Fan of distributed systems. Previously HotDoc, Airtasker, AWS. Green energy afficiando. Opinions are my own.

Joined May 2009
701 Photos and videos
Our profession needs to reinvent our ways of working. Most of software engineering craft - sprint planning, stand ups, backlogs, rfcs, code reviews - was made for a time where the cost of rework was huge, and high risk. We always needed to slow down to speed up. We simply don't live in that era anymore.
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This. Sheโ€™s clearly one of the very best operators in town.
If she wasnโ€™t working for Elon Gwynne Shotwell would be hailed as an incredible success story and the most powerful woman in aerospace. Instead itโ€™s radio silence from the media
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I swear Keir Starmer was Claude Whelan from Slow Horses in another lifeโ€ฆ
Despite Putinโ€™s best efforts to evade sanctions, we will not let him get away with it.
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Doug Rathbone ๐Ÿฆ˜๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ’ป retweeted
white pill for my nerds: 60fps e-ink display a random guy outperformed entire eng teams by developing a pixel by pixel driver for e-ink displays that makes it 60fps. he did that after work for months, launched it yesterday. the future is bright
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Doug Rathbone ๐Ÿฆ˜๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ’ป retweeted
I built ponytail, the senior dev who closes your PR with "no," reopens it himself, and somehow solves everything in a seventh of the lines. don't ask. no skill: 3,629 lines caveman: 1,440 ponytail: 490 same model, same tests, same pass rate. github.com/DietrichGebert/poโ€ฆ
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Doug Rathbone ๐Ÿฆ˜๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ’ป retweeted
This is a *way* bigger deal than it seems... Frontier AI companies will *never* own the frontier again I kid you not... I've been waiting for someone to show this result for like 4 years... this is a huge deal. The short reason: combinations of models will *always* outperform individual models The long reason: this is the gateway to a million times more data... and huge leaps in compute efficiency. The AI scaling laws always win. More in article below ๐Ÿ‘‡
Introducing the Fusion API, the smartest compound model in the market. Fusion achieves Fable-level intelligence at half the price. How it works ๐Ÿ‘‡
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Doug Rathbone ๐Ÿฆ˜๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ’ป retweeted
Marco Rubio finding out he has to be the CEO of Anthropic after it gets nationalized
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Doug Rathbone ๐Ÿฆ˜๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ’ป retweeted
Iโ€™ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true: โ€” As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable. โ€” Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then youโ€™ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldnโ€™t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability โ€” big or small โ€” it is Anthropicโ€™s responsibility to patch.) โ€” A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused. โ€” In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isnโ€™t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropicโ€™s brand as the AI safety company. Itโ€™s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not โ€œserious.โ€ โ€” In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety. โ€” In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. Itโ€™s been very surprised that Anthropic hasnโ€™t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropicโ€™s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community. โ€” The Adminโ€™s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasnโ€™t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority. โ€” Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropicโ€™s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropicโ€™s court.
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Doug Rathbone ๐Ÿฆ˜๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ’ป retweeted
This is really big news. Google introduced the Open Knowledge Format (OKF) - a standardized way to store information in a directory of markdown files. Makes it really easy to make a digital brain that agents can use. These files can serve as a living wiki. You can give agents the ability to query them or edit them. They can interlink. Seems to me this could replace Notion or Obsidian. I can think of so many uses for this. Google's blog post: cloud.google.com/blog/producโ€ฆ An easier to understand explanation is the SPEC.md file: github.com/GoogleCloudPlatfoโ€ฆ I gave those two links to Antigravity and asked how we could use it for any of the projects we're working on. It came up with so many ideas. I would imagine Claude Fable 5 would whip up some pretty amazing things based on this system. Currently creating an OKF library of our pepper garden. It's going to be a fun weekend.
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Doug Rathbone ๐Ÿฆ˜๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ’ป retweeted
We've reset 5-hour and weekly rate limits for all users.
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Someone in the Trump admin has clearly read The Cobra, or Frederick Forsythโ€™s death was faked last year so he could advise the whitehouse.
โ€œAt my direction, the United States Southern Command delivered a swift and lethal kinetic strike to successfully execute Niรฑo Guerrero, the infamous leader of Tren De Aragua, one of the most bloodthirsty Terrorist Organizations on Planet Earth.โ€ - President DONALD J. TRUMP ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ
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Doug Rathbone ๐Ÿฆ˜๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ’ป retweeted
A short history of how we got here, because the chronology is the whole story. January: the Pentagon demands unrestricted use of Claude for autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. Anthropic says no. February: the President orders every federal agency to drop Anthropic. The Defense Secretary bans Pentagon contractors from doing business with them. A rival announces its classified-network deal within hours. March: the Pentagon designates an American company a "supply chain risk" under a statute written for foreign adversaries. A federal judge blocks it. May: the Pentagon signs AI deals with seven companies. Anthropic is not one of them. June 9: Anthropic releases Fable 5. June 12: Commerce issues an export control directive over a jailbreak that, by the government's own account, was demonstrated verbally, came with no written explanation, and involves a capability you can get from other publicly available models today. Two things are true at once. First: Anthropic spent months marketing Mythos as too dangerous to release. Sam Altman said it was "incredible marketing to say we have built a bomb." The Commerce Department has now formally agreed it is a bomb. If you describe your product as a munition in every press release, eventually a government takes you at your word. They wrote the legal predicate themselves and called it a brand. Second: we have run this experiment before. In the 90s the government classified encryption as a munition under ITAR. Activists defeated it by printing PGP's source code as a book, because books are protected speech and floppy disks were arms exports. A t-shirt with three lines of RSA Perl was legally a munition. The controls collapsed because math does not stop at customs. The new wrinkle is the "deemed export" rule: showing controlled technology to a foreign national inside the US counts as exporting it abroad. Which is why Anthropic's own foreign-national employees are now locked out of the model they built. The munition is in the building and the people who made it are not allowed to look at it. The jailbreak is the paperwork. The refusal was in January.
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-mytโ€ฆ
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This is a pretty wild development. Like using Blowfish encryption in the 90s/2000s, the streisand-effect itself may lead to higher usage via VPNs etc.
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Claude models is not affected. We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible. Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-mytโ€ฆ
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Doug Rathbone ๐Ÿฆ˜๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ’ป retweeted
Fable 5 is doing something wild on our FrogsGame post-training task. It trains a weaker model to solve the puzzle, peaks at 68%, and produces the only ~10x improvement we see across the benchmark. It spent 17 hours, 25M tokens without human in sight. 34% pass@1, while every other frontier model averages under 4%. We will publish a more detailed analysis soon.
Model shaping is still a craft of a few. That's what AI agents are for: learning it and doing it for everyone else. As a part of FrontierSWE benchmark we built a 20-hour post-training task on @tinkerapi and found the real bottleneck is research intuition.
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The sheer cost of Fable makes even an AI optimist like me fear for the future of humanity. Not because its so great, but because you'll only experience its power if you give a small island nations GDP to Anthropic every month. Everyone else will live in Sonnet hell for the next 10 years.
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"You only want to use safe AI guys. Lucky for you, i know someone..."
Today I'm publishing a new essay, Policy on the AI Exponential. AI is progressing extremely fastโ€”much faster than the policy process was built to handle. The essay lays out where I think the technology is now, and the action needed to close the gap: darioamodei.com/post/policy-โ€ฆ
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Australia being the legal testing ground for the US and UK's policies on free speech and copyright law is getting a little tiring.
What you need to know about the new Social Media Ban in the UK: 1. All persons under 16 are prohibited from accessing social media platforms without verified parental supervision. 2. Parental supervision must be logged digitally through the UK. gov app. 3. Parents must approve each post, comment, like, or share in real-time. 4. Failure to supervise constitutes negligent digital guardianship. 5. Penalties for negligent digital guardianship include fines up to ยฃ10,000 and potential removal of devices from the household. 6. Educational use is not exempt. 7. Mental health considerations are not exempt. 8. Checking the weather on a browser that could access social media counts as attempted access. 9. Screenshots of banned platforms are treated as contraband. 10. Discussing banned platforms in school counts as conspiracy to access. 11. Parents who express disagreement with these rules online will have their supervision privileges revoked. 12. Any family member can report violations anonymously (encouraged). Compliance is mandatory. Britain is safer for it.
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Doug Rathbone ๐Ÿฆ˜๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ’ป retweeted
Pope Leo XIV just held mass at La Sagrada Familia to honor 100th anniversary of Gaudiโ€™s death. They lit up the cross at peak of the Basilicaโ€™s Tower of Jesus Christ for the first time and did a light show with a drone visual of Gaudiโ€™s face. Next level.

Antoni Gaudi died 100 years ago today. He was 73 and spent over 40 years working on La Sagrada Familia (completing 1/4th of entire basilica). Gaudiโ€™s method for designing it was genius: he hung movable weights on strings and let gravity do the work of showing the proper angles and force vectors for his nature-inspired look. He then flipped the model upside down to see how to build the columns and arches. Also inspired by forests and sea life, the legendary architect once said, โ€œthere are no straight lines or sharp corners in nature.โ€ In the final years of his life, Gaudiโ€™s was solely focussed on the project. His diet was lettuce leafs dipped in milk. Lived inside the Basilica and barely slept on a simple cot. He died after getting hit by a tram while walking aroudn Barcelona. His clothes was so ratty โ€” underwear held together with safety pins โ€” that passerbys thought he was homeless. The city held a massive funeral for him with 30,000 people packing the streets. While 3/4 of La Sagrada Familia was undone, Gaudi left enough plans (models, drawings) for future generations. La Sagrada Familia was largely dormant for a few decades 1930s-1960s (Spanish Civil War, World War II, early Cold War). Some of Gaudiโ€™s designs were so ahead his time that it would require the development of aeronautical design software to complete his vision. Gaudi once remarked that โ€œmy clientโ€ โ€” referring to God โ€” โ€œis not in a hurryโ€. There is still work to be done but a major milestone was completed in February: workers installed a cross on top of La Sagrada Familia, making it the tallest church in the world (172.5 meters or 566 feet). Itโ€™s also the tallest structure in Barcelona. But Gaudi intentionally capped the height because โ€œhuman creation should not pass Godโ€™s work.โ€ The Montjuรฏc Hill in the southwestern part of Barcelona is ~570 feet. *** Video link: youtube.com/watch?v=JlL6ZHChโ€ฆ
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Doug Rathbone ๐Ÿฆ˜๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ’ป retweeted
NEW: malware developers added nuclear & biological weapons text to to their spyware. Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals... so that their spyware wouldn't be analyzed by an AI security scanner. Cleanest practical example I can think of for why over-indexing on first order safety alignment is risky. When closed (and open) models ship with aggressive refusals, they will be sprinkled with second-order blindspots that attackers will discover...and exploit. We are only in the earliest days of attackers leveraging these features, and it wouldn't surprise me if users systems that need to handle complex cybersecurity issues demand that models be less safety-blunted. In the weeds: @SocketSecurity's post also shows why intention matters in how you design a malware analysis pipeline to avoid prompt manipulation. H/T to colleagues that shared this with me socket.dev/blog/mini-shai-huโ€ฆ
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Doug Rathbone ๐Ÿฆ˜๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ’ป retweeted
Anthropic and OpenAI are both telling engineers to write loops. Not prompts. Not agents. Loops. That is not a coincidence. When the two most important AI labs on the planet independently converge on the same pattern โ€” that is a signal worth paying attention to. Most engineers are still thinking in terms of single calls. Input โ†’ model โ†’ output. The engineers winning in 2026 think in cycles. Output becomes input. The model evaluates its own work. The loop runs until the result is right. This is the complete breakdown of what loops are, why they matter, and how to build them โ†“
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Doug Rathbone ๐Ÿฆ˜๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‘จโ€๐Ÿ’ป retweeted
Fable is a good model. As with all new models, it is simultaneously excellent and entirely unremarkable (relative to other models). It is slow and expensive, and the "loops are all you need" discourse they are pushing is obvious in the context of someone using Fable-class models What I've found so far is that for broad scope design (code architecture) tasks, Fable is unremarkable. Or, not better enough to justify its cost and speed. But in highly targeted goal-oriented loops, it is another beast entirely. It is very slow but produces very good results. I let it churn on optimizing a SwiftUI-layout resolver in Go I wrote and it was able to bring it down to an order of magnitude I could not reach myself (micro => nanosecond scale). But it took 2 hours and $40 to do it and I had to claw back some changes it overfit to Apple Silicon. Still, very worth it. In comparison, for "implement this feature/change" iterative work, I ran head-to-head Fable vs GPT5.5 vs. GLM-5.1. They all produced equally acceptable final results, but GPT5/GLM did it in a couple minutes and Fable was churning away for 40 minutes. And GLM cost me less than a dollar, GPT5.5 ~$1.50, and Fable cost $9. You can see that in this context, interactively working with an agent is nonsense. Its too slow. You need to write loops to keep the agent working and you probably want to highly parallelize the work being done. As with all things, I think a balance makes sense... My sense is that I'd reserve Fable for targeted, surgical analysis and work. Not for daily driving everyday tasks. I'm going to keep spending a shitload of money (relatively) and maining Fable for the rest of the week to continue to judge, will report if anything changes. I'll continue to head-to-head as well.
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