of failure is the most significant obstacle in the pursuit of success allows you to confront it head-on.

By acknowledging this fear, you can focus on taking that first step, knowing that once the ball starts rolling, it becomes much easier to keep it in motion.

Remember that starting is more than half the battle. Don't wait until you feel ready, because the perfect moment may never come.

The Bottom Line

Rather than striving for perfect execution, embrace the power of starting - put forth an MVP, soft launch an initiative, or set a milestone. Progress begets motivation. By simply starting, you open the door to growth and innovation. The rest will follow.

Embrace the power of starting and then iterating until you're happy.

[SemiAnalysis @SemiAnalysis_]

The Great AI Silicon Shortage,
TSMC N3 Wafer Shortages,
Memory Constraints,
Datacenter Bottlenecks,
Supply Chain Wars Winner.
https://t.co/gX82gRtnTf

[Hugging Models @HuggingModels]

Meet a reasoning powerhouse. This Qwen3.5-27B model is a distilled specialist, fine-tuned for advanced chain-of-thought reasoning. It's not just another text generator. It's built to think step-by-step like top reasoning models, and the community is downloading it like crazy for that exact purpose.

[Hasan Toor @hasantoxr]

🚨 🚨 BREAKING: Alibaba just gave the AI agent community a powerful, real-world sandbox tool for free.

It's called OpenSandbox and it gives any AI agent a secure, isolated environment to execute code, browse the web, and train models with a unified API across languages.

No vendor lock-in. No per-minute billing surprises. No stitching together 5 different tools.

Built on the same infra Alibaba uses internally to run AI workloads at massive scale.

What it actually does:
→ Spins up isolated sandboxes for coding agents, GUI agents, code execution, and RL training
→ SDKs in Python, TypeScript, Java/Kotlin, and C# Go on the roadmap
→ Docker for local dev, Kubernetes for production-scale distributed runs

The integrations are wild:
→ Claude Code
→ Gemini CLI
→ OpenAI Codex
→ LangGraph
→ Google ADK
→ Chrome, Playwright, full VNC desktops

Three commands to get started:
→ pip install opensandbox-server
→ opensandbox-server init-config
→ opensandbox-server

That's it. Your agents now have a secure sandbox to run anything.

100% Open Source. Apache 2.0 license.

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

Citadel Securities published this graph showing a strange phenomenon.

Job postings for software engineers are actually seeing a massive spike.

Classic example of the Jevons paradox. When AI makes coding cheaper, companies actually may need a lot more software engineers, not fewer.

When software is cheaper to build, companies naturally want to build a lot more of it. Businesses are now putting software into industries and tools where it was simply too expensive before.

---

Chart from

citadelsecurities .com/news-and-insights/2026-global-intelligence-crisis/

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

nanochat now trains GPT-2 capability model in just 2 hours on a single 8XH100 node (down from ~3 hours 1 month ago). Getting a lot closer to ~interactive! A bunch of tuning and features (fp8) went in but the biggest difference was a switch of the dataset from FineWeb-edu to NVIDIA ClimbMix (nice work NVIDIA!). I had tried Olmo, FineWeb, DCLM which all led to regressions, ClimbMix worked really well out of the box (to the point that I am slightly suspicious about about goodharting, though reading the paper it seems ~ok).

In other news, after trying a few approaches for how to set things up, I now have AI Agents iterating on nanochat automatically, so I'll just leave this running for a while, go relax a bit and enjoy the feeling of post-agi :). Visualized here as an example: 110 changes made over the last ~12 hours, bringing the validation loss so far from 0.862415 down to 0.858039 for a d12 model, at no cost to wall clock time. The agent works on a feature branch, tries out ideas, merges them when they work and iterates. Amusingly, over the last ~2 weeks I almost feel like I've iterated more on the "meta-setup" where I optimize and tune the agent flows even more than the nanochat repo directly.

[stonebig.. @stonebigdotdot]

Python suddenly at 34% on https://t.co/YkaRjgi99Z, but at same time github statistics do not match... https://t.co/KwYXlFFOLr . Hypothesis: AI generates the 1st current best for any task, speed of writing is no more a sufficient winner

[stonebig.. @stonebigdotdot]

Hyperion was an extraordinar experience

[_DavidMorrell @_DavidMorrell]

My dear friend & incomparable author Dan Simmons died Saturday from a stroke at age 77. He defied literary norms, exploring historical fiction, horror, crime & other genres. His must-read titles include THE SONG OF KALI & HYPERION. He was one of a kind.
https://t.co/NcBFT4hBc6

[_DavidMorrell @_DavidMorrell]

My dear friend & incomparable author Dan Simmons died Saturday from a stroke at age 77. He defied literary norms, exploring historical fiction, horror, crime & other genres. His must-read titles include THE SONG OF KALI & HYPERION. He was one of a kind.
https://t.co/NcBFT4hBc6

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow.

Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes.

As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now.

It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

[stonebig.. @stonebigdotdot]

@rasbt DeepSeek r4 is apparently going to be better for a few weeks, competition is good

[stonebig.. @stonebigdotdot]

64GB is all you need... but you need that 64gb RAM

[Simon Willison @simonw]

Here's the first Qwen 3.5 model that should hopefully work comfortable on a ~64GB Mac

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Bought a new Mac mini to properly tinker with claws over the weekend. The apple store person told me they are selling like hotcakes and everyone is confused :)

I'm definitely a bit sus'd to run OpenClaw specifically - giving my private data/keys to 400K lines of vibe coded monster that is being actively attacked at scale is not very appealing at all. Already seeing reports of exposed instances, RCE vulnerabilities, supply chain poisoning, malicious or compromised skills in the registry, it feels like a complete wild west and a security nightmare. But I do love the concept and I think that just like LLM agents were a new layer on top of LLMs, Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents, taking the orchestration, scheduling, context, tool calls and a kind of persistence to a next level.

Looking around, and given that the high level idea is clear, there are a lot of smaller Claws starting to pop out. For example, on a quick skim NanoClaw looks really interesting in that the core engine is ~4000 lines of code (fits into both my head and that of AI agents, so it feels manageable, auditable, flexible, etc.) and runs everything in containers by default. I also love their approach to configurability - it's not done via config files it's done via skills! For example, /add-telegram instructs your AI agent how to modify the actual code to integrate Telegram. I haven't come across this yet and it slightly blew my mind earlier today as a new, AI-enabled approach to preventing config mess and if-then-else monsters. Basically - the implied new meta is to write the most maximally forkable repo and then have skills that fork it into any desired more exotic configuration. Very cool.

Anyway there are many others - e.g. nanobot, zeroclaw, ironclaw, picoclaw (lol @ prefixes). There are also cloud-hosted alternatives but tbh I don't love these because it feels much harder to tinker with. In particular, local setup allows easy connection to home automation gadgets on the local network. And I don't know, there is something aesthetically pleasing about there being a physical device 'possessed' by a little ghost of a personal digital house elf.

Not 100% sure what my setup ends up looking like just yet but Claws are an awesome, exciting new layer of the AI stack.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

The best way to use AI is an interface to information that lets you deepen and improve your own knowledge and mental models. The worst way to use AI is as a crutch to outsource and forsake your own cognition

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

New art project.
Train and inference GPT in 243 lines of pure, dependency-free Python. This is the *full* algorithmic content of what is needed. Everything else is just for efficiency. I cannot simplify this any further.
https://t.co/HmiRrQugnP

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

This 40 minute lecture from Peter Thiel at Stanford will teach you more about business competition than a 2 year MBA program