Rami Khalil

dgx spark arriving this week. shipped directly from nvidia. upgraded my lab to gigabit wifi. the benchmarks i'm about to publish will make some people very uncomfortable.

Thrilled to announce the Monitor tool which lets Claude create background scripts that wake the agent up when needed. Big token saver and great way to move away from polling in the agent loop Claude can now: * Follow logs for errors * Poll PRs via script * and more!

i am still in shock that Qwen 3.5 27B dense on a single RTX 3090, a $900 GPU, one shotted a game challenge that 120B MoE at full precision on $70K+ production hardware could not. this is leading me to doubt if it was a fluke. so i am going to reproduce it. i will test 27B dense Q4 on my single 3090 again paired with Hermes Agent and have it reproduce the results. after that i will test the same dense 27B but unquantized because if Q4 can one shot something that 120B full precision cannot then i wonder what dense 27B unquantized would do. dense models with all parameters active on every token might matter more than total parameter count for agent coding. if this reproduces it changes how i think about what hardware you actually need. this is not letting me sleep well since yesterday. i will report back.

Conferences are useful for this imo

Terence Tao spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study - no teaching, no random events of committees, just unlimited time to think. But after a few months, he ran out of ideas. Terence thinks that mathematicians and scientists need a certain level of randomness and inefficiency to come up with new ideas.

My wife calls me, panicked. The call is from her number, and her voice is unmistakable- that’s my wife. ‘Babe, our son is hurt. He got in a bike wreck. I’m at the emergency room but they won’t take our insurance and I need cash to get him help. Please send me 3000 dollars as soon as you can, he’s really not doing well.’ Me- ‘Wow, that’s scary. Tell me our passphrase and then I’ll send the money.’ Her (it) - ‘What? What passphrase? This is your wife, our son is hurt. Send the money now!!’ Me- ‘I’ll call you back. I don’t believe that this is my wife. If it is, I’m sorry, but we discussed this.’ The number? Spoofed. Easy to do and there’s no way to tell if a phone number is being spoofed aside from hanging up and calling back to confirm. The voice? AI generated. Easily done. A few seconds of audio is all it takes to create a realistic audio deepfake. What can you do? 1) Create a family safe word or passphrase. Ours is definitely not ‘Keep Going’ although we considered it. Discuss the passphrase far away from phones or any recording device. This is as analog as possible. Don’t forget that the trigger for the passphrase is just as important as the phrase itself. So instead of asking ‘what’s the safe word?’ have a separate triggering question. For example, you could say ‘I’m eating banana cream pie’ and this would trigger your spouse to respond ‘purple velvet pillows’ if that’s the safe word. Make it fun, silly, and easy to remember. And DON’T WRITE IT DOWN. 2) Cognitive security is an essential skill in 2026. Assume every image and video you see online is fake until proven otherwise. Expect scams and spammers, and be pleasantly surprised when it’s not. 3) Figure out a backup communication option with people who you absolutely need to be able to reach. Don’t just rely on a phone number for communication. Have redundant, ideally encrypted methods of communication with family. What did I miss? I think (hope) Nikita is wrong on the timeframe- agentic bots like Claude bot are impressive but not quite ready to flood the phone lines in just 90 days. But I think it’s going to be a huge problem by the end of the year. I already get dozens of increasingly realistic spam calls and texts daily- it’s only going to get more annoying. Have a plan to keep your family and your finances safe!