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Adam Compton

@comptona.bsky.social
467 followers 2.7K following 1.1K posts

Dad, husband, and principal engineer @ wayve.ai. Anyone can break one computer, but if you want to break thousands of computers at the same time you need a professional. Also enjoys reading everything that's not nailed down and pixel art.

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Reposted by Adam Compton
Micah @rincewind.run · 6h
rip to one of the coolest software engineers who ever lived
Margaret Hamilton standing next to a printout of code she and her team wrote for the Apollo program, which is as tall as she is
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Our entire economic system is oriented around eliminating friction and it turns out we need to put effort into things for them to feel worthwhile. Oops, I guess
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Did someone force you to use Teams? I'm so sorry
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Reposted by Adam Compton
mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
look, if you're worried about being remembered, don't try to pursue immortality or whatever, the smart move is to start selling substandard copper and then make sure anyone who complains deposits a physical copy of that complaint in a site that will later be archaeologically significant
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
"project preparation"? Isn't that immediately implementing the first technical idea you thought of and insisting that management will make everyone adopt it?
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Reminds me of the Zig Ziglar quote about, if you're not willing to learn nobody can help you, and if you're determined to learn nobody can stop you
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
You have to know what you want and why you want it (so you can pivot in case the first thing you want doesn't work out). Seems like a low bar, and yet, it towers like a skyscraper over a huge chunk of engineers I've met
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
In the same sense that we might describe our current world as "breathing-normative", and the premise that someone might not need to breathe constantly would be downright bizarre to consider
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
A bond is a tradeable loan. Just like taking out a loan to buy a house or a car, but with enough standardization and scaffolding that the person who loaned you the money can easily sell the right to collect it to someone else.
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
@doctorow.pluralistic.net has a great piece about this very thing, where he posits that as someone with time and resources, he has a duty to complain about poor treatment and rules violations and get them fixed for people who lack his privileges. Seems like a great use of automation to me
pluralistic.net
Pluralistic: The petty (but undeniable) delights of cultivating unoptimizability as a habit (22 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Reposted by Adam Compton
Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Don't mind me, just setting up a puppet config to install prometheus-node-exporter on my RetroPie emulation box, totally normal things that everybody does
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Don't mind me, just setting up a puppet config to install prometheus-node-exporter on my RetroPie emulation box, totally normal things that everybody does
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Reposted by Adam Compton
Micah @rincewind.run · 26/09/2026
you know what? I agree with him my moral and ethical story about how we live together in this moment is we throw all of these assholes out of office and then we put them in jail
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Reposted by Adam Compton
Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I take issue with your using a word I don't know, even though I could easily guess it from context. No, I didn't read all the way to the end of your post, what does that have to do with anything?
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Reposted by Adam Compton
Gremliny Nussboo @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Every week, the Muppets have to put on a show to salvage a new institution: the Kennedy Center, the Supreme Court, the No-Mask Lesbian Bar, the Wonka Experience, Kozmo Dot Com (this has a time travel dimension, à la Quantum Leap), Cafe Loup in the West Village, democracy, the third season of GLOW
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Oh, sorry, I was indeed filled with fathomless blinding rage about you and everything you stand for, but then I got a notification on my phone and now I've completely forgotten you exist
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I take issue with your using a word I don't know, even though I could easily guess it from context. No, I didn't read all the way to the end of your post, what does that have to do with anything?
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
One less-acknowledged consequence I ran across in a story once was that everybody will just ask the oldest person for guidance and nobody will ever make their own decisions again. "How could you trust someone who's been alive only 1,300 years to know how to handle this situation?"
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Just because it's smarter than he is doesn't mean we all have to change the name. That said, I bet Slovenia is excited about the new domain name hosting revenue
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I miss the days when the product knob was set to "good changes that people will like" instead of, you know, the other way
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Reposted by Adam Compton
ceej @ceej.online · 25/09/2026
Be serious. Bert and Ernie are not “in love.” Maybe they used to be, once
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bree bird 🇨🇦 @goose.ski · 25/09/2026
this thread is a very fun ride lol neuromatch.social/@jonny/11733...
neuromatch.social
jonny (nonvenomous) (@jonny@neuromatch.social)
i am waiting on using meta's free ai vm to periodically try and get me oracle's free vps tier to proxy a domain into meta's free ai vm so i can serve the vm image dump of meta's free ai vm from meta's...
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Reposted by Adam Compton
Adam Compton @comptonformillercreek.org · 22/09/2026
Got my official campaign yard sign up!
An image of the front yard of a house, prominently featuring a yard sign labeled "Adam Compton - Miller Creek School Board - ComptonForMillerCreek.org" and a jaunty line art of an apple resting atop a stack of schoolbooks
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I agree with you that it's probably straightforward, but there's also lots of news stories of people who've gone around the bend after talking with an AI for a while, so it does not appear to be something that the big consumer-facing models have done in the past and I'm skeptical it's changed
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
But then you get into the obsequiousness problem, where an actual human might poke a couple of holes into your premise that you're the second coming. Which is riskier, not thinking about what you think, or doing so with the aid of AI that might accidentally give you a psychotic break along the way?
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
One thing I am not looking forward to with the spread of AI will be more and more people never actually pursuing that project, and condemning themselves to floating along unexamined-ly for big chunks of their lives. I mean, they do that now, but even more so
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Reposted by Adam Compton
Elixir of Progress @elucidating.extradimensional.space · 21/09/2026
I've seen folks defending the concept of "vibe coding" as valid in the industry and I don't get why. Vibe coding is the AI equivalent of a hobbyist writing just code. The quality of the work is variable. Professional software engineers should not (and usually do not) proceed that way.
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
It blows my mind every now and again to think that I can listen to any song I want at any time, when for all of history until the last ~150 years music was An Event that people had to coordinate and make the time to attend when it was even available at all
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I am surprised by all the other candidates who do
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I am running for my local school board and I've been advised to include pictures of my family on my campaign website. I do not want to do that! My kids deserve their privacy
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I think it also depends on who you get to go back as. I've never heard a woman pine over going back in time to a period when she'd be literally property
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I think meaning comes from effort in service of something we value. Denying ourselves the opportunity to exert this effort cuts us off from this source of meaning in our lives.
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rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
the whole thing of being open-minded isn’t saying all viewpoints are equally valid, it’s subjecting them all to equal scrutiny then rejecting the ones that are evil or backwards or stupid
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Reposted by Adam Compton
Ms . Penny Oaken @skywitchy.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
I need to make this clear: If you (WHOM I AM SPEAKING TO RIGHT NOW) have decided that "The Devil says he'll let us all go if we just hand over the outcast!" You *are* the villain, you *are* the monster, you *are* the bad guy. No questions. No exceptions. Liberty and Justice for ALL or GTFO
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Now we just need to teach the LLMs to be Mean-Girls-level snarky, and no human will ever write code again. "You really named that variable 'index'? What's wrong, did you need a reminder about how lists work on every line?"
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
One such example: www.starryhope.com/linux/tailwi...
starryhope.com
Tailwind CSS Lays Off 75% of Team as AI Kills Revenue
Tailwind CSS laid off 75% of its engineering team as AI tools decimated revenue by 80%. What it means for developers and open-source sustainability.
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I suspect the most enduring effect of AI will be ticking up Sturgeon's Law a few percentage points
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Sic semper maintenance work
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Reposted by Adam Compton
Starfire’s Deranged Neocon Foreign Policy Podcast @irhottakes.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
It’s very simple. A reality TV host became dictator because he turned down a role for Sharknado 4 and that’s why the king of outer space, who cheats at Diablo, got to kill Africa. Now the economy is controlled by a sex cult that has something to do with Harry Potter fanfic because of robots.
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
This is one notable example. I think the real problem is that it's much easier to generate software, but no easier (and in fact much harder) to discover it. If a million vibe-coded apps set up boilerplate landing pages in the forest and nobody finds them, do they actually exist?
thenextweb.com
Vibe coding drove an 84% jump in App Store submissions. Apple is cracking down.
AI vibe coding tools drove an 84% quarterly surge in App Store submissions, straining review times to 30 days. Apple has started pulling apps that violate its self-containment rules.
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Just say we can put the AI datacenters on high-speed rail and drive them around really fast to cool them down, everybody wins
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
I think we might be in a hard spot where the numbers are getting big enough that people can't reason about them colloquially. Doing math in your head is easier for tens of dollars than for hundreds, even if the nominal values are equivalent. tl;dr we need a WoW-style stat squish but for money
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TechCrunch @techcrunch.com · 16/09/2026
Former Waymo CFO jumps to self-driving startup Wayve
techcrunch.com
Former Waymo CFO jumps to self-driving startup Wayve
Elisa de Martel, who left her position as chief financial officer at Alphabet's autonomous vehicle company Waymo in January, will be based out of Silicon Valley.
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Reposted by Adam Compton
Shiv Ramdas Mens Rice Activist @nameshiv.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
fuck it, I'm feeling honest today. It's not just highly successful ppl it's also moderately & mildly successful people. There's like 9 billion ppl on this planet, getting ahead is more a function of fortune and circumstance than personal achievement. roulette wheel stopped where we were, thats all
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
The best I can offer is knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/me...
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little john @littlejohn.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Imagine what would be possible if we funded education. Adequately, fully, publicly, in proportion to its importance in society and all the burdens that fall to it. Really: imagine. People in power and on the far right have, and that's why we're in this mess. They don't want that to ever happen.
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
I was just making a joke, but now I'm super curious how they do that
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Nielsen boxes can't tell if people are sleeping in front of the TV
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
The real Roko's Basilisk is the friends we made along the way
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Adam Compton @comptona.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
LLMs are improv machines, and inference is running "yes, and?" in a loop really really fast
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