An introvert who doesn't like to be alone. CTO @udaandotcom
Bangalore, India
Joined May 2007
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Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
There's some senior engineers on here who, in the face of AI changing the very structures this industry is built on, present themselves as Stewards of the Craft of Programming.
Bugs the hell out for me.
They keep alluding to the virtue of doing things by hand, the value of Good Code and of craftsmanship, saying that yes, AI might change some things, but hey it won't ever change the value of something done with proper care, by hand, just like in the olden days of 2024. Most everything that was Good back then is still Good now: deep knowledge of languages and systems, good code, great architecture. You know the sermon.
And, yes, some of that *is* true. At least I think so. But we don't know, because no one truly knows what will be important in the future.
We're going through times of great change and I think the best advice to give to young people and others who want to have a job and provide value is: keep your eyes open, rethink from first principles, derive from what businesses value what you can provide; the digital world is more malleable than ever, you should rethink how you can help shape it.
All this pounding on the Bible of Good Code seems to me to be doing the opposite: it lets people feel comfortable -- what I've valued all my life is still valuable, I can rest easy -- in times when one shouldn't feel comfortable. This is a bumpy, exciting, strange ride. If you lean back you might fall off the waggon.
Let's not delude ourselves and others that we can keep doing what we've been doing. Rethink it all.
And, like I said, it bugs the hell out of me seeing senior engineers (that are secure in their career) talking as if there's nothing *really* to change, because the Fundamentals will still be valued. They might!
But it's the wrong advice to not rethink everything right now.
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
The "whiteboard defense:" I should be able to pull you aside at any moment and ask you to explain any customer-facing system you've shipped. You should be able to clearly explain how it works and defend the decisions you made. This is my benchmark for responsible AI usage.
I don't expect line-level familiarity with the code. I don't care if you remember the exact function name or implementation detail. You may not even know it. I don't care.
But if I ask "why did you do X instead of Y?", "what happens if this actor behaves maliciously?", "what data structure did you use here and why?", or "where does this fail?" you should be able to answer confidently.
For PoCs, demos, experiments, whatever: I don't care. Generate 100% of it and understand none of it. Speed over quality every time in those specific scenarios.
But if you're shipping customer-facing work, you can't be shipping things you don't understand at a high level.
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
the general public has been getting constant waves of fear and confusion from ai companies
i thought the whole "you will be replaced" thing was as bad as it gets but now it's "you will literally die"
the defense is always "it would be irresponsible of me not to warn people of the risks"
but all that's happening here is the same thing that always happens: a group of people had the thought that their cause is righteous and moral
and they're incrementally justifying worse and worse behavior and entirely incapable of reflecting on how they might be the problem
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
More than ever, we should ignore how we *feel*. "I'm worried" is a state of mind, not an objective reality.
I believe ex-frontier people *feel* the way they claim they do. But it's not whistleblowing until you leak a spreadsheet, an experiment postmortem, or some form of fact.
"I'm worried" could come from (a) real threat, or (b) "I've been grinding for years, sleeping on a mattress under my desk, and my only contact with human beings is the company Slack". In which case, you deserve a hug and a break, but not to cause mass hysteria.
Again, the threat might be real. But for us to take you seriously, you need to do two things:
1. Leak data, not feelings
2. Detach yourself from financial incentives (i.e. equity)
Thanks for coming to my ted talk, I love all human beings, including the ones under great amount of stress and pressure to perform in Silicon Valley.
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
Pre-AI: "I can build the core feature in a week, the product around that feature in a quarter, and the company around that in a year."
Post-AI: "I can build the core feature in a day, the product around that feature in a quarter, and the company around that in a year."
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
Me: "Please fully remove this feature."
Claude: "Done! I have removed the feature, and added some tests to ensure that the feature continues to not exist."
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
Another hot take: you are not the bottleneck, you are an essential part of the agent backpressure. Never ship at speeds greater than what you can review.
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
What worries me most about protectionist arguments against Chinese AI is that they seem to ignore history.
- Groups of very smart people, with constraints (no easy access to the best nvidia chips) will out-innovate teams who can merely solve their problems with money.
- Groups of smart people who borrow every good idea they see will out-innovate those that are insular and think they're smarter than everyone else.
Some greatest American moments from our history come out of these two points. We shamelessly adopted great ideas and incorporated them, when he had limitations placed on us we got creative. And we succeeded.
In the long term, limiting Chinese access to the best nvidia chips will create more innovation, not less. Further, using distillation to explain how DeepSeek, Moonshot, et al. are delivering strong models dismisses the genuine innovations taking place.
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
Yes -- I've been meaning to write something like this for a while.
I think a lot of people expect superintelligence to be like some magic power. A superintelligence walks into a room, blows a puff of air in the right direction to cause a complex chain reaction that makes an arbitrary thing happen.
But raw intelligence is not actually *that* powerful. It's just a useful tool.
I think the rationalist AI doomer crowd worships intelligence in a sort of religious way and that's why they think it's so dangerous, but... it's not really.
If you lock a superintelligence in a room with an angry grizzly bear, the grizzly bear is gonna win.
If raw intelligence were all that mattered, we wouldn't have our current president.
etc.
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
you don't get experience by doom scrolling your AI FOMO twitter TL.
you get experience by building and doing things and ignoring what's basically 99% noise on here.
in fact, i think youngens getting their insights from here is detrimental to them.
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
We care deeply about your privacy and respect customer choice. For teams using zero data retention, no trace and code data is ever retained. All API key use of Grok Build also respects ZDR.
If ZDR is disabled, the /privacy command is available in the CLI to disable data retention, which also deletes previously synced data.
Run the /privacy command to view or change your settings at any time.
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
Control the ideas, not the code: blog post here antirez.com/news/169
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
Yall, can we recognize its silly flexing how much money you spend on tokens
I hate how much tokens cost me. I don't think its cool that a simple Fable coordinator session is hundreds of dollars. I dont value 20% productivity gains at thousands of dollars a month in additional burn.
This whole thing is silly. Its a bigger flex to crush it at solving a problem without all the bells and whistles that no one wanted in the first place. To do it on a budget. To do it without operating the most inefficient way possible.
Tho I guess congrats on discovering the secret of having more (venture) money than the other guy and making sure everyone knows about it?
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
It is very easy to be pessimistic and right.
Most ideas are bad. Most markets are too early, too small, too crowded, too hard. You can build an entire worldview around seeing the flaw first, and be rewarded for it over and over again
But the strange thing about startups is that the only outcomes that matter come from the places where someone was optimistic and right
I used to underestimate how much this matters. But there is a whole world of difference between reacting to the world as it is, and having enough understanding of the world as it is to still stay open to what it could become
Long optimism
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
"AI safety" is like "speech safety": sounds good in the abstract, but it leaves out the most important part: who defines "safe"?
If you only support "AI safety" when the arbiter agrees with you, then what you're really arguing for is control, not safety.
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
A few additional thoughts on the Telegram ban in India:
1. Is this a permanent ban?
It's unusual for the Indian government to issue a press release about the telegram ban: the precedence that I remember is when Chinese apps were banned in India in June 2020 including tiktok. A Section 69A order to ban something doesn't necessitate a press release, in fact it is protected by a secrecy clause, which should be held unconstitutional.
So what prompted this press release? Is this a signal? Were they expecting a backlash and a PR puts a govt justification (as hollow as the Chinese app ban, which I supported) before the reaction. A BJP guy I spoke to the night of the Chinese app ban told me if they had their way, this would be permanent.
So, is this ban permanent? As in, after things die down, will the date be extended?
2. This looks terrible for India and will impact us:
It makes us look like a banana republic. Who in their right mind blocks an app used by hundreds of millions of users because of AN EXAM? How is this even legal, and is such a short-sighted-knee-jerk-uneducated-action-even-justifiable in a democracy?
We talk about ease of doing business but for us it's a slogan. Which global business will want to operate in an environment of such regulatory uncertainty? We've seen some exit: toyota, citibank.
This will play out across the world. It will definitely make it to late-night-comedy on US TV shows. We'll be a joke. Blocks telegram because of EXAMS?
These are important signals that investors look at, and investors like going where things are predictable from a regulatory standpoint (unless they're playing a high stakes game), and not operating on whims. Look at the Crypto ban that pushed Indian crypto companies overseas. Look at the advisory on AI regulation that made founders question about building AI in India, before it was hurriedly rolled back.
And this does look whimsical, unconstitutional and the idea of some guy with power who decided this is how things go. I mean, look at the US these days. Same thing.
Varun Grover's "kabootar ki barfi" commentary comes to mind.
At this point in time, as a nation, we need to project regulatory certainty and rule of law in a global economy where money doesn't know where to go. If the CEO of a company has to justify investing in India to her board, with the limited understanding that people have about India, the board is likely to push back because its their job to protect investor money.
We're failing at this spectacularly, and I'm not saying this just wrt the Telegram ban. We're doing the opposite of what we ought to do.
3. This is precedence-setting.
Once this goes through unchallenged, this will happen again and again and again. it happened with Internet shutdowns, and the Indian government got a lot of criticisms for years, for over 100 Internet shutdowns a year in the country. In some cases, especially Kashmir and Darjeeling, there were over 100 days of bans. Kashmir had bans regularly, for years. At that time we argued that this won't happen in a major city.
App bans are easier: you block one, and people switch to an alternative, because as Indians, we adjust to government diktats. It hurts less than an entire Internet ban.
IT Cell kicks in and says:
- "you can't sacrifice using a messaging app for your country?"
-"They didn't follow government orders, so this is right." - "there's lots of harmful content on telegram (pick anything from terror financing to port to copyright violation to app features)"
- "It has harmful features like message editing that can lead to people being mislead that an exam paper has leaked."
I'm surprised tech company founders haven't been given rewritten tweets on this issue btw. It's a thing and I'm surprised to see some friends of mine tweet a copypasted tweet recently, but I understand their compulsions: they're in a high risk business in a high risk country with little or no leverage.
4. Is this a smoke-test for Whatsapp?
I'm wondering about how the decision went, and who took the final call. We know that it probably wasn't MEITY: for things like such bans, MEITY bows to Home Affairs. It's a BIG decision to take, given the hundreds of millions of users impacted. Did it go up to the PM? Ofc heads won't roll, like in case of the education minister, and that was demonstrably a shit-show that deserved a public sacking. this is smaller.
This is kinda like the Indian Internet's demonetization moment, except there's no Paytm publishing ads in newspapers, and no payments industry celebrating a windfall, leeching growth off millions of people hanging off a cliff trying to get access to their own money. Media is already controlled and probably won't cover this well, and social media and YouTube is all there is, and it's tiny, and this is Telegram not Whatsapp. This makes me wonder if this is a smoke test as leverage against Whatsapp.
Remember that the streaming services did not challenge the IT Rules in 2021 after what happened in case of Tandav.
5. Legality of the ban:
legality of a ban is not a consideration anymore in India since the IT Rules challenges (they're largely unconstitutional) are stuck in courts, and in my opinion Indian courts are doing little about constitutional rights like freedom of expression, so that has given confidence to the government to create an infrastructure for censorship, and increasing censorship over the last five months. They're not responding to RTI's btw. We tried.
Make no bones about this:
- This act is disproportionate. There is legitimate speech that is being pre-censored with a ban on an app like this.
- there is no clear cause-and-effect impact in terms of public order here.
- The short term of the ban (so far) doesn't justify the scale of the impact, though that might be leverage in courts because by the time the hearing happens, the ban may be lifted so no one may actually consider challenging it.
I'm of the opinion that except in some cases, our courts, including our Supreme Court, haven't upheld constitutionality and individual rights of citizens that is core to the functioning of a democracy. But that's a global trend, and this too shall pass. I think that when courts act to protect our rights, its an exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, like the SC did in case of the Right to Privacy (700+ days before a nine judge bench was founded), they just delay justice.
6. There are reports, and I don't understand this too well since I've not tracked network infrastructure for a while, that Internet landing station infra is being used to block Telegram. Ignore Durov's conspiracy theory claims of Whatsapp initiating this, because afaik this is a different Reliance (ADAG). Plus I don't think Whatsapp is that stupid or short sighted. But for those in networking, is the usage of landing stations to block an app unprecedented?
Anyway, these are just some things I was thinking about so dumping it here.
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
there's a new word i'm hearing a lot in the most frontier-pushingest coding-agent builders:
_program design_
for even the best agentic coders trying to maintain code quality, we've all seen it
- you come up with something to build
- you research the codebase, riff with the agent, align on what the end state looks like
- you (or the agent) breaks it down into tasks for individual agents / context windows
- you rip the implementation
- the code works or is close to working - and it follows your spec to the letter
but the code itself is still trash
- poorly factored methods
- leaky abstractions
- tramp data
- overloaded interfaces
- try catch, useEffect, global variables everywhere
I thought models would catch up, or that this wouldn't matter - that if we stayed in spec-land, understood the high-level architecture, and tokenmaxxed hard enough, we would be able to skip code review and just stay shipping
doesn't seem to be working out that way
I have seen agent-owned codebases spin up out of nothing...
...and I have seen them collapse into rubble within 6 months
now there's something to be said about "skate where the puck is going"...
...and I can't tell you what tomorrows models will be capable of
but I *can* tell you that *today*, models are mid-to-bad at program design
you can solve some of this with memory / agents.md, but the scope of program design is massive.
- entire companies have been built to help you implement it
- books, classes, and professions have spun up around it
are you building something to last? Or are you slinging more slop on the pile?
anyways, thats the post, stay tuned for a fun announce tomorrow y'all 🙂
Siddhartha Reddy retweeted
India hasn't been the first in any of the large areas in the past. We got our internet access right two decades after every one else. We skipped most of the CDMA drama and went straight to GSM+3G after the world had figured out mobile telephone way earlier. We were late to payments, but figured out a way better way to clear payments than most others.
We have been late to every new technological change, mostly because we've been loathe to invest large sums where failure is a given. Even our space and nuclear programs - where we have had to work indigenously with local research - we've taken a lot of time, to avoid major failures.
The cost of failure is not just financial in India, it's the fear of shame that runs way too deep. New nice looking road? Oh look, not enough traffic on it, shame. That rocket didn't take off? Shame on us, we should have worked harder so it wouldn't fail the first time. Failed an exam? Shame. A gap year in your resume to try something out? Shame.
This feeling is pervasive, but it's changing as we speak. As it does, India is investing into things, and we embrace failure a lot more these days. This will come from the next brand of companies that aren't afraid of failure, perhaps not so much from the older set of companies that have designed themselves to be cash flow giants. Not just IT, but in FMCG, etc. (Though in metals, we have seen massive risk being taken)
There are companies that have transformed themselves through very large risk oriented projects - the biggest company in India is one. But I believe technological risk will be taken by startups and will be funded by people in the space who've seen what risk can produce, through successful exits in ESOPs or as founders from companies in otherwise boring spaces.
We've lacked that capital really, because otherwise capital has been preserved in large families - risk taking is obviously stunted there as preservation takes a larger role in their future. Now that the first gen capital is more, expect some of this to happen. And no, I don't think the government should play this role (they can help by deregulating business) - it's private capital that should fund the next big thing. From the people that don't consider it shameful to fail.