Behind the Binance hack. I'd hate to be head of security at Binance. You must be one step ahead of every hacker in the world. But I can't believe that an engineer would think it would be a good idea to just download a coding tool from a website without it being checked out first. And recruiters – there needs to be a policy about them. Perhaps in the future, every engineer which have to have their work computers imaged at the end of every day, and the images analyzed by security. Maybe this can be automated with AI.
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AI-generated scholarly writing is making journal publication less attractive. The ability of tools to detect AI-generated writing is uncertain and threatens the credibility to science. As long as AI-generated writing is accurate and factual, I really don't care. Even humans err.
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Very interesting article on the limitations of vector embedding-based retrieval. And how query structure is still important. And how the good ol' BM25 retrieval strategy can still beat cosine-similarity. This is good to know.
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Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel ...has given a 27-year-old ex-startup founder...a new job to refactor 98% of the company's legacy code within 24 months.
The employee, Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, joined Cisco after it acquired EzDubs, a translation startup that Krishnamurthy helped build in 2023. While having executive experience, Patel found that "Paddy" was left "buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic."
According to the report ...Krishnamurthy told him that he could rewrite Cisco's legacy code in a team of just two people, and that "even the most AI-forward people on [Patel's] own team weren't thinking that way."
As a result, he's now been tasked with rewriting 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months
Crazy.
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Higher income was also followed by subsequent decreases in agreeableness and extraversion...Personal increases in conscientiousness and emotional stability were followed by later increases in income, suggesting a mutually reinforcing cycle between these two traits and financial success. In contrast, increases in an individual’s extraversion were followed by slight decreases in subsequent income...
So being conscientious and emotionally stable leads to income increases, which lead to decreases in agreeableness and extraversion. Got it.
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You’ll need nerves of steel to work with AI agents. If I had to deal with this all the time:
The agent writes code and changes dozens of files. I start reviewing the code, and the following conversation ensues:...I wouldn't be able to function. Do people really put up with this?
— Why is this function here?
— You’re right. This function isn’t needed here. (Deletes the function and makes changes to many files)
— Why did you delete it?
— You’re right. I shouldn’t have deleted that function. I’m putting it back. (Makes changes to many files again)
And I still never got an answer to the question of why that function was needed.
By the way: Cat Wu, a face of the blockbuster app Claude Code is leaving Anthropic. What does that mean?
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Why Your Shrink Should Prescribe Exercise. Exercise is critical for brain health. More evidence on the existence of the muscle-brain axis (do they teach this in medical school?). Exercise stimulates release of myokines, such as IL-6, IL-15 and BDNF. I always associated elevated levels of IL-6 with sarcopenia risk in the elderly. So when muscles release it after exercise, is it a good thing? Maybe the only myokine we really want is BDNF.
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Firefox 160’s new Mini Window is every multitasker’s dream. This could be useful, especially on small screens. Mozilla is apparently soliciting feedback on this. You can test it out in the Nightly releases.
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Cool. Acoustic Orbit lets you use all your Bluetooth-connected devices as speakers for a giant surround sound effect.
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Hex is another local text-to-speech app. I'm still looking for the one I like. Github here.
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