Polymath, inventor, thinker. Computer Science artist.
Earth, for now.
Joined November 2024
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On AI and The Death of Software Engineering.
Caution: much techno-speak follows. Thinking caps are recommended. 😆
I recently read a couple articles describing how to get AI to author and fully verify software. The articles were well written, but overlooked (ignored?) a couple significant issues.
Writing new software is difficult. Mimicking, copying existing software is pretty straight forward. Where is new software needed? Lots of places.
Porting operating systems to new processors.
Running new sensors, cameras, peripherals.
Driving cars.
Flying airplanes.
Controlling robots. Robots for surgery, for assembly lines, for personal assistants.
Launching rockets.
Landing rockets where you launched them.
These are non-trivial projects, where safety IS CRITICAL.
Verification is essential, as pointed out in the articles. And for safety-critical fields verification must be complete and error-free. In their latest AI training courses, Google emphasizes the need for verification, and emphasizes human involvement.
"But," respond AI enthusiasts, "that is slow, error-prone! So we'll get AI (different agents) to verify the output!" But then, how do you verify the verification? And how do you verify the verification of the verification? Ad Nauseum. Call this "uber-verification."
For simple tasks, it is simple, even trivial. But as task complexity increases, like in the fields mentioned above, verification needed, and associated effort, explodes. The overall write-verify task is a variant of the SAT (Satisfiability) problem in algorithm and complexity theory. Ask @grok to discuss SAT. It's a great read.
SAT is known to be NP-Complete. That means HARD. Extremely HARD in general form. And time to run explodes super-exponentially, a fancy way of saying the variables in your system are in the EXPONENT of the equation describing how long a solution takes to be generated or run. @grok also has much to say about SAT runtime versus problem size.
Humans, trained in the fields, are quite good at spotting errors, better than AI agents. So as the verification problem explodes, the need for human-in-the-loop goes UP, not DOWN.
Examining software creation and verification from another angle reveals the design/verify issue and solution are also a variant of the Turing Halting Problem (THP). You are asking, "Does this program behave correctly, and does the verification system prove it?"
The THP was PROVEN to have NO SOLUTION by the genius Alan Turing in 1936, 90 YEARS ago, long before digital computers existed (sorry, Ada Lovelace & Charles Babbage, close but no cigar.) And @grok could write a novel about Turing, Lovelace, and Babbage, which is also fascinating.
This brings us back around to the core theses of these AI articles and shows that there are fundamental reasons these problems can never be "solved" by AI. We CAN improve on past tools and solutions, but we need to keep the facts firmly in focus:
1. While you MAY have a set of agents/prompts that work great for some, even many cases, there can be no general system to write, verify, uber-verify any problem you give it. This is PROVEN. A CENTURY(ish) ago!
2. The combination of SAT and THP means the field can have many "really good" tools etc, but NONE OF THEM will be the ultimate, universal solution.
3. This does NOT mean "don't try this." Many companies have made fantastic breakthroughs in faster solutions to complex problems. The problem in general remains NP-Complete AND Undecidable. AND ALWAYS WILL BE. But in some cases, a human in the process, in the right place, making the right decisions, yields FANTASTIC results.
Unstoppable retweeted
This post is going to sound like a brag about me. It's not. It's about what traditional fiction publishing has done to itself.
I am a skilled and capable writer. I've shipped many successful nonfiction books and articles, including one New York Times bestseller back when that rather more than it does now.
Back around the end of the 20th century at a Worldcon room party I was told by a slightly tipsy woman who was an acquisition editor at the Berkeley paperback imprint, which published a respectable line of science fiction, that I have the one thing that mass-market publishers look for - an established fanbase that wants to buy my books.
She literally said to me "Send me anything. Anything at all. If it's not unsalvageable crap, we'll publish it." Hearing it put that way bothered me a little and I never took the offer. I wanted to write something really good, not just be picked up because I'm an easy sell.
Many years later I sold one SF short story. It got nominated for a Hugo (shortly before the Hugos self-enshittified) for political reasons I was not happy about. I didn't think it was Hugo-quality, but it was a solid piece of work in which I proved to my own satisfaction (and that of other people) that I can in fact write competent genre SF.
I have two novels in progress. Odds that I will eventually finish one of them aren't bad, I just have to budget the time and buckle down.
What all this adds up to: from the point of view of tradpub, I am about the best bet on a new novelist anyone could ask for. Demonstrated ability, a largish fan base, and I can be billed as a besteller author? If you're bossing a publishing imprint, you look at that resume and think "we put most of the little marketing money we're willing to spend on this guy, and buy him space on endcap displays".
The hope, of course is that I break big and become a star author that they can get multiple books out of. And make them a metric ton of money.
For most of my life I would have been delighted with that outcome. And I am absolutely the kind of new talent tradpub should least want to drive away.
It's not going to happen. With the possible exception of Baen Books, I wouldn't touch tradpub with an insulated 21-foot pole. And it's not just because think I'd get to keep more of a book's earnings per sale by selling indie, either.
Tradpub has over the last 30 years catastrophically reduced the value it offers an author while escalating its demands. That woman from Berkeley was conveying, among other things, their desire to skive out of ever spending any serious promotional money. My spies tell me they've gotten much stingier since.
It used to be that through their cozy relationships with chain bookstores and the major distributors, tradpub was effectively the only route to mass distribution and high-volume sales. That sure isn't true anymore - and yet, they still rake off most of the book's gross price as though it were still paying for that channel access.
And this is before we even get to the fact that most of tradpub has become a gay race communist longhouse that insists on "sensitivity readers" and literally hates both me and most of my potential audience. Hard SF is toxically masculine, don't you know.
I, and any other writer with self-respect, will leave them to their incestuous political screeds and their monsterfucker porn. And good riddance.
Unstoppable retweeted
He just highlighted the exact problem.When Democratic early and mail votes alone are already enough to win, before a single Election Day vote is counted, in states like Texas, that’s not “enthusiasm.” That’s the system producing outcomes that no longer require in-person voters.This is the same pattern from 2020, only more extreme. teapaw.org/SteveRattner/status/21…
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The real reason we loved LAN parties wasn't just the games.
It was being in a room full of friends, surrounded by computers, pizza boxes, tangled network cables and absolutely no concern about what was happening anywhere else in the world.
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I live in Texas. I am an election clerk. I can tell you the election is 100% fraud.
Texas is not blue. Illegals found loopholes to gain registration cards.
Follow the money.
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Yes. Election was stolen.The Republican states that were stolen all submitted their voter files to DHS. Now the crush comes.All 21 states. All 1,799 counties. Every single one shifted blue. Literally impossible. GOP vote stayed basically flat from 2022. Democrats materialized roughly 20 million new House votes in a midterm. Same clean 15 percent pattern across Senate and governor races. For every 1,000 Trump votes in 2024, 150 landed on the Democratic side. It didn’t matter how red the state was.Without an honest election we do not have a country. It had to be this way. The numbers raise the question. The ballots can answer it. Paper ballot hand counts. Poll-book check-ins against votes counted. Voter files showing who actually turned out. Those come first.
Unstoppable retweeted
There are people on 𝕏 who have turned replying to Elon Musk into a full time job
Unstoppable retweeted
Election fraud: Kansas Republicans cast more votes for Treasurer, and Insurance Commissioner, than their US Senate and Governor seats. Really? I don't think so.
The pattern continues like Texas, North Carolina and Ohio, North and South Carolina, Georgia (see previous tweets).
@FSociety_1942 found this unholy pattern, help him out at his give-send-go link at the top of his X page.
@realDonaldTrump @AGToddBlanche Kansas:
Unstoppable retweeted
🚨 BREAKING:
A missing memory card just flipped a Georgia House race.
Republican Gerald Greene was down 58 votes to Democrat Harry James.
Then officials found uncounted votes in Seminole County during routine checks, a 388-vote discrepancy, and Greene is now reportedly ahead by 262.
If it holds, Democrats will have only a ONE-seat majority in the Georgia House. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has opened an investigation.
My take:
A whole memory card of votes went missing and nobody noticed until a routine check. Imagine how many races are decided by margins smaller than that.
This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's a basic accountability problem.
Paper ballots, hand counts where possible, and full audits.
Every legal vote should count, and counting them shouldn't depend on luck. 🗳️
h/t @kylenabecker
Unstoppable retweeted
Gotta love the conspiracy wackos, they are consistently predictable.
“Where are the debris?” “Why are there no debris? It’s been an hour, how come we don’t have big obviously recognizable airplane parts? It was obviously a missile?”
Now we have hundreds of plane (and, sadly, human) debris recovered, on camera, some with identifiable parts matching a Learjet (and I’m sure we’ll have DNA matches too).
“Oh, that was convenient” “oh, sure, anyone could have planted that there” “how come we didn’t find their passports too?” “Those look like missile parts!”
These people are absolutely ridiculous. Mindless drones.
Unstoppable retweeted
Elon Musk was once asked to explain first principles thinking in a way that anyone could understand. Instead of giving the business school version (which he has done many times), he gave an example so simple that it revealed something about how his brain actually works, not how he describes it working.
He said: "If you want to make a cheaper rocket, most people look at what rockets cost today and try to make them 10 percent cheaper. That's reasoning by analogy. You're comparing to what exists. First principles says: what is a rocket actually made of? Aluminum alloys. Titanium. Copper. Carbon fiber. What do those materials cost on the commodity market? About 2 percent of the cost of a finished rocket. So the question becomes: why is there a 98 percent markup between the raw materials and the finished product? The answer is: because that's how it's always been done. First principles says that's not an answer."
The 2 percent number is the one that changed SpaceX. When Elon calculated that the raw materials for a rocket cost 2 percent of the finished rocket, the gap between 2 percent and 100 percent became the engineering problem. Every layer of that gap (labor, manufacturing process, supply chain, contractor markups, design complexity, testing redundancy) was interrogated individually. The layers that were necessary were kept. The layers that existed because "that's how it's always been done" were eliminated.
The elimination produced the Falcon 9. A rocket that costs roughly $2,720 per kilogram to orbit. The Space Shuttle cost approximately $54,500 per kilogram. The reduction is not 10 percent. It is 95 percent. The reduction came not from building a better version of the existing approach but from asking why the existing approach costs what it costs and eliminating everything that doesn't have a physics based answer.
The simplicity of the explanation is the vulnerability. Most CEOs explain their thinking in complex frameworks designed to sound impressive. Elon explained his in terms of aluminum prices and percentage markups. The explanation is so simple that it's almost embarrassing for the audience of MBAs who spent two years learning frameworks that a commodity price check renders unnecessary.
The man who thinks in first principles can explain it to a child because the thinking itself is childlike. Children ask "why" until the adult runs out of answers. Elon asks "why" until the engineer runs out of physics based answers. The moment the answer becomes "because that's how we've always done it," the thing being discussed is a tradition, not a requirement. And traditions are eliminated. Requirements are optimized. The distinction between the two is worth $100 billion in rocket economics.
First principles is not a business methodology. It is the refusal to accept an answer that doesn't reduce to physics. Every child does it naturally. Most adults unlearn it. Elon never unlearned it. The man who builds rockets thinks like a five year old who won't stop asking why. The five year old's question, applied with an engineering degree and a hundred billion dollars, is the most powerful tool in commercial space.
Unstoppable retweeted
All 15 Texas statewide midterm races from 2018 to 2026.
Consistent Republican votes.
Consistent Democrat votes.
That was true even in 2018 among Democrats, when Trump was very unpopular.
Then, suddenly...
Unstoppable retweeted
Well said @elonmusk
“🚨 BREAKING: ELON MUSK FINALLY RESPONDS AFTER GINA HINOJOSA THREATENED TO TAKE ACTION AGAINST HIS TESLA OPERATIONS IN TEXAS.
🗣️ “Gina is nothing more than a puppet of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris. Democratic Party power brokers put her in that position to advance their own political interests. But here’s the reality: they need me far more than I need them. If they don’t want me in Texas, I’m prepared to pack up and relocate to Florida without hesitation.
I can already see what she’s planning. She will attempt to interfere with Cybertruck manufacturing by hiding behind increased taxation, but everyone understands the real motivation. Her political allies in the deep state want to punish me for standing behind Donald Trump during the election.
This confrontation goes beyond my businesses. Their real objective is Trump, and they believe targeting me is another way to get to him. What they seem to have forgotten is that the President still possesses veto powers.
I’m certainly not intimidated by Gina Hinojosa. Whenever she makes these threats, I simply find them amusing. Any reckless decision she makes will ultimately damage Texas, its economy and its residents much more than it will affect my companies.
Let’s see whether Gina genuinely intends to protect the interests of Texans or whether she is willing to undermine everything the state has accomplished simply because of political hostility.”
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The quote attributed to Elon Musk is fabricated and does not match any of his posts or verified statements. His actual recent comments include "Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now" and winding down Cybertruck production at Gigafactory Texas.
x.com/elonmusk/statu…
x.com/elonmusk/statu…
finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/…
huffpost.com/entry/gina-hin…
Unstoppable retweeted
It is only possible when you cheat. It can be built into the software and front loaded into the machines before the polls even open. Or it can be done in real time by accessing the servers.
HOLY CR*P 🚨 How is this even possible??
All of California’s major candidate election results are the EXACT SAME percentages for Democrats and Republicans
Governor 64% (D) vs 35% (R)
Lieutenant Governor 64% (D) vs 35% (R)
Secretary of State 64% (D) vs 35% (R)
Controller 64% (D) vs 35% (R)
Treasurer 64% (D) vs 35% (R)
Attorney General 64% (D) vs 35% (R)
Supreme Court Justice: Joshua Groban 72% (D) vs 28% (R)
Supreme Court Justice: Kelli M. Evans 72% (D) vs 28% (R)
These don’t look like real election results, they look like a computer algorithm
Our elections are fake
Unstoppable retweeted
Hey @grok . The World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. Did a friend of the mastermind of that bombing just win an election in New Jersey?
Unstoppable retweeted
Yes. Adam Hamawy won New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District seat on November 3. In the early 1990s he associated with Omar Abdel-Rahman (the Blind Sheikh), the spiritual leader whose followers carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Hamawy traveled with him, translated for him, visited his home, and later testified as a defense witness at his 1995 terrorism trial. Hamawy has said the connection was limited and community-based; he was never charged with any crime and later served as a U.S. Army combat surgeon.
Unstoppable retweeted
Nine people in ten would point at the steak on the right and call it the healthy one, and I have run out of patience with every single one of them.
The one on the right is a ribeye with the ribeye taken out. The one on the left is the animal as it was built, a cap of fat round the edge thick enough to earn the word, a seam of it between the muscles, marbling through the eye so dense it looks like frost. Fifty years ago the butcher would have charged you more for the one on the left and apologised for the one on the right.
Now the trimmed one is premium and the real one is a guilty pleasure, and the country that fell for that is the country with the diabetes clinic.
The fat is the food. A, D, E and K2 live in it and nowhere else on the plate. The flavour lives in it, which is why the right one needs a jus and the left one needs a knife. The fullness lives in it, which is why the right one has you at the fridge by nine and the left one has you forgetting breakfast. The fuel lives in it. The red is the packaging, and you have been taught to buy the packaging and tip the contents away.
And this fat, out of every fat on the counter, is the one that cannot hurt you. The cow's rumen saturated it before it reached her. It sits solid and white on the board, it does not go rancid in the pan the way the bottle of sunflower oil does, and it is the fat your great-grandmother fried everything in while heart disease was still a rarity you wrote up in a journal.
So who convinced you otherwise. A margarine firm with a heart on the lid, a 1977 guideline written by a man who never ran a trial, and forty years of magazine covers, every one of them paid by somebody with a bottle to sell. They could not sell you the fat on the left, because it comes free with the cow. So they taught you to fear it and sold you the substitute.
Half a century on, the lean one costs more, tastes of less, leaves you hungry, and gets called healthy by people who have never once asked what the fat was for.
The one on the left. Eat the edge first. Stop apologising for being right.
Unstoppable retweeted
Dear Elon Musk @elonmusk,
Three days ago, Block, the parent of Cash App, agreed to pay roughly $764 million to the Department of Justice for failing to stop money laundering on a product that looks a lot like X Money. Regulators found Cash App’s backlog of unreviewed suspicious activity alerts went from 18,000 to 169,000 in two years. The product grew faster than the people watching it.
I am writing because I believe the same thing is about to happen to you, and I would rather say so now than read about it later.
My name is Everett Stern. I am the HSBC whistleblower. In 2010 I was a compliance officer who found money moving through the bank for drug cartels, terror financiers, and sanctioned regimes. I documented it. I escalated it. I was told to stop. So I took it to the United States government, the way every citizen is told to. The bank paid $1.9 billion. Nobody went to jail. And I lost everything. My career ended. I was blacklisted from the industry I had tried to protect. I slept on a cot in an apartment with cockroaches and waited tables at @PFChangs to survive. I risked my life, and for a long time I was not sure it had been worth it. I rebuilt from nothing, and I decided the rest of my life would be spent preventing the next HSBC.
Last month Bank of America admitted to willfully violating the Bank Secrecy Act. More than $5 billion in suspicious transactions went unreported. 475 sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism programs. The bank paid $1.2 billion, about two weeks of its profit, and not one person was charged. I wrote an open letter to Secretary Bessent asking him to refer the people responsible for criminal prosecution. 3.7 million Americans read it. Republicans and Democrats stood behind it. The Secretary never answered. No banker is going to jail.
Here is the problem we are facing, in plain terms. Every terrorist attack starts with a wire transfer. Every drug death in America starts with a cartel being able to move its money. The banks know it, pay their fines, and keep going. The government knows it and takes no real action. Fourteen years after HSBC, nothing has changed, and people are dying because of it.
But you can change it. You can on your own platform, from the first day, before the first alert backlog ever forms. The banks will not do it. Treasury has not done it. You could be the first person with the power to build it right who actually did.
I have the highest respect for you and what you have built. I know you have no interest in supporting terrorists or drug cartels. But I have spent fourteen years watching how they work, and they are already reading your website. It promises to “pay anyone on X, free and with no limits,” a Visa card with worldwide ATM fee reimbursements, no foreign transaction fees, and wires in and out. That is a feature list for an honest customer. It is also a feature list for a cartel. You have spent three years fighting bots on this platform. The day a bot can hold a wallet, the bot problem becomes a money laundering problem. Picture a fentanyl distributor in Phoenix with two hundred burner accounts, moving $900 at a time with no limits, cashed out through an X Card at an ATM anywhere in the world by Friday, with the fees reimbursed. Regulators call that structuring. Everyone else can see what it is.
Your website says a great deal about yield, cashback, and FDIC coverage. It does not say one word about how X Money verifies who a customer is or watches where the money goes. Maybe that work is being done quietly. If it is, I would be glad to be wrong. If it is not, that is the gap Block just paid $764 million for.
I am asking for a conversation. With you, with whoever leads financial crimes at X Money, or with anyone there who has the power to make a difference. Please allow me the honor of helping make X Money better and protecting the financial system of the United States of America.
Thank you for all you do for this country.
With sincere respect,
Everett A. Stern
HSBC Whistleblower
Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit