Jake Gold

Not driving while not coding was not exactly how I imagined the future.

My default assumption is that this apparent backdoor in Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is not actually a deliberate backdoor. But people are certainly clever enough to have "oops, this is just an RL artifact" ready as a cover for a deliberate backdoor. And most importantly: model backdoors are a serious risk.

Predictable if you admit that bad actors can be clever too. jacob.gold/posts/why-i-...

AI bots like Muse, Dots, etc are interesting because they seem like the future of computing and yet the current products are, in a weird way, kinda useless. These products are in the "toy" phase, where most of the usage is idiosyncratic and relatively low-value. It may just be a matter of time.

Over a year since I started running each of my coding agents in yolo mode inside isolated containers. The "leaders" actually move quite slowly relative to what's possible.

This post is so useful and wise that I've been referencing it for over 20 years. slashdot.org/comments.pl?...

I’d like to work in one of these second floor offices.

The NSA must be disappointed to be losing this PHP exploit.

Companies that are still hiring devs the way Google popularized in the 2000s are going to have a really bad time. The outliers are even more extreme and it's even harder and more important to be able to identify them.

Cycling between 10+ coding agents doing related work.

Coding agents as compilers is a good analogy. When I started, there were devs that insisted anyone using a high level language like C was basically a vibe coding noob generating garbage assembly. Those devs would've been much better off finding cases where their deep assembly knowledge did matter.

“For the immortal gods are wont to allow those persons whom they wish to punish for their guilt sometimes a greater prosperity and longer impunity, in order that they may suffer the more severely from a reversal of circumstances.” Consequences have a way of catching up to bad actors, eventually...

Nothing Bluesky PBC does matters if the Bluesky app fails to reach mainstream scale. And if it reaches mainstream scale, everything else, including monetization, is easy. So @toni.bsky.team here's your scorecard so far:

It's exhausting talking about AI all the time, and yet it's hard to imagine how such a big change to computing could be any different.

The simple, safe, and scalable solution was likely abandoning the monorepo requirement. Instead, they're reinventing source code management from first principles. At least it'll sound good on their resumes!

If you’re going name your company Zoox, you may as well make your vehicle equally as ugly.

It’s not Taco Bell. It’s Cantina.

Alright. Deleted my (shockingly) controversial post. I'm very happy share my critical and honest feedback if it's at all useful in helping Bluesky succeed. But I don't want to just upset a bunch of people for no purpose.

Dog pile me all you want. I just want Bluesky to succeed in displacing X, Reddit, and Meta and we're not on track. The first step is bering honest about where we are.

A big secret of both Stripe's and Google's success was making boring products technically interesting to work on.

When will I learn. When will I learn!

Why is Claude Code so good? Because it can run Bash like a superhuman programmer.

This new small codebase isn't large and modular enough to make running many coding agents in parallel very effective. Really feels so slow and boring not to have 10+ agents to switch between. How am I supposed to get into the zone?

First write it in Go to ship a high quality version quickly. Then rewrite in Rust so people know you're still cool.

Over the last 2.4 years, coding agents have aged this post like fine wine.

"I'll just write this part of the code myself, I'm a big boy!" as I launch vim for only second time this week.

Ignoring that it's DHH, this is really just a typical example of how many developers are generating code now. Sometimes it's totally fine and other times its kinda scary. Always a huge advantage for the rest of us who continue to maintain a strong understanding and control over our generated code.

I've called this the 'The Kobayashi Maru' interview question for programmers. There's no "right" answer only painful trade-offs which makes it very revealing.

Something to know about the .bsky TLD when it happens is that it will, like all gTLDs, have to follow ICANN's policies. You can't technically "own" any domain but for most intents and purposes you effectively do. The .bsky domains will be like almost any other domain you might register today.

I've had to re-learn this lesson so many times I'll never forget it: shipping = growth You can get lucky and have external forces help you, but the thing you can actually control is how much you ship.

Please stop anthropomorphizing urine. It cannot "run" down your leg. Urine has no legs.

For this reason, foreign spy agencies would be incompetent not to have people on the Caltrain in the Bay Area. If I manged a spy agency, I'd have a whole team just doing wifi hot spots and recording screens with hidden cameras all over the world.

Everyone says "I am jev" no one asking "how is jev?" I genuinely feel bad for the team, they spent 2 years in stealth to build something others cloned in 2 weeks... This is why we launch quickly, folks.

Most unbelievable scene in Disclosure Day wasn't the aliens. It was the: 1. Over the shoulder bread holder 2. Stealing a chunk of plain bread 3. Insufficient toasting 4. Dedicated butter dish 5. Butter dish stacked on bread Spielberg is an alien that doesn't understand toast.

Better benchmark: ask 10 experienced devs what they use

Really enjoyed The Odyssey But surprised and a little disappointed to say that the Ralph Fiennes movie The Return did the final scene much better. www.imdb.com/title/tt1986...

It's weird that Slack hasn't added support for ACP + diff viewer etc. So that using agents via Slack wasn't such a huge downgrade vs using them with a purpose-built interface. Slack is already fine for non-devs but I don't see how devs live with generating code, it would slow me down so much.

What? Agile did not speed up software development by 10x. With respect, that’s just a silly claim to make and there’s no data that supports it. People actually following Agile (which almost no one did) probably moved slower. Open source libraries sped things up but probably not even by 10x.

San Francisco Startup Rule #5823: you're not allowed to judge a person for ditching out on an important meeting if they're going to see The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm the day before it stops playing at The Metreon.

“What if we flip the b around?” Smart using Astra so that it’s resistant to prompt injection.

Okay Jev had less than two months in the sun. I should’ve predicted weeks.

I knew there was a reason I had an extra cup today, I just didn’t know why. Until now. Turns out I was celebrating.

If AI is as big as the Industrial Revolution that’s pretty scary The Industrial Revolution took hundreds of years to unfold, giving civilization time to adapt. AI will absolutely not take hundreds of years. We’re all just hoping it takes at least decades.

trust or no trust?

This is great. PLC being centralized is a legit weakness in the Atmosphere's story and this goes a long way to mitigating it. I still want @dholms.at to be the PLC CEO, regardless of whether it makes any sense or not. We had a deal, kinda.

Jensen got into GPUs for the love of the game. Literally.

FYI, ChatGPT Voice mode is finally good enough to tutor you in Japanese! (and probably other languages) I've tried every version since it was released and it didn't work well enough. It's still not perfect, but the endless patience and lack of embarrassment make it incredibly productive.

I feel exactly the same way about the kind of LLM-based AI we have today. But the AI x-risk argument is about what happens when we have "real" AI that can actually think like humans but a million times faster. There are no real experts on this and yet it does seem worth worrying about in advance.