Jonathan Ellis
@spyced
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Brokk founder. Previously DataStax co-founder, JVector author, and Apache Cassandra project chair.
Austin, TX
Joined April 2009
Really pleased with how this came together. Thanks to @OpenAI for releasing GPT 5 last week just in time for the Power Ranking :) Analysis + thoughts in thread:
Introducing the Brokk Power Ranking: a new open-source coding benchmark with 93 tasks from real-world codebases. SWE-bench is Python-only and old enough that labs are likely training to the test. The Power Ranking uses tasks derived from recent commits to Apache Cassandra,
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Within 20 pages, the author manages to: -Strongly imply using insanely shifty language that a data center would use 5000x as much water as it was actually projected to, 4x as much water as all homes in the country it was built in. -Say that AI is projected to consume 10 times as
Okay, I have to write a quick post on Empire of AI. It is the single most misleading writing on AI water I’ve found, period.
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I hope that one day, journalists, who often are (justly) worried about disinformation, would realize that getting numbers egregiously wrong is also disinformation. In almost any setting, whether it’s immigration, crime, taxes, or the environment, a 1000x difference is not just
This is the single most massive factual error in a major book I've ever personally noticed on my own, and I think I'm the first person to notice it? Empire of AI asserts that a data center is using 1000x as much water as a city. In reality, it's 22% of the city's water.
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This is the single most massive factual error in a major book I've ever personally noticed on my own, and I think I'm the first person to notice it? Empire of AI asserts that a data center is using 1000x as much water as a city. In reality, it's 22% of the city's water.
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Context is the entire game in AI coding. Brokk lets you see it, shape it, and control it. No more guessing.
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Privatizing student loans would fix this problem Banks would treat education loans the same way they treat mortgages/car loans and would only give loans to people they think will pay them back It would force college tuition prices back down to market rate and would incentivize
You can’t get a $1 million mortgage if you make $100K/year. You can’t get a $75K car loan if you make $35K/year. The fact that you can get $250K in student loans for a college degree where you’re expected to earn $40K/year is unacceptable and a complete failure of US society.
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The "every kid gets a Chromebook" idea has been a failure. Test scores are down. Screens are bad for learning. Plus kids use school-issued devices to watch streaming services, YouTube, and even porn. My latest in @nytimes: https://t.co/SGcxJWrWHG
nytimes.com
Asking students to drill down on their schoolwork amid an array of digital distractions is inimical to learning.
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“Although it once seemed like a good idea to give every child his or her own device, it’s clear that those policies have been a failure.” 💯 School-issued laptops distract students at school and home, expose them to things they shouldn’t see, and hurt learning. 🧵
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Sharing an interesting recent conversation on AI's impact on the economy. AI has been compared to various historical precedents: electricity, industrial revolution, etc., I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm (Software 2.0) because both are
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I used to think the main damage from social media was to youth mental health. Now I believe that the global destruction of the human ability to pay attention may be even larger. A meta-analysis shows the damage, to adults as well as teens, from TikTok+ https://t.co/YS0dkQTdj0
psycnet.apa.org
The resurgence of short-form videos (SFVs), popularized by TikTok and Douyin, has transformed social media platforms, with features like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts fostering their widespread...
Bingeing TikTok reels may be hazardous to your well-being. 71 studies, >98k people: The more short-form videos teens and adults watched, the more they struggled with attention, self-control, and stress and anxiety. Read a book. Watch a movie. Long live longform.
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We used to ask candidates to build a particular stateful API from zero. You show up with your laptop and you’re given an empty folder, and can use the internet however necessary to accomplish it. (this is all pre-AI) Startup engineers owned it, FAANG devs struggled. The theory
From a CTO at a startup: "We interview devs by giving them a task to build an app on the spot, from scratch (2x BE endpoints, some frontend.) They can use AI, ofc - and we dig into why they did this or that. What is surprising: 14/15 devs from Meta failed this screening."
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From a CTO at a startup: "We interview devs by giving them a task to build an app on the spot, from scratch (2x BE endpoints, some frontend.) They can use AI, ofc - and we dig into why they did this or that. What is surprising: 14/15 devs from Meta failed this screening."
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The last thing humanity needs is more deep relationships with AIs, even if the AIs are simulating people we loved before they died. This is sick, and this is our lonely future unless we start saying no to it now.
I think this is genuinely evil.
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One of the most powerful things about a software-driven learning platform is that we can instantly adjust the curriculum based on what we're hearing from our students. Lots of parents kept telling us, "We love Mentava, our kids is learning so fast, she's still confused by b and
@NielsHoven My kid went through this gauntlet in mentava this week and I think he finally has it! Huge fan of the micro-modules in mentava that focus on specific areas like this.
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@ChrisMurphyCT You're being played by people who want regulatory capture. They are scaring everyone with dubious studies so that open source models are regulated out of existence.
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One of the primary things educational software in schools has enabled is accidental cruelty. No one would ever make a rule that you are not allowed to finish your homework quickly, or that you must watch the same minute of animation thousands of times. Software does both easily.
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Don't make me tap the sign
We will now be able to discover new drugs 1000s of times faster. Thanks to AI, all diseases will be curable during the 2030s. MADD - Multi Agent Drug Discovery Orchestra, a multi agent AI system designed to massively accelerate the early stages of drug discovery, especially
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When I was in college at UChicago, I dated another student from Appalachia. She once told me she had gotten straight As in high school calculus -- and when she took the AP exam, she got a 1, the worst possible grade. (And she was pretty talented, she later on pretty well at
The fact is that high schools are graduating kids with As and Bs in advanced math courses who haven't mastered foundational skills. The data from the UCSD report makes that clear. 20% took calculus in high school! Their GPA in math classes is ~3.6! This is happening all over the
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> "What's the case for teaching reading at 3yo versus waiting until age 5?" Unfortunately, the single best justification I have for teaching your kid to read early is: it helps you negotiate with your school, which by default will try to slow down your child's learning. When it
@NielsHoven What's the case for teaching reading at 3yo versus waiting until age 5? Maybe my children aren't super geniuses (I think they are pretty smart), but I don't really see the point in teaching reading before age 5. Our 3.5yo doesn't even understand real world concepts like
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If your boss is doing it themself, Then the work isn't beneath you. It's a start-up.
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When people express worry about the job loss from driverless cars, it always sounds to me like "We discovered a pill that cures 99% of breast cancer instantly, but maybe we shouldn't use it because what about all the people who work in chemotherapy who'd lose their jobs?"
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