Ian Hoffman

@JonathonInkin @StevenSt90666 @ChristopherHale That is a semantic quibble. No one is asking you to judge his soul. You are being asked to condemn his behavior, not vote for him, not support him as a leader, etc. Leave his soul to god, sure.

@StevenSt90666 @ChristopherHale I will condemn his actions but I will not condemn him as a human being. Only God reserves that particular right.

No Christian can defend this godless man.

@karpathy I had to stop reading after the German lady makes one too many completely pointless quips about how amazing the US army is.

Had to go see Project Hail Mary right away (it's based on the book of Andy Weir, of also The Martian fame). Both very pleased and relieved to say that 1) the movie sticks very close to the book in both content and tone and 2) is really well executed. The book is one of my favorites when it comes to alien portrayals because a lot of thought was clearly given to the scientific details of an alternate biochemistry, evolutionary history, sensorium, psychology, language, tech tree, etc. It's different enough that it is highly creative and plausible, but also similar enough that you get a compelling story and one of the best bromances in fiction. Not to mention the other (single-cellular) aliens. I can count fictional portrayals of aliens of this depth on one hand. A lot of these aspects are briefly featured - if you read the book you'll spot them but if you haven't, the movie can't spend the time to do them justice. I'll say that the movie inches a little too much into the superhero movie tropes with the pacing, the quips, the Bathos and such for my taste, and we get a little bit less the grand of Interstellar and a little bit less of the science of The Martian, but I think it's ok considering the tone of the original content. And it does really well where it counts - on Rocky and the bromance. Thank you to the film crew for the gem!

@pmarca The idea that there is some true self we can access via long hours of meditation? Probably a minor narcissism. But I’d hope that doesn’t mean you never feel guilt, joy, etc, and then wonder why you’re feeling those emotions - which is itself a form of introspection.

TLDR There is no inner self, you're chasing an imaginary concept, the end.

@zeeg When you’re building a new product (even within a larger organization), the important thing is finding PMF, not code quality. These agents let you generate reasonable — yes, not amazing — code at an insane velocity. You can clean up (with the better agents we’ll have soon) later.

im fully convinced that LLMs are not an actual net productivity boost (today) they remove the barrier to get started, but they create increasingly complex software which does not appear to be maintainable so far, in my situations, they appear to slow down long term velocity

@edandersen @JeffBohren No, but developers ship bugs all the time too. The question isn’t “who takes responsibility” but how to build the tooling to prevent and recover from bugs. Obviously the degree to which this approach is acceptable depends on how mission-critical your software is.

@JeffBohren AI can't take responsibility yet right?

Reading code, especially code you didn’t write, is 10x harder than writing code These people AI generating 90%+ of their code *are* reading it all, right… or are they just dumping the difficult verification work on their colleagues in PRs?

@PaulRoundy1 @ChrisMurphyCT Yeah, maybe a few more days of bombing and the uprising of the Iranian people will happen. That seems really likely to work.

@ChrisMurphyCT It's not that they don't want regime change, it's that they don't want to implement it themselves. The Iranian people have to do that, and it's not inappropriate to follow this path.

I was in a 2 hour briefing today on the Iran War. All the briefings are closed, because Trump can't defend this war in public. I obviously can't disclose classified info, but you deserve to know how incoherent and incomplete these war plans are. 1/ Here's what I can share:

@sciad @stylewarning What many older engineers have is judgement. Sure, they might not be fully up to speed on the new hotness — after all, fads come and go — but fundamentals are constant. That takes time to build. Once you’ve made enough bad decisions, you come to appreciate good judgement.

I’m starting to understand why there aren’t any software developers past their forties

@badlogicgames The clanker is not magic - you need to guide it towards the correct solution. But you don’t need to understand your codebase on a micro-level anymore. I’m looking forward to better tools for understanding code than reading code or asking AI - something visual, maybe.

many of my peers who've also sucumbed to the slot machine claim they are learning so much new stuff via their clankers. then i take a look at their public repos using stacks i know and i just scratch my head. you've learned nothing. you have learned what an agent thinks is good for that stack and problem. Sometimes not even that as "lAnGuaGeS aNd StacKs Don't MaTter AnyMore" and "I doN'T reAd CoDe AnYmoRe" you have zero baseline to judge whether it's any good. you are kidding yourself. truely.

recommended reading. had this on my reading list for a while, finally found time. it's a small study, ymmv. would love to see one with senior engs. they great atrophy has begun. arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245

@thisdopenose Comparing Morrissey and Jerry Seinfeld is rather insulting to Morrissey. If anything M was in the LD role in The Smiths.

People talk about Morrissey not being part of the reason why The Smiths were so amazing the same way they talk about Jerry Seinfeld not being the genius of Seinfeld. It’s just factually and objectively not true. You don’t have to like either of them but come on

@softwaredoug I haven’t seen a lot of literature yet on post-processing tool results (there’s compaction, I guess).

@softwaredoug One minor thing I’ve found to help is to de-dupe search results across tool calls. You replace the duplicate results with a pointer, basically text like “[Removed duplicate result {id}].” In evals this shrank context and very slightly improved quality.

We've known for a long time that simple search (grep, BM25, etc) can work through agents. The question is more doing this in a way that doesn't eat through your tokens / create context rot softwaredoug.com/blog/2025/10/0…

@uehackler @clashreport Christ, this went from bombing to “boots on the ground” pretty fast. Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t enough for you? Let’s flush all our money down the drain.

German Chancellor Merz on Iran: We are urging strongly that Iran’s statehood be preserved. We do not want to see a Syrian scenario here, but rather we want this state to become functional from within itself. And that is why I also appeal, both in Washington and in all talks with the Israeli government, to create the conditions as quickly as possible for this country to be stabilized, for it to get a democratically legitimized government, and for it to be able to continue to exist as a state. It is a country with over 90 million inhabitants, and we naturally also have a high self-interest in this in order to avoid new refugee flows from the region.

@clashreport This was foreseeable. Maybe he shouldn’t have cheerled the war a few days ago.

@ivanburazin I agree, but: it does make me question whether I still want this career. Maybe I’ll come to enjoy AI engineering as much as traditional programming. I’ve been privileged to have a career I enjoy for a long time and I’m not going to swim against the tide, but still — bittersweet.

I've never seen this before in my career: 28-30 year olds who refuse to use AI coding tools. You show them what they can do augmented (not replaced) with AI and you see in their eyes that they have no damn clue of what's happening. You can't work with these people anymore. Time used to pass over older generations slowly. Now it's passing over us at the peak of our careers. Sadly, adaptability isn't optional at this point.

@TinFoilHatEco @KingWahisi @NathanJRobinson Sure. I hope for the same, I’m just less optimistic than you are. Good luck.

@ihoff1 @KingWahisi @NathanJRobinson Well, I am talked out. I hope for a peaceful transition to a Free Iran. Good luck to you.

US media coverage sanitizes war and obscures the full horror of what we are doing to Iran. In this article I show how the war is far more twisted and evil than Americans understand: currentaffairs.org/news/the-iran-…

@TinFoilHatEco @KingWahisi @NathanJRobinson Again, I think a nuclear Iran is possibly preferable to a failed state in Iran, but I also think a nuclear Iran could have been avoided via negotiation. I think that’s Sachs’ perspective too. The idea that Iran was going to nuke NYC is just fearmongering.

@ihoff1 @KingWahisi @NathanJRobinson Tangible proof? Why do 23 nations operate nuke power plants w/o any enriched uranium? Or, would you like to wait for proof...in the form of mushroom cloud over NYC? Jeffrey Sachs says he prefers an Iran with nukes and missiles. You agree?

@TinFoilHatEco @KingWahisi @NathanJRobinson Same guy: “IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi stated Grossi explained in June 21 CNN interview that the IAEA does "not have … any tangible proof that there is a program or a plan to fabricate to manufacture a nuclear weapon."” congress.gov/crs-product/IF…

@ihoff1 @KingWahisi @NathanJRobinson You believe there is no evidence the IRGC was building a nuke? Are you daft? iranintl.com/en/202601205064

@MoMorganMoProbz @MattBruenig And then there’s the human level: what if I want medical advice from an LLM? I know it’s not doctor-quality. OK. Does that mean it’s useless? Who gets to decide?

@MoMorganMoProbz @MattBruenig One problem is that on a technical level, censoring an LLM is impossible. There’s no way to automatically classify some answers as legal advice, others as medical advice, and others as general purpose. So the effect will be to ban LLMs for most question and answering tasks.

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@Polymarket Well this would be a good way to shoot ourselves in the foot. Put your head in the hole in the ground! Quick!

BREAKING: New York bill would ban AI from answering questions related to medicine, law, dentistry, nursing, psychology, social work, engineering, & more.