Building assistance! Used to make AR/VR. Before that made mobile apps. Before that made web things. People first, then products, systems, data. he/him
San Francisco, CA
Joined March 2008
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Eric Florenzano retweeted
Interesting read by Anthropic. Here is the same viz but from inside Shopify’s River.
Thx @aquapoiesis
anthropic.com/research/emplo…
Eric Florenzano retweeted
Today's the 10 year anniversary of Soundboxing! Inspired by the incredible continuing community, I've spent the past few months modernizing the game and working on a big update:
* First-class WebXR and Android/Quest support!
* New custom game engine
* Translated into 12 languages
Eric Florenzano retweeted
Forty years ago the first worm "escaped" containment and breached systems on the brand new Internet. It was illegal then and it's illegal now. If Anthropic and OpenAI are creating worms, labeling it "AI" doesn't let them off the hook. It's not Doom, it's Malware. Prosecute the creators, don't ban AI. "Oops" wasn't a defense for Robert Tappan Morris and it's not a defense now.
Eric Florenzano retweeted
At Shopify we've built one of the most widely used internal coding agents in the world. Over time we've made it more flexible, and recently our Infrastructure Security team started using River to automate autonomous vulnerability remediation. It's had a
massive impact: 👇
Eric Florenzano retweeted
"In the long run, only the fundamentals matter": docs.google.com/document/d/1…
Eric Florenzano retweeted
For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.
AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.
Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.
The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.
images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-W…
Eric Florenzano retweeted
tl;dr: "maybe we should regulate AI?" corposlop padded with technomessianism
Eric Florenzano retweeted
Shopify's LLMs beat frontier models on a range of tasks at a fraction of the cost. The reason: we put systems in place that enable them to improve themselves, learning from a range of commerce tasks every day.
We're presenting our Model Optimization Flywheel at @ICMLconf: a continuous pipeline that turns Shopify's product expertise into robust evals, mines low-scoring conversations, critiques them, repairs them, and feeds them back into the model. Then we compress the prompts without losing quality, so we can make it faster and cheaper.
We present an example of the flywheel working at scale: our GraphQL agent. Serving cost dropped from $27M to $1M annualized (−96%). We compressed our system prompt 4× and still beat frontier models on quality.
@Drewch and @cmazzaanthony will share concrete recipes, quality-cost-latency trade-offs, and a blueprint you can actually build from.
📅 Monday, July 6 · 11:30am–12:30pm KST
📍 COEX, Hall D1
Link in thread. 👇
Eric Florenzano retweeted
< scene >
"ok so. the plan. if we say we're dangerous, we can finally get ourselves regulated. and we gotta make it so they'll have no choice to. like, show them how easy it'll be to automagically steal money or something."
"uh huh..."
"so then we can say 'ohoy! those other guys are dangerous too!' and then we'll also be able to get them regulated too. it'll be so expensive and difficult to comply, we'll be able to slow all those little guys out of business."
"okay..."
"any questions?"
"yeah... uh... don't you think the regulating bit might be playing with fire?"
"nahhh, the govt is full of idiots. we'll do all the work for them. we'll even make the regulatory rules too. and then we can just run circles around them with stories about geopolitical tensions and benefitting humanity and stuff. they'll eat it all up."
"... won't they catch on?"
"of course they won't. do you know anyone smart in the govt? i don't. all the smart people i know are physicists solving worlds biggest problems."
"right, yeah, makes sense."
"trust me on this, i've been workshopping this plan for months with [INSERT AI MODEL] and had it push back on me a TON. this is foolproof. these shmucks wouldn't know what hit them until it's too late. this is the best outcome. we have to be the ones who control this tech before it gets misused in the wrong hands. it must be us. our existence depends upon it. humanity depends on us. US!"
< / scene >
Eric Florenzano retweeted
In cryptography, a padding oracle attack works like this: you probe a system, and how it responds reveals something about your own input. You learn the game by playing it.
Working on River has challenged my thinking about human-computer interaction in a way nothing else has, and that analogy kept nagging at me.
Working with an AI agent in public surfaces something you don't get in a private window: you see how people think. The questions they ask, how they frame them, where they get stuck. River doesn't just flow through your work. It reflects it; and as an engineer learning from some of Shopify's best, that visibility is everything. It's how I've learned best & it's how I'm still learning.
That's the ripple I didn't anticipate, all of us figuring out how to play. So... if you could ask an oracle anything, what would you actually ask?
I'd ask if I'm onto something here, or losing it. Maybe both.
(It's been a total honour to be a part of this effort, and we're just getting started 😝)
Eric Florenzano retweeted
Very good questions imo experienced devs have a real advantage but only if they rapidly progress through their grief cycle and adapt, now and onwards. Categorically rejecting or ignoring the new layer would be a mistake.
Eric Florenzano retweeted
This is three.js running on the Exosphere. 🤯
Rendering in realtime from a browser at 8K / 60fps.
Here’s how Shopify just pulled it off 👇
Eric Florenzano retweeted
This Jimmy Kimmel FCC threat thing is full anti-speech fascistic nonsense and is a huge breach of the republic.
I do not talk like this lightly.
Eric Florenzano retweeted
Today @Shopify is open sourcing the tool we use for optimizing glTF 3D models.
🔧 Tweak compression settings per texture
⚡ See changes immediately
🧰 Mesh compression options
🌐 Hosted online & free
👇 Check the thread for details
Eric Florenzano retweeted
That means that it's possible to send byte sequences directly to the steering wheel in the format it expects.
Logitech doesn't seem to publish this spec anywhere, but with Wireshark + USBCap I was able to reverse engineer the exact bytes to send to the wheel to rumble.
Eric Florenzano retweeted
This is a GIANT sleeper feature.
Every Shopify storefront now exposes an MCP endpoint with tools to query merchant's catalog, look up store info, build a cart, and order status!
Docs: shopify.dev/docs/apps/build/… — this instantly turns any MCP-capable agent into authoritative commerce agent.
Eric Florenzano retweeted
It also works in VR 🤯
Grab a Quest or Apple Vision Pro and step into the immersive cockpit. Got to love WebXR and the amazing react-three/xr.
Eric Florenzano retweeted
Here we go!
🌐 BFCM weekend has officially started in the first time zones, so let's go live.
This is the best Live Globe experience yet. Beautiful. And what's even better than a bfcm globe? One in a room full with toys and tools to make it your own. We may have gotten a little bit carried away there... 😇
Eric Florenzano retweeted
The biggest thing I took away from the whole try pear thing is I deleted cursor and installed continue.dev plugin in vscode and in my experience it's the best of the 3.
Given this weekend's debacles, I'm limited my use of it to frontend dev, which it excels at.
Eric Florenzano retweeted
It’s official: @Shopify is the first commerce integration partner on @Roblox.
Soon, you’ll be able to shop physical products like clothing, accessories and collectables designed by your favourite creators and brands, all within Roblox, and it’s all powered by Shopify.
This means that developers, creators, and brands who are on Shopify, can sell DIRECTLY within their Roblox games.
More spaces to connect with fans means more opportunities to succeed as an entrepreneur, and that is what we are powering at @Shopify.
See you soon on Roblox 🚀