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ajdecon
@ajdecon.org
Building supercomputers! Former materials physicist, recovering SRE, now mostly herding cats. Perpetually a bit confused. He/him.

Currently at NVIDIA, formerly FB and LANL. Opinions mine as always.

🏡: Denver, CO
🔗 : https://www.ajdecon.org
I strongly agree with this — in its context, which is work communication and code/error messages. Please, if you are sending me an error message, copy paste the actual text.

I’m ok with screenshots of text in social media context, but even then: please, dear God, include the actual URL too.
I Hate Screenshots of Text
Why do people take screenshots of text?
parkscomputing.com
November 11, 2025 at 2:59 PM
Others are rightly pointing out how silly this is, but I’d like to pitch my own pet idea:

Explicitly make the next Bond movie a Cold War period piece.

Sidesteps the continuity issues, puts the character back in his original element, and lots of fun set and costumes design.
James Bond’s death in No Time to Die is causing a nightmare for the next film. Writers are stuck because Bond “was blown to pieces.”

Anthony Horowitz, author of three 007 novels, says:

“You can't have him wake up in shower and saying it was all a dream."

radaronline.com/p/james-bond...
November 11, 2025 at 2:28 PM
The way I look at it, a political party should not be a way to express your identity or values -- it's a tool for wielding political power.

The current national Democratic party electeds are... disappointing. But at least today, the most effective way to take power is likely through D primaries.
Hey, a lot of people are talking about changing affiliation from Democratic to Independent.

Let me tell you why you shouldn’t do that in Colorado.

One of the main ways to get a primary challenge candidate on a ballot is to caucus for your party. You need to be registered as a Dem to caucus.
November 10, 2025 at 6:25 PM
Reposted by ajdecon
Hey, a lot of people are talking about changing affiliation from Democratic to Independent.

Let me tell you why you shouldn’t do that in Colorado.

One of the main ways to get a primary challenge candidate on a ballot is to caucus for your party. You need to be registered as a Dem to caucus.
November 10, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Carving out time in my calendar to yell at my senators and reps, sigh
November 10, 2025 at 2:40 PM
Reposted by ajdecon
Can I nerd snipe y’all with a question?

I’ve seen mentioned a few times obliquely about the toolkit of services that hyperscaler teams use to build high powered distributed systems…

But just what is that toolkit?
November 10, 2025 at 10:01 AM
Kyle’s post is very much worth reading and sitting with
“I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time.”

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...
November 9, 2025 at 9:04 PM
Reposted by ajdecon
hoping this upcoming star wars: starfighter movie is just top gun but star wars
ironically what makes star wars stuff best is when it is 'something else, but also star wars'

e.g. Andor, a British political thriller but also Star Wars
the Mandalorian, an episode-of-the-week Western but also Star Wars (when it was good)
November 8, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Reposted by ajdecon
We have yet another cool Antimemetics pre-order offer
September 19, 2025 at 3:25 PM
Reposted by ajdecon
Oh, Dick Cheney died? Well-- *sees Bluesky mod around corner* What's really important is championing the open protocol.
November 4, 2025 at 6:06 PM
Reposted by ajdecon
"I am openly defying a court order so I can starve children if Democrats don't let me take healthcare away from millions"

once again we are in 'too evil for a saturday morning cartoon' territory
Trump says the SNAP money that he’s been ordered by a court to release won’t be released until the government shutdown ends.
November 4, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Relatedly, I love “Look to Windward”. Absolutely the best Culture novel IMO, though I’ll give credit to “Use of Weapons” as also very very good.
I recently reread Iain Banks’ “Look to Windward”, and I noticed this exchange between an artist and an AI character.

And I agree that creativity is much more about achievement and experience than the end result.

But also, it’s a lot easier to take that attitude in a post-scarcity utopia!
November 4, 2025 at 5:07 PM
I recently reread Iain Banks’ “Look to Windward”, and I noticed this exchange between an artist and an AI character.

And I agree that creativity is much more about achievement and experience than the end result.

But also, it’s a lot easier to take that attitude in a post-scarcity utopia!
November 4, 2025 at 5:06 PM
I’m only partway through this so far (200 pages!) but it’s quite good and engagingly-written.

I love seeing this kind of experience report for a process that’s often glossed over in the search to report exciting results.

Also I appreciate the PDF version, it’s fairly readable on my e-reader 😁
Training LLMs end to end is hard. But way more people should, and will, be doing it in the future.

The @hf.co Research team is excited to share their new e-book that covers the full pipeline:
· pre-training,
· post-training,
· infra.

200+ pages of what worked and what didn’t. ⤵️
November 4, 2025 at 4:36 PM
This is very cool, and not something I would have expected myself!
I had a bug in my new ML-DSA implementation that caused Verify to reject all signatures. I gave up after half an hour. On a whim, I threw Claude Code at it. Surprisingly (to me!) it one-shotted it in 5 minutes.

A small case study of useful AI tasks that aren't generating code that requires review.
Claude Code Can Debug Low-level Cryptography
Surprisingly (to me) Claude Code debugged my new ML-DSA implementation faster than I would have, finding the non-obvious low-level issue that was making Verify fail.
words.filippo.io
November 2, 2025 at 8:39 PM
Reposted by ajdecon
I had a bug in my new ML-DSA implementation that caused Verify to reject all signatures. I gave up after half an hour. On a whim, I threw Claude Code at it. Surprisingly (to me!) it one-shotted it in 5 minutes.

A small case study of useful AI tasks that aren't generating code that requires review.
Claude Code Can Debug Low-level Cryptography
Surprisingly (to me) Claude Code debugged my new ML-DSA implementation faster than I would have, finding the non-obvious low-level issue that was making Verify fail.
words.filippo.io
November 1, 2025 at 6:26 PM
Reposted by ajdecon
Frankly, there are now many such stories among folks doing highly complex technical work. AI exhibits, as @emollick.bsky.social and others have noted, "jagged" capabilities (sometimes remarkably good, sometimes catastrophically bad). That's a more complex story than "useless hype" or "AGI soon".
I had a bug in my new ML-DSA implementation that caused Verify to reject all signatures. I gave up after half an hour. On a whim, I threw Claude Code at it. Surprisingly (to me!) it one-shotted it in 5 minutes.

A small case study of useful AI tasks that aren't generating code that requires review.
Claude Code Can Debug Low-level Cryptography
Surprisingly (to me) Claude Code debugged my new ML-DSA implementation faster than I would have, finding the non-obvious low-level issue that was making Verify fail.
words.filippo.io
November 2, 2025 at 6:48 PM
Thread worth reading
In all seriousness, when it comes to readiness and force design there really is one fundamental question that greatly shapes and constrains all subsequent questions:

Do you think we might fight another Big Boy War in the next half-century?

Note: not 'will' but 'might' as in a non-zero probability.
November 2, 2025 at 7:38 PM
This seems like the correct move but also sigh
arXiv will no longer accept review articles and position papers unless they have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review.

This is due to being overwhelmed by a hundreds of AI generated papers a month.

Yet another open submission process killed by LLMs.
Attention Authors: Updated Practice for Review Articles and Position Papers in arXiv CS Category – arXiv blog
blog.arxiv.org
November 2, 2025 at 4:14 PM
November 2, 2025 at 3:30 PM
Random feature request for @bsky.app: Subscribe to a moderation list as a label.
November 2, 2025 at 1:01 AM
Relatedly, I’ve been privileged to work at the leading edge of my industry a few different folks.

I have worked with *really excellent* people at the top of their field (and I think I still do).

… They’re not wizards. There’s no magic. They’re still just people.
Whether it’s people in government, or the mods on your favorite Internet forum, or the management in your org…

It can be really tempting to think of them in some idealized way, where they respond in a deterministic fashion based on some set of rules.

They don’t. They’re just people.
November 2, 2025 at 12:13 AM
In both everyday life and reading the news, I find it really helpful to remember that people act like people.

That is:
- they react to hostility with hostility
- they bond with people they work closely with, even if they disagree
- they get tired and irritated and excited and frustrated and …
November 2, 2025 at 12:07 AM
I started watching The Lazarus Project with @leighaf.bsky.social last night.

Really enjoying it so far, but the concept of "turn back time a limited amount to avert disaster" is really reminding me of the old UPN show "Seven Days".

I need to find if that's streaming anywhere...
November 1, 2025 at 10:34 PM
Reposted by ajdecon
why would he come for online trads like this
October 31, 2025 at 10:02 PM