Travis Turner retweeted
For the first time this year, we have space to take a few more clients. Come work with us!
Hey friends, send us some work! We're smart, cool, and our job is to make you succeed 😎
Come work with @evilmartians Martians on all these things and more:
Rails performance and CI optimization
LLM benchmarks and agent infra
Product and design for devtools and builder tools
Product and design for cybersecurity
Forward-deployed engineering for AI-native products
UI coding harness: make agents stick to your design system
Ruby, Go, TS SDKs and adapters
Secure, agent-ready npm packages (provenance)
Cloud and DB migrations
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Thank you!
You need to drop everything and watch this fantastic talk by @travis____t!
youtube.com/watch?v=nzg03q…
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Travis Turner retweeted
At SF Ruby, students and newcomers get in free. 🧑🎓
We're giving away FREE TICKETS to students, recent grads, career changers, and people from underrepresented groups.
You don't need Ruby experience. The application takes less than five minutes.
👀 Deadline: October 30.
Apply here: sfruby.com/scholarship/
We're giving away FREE TICKETS to students, recent grads, career changers, and people from underrepresented groups.
You don't need Ruby experience. The application takes less than five minutes.
👀 Deadline: October 30.
Apply here: sfruby.com/scholarship/
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George Carlin’s standup comedy is not comedy, it’s just depressing. Do people laugh at his material?
Carlin himself, outside that medium, is pretty funny.
Carlin himself, outside that medium, is pretty funny.
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Travis Turner retweeted
Rumor has it, there's a secret discount code hidden in this article. 👀
If you know us, you know we love Ruby.
@sfrubyconf was born out of our appreciation for the language and its community. It’s a conference for passionate engineers who are moving the ecosystem forward.
We have talks from people at @Shopify, @GustoHQ, @intercom, @withpersona, @AnthropicAI, @typesense, and more, plus the creators of RubyLLM, Herb, and Solid Queue.
If you’re into learning from the brightest minds, having conversations that help build a better future, and making new friends, you won’t want to miss this.
Read more about why this conference is for you: evilmartians.com/chronicles/why…
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Travis Turner retweeted
Agents on @rails is the Rails Foundation's LLM benchmark. Evil Martians designed its evaluation tasks and the tooling to run trials at scale. Now, we're going behind the scenes. First: how we wrote black-box checks for apps whose code we'd never seen, to keep trials fair and results reliable. Bonus: the same evals run against Rust. evilmartians.com/chronicles/the…
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Travis Turner retweeted
@evilmartians engineers writing the content is exactly why it gets read. marketing-written tech content is instantly obvious and nobody trusts it
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Yeah!
All our engineers are encouraged to write technical content for the blog, which then powers most of our marketing strategy.
This makes all the difference for us. Hundreds of thousands of people read our blog every year and trust our team enough to do business with us.
We’re rated the top blog in @planetargon’s 2026 Ruby on Rails Community Survey. Thanks to everyone who reads us, and to @travis____t for leading the blog! ♥️
P.S. @sfrubyconf also made the list of the top ten conferences Rubyists plan to attend this year. How exciting!
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Travis Turner retweeted
All our engineers are encouraged to write technical content for the blog, which then powers most of our marketing strategy.
This makes all the difference for us. Hundreds of thousands of people read our blog every year and trust our team enough to do business with us.
We’re rated the top blog in @planetargon’s 2026 Ruby on Rails Community Survey. Thanks to everyone who reads us, and to @travis____t for leading the blog! ♥️
P.S. @sfrubyconf also made the list of the top ten conferences Rubyists plan to attend this year. How exciting!
This makes all the difference for us. Hundreds of thousands of people read our blog every year and trust our team enough to do business with us.
We’re rated the top blog in @planetargon’s 2026 Ruby on Rails Community Survey. Thanks to everyone who reads us, and to @travis____t for leading the blog! ♥️
P.S. @sfrubyconf also made the list of the top ten conferences Rubyists plan to attend this year. How exciting!
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That’s what I’ve been saying
1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness.
New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.648… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)
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Travis Turner retweeted
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.
The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.
But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.
So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.
TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.
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He was also the bomb in Phantoms, yo.
Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models
“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film alog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.
“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor.
“You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something.
“That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’
“I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”
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There’s no euphoria like meeting a deadline at the last minute. Today is the best day to get your ticket, everyone! evilmartians.com/chronicles/sf-…
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Travis Turner retweeted
You may just have to wait for the video of Travis Turner's closing remarks. Is it aliens? Is it God? Or just drugs?
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Travis Turner retweeted
We are thrilled to announce our next Emerald sponsor.
... Ready?
It’s TRMNL, widely loved by fashionable engineers and DIY tinkerers.
@useTRMNL is the premier ePaper dashboard powered by Ruby. Ryan is bringing a few devices for sale at the event, and we'll also give or Pier coins.
... Ready?
It’s TRMNL, widely loved by fashionable engineers and DIY tinkerers.
@useTRMNL is the premier ePaper dashboard powered by Ruby. Ryan is bringing a few devices for sale at the event, and we'll also give or Pier coins.
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Travis Turner retweeted
Lisbon friends, come listen to Nina's talk on how to protect yourself from supply chain attacks.
We've talked about this topic a lot and @ninoid_ is one of the people on our team actively building a more secure ecosystem.
If you go, send us pics!
We've talked about this topic a lot and @ninoid_ is one of the people on our team actively building a more secure ecosystem.
If you go, send us pics!
Supply-chain attacks are a daily reality now. Even the most widely used npm packages get weaponized to compromise thousands of developers at once, and no project is out of reach.
@ninoid_ is a Frontend Engineer at Evil Martians, increasingly focused on what developers can attacks.
She'll review two real dependency updates live using Multiocular, the open-source tool her team built, to show what separates them once you stop trusting the version number and start reading the diff.
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Travis Turner retweeted
New revamped edition of Ruby AI News is out now!
rubyai.beehiiv.com/p/ruby-ai-news…
rubyai.beehiiv.com/p/ruby-ai-news…
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Travis Turner retweeted
Did we tell you that all the coins you collect on The Pier turn into real gold at the conference!? 👀
Well, not gold gold, but Ruby Goodies.
We'll have collectibles, physical and digital Ruby products, and merch that you want to wear. Spoiler alert: there're TRMNL devices need to fight @palkan_tula for them.
Don't walk, run to The Pier, and complete quests to get coins. (You'll need to walk there, tho, we don't have a running feature available).
Well, not gold gold, but Ruby Goodies.
We'll have collectibles, physical and digital Ruby products, and merch that you want to wear. Spoiler alert: there're TRMNL devices need to fight @palkan_tula for them.
Don't walk, run to The Pier, and complete quests to get coins. (You'll need to walk there, tho, we don't have a running feature available).
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