Works at Lyftdata. Likes Go, Rust, Lua and C. Does not like C++, even though I wrote a fkn interpreter and based a book around it.
Johannesburg, South Africa
Joined January 2018
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Sigourney Weaver testing a flame thrower in 1978 for Alien. Should handle those Murder Hornets ....
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Steve Donovan retweeted
Why is AI slop so frustrating to read?
AI writing often obscures main ideas and invents awkward phrases, making sentences more complex than necessary.
Many of these slop patterns violate writing principles established in English writing books.
In our benchmark, AI writing breaks these principles far more often than human writing, with Claude Code replies by far the worst offenders.
We show examples of the most common slop patterns in this thread
ALT How often AI and humans break writing rules
Steve Donovan retweeted
Dan Corder, Kiffness, Michael Beaumont all grew up wealthy. They work hard. But the hill from which they survey... not many can relate. I’m not saying you have to be poor to become a leader, I’m just saying that, on a base level, they’re just rich white boys.
Steve Donovan retweeted
Norway now has more than 2,000 underwater AI laser robots shooting lice off its salmon
they're made by a company called Stingray, and they already guard more than 50 million salmon and trout 24/7
the reason is sea lice, tiny parasites that latch onto salmon and feed on them
as few as 11 can kill a small fish, and one pen can hold 150,000 salmon
the usual fix is pumping the fish out and blasting them with warm water or water jets to knock the lice off
but the handling is so rough that Norway's fish health report ranks it the top cause of death in full-grown farmed salmon
so instead, Stingray puts a robot inside the pen that hunts lice one at a time, all day:
> two cameras watch every salmon that swims past
> AI checks two frames to make sure it's really a louse
> then a green laser fires from up to 2 meters away
> the salmon's scales reflect the beam, so the fish swims off fine and the louse is dead
we now live in a world where AI lasers do pest control on your dinner lmao
Steve Donovan retweeted
Visitor: "Where's the fruit? Gorillas eat fruit."
Keeper: "Not here. We took it off the menu in 2014. Most big zoos have since."
Visitor: "Why would you take fruit off a gorilla?"
Keeper: "Because it isn't fruit any more. Everything in a supermarket's been bred for a century to be sweeter. A wild fig's about as sweet as a carrot. A supermarket banana's a pudding."
Visitor: "And the gorillas?"
Keeper: "Got fat. Teeth went. Two of the males were pre-diabetic. The vet said feeding them modern fruit was like feeding them chocolate bars with the wrapper left on."
Visitor: "What do they get now?"
Keeper: "Leaves, stems, a bit of veg. They sulked for a fortnight and lost the weight."
Visitor: "So the fruit was too sugary for a 180-kilo animal built to eat it."
Keeper: "That's the paperwork, yes."
Visitor: "I've got a bag of grapes in the buggy for my two-year-old."
Keeper: "Lovely. We'd not be allowed to give those to the chimps."
Steve Donovan retweeted
We all die one day but I am not giving up my machine intelligence work to a corporations offering at most $10K or less for an advanced visual perception system codebase I developed while teaching myself computer vision & programming in Zambia back when internet was expensive.
Steve Donovan retweeted
I’m against AI revolution in Africa bcs to me it’s another global trend we are hoping on before fixing the foundation of what should carry it
E.g, how do we prioritize conversations like ‘AI in agriculture’ when we are still tussling over land, water access and ownership
Steve Donovan retweeted
British artist Louis Duffy's 'Christ Driving the Money-lenders from the Temple' (1940) shows Christ as a truncheon-wielding everyman confronting business-suited arms dealers, one with talon-like hands, trading on graves of war dead ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/militar…
Steve Donovan retweeted
The reason these "throw everything at once" style agentic cyberattacks work is because most orgs are chronically terrified of deploying deterministic detection + remediation automations.
Most security products have a "lock out this account" or "disconnect this system" or "block this IP" options that you can set if certain alerts are triggered. But because business function takes precedent, most orgs would rather risk a successful intrusion than an accidental disruption.
There's no reason to believe that "agentic defenders" would be a viable solution. Defenders need to consume many times more context/signals that attackers do, therefore by nature are slower. Defenders win on controlling the playing field, not out-maneuvering attackers like it's some Hollywood style fighter jet battle.
In the same way that reactive human defenses are slower than human offense, reactive AI defense are slower than AI offense (and regular old deterministic automations, too). The whole "fight AI with AI" thing is pretty ridiculous and misunderstands what good defense looks like.
The only answer is proactive defense + fast deterministic detection & response. But nobody is ready for that talk yet, so we're probably just gonna do like 10 years of "agentic AI SOC", until everyone runs out of money and/or figures out it doesn't work.