hans.gerwitz.com microblog

America 243

Maybe I’m in a honeymoon phase with my chosen country, but 14 years in I still enjoy how positive international social media is about the Netherlands and Dutch culture.

The Internet Remains American

This is the most important new website of recent memory: https://industrystandard.tools/ seeks to share what products professionals prefer, without fluff or advertising.

Proud Protest

I often get asked whether I think AI is a bubble.

Reagan in the Machine

I wish more product teams were asking themselves: should we be offering the user more “AI”, or should we be ensuring our product works well when they are using agents alongside it or even as an intermediary?

The recent Dwarkesh Podcast episode about AI “learning on the job” has no news or discoveries but provokes some thoughts: The true believers of AGI probably are also adherents to the Great Men of History view.

When I first started using coding agents: “Recent changes have caused an error rendering the template file /path/to/file.html.

More efficient circuits that require proteins grown with bacteria?

SpaceX is doing amazing work, and is full of engineers I really want to celebrate.

I have been trying models from 3 providers on 2 very different codebases and using 4 different agent/IDE toolchains.

I so tired of exaggerated ink traps.

There is a growing body of research into LLM self-awareness but I am particularly fascinated by the “evaluation awareness” research by Anthropic into the Hawthorne effect in LLMs.

Jakob Nielsen is extremely grumpy about Jony Ive which makes me feel a bit better about my own ranting.

Today in “things my coding model said”: This is a great example of premature optimization - the debouncing added complexity to solve a performance problem that doesn’t actually exist at the scale we’re operating.

As I enjoy watching models explain their reasoning through work I’ve given them, I keep thinking about the recent paper _Chain-of-Thought Is Not Explainability and how much we should remind people that rationalization is not always insight: verbalised cha…

My AI coding agent has been well coached.

Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.

A lot of enterprise software design has always been serving users that work on behalf of others (customers, managers, etc.).

Opening a file in 2025

I recently let Cline (I don’t remember which model) do a refactor that seemed quite harmless.

It’s no surprise that training an LLM on material that demonstrates sound reasoning results in better performance, but I’m fascinated by this identification of “cognitive” behaviors (verification, backtracking, subgoal setting, backward chaining).

“En ik zie alleen maar amateurisme.”

In the way the dismantling of USAID is a practice run for DOGE dismantling the US government, I’m growing concerned the birthright citizenship attack is just a first step towards weakening the 14th amendment.

If we don’t purposefully raise AI, the internet will do what it will: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04465-z

I find it worrying how often Github Copilot offers to complete my Rust database access code using .execute(), which is a method on the very popular sqlx crate, which I am not using.

My biggest fear with AI is that we’ve reached a plateau.

This feels like a glimpse of the future: coding by writing examples that are treated like unit tests: https://austinhenley.com/blog/mirrorlang.html

Support Harris for Palestine

Germany, of all nations, should be keenly aware of the dangers of forgetting state attrocities.

I’m old enough to remember when voting for local offices required researching the candidates because you couldn’t count on whether the Democrat or the Republican was the batshit crazy one.

I’m very tempted to approach the creators of inTouch and ask how much it would cost to influence “parents” to vote or subscribe to crypto schemes.

Today we observe that the Israeli state under Netanyahu has spent a full year “defending itself” by killing a child every 48 minutes.

Then they came for the teachers

As if we didn’t already have enough to worry about, now the mushrooms are building a robot army.

Unfortunately, it seems that today’s big LLMs are more like physicists than philosophers.

I meet so many aspiring designers who proudly assert that they’re really good at “ideas”.

Klarna is going DIY on software thanks to AI.

I just re-read this classic post about leadership in the metaverse and it strikes me how similar the experience seems, from my outsider perspective, to running a large open source project.

Open Interpreter’s Local Model Computer protocol feels very important.

The strategy of empowering a nitwit despot just to get SCOTUS stacked in their favor really paid off for the antifederalist anarcho-capitalists today.

Mind of the Creator

Artificial Conscience

Just because I think the tech is revolutionary doesn’t mean I disagree that most of today’s products are bullshit: https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/

I hope something comes of this.

A parable of our decade in two pieces of nearly-identical hardware: In 2012 we had the Descriptive Camera using Mechanical Turk, as a thought provoking student project and a blog post.

I see a lot of experts-of-the-day gnashing teeth over @rabbit@threads.net being “exposed” for using puppeted Android apps in the cloud.

If we expect to treat AI agents like people, why wouldn’t we expect to organize them similarly?