Keith Nothacker retweeted
Someone discovered a new Amazon AI feature that summarizes what it knows about you and I am crying of laughter
Keith Nothacker retweeted
We are now entering into an era where any product can be created exactly to a consumer's preferences & needs.
I vibe-fabricated a dog door with a wifi-controlled lock, perfectly to the specifications & design of my house.
I know nothing about metal fabrication or electrical engineering.
It's now getting manufactured and delivered in 2 weeks -- for almost the same cost if I bought a mass-produced item off-the-shelf.
Keith Nothacker retweeted
Mike Tomlin showcases his Minecraft city that he’s been building for a decade:
Keith Nothacker retweeted
I used GPT-6 Astra to break an unsolved cipher to one of Napoleon's generals that had gone unread for 217 years.
What makes this impressive isn't actually the codebreaking, but that Astra completed the entire multi-modal workflow in ~6 hours from a single image and goal.
1/6🧵
Keith Nothacker retweeted
2019: “GPT2 is groundbreaking in two ways. One is its size, says Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s research director. The models “were 12 times bigger, and the dataset was 15 times bigger and much broader” than the previous state-of-the-art AI model” theguardian.com/technology/2…
Keith Nothacker retweeted
Next time you worry about AI taking your job realize firewood used to be a quarter of GDP
Via @NatBullard
Keith Nothacker retweeted
Andrej Karpathy literally built the neural networks running inside coding assistants.
He taught the world deep learning at Stanford. He ran AI at Tesla.
If he feels “dramatically behind” as a programmer… that tells you everything about where we are.
The confession here is that raw intelligence and deep technical knowledge no longer guarantee mastery. The new stack isn’t about understanding transformers or writing elegant algorithms. It’s about orchestrating a zoo of stochastic systems that nobody fully controls.
Karpathy’s list is revealing: agents, subagents, prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations. That’s 15+ new primitives that didn’t exist 18 months ago. Each one evolving weekly.
The mental model problem is real. Traditional engineering gives you deterministic systems. You write code, it does exactly what you wrote. Now you’re managing entities that are “fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing.”
His “alien tool with no manual” framing is exactly right. We’re all reverse-engineering capabilities in real-time. The documentation is always out of date. The best practices from 3 months ago are already wrong.
The magnitude 9 earthquake isn’t coming. It already hit. The aftershocks are the new normal.
I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.
Keith Nothacker retweeted
Pose control with nano-banana is shockingly good.
Upload characters + a sketch of a pose and ask to combine.
Prompt: "take the anime man and woman in the first image and put them in the poses of the stick man in blue and stick woman in red. erase the stick figures"
Keith Nothacker retweeted
Tesla’s Robotaxi service in the Bay Area was significantly more affordable than competitors for a short 1.36-mile route in San Francisco.
The Robotaxi fare was only $0.84 more than a bus fare. This is just day one.
Keith Nothacker retweeted
"[video game] as a community theater production" may be one of the most delightful Veo 3 Fast prompts
Please enjoy, in order: GTA, Pokemon, Mario Kart, The Witcher 3, Stardew Valley, Tetris, Mortal Kombat, The Sims, & Death Stranding(!)
Yes, the whole prompt was the one above.
Keith Nothacker retweeted
Payroll for engineers should not be penalized by the tax code. If you pay an engineer a salary, you should be able to deduct that salary just as you can the salary of a lawyer or accountant.
Seems obvious and yet!
Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)
news.ycombinator.com/item?id…
Keith Nothacker retweeted
Small businesses and homeowners in San Francisco: permitting is about to get easier.
Today, we announced reforms and legislation that will make permitting faster, simpler, and more transparent.
These ordinances will cut red tape, save time and money, and finally make our permitting system work for the people it’s supposed to serve.
Here are some examples of what this means in practice:
➡️ No more permits for sidewalk tables and chairs—putting $2,500 back in the pockets of small businesses and saving them valuable time.
➡️ No more permits and fees to put your business name in your store window or paint it on your storefront.
➡️ No more trips to the Permit Center to have candles on your restaurant’s table.
➡️ No more rigid rules about what your security gate must look like so businesses have more options to secure their storefronts.
➡️ No more long waits or costly reviews for straightforward improvements to your home, like replacing a back deck.
➡️ And we’re getting rid of outdated rules to give downtown businesses more flexibility with how to use their ground-floor spaces—because if adding childcare centers and gyms will help bring companies and employees back downtown, we should support it.
In addition, every city department involved in permitting will track timelines and publish them online. We’re building one system—simple, accessible, and focused on the customer.
And we’re not done.
In the coming months, we’ll roll out a consolidated permit application and bring more of the process fully online.
When we make it easier to open a business, improve a home, or invest in our city—we don’t just support individual success. We fuel our city’s economic recovery.
We attract more customers, more residents, more small business owners—and with them, the revenue and energy that San Francisco needs to thrive.
Learn more about the initiative at sf.gov/permitsf
Keith Nothacker retweeted
Updated paper by physicians at Harvard, Stanford, and other academic medical centers testing o1-preview for medical reasoning & diagnosis tasks: “In all experiments—both vignettes and emergency room second opinions—the LLM displayed superhuman diagnostic and reasoning abilities.”
Keith Nothacker retweeted
The @USChamber sounds the alarm about the effect of tariffs on small business, which are responsible for 1/3 of all imports by value. The Chamber is requesting an automatic exclusion from the new tariffs for any small business importer, automatic exclusions for all products that cannot be produced in the U.S. or are not readily available from domestic sources (e.g., coffee, bananas, cocoa, certain minerals, bespoke industrial inputs), and for a process to be established for businesses to expeditiously obtain exclusions in certain situations. Full letter: uschamber.com/assets/documen… Cc: @NeilBradleyDC @SuzanneUSCC
Keith Nothacker retweeted
FYI: The new tariff rules won’t hurt China long term.
They’ll kill the honest U.S. importers—and hand the market to those who:
- Lie on their invoices to pay less duties
- Fake their country of origin
However, there is a fix.
We need to pair this policy with a simple enhanced enforcement framework.
1. Ownership Chain
If you want to sell into the US:
- Disclose the full ownership structure down to the individuals—not just the LLC. No pass-throughs, no fake directors.
2. Compliance Risk Score
Build a model that automatically flags high-risk shipments:
- Declared invoice value vs market average (by HTS code)
- Unusual routing patterns (China → Vietnam → U.S.)
- First-time importers moving high volume
3. U.S. Person Accountable for All Imports
Every container should be signed off by a U.S. citizen—a certified importer.
That person certifies:
- Invoice value
- HTS code
- Country of origin
If it’s fraud, they should be criminally liable - real consequences.
Honest importers would love to play by these rules, because they are FAIR.
Keith Nothacker retweeted
Every state in the union should pass a law that any seller on a digital marketplace MUST have a verified American address and must pay all applicable taxes and fees, otherwise it’s illegal and THE MARKETPLACE will be liable for $10k per instance
THIS will accelerate the growth of our online sellers faster than anything
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Keith Nothacker retweeted
Last January, I noticed something peculiar in my 2yo’s bedroom that - after a year of obsessive reporting - led me to a profound cosmic revelation about what’s even possible in our universe. A 🧵.
ALT The moon with a rocket landed in its eye. The most iconic shot of 1902 sci-fi film Le Voyage Dans La Lune.
Keith Nothacker retweeted
A recently published study in DADR tested the feasibility of an automated remote contingency management program for treating heavy alcohol use. Participants found the @BACTrack system to be easy to use and helpful in reducing alcohol intake.
tinyurl.com/mtkte4tk
Keith Nothacker retweeted
I have helped run an AI-based entrepreneurship program for years, written papers on the econ of AI, and follow the field quite closely. Nonetheless, I am *shocked* by how good OpenAI's new chat (chat.openai.com/chat) is. E.g., you can no longer give take-home exams/homework.
Keith Nothacker retweeted
@YaleMed researchers recently conducted a field study of the BACTrack Skyn, a new wrist-worn alcohol biosensor, and provided it to 47 heavy-drinking young adults to wear under conditions of daily living. Read their results: bit.ly/39AgHiQ