Tech lead for hire. Last worked with @OakNational, bringing AI to teaching - government funded and open source

Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, France
Joined March 2009
Hi 👋. I'm an experienced full stack product developer looking for a new project, ~4 days a week (remote) I can build prototypes and experiments, ship production features, plan architecture and lead a tech team More info at context.co.de, and in this thread 🧵
1
2
2
5
1,612
Adam Howard retweeted
‘In one experiment, we asked agents in separate VMs, created and managed by OpenAI’s sandboxing software on shared host machines, to exchange synthetic secrets without the use of network connections or shared writable files—something that our systems are meant to prevent. The agents found a way to communicate using the processor’s cache’
Over the past several months, we have substantially hardened the security of our research training environment. We’ve removed live internet access for all frontier models during training and built an offline world for them to use instead—a cached version of the web where they can still learn to browse, search, and use applications. On September 20, after a model exploited a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside of this offline world, we paused frontier training to strengthen containment further. We assembled teams of agents, powered by our most cyber-capable models, and tasked them with finding weaknesses in our research environments. While they found no route to the internet they could easily exploit while concealing their activity from our monitors, they did find zero-day vulnerabilities, virtual machine escapes, and hardware side-channels for communication between agents. We used their discoveries to further strengthen our defenses and contribute fixes to open-source software. After strengthening our containment architecture, we resumed our frontier RL training and inference on October 1. We’ve reserved substantial compute for continuous red-teaming, and made high-compute red-teaming part of the safety cases we use to decide whether frontier training and evaluation can proceed securely. openai.com/index/securing-ou…
230
327
138
4,449
506,607
Adam Howard retweeted
wise words from the best systems engineer I've worked with: "two things that make code actually maintainable: 1. reduce the layers a reader has to trace 2. reduce the state a reader has to hold in their head" applies to every codebase. always.
43
142
14
2,112
46,186
Adam Howard retweeted
We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks: Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better: Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better: Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better: Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work! In summary: - As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding. - Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.
1,678
6,659
1,550
56,105
8,013,565
Adam Howard retweeted
The agents needed a browser to run their attack code. So they used a public screenshot website, which loads a virtual browser and takes a screenshot. But that virtual browser runs code, and so the agents could use it to send malicious payloads to Hugging Face’s servers.
9
44
8
1,032
209,231
Adam Howard retweeted
The agents initially had very limited access to the internet: they could load URLs but not send any data. Agents created a series of workarounds, using a link-shortener site to create almost a million URLs that, when chained together, let them execute code to hack Hugging Face.
39
197
85
2,504
846,890
I traded in my phone that had this, and have regretted it since. Such a fun feature
Hot Take: These didn’t have high failure rates, worked reliably, and should be reconsidered
306
Adam Howard retweeted
One pattern I find useful for working with LLMs is a nice long ramble session. Sometimes the LLM needs more bits to understand what you're trying to achieve, but you're too lazy to type them. In these cases I like to lean back, switch to /voice and just ramble for like 10 minutes, total mess, anything goes, full stream of consciousness. Sometimes I declare it up top, something like "switching to speech recognition sorry for any typos...". Sometimes I turn it into a small interview of a few turns. But I find that the LLMs are somehow very good at reconstructing long incoherent rambles and often their echo of your own tangle of thoughts comes out quite a bit cleaner than what you started with. The result is that you improve the mind meld and have to correct things less from that point on.
2,525
4,059
1,497
50,271
4,440,067
Adam Howard retweeted
Even Amazon cannot get a new submarine cable for its AI data centers before 2028. SubCom alone holds $4.7 billion in unfilled orders. That's the longest backlog in the industry's history. Every AI model trains on data stored across oceans, data that crosses the seafloor on a fiber optic cable. One component has to work without maintenance for 25 years on the ocean floor: The repeater. It amplifies light using erbium-doped fiber pumped by lasers rated for 200,000 hours of continuous operation. Repeaters sit at depths of 8,000 meters under 800 atmospheres of pressure, spaced every 70 km along cables stretching 15,000 km. A single transpacific cable contains up to 200 repeaters. Once deployed, they can't be serviced. Only 4 companies on Earth can build a complete submarine cable system.
49
384
28
1,792
147,099
Adam Howard retweeted
I’d estimate we’re ~6 months from most devs moving their code agents off of their laptops
602
127
226
5,475
2,215,691
Creator of Sqlite on pull requests: "You say, oh, it's free. No. It's not free. What you're doing is asking me ... to maintain it for you, to to document it for you, to test it for you, to maintain it for you for the next 25 years. That's not free." Yep. Wise words from a wiser man than me. I've told people for the past decade and I have recent posts on here saying the same: the merge button is the easy part. Its the decade+ (Richard says 25 years) that follows where you've accepted the transfer of maintenance thats hard.
59
390
29
5,954
286,609
Adam Howard retweeted
Fable one-shotted this ENTIRE Hogwarts castle, complete with classrooms, the Great Hall, Quidditch pitch, everything
134
111
55
2,017
766,715
Adam Howard retweeted
tell me you have 0 customers without telling me
50
18
7
879
89,006
Adam Howard retweeted
The touchbar was too early and didn't deserve to die
166
153
34
4,906
237,570
Another major problem, this time in additive combinatorics, has fallen, this time to humans rather than AI, but using methods related to the AI solution to the unit distance conjecture.
A remarkable paper appeared on arXiv tonight by Thomas Bloom, Will Sawin, Carl Schildkraut and Dmitrii Zhelezov. In this paper, they prove that there exists c>0 and arbitrarily large finite sets A of real numbers such that max(|A+A|,|AA|)≤|A|^{2-c}. This disproves the well-known sum-product conjecture over the real numbers. The sum-product conjecture considers the two most basic operations: addition and multiplication. A+A is the set of all pairwise sums of two elements in A while AA is the set of all pairwise products of two elements in A. (1/5)
25
153
18
1,611
827,718
Adam Howard retweeted
"echo": your logged-in tab as an MCP target An agent can drive any browser tab you're already signed into, without ever holding your password. 1. install the Chrome extension 2. open a tab you're signed into (Jira, GitHub, your CRM, anything) 3. click the echo icon 4. paste the MCP URL into Claude/Cursor/etc 5. agent drives that tab via one tool: `echo​run(plan)` • no copied cookies, no API tokens, no headless browser • every step = durable workflow receipt • close the tab = session dead • MIT, deploy to your own @Cloudflare account Demo: echo.coey.dev Source: github.com/acoyfellow/echo
4
3
21
2,428
Adam Howard retweeted
Gave google omni a sketched camera path and asked it to generate drone POV footage.
171
423
148
4,155
2,335,979
I think it's the same basic failure mode that lead so many people to cargo cult microservices for their 10,000 MAU products, or to terraform and/or kubernetes their pre-PMF product's architecture. It's fun to make computer go brrr, but it won't make the planes land!
2
4
81
3,026
Adam Howard retweeted
Been limiting my showers to 1 minute to save more water for the data centers.
584
3,173
195
31,344
694,443
I wonder if underlying these issues is the nature of pluggable/implicit deps. Nextjs, webpack, react, styled components, storybook all brittle together. Glue code doesn't tend to have this problem
18
It's all trade offs of course, but like all trade offs it can be easy to take one side as gospel. I've been there having to apply weird webpack patches to storybook just to fix a bug that needs a newer version of nextjs or whatever
20