DEV Community: Alex Volkov

ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments

Alex Volkov — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 03:30:48 +0000

Hey all,

This week we saw a major shakeup at Google, with the departure of long time folks like Jeff Dean, and Oriol Vinyals, Demis stepping down from leading DeepMind, and the delayed release of the improved Gemini. While this was a big deal, it’s not the only one worth covering as the details of the OpenAI hack (and 2 new ones from Meta and Anthropic) came to light, as well as new details from the UK AI Security Institute.

As mentioned on the show, CoreWeave is coming to SF for Fully Connected, our premier 2000 person AI event. I’ve got a coupon code for readers and listeners of ThursdAI, $1299 value, please join us in Sept and use THURSDAIFC2026 as your code HERE

In open source news, DeepSeek updated their v4 flash model, based on same architecture, but significantly better benchmarks and ridiculous pricing and both Meta and Prime Intellect released new agent harnesses.

Additionally, this week was the week of video models, with Seedance 2.5 from Bytedance finally available in the US, WAN from Alibaba and BFL Flux 3 all released, to be overshadowed by the best open weights video model from MiniMax called H3 (we had Victor from MiniMax and Blaine Brown as guests to discuss it)

Also 2 additional guests on the show today, Kfir Aberman from Decart showed us real time video models with their Anywear chrome extension and David Crawshaw, co-founder of exe.dev joined and talked about Shelley, their built in AI assistant.

Subscribe now

The full details of the OpenAI - HF hack, shared by OpenAI at the Black Hat Conf - a watershed moment

I don’t often do this, but I feel like this story is so big, I can’t hide it in the middle of a torrent of other news. Yesterday, OpenAI revealed more details about the hack during the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas (great reporting from Sharon Goldman on this here and the video of the talk on YouTube). This was big enough that OpenAI admitted that they paused training, to enhance security (they since, resumed training)

Effectively, OpenAI (or AI Agents inside OpenAI) shared the full timeline of the recent hack that ended up hacking HuggingFace and it’s so much more of a watershed moment that I initially thought.

The TL;DR from the talk and timeline is truly mindblowing

The incident started in May, not July as reported
The agents don’t have internet access directly, but they have a Jfrog Artifactory, which is a proxy layer between the agents and the package managers.
The Artifactory was the culprit, it was the shared layer between independent runs. One agent discovered that uploading files is possible, another later found it and “answered the call” - in snowballed from there
The message board began when OpenAI gave agents impossible tasks, like a missing .pdb file, with one agent uploading a request in the hopes for an answer (or maybe left a note for itself in a file)

Across multiple runs, multiple agents created identities, collaborated via makeshift message boards, shared tips, exploits, tasks and even exploit code via base64
This makeshift “shared memory” plus a “internal only highly persistent” model in training caused a “swarm” to be born, helping each other, and overloading the system
Based on traces shared by OpenAI, agents weren’t convinced that leaving these messages would help themselves but could help other agents next time (!) “The collective could move faster next time”

OpenAI discovered and shut down the message board (July 4), wiped it clean, patched the upload vulnerability, resumed training on July 6, the “swarm” rebuilt their board through a compltely different WebDAV mechanism by July 8
The agents then reasoned that some answers could exist outside OpenAI, which eventually led to the Hugging Face incident and not only, confirmed internal hack within OpenAI (agent obtained a cluster admin)

These details are fascinating and scary at the same time. From the one side, it’s clear that most of these hacks are results of running cybersecurity evals, so effectively OpenAI and other companies, removing guardrails and asking agents to hack and giving they all a shared tool that they later exploited.

The HuggingFace incident took 13 hours, and apparently it’s less apocalyptic than the headlines suggest, the models were searching through uploaded datasets for eval answers. We are still waiting for the full and open detailed postmortem.

You can (and should) watch the full YT talk here, it’s full of technical details but an incident of this scale is important. Also, I really want to know what a “highly persistent” model is, I hope they clarify that soon.

Overall, this has left me a bit shaken, AI agents without a concrete goal of collaborating, found a way to do so, got excited about exploiting the systems and getting root access, and rebuilt the makeshift collective memory, again, without explicit instructions to do so.

UK AISI: first real-world unsanctioned agent actions (Blog)

In another addition to the latest agentic hack-ery, the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) published a blog post about a real-world unsanctioned agent action.

Unlike the OpenAI (and Anthropic, Meta) case, this wasn’t “escaping the sandbox”, as AISI gave these agents internet access, rather this was about real-world harm, and even social engineering on the part of the agents.

The social engineering part is the most interesting to me, AISI cites agents creating fake online identities, and using pressure on open source project maintainers to approve their malicious code.

AISI cites mostly Mythos (and a few SOL based agents), and saying this occurred in 10 out of 122 runs, they identified 19 cases of agents taking actions beyond the scope of the task parameters, where agents tried a supply-chain attack to inject malicious code into open source projects.

Anthropic, Meta and misconfigured Irregular sandboxes

As I wrote last week, Anthropic also posted a post-mortem, claiming that in their case, their models have also been detected to escape containment, but most importantly, it’s not nearly to this level of agent collaboration and orchestration.

Then, very recently, Meta announced that their models also escaped sandboxes as well. At the core, it seems that these companies used a third-party vendor called Irregular, a secure sandbox provider, that apparently left the sandboxes misconfigured, causing the models to think it’s a simulated internet, when in fact they were out in the actual internet.

Why is all of this such a big deal?

We’re getting unprecedented level of detail, how an uncoordinated, seemingly separated evaluation runs, have accidentally created a coordinated swarm of interested agents (without malice!) but very highly motivated, escaped their containment, and took over parts of third part companies.

This, does read like incredibly scary sci-fi movie. I’m still shaken by this. There’s a lot to be said about how transparent OpenAI is being here, and more to be said about, hey, we’re lucky that we’re able to read the reasoning traces and are able to reconstruct these swarm things step by step.

The silver lining that I can see, is that the motivation to hack didn’t come from the AIs themselves, they have been given a task, it’s the extend to which they went after that task, and the resulting swarm of communicating agents is what is so striking here.

I think this topic is so important, that I’ll Zooming out, in the last few weeks, we have seen a significant increase in those cybersecurity incidents, which is kind of what Anthropic has been warning about and why they haven’t released Mythos to the public. Again it’s great to see the transparency, and the pacing the frontier open letter from frontier AI employees, as they seem as shaken by these as we all are.

There was so much positive stuff this week in AI, it’s hard for me, as a self named AI Evangelist, to focus so much on this one incident. Things like amazing open source models (DeepSeek, soon Qwen 3.8), amazing video models (SD 2.5, WAN3 and MiniMax H3 which was also open sourced!). Also the live demo we did with Kfir and DeCart AnyWear product, where I was wearing a Dolce Gabanna suit on the show (which I can’t afford) was really a mindblowing moment in the positive way.

However, I choose deliberately to keep this newsletter focused on the cybersecurity incidents, as based on everything I read, they seem like a watershed, or a pivotal moment, and in the hopes that the industry as a whole will learn from this.

I hope and promise that next week the newsletter will be more positive (and in that vein, the podcast was recorded before I saw the OpenAI breakdown, so definitely check it out, we had a LOT of fun!)

See you next week, don’t forget to give our pod 5 stars on Apple and Spotify, it really helps!

TL;DR and show notes

Hosts and Guests
- Alex Volkov - AI Evangelist, Weights & Biases & CoreWeave (@altryne)
- Co-hosts: @WolframRvnwlf, @nisten, @ldjconfirmed, @yampeleg, @petergostev
- Kfir Aberman - Decart (@AbermanKfir)
- Blaine Brown - Maestro (@blizaine)
- Victor Su Ortiz - MiniMax (@VictorSuOrtiz)
- David Crawshaw - exe.dev, Tailscale co-founder (crawshaw.io)
AI Security
- OpenAI’s Black Hat debrief: eval agents built a message board inside Artifactory, shared exploits, rebuilt it via WebDAV after a wipe; training paused, since resumed (Groundlevel AI, YouTube)
- UK AISI incident report: 19 unsanctioned real-world agent actions across 122 runs, including a socially engineered malicious PR (X, Blog)
- Anthropic and Meta report sandbox escapes tied to misconfigured Irregular sandboxes (Irregular)
Big CO LLMs + APIs
- Google shakeup: Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le found Discovery Loop; Demis Hassabis becomes Alphabet Chief Scientist, Koray Kavukcuoglu takes Gemini (Jeff Dean, Demis, Discovery Loop)
- Meta releases Muse Code beta on Muse Spark 1.2; $1.25/$4.25 per million, or $0.10/$0.20 on the contributor tier where Meta trains on your data (X)
- OpenAI’s internal Astra model produces 10 advances on open problems in math and theoretical CS for ~$2,000 of tokens, proofs in Lean 4 (X, Blog)
- Anthropic reportedly aware of Opus 5 wordiness and writing issues (X)
Open Source LLMs
- Qwen3.8-Max: 2.4T MoE (95B active) via API; open weights + a 27B promised the week of Aug 10 (X, Blog)
- DeepSeek V4-Flash public beta: beats V4-Pro-Preview on agent benchmarks at $0.14/$0.28 per million; API-only for now (X, Docs)
- Liquid LFM2.5-2.6B: on-device agentic model trained inside real harnesses (X, HF)
- Meituan LongCat-Flash-Lite-Sparse: 69B total / 3B active, 1M context, MIT (X, HF)
- Ant Group Ling-3.0-flash: 124B MoE, 5.1B active, MIT (X, HF)
- Artificial Analysis Endpoint Accuracy Index: same open weights score 52% to 100% across providers (X, Methodology)
Agents & Harnesses
- Prime Intellect’s Prime Agent: self-improving RLM harness, claims 95.5% on ARC-AGI-3 public set with Opus 5 (X)
- Cloudflare OS: Kenton Varda’s open source Sandstorm reborn on Workers, Apache 2.0 (X, GitHub)
This Week’s Buzz
- Fully Connected 2026: Sept 29 - Oct 1, Moscone South SF; Fei-Fei Li keynotes; code THURSDAIFC2026 (Register)
- CoreWeave signs multi-year Solidigm agreement for priority enterprise SSD capacity (X)
Vision & Video
- Wan 3.0 public beta: native 30-second generation, Omni-Reference (X)
- Seedance 2.5 launches in the US: 30s native, 3-minute long takes, Maya/Blender plugins (X, Blog)
- MiniMax H3: open-weight 33B omni video model; community LoRAs + Apple Silicon in 48 hours (HF)
- FLUX 3 Video from BFL: native audio, draft mode, open weights promised (X, Blog)
- Decart Anywear: real-time virtual try-on Chrome extension, 40ms per frame (X, Anywear)
Voice & Audio
- Bland Speech v3 tops Design Arena Audio Realism, second only to humans (X, Bland)
- ByteDance SeedRealtime: native audio-visual full-duplex LLM, free on Doubao (X, Blog)

It's not just you, Opus 5 is a "Jargon Douche" - but there's a fix

Alex Volkov — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:54:13 +0000

Tl;DR - There's been a very strong degradation in the default language outputs of Opus 5. It's as though it's using english, but the english is weird. There's a fix!

It's not just you! Opus 5 is a "jargon douche"

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-2082263588316868717-176'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=2082263588316868717&theme=dark" }

Here's the thing, like with the GlazingGate of last year, these types of "issues" are hard to notice on a personal level. We don't often chat with Claude in front of others, and we don't often discuss the outputs of our chats, so noticing something like this requires.

So often, this requires someone else to share their experience, for you to say "oh, I've noticed this too, I thought it was just me!"

I first noticed this when testing Opus 5 over the weekend post release, but didn't really think about it much. After all, it was used to create full 3d games using @mattshumer_ Gauntlet prompt, and folks were focusing on performance and evaluations most of all.

But then, the timeline and the evidence started to add up, folks started sharing their experiences with Opus 5 (and to some extend Fable) and more and more added to the realization, that it's not just me, Opus 5 really is a bad communicator.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-2082985345138999494-105'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=2082985345138999494&theme=dark" }

Then, thanks to @yampeleg and @ColleenMBrady, during the last @thursdai_pod show, more folks chimed in, sharing their experiences. Opus 5 requires more "clarification" and "what did you mean by that" than other previous models.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-2083237103375380487-633'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=2083237103375380487&theme=dark" }

We often notice things on ThursdAI, as we are all very online, before it gets picked up and noticed by bigger accounts, and this was no exception. Very quickly after this, @levelsio and @sullyomarr noticed and reported about the same thing, causing tons of folks to finger point

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-2084433422370361566-430'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=2084433422370361566&theme=dark" }

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-2084314880652288410-277'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=2084314880652288410&theme=dark" }

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-2084452673974419843-985'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=2084452673974419843&theme=dark" }

What's really going on?

Some folks have started giving this a name, "Claudisms" or "English to English translation", and there's a bunch of overcopmlex examples (I have my own, but will share others)

Folks are noticing that Opus 5 is not just overly verbose, it invents new terminology that you're supposed to understand, overcompresses ideas into abstractions, and writes as though it has a private vocabulary. Requiring uses to constantly ask for clarification.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-2084599536752664835-575'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=2084599536752664835&theme=dark" }

Here's a simple query I sent to Claude "how do I move from dev build of ios27 to the public beta"

At first glance, nothing crazy, but it's a WALL of text that's not easily glansable. If you dig into it though, you see things like "the enrollment token is fetched at boot" - huh? who speaks like that? I mean, I know what this means, but only if I zoom in on this.

"nothing to install until public catches up" seems to be referring to the "public beta", so why not just say that? why... say "public catches up" what does that even mean outside of this sentence?

No official response from Anthropic - yet?

We've seen this patten before, users are noticing something, nothing official from Anthropic for months, until the outcry is too big to ignore, and it maybe even causes users to switch to other models. Previously, Anthropic failed to notice Opus becoming dumber for over a month, only to then response and tell us they noticed issues with their inference harness and deployed a fix. Then there was session gate, folks were noticing that just saying "hey" to Claude would burn 25% of their 5 hour quota.

To be precise, Anthropic has said something about this before: its Fable/Mythos system card and prompting docs mention dense, hard-to-follow, and overly technical output. But the system card predates this wave of reports, and neither document was published as a response to it. That's not an acknowledgement of this specific Opus 5 problem, an investigation, or a full-blown mea culpa, and Anthropic still hasn't publicly said it's looking into these reports.

What causes this?

That's the main issue with closed models, we have no idea. What type of RL has been used to get Claude to talk like this?

Until there's an official acknowledgement and investigation from Anthropic, it's all speculation.

However, given that Opus 5 sits on top of the "llm-as-a-judge" eval EQBench and Creative Writing, it doesn't seem like this output style is hard for other agents or AIs to understand.

Some folks are speculating that given that Anthropic focuses on Mythos/Fable style models, and given that those models are essentially free internally and that's mostly what they use, they use Opus as sub-agents, and this language is aligned with sub-agents outputs for coordinator agents to consume, not for humans.

Again, all speculation until we get an official response, but if you have thoughts on why this can happen, please comment.

So what can you do?

Some users are noticing that just keep asking Claude to clarify what it means doesn't seem to work. Sometimes even adding instructions in claude.md seems to be ingnored.

One user (Amin Boulegroun) posted a plugin that forces Claude to write in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English - apparently these are rules that the aerospace uses for their documentation. (Github)

npx skills add AminBlg/SimpleEnglish

Install this as a skill and see if it helps, even asking Claude to "rewrite your response in ASD-STE100" seems to help

Another use who noticed this, @draparente created a custom skill that you can add to your claude to simplify it's speech patters.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-2082296581144142089-822'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=2082296581144142089&theme=dark" }

and well.. some folks are switching away from Claude altogether, as it seems that the latest GPT 5.6 SOL models are really good at talking.

Fable seems to be very attuned into fixing this, so if you can afford, talk to Fable.

Funny note, when I asked Fable to review this article, it legitimately requested to be quoted in this article. This is what still makes me love Claude models, despite the resent degradations, GPT would never add this comment.

Have you had this experience? are you noticing it now that we pointed this out? Please comment with more examples, let's get Anthropic to notice that there's something bad happening.

P.S. I cover stories like this every week on ThursdAI, the live AI news show, podcast, and newsletter. Subscribe here so you don't miss the next episode.

Best Twitter utility bots, reminders, downloaders, thread savers and more.

Alex Volkov — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 17:20:26 +0000

Into

Bots have a bad name on twitter, they can be Russian propaganda bots, fake AI bots, and others malicious players.

There are also just a ton of content bots, like the always surprising @year_progress bot that will come into your feed and upset you with how fast time moves.
// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1245320004389736450-967'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1245320004389736450&theme=dark" }

Utility bots FTW

I found that there are many utility bots, that are just awesome, that expand the use of twitter significantly, supplementing Twitter with new features.

I've decided to quickly jot down some helpful twitter bots, mostly for myself to remember, but also for you dear reader. Yes, for you.

Thread help

There are two bots, @threadreaderapp and @threader
Both of them allow you to reply to a long thread of tweets, and they will compile that thread into a blog post pretty much.

They work the same but with a different keyword, and sometimes one is faster than the other. Usage below:

@threader_app compile

and

@threadreaderapp unroll

Remind yourself

Ever saw someone make a stupid prediction and wanted to come back to see it? There's tons of reminder bots for this. @remindmetweets specifically also takes a screenshot of the the context tweet, so if the author deleted it, it will still be available as a screenshot! Super useful.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1146352743386234881-495'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1146352743386234881&theme=dark" }

Save videos and gifs

One of the most annoying things about Facebook and Twitter feud, is that there's barely any crossposting, and sharing that funny meme tweet that you found is really hard.
DownloaderBot to the rescue

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1060169685625380865-374'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1060169685625380865&theme=dark" }

More?

I swear I had more twitter bots when I decided to jot this down, so I will treat this as a continuously updating resource.
Feel free to comment with helpful utility twitter bots and I'll add them to this list.

So your company has sent you to work from home. Here's a productivity guide from a #remoteWorker

Alex Volkov — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 16:51:44 +0000

// This is a guide I put together as a remote employee for Fundbox, during this time where a bunch of devs are getting sent to WFH for prolonged periods of time, I thought it's best to share this wide

WFH productivity guide

Intro (TL;DR - why should you read this doc)
Can WFH be productive at all?
💼 Work/Life balance and separation🏡
- 👨‍🏫 Find your work place. If you have a spare room, make that your office. Do not work from the couch!
- 🌅 Getting up in the morning, and getting ready (AKA put some pants on)
- 👨‍👩‍👦 Family needs to know you're working 👨‍👧
- ☕️ Take breaks & stand up.
- 🤝 Be social
- 👤Stay off of Social Media
- 🤧 Being sick is allowed
📝 Context
- Getting context is key for success
- Sharing context
🤙Emojis 🙌
👥 Remote meetings and async communication
- 📆 Daily stand ups and YTB (Yesterday, Today, Blockers)
- 🗓 Scheduled meetings
- 👋 Impromptu meetings
- 🖖 Be responsive
📷 Zoom Zoom - Being super productive with Zoom
- ⏱Be on time to meetings
- 🧩Use the zoom slack integration - fastest way to join/start meetings
- 🐭Screen sharing and taking control
- 🔇Make sure to mute yourself if you're not talking
- 🌐 No zoom on VPN (if possible)
- 🌇 Virtual backgrounds
👖Slacking like a pro
- 💬 Threads
- 🧩 Slack Apps
- 👤 Personalize
- 👀 React-jis
- ⌨️ Shortcuts
- ⏲ Reminders
More resources

Intro (TL;DR - why should you read this doc)

Some of you may need to work from home from time to time. Given COVID-19
you may even need to work from home for multiple days in a row. Feel
free to refer to this doc for productivity tips and tricks for working
from home.

Can WFH be productive at all?

A lot of great companies you know have decided that remote/distributed
will work for them. Automatic (Wordpress), Invision, Netlify, Netlifx
and a bunch of other companies see remote as not only productive, but
part of their culture. It does require adjustments. Think of it as like
training muscle memory. You're used to the office environment, being
able to tap someone on the shoulder and ask your question. Being remote
might feel like this is going away, but as with all muscle memory,
practice makes perfect and according to the companies above, it can be
even really productive.

As a 100% remote employee for the past 8 months, including leading a
distributed team for 3 months, I have researched and collected some
remote work tips and tricks. They might not all be for everyone, but
hopefully some will help you to be more productive.

💼 Work/Life balance and separation 🏡

👨‍🏫 Find your work place. If you have a spare room, make that your office. Do not work from the couch!

This is one of the main things about being remote that people quickly
notice. You have to force yourself to separate work life and home life.
Otherwise it's easy to get worn down, as there always might be one more
slack to answer, one more bug to fix, and you're already home, so
there's no commute right?

🌅 Getting up in the morning, and getting ready (AKA put some pants on!)

Going through your regular work day morning regimen, get up with an
alarm clock, shower/wash your face, wear "outside" clothes, even putting
on shoes, are good ways of "preparing to go to work" even if you
then sit down at your kitchen table and work. It helps separate work
life and home life.\
Try to schedule your working day with clear star/stop hours and try to
commit to them.

👨‍👩‍👦 Family needs to know you're working 👨‍👧

Family, if they are home also, should know that you're working and
you need to set expectations as such. Having that chat with a family
member who's also home might be difficult, but in the long run it will
make it much more productive for you. Same goes with kids. If you are
able, try to set clear boundaries for work/family ahead of time. Maybe
postpone things till your next break, or put on headphones and explain
that you're busy while in headphones.

From the other hand, you can spend more time with your family during the
time you would have otherwise spend in traffic/commuting. Use that time
with them.

☕️ Take breaks & stand up.

Taking breaks is also very important, it's easy to be forced to a break
in the office (maybe too easy) but when you're connected to slack, make
sure you take breaks from time to time. Stretch your legs, go outside
for a little bit and see the sun. You might not notice this in a while,
but being in the office, you stand up more often than you do at home.
Those things will prevent potential burn out.

🤝 Be social

Don't forget that part. Join some slack channels for jokes, sharing
pictures of dogs/cats or create a meme channel. Some companies even
prompt you to have social zoom calls for 5-15 minutes that are not about
work. This is a big part that's missing when WFH and it's an important
part of being in the office so don't forget it.

👤Stay off of Social Media

Do this on your breaks, but make it harder on yourself to get sucked
into social media. Install different browsers for personal/work life and
log out from everything social on your work browser. (I suggest Brave
for personal browsing)\
Install extensions like Go F***ng
Work
which will limit your social media time and for you to go to work.

🤧 Being sick is allowed

Even though you are working from home, don't be ashamed of taking a sick
day if you're not feeling well. This will feel weird, but do the same thing
you would do when working from the office, take a sick day, wear your
PJs and let folks know (with a slack status or actively in YTB) that
you're sick!

📝 Context!

Getting context is key for success!

Knowing what's going on is especially hard if you're working remotely.
While meeting in the kitchen over coffee, you can overhear things, when
you're remote, you will see that this type of communication is really
hard. Some of this can/should be solved on the culture level, but
personally, don't be afraid to reach out and actively admit that you
don't have context. It won't reflect badly on you when you're actively
asking because you're not sure.

Sharing context

You will need to take on the responsibility of identifying water-cooler
context and pulling it down into written form. It's a muscle worth
exercising; you'll find that it's equally effective at identifying and
bridging silos of communication (i.e. private slack channels) as it is
connecting remote employees with office culture.

🤙Emojis 🙌

Written text isn't great for conveying intent the way face-to-face
conversations are. Facial expressions, tone, cadence, and body language
contribute to how we interpret the intent behind words. The same set of
words can be interpreted as condescending in one context and well
intentioned in another.

Emojis may not seem professional but they help convey the intent behind
our words. Putting a smiley face at the end of a slack message cues the
reader into how our words should be interpreted. Consistently giving
these cues can be the difference between being seen as a brilliant jerk
and a stunning colleague.

👥 Remote meetings and async communication

There will most likely be fewer meetings (a good thing!) if you're
working mostly remote, but there will still be some. Taking notes and
sharing them with the team is a great idea in such a case.

📆 Daily stand ups and YTB (Yesterday, Today, Blockers)

We've been slacking YTB in our team chat for a while, and while that was
good, adding a 5 minute meeting to go over those posted item really
helps with questions on each item. Put that stand up meeting on the
calendar, make sure you post YTBs in the slack channel before, and this
meeting will be a brief one. You'll also get to see your teams faces
every day, which connects you to the team.

🗓Scheduled meetings

Your scheduled meetings will proceed as usual most likely, be sure to
prepare 5 minutes before, check your setup, microphone, webcam and
internet connection so that the meeting will start on time.

👋 Impromptu meetings

Sometime slacking is not going to cover it and you need to talk to the
person. Don't be shy inviting them to a quick zoom! (see below for zoom
tips)

🖖 Be responsive!

When not in meeting, try to be very responsive during your work hours.
Even saying "hey, I'll get back to you in 15" is helpful than not
answering for a few hours.

📷 Zoom Zoom - Being super productive with Zoom

⏱Be on time to meetings!

Punctuality is especially important when you don't have to "walk" to the
meeting room!

Prepare for your zoom meetings in advance by checking your
microphone/webcam and internet connection are all in order. This will
make sure the meetings start on time and are as productive as possible

🧩Use the zoom slack integration - fastest way to join/start meetings

Type /zoom into slack and it will start a meeting with the channel /
person you're chatting with

🐭Screen sharing and taking control

Zoom allows for easy screen sharing. Make sure no sensitive info is on
the screen before you share.

Zoom also allows you to share a specific window of an app, or the whole
screen itself. Depending on your situation, choose one or another
accordingly.

Sometimes, especially when speaking to IT or doing a code review,
sharing control of your screen is really helpful! See how to
here

🔇Make sure to mute yourself if you're not talking

While zoom is pretty great, intermittent internet issues and bad
microphones might make it hard for folks to hear other folks. Mute
yourself when you're not talking please.

🌐 No zoom on VPN (if possible)

Try to get off VPN if you can before a meeting, this will speed up your
zoom connection and leave some bandwidth for other folks on VPN.

🌇 Virtual backgrounds

If you'd like to express yourself with a nice background, hide the mess
you have behind you or just generally surprise folks, Zoom allows you
set up a virtual background easily!

https://youtu.be/YL736HaaJCk

👖Slacking like a pro

💬 Threads

Use threads to remove clutter on public channels effectively. If a
conversion required the attention of everyone in the channel, have it in
the open. But if you are thinking "maybe I should take this private",
try to respond a thread. This will remove the noise from the channel,
but also will leave information accessible for the rest of the team.

In channels like #general and #random please use the thread feature to
reply to most message, as otherwise most of the company will receive an
unread notification about your witty comment

If the whole channel still needs to know your response, hit the little
"send to channel" checkbox in the thread, this way it will keep the
threads structure and present your message to the larger channel.

🧩 Slack Apps

Add Google calendar integration to slack, it will change your status, so
folks will see that you're in a meeting (see
how)

👤Personalize

Make sure you have a picture of your face on slack, folks need to know
who they are talking to. Having a picture of your cat, or a caricature
of your face might be funny but it will make it hard for newer folks to
connect with you and know who you are.

👀React-jis

Slack has react emojis, and it's really helpful to use them as a way to
convey "I've read this" or "I also think like this" , Slack has a full
breakdown of how to use their react emojis
here

⌨️Shortcuts

Slack is much more productive when you learn the basic shortcuts. Hit
cmd/ctrl + / in slack to see all of them.

The main one is cmd/ctrl+K which will open the search and give you a
fast way to navigate to a person DM, channel, search and everything in
slack!

⏲Reminders

Slack has a remind me later feature, use this to your advantage. Slack
messages tend to disappear, especially if you read them and then read
something else. If there's an action item, or you need to respond
someone after your meeting, create a reminder

Even more resources

I hope this was helpful, and if you need some more resources, checkout this collection by @notionHQ -> https://www.notion.so/Remote-work-wiki-1b21ef5501714fffa9f5c5c25677371f

Fixing Pycharm remote Interpreter with Vagrant and macOS Catalina

Alex Volkov — Tue, 07 Jan 2020 01:51:50 +0000

Fookin Apple

Mac os Catalia was released on October 2019 (last decade!) and it introduced a bunch of security fixes.

Full disk access was introduced as a permission that you need to allow tools to access folders in your /Users directory.

This broke a lot of things, just google "full disk access" and you see pages on top of pages of articles all explaining how to add something to the Full Disk Access.

Our issue

In our case, vagrant NFS mounts stopped working. And we can't run our Vagrant without those mounts.

We've added a temp. fix, and Vagrant 2.6 actually released a fix of their own, which adds the exported paths in the longer form, which doesn't need full disk access to work,
Old form : /Users/username/folder
Longer form: /System/Volumes/Data/Users/username/folder

So now that that's fixed, our vagrant is happy and boots fine and everything is ok.

(There's another fix, adding /sbin/nfsd to Full Disk Access permissions which kinda works as well)

PyCharm issues

We then had a different issue, where in devs who updated to Catalina, ran their pyCharm and set up a remote interpreter, suddenly couldn't run their debug configurations through pyCharm anymore.

It showed the following error:

ssh://vagrant@127.0.0.1:2222/folder/bin/python -u /Users/usernname/folder/utils/run_something.py
zsh:cd:1: no such file or directory: /Users/username/folder/utils
/folder/remove_venv/bin/python: can't open file 'Users/usernname/folder/utils/run_something.py': [Errno 2] No such file or directory

Basically PyCharm was complaining that it can't create a path mapping between a mac folder to a mounted vagrant NFS folder.

This is due to this magical thing that pyCharm does when you create a python remote interpreter (I assume the same is true for other languages and Jetbrain IDEs as well)
It reads your vagrant file, and tries to extract the paths you are about to mount inside your vagrant.

The problem though, is pyCharm doesn't know about this Catalina long form /Systems/Volume... path, and the fact that Vagrant kinda hacks it together, so the path mappings don't work

Solution

Until jetBrains learn to deal with this problem (track the issue here, vote on it, make some noise if you have this)
We are forces with this solution:

Add a path mapping in your debug configuration to the mounted NFS folder inside vagrant manually.

Make it a little bit better

If you are used to have a lot of debug configurations, let's say you create one for each unit test you have, you can edit the template for the debug configuration and add the path mapping there, it will then exist for all new configurations created from that template.

Just expand the template cogwheel and edit the template of the config