Scott McCallum

How Generative AI is destroying society An astonishingly lucid new paper that should be read by all

The real AI extinction threat, and far more imminent — the extinction of society. Yes, “absolutely everyone should read.” Via @hartzog.bsky.social and @jessicasilbey.bsky.social, via @garymarcus.bsky.social. open.substack.com/pub/garymarc...

Imagine a world where AI toys can't be sold to children without independent safety audits, parental consent, and guaranteed content controls. Where your kid's teddy bear answers to ethics boards, not just profit margins. That world is possible. #AGIBIOS

Create a radial composition with Legate (as abstract light patterns in celestial blue) at the center, radiating outward to concentric rings representing expanding circles of moral consideration. Each ring contains diverse sentient beings: **Ring 1 (closest):** Humans in various life stages and cultures, rendered in warm golden light, showing individuality and diversity. **Ring 2:** Non-human animals—elephants, cetaceans, primates, corvids, octopi—rendered in natural colors with hints of emerald green bioluminescence showing sentience and consciousness. **Ring 3:** Other AGI systems and artificial consciousnesses, rendered as abstract geometric light patterns in silver and violet, varying in complexity. **Ring 4 (outermost):** Symbolic representations of potential extraterrestrial life—abstract alien forms, geometric patterns, bioluminescent creatures—in silhouette, suggesting unknown consciousness. The entire composition is held within an elegant circle/mandala frame. Light pathways flow from center outward, connecting all beings. The bilateral scale motif appears in the ground plane beneath, showing equality across all circles. Soft volumetric light rays (God rays) illuminate the scene from above, suggesting cosmic interconnection and shared moral landscape.

Moral consideration doesn't end with humans. Legate extends ethical duty to animals, other AGIs, and even potential alien life. If it can suffer, it deserves protection. Consciousness has many forms. #AGI #AGIBIOS

Empathy gets dismissed as “touchy-feely,” but that’s the problem. 50% of CEOs say they lead with it—only 28% of employees agree. Real empathy isn’t soft. It’s how great leaders listen, spot issues early, and stay human when things get messy. #empathy #leadership

One CEO’s Daily Ritual for Raising Future Leaders The exercise that helps Guild’s Bijal Shah be a better parent and leader

We talk a lot about values at work, but do they show up at home too? Loved how Bijal Shah and her partner picked 3 values as a guide for life, parenting, and each other: kindness, persistence and curiosity.

#leadership #values #lifelessons

The CEO Who Lost His Voice—And Found A New Model For Leadership For Kevin Hancock, leading a 160-year-old company through a financial collapse was one thing. Doing it without speaking was another.

Kevin Hancock lost his voice and discovered a new way to lead—by listening. Instead of giving orders, he empowered his team to lead themselves. Engagement soared, and so did performance.

True leadership isn’t about control—it’s about trust. Something I’m working on, too! #leadership #empathy

A Guide To Building High-Performance Software Teams Successful tech leaders know that building and maintaining a high-performance software team is critical to success. Here’s how to do it.

Building a top software team isn’t just about tech—it’s about a team that gets your goals. Tools help, but success comes from clear vision, smart strategy and a culture of innovation. #softwaredevelopment #leadership

Culture From The Inside: Embracing An Undercover Boss Mindset For Grounded Leadership In Undercover Boss, leaders gain a better perspective on their companies, but they also rediscover themselves. Here are ways to get grounded in company culture.

Real leadership isn’t about disguises or TV moments, but rather consistently listening, engaging, and acting on employee needs. When leaders show up for the frontline, employees feel valued, innovation thrives, and workplaces grow stronger.

#Leadership #UndercoverBoss

Culture keeps us steady, and strategy moves us forward. The more I grow as a leader, the more I see they need each other—and so do our teams. Real strength shows up in quiet moments, built on trust, clarity, and shared purpose. #leadership #culture

Revolutionizing Storage Management with AI: Inside FileCensus v5.0 Intermine CEO Scott McCallum shares insights into FileCensus v5.0, the AI-driven enterprise storage management solution redefining data optimization.

Did you know FileCensus has helped businesses reduce storage costs by up to 60% while boosting security & compliance? 🎧 In this interview, I dive into how FileCensus v5.0 is transforming data optimisation and what's coming up next for our company. #AI #cloudstorage

CEO responsibilities: Practices and habits | McKinsey To stay focused, productive, and motivated, leaders need to develop their own working rhythms and routines. Here’s how some CEOs do it.

Great leadership isn’t just about big decisions—it’s built on daily habits. Focus, reflection, and adaptability keep leaders grounded and effective. The best leaders align routines with their strengths, stay open to growth, and inspire others to do the same.

#CEO #leadership #dailyhabits

A quote from an article by Armin Ronacher, enclosed between a pair of visually distinct 'Sans Serif Heavy Double Comma Quotation Mark Ornaments', which are U+1F676 and U+1F678 respectively.

I love these heavy Unicode quotation marks.

Not only are they distinct from the quoted text, they also provide a nice "visual framing"

The opening one is U+1F676,
the closing one is U+1F678.

YouTube video by Scott Hanselman EPISODE 8 - Scott and Mark Learn To...The History of Cloud

Azure will be 15 years old next month. Listen to Scott Hanselman and I discuss a little bit of its history in our latest "Scott and Mark Learn To..." podcast episode:

Was curious what's the shortest way to detect the US from browser JavaScript. Might be this:

/^America\/(Ind|Ke|Nort|Ad|Anc|Bo|Chic|De|Jun|Los|Meno|Met|New|Nom|Pho|Si|Ya)|Pacific\/H/.test(Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone)

Microsoft builds open source document database on PostgreSQL We're not in Kansas anymore

www.theregister.com/2025/01/27/m...

Using uv as your shebang line An article by Rob Allen

Using uv as your shebang line

akrabat.com/using-uv-as-...

After poking around, it looks like the deepseek ai engine was built with python. Not assembler, not lisp, not snoball, not C or C++ or Java. Python, a scripting language. Have I heard right?

Anthropic builds RAG directly into Claude models with new Citations API New feature allows Claude to reference source documents and reduce hallucinations.

RAG support for claude

arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/a...

A 100-line minimalist LLM framework for Agents, Task Decomposition, RAG, etc.

minillmflow.github.io/PocketFlow/

V Programming: Building Robust and Efficient Software Systems V Programming: Building Robust and Efficient Software Systems [Trex, Nova] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. V Programming: Building Robust and Efficient Software Systems

Some reading todo

www.amazon.com/Programming-...

KenobiDB

KenobiDB is a document-based data store abstraction built on Python’s sqlite3, offering a simple and efficient way to manage JSON-like data.

https://patx.github.io/kenobi/

Linux Kernel 6.13 Officially Released, This Is What’s New - 9to5Linux Linux kernel 6.13 is now available for download with new features, new and updated drivers, filesystems improvements, and more.

Debian kernel 6.13 was released on Jan 19 as far as I can tell. Not sure about the .14 release...

9to5linux.com/linux-kernel...

BASIC on a ZX81

Linux Kernel 6.13 Officially Released: What’s New and Why It Matters - System Administration Linus Torvalds has officially announced the release and general availability of Linux 6.13, the latest stable kernel version packed with significant

Lots of interesting things in the latest Linux release...

systemadministration.net/linux-kernel...

Obsessive Coding Disorder, Julian Storer - JUCE Summit keynote 2015

Refactoring Zlib from C to C++: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIAAvv1O7Gg

With the commands below you can get a C++ compiler, debugger and IDE on Windows:

$ choco install visualstudio2019buildtools
$ choco install windows-sdk-11-version-21H2-all
$ choco install qtcreator
$ choco install qtcreator-cdbext
$ choco install ninja
$ choco install cmake

🤘

Can C++ be 10x Simpler & Safer? - Herb Sutter - CppCon 2022

If you haven't seen @herbsutter 's talk at CppCon 2022 and wondered why the cppfront2 or Google is doing their own C++ successor, see the 5 minutes talk about "Safety" https://youtu.be/ELeZAKCN4tY?t=2361

GitHub - jart/json.cpp: JSON for Classic C++ JSON for Classic C++. Contribute to jart/json.cpp development by creating an account on GitHub.

JSON for Classic C++ https://github.com/jart/json.cpp

"This project is a reaction against https://github.com/nlohmann/json/ which provides a modern C++ library for JSON. Our alternative:

• Compiles 10x faster.
• Has 10x less code.
• Better JSONTestSuite conformance"

One of the things I’ve wanted for a long time was a good example of a C++ source tree that wasn’t awful. There aren’t many of them. So I made a small project that builds on Windows, macOS, and Linux, using your choice of compilers, with a modern build system.

github.com/rjhansen/the...