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Dan Luu
5,618 posts
@danluu

Dan Luu

@danluu
Active on mastodon.social/@danluu; also trying out bsky.app/profile/danluu…
danluu.com
Joined December 2008
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  • Pinned
    @danluu
    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Dec 24, 2017
    Computer latency: 1977-2017 danluu.com/input-lag/
    89
  • @danluu
    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Sep 23
    Why have Anthropic's Mythos/Glasswing vuln reports been so bad? In danluu.com/ai-coding/#myt…, I mentioned a colleague saying the reports we got were mostly nonsense. That seems common? E.g., @gregkh on kernel reports and vulncheck.com/blog/anthropic….
    13
  • @danluu
    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Sep 22
    Were Ralph loops ever effective? They were popular, but when I did a comparison, they underperformed vs. a normal loop with context. There were all these theories about why Ralph loops were effective but AFAICT people just didn't run the comparison? danluu.com/pl-tokens/#ral…
    Ralph loops underperform in 27 out of 30 conditions
    11
  • @danluu
    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Sep 18
    There's no point at which turning your brain off will work: danluu.com/brain-off/
    In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs1. They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked2. This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was often quite silly.

As LLMs have gotten better, I've seen more of this. Sometimes, people will try to get the LLM to write some code for them and basically just assume that it works3. Sometimes there's a human in the loop and, if the thing doesn't work, they'll ask the LLM to figure out the problem and solve it. Niklas Gruhn calls some variants of doing this being a meat proxy.4

Being a for loop meat proxy works better than it did in early 2025 and the software I've tried that's developed like this sometimes actually sort of works. Not well enough that I'd want to use it or that it's successful, but I'm impressed at how effective being a meat proxy is in September 2026. You could even imagine LLMs improving enough that brain-off meat-p...
    29
  • @danluu
    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Sep 16
    Amazon exec: you wouldn't notice [if someone blew up a datacenter]. I mean, we might be a bit upset, but you wouldn't notice! [laughs] Amazon after DCs blown up: After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data ...
    ​​But hold on a second: If we're concentrating all of our data into data centers, and concentrating most of the data centers in one county, doesn't that make a very tempting target for terrorists?

Amazon's Matt Wood isn't worried: "If something does happen or we have a power event or there's a flood in one specific location, that data is held redundantly in other locations as well."

Pogue asked, "I don't mean to give anyone ideas, but let's say I figured out that one of these unmarked buildings was an AWS data center, and I blew it up. Are you saying that it's so backed up and redundant that you probably wouldn't notice?"

"Yeah, you wouldn't notice. I mean, we might be a bit upset, but you wouldn't notice!" Wood laughed.
     AWS says wartime damage means some Middle East cloud resources are gone for good

Iranian strikes overwhelmed regional redundancy in Bahrain and left one UAE Availability Zone inaccessible
Dan Robinson
IT INFRASTRUCTURE REPORTER
25
Published Wed 16 Sept 2026 // 12:11 UTC
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it is unable to restore access to resources and data in some of its Availability Zones in the Middle East after datacenters were damaged during the US war with Iran.

In an update to its AWS Health Dashboard, the cloud giant confirmed that anything hosted ex
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