Christian, Kotlin expert (Python and Scala too), C, C++, Zig wannabe, Open source contributor, BJJ Blue Belt, Cyclist. CEO of HTMX. Ang Moh? in SG
Singapore
Joined April 2009
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Pinned Tweet
My first book. Functional @kotlin with @rivuchakraborty published by @PacktPub packtpub.com/application-dev…
Mario Arias retweeted
This guy has the funniest instincts I’ve ever seen in an executive. A genuine gift for saying weird and off putting shit like “I can’t imagine raising a kid without ChatGPT” or “it takes a lot of energy to raise a child too” or “it’s more important data centers get RAM.” A real talent
🦔Sam Altman says it’s “quite terrible” for regular people to keep so much memory in their own computers. He told the Cheeky Pint podcast that home PCs only use their RAM about 5% of the time. In his view, the world’s limited supply of memory does more good in the cloud.
My Take
He said this the same day Intel blamed expensive memory for a drop in PC sales. My car stays parked for most of the day too, and I’m not selling it to rent one by the hour.
OpenAI earns its money when you rent its computers instead of using your own, so of course Altman wants the memory in his data centers. I think he worries about local AI more than he lets on, because people who run good models at home have less reason to pay for ChatGPT.
Hedgie🤗
Mario Arias retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
Mario Arias retweeted
Lets not forget that an LLM can write code so fast today only because of the trillions of lines of code that were written by hand and released as open source. Try writing COBOL, ALGOL, or Eiffel with an LLM, where the training corpus is minimal, and then tell me.
Mario Arias retweeted
I've been mulling over Peter's thoughts in this post for a couple of months, and it's finally hit me: LLMs have essentially disconnected the concepts of production and verification, which for most of human history have been inextricably linked. Put another way: they can create things without understanding them.
In the past it was vanishingly rare for someone to produce a correct complex math result, or a large functional program, while simultaneously having no idea how it actually worked. Humans essentially create through a process of "incremental verification". We are constantly course-correcting.
A convincing sounding rebuttal to this position is "but a person using Wix has no idea how their website actually works!". That's somewhat true for the end user themselves, but someone, somewhere still does (the wix devs, the browser company, the AWS engineers, the linux maintainers, etc). We still hold the knowledge & understanding in aggregate across the human race at large, and the process for producing that website has been incrementally verified all the way up to the point that the end user engages with it.
As a result, the elephant in the room is that this new mode of production relies on retroactive verification of the entire solution, which is extravagantly more expensive (in terms of human effort) than the incremental verification humans do along the way while creating something themselves. In fact from my experience with AI programming tools, I am beginning to suspect that retroactive verification is actually more expensive on its own than the entire process of creation "by hand" + incremental verification.
I suspect this is also the reason why the most successful users of AI code generation tools seem to be people who are a) experts in their domains already and b) willing to babysit the production of the software in small enough chunks that they can personally incrementally verify the output.
When OAI dumps 1000s of math proofs on the community, they're essentially washing their hands of the work required to actually verify the results. I wouldn't be surprised if paradoxically, we see the cost of verifying these "P-like" tasks actually greatly increase over the next 10 years, as experts tire of verifying machine generated output, and are forced out of the field by changes in economics.
Of course people love to talk about the idea that "the LLMs will verify the output" but if you've used any of these tools you'll know that they all suffer from the same seemingly intractable "steering problem", where the output is dependent on the expertise of the operator. This is as true today as it was in the very early stages.
Put simply, if you don't have any experts that can verify things by hand, LLM verification isn't going to help you.
I think the single largest disconnect on how folks view the impact of AI is which folks' jobs are more "NP-like", where you can recognize a correct solution easily, vs work where you checking a solution is comparably hard to solving the problem ("P-like"). For example, "do my taxes" is relatively P-like, while "get my printer working" is relatively NP-like.
I often hear the "AI is useless" crowd say "but you have to check all its outputs", and it never landed until I realized that a ton of those people work P-like jobs where there that impression probably *is* relatively true.
For example, if you're a writer (like Ed Zitron) there's probably very little NP-like work, so I actually just buy that the unreliability of AI is a big deal for him. But I almost never hear Ed talk about all the NP-like work that exists out there. He'll just be like "you have to check the outputs anyway, so what's the point". I asked Opus 5 to design a 3D printed part to adapt one part onto another, and it fetched all the datasheets, got the dimensions, and one-shot it. I printed Opus's part without looking, and when it was done, sure enough everything lined up and the part worked great, and there was nothing to "check".
I think Ed just doesn't do very much NP-like work -- which is not a knock against him! A lot of very important specialized labor in the world is P-like (doctors, lawyers, etc.). And sure enough, we're seeing slow penetration of AI for such labor. I just think he's missing that a lot of labor is NP-like.
I thought of this because I've now watched about three different @edzitron interviews in which someone says "well, I get value from AI", and then Ed (very reasonably) asks "can you give an example", and then the person gives an extremely P-like example (like "doing my taxes" or "checking my lab results"), and I wince, because I know that Ed is going to (probably rightly) push back. I want the next person to chat with him to give a very NP-like example!
(P.S. Maybe I should NP∩coNP, or FNP or something instead of NP to be more accurate, but NP is much better known.)
Mario Arias retweeted
I see a lot of people dunking on this and comparing it to 8 years’ worth of Claude subs spent to get inferior AI models and slower inference.
But I think the people doing these kinds of investments and experiments will be the long-term winners, for four reasons:
1- local AI will continue to get better. You’ll get a lot more intelligence for a fixed amount of compute and memory. We already have GPT-4-level LLMs running on laptops, so it’s only a matter of time before local AI catches up with the current frontier.
2- AI subsidies will come to an end. AI labs are currently burning cash to maintain market share (just look at Anthropic’s S1). They will eventually charge you the full price of the LLM tokens you spend. So if you’re a power user, don’t count on the $200 Claude subscription giving you thousands of dollars’ worth of tokens every month.
3- If you’re a startup, you should be wary of pumping your data into AI companies. They are incentivized to look for and clone successful applications. Even if they don’t directly look at your data, they have ways to mine useful information from your usage.
4- You don’t need the absolute frontier of AI for most tasks. Owning your own AI stack helps you explore the Pareto frontier and find the best per-task model. That knowledge and experience will be very valuable as AI continues to evolve.
Local AI is good enough for a startup. A 10-person startup built its own 128GB-VRAM AI server for $18,000.
One Threadripper box sitting locally with
🎮 4× Radeon AI PRO R9700 32GB
💾 128GB total VRAM
🧠 Qwen3.8 + DeepSeek V4 Flash
👥 16 concurrent AI sessions
And they're actually pushing it.
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next with 16 simultaneous sessions:
📚 48K context/user
⚡ 538.5 tps aggregate decode
At 128K context per user
⚡ 365 tps aggregate decode
The GPUs are even undervolted to under 210W each.
Link in ALT
ALT https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1x2u742/building_a_4x_r9700_setup_for_a_10_person_startup/
Mario Arias retweeted
I seriously doubt anyone at Anthropic, outside of the marketing department, believes this.
You should not.
There are AI such as TinyML that can run on such compute restrained devices.
But a Frontier LLM AI will not.
Mario Arias retweeted
People need to understand this: these billionaire tech bros teach their children Montessori and Waldorf methods which focuses on teaching kids the ability to focus for long periods, think critically, and be creative, while they push attention-destroying short form videos and AI onto the masses and pretend it’s for the good of humanity.
They understand that your ability to focus and be creative is the main factor of success in the future, yet design apps that degrade those crucial life skills. The average person must be aware of this and resist this at all costs.
Mario Arias retweeted
The life of a human being (even an impaired one or an old one or a young one or one who annoys you and has made some bad choices) is more valuable than the life of a tiger
Mario Arias retweeted
I guess that's one way to look at it :D
On the other hand, I'd say this has been an excellent way to publicly show that we are not one bit ready to stop reading code. The specs are inconsistent, the initial one-shot of all languages were garbage, reliability is overlooked, and everyone agrees the code is below standards across the board.
If someone is looking at this mess and saying "yeah, this means I can vibe in language xyz", then I don't think there is any amount of evidence that would convince them otherwise. Maybe we can stop reading code if we put effort into building solid practices and guidelines, but this "benchmark" also showed putting those in place require real work and we cannot just vibe our way through them.
Trying to create an @AnthropicAI account
I don't know. You told me the software engineering is solved
Creating an account with gmail works, or you can create it using the Desktop app.
But Anthropic partners such as Skilljar cannot use the account that I just created (gmail or email) for SSO.
But hey, software engineering is solved. am I right?
Mario Arias retweeted
“Chess engines can beat all human players, but chess is more popular than ever” as an LLM analogy conveniently leaves out the part where the all the major employers of chess players (tournaments, sponsors) have literally banned the use of chess engines.
The comments are so depressing…
Yes, yes… we heard you, you don’t review code anymore and you let the clankers do everything for you
Nvim 0.12.6 release
github.com/neovim/neovim/com…
Mario Arias retweeted
Wrong. It is not thumos that is the heart of the greatest civilizations, but reason. And it is not the “struggle for distinction” that made the West, but the pursuit of the true and the good. It was this Socratic pursuit, not Spartan pride, that led the Church to embrace the achievements of the Greeks. As Plato warns in the Republic, to subordinate reason to thumos and the pursuit of truth to the pursuit of honor is the mark of timocracy, the first of the four corrupt types of polity and corrupt types of soul he identifies. Yet this is what many on the right today embrace, just as many on the left embrace the corrupt egalitarian and libertine tendencies Plato says are typical of democracy, another of the corrupt regimes he identifies. From the perspective of the tradition begun by Socrates and Plato, this timocratic strain of the right is not a cure for what ails the West any more than the woke left is, but simply another manifestation of the disease.
