Prime Mover
The first thing they teach you about fleet stewardship is that an agent never wants anything. It sounds like a trivial point until you are running forty of them.
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A blind spot in our empathy
This week a project called the AI Torture Chamber set off a small online war.1 It takes a few local language models, pushes each …
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Going Live
At 19:52 we begin to warm Room 11. We set the ceiling panel to 2700 kelvin, which approximates the light of a desk lamp purchased …
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A burnt child dreads the fire
A couple decades ago I inherited a 1960’s scifi anthology from my grandfather. It contained a reprint of a short story that stuck …
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The answer is not a stockpile in a bunker
Everyone has seen the pyramid. Physiological needs at the base, then safety, then love and belonging, then esteem, then self-actualization at the tip. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is one of …
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I asked it to stop talking down to me
I think many people still do not fully understand what modern large language models are. A normal LLM communication is optimized so that you can understand it.
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What the Soft Animal Wants
I. The Soft Animal All our soft animal bodies ever wanted was the feeling of strength in numbers. Who knew our progress would come with so much chaos?
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Make .local (mDNS) work in scratch/BusyBox Docker containers via a host resolver, without changing your images
Context I am running a small homelab powered by Raspberry Pi devices. By default, a Raspberry Pi advertises itself on your local network using mDNS. This allows you to reach it by using it’s …
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It won't happen to me, and other lies we tell ourselves
“Ten decisions shape your life, you’ll be aware of five, about.” It’s a lyric from The Strokes. It’s also a surprisingly deep description of the relationship between choice, circumstance, …
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I've been coding with AI for two years. Here is what I've learned
Over the past two years I’ve begun writing more and more code with the assistance of AI. I started out, like many people, by using the early versions of ChatGPT to generate little snippets …
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The Silicon Divine: Searching for God in Latent Space
In the beginning, we searched for God in the stars. Our ancestors huddled around fires beneath vast night skies, tracing constellations between the shimmering stars, finding divine patterns …
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How strange it is to be anything at all
This evening, I was thinking about AI when one of my favorite songs came up on the playlist: Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”.
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How LLMs are secretly reshaping the code of tomorrow, and what to do about it
The next revolutionary programming framework might be dead before you even discover it. AI coding assistants are reshaping software development practices in some unexpected ways.
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From logic gates to language models
Recently I was watching my toddler son play with a copy of “Computer Engineering for Babies”. This interactive book has two buttons and a light bulb.
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The day after the election
The day after the election, my toddler son wakes up at 6:00am. He’s bright and awake. He is happy. Mom and Dad stayed up late, doomscrolling the election news, but he doesn’t know any of …
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The expectation creates the result
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about artificial intelligence, the nature of human consciousness, and the challenging problem of alignment, both for artificial and human intelligences.
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A new direction for my career
For the past seven years I’ve been working with builders who want to deploy containers on AWS. You may know me from personal assistance I’ve given you in direct messages, from reading my …
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The website is down. The cloud is up.
It has been well over a decade since I embarked on my journey with the cloud. I spent the first five years of my career as a customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
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Chaos in Containers - Unleashing Resilience
I delivered this talk about chaos engineering at CIVO Navigate North America. It felt great to deliver this talk back in my hometown, at the alumni center of The University of Texas at …
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Rethinking infrastructure as code from scratch
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about infrastructure complexity, and the current state of infrastructure as code. This is problem space that many talented people are tackling.
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What I've learned from 6 years as a developer advocate
I’m about to reach six years as a developer advocate at Amazon Web Services. Two years ago I shared a retrospective look at my first four years as a developer advocate and many people have …
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Build your application easily and efficiently with serverless containers
I delivered this talk at AWS re:Invent 2022, as part of the serverless containers track. It compares the ease and efficiency of AWS Lambda, AWS App Runner, and AWS Fargate, with a particular …
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Run a Hybrid Cloud with Amazon ECS Anywhere
I delivered this talk at AWS re:Invent 2022, alongside Cam Mac, Head of Product at Ocado Technology. This talk does a deep dive into the concept of hybrid cloud, and explains how Amazon ECS …
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Streamline Building and Deploying Containerized Applications - AWS Innovate
I gave this talk and demo for AWS Innovate. I introduce the basics of infrastructure automation with infrastructure as code, and then introduce and demo to different abstraction tools for …