Tim Huckle

Engineering Director @AJBell

[Google Gemma @googlegemma]

Meet Gemma 4 12B!

A unified, encoder-free multimodal model designed to bring high-performance intelligence directly to your laptop, and released under an Apache 2.0 license.

Bridging the gap between edge efficiency and advanced reasoning. Here is what’s new with Gemma 4 12B: 👇

[Huy @HuyNguyenTw]

Flutter Agent Lens MCP Server

Agent-first MCP server to debug, profile, and optimize running Flutter apps

https://t.co/r4EEqQlPfq

[Tim Huckle @timhuckle]

@banksynchq would you mind removing https://t.co/b0nyVVnrkb - we are UK based, not a bank and you’re not integrated with us. Thank you.

[Jesse Ezell @jezell]

Flutter 3.44.0 release notes are up
https://t.co/KoDfXzsWg2

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

🤯 This is scary good for something rendering in real time.

Selfie-based liveness checks ask for a fixed set of motions: head turn, blink, close approach to the camera. This demo nails all of them, including the part that usually breaks for synthetic faces (skin micro-texture and forehead wrinkles holding up at close range).

Without the side-by-side at the bottom, you wouldn't know it's not Will Smith.

Source: Incognia

[Merill Fernando @merill]

CloudFlare's post is one of the better written reports on Mythos.

Worth a read for both devs and cybersec folks.

[ChatGPT @ChatGPTapp]

A preview for Pro users: a new personal finance experience in ChatGPT.

Pro users in the U.S. can securely connect financial accounts, see where their money is going, and ask questions based on the information they choose to connect.

Your full financial picture, now in ChatGPT.

[Tim Huckle @timhuckle]

HSBC Apple Pay. Possibly all(?) HSBC UK customers have woken to an email from them confirming registration of their card on to Apple Pay. Contact centre on +30 minute wait times as concerned customers phone in. I’m told the comms were sent in error. @HSBC_UK

[Tim Huckle @timhuckle]

@kyle213187 @HSBC_UK Also. Seems to be a glitch.

[Shruti @heyshrutimishra]

Jack Dorsey just said the quiet part out loud.

"Middle management exists because humans were the only option for information routing. They aren't anymore."

I'm running a small team right now. We just hit the point where I can't keep everything in my head anymore. I know this problem intimately.

A human can manage 3-8 people effectively.
That's it.
I'm at that edge right now. The moment you cross it, you need another layer. Another person to route information. Another meeting to align. Another delay.

The Roman Army invented hierarchical management 2000 years ago.

8 soldiers → 80 men → 480 → 5,000.

Every company still uses this structure today. I assumed this was just how it works.

Jack Dorsey just published why that's about to end.

The Constraint I'm Living Right Now

We're at the inflection point. Small enough that I can still talk to everyone directly. Big enough that I'm becoming the bottleneck. Every decision waits for me to route context between people.

I've been watching AI tools for 2 years. Claude, ChatGPT, every new model. I thought the answer was copilots. Give everyone AI assistants to work faster within the existing structure.

Block just published something that made me realize I was thinking too small.

What Block Is Actually Building

They're not giving everyone copilots. They're replacing what the hierarchy does with a "world model."

Two parts:
Company World Model: How Block understands its own operations. This replaces me. The information I carry in my head, the context I relay between people, the decisions I route. The world model does that.

Customer World Model: Block sees both sides of millions of transactions through Cash App and Square. Money is the most honest signal. People lie on surveys, but transactions are facts. That understanding compounds every second.

Here's what got me: When Block's intelligence layer tries to compose a solution and can't because a capability doesn't exist, that failure becomes the roadmap. Customer reality generates the backlog directly.

No product manager hypothesizing. No guessing what to build next. The system observes what customers actually need.

Block normalizes to three roles:

- ICs: Build capabilities, models, interfaces. The world model provides the context I currently provide. They don't wait for me to tell them what to do.

- DRIs: Own specific problems for 90 days. Full authority to pull resources from any team. Then rotate to new problems.

- Player-Coaches: Still build. Still code. Develop people. But don't spend days in alignment meetings because the world model handles that.

No permanent middle management layer.

Why This Matters to Me

I'm at the exact moment where most companies add a layer. Hire someone to manage the growing team while I focus on strategy. Standard playbook.

But that just delays the problem. When we hit 30 people, we need another layer. Then another at 100. Each layer slows us down.

Block is saying: what if you don't add layers at all? What if the AI becomes the coordination layer?

I don't know if Block's execution will work. This could break spectacularly. But the question is too important to ignore.

Dorsey asks: "What does your company understand that is genuinely hard to understand, and is that understanding getting deeper every day?"

If the answer is nothing, AI is just cost optimization. Cut headcount, improve margins, get absorbed.

If the answer is deep, AI reveals what your company actually is.

The Uncomfortable Truth I'm Sitting With

For 2,000 years, we had no alternative to hierarchy. The question was never whether you needed layers. The question was whether humans were the only option for what those layers do.

They aren't anymore.

I'm watching this closely. Not because I have answers. Because I'm living the exact problem Block is trying to solve. And if they figure it out, it changes everything.

Follow @heyshrutimishra for more on AI reshaping how companies actually work. I'm figuring this out in real time.

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

I see some weird things but this takes the biscuit. A vulnerability in the Companies House website, that let anyone view the private dashboard of any one of the five million registered companies, see directors' personal details.

And modify them.

[Tim Huckle @timhuckle]

@EvanCull @MartinSLewis how does that explain people seeing different customer's transactions each time they log in. One example being a customer saw 7 different customer details. More like a CDN cache misconfiguration resulting in API calls being cached; or a fault with in-memory cache such as Redis?

[Dr Milan Milanović @milan_milanovic]

Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off at AWS

[jack @jack]

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.

####

today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.

first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.

we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.

i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.

a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.

we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.

to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.

to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.

jack

[Oliver Prompts @oliviscusAI]

the cybersecurity industry is about to get completely disrupted.. 💀

someone just open-sourced a fully autonomous AI Red Team.

it’s called PentAGI. multiple AI agents that talk to each other to hack a target. zero human input.

[Stripe @stripe]

Over 1,300 Stripe pull requests merged each week are completely minion-produced, human-reviewed, but contain no human-written code (up from 1,000 last week).

How we built minions: https://t.co/GazfpFU6L4.

[Tim Huckle @timhuckle]

Seeing AWS Route53 issues right now impacting DNS lookups. #aws #route53

[Tim Huckle @timhuckle]

@mzaian Yes. DNS lookups dropping completely

[Tim Huckle @timhuckle]

@AWSSupport @mzaian There are most definitely Route53 issues at the moment, I suggest you take another look.

[Tim Huckle @timhuckle]

@Apple @OpenAI how did this get on to TestFlight ?