Tech tinkerer, Curious Thinker(er), Lost Leprechaun. Always trying to improve.
Winterthur, Switzerland
Joined June 2009
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Sean Murphy retweeted
Ireland is one of the oldest democratic countries in the world, believe it or not. We're one of only 10 nations that have been an electoral democracy for more than 90 years unbroken. In Ireland's case, we've reached 102 years. We can be proud of that 🇮🇪😇
ourworldindata.org/data-insi…
Sean Murphy retweeted
Firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if open source did not exist. The top six programming languages in our sample comprise 84% of the demand-side value of OSS. Further, 96% of the demand-side value is created by only 5% of OSS developers.
Hoffman et al., 2024
Sean Murphy retweeted
Nicholas Carlini is one of the sharper people I have ever met and I pay attention to anything he writes; this, on day-to-day utility of LLMs, rings pretty true to me. nicholas.carlini.com/writing…
Sean Murphy retweeted
July 20th, 1969 is a date that stands high in my life – it was the day that we, together as one people, achieved the greatest scientific and technological feat in human history. The specific role that Neil, Mike and I performed in the event was but one part of an immeasurably larger effort – not just for our nation, but for all mankind. As I look back on what we accomplished 55 years ago, I am still inspired by what we all saw and did – the best of America and the best of humanity. Thank you for the privilege and the honor of serving you, and for being part of this exciting and wonderous journey with me. #Apollo11
Sean Murphy retweeted
Next Sunday the All-Ireland hurling final will be on the BBC for the first time. It’s Cork vs Clare, a cracker of match in front of 82,400 screaming fans at Croke Park, for the highlight of the Irish sporting year. If you’ve never seen Hurling, here is a quick explainer…
Sean Murphy retweeted
We've put a lot of work into the Anthropic Console the past few weeks and I'm excited to share the latest updates with y'all.
Turns out Claude is pretty good at prompt engineering so we've integrated Claude everywhere:
Sean Murphy retweeted
Russia blocked the speech of the Czech ambassador at the UN, let's make sure everybody can read it - here is the transcript and the link: @CzechMFA
"Colleagues, First and foremost, on behalf of Czechia, I wish to express my profound sorrow and sadness at the attacks on Okhmatdyt Children's Hospital as well as on several maternity hospitals in Kyiv and across Ukraine, resulting in many dead and wounded. What happened yesterday is unconscionable. It is beyond the pale. Czechia condemns in the strongest terms the devastating attacks perpetrated by the Russian Federation. The horrific spectacle of relentless death and destruction caused by Russia’s blatant aggression reached a new dark chapter yesterday. Targeting small, innocent and sick children with hypersonic missiles is utterly shocking.
Directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects is a war crime, and any such attacks are unacceptable and must end immediately. Regrettably, Russia continues to completely disregard international law as well as claims for durable and just peace. It is more than obvious that arguments such as “mistaken strike” or “Ukrainian air defence caused it” do not hold any ground here. Russian military must have known perfectly well what civilian targets they aimed at and what damage these strikes would cause.
Colleagues, No matter what lies the Russian propagandists continue to spread, the simple truth remains: Putin’s Russia is the aggressor. The launching of this war of territorial aggression is Russia’s choice.
The gross violation of the UN Charter and international law is Russia’s choice. The bombing of schools and hospitals is Russia’s choice. The killing of children and civilians is Russia’s choice. Let that sink in. Those responsible for this war must be held to account. Colleagues, Ukraine needs our support. Ukraine is defending its territorial integrity and fighting for its survival. I want to use this opportunity to reaffirm that Czech support for Ukraine remains unwavering.
The international community must take concrete steps to end the war and support Ukraine’s sovereignty within its internationally recognised borders. Czechia is determined to work with all those who genuinely uphold the key principles of the UN Charter to bring an end to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine once and for all. Thank you. "
Link: mzv.gov.cz/jnp/en/issues_and…
Sean Murphy retweeted
Is Europe really willing to allow Russia to rape, murder & destroy Kharkiv?
This would be a humiliation for European foreign policy as well as a tragedy.
An emergency summit should be called to finally agree what brave Ukrainians need !
The Defense Forces of Ukraine are defending our strongholds in the Kharkiv region.
Over the past day, the enemy used guided aerial bombs to carry out airstrikes in the Vovchansk direction.
With the beginning of the night, the russian occupiers increased the fire pressure on first line of our defense with the support of artillery.
At approximately 5 am, there was an attempt by the enemy to break through our defense line using armored vehicles.
As of now, these attacks have been repelled; battles of varying intensity continue.
Reserve units have been deployed to strengthen the defense in this area of the front. The Defense Forces of Ukraine continue to hold back the enemy's offensive.
We are grateful to every soldier, sergeant and officer who displayed the necessary fortitude and bravery to defend our positions.
Sean Murphy retweeted
Young builders of the world: Really want to come to SF? But can't afford to come to SF? Please read on. I'm going to sponsor two of you to visit this summer.
I've been promoting San Francisco as THE place that those who wish to build the future should be. But I've got a couple sad replies from people saying it's financially out of reach. I get it. I could barely afford to come here in 2011—I bought my flights and initial accommodation with a €2k bank loan.
So to pay off my guilt for pumping SF, and to support those younger versions of me who can't even get a loan, I'm going to sponsor two young builders to come here for 90 days starting 1 June. They'll get:
- CHEAP return flights from your home and back
- CHEAP Bay Area accommodation
- A $50 daily stipend… you'll need to like cooking :)
- One meeting with an immigration attorney to advise on your options
- One meeting with me for a high five and a pep talk :)
This will be hard. It's NOT a holiday. It's definitely not meant to be. But you'll get an exposure to the greatest city for builders on earth and what you do from there will be up to you.
To apply:
- mail: [email protected]
- include your name, your age, your location, and ONE line on why you want to come here
- confirm that there's no way you could afford to come here by your own means
Please don't mail more than once. We may request a short interview. We'll choose people who we think can make the most of it + somewhat at random.
The deadline for applications is this Friday :)
To everyone not applying, I'd appreciate a retweet or otherwise a share of this message. I'll announce the winners next week and send some updates through the summer on how it all goes.
Sean Murphy retweeted
Some economists tried to reproduce the results of 67 economics papers and they pretty much couldn't do it:
Even with help from authors, only half of papers ended up being reproducible, and this was still a problem at journals with required reporting of code and data.
Sean Murphy retweeted
Sunday rant.
For software engineering, my sense is that the phrase “premature optimization is the root of all evil” has massively backfired. Its from a book on data structures and mainly tried to dissuade people from prematurely write things in assembler. But the point was to free you up to think harder about the data structures to use, not leave things comically inefficient. This context is always skipped when it’s uttered.
Not all fast software is world-class, but all world-class software is fast. Performance is _the_ killer feature.
If you are in engineering, here is a fantastic anecdote. I refer to this account often. It’s a bit subtile, but the implications are massive-
It’s an account of how SQLite became 50% faster, not by doing one specific thing but hundreds of small ones.
SQLite is everywhere today because of this work.
sqlite-users.sqlite.narkive.…
We need the engineers in all companies fight for this more. Product leads are not the right owners of the end performance of the software. This needs to be encoded in the professional pride of the software engineering discipline. Leaders in companies need to encourage it and hold engineering accountable. It’s simply not ok to fritter away the performance of the products for random reasons.
Every user of your products cares exactly as much about latency as engineers do when typing in their terminal. They just don’t have the words to describe what they don’t like about the experience and neither should they.
Sean Murphy retweeted
95% of what we are doing in AI is stuff that's simple enough to explain to a child, made way over-complicated by mathematical-looking notation and unclear thinking. A short rant 🧵 using attention as an example.
Sean Murphy retweeted
Two years ago, I wrote a post that went viral and was translated into various languages. The post was about Ukraine's determination to fight to the end.
Today, I want to add more…
1/n
Sean Murphy retweeted
english has a cool built-in heuristic for detecting bullshit
are most of the nouns and verbs being used latin/greek or germanic in origin?
if germanic, the things being discussed are probably real physical actions and things: tree, walk, cow, shit, fall, wood, buy, leg, go
Sean Murphy retweeted
Spoke to a Microsoft engineer on the GPT-6 training cluster project. He kvetched about the pain they're having provisioning infiniband-class links between GPUs in different regions.
Me: "why not just colocate the cluster in one region?"
Him: "Oh yeah we tried that first. We can't put more than 100K H100s in a single state without bringing down the power grid." 🤯