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robf.bsky.social

@robf.bsky.social
508 followers 439 following 22 posts

Technologist, repeat founder, investor, dad, music and comedy lover. Currently giving another start-up my all. Goddamnit Donut!

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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 16/08/2026
Heees my review of Qwen 3.8 27B - I can't remember the last time I've had this much fun playing with a local model that runs on my own computers simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/16/...
simonwillison.net
Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things
Friday’s big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba’s Qwen research lab. I’ve been looking forward to this one: 27B is an …
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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
there's clearly a massive scandal in these GJ transcripts. And the public deserves to know what it is.
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Paul Byrne @theplanetaryguy.com · 04/05/2026
NASA just dropped more than 12,000 photos from the Artemis II mission. It'll take me a few days to go through them all, but so far it's one stunner after another. Link: eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos... Credit: NASA/Artemis II Crew (h/t @jonostrower.com)
Crescent Earth and some delicious lens flareCrescent Earth seen beyond the MoonCrescent Earth behind the MoonThe Moon eclipsing the Sun, with the corona and zodiacal light forming a diffuse glow behind the satellite
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 14/03/2026
I spoke about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit last month, in a fireside chat hosted by Eric Lui - here's the half hour video plus highlight quotes and extra notes from our conversation simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/14/...
simonwillison.net
My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit
I was a speaker last month at the Pragmatic Summit in San Francisco, where I participated in a fireside chat session about agentic engineering hosted by Eric Lui from Statsig. …
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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 13/02/2026
Vaguely recall how Biden admin emails to Twitter were the biggest attack on free speech ever. There was a whole twitter files thing about that. Curious where are Elon, Taibbi, Bari and crew on this?
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Ars Technica @arstechnica.com · 11/02/2026
arstechnica.com
FDA refuses to review Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine
The move comes amid RFK Jr.'s relentless efforts to enact his anti-vaccine agenda.
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Eric Lipton NYT @ericlipton.nytimes.com · 01/01/2026
Trump’s Tangled Web of Deal-Making, Policy and Riches An illustrated guide of the first year of profiteering. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
nytimes.com
Trump’s Tangled Web of Deal-Making, Policy and Riches (Gift Article)
The president, his family and some of their closest associates have engaged in a sprawling campaign of deals that stretches across industries and the globe.
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Brad Heath @bradheath.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
To give you a sense of how big a departure this year, the government doesn't do this for wanted criminals.
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robf.bsky.social @robf.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Stars (Wars nor Trek), LOTR, or Marvel, Disney Animated or Pixar.
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Jesse Eisinger @jeisinger.bsky.social · 30/11/2025
$1.6bln: The amount of his fraud scheme 7: Years of his sentence 10,000: Victims of his fraud 1,000: Letters from victims to the court 13: Days he served 1: Pardon from Trump www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/u...
nytimes.com
Trump Frees Fraudster Just Days Into Seven-Year Prison Sentence
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robf.bsky.social @robf.bsky.social · 25/11/2025
This thread is absolutely hilarious!
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Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
Grand opening, grand closing. X quietly disabled a new feature that showed which country an account was posting from when it revealed that lots of popular right wing MAGA accounts were being run from foreign countries like India and Nigeria.
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 06/11/2025
I've been getting a lot of value using coding agents for code research tasks recently - I have a dedicated simonw/research GitHub repo and I frequently have them run detailed experiments and write up the results. Here's how I'm doing that + some examples: simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/6/a...
simonwillison.net
Code research projects with async coding agents like Claude Code and Codex
I’ve been experimenting with a pattern for LLM usage recently that’s working out really well: asynchronous code research tasks. Pick a research question, spin up an asynchronous coding agent and …
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Ben Penn @benjaminpenn.bsky.social · 01/11/2025
Scoop: FBI ousts senior official after Kash Patel’s fury over news of his use of government jet to see girlfriend perform. The removed head of critical incident response group was 27-year FBI veteran who oversaw aviation sections. news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/fbi-o...
news.bloomberglaw.com
FBI Ousts Leader as Patel Fumes Over Attention to Agency Jet Use
The FBI forced out a senior official overseeing aviation shortly after Director Kash Patel grew outraged about revelations of his publicly-available jet logs indicating he’d flown to see his musician ...
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 19/10/2025
First Trump administration story in a while that genuinely shocked me:
washingtonpost.com
Rubio promised to betray U.S. informants to get Trump’s El Salvador prison deal
To secure U.S. access to President Nayib Bukele’s notorious CECOT prison, Rubio agreed to turn over several MS-13 leaders central to a long-running Justice Department investigation.
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Justin Wolfers @justinwolfers.bsky.social · 17/10/2025
There are basically only two positions in the debate about AI. 1. I’ve barely invested any time in learning how to use it effectively. AI sucks. 2. I’ve invested in learning how to use this tool. Holy cow, it’s transformational. Position #1 has lower barriers to entry.
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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 09/10/2025
As a parent with a kid who’s starting to play games on the iPad, I’m so pissed at the predatory state of kid’s games. 1. I pay $7 to remove all ads from this game. Yet catch my kid watching ads - even after paying they are offered to watch for in-game rewards. WTH 2. (cont’d)
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pamelafox.bsky.social @pamelafox.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
I liked the breakdown from Pragmatic Engineer about ways that companies measure agentic coding usage: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-tech-c...
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com
How tech companies measure the impact of AI on software development
How do GitHub, Google, Dropbox, Monzo, Atlassian, and 13 other companies know how well AI tools work for devs? A deepdive sharing exclusive details, with CTO Laura Tacho
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 22/09/2025
Some notes on the new CodingBench benchmark which scores LLMs on how well they can accomplish gnarly code compilation challenges, including digging into the Go source code to figure out how its agentic loop works simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/22/...
simonwillison.net
CompileBench: Can AI Compile 22-year-old Code?
Interesting new LLM benchmark from Piotr Grabowski and Piotr Migdał: how well can different models handle compilation challenges such as cross-compiling gucr for ARM64 architecture? This is one of my ...
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Noah Shachtman @noahshachtman.bsky.social · 20/09/2025
More than that. "The FBI ***recorded*** Tom Homan taking the money "after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration."
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Annalee Newitz @annaleen.bsky.social · 09/09/2025
I always love those lists of "35 under 35," but as I get older, I find that I would love to know about innovations/art from people over 65. "65 over 65" please. Elders have incredible ideas that are the result of having seen the full lifecycle of previous ideas and learned from it.
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Fenit Nirappil @fenitn.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
The No. 2 at NIH repeatedly insisted vaccines are unnecessary in a healthy society even when presented evidence healthy children died of flu, according to whistleblower complaints. @carolynyjohnson.bsky.social reports www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...
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andy jabbour @andyjabbour.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
Welcome to the Golden Age of Weaponization... 🫥 @mmasnick.bsky.social: 'Now...we’re getting to see what actual censorship looks like—and surprise, surprise, it’s coming from the very people who complained the loudest about being silenced.' www.techdirt.com/2025/09/03/t... @noupside.bsky.social
techdirt.com
The Censorship Crybabies Are Now The Censors: FDA’s Vinay Prasad Uses Copyright Claims To Silence Critic
It’s always fascinating to watch supposed “free speech warriors” reveal their true colors the moment they get a tiny bit of power. We’ve been covering the ongoing saga of va…
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Scott Hanselman 🌮 @scott.hanselman.com · 03/09/2025
Bringing BASIC back: Microsoft’s 6502 BASIC is now Open Source opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09...
opensource.microsoft.com
Microsoft Releases Historic 6502 BASIC - Microsoft Open Source Blog
Explore the original 6502 BASIC—now open source! Dive into retro code, history, and emulators. Fork it, run it, and relive computing's roots.
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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 05/08/2025
Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.
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Opal @opalescentopal.bsky.social · 27/07/2025
With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.
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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 17/07/2025
I've had this headline rattling around in my brain since January and I finally wrote it. Been hearing too many people in the startup world buying into the neoractionary nonsense that maybe a little light fascism is good for silicon valley. It's not. It's very, very bad.
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David Gura @davidgura.bsky.social · 27/06/2025
The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Susan J. Kressly, said "creation of federal immunization policy is ‘no longer a credible process.’”
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robf.bsky.social @robf.bsky.social · 24/06/2025
Decision in the Anthropic fair-use case has dropped: www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...
reuters.com
Anthropic wins key ruling on AI in authors' copyright lawsuit
A federal judge in San Francisco ruled late Monday that Anthropic's use of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal under U.S. copyright law.
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Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 17/05/2025
In these dark times, it’s great to come together and find something we can all take joy in.
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robf.bsky.social @robf.bsky.social · 15/05/2025
I unabashedly recommend DCC!
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Mike Sowden @mikeachim.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
OK, this is wild. In September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them. It was picked up in the Arctic. And Antarctica. It was detected everywhere, every 90 seconds, as regular as a metronome, for *nine days*. What the HELL? 1/
Unsplash image of the Earth, mostly the nightside with a tracery of city lights on every continent.
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Billy Binion @billybinion.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
A hill I’ll keep dying on: Whatever your politics, the fact that so many U.S. leaders do not understand basic constitutional law—or willfully distort it—reflects extremely poorly on our country.
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Naomi Saphra @nsaphra.bsky.social · 26/04/2025
I wrote something up for AI people who want to get into bluesky and either couldn't assemble an exciting feed or gave up doomscrolling when their Following feed switched to talking politics 24/7.
nsaphra.net
The AI Researcher's Guide to a Non-Boring Bluesky Feed | Naomi Saphra
How to migrate to bsky without a boring feed.
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Robert Graham @erratarob.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
Here's my blogpost in support of Krebs. It's different enough from those by @stamos.org or @k8em0.bsky.social that it's worth writing, though the conclusion is much the same. cybersect.substack.com/p/i-am-speak...
cybersect.substack.com
I am speaking up in support of Chris Krebs
We all need to
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James Medlock @jdcmedlock.bsky.social · 12/04/2025
How it started // How it’s going
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Atmosphere Community @atmosphere.community · 03/04/2025
Yep! We're working on getting a retrospective page for the talks up. In the mean time you can find all of the talks up in this YouTube playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...
youtube.com
ATmosphereConf Seattle 2025 - YouTube
Recorded talks from the ATmosphereConf Seattle conference held in March 2025 https://atprotocol.dev/atmosphereconf/ The ATmosphere Conference was a 2 day eve...
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robf.bsky.social @robf.bsky.social · 22/03/2025
@ ATmosphere Conf Love to say hi if you’re around.
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Lea Kissner @leak.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
My team at Google spent over 9 years learning how to do this effectively and wrote a paper explaining how (and were kind enough to make me a coauthor). I hope it'll be useful to you as well. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
dl.acm.org
Supporting the Digital Safety of At-Risk Users: Lessons Learned from 9+ Years of Research & Training | ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
Creating information technologies intended for broad use that allow everyone to participate safely online—which we refer to as inclusive digital safety—requires understanding and addressing the digita...
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Science Friday @scifri.bsky.social · 21/02/2025
In a small trial, nearly half of pancreatic cancer patients who received an mRNA vaccine had no signs of relapse after three years. Dr. Vinod Balachandran from @mskcancercenter.bsky.social joins us to discuss the results and what they could mean for cancer treatment.
buff.ly
A Vaccine For Pancreatic Cancer Continues To Show Promise
In a small trial, nearly half of pancreatic cancer patients who received an mRNA vaccine for the disease had no relapse three years later.
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Oren Gur @orengur.bsky.social · 08/02/2025
Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania has indirect rate of 70%, but they probably didn’t want to list that atop Harvard because defunding a children’s hospital might be perceived as problematic. This is devastating
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Popehat @kenwhite.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
Overturning Sullivan has at least two votes on the Supreme Court — Thomas and Alito. Maybe more. I can’t overstate how catastrophic that would be for free expression in America in an environment where political and performative defamation litigation are common.
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Rush Doshi @rushdoshi.bsky.social · 03/02/2025
The new acting Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy — State’s top public diplomacy official: 1) not only denies the Uyghur genocide but appears to applaud it 2) says the US should sell out Taiwan to China for concessions in Antarctica (???)
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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 01/02/2025
Elon just filed his proposed second amended complaint, asking for "treble damages" for companies illegally [checks notes] not advertising on X... The level of entitlement is insane. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
storage.courtlistener.com
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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 29/01/2025
The key point in this: "What makes these [attacks on free speech] particularly perverse is how they are often cloaked in the language of defending free speech." For the last few years I've felt like I must be taking crazy pills as I tried to raise the alarm on this, with little reaction.
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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 23/01/2025
So, TikTok is supposedly a national security threat from China, but it seems odd that there's been almost no mainstream press coverage of Trump dismantling the board investigating the Salt Typhoon hack which is an ACTUAL PROVEN hack from China & incredibly damaging. www.techdirt.com/2025/01/23/t...
techdirt.com
Trump Disbands Cybersecurity Board Investigating Massive Chinese Phone System Hack
For all the hype and warnings about how TikTok is clearly a “national security threat” from China, the Trump administration has effectively kneecapped the investigation into one of the most serious…
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Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai @lorenzofb.bsky.social · 22/01/2025
NEW: The Trump admin has fired members of the Cyber Safety Review Board, a committee that was lauded for its investigation into Microsoft hacks of 2023, and was working on the recent Salt Typhoon telco hacks. One source called it a “horribly shortsighted” decision. techcrunch.com/2025/01/22/t...
techcrunch.com
Trump administration fires members of cybersecurity review board in “horribly shortsighted” decision | TechCrunch
The Department of Homeland security told members of the Cyber Safety Review Board that their membership was terminated.
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Dave Willner @dwillner.bsky.social · 21/01/2025
Early on at Facebook, the nascent Content Policy team organically developed a set of aphorisms to guide our work. A set of simple-ish “north stars” to navigate by, keeping us on track while coping with of the ever growing and diversifying torrent of reports. 🧵1/9
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Popehat @kenwhite.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
Not everyone can fight Trumpism and Trumpists directly. But remember this: kindness, decency, and fidelity to American values are defiance in the face of Trumpism. So be kind, decent, and faithful, particularly to the many kinds of people despised and attacked by Trumpists. That’s revolutionary./1
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HELL Kennedy @helenkennedy.com · 18/01/2025
Jan 20, 1961. A blizzard the day before. Temperatures well below freezing. Without a coat or hat, JFK gave a speech we still quote today. Robert Frost, 86, recited a poem. Steinbeck and Hemingway and Rothko were among the VIPs. A million people gathered in the cold to hear it. This is the precedent.
Kennedy speaking at his inauguration, looking young and vital.
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