I’m not sure how to feel about all this. On the one hand, my talents have never been more valuable, as AI has amplified my talents without (yet) subsuming them, but on the other hand I feel like I may have forever lost the permission to engage in a certain form of craftsmanship.
I recall circa ~2000 FIRE’s Harvey Silverglate visiting Tufts University for a conversation about the topic that forms the organization’s name. This occurred contemporaneously with a moment when the campus publication with which I was associated was under comprehensive assault which ranged from the student senate continually trying to defund it to activists regularly bulk stealing paper copies of the free publication from distribution points.
Ideally those charged with the safety, security, and efficacy of systems would proactively monitor and analyze leading indicators that hint of tragedy to come. Second best, then, is at least to have a framework, workforce, mandate, and will to diagnose the root cause of a tragedy once manifested, in the hopes of preventing not just similar ones but also understanding what other hazards lurk just below the surface.
I tried to beam some positive energy into the world on Wednesday with a video of Little Kitty reveling in a fresh feather attached to the wand. Having posted a clip to social media, I then headed out for an afternoon’s skiing, but when I later pulled up Facebook in the lodge I was, alas, greeted not by happy reactions to feline frivolity but rather a clip from CNN of ICE fatally shooting Renee Nicole Good. This perspective seemed fairly damning in certain regards, to a degree I found myself tempted to react immediately, but instead I put my amygdala in jail to cool down, resolving to allow more of the story to clarify before sharing a take.
Three Years Of LLMs: The Run-Up, Realities, Risks, and Road Ahead
So many genies are long out of the bottle and just can’t go back. Three and a half billion years into an unceasing arms race on this ball of rock, that is just the inescapable nature of things. Authoritarian regimes episodically make a run at controlling these genies but ultimately fail because the controls prove too horrifying, the temptations toward abuse too great, and the complexity ultimately unmanageable. We would do well instead to take a cue from the domains of security engineering and distributed systems, accept an imperfect universe, and strive to have fault-tolerant systems where the design leverages compensating controls and operators regularly perform root cause analysis on failures. There are more choices available to us than authoritarianism and anarchy.
As the world grows ever more complex and the leverage of various products and services to help us navigate this complexity becomes ever more compelling, the temptation to outsource our thinking becomes enormous… but all it takes to realize the risks of such dependency is to accidentally close Google Maps on your phone when beyond the reach of cell towers. I gather most people have experienced this particular horror at least once yet most of us still likely behave in a way that presumes being saturated in high-bandwidth/low-latency reality with access to our favorite magic most of the time. Occasionally crazy stuff happens when S3, GitHub, CloudFlare, or CrowdStrike takes a dump but then a day later we’re all back to worshipping at the alter of efficiency no matter how much tail risk imperils our way of being. Nuclear weapons, anybody?
Watching the rising clamor around the Venezuelan boat debacle, I feel reflexively tempted to perform the “Orange Man Bad” ritual, because the situation strikes me as legitimately bad both in principle and precedent, to say nothing of the capriciousness and hypocrisy, but I don’t imagine we will have a useful conversation that transcends present tribalism without zooming out to an historical arc that long predates either Trump presidency.
Rule number one when getting kidnapped is really quite simple — never get in the car.
Of course, resisting lawful arrest by a duly appointed agent of a legitimate government may sit near top-of-list for dumb ways to die, too — try not to do that either.
Deconflicting these two constraints under the present regime — left as an exercise to the everyman.
Imagine a world where a distant actor can’t so readily turn your house upside down.
Twenty years ago, at the outset of over a decade’s service at the department recently re-branded from “Defense” to “War”, I swore an oath to the Constitution of a country that day-by-day I find increasingly difficult to recognize.
We don’t speak enough about path dependency. The order in which you learn things can, sometimes literally, make or break you.
Listening today to Gavin Newsom’s March 2025 interview with Charlie Kirk filled me with grief. At times when we most need open, vigorous, and respectful debate, so, too, does the temptation to demonize and quash dissent prove greatest.
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
That aphorism, coined Goodhart’s Law, sprang to mind as my feed filled with hot takes on Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s Twitter boast that “~40% of daily code written at Coinbase is AI-generated” which he coupled with a charge “to get it to >50% by October”.
I encourage all engineers in 2025 to aggressively experiment with AI in their workflows and yet find mandates like this hella cringe.
