Emil Sit

I lead and develop leaders in technical organizations. This is a personal account.

Emil Sit boosted:
Itamar Turner-Trauringitamarst@hachyderm.io
2025-07-07

Tesla's so-called "autopilot" turns off automatically a fraction of a second before a crash, so the driver might be blamed even though the driver has no time to respond. (It's been that way for more than a year since originally publicly documented by the NHTSA, this is clearly a choice someone made.)

theguardian.com/technology/202

(This is just one example out of many terrible things in their software.)

And while Tesla management clearly just loves doing terrible things, an individual engineer implemented this.

You don't want to be that engineer:

1. It's immoral, and a dereliction of your professional duty.
2. If your action ever goes to court, there will be some very expensive lawyers trying their best to make you the scapegoat and claim you are either incompetent or malicious, but you very definitely did this on your own.

When Volkswagen cheated on emissions, the CEO blamed... the engineers: "This was not a corporate decision, from my point of view, and to my best knowledge today. This was a couple of software engineers who put this in for whatever reason... some people have made the wrong decisions in order to get away with something that will have to be found out." (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswag).

And most of the time the things you'll be asked to do aren't as bad. I know someone who was asked by their manager to put a CE mark on products that were from the non-CE factory. These devices weren't safety critical, this wasn't going to kill anyone. But it's still fraud, and the incentive was still there for the company to make this engineer the scapegoat.

The engineer said "no"... and that was the end of it. Sometimes that's all it takes to enforce standards.

If "no" isn't enough, asking for something in writing (signed and dated) is a good next step. Chances are that will be the end of it, and meanwhile you can start looking for a new job.

Emil Sit boosted:
Democracy Matters :verified:DemocracyMattersALot@mstdn.social
2025-07-05

According to one analyst, only two groups are celebrating H.R. 1 — President Donald Trump's massive new budget law — on July 4: Republicans, and the Chinese Communist Party! LOL.

China sees Trump's new law as 'one of the greatest acts of strategic self-harm'
alternet.org/trump-china-law/

#China #BigFuglyBill #BBB #Medicare #Medicaid #TrumpDidThis #RepublicansDidThis #GOPKakistocracy #NoRepublicansEverAgain #USPol

2025-07-05

@rands isn’t that explanation just a randomly generated sequence of words, not necessarily tied to its actual decisioning…

Emil Sit boosted:
2025-07-03

The GOP is trying to kill the Keeling Curve, the most iconic time series in the environmental sciences.

edition.cnn.com/2025/07/01/cli

Emil Sit boosted:
𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not yet begun to fight"Lana@beige.party
2025-07-02

If you are using undocumented immigrants' tax records to find and kidnap them, then it was never about them paying taxes.

If you are showing up at their place of employment, then it was never about them not working.

If you are showing up at courthouses, then it was never about getting them to "do it the right way".

If you are kidnapping women and children, then it was never about criminals.

If you're refusing to give them due process, then it was never about the Constitution.

If you are building concentration camps in Florida to keep them here in cages, then it was never about the border.

If you're spending billions to do this, then it was never about the economy.

And if you're doing all this in the name of a 34 time convicted felon, then it was never about following the law.

Emil Sit boosted:
Justin Searlssearls
2025-06-29

MCP is doing the heavy lifting here. I've written two "agentic" apps. I immediately realized I could improve both by replacing the LLM part with normal fucking code. The revolution here is MCP shoehorning API access into many more programs and services than we previously had worksonmymachine.substack.com/

Emil Sit boosted:
2025-06-25

The American electoral left thinks they're making an argument about winning elections to an out of touch aging leadership class that just doesn't understand.

This is false. They absolutely understand your way, the Sanders way, the AOC way, the Mamdani way would win them more elections. They just don't care. What matters MOST to them and their donors is protecting capital.

Not realizing this will be your fatal mistake, and why the Dems will run a center right platform in 2026 and prolly 2028.

Emil Sit boosted:
Timnit Gebru (she/her).timnitGebru@dair-community.social
2025-06-23

I know I'm late to the party to be finishing @karenhao's Empire of AI Now. But now that I've finished the book, I can tell you that it is nothing short of a masterpiece. It needs to be required reading for everyone in the tech industry, or anyone who wants to be in the tech industry.

The book also articulates why I've had such an aversion to OpenAI since its inception in 2015, more so than any other tech company.

penguinrandomhouse.com/books/7

Emil Sit boosted:
The Conversation U.S.TheConversationUS@newsie.social
2025-06-23

“The more Tehran is pressured through direct strikes, the more likely it is turn to unconventional warfare tools.”

Iran’s global network of proxy rebel groups, spies and hackers poses a serious threat:
theconversation.com/a-militari

Emil Sit boosted:
2025-06-18

> Signal groups, in particular, are more powerful than you might be aware of, even if you already use them all the time. In this post I'll show you how to:

- Turn an in-person meeting into a Signal group using QR codes
- Manage large semi-public groups while still vetting new members
- Make announcement-only groups, perfect for volunteer networks rapidly responding to things like ICE raids

**Using Signal groups for activism** by @micahflee

micahflee.com/using-signal-gro

#Signal #DataPrivacy

Emil Sit boosted:
2025-06-18

The #Republican controlled #Senate Tuesday passed #legislation to establish a #regulatory framework for #stablecoins, putting the
#cryptocurrency industry, which had long been viewed with suspicion by lawmakers in Washington, on the brink of a major policy breakthrough.

The *GENIUS Act*, followed an aggressive lobbying campaign aimed at transforming cryptocurrency’s image from #scandal-plagued experiment to *legitimate* financial sector.

#law #finance #fraud #Trump
nytimes.com/2025/06/17/us/poli

Emil Sit boosted:
2025-06-16

I think this is a more or less up-to-date map of the businesses, LLCs, and people associated with the Trump family crypto projects.

#crypto #cryptocurrency #USpol #USpolitics

Extremely tangled diagram depicting relationships between nine LLCs, seven major companies, the Trump family, Bill Zanker and various other individuals, and various crypto projects including the $TRUMP memecoin, NFTs, World Liberty Financial, and the new Trump wallet
Emil Sit boosted:
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦rysiek@mstdn.social
2025-06-10

As part of the investigation, I have looked closely at Telegram's protocol and analyzed packet captures provided by IStories.

I have also done some packet captures of my own.

I dive into the nitty-gritty technical details of what I found and how I found it on my blog:

Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot
rys.io/en/179.html

Yes, my packet captures and a small Python library I wrote in the process are all published along.

#Telegram #InfoSec #Privacy #Surveillance #Russia

Emil Sit boosted:
2025-06-10

"The cult of goal-setting thrives in this illusion. It converts uncertainty into an illusion of progress. It demands specificity in exchange for comfort. And it replaces self-trust with the performance of future-planning."

(Original title: Smart People Don't Chase Goals; They Create Limits)

joanwestenberg.com/smart-peopl

Emil Sit boosted:
Ian RobinsonianRobinson
2025-06-08

Apple researchers have published a new paper; it’s pretty devastating to LLMs, and is a powerful followup to one from many of the same authors last year.

garymarcus.substack.com/p/a-kn

Emil Sit boosted:
2025-06-07

Here's video, slides and a detailed annotated transcript from my talk at this week's AI Engineer World's Fair conference in San Francisco - "The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles" simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/6/s

Emil Sit boosted:
2025-06-06

If a coder keeps their job but has to supervise LLM code agents, they depend on the LLMs remaining at a level that requires supervision.

If the LLMs remain at a level that requires supervision, is it a coding job or purgatory?

Emil Sit boosted:
jenny (phire)phire@phire.place
2025-06-06

“Whatever our environments afford, we tend to do more of. Whatever they resist, we tend to do less of. So in a world where we were all writing all of our code and emails and blog posts and texts to each other with LLMs, what do they afford that existing tools do not? …LLMs are an affordance for producing more text, faster. How is that going to shape us?”

This was fantastic and extremely resonant of my experience in this space, ty for writing @glyph blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-

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