Reid Burke

Google DeepMind with Joel Z. Leibo, Alexander Sasha Vezhnevets, Manfred Diaz, John P. Agapiou, William A. Cunningham, Peter Sunehag, Julia Haas, Raphael Koster, Edgar A. Duéñez-Guzmán, William S. Isaac, Georgios Piliouras, Stanley M. Bileschi, Iyad Rahwan, Simon Osindero, and others:

What is appropriateness? Humans navigate a multi-scale mosaic of interlocking notions of what is appropriate for different situations. We act one way with our friends, another with our family, and yet another in the office. Likewise for AI, appropriate behavior for a comedy-writing assistant is not the same as appropriate behavior for a customer-service representative. What determines which actions are appropriate in which contexts? And what causes these standards to change over time? Since all judgments of AI appropriateness are ultimately made by humans, we need to understand how appropriateness guides human decision making in order to properly evaluate AI decision making and improve it. This paper presents a theory of appropriateness: how it functions in human society, how it may be implemented in the brain, and what it means for responsible deployment of generative AI technology.

if your product doesn’t load instantly in the web browser with 0 logins and clicks it’s a bad product and no one is going to use it

Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026. Here’s what’s new last month.

Following a recent observation on interview questions like pull-ups.

From NSHipster:

We’ve touched on .env files in past articles about xcconfig files and secret management on iOS. But this week on NSHipster we’re taking a deeper look, exploring how the lesser-known 1Password CLI (op) can solve some problems many of us face managing secrets day-to-day.

In case you’re not familiar with Twelve-Factor Apps:

Around 2011, Adam Wiggins published “The Twelve-Factor App”, a methodology for building modern web applications that has since become canon in our industry.

The third of those twelve factors, “Config”, prescribes storing configuration in environment variables:

“Apps sometimes store config as constants in the code. This is a violation of twelve-factor, which requires strict separation of config from code. Config varies substantially across deploys, code does not.”

This core insight — that configuration should be separate from code — led to the widespread adoption of .env files.