Rob Lion

the Bank of Costco. Costco Logistics Division. Costco University. Costco Security Services. I propose all this because Costco is already the major company that would be the least mad about getting nationalized

Vibe coding broke people's brains because they had a bad understanding of the software design process.

The pop culture model goes something like this: start out with a sketch and then render that same idea in progressively finer detail.

So when tools could "skip" to high detail, people went WOW.

LA City Council’s City President Marqueece Harris-Dawson says he has been pulled over four times while a member of the council; the most recent was this week. He missed a committee meeting because of the stop, according to him.

Among the questions: “how do you have this vehicle,” according to him.

One of the wildest parts of this revelation is that this is really the first I’m aware of this being discussed. The standing city council president (ostensibly the most powerful or second most powerful person in local politics) being pretextual stopped days before a discussion on pretextual stops.

I am going to create a source of truth that is so single

every project manager

Without the synthesis process of critique, everyone who vibe coded a thing now has their own mental model, which means they are no longer actually a team.

This kills the project.

When you treat low fidelity artifacts (regardless of the amount of detail) as disposable sketches, this doesn't happen.

Illustration depicting a giant riding a giant bicycle through a bunch of people on a city street.

"The Unrestrained Demon of the Wheel"

Judge magazine, 1893
🎨Grant E. Hamilton

Let’s talk about Graham Platner’s Big Lie, finally. In 2009, at the height of the Gulf War, the Marines barred him from active duty. Platner claims it was his forearm tattoos. But his one forbidden tattoo was the Nazi symbol on his chest. He knew - and he left the Marines rather than give it up. 1/

reminds me of the day i tried to order "another beer" in berlin. almost said "uno mas" but ofc that's spanish so i caught myself!

then they came out with a mug the size of my head

turns out, i'd said "ein mas"

not only is "ein mas" valid german

not only is it a drink

a mas is a LITER of beer

I swear to fuck that the modern age looks at the concept of "offline backups" with incurious confusion and it fills me with so much goddamn nerdrage.

In crime Something funky’s been happening with the US Marshals’ pile of seized crypto — the crypto they’re tasked with hanging on to as cases wind through the courts.b In March 2024, almost $25 million was inexplicably removed from a Marshals-controlled wallet containing funds connected to the 2016 Bitfinex hack. In October 2024, crypto sleuth zachxbt noticed that $20 million of the Marshals’ crypto assets had apparently been stolen, with the thief laundering the funds through various exchanges [W3IGG]. The next day, $19.3 million of those funds were mysteriously returned. Now, zachxbt has linked the stolen government funds — as well as stolen assets belonging to other victims — to a man named John Daghita. According to zachxbt, Daghita was previously known only as “Lick” online, and was active in Telegram chat rooms where crypto thieves boasted about their wealth. When another thief taunted Lick for “only having $6 mil”, Lick evidently decided the only way to defend his honor was to go on a screenshare call to show proof of ownership by transferring funds between wallets. In doing so, he exposed several wallet addresses, and zachxbt was able to trace some of the crypto back to the US government wallet addresses.1415

Shockingly, Daghita’s father is reportedly Dean Daghita, the owner of an IT company called Command Services & Support (CMDSS). In November 2024, CMDSS began a contract with the US Marshals to provide management services for their seized crypto assets.16 The contract is still active. While Coinbase has since July 2024 managed what the Marshals call their “class 1” crypto assetsc — the most popular cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, ether, and Tether — CMDSS was chosen to manage the “class 2” through “class 4” cryptocurrencies.d While it could be that the younger Daghita gained privileged information or access to the Marshals’ crypto wallets through his father, it’s not clear how that would have enabled thefts in the months prior to the contract award. I am hopeful that a FOIA request I filed with the Marshals earlier this week will shed some light on that. It’s also curious that many of the assets Lick siphoned from government wallets fall into the “class 1” category, which CMDSS is not involved in managing. The Marshals have declined to comment on the matter, citing ongoing investigations.17

The incident has renewed concerns about the US government’s ability to prudently manage crypto. In 2022, a Department of Justice Inspector General report identified “challenges” in the Marshals’ crypto custody practices, including “lack of comprehensive inventory management” and “inadequate, incomplete, and conflicting policies and procedures”.18 Last year, the Marshals struggled to provide even an estimate of how much crypto they held. An IT contractor who was passed over for a contract with the Marshals explained to CoinDesk, “As far as I’m aware, the USMS is currently managing this with individual keystrokes in an Excel spreadsheet. ... They’re one bad day away from a billion-dollar mistake.”19 Later in 2024, the Marshals disclosed in response to a FOIA request that they held around 28,988 BTC (more than $2.5 billion at today’s prices), though they did not provide an accounting of their other tokens.20 After zachxbt’s allegations, a wallet linked to the thefts launched a “John Daghita” token, with the ticker $LICK, on the pump.fun memecoin launchpad. I couldn’t help but laugh when I read reporting from Cointelegraph that “The deployer of LICK held 40% of the total supply at launch, according to blockchain data visualization platform Bubblemaps, a level of concentration often viewed as a red flag in early-stage token launches.”21 I’m not sure the degree of concentration is really the primary red flag here.

$40 million in seized crypto held by the US Marshals was stolen in 2024, and crypto sleuth zachxbt has now linked the thefts to the son of a contractor managing the agency's crypto assets. The incident has renewed concerns about the government's ability to manage its crypto holdings.

I've got you.

you fucked up a perfectly good computer is what you did. look at it. it’s got anxiety.

Excerpt from interview: Ezra Klein is talking about a commencement address he was asked to give, but ultimately didn't, because of Covid. He says, "The whole commencement address was called "Just do the work," or do the reading in this case, actually. The point I was making was that you just would not believe, as a young person going out into the world, how many shortcuts your elders are taking. "When I got into journalism, the idea that I would just actually read the Congressional Budget Office reports, which are not complicated, are not usually longer than 30 pages, but people are just reading the executive summaries, if that. People just weren't doing the reading, and that was a huge opportunity for a young person. "You could just beat people by outworking them, by reading the things that they had ignored, that they found too boring, that was not the part of the job they enjoyed. It happens to be the part of the job I actually enjoy, so bully for me. I read the book."

This, from Ezra Klein, matches up with my experience. There are far too many journalists for whom this applies.

Or to put it another way: I sometimes say my sole advantage, as a journalist, is that I am willing to go to the library.

howiwrite.substack.com/p/ezra-klein...

Once the review of an entry is complete and any manual duty calculations completed (see paragraph 18 above), it takes an IS or ES approximately 5 minutes to process an individual refund, including amending, liquidating and certifying the refund for each entry. The refund processing for the 53,173,939 entries with IEEPA duties will require 4,431,161 man hours for CBP to complete.

At 5 minutes per refund, it will take 506 years of staff time to resolve this.

Like asking someone for their opinion and then asking someone else if the first person really feels that way.

I love watching people use LLMs in public. They’ll reply to a breaking news article and say “@grok is this true?” Babe where do you think it’s about to pull its answer from

mmm, Oreo factory floor sweepings.

and yet a trace of the true self exists in the false self

Democrats may not be able to prevent Mullin's confirmation, but they can certainly turn his track record of offense and stupidity into two days of televised humiliation so spectacular that he is wounded in Trump's eyes from day 1. That is the job.

Scientific datasets are riddled with copy-paste errors Initial results from scanning through Excel files belonging to 600 published scientific papers.

If you want to take your mind off awful politics and look at awful science stuff instead, this is a good read: www.sciencedetective.org/scientific-d...

As I get older I'm coming to increasingly radical views like "you have to do things to get good at them" and "you have to think about problems to solve them"

Threads thread: thriller_instinct 3d Is it okay to bully 40 and 50 year olds who are on social media just for being on it, cuz like why are you here - 254 Q 3.1K G 28 746 corporateash 18h ••• My ICQ UIN is 7231680. That number is burned into my consciousness. I inadvertently learned that you could see private conversations in public chat rooms when using Telnet instead of a browser on GeoCities. I can tell you the difference in audible dial-up handshakes between 1200, 2400, 14.4 kbps modems. I needed a edu email address to join Facebook after my university was admitted. We were here at the beginning. We made social media. You wouldn't be in my Top 8. I have usernames older than you. 852 Q62 G6 72

“I have usernames older than you.”.
Holy shit

holy fuckin shit lmao

a supply chain attack perpetrated by a prompt injection in a github ISSUE TITLE

eh. coding agents? what could go wrong

"Oakland is west of Bay Area and Palo Alto,." is an instant classic in my group chats.

Importantly they are planning to hire these people on 2 year contracts so what actually happened is they fired everyone so they could rehire them with worse working conditions and an easy revolving door with industry 🫩 🔭

Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference Reproducibility is a bedrock of scientific progress. However, it’s remarkably difficult to get reproducible results out of large language models. For example, you might observe that asking ChatGPT the...

thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeati... more on the subject

I keep seeing lots of people saying "LLMs are like compilers/assemblers for prompts"

Noooooooooo
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

LLMs are not compilers, and they're not assemblers. Determinism is a key aspect to assemblers and compilers.

And they *certainly* can't be part of a reproducible pipeline