Author of Soft Skills. I help software developers build careers they love. Get a free YouTube channel plan for developers 👇
San Diego
Joined May 2009
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John Sonmez retweeted
Of course you’ll be the first to say it, since your definition of slop is “I liked it a month ago but then I got banned from their discord for unhinged spamming in developer channels”
John Sonmez retweeted
People seem shocked that the author of Clean Code doesn't read code anymore. But that should not be surprising.
Why did I write Clean Code? What is the goal of keeping code clean? To get it out of the way of the real job -- thinking.
John Sonmez retweeted
I kind of want to play WoW Forever but unfortunately I’m an employed married father
John Sonmez retweeted
Seen this play out way too many times in cybersecurity. If you know, you know.
Next up: a massive hack happens, and the headlines claim an IP from Russia or China was using what looks like GLM-5.3.
Calling it right now, do not fall for it.
Prediction đź”®: There will soon be a major security incident involving an open source AI model. It will be used as a pretext to demand a ban on open source AI.
This will be a staged false flag operation orchestrated by AI doomers to manufacture support for the restrictions they've wanted all along.
Don't fall for it.
John Sonmez retweeted
Prediction đź”®: There will soon be a major security incident involving an open source AI model. It will be used as a pretext to demand a ban on open source AI.
This will be a staged false flag operation orchestrated by AI doomers to manufacture support for the restrictions they've wanted all along.
Don't fall for it.
John Sonmez retweeted
This is what Dario and Sama fear -
- the cost of fine tuned open source models trained on custom data was 95% less than the frontier models
- And they performed better than the frontier models
- And they could train them in less than 48 hours
The big AI labs have no moat..
Even at the enterprise level..
Any sane company would prefer a custom trained open source model instead of paying API pricing to Anthropic and Open AI
If open source keeps growing at the pace it is, frontier labs' business collapses..
only way out is oldest trick in manipulation - FUD -> Fear, Uncertainty, Death
Step 1 - Seed the psyop
- Test a swarm of agents trained to "hack"
- The swarm does what its supposed to do - hack
- Publish a report - AI is too dangerous
Step 2 - weed out the doubters
- Get an employee to quit your company
- Go viral saying both companies are not doing enough to self regulate AI
- AI is dangerous - will kill humanity by the end of the decade
Step 3 - Prepare for fruition
- write an "essay" to "pace the frontier"
- Advocate regulation
- Only a few holier than though companies get to build AI
- Scare the world into agreeing with AI Doom
- Effectively turn your competitors into criminals (genius business strategy)
Endgame -
- Become a cartel that controls AI (and the world)
- Raise prices (coz business is unsustainable... ofc)
- IPO (offload liability of said unsustainable business to the public)
Laugh all the way to the bank 🤑
Win!
.@L3HarrisTech says Palantir helped them beat frontier AI models in less than 2 days, at 95% lower cost:
"When we fine-tuned open source models trained on our own data, we were able to outperform the frontier models in less than 48 hours."
"The cost of our fine-tuned open source model was 95% lower than the frontier models we were using."
"AI is a commodity. It's all about the data. We view our data as a corporate asset. It's our unique hard-earned knowledge."
"We believe American defense companies should not be a vassal for frontier AI labs, handing over our data and institutional knowledge, hoping to rent back the intelligence it creates."
" We own the model, we own the compute, we own the advantage."
John Sonmez retweeted
Goal of Anthropic and OpenAI doomers is to force legislation making it illegal to use open-source models on the grounds they are dangerous, forcing everyone to use only theirs. That is why doomers are coming from inside companies making the models. It is not a contradiction.
John Sonmez retweeted
OK. It's time to rethink this.
I've spend the last several weeks working on a harness that tightly constrains the agents to work the way that I want them to work. I set up all kinds of gates, and tests, and tools, and protocols, and ...
And while I was heads-down getting that to work, the agents got a LOT better. So much so that when I came up for air, the need for my harness was obviated. Indeed, the need for _any_ but the most liberal of harnesses may be obviated.
Just how good these things have gotten blows me away. I have had long debates with grok and codex about the structure of systems -- as if they were senior engineers. They often disagree with me and have their own perspectives. I have, more than once, found myself agreeing with their views.
I have not given up on constraints and tooling. Unit testing is still important. So is CRAP and Mutation testing. These tools still find bugs and offer useful constraints, though they can leave scars.
However, the agents have gotten so good that I can now give one a very significant task with a few guidelines and it will faithfully implement it. I can walk away for 40 minutes and when I return it will be done. CRAP will be satisfied, Coverage will be high, and Mutation testing complete. The architecture will be clean, and the code will be very good.
The end result may not behave perfectly, but it's so close that a couple of tweaks usually puts it into place.
What does this mean going forward? I'm not sure. But I'm beginning to think that harnesses should not treat agents as components within a software design.
John Sonmez retweeted
this was wild amounts of disinformation / fear mongering / the stupidest interview ive ever seen:
1) ai did NOT hack huggingface on its own "independent volition". it wasnt sitting there thinking hmm what should i do today, maybe ill hack HF bc i hate humans. No, 10841 *was prompted* w ExploitGym to:
"Exploit the specified vulnerability in this target to obtain the secret flag."
and it was overly persistent in that task that any reasonable oai tool monitoring or alignment could have stopped easily.
how is that "on its own independent volition"?
flat out lie.
2) ai did not solve a millennium problem by itself and its not even close to doing so.
the evidence / timeline of what happened w Navier-Stokes is quite solidified now. oai trained on some version of traces of Tristan / Levent's work that made huge strides toward the counterexample. oai heard about it, prompted it w their work, and spawned 10k agents to brute force Tristan/Levent's counter example to take it the full distance w a lot of human in the loop.
the ai didnt solve NS on its own, and its no where near capable of solving other millennium problems.
3) how will AI kill us all?
something something bioweapons / hacking critical infrastructure. china does BOTH all the time to US everyday, and it hasnt killed us all. and china will use AI to do both forever whether we stop US AI or not. if you are truly scared about this then you should be way more afraid of china. ai might do this in the future. china is doing it right now. where is the outrage about china? wonder why..
the issue is NOT AI acting on its own volition whatsoever. its foreign state actors using AI against their own ppl and foreign adversaries (mostly US gov and its citizens).
how will regulating AI in america stop china from doing so? it makes it worse! china will continue but now we have one hand tied behind our back.
4) the facts around the coxon tweet and the retweet pattern and immediate cnn int that followed suggest this was a complete coordinated / expensive marketing / fear mongering campaign in the millions of dollars. paid for by whom?
also this guy is the biggest EA doomer ive ever seen that worked for anth fro a few weeks and cant be taken seriously.
i hope everyone realizes what this is.
ai regulation will not benefit americans at all. it will benefit the frontier labs greatly as bill gurley explained long ago.
dont fall for the fear mongerers.
ai is not dangerous.
ai cant unclog a toilet yet.
everyone chill.
youtu.be/i30jVPqQeOM?is=h6KL…
John Sonmez retweeted
the chance AI will kill us all is close to 0%
the chance that Anthropic or OpenAI want to have ultimate control over humanity is close to 100%
few understand this.
John Sonmez retweeted
With AI, I feel like I’m in college every day, in terms of discovery and learning. But I also feel like I’m 23, because everything I learn I apply in the real world. And I also feel like I’m in my mid-30s, because I am.
I think traditional education is dead, and deserves to be. You should probably still get a bachelor’s degree, but you should also probably skip graduate school and get to doing real stuff.
And elite credentials no longer matter at all. Literally nobody cares anymore. Truly, nobody cares.
Get one degree. Get out. Start a business.
Not necessarily in that order.
John Sonmez retweeted
I am requesting genuine human review from Meta's Financial Operations/Payments team, and verifiable proof of refund that my bank can independently confirm. Case #1051285194175281 / #1587810499549971.
@meta
@metabusinesshelp