Professional Social Engineering - https://xitter.cf/t.co/U36jAu7qZj Past: graphics programmer at Snapchat, @CesiumJS, and indie game dev @MoveOrDieGame
Ithaca, NY
Joined November 2013
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Omar Shehata retweeted
I'm an avid user of coding agents, but there's something I've been struggling to put into words which I think is encapsulated well by these screenshots. these are two PRs to fix the same bug: the first is a +627 / -291 line change, from Claude, the second is a +3 / -2 line change, from Matt, a human (we closed the former and merged the latter).
there's a certain coherence in a human's mental model of the codebase which makes some bugs trivial for humans and still really difficult (or token-expensive) for agents. this goes beyond just better memory of the codebase. humans will build a mental map and a probability matrix for which parts of the codebase are most likely to surface a particular bug, given the codebase's coherence, and start by tackling those before going another layer deeper.
without matt's contribution we might well have merged the +627 / -291 PR, in turn losing coherence, and becoming more token-dependent as a result. after you lose coherence it's game over.
i've found myself pair programming with agents on tiny PRs after a huge amount of independent research / agent swarms to tackle a given problem, and I think this is pretty effective; you can combine the things that agents are naturally good at (parallelization, verifiable problems) with your human coherence. often this results in 15-20 PRs, not all of which get merged.
Omar Shehata retweeted
i am releasing a limiting belief that wholesomeness cannot be viral ❤️
I really don't understand this logic. Imagine someone in 2015 saying "I could have paid someone to write that program for me. I can't believe I wasted time learning how to do it"
Omar Shehata retweeted
I quested to the Haven of Light, to PDKU PlzDontKillUs aka PIDOKU
I encountered a lot, from monsters to angels to devils, from fake cult allies to real people in my “Us” vs “Them”, and documented it here thevatstack.substack.com/p/i…
ah fuck it. PDKU was a wondrous experience, and easily the best time i've had in my life. the critique on the organisers, the funding, the venue, the mentors, the events and related happenings are valid and outsiders have the right to discuss them. the berkeley rationality scene might be toxic, a sex cult, the people involved accused of rape, pedophilia, all that.
but that was not PDKU. when i look back on it, i remember the fellows. i remember sitting on the astroturf, pressing myself in a corner with my lunch, timidly waiting until someone would at last approach me and strike up a conversation. looking up, sun bright in my eyes, and a minute later one of the cutest nerds i have met in my life is surprised when i tell him no one here seems to know what the ccru is.
i remember, at a party, dancing with a fellow i had never spoken to before. a week later, dancing with him again, although i did not know his name. i remember telling him afterward, drunk and happy, that i loved how he moved, and i loved how we did not need to speak to understand each other. we communicated through dance.
i remember a girl who fed me pizza when i was too high, and afraid, and i remember she took care of me. i remember her laughing about my ridiculous breakfast. it was an apple chunked up, in a bowl of vegan protein chocolate milk. i remember our first kiss, captured on camera by a small audience.
i remember singing along with basketball shoes, a song by bcnr, a song that breaks my heart, a song i hadn't sung in years. but it was okay because the funniest boy on the planet was singing along with me, drinking a soylent.
i remember a boy and his guitar. i remember wanting to be those strings, wanting to be touched. for those fingers to make music with me.
i remember partying under the stars, on the roof, in secret rooms, in the shower, kissing everyone. running barefoot with my friends at night, knowing that if i died then, it would be heavenly.
i remember being in love with everyone. that's it, really
Made my first Wikipedia contribution this weekend - on Ithaca's water supply page en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php…
Anatomy of a Fall - good movie. Feels the same genre as "gone girl" where you're presented with information in sequence and keep updating who you the is guilty, like a real trial (and I like that this movie depicts scenes from a trial)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatom…
Omar Shehata retweeted
In each case:
- You can theoretically get the same result either way.
- We're removing constraints, letting the agent work with a more raw material.
- We're forcing the agent to attend to more details, spending tokens/context/attention. This is why these all seem silly to me.
I keep forgetting I was technically employed by Wikimedia for a summer
(was fun to get access to all the internal systems, not much else happened)
Omar Shehata retweeted
new album 'Leave It in the Sand' out everywhere now 🤍 writing these songs over the past three years was an exercise in trying to feel more hopeful about an increasingly hostile world. I hope listening to it offers a tiny bit of the same feeling. pleasuresystems.bandcamp.com…
Omar Shehata retweeted
I'm ready to be wrong on this, but the idea that assembly is, or ever will be, a good language for agents feels ridiculous. It forces the agent to attend to a huge number of extra details. Same problem as with humans! Why spend limited attention and context on that?
Omar Shehata retweeted
They do want to build something. It’s just not digital. They want to build a house with a pool, a car that matches their style, a wardrobe they look great in, some accessories that express their personality, a fridge full of good food and maybe even a family to share it all with.
Sure you can earn money building digital tools or content or whatever and then buy those things but that’s a gamble.
So until they can prompt AI to “build me a house that looks like [this] and has these [features]”, it’s a risky abstraction they don’t want to waste time on when they can earn money towards their goals with skills they already have.
here's the tension - when i told some people "you can use agents to build anything you want now", they literally don't give a damn, because they never wanted to build anything in the first place
but i don't agree we should then look at that and say "people lack imagination"
it's actually the classic question of pain killer vs vitamin. for the most part, AI feels like vitamin right now. people are living their lives just fine without it
when they look at how AI people talk about AI, it's either a tech bro posting screenshot of 10 monitors running 50 terminals shipping absolutely nothing useful, or "look you can book a whole vacation trip with this agent" while many people don't even have the money or time for a vacation
the problem is not people's imagination. i don't think people are responsible for imagining problems they don't have
i think the problem is that people making AI are all silicon valley multi-millionaires who have a very different set of problems from the mainstream consumers
this is not meant as criticism to AI builders (i am one myself) - i just think it's worth pointing out the disconnect and the fact that we still have a long way to go to figure out what real problems AI can actually solve for a lot of people as a pain killer not a vitamin, and nail both the messaging and the actual products to deliver the value
(everyone knows these series of posts is coordinated, but no one is saying "psyop" because it's clean - the origin of the firepower is known)
I'm gonna be a mentor!
Story time:
I did 1 year of uni and hated it
So I skipped every class so I could stay up all night writing code until 5 am
It first started off when I was 12 and made my first sweet taste of internet money: I made a minecraft server, then learned to code to write server plugins and make a unique experience, and made a bunch of money selling in-game rewards
Then I realized the power I had unlocked with code
My ADHD brain started using these powers the best way a 13 year old kid would know how, by being a total hooligan and prankster.
I have a lot of stories of the shit I got up to which should be its own post, but one example is I wrote a script that would spam my teacher or friends in math class with thousands of text messages which would make their phone vibrate like crazy and disrupt the entire class
Needless to say I was engaging in hooliganism and tomfoolery to the highest degree
I was just an ADHD kid who learned how to code and needed an outlet to direct all that creativity and curiosity
Fast-forward to my 1st and only year of uni, within a few weeks I realized I had made a grave mistake
I thought I would be so happy to take CS and being surrounded by ppl who loved coding and computers as much as me
Instead, I was surrounded by people who couldn't care less, who were only taking CS because their parents told them to, people who were paying all this money to struggle to write a for loop in python when I taught myself this at 15 for free so I could write a script to scrape all my teacher's phone numbers from my school's directory site for my stupid pranks
Not saying there's anything wrong with that, just that I had been psyopped by higher education propaganda that uni would be the best years of my life and I was going to benefit so much from being surrounded by "like-minded peers", when the reality was not that at all
So what ended up happening is that I would wake up at 2pm (basically missing all my classes/lectures) and would write code until 5 am, working on my own projects and teaching myself what I wanted to learn 10x faster
That's when I met @CryogenicPlanet and he introduced me to the world of startups and silicon valley etc
All of a sudden I realized I could direct all that ADHD energy into building something cool and there was all these people in this place called San Francisco who were doing it too and the rest is history
So the academy is the school I wish I went to. I just needed the space to work on my projects and learn at my own ADHD speed and be surrounded with other kids with the same level of ambition and adults who successfully directed their curiosity into building something cool
So I'm proud to say I'll be a mentor at The Horowitz Andreessen Academy, and I hope I can help guide some young people who were quite like me into following their curiosity and working on something they find cool
Btw my fiancée @zeldapoem is helping build it and she's super cool you should follow her, she dropped out of high school at 16 to reform education and was literally born to work on something like this
