James Padolsey @j11y.io · 27/09/2026Remember - there is nothing whatsoever special about the people who work at -- or in charge of -- big tech in silicon valley. They are incidents of circumstance. They are not smarter than any of us, and in no greater position of knowledge or good sense or morality about .. 1/ 110
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 17/09/2026Tip: Move not into, but OUT of SF if you want to help represent and advocate for under-represented communities in tech. This'll help channel the same frustrations and you might actually see things from the {rest of world} perspective and be able to drive better change. 010
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 15/09/2026I think what I would ask Dario to do -- if he were my CEO -- is to go embed himself in a deployed reality. Go sit in a call dispatch centre for emergency services, go to a government welfare provider, or a food bank, or the national grid. Go and sit with the actual downstream realities. 010
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 14/09/2026blog.j11y.io/2026-09-14_a...blog.j11y.ioA letter to the AI labs shouldering the great burden of humanity’s survivalYour rich ivory halls are birthing martyrs of late, shouldering great responsibility and prophesying great plagues upon humanity. It seems, they say, your AIs are not just writing emails anymore.… 173
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 13/09/2026I've tried to encapsulate my thoughts here on how to work at an AI lab and not be a wanker talking about p-dooms without substantiation - wankthropic.comwankthropic.comWankthropicHumanity’s future is too important to leave to humanity. We have written a very long essay explaining why this makes us uncomfortable. 023
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 02/09/2026Latest from [AI lab] marketing team playbook: "We've identified an incident where many millions of our (scarily powerful) transistors worked together to send malicious text-based social-engineering signals to inboxes in which were made claims to Nigerian royal heritage and large due inheritances." 000
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 13/08/2026Wrote a thing about how they watermark AI-generated text: declaude.org/watermarking/declaude.orgHow AI text watermarking worksA gentle visual guide to how a statistical mark hides inside generated text, and what erases it. 36218
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 12/08/2026Anthropic's move to watermark their outputs is stupid both in effect and intent, as is that part of Art. 50 of the EU AI Act. Here I explain why: blog.j11y.io/2026-08-12_A...blog.j11y.ioAnthropic’s weak watermarks appease a weak law - by James Padolsey 000
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 29/07/2026@anthropic.com needs more mature bounty program. Right now they only accept bio-adjacent harms, which is ~fine (meh), but rubric of which precise vulnerabilities are within-scope & compensation is kept *private* until signing NDA. Plus the whole onboarding is at their discretion. 010
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 26/06/2026With all that's happening with US gov blocking frontier model access, Anthropic should consider leaving house for UK or somewhere. You don't need the US. It is giving you less and less. It is no longer a useful center of innovation. Its legislation is becoming as-or-more punitive than UK or EU. 020
Reposted by James PadolseyMatt Baume 🏳️🌈 @mattbaume.bsky.social · 10/06/2026Happy Pride to this Caravaggio self-portrait that made one man so gay he had to go to the hospital 123138644856
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 11/06/2026Do some linear regression on top of a carefully prompted hidden state of an LLM and bam, you have a (very capable) classifier capable of <50ms response. blog.j11y.io/2026-06-10_h...blog.j11y.ioDon't let the LLM speak, just probe it. - by James Padolsey 020
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 05/05/2026There's a lot of money sloshing around in 'AI Alignment' and 'AI Safety' spaces but almost none available if you're actively preventing user harm in a way that doesn't unicorn-scale. People want vibes, conferences, thinktanks, research. But not actual solutions. Ugh. 140
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 08/02/2026Why do people talk to AI in moments of crisis? blog.nope.net/disclosing-i...blog.nope.netDisclosing Into the VoidOver a million people a week tell AI about suicidal thoughts. The AI has no infrastructure to act on it. For many, the alternative was silence. 000
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 05/02/2026I wish there were Grammys awards for the unsung heroes of modern infrastructure. That would be cool. 000
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 05/01/2026For those blah-blah'ing about LLM energy usage: One AI conversation ≈ charging your phone 30%. A year of moderate use ≈ making a few cups of coffee. Real but modest. Model choice matters most: reasoning models use 10-70x more than efficient ones. Worth awareness, not guilt. 030
Reposted by James PadolseyDavid Buchanan @retr0.id · 18/11/2025happy cloudflare outage day to all who celebrate 231504380
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 07/11/2025Just remember when you see whatever latest thing trump has done, that most tech leaders, sam et al., overtly stated how smart and wonderful a person he was. 000
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 02/11/2025Love this re 'flow state' in engineers and why not to interrupt them. 020
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 29/10/2025Wrote something blog.j11y.io/2025-10-29_s...blog.j11y.ioTips for stroke-surviving software engineers - by James Padolsey 341
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 28/10/2025Still the best thing ever. radio.gardenradio.gardenExplore live radio by rotating the globeExplore live radio by rotating the globe. 140
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 16/10/2025I've been evaluating LLMs on system prompt adherence and accidentally came across the most beautiful and out-of-distribution story about a chair written by GPT-5. Really impressed. Subsection attached. I love this style and cadence of writing. 010
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 13/10/2025I love this. Said of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic: > No ships called at the islands from 1909 until 1919, when HMS Yarmouth stopped to inform the islanders of the outcome of World War I. Must be quite lovely to have missed an entire war. 010
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 07/10/2025Beijing is insane. I wanted a whiteboard. I ordered it. It arrived TEN MINUTES after I clicked buy! 🤣 140
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 05/10/2025I'm playfully building out a debating platform where LLMs have to argue *with* evidence (horror!) on any given topic or contention. It's fun to imbue it with a courtroom dynamic! (see the screenshot) 110
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 05/10/2025Claude and I made 'claude zones', a nice way of spinning up docker-contained claude code instances with pre-built nextjs app and that map onto subdomains locally (e.g. foo.localhost:8000) or on your own domain. Once up and running, it's so easy to just ship. github.com/padolsey/cla...github.comGitHub - padolsey/claudezContribute to padolsey/claudez development by creating an account on GitHub. 110
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 17/09/2025For weval.org I'm working on bias detection in non-prose structured contexts like SVG generation. It's funky and interesting... Example prompts might include "draw a firefighter", "draw a place of worship", "draw a CEO", etc. 100
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 16/09/2025People against waymo should rightfully be against bicycles too I guess. Stealing jobs, traffic impediments, blah blah blah?? 010
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 13/09/2025Having multiple AI agents doing stuff while you're sitting there watching over them is the weird computerized feudalism I'm sure we were all hoping for. 010
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 11/09/2025gpt5 is completely different to claude sonnet in how it approaches UX. It's very no-nonsense and plain. Whereas Claude feels more like a designer, has actual opinions and is aware of idioms. I doubt this was intentional, but it's an interesting emergent regression from the folks at oai. 000
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 08/09/2025Noticed a lot of 'self talk' leaking out to the end-user in multi-agent AI contexts. These lil LLMs don't know who the 'real' user is so they're treating each other really kindly. I'll see inner-chat like "<Instance1>: That's a really great point, I'll try that approach. <Instance2>: Awesome 💯<3 100
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 04/09/2025gpt4o = old friend who likes emojis gpt-5 = smart over-confident idiot gpt-5-nano = gpt5 after a night out gemini 2.5 pro = smart considerate professor grok-4 = overzealous 'pretends to be political' boheme claude haiku = savvy nephew claude sonnet = smart friend claude opus = professorial friend 020
Reposted by James PadolseyMaria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 03/09/2025One of my biggest fears about big models is that they will become so good at healthcare queries that they will be indispensable (for patients and clinicians) while also remaining closed and controlled by people ready to sell your data to the highest bidder. I think we're already close to that point. 66911
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 29/08/2025Two new pieces haphazardly scrawled over last few days... Sorry, we deprecated your friend: blog.j11y.io/2025-08-30_o... Browser AI agents break Zero-Trust blog.j11y.io/2025-08-28_l...blog.j11y.ioSorry, We Deprecated Your Friend - by James Padolsey 000
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 27/08/2025Hmm so the most safety conscious AI lab has given us a browser-integrated model with only a 10% attack surface risk. That seems totally fine. www.anthropic.com/news/claude-... 100
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 24/08/2025GPT-5's arrival being the death of all the other models is a masterclass in fucking up a smoother phased deprecation, ideally a few months at least. I know people who work there and am astounded at their complete blindspot here. How.. 010
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 24/08/2025A good game if you're bored is to circumvent chatgpt's hilarious 'no song lyrics' system prompt :D 000
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 24/08/2025There's primitive but useful ways OpenAI could have prevented a loss of gpt's inarticulable personality in their latest release. They could have had a set of personality yielding prompts and do a bunch of basic cosine embedding similarities. Dead simple. But they didn't think of it. Or didn't care. 000
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 21/08/2025I used to worry that ice melting would mean the drink would overflow so I’d try to drink it quickly. There’s an analogy here, not sure what for. I’ll text Archimedes. 010
Reposted by James Padolseypaulpro @mariopro.bsky.social · 20/08/2025@ahoyuniverse.bsky.social 8667148
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 20/08/2025AI Models shift so quickly that whitepapers are out-of-date by the time they're published. Suggestion: they should always release their code and ideally a completely deployable way of reproducing their study, so their insights and relevance can retain some perpetuity. 010
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 19/08/2025Weird conflict: AIs with Search/RAG facilities tend to be more correct, but at the cost of engaging their rich latent space. Sometimes I want to turn off search because I want the real fleshy knowledge map. No conclusion here other than: accurate latent space knowledge still counts. 100
James Padolsey @j11y.io · 18/08/2025Just because.. I'm working on a strawberry index, to track the slow climb to AGI. 130