TechLife
Sean Goedecke.
Software engineering and personal reflections.
Recent essays
30 of 57Powerful AIs might escape containment by releasing themselves as open-weight models
Impro is a handbook for running a cult
Overtraining as the path to human-like AI
What does "playing politics" mean for software engineers?
In defense of not understanding your codebase
Blog about things you don't understand yet
Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing it. If I don’t learn anything new while I’m writing, it’s not interesting enough to publish.
C2PA only works if everything is signed
Lots to unpack. Let’s start by considering images, since that’s the easiest case.
Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove
LLM text watermarking is a fascinating problem. Like the best engineering problems, it is theoretically hard to solve perfectly, but has multiple partial solutions: for instance, Google’s SynthID, and (as I’ll argue) some quiet Unicode trickery from OpenAI and…
Saying the obvious thing
Stating the obvious doesn’t mean avoiding nuance. Every obvious claim carries with it a host of subtle, non-obvious claims. For example, I believe that having a big ego can be very useful as a software engineer. But why exactly is that, and what do I mean by e…