umar

Coder, Writer, Opinion haver.

[Alex Imas @alexolegimas]

This is one of the most important pieces of social science on human and AI interaction that I’ve seen in some time. Experts follow agentic advice the vast majority of the time (causally), but only a tiny fraction credit the agent—majority think they came to decision on their own volition.

Reminds me of the classic Nisbett and Wilson study on people following outside influence without realizing it

“ But as more work is handed to AI—including AI safety research—these judgment calls are the main levers for people's own values to influence outcomes.

If people defer to AI without noticing, then "human in the loop" might provide less assurance than people expect.”

[umar @Umar_init_]

@cafkafk OS should've had a rule that any updates required by corpos w 10M+ ARR should have to pay a service fee

[umar @Umar_init_]

@LeoAintReal @kingofknowwhere Is Indus the OCR on Indian documents? I’ve been wondering how well it does it. Any insights?

[umar @Umar_init_]

@akhmxt 2k rupees per month sounds fine for a subscription for developers but yeah, I guess the ones earning in entry-level positions would have some trouble with it (most of Indian dev markets I guess)

[umar @Umar_init_]

Listen to my namesake yall

[Omar Khattab @lateinteraction]

it’s my nature to keep posts rather impersonal, so i have to work extra hard to tweet this sort of personal testimony below from time to time as i think the reminder in it around AI and the “value of human intelligence” is worth it

as of the end of Oct 2026, i have not (yet - you may insist) had the *slightest* moment of questioning the impact of AI on the meaning of any of my work/skills - or even feeling any unusual shift beyond having an amazing (and rather often infuriating) tool

believe it or not, but my ability to produce a completed artifact* (paper, model, open source software, lecture, …) and the effort, expertise, or time one takes to produce has actually barely reduced - despite comprehensive productivity benefits from AI

the reason is that i essentially NEVER choose to work for a pre-determined outcome or some field-wide well-specified problem; i only work on artifacts i aim to perfect according to *my* judgment and where my personalized ambition obviously has no set limit and isn’t somehow pre-loaded onto AI

better tools simply change the costs of my choices - i quite literally work on moving goal-posts if you will! when the fixed constraint are only time and energy, AI simply allows me to re-explore scope and make fewer (or different!!) tradeoffs or compromises, which feels almost no different!

i’m not saying every job or every endeavor - including very advanced and historically prized ones! - looks like this today, but i’m offering:

(1) at least one voice in this moment (of so many annoying loud FUD voices!) that it’s totally possible and i suspect extremely scalable and i predict will remain so for the foreseeable future!

(2) why “someone like me” is indeed choosing happily to be in academia and not elsewhere! (again lots of FUD out here!, but where else do you have the freedom to keep seeking to create value for deciding and solving ~arbitrary ambitious/useful problems, establish credit for it, and train superstars who do the same?)

my fear and worry in this moment is a lot less about Al or "the value of human intelligence" and much more about how concentration of power has a very reliable history of being very dangerous to large numbers of affected people! a VERY different problem imo

*i guess certain of those took way longer than i expected but do stay tuned for a half dozen things on the short horizon…

[umar @Umar_init_]

@akhmxt Codex and CC are really not targeted at everyone or everyday people though. They’re developer specific tools.

[umar @Umar_init_]

@BandaruShekhar Their stack is unfortunately very old, and they want specific people for it.

[umar @Umar_init_]

@dadua_daku This is what I dislike about American sports. They’re all focused on athleticism and wingspans and all those things, and they build systems accordingly.

[umar @Umar_init_]

I figured I didn't really need @executorsh, even though I had it downloaded for a while, because most calls that I was making were easily done and the API keys secured in files the LLM wouldn't read. Until this happened:

[umar @Umar_init_]

@yc989 They can’t be independent persons with opinions?

[umar @Umar_init_]

@_Felipe Congratulations 🙌 a breath of fresh air to see the results.

[umar @Umar_init_]

@gitshadan Acha

[Miguel de Icaza ᯅ🍉 @migueldeicaza]

These bans deputize random busybodies into hall monitors, replacing communities built by people who contribute with hierarchies ruled by people who have nothing to offer but the power to stop others.

[umar @Umar_init_]

@avrldotdev OIDC.

[umar @Umar_init_]

@JohnGreenDev Adversarial testing, honestly. Running everything that can go wrong will go wrong type of E2E penetration testing. Can give an LLM all the APIs and tell it to cause the program to fail. Failures can then be made deterministic tests.

[umar @Umar_init_]

@tanejagarvit_ What’s your activity manager showing?

[umar @Umar_init_]

@tanejagarvit_ That’s the killer I think. See if you can reduce dockerized containers in itself, they eat a buttload of RAM lol

[umar @Umar_init_]

@tanejagarvit_ are these dockerized backend services?