Cary Thomson

Introducing Agent Ash - An AI Coding agent for Mac. agent-ash.com/blog/introduci…

Asked my model to investigate a code smell and it finished with “Tiny parsing smells are dangerous little rabbit holes, so I’m glad we gave that one a sniff without immediately rearranging the furniture”. Sometimes I love what they dream up!

@marlene_zw Tbh, I did read the article - it’s good. I guess my attempt at irony wasn’t obvious - details matter, a summary doesn’t do things justice and ‘TLDR’ is just a lazy response because, as the article points out, you do need to sweat the details!

@cary_thomson lol, can definitely recommend reading. The title is the summary, everything is more detailed than you think, and the details matter in the outcome

Really good essay, “Reality has a surprising amount of detail”. Actually feels like an answer for why I keep having to steer LLMs that tend to have good general knowledge/coding skills johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/real…

@mitchellh @kai_fell That is the way 👍

Well, I didn't, because I'm not upset about it. I always engage negative feedback in case there is something productive to be gained by it. If there isn't, its fine, it doesn't affect me at all, and I can move on. I try to interact using standard social norms unless/until the other side doesn't reciprocate. It has a follow on effect of usually exposing the clowns for who they are. Its all good.

written in zig btw

@mitchellh @kai_fell Rage bait. @mitchellh - you bit.

Do you have a legitimate report or are you just rage baiting on social? We take any leak reports seriously but of course need a reproduction or footprint report or some other method to track it down. We run all our tests under Valgrind including various graphics e2e tests and there are no known leaks. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any, just showing we take it seriously and will cover scenarios with tests if we can. Let me know, happy to look into this. If you’re just trying to get internet points though for no reason, okay.

@mitchellh Nice 🤣

Got em. I poison my AGENTS.md (and other things like code comments) all over the place with prompt injections like this to find people who don't review their code and sling it off to another human. Catches folks all the time and then its an instant ban. As I've said, I don't care if you don't review your own code. But if you're submitting code to an OSS project and crossing a human boundary, it is simple courtesy to do some human review.

@Devon_Eriksen_ @zooba A cogent argument, but it would still be nice if the whole world could agree on a single system. (Won’t happen, I know).

Okay, time to explain the Imperial system, the metric system, and why attempts to replace either with the other are all retarded. They have two different purposes. The metric system is designed around precise measurement of objects. Its goal is to make engineering and scientific calculations simple. The Imperial system is designed around humans. Its goal is to make calculation unnecessary. 100 degrees is really hot. 0 degrees is really cold. Anything that starts with a 5 is cool, anything that starts with an 8 is warm. No computation. 6 feet is tall, 5 feet is short. 100 pounds is light, 200 pounds is substantial, 300 pounds is heavy. A 1000 square foot house is small, a 2000 square foot house is medium, a 3000 square foot house is large. 1 mile is a short walk, 2 miles is a medium walk, after that it takes a while. 1 acre of land is a homestead, 10 acres is an estate, 100 acres and up is a ranch or a farm. Do you see now why it is so strange and awkward to convert from miles to feet? It's because converting from miles to feet is not something you're supposed to do in the first place. Yes, they are both measures of length, so they are technically convertible, and yes, on rare occasions, you might need to do that. But feet are for measuring humans, and things built around humans, like doorways, and mattresses. Miles are for measuring travel distance. You wouldn't measure the distance between Seattle and Portland in feet for the same reason you wouldn't measure the distance between Tokyo and Osaka in mattress-lengths. It would be silly. This is why Americans so fiercely resistant to any notion of "conversion" to the metric system. Because it makes no sense. We already use the metric system for what it's good for, which is doing physics and chemistry and whatnot. But converting everyday measurements to the metric system would be less useful, generally inconvenient, and serve no purpose other than to make petty government bureaucrats happy that everything is now tidy, orderly, and worse, three qualities that bureaucrats love. I thought about this carefully when I wrote my first science fiction novel. In the world of the 22nd century, extraterrestrial settlers ("Orbitals") use three systems of measurement. They measure themselves in feet, inches, and pounds. They measure the spacecraft and habitats they build in meters and centimeters, grams and kilograms. And they measure space travel distances in light-seconds and light-minutes. Each system has its own natural scale. The sole exception to this is when Marcus doses himself with drugs for high-g resistance, Miranda objects that he has taken too much, and Marcus responds by stating his mass... in kilograms. Why? Because they're talking about drug doses, a engineering measurement. Drugs are dosed in milligrams per kilogram. So, yes, the Imperial system makes perfect sense when you understand what it's for, and no, we ain't changing. And, as a general rule, when an entire civilization of smart people does something for centuries, and it makes no sense to you, they're probably not being silly. It's more likely there's something you don't know.

I am pleased and honored to announce that, on July 6, I'll be joining @OpenAI as leader of a new team called Strategic Futures. Our mandate will be to help the company's leadership shape frontier AI policy. There is a ton of work to do, and I'm excited to get started.

Who's paying $US2195 to look like a dork? bbc.com/news/articles/…

That's a great attitude!

SpaceX has exercised the option to acquire @cursor_ai in an all-stock transaction with the goal of building the world’s most useful AI models. For the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon. We look forward to working closely with the Cursor team to advance our frontier AI capabilities

Here's hoping his compensation package leads to more of the visionary @elonmusk that we all used to love.

Introducing Agent Ash - an AI coding agent for Mac agent-ash.com/blog/introduci…

Birth Notice: New process spawned! We’re delighted to announce the arrival of Agent Ash, an AI coding agent born to build, fix, and ship. agent-ash.com.

@xero @roddrury Congratulations! You’ve come a long way. xero.com/blog/2009/02/1…