Data gaucho. Information retrieval, timelines, knowledge graphs, crowdsourcing, human computation. Author: https://xitter.cf/t.co/iirVQx4GTt
SF Bay Area, CA
Joined April 2009
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Asking Google AI studio to vibe code something and it shows me OpenAI results @GeminiApp
Omar Alonso retweeted
157,240 workers. 167 countries.
They told us who they were, one HIT at a time.
As Amazon Mechanical Turk closes, a final tribute from my Mechanical Turk Tracker and a thank-you to the people behind the data.
410 Gone.
Omar Alonso retweeted
Experience gives perspective. Programming is not dead, and never will be.
It's late September 2026. Sometime in September 1976, just after I entered college, I wrote and ran my first serious program. I have now been a programmer for literally 50 years.
And man, I have seen it *all*. Punched cards to glass ttys on minicomputers to workstations to the earliest micros. I've written business software, communication programs, development tools, games, language implementations, kernel device drivers, graphics libraries, a few critical pieces of infrastructure, and all manner of odd programs for which there is no taxonomy. Coded in a score of languages some of which are now forgotten. I've run over 70 open-source projects and contributed to at least as many more.
Along the way I noticed a few things, and wrote about them, and that made me famous. But I'm not here to write about that today. I'm here to write about what it means to be a programmer and a technologist with the Singularity upon us.
I have lost count of the number of times I have been told "programming is over". You kids may think this is a new claim that came into the world with LLMs. Hah! There's been that kind of talk at every step function in the quality of our programming tools. I first heard it when compilers were replacing hand-hacked assembler in the early 1980s, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if somebody said it earlier when in-memory code replaced plugboards.
One constant amidst all this change is that the intentions in a user's head do not magically turn into executable instructions that a computer can run. Another constant is the mindset of the people who specialize in bridging the gap between wish and algorithm. A programmer is a programmer is a programmer - the tools are secondary.
"But it's different this time!" some people will say, "AIs are superhuman now!" So? What did you think the optimization stage of a compiler was, chopped liver? We've been relying on tools that exceeded human capabilities all along - we built them precisely because our meatbrains could not otherwise keep up with the demands of the job.
It's been a hell of a ride, that 50 years. I've succeeded and failed and succeeded again. Done a lot of work I'm proud of. Built at least a few things that look like they're going to last. None of that goes away because, hypothetically, an AI might have made me faster.
The work is never done, even if the tools can talk to us now. Because intentions still have to be communicated; people who specialize in that and develop right mindset to do it still have a major advantage over people who don't.
If you're feeling depressed because you spent years or decades developing hand-coding skills that are obsolete now? Buck up. You still have the most important asset - a mind that knows how to think that way.
I'm facing the winds of the Singularity with a smile. Because 50 years and I'm still standing - still shipping code that people can use, still learning, still refusing to be paralyzed by the pace of change.
The best therapy for your uncertainty? Get to work on something.
Omar Alonso retweeted
Last year @elunca and myself edited a book that updates my IR book. See here: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/36741…
Omar Alonso retweeted
Schmidhuber: "Well, large language models are far from AGI.
LLMs large language models such as ChatGPT. They are just a clever way of indexing the world's existing human generated knowledge,
such that it can easily be addressed through in a way that humans are familiar with, which is natural language.
That's good enough to facilitate many desktop jobs, for example, writing summaries of existing documents in a particular style, or creating illustrations or an article. And and so on. However true AGI goes far beyond that.
It is much harder, for example, to replace craftsmen such as plumbers or electricians, because the real world, the physical world, is much more challenging than the world behind the screen.
At the moment, the only Al that works well is behind the screen, and it's good for desktop to desktop workers. But but not really for for people working in the physical world."
Omar Alonso retweeted
“Enshittification” Isn’t Real by @being_on_line open.substack.com/pub/a16z/p… // I like this framing a lot...BUT it might be taken the wrong way by the very people who should appreciate it (just because no one thinks narcissism is a positive attribute).
Here are three observations and why the reaction might be "Enshittification":
1. People just want to do stuff. Whether social or spreadsheets they approach platforms with a goal. When platforms change, even in small ways, some people feel a sense of disempowerment. The more expert you are the more you feel this versus "who moved my cheese" lost. The vast majority of people using software will get into a groove and not seek out all the latest and greatest or appreciate the newest and bestest way to do the same old thing (something that is 10% better is really 100% different, we used to say.) Most people using work software learned it and have no interest in being marginally efficient if it increases the chance they will mess up the work for their boss. I can't say enough about the problems that come from disempowering people. I made my share of mistakes in this regard. BUT this is also the way to move technology forward. That's why you need to focus change on empathy but realize sometimes the whole business is to bring people forward to some new place. Moving to a graphical interface was just such a thing. Cloud storage was another. Mobile yet another. There are many products that never changed because of the fear of alienation, so holding on to the old ways can be a disaster.
2. Change is difficult and poorly timed. With a gazillion people using a platform, some percentage of people just aren't in the mood for change right at that moment. This is especially acute for work platforms. We're all familiar with being hit with an update right before a Zoom or right when you flip up the lid and find out there was a restart. Part of this is a "me" thing but the problem is it hits everyone at some point. Couple this with some product change "hey check out our AI thing now blocking half the screen" and you get the above result.
3. Unaligned change is the worst. This is change where it is clear the benefit accrues to the platform and not users. "Try this new thing out" popups or "Good news we changed and rearranged Privacy Settings [to make it harder to change them]" are notorious sorts of changes. This has become especially acute with "growth" and business software taking on the techniques pioneered on consumer platforms. Ultimately when you change a product for the benefit of the business and can't articulate why it has a potential to be good for people, they drive at "Enshittification."
Now there's a whole world of people that say they don't mind change so long as you offer a warning, a timed rollout, and option to keep things the old way either for a while or forever. There's a whole post over how this is almost worse for everyone involved :-)
Omar Alonso retweeted
Will AI write +90% of all code this year?
Anders Hejlsberg (Creator of Typescript, C#): "For certain classes of apps that might be like all of I coded apps are writing 100% of the code. And there's an awful lot of that being written.
Are they going to write 90% of the high quality code on the Internet? I don't know about that. I know that AI could not write our compiler, the Typescript compiler.
It just can't. We've tried it can't do it. And I'm not asking it to either.
I'm not saying it's not impressive. It's wildly impressive what it can do, But I just think there's a long way still to it's doing all of it. And I don't know that we ever get there.
I hope we don't. Because then what's the point of humans anymore?"
For the full conversation, you can search Ander's name on my YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts (link in bio)
Omar Alonso retweeted
Papers should ship with data, code, and validated references. Do that and the AI-authorship panic disappears. Fake results cannot survive verification. Real results do not care who typed them.
[Pangram score: 100% AI]
WSDM Industry Day CFP. Please consider submitting. More details wsdm-conference.org/2027/cfi… #wsdm2027
Omar Alonso retweeted
Announcing Discovery Loop!
I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor.
♾
Learn more at: discoveryloop.com
Omar Alonso retweeted
We created a pitch deck to tell a handful of VC firms about us and what we were up to (a fun experience!). Here’s a few slides about our background and some of the things we’ve worked on from the pitch deck (it was fun putting together the list of people in our teams who have gone on to found a whole range of exciting companies). We are delighted to have selected @radicalvcfund
and @khoslaventures to lead our initial funding round, along with participation from @lightspeedvp, @kleinerperkins, Doerr Capital (@johndoerr), and Alphabet (@Google). We’ll be working with them to close our seed round over the next few weeks.
Tutorial on knowledge graphs data quality at scale: challenges, solutions and applications accepted at CIKM 2026. Joint work with @sfn_mrc and Gianmaria Silvello. See you all in Rome. #CIKM2026 #KnowledgeGraph
Omar Alonso retweeted
📢 Call for Emergency Reviewers for #HCOMP26 / #CI26
We are building a volunteer pool to support the CI/HCOMP 2026 review process.
Completed emergency reviews will be recognized by name on the conference website.
📝 Sign up: forms.gle/JzHD4sHSpzT5u8cV7
Omar Alonso retweeted
Get ready to experience one of the most anticipated rock ‘n’ roll comebacks of our time.
Witness the return of Oasis in “Don’t Look Back In Anger,” in cinemas and IMAX this September.
Omar Alonso retweeted
No matter who you are or where you are
Happy Father’s Day to all the amazing dads out there! 🎉🫶
DESIRES is back. Looking forward to the upcoming edition desires-conf.github.io/2027/ #sigir #www #cikm
Omar Alonso retweeted
Since we're counting model parameters, let me introduce you to a two-parameter model for agentic search that's awesome: It's called BM25. I haven't tried it yet, but I think fp4 will work fine. arxiv.org/abs/2605.10848
Omar Alonso retweeted
The web is disappearing 🕳️
According to a Pew Research Center report, 26% of pages from 2013-2023 are no longer accessible.
But that’s not the whole story.
In a new study published in Internet Archive's book, VANISHING CULTURE, data scientists working with the Wayback Machine have found:
16% have been restored through the Wayback Machine.
56% are preserved before they disappear.
Preservation is the remedy for cultural loss.
📚 Read VANISHING CULTURE free from the Internet Archive
📖 Download & read: archive.org/details/vanishin…
🛒 Purchase in print: betterworldbooks.com/product…
#VanishingCulture #DigitalMemory #InternetArchive #BookTwitter
ALT Infographic titled “URLs Preserved in the Wayback Machine” based on a dataset of 5.4 million URLs. It shows 26% of web pages are dead and 74% are still alive. Of the total, 10% have vanished completely, 18% are endangered (not yet preserved), 16% have been restored through the Wayback Machine, and 56% are preserved. The visual uses a flow-style diagram to show how preservation reduces permanent loss.