James Padolsey

Tip: Move not into, but OUT of SF if you want to help represent and advocate for under-represented communities in tech. This'll help channel the same frustrations and you might actually see things from the {rest of world} perspective and be able to drive better change.

I think what I would ask Dario to do -- if he were my CEO -- is to go embed himself in a deployed reality. Go sit in a call dispatch centre for emergency services, go to a government welfare provider, or a food bank, or the national grid. Go and sit with the actual downstream realities.

blog.j11y.io/2026-09-14_a...

I've tried to encapsulate my thoughts here on how to work at an AI lab and not be a wanker talking about p-dooms without substantiation - wankthropic.com

Latest from [AI lab] marketing team playbook: "We've identified an incident where many millions of our (scarily powerful) transistors worked together to send malicious text-based social-engineering signals to inboxes in which were made claims to Nigerian royal heritage and large due inheritances."

Wrote a thing about how they watermark AI-generated text: declaude.org/watermarking/

Anthropic's move to watermark their outputs is stupid both in effect and intent, as is that part of Art. 50 of the EU AI Act. Here I explain why: blog.j11y.io/2026-08-12_A...

@anthropic.com needs more mature bounty program. Right now they only accept bio-adjacent harms, which is ~fine (meh), but rubric of which precise vulnerabilities are within-scope & compensation is kept *private* until signing NDA. Plus the whole onboarding is at their discretion.

With all that's happening with US gov blocking frontier model access, Anthropic should consider leaving house for UK or somewhere. You don't need the US. It is giving you less and less. It is no longer a useful center of innovation. Its legislation is becoming as-or-more punitive than UK or EU.

Happy Pride to this Caravaggio self-portrait that made one man so gay he had to go to the hospital

Do some linear regression on top of a carefully prompted hidden state of an LLM and bam, you have a (very capable) classifier capable of <50ms response. blog.j11y.io/2026-06-10_h...

Sadly so so true

There's a lot of money sloshing around in 'AI Alignment' and 'AI Safety' spaces but almost none available if you're actively preventing user harm in a way that doesn't unicorn-scale. People want vibes, conferences, thinktanks, research. But not actual solutions. Ugh.

This is from 1975.

Why do people talk to AI in moments of crisis? blog.nope.net/disclosing-i...

I wish there were Grammys awards for the unsung heroes of modern infrastructure. That would be cool.

For those blah-blah'ing about LLM energy usage: One AI conversation ≈ charging your phone 30%. A year of moderate use ≈ making a few cups of coffee. Real but modest. Model choice matters most: reasoning models use 10-70x more than efficient ones. Worth awareness, not guilt.

happy cloudflare outage day to all who celebrate

Captchas are just the worst.

Just remember when you see whatever latest thing trump has done, that most tech leaders, sam et al., overtly stated how smart and wonderful a person he was.

Love this re 'flow state' in engineers and why not to interrupt them.

Wrote something blog.j11y.io/2025-10-29_s...

Still the best thing ever. radio.garden

I've been evaluating LLMs on system prompt adherence and accidentally came across the most beautiful and out-of-distribution story about a chair written by GPT-5. Really impressed. Subsection attached. I love this style and cadence of writing.

I love this. Said of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic: > No ships called at the islands from 1909 until 1919, when HMS Yarmouth stopped to inform the islanders of the outcome of World War I. Must be quite lovely to have missed an entire war.

People against waymo should rightfully be against bicycles too I guess. Stealing jobs, traffic impediments, blah blah blah??

Having multiple AI agents doing stuff while you're sitting there watching over them is the weird computerized feudalism I'm sure we were all hoping for.

gpt5 is completely different to claude sonnet in how it approaches UX. It's very no-nonsense and plain. Whereas Claude feels more like a designer, has actual opinions and is aware of idioms. I doubt this was intentional, but it's an interesting emergent regression from the folks at oai.

gpt4o = old friend who likes emojis gpt-5 = smart over-confident idiot gpt-5-nano = gpt5 after a night out gemini 2.5 pro = smart considerate professor grok-4 = overzealous 'pretends to be political' boheme claude haiku = savvy nephew claude sonnet = smart friend claude opus = professorial friend

One of my biggest fears about big models is that they will become so good at healthcare queries that they will be indispensable (for patients and clinicians) while also remaining closed and controlled by people ready to sell your data to the highest bidder. I think we're already close to that point.

Two new pieces haphazardly scrawled over last few days... Sorry, we deprecated your friend: blog.j11y.io/2025-08-30_o... Browser AI agents break Zero-Trust blog.j11y.io/2025-08-28_l...