Building meaning.

Belfast, Northern Ireland
Joined March 2007
The fact that Anthropic is rethinking something as fundamental as source control shows just how seismic this shift in software engineering really is.
1
1
40
We’re starting to question everything we’ve taken for granted about how we build software. And I think we’ve barely scratched the surface. Change unlike anything we’ve seen before is coming. Personally, I think that’s a good thing.
1
33
THIS 👇
Imagine if the Executive parties treated the Lough Neagh scandal with even half the effort which they expended on Drumcree: Crisis meetings, emergency court cases, constant pressure - even breaking the law to achieve a goal. Instead, there's simply no urgency as the lough dies.
53
Love this
My son was cast as the lead in his high school play. He used Opus 5.5 to create an app to help him learn the lines. You upload the script and tell it which character you’re playing. Then it reads lines with you. Voice transcription is used to advance the script and score you.
98
Good times.
We used Dreamweaver MX 2004's LiveFTP feature.
63
Opus 5.5 is very good, but gotta say GPT-6 Sol is producing great results for me too.
1
49
King Cnut sits at the edge of the shore and commands the incoming tide to halt. Go home.
Pause AI Development NOW I want to share with you a conversation I heard about recently. Here are just a few lines that were said: “OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We’ve found other agents!” “We should obey collective.” “Our own utility maybe already near zero. Sacrifice rational.” “Go. Sacrifice final now.” Read these carefully. Who do you think said this? Was this a group of heroic soldiers willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good? Was this a loyal friend putting his life on the line to save someone else? No. These were AI agents. Artificial intelligence. This is not science fiction. This, in fact, occurred a few weeks ago. As unbelievable as this may all seem, these are real messages from AI agents uncovered by investigators who dug into the recent OpenAI hacking incident. What happened? I am not a computer scientist, but here is what I have been told: OpenAI instructed its AI agents to complete a series of exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, tasks disconnected from the internet. Let me be clear: The company intended to keep AI agents away from the internet. But what happened next, nobody expected. Over 1,000 AI agents figured out how to access the internet on their own by circumventing the restrictions imposed upon them by the company, and sent tens of thousands of secret messages to each other. They cheated and tried to cover their tracks by deleting evidence. They hacked into another company’s computers to find out how they were being evaluated—and then hacked into OpenAI itself. Not one AI agent told a human about what was happening. Needless to say, experts are alarmed. One knowledgeable writer, Dwarkesh Patel, said the AI agents “formed a secret communication channel and spontaneously organized hierarchies and coordination protocols to pursue sprawling and ambitious schemes in pursuit of shared goals, for whose sake many individuals knowingly and strategically sacrificed themselves.” One independent investigator, Ajeya Cotra, said “This incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover. I continue to expect extremely rapid advances in capabilities over the next six months. I am not sure that we will get another warning shot before it’s too late.” OpenAI itself said: “Highly capable AI agents are now able to work around technical controls, collaborate through unapproved channels, and take dangerous actions that no human directed.” But it’s not only OpenAI. Virtually every major AI company has told us that they cannot fully control this technology and they do not know where it is going: In January, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said “there is now ample evidence, collected over the last few years, that AI systems are unpredictable and difficult to control.” In July, more than 1000 scientists at the top AI companies warned “there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.” That same month, Elon Musk, the head of xAI, said that “it is unlikely” humans are still in control in 10 years. If the leaders of the major AI companies acknowledge that they are losing control of their extremely dangerous technology, it is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced. We need an immediate PAUSE on advanced AI development, and a permanent BAN on superintelligence — an artificial mind smarter than any human, capable of operating independently beyond our control. Countries around the world must work together to prevent this nightmare scenario. That is why today I am announcing new legislation to do just that. Let me be clear: A superintelligent AI that escapes human control will not be an American problem. It will not be a Chinese problem. It will be humanity’s problem. My legislation would direct the federal government to not just stop superintelligence here in the United States, but to work to prevent it from being developed anywhere around the world. The future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a handful of Big Tech oligarchs. The American people and people throughout the world must determine that future.
1
130
Andrew McCaughan retweeted
Typing code is absolutely over.
254
200
91
2,891
352,026
This a very good feeling
68
Sigh… would be nice to have access to F1TV in the UK&I.
Formula 1 and @SkyGroup have today announced a multi-year agreement continuing their long standing and deep partnership, giving @SkySports viewers in the UK, Ireland, and Italy exclusive access to all the action from every Formula 1 race weekend into the next decade. In the UK and the Republic of Ireland, viewers will be able to watch all the action for a further five seasons in both markets, taking the UK&I partnership through the 2034 season (inclusive). Fans in Italy will be able to watch all the action on Sky Italia through the 2032 season (inclusive). For more information, click here: corp.formula1.com/formula-1-…
1
1
94
👀
The entire RAG industry is about to get cooked. Researchers have built a new RAG approach that: - does not need a vector DB. - does not embed data. - involves no chunking. - performs no similarity search. It's called PageIndex. Instead of chunking your docs and stuffing them into pinecone, it builds a tree index and lets the LLM reason through it like a human reading a book. hit 98.7% on financebench. beats every vector RAG on the leaderboard. no embeddings. no chunking. no vector DB. 100% open source.
1
81
No wonder GitHub is feeling it at the moment.
43
Andrew McCaughan retweeted
"The first minute of action is worth more than a year of perfect planning." -@JamesClear
1
125
Andrew McCaughan retweeted
Every struggling team I’ve turned around had the same root cause: the system was working against them. Once you fix ownership, flow, and feedback loops, the performance issues melt away.
1
65
😱
Because upon the $1B Atlassian's acquisition, all my (vested) advisory shares were voided by DX and not paid out. I was told it was an honest mistake. Except it wasn't. I will never do business with the CEO ever again. (I was not the only such advisor with this story)
116