Radu Constantin retweeted
Polska nie powtórzy błędów innych europejskich państw, nie będzie też za nie płacić. Twardo bronimy granicy przed nielegalną migracją, mamy własną politykę azylową (nie przyjmujemy wniosków), deportujemy tych, którzy łamią polskie prawo. W kwestii bezpieczeństwa będziemy bezwzględni. To usłyszeli ode mnie liderzy Europy w Brukseli.
Radu Constantin retweeted
Announcing Gemini 4 Argon, our new frontier model.
Argon is built to sustain deep reasoning across complex, long-horizon workflows and delivers frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense.
We’re also expanding the model’s output token limit to an industry-leading 1M tokens.
Argon is currently rolling out to a set of trusted cyber defenders in the Fairwind Program, with broader availability as soon as possible.
Radu Constantin retweeted
Introducing Gemini 4 Argon, our new frontier model, rolling out to cyber defenders starting today, and more widely as soon as possible. I am really excited by the progress we have made here. Argon is priced at $2 in and $10 out during introductory pricing!
Radu Constantin retweeted
Firefox 157 drops today, bringing back Compact Mode, this time with its own dedicated setting.
During early testing many of you shared that you didn’t want to lose density in the new design. That feedback directly impacted this release. 1/3
ALT Zoomed in Firefox browser showing compact mode against a light peachy purple gradient background
Radu Constantin retweeted
Nu avem bani pentru bursele sociale, nu avem pentru ajutorul de handicap in Bucuresti, dar avem bani pentru Buzoianu care si a mai luat un secretar de stat, pe Flavia, sotia lui Hossu.
Explicatia cu sunt capitole diferite, bugete diferite, tine fix la atatia oameni cati sunt acum la protest la Cotroceni. Cand tipi ca n ai bani de asistente medicale, de burse sociale sau de ajutoare de handicap stai in mortii tai in banca ta si nu mai cumperi nici pixuri.
Bai, fix scroafa urcata in copac sunt astia! Hai, mult a fost, putin a ramas!
Ana Maria Itoafa
Radu Constantin retweeted
Cum a gasit Oana Gheorghiu experienta la finantatorul lui Nicusor Dan, e uluitoare femeia! – at Dobroeşti, România
Radu Constantin retweeted
>let's switch to Rust!
>use Claude to move from Zig to Rust
>over 200 bugs currently reported
>no longer releasing regularly every two weeks
>version 1.4.0 keeps getting delayed indefinitely
Is this the power of Claude and Rust rewrites?
Radu Constantin retweeted
A new issue of my weekly AI newsletter is out:
AI adoption in S&P 500 firms
Testing of detection tools for AI-generated text
[OpenAI] Safety and alignment in an era of long-horizon models
Have Chinese AI models caught up to the US frontier?
[Google] Towards demystifying the creativity of diffusion models
[Explained] A hardware-level tour of how LLMs generate text
Leaning Book. Subscribe to receive an email when this happens.
[Microsoft] ResearchStudio: AI co-author, from research problem to final publication
[HuggingFace] Kimi K3 model overview: 2.8T parameters, MXFP4 quantization, and what the open weights mean for the community
True Positive Weekly #170 open.substack.com/pub/aiweek…
Radu Constantin retweeted
A new issue of my weekly AI newsletter is out:
[Ars Technica] Hackers can use 9 of the most popular AI tools to assemble massive botnets
A new look at AI’s Impact on jobs: Firm-level AI spending and workforce adjustment
HackerRank open sourced its applicant tracking system: How hiring is becoming a luck filter
[OpenAI] Separating signal from noise in coding evaluations
[Model] DeepSpec: DeepSeek open-sourced the software stack behind fast inference
[Nature] Generative AI creates delicious, sustainable, and nutritious burgers
[Explained] What happens when you run a CUDA kernel
[Tool] miles: an enterprise-facing reinforcement learning framework for LLM and VLM post-training
True Positive Weekly #169 open.substack.com/pub/aiweek…
Radu Constantin retweeted
The Zig crashout is great. Andrew is in the wrong, but everybody wins. It's much better when everyone's position (and vision, philosophy, etc) is known rather than being hidden under corporate or HR speak.
We need more of this, not less.
Radu Constantin retweeted
Good reminder to everyone who is always like "what does it matter if everyone gets a mind virus just ignore it"
Okay but then you ignore it and suddenly you're allergic to meat because they spread genetically engineered tics because "meat is bad"
It's always a slippery slope!
A peer-reviewed paper published last year in the journal Bioethics by two professors at Western Michigan University School of Medicine argues that it is "morally obligatory" to genetically engineer ticks to spread alpha-gal syndrome, a permanent condition that makes you violently allergic to red meat.
The paper is called "Beneficial Bloodsucking."
Their argument: if eating meat is morally wrong, then preventing the spread of a disease that forces people to stop eating meat is also morally wrong. Scientists should gene-edit lone star ticks to enhance their ability to carry alpha-gal syndrome and expand their range into urban environments to infect more people.
They call this a "moral bioenhancer." They frame releasing genetically modified disease-carrying ticks as a "vaccination" that only "infringes" on your bodily autonomy rather than "violating" it. The distinction, apparently, is that a tick bit you instead of a government official holding you down.
Alpha-gal syndrome is not mild. The CDC estimates up to 450,000 Americans are already affected. Cases have surged 100-fold in the last decade. Symptoms include anaphylaxis. There is no cure.
Alpha-gal cases are exploding across the United States. The lone star tick's range is expanding far beyond its historical territory. And two academics at a medical school published a paper arguing this is a good thing that should be accelerated.
At what point do we stop treating papers like this as fringe academic exercises and start asking whether anyone is already acting on them?
Radu Constantin retweeted
Most of the Zig "hate" I've seen is just fun n' games. But even so, having an anti-Zig stance is completely understandable.
- still in beta after 10 years, unstable
- break code almost every release (wonder if they'll rewrite I/O again, again)
- anti-ai policy regardless of code quality
- good PRs blocked due to that policy
- moving off GitHub with a holier-than-thou attitude... while the engineering reasons were understandable, the political bookending was nonsense
- call GitHub engineers monkeys and losers then backtrack when you receive backlash
- their whole comptime duck typing thing is rough. no traits, no interfaces, errors buried in generic bodies. good luck to ya.
Zig's largest user has to fork Zig to ship at a reasonable pace, and when they try to push a change with 4x faster debug compilation, Zig doesn't accept it.
So let's not pretend the Zig "hate" is unwarranted. There are plenty of reasons for it.
It isn't unexpected that the focus of the Bun Rust rewrite is on the anti-Zig side more than anything, since the internet loves to hate. What is unexpected and unfortunate is that leadership within Bun hasn't tried to steer the conversation away from that at all.
There are so many positive and interesting takeaways from this and I'm not really seeing any of them pushed as the primary message.
A positive thing that hasn't been talked about at all is how far Bun came thanks to Zig. And even if you dump it now, its meaningful for how good Zig was to even build a product to this point and impact by any metric. I would've loved to see anyone in leadership say this.
On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programming languages used to be LOCK IN, and they're increasingly not so. You think the Bun rewrite in Rust is good for Rust? Bun has shown they can be in probably any language they want in roughly a week or two. Rust is expendable. Its useful until its not then it can be thrown out. That's interesting!
There's been a lot of talk about memory safety and no doubt Rust provides more guarantees than Zig. But I'd love to see a better analysis of why Bun in particular suffered so much rather than take the language-blame path. How could engineering as a practice been more rigorous to prevent this? What were the largest sources of crashes other programs should watch out for? How does Rust prevent them? How could Zig theoretically prevent them? That's interesting.
I know the official blog post hasn't come out yet from Bun. But they're smart enough to know that that PR would stir up controversy the moment it opened, or they should've been. And plenty in the company have been tweeting and writing about it. Its somewhat telling to me in various dimensions what they chose to talk about first.
I tend to think I'm pretty good at corporate PR/comms (especially when it comes to developer audiences) and I think appealing to the negative is never the right long term strategy; it does work to get short term eyes though.
Radu Constantin retweeted
“Vibecoding”, i.e. ~hands-off usage of LLMs to rapidly generate code without regard for the actual code’s contents, for novel applications, can literally never be non-slop, because—as I’ve described before—there is not enough bits of information content in prompts to express the user’s exact desires in sufficient detail, and the desired solution is not expressed in training data (due to the problem’s novelty).
Only a sentient human developer can relate to another human user to determine what is desirable, and design the software such that it accomplishes this desirable outcome, and carefully verify that it is doing that, rather than something else (potentially undesirable).
This is true even for the combinatoric space implied by the training data, for instance if the novel problem is merely novel in that it combines pieces of existing solutions. There needs to be a guiding force to know what to combine and how.
The more detailed the prompt becomes, the more human oversight (the more human-guided round trips with the LLM), the closer it becomes to actual code (i.e. detailed execution instructions for a computer).
