Ten months ago, we launched the Vesuvius Challenge to solve the ancient problem of the Herculaneum Papyri, a library of scrolls that were flash-fried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Today we are overjoyed to announce that our crazy project has succeeded. After 2000 years, we can finally read the scrolls: This image was produced by @Youssef_M_Nader, @LukeFarritor, and @JuliSchillij, who have now won the Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize of $700,000. Congratulations!! These fifteen columns come from the very end of the first scroll we have been able to read and contain new text from the ancient world that has never been seen before. The author – probably Epicurean philosopher Philodemus – writes here about music, food, and how to enjoy life's pleasures. In the closing section, he throws shade at unnamed ideological adversaries – perhaps the stoics? – who "have nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or in particular." This year, the Vesuvius Challenge continues. The text that we revealed so far represents just 5% of one scroll. In 2024, our goal is to from reading a few passages of text to entire scrolls, and we're announcing a new $100,000 grand prize for the first team that is able to read at least 90% of all four scrolls that we have scanned. The scrolls stored in Naples that remain to be read represent more than 16 megabytes of ancient text. But the villa where the scrolls were found was only partially excavated, and scholars tell us that there may be thousands more scrolls underground. Our hope is that the success of the Vesuvius Challenge catalyzes the excavation of the villa, that the main library is discovered, and that whatever we find there rewrites history and inspires all of us. It's been a great joy to work on this strange and amazing project. Thanks to Brent Seales for laying the foundation for this work over so many years, thanks to the friends and Twitter users whose donations powered our effort, and thanks to the many contestants whose contributions have made the Vesuvius Challenge successful! Read more in our announcement: scrollprize.org/grandprize

The deepseek team is obviously really good. China is full of talented engineers. Every other take is cope. Sorry.

We moved out of San Francisco to Menlo Park a year ago after two meth addicts broke into our house while we were home and robbed us. They are both free now. The police who arrested them -- and were later forced to release them by the DA -- said these criminals were "frequent flyers." We didn't want to leave SF -- we love it there -- but we have a young kid and it seemed irresponsible to stay in a place where drug addicts commit home invasions to the point where they are called "frequent flyers."

We did it! We tested 300 Bay Area foods for plastic chemicals. We found some interesting surprises. Top 5 findings in our test results: 1. Our tests found plastic chemicals in 86% of all foods, with phthalates in 73% of the tested products and bisphenols in 22%. It's everywhere. 2. We detected phthalates in most baby foods and prenatal vitamins. 3. Hot foods which spend 45 minutes in takeout containers have 34% higher levels of plastic chemicals than the same dishes tested directly from the restaurant. 4. The 1950s Army rations we tested contained surprisingly high levels of plastic chemicals. 5. Almost every single one of the foods we tested are within both US FDA and EU EFSA regulations. Check out our full results below.

Today we are announcing a major breakthrough in the Vesuvius Challenge: we have read the first word from an unopened Herculaneum scroll. The word is "πορφυρας" which means "purple dye" or "cloths of purple." scrollprize.org/firstletters Congratulations to 21yo computer science student @LukeFarritor who is the first person to see this handwriting in nearly 2000 years. He has won the $40,000 First Letters prize for this world-historical achievement. We are also awarding a $10,000 First Ink prize to @CJHandmer who was the first person to see ink and multiple letters within an unopened scroll. His work was the basis of Luke's ML model. And @Youssef_M_Nader has won a $10,000 second-place First Letters prize for producing the clearest and most comprehensive images from inside a scroll yet. This has been the dream of many people since the scrolls were first discovered in the 1750s. It is also the result of 20 years of work from Dr. Brent Seales and his team at EduceLab, whose years of dedicated work have made this last mile possible. The $700,000 Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize is now in sight. Who will claim it?

Today we're making GitHub free for teams of unlimited size, for private and public work. 🎉 Every developer on earth should have access to GitHub, and price shouldn't be a barrier. github.blog/2020-04-14-githu…

Many tech companies are 2-10x overstaffed and everyone who's paying attention already knows this

Today(!) we’re thrilled to announce unlimited free private repos for all GitHub users, and a new simplified Enterprise offering: blog.github.com/2019-01-07-n…

TIL: in the 1990s Clinton offered federal workers a $25,000 buyout, and ~150,000 took the deal. He cut federal government spending from 22% to 18% of the economy, the lowest level since 1966.

Federal spending in 2024 was ~$7T. In 2019 it was ~$4.5T. 🤔

That @satyanadella had the vision and conviction to put $1B into OpenAI a year before GPT-3 is amazing and underappreciated. openai.com/blog/microsoft/

Cookie banners are annoying, so we removed them from GitHub: github.blog/2020-12-17-no-co…

Luke Farritor is a national treasure.

We found the title of a scroll for the first time! This cylinder of charcoal turns out to be "On Vices, Book 1" by Philodemus

Megabytes of ancient text are coming

We’ve just added built-in citation support to GitHub so researchers and scientists can more easily receive acknowledgments for their contributions to software. Just push a CITATION.cff file and we’ll add a handy widget to the repo sidebar for you. Enjoy! 🎉

Started work at Meta this week. My job is to make amazing AI products that billions of people love to use. It won't happen overnight, but a few days in, I'm feeling confident that great things are ahead.

After more than two years of work, we have secured a license from the U.S. government to offer GitHub to developers in Iran. This includes all services for individuals and organizations, private and public, free and paid. github.blog/2021-01-05-advan…

At GitHub every employee gets a prepaid debit card that you can use for books, courses, training, conferences – anything that might help you do your job better or advance your career.

We are taking a stand for developers and have reinstated the youtube-dl repo. Section 1201 of the DMCA is broken and needs to be fixed. Developers should have the freedom to tinker. That's how you get great tools like youtube-dl. github.blog/2020-11-16-stand…

Watching llama.cpp do 40 tok/s inference of the 7B model on my M2 Max, with 0% CPU usage, and using all 38 GPU cores. Congratulations @ggerganov ! This is a triumph. github.com/ggerganov/llama.c…

Yes. The voters are getting exactly what they are voting for.

✨Shipping today on GitHub: multi-line suggestions! 🥳

Thanks to a major contribution of $2,084,000 from the Musk Foundation, stage 2 of the vesuvius challenge is now fully funded. Thank you to @elonmusk and his team for this support! We will do everything in our power to efficiently solve the remaining technical problems. The other generous donations we've received will be used to accelerate our work on scanning at scale. We should eventually be able to convert at a rate of approximately one dollar : one word of recovered ancient text.

BIG news! After an amazing three years at GitHub, I'm ready for my next adventure. Later this month, I'm passing the role of CEO to the very capable @ashtom: github.blog/2021-11-03-thank…

The book that inspired SimCity!

Very nice article about the project from @ashleevance: bloomberg.com/features/2024-…

I'm hiring full time engineers and geometry processing and computer vision researchers to help us read hundreds of ancient scrolls buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius 2000 years ago. We are scanning 100 scrolls this year (20x more than have been scanned in the last 25 years) and are closer than ever to automating the full unwrapping and ink detection pipeline. Please apply by emailing jobs@scrollprize.org

The White House should require that federal vendors put the United States at the top of all country selector dropdowns.

We just added a "Copy" button to all code blocks on GitHub. 🍝

Ugh we're still working on the scrolls

Oh, almost forgot to mention. New pro tip: Hit '.' on any GitHub repo. 😍

Instead of leaf blowers, I want a quiet little robot that picks leaves up one at a time and puts them in a bag, at night while I'm sleeping.

Consistently awed by the beauty of nuclear power plants, and by what they represent. The ability to create clean energy from matter, in a tiny geographical footprint, night and day, has to be one of the highest human achievements. I hope we start building them again!

Advice for Food Companies Since we launched PlasticList, we’ve been heartened to have quite a few food companies reach out and ask for help interpreting their results and tracking down and eliminating their contamination. I’ve had calls with a bunch of these. I am happy to report that no food company wants this stuff in their food and they are all eager to figure out what’s going on and how to remove it. After a while I noticed the advice we were giving was pretty similar for every company, so I thought it would be useful to write it down and share publicly. So, here are some notes: 1. To track down the source of your contamination, don’t just test a few samples of your product with varied production processes. Instead, test every single one of your inputs: every ingredient and input in the form you receive it before any processing steps, including water and any other consumables. 2. Then, test the food before and after every step in your production process. If you boil something in tap water, test before and after boiling. If you chop something on a plastic cutting board (because wood cutting boards are outlawed in commercial kitchens, apparently), test before and after chopping. 3. You may have to go deep into your supply chain to figure out the source of your contamination. One food company founder we spoke to said that some of the fruit they include in their product is picked, put into plastic bags, and then steamed in the bags before the bags are cut open and the fruit is transferred into another plastic bag, while still warm, for shipping. Whoops. 4. Run at least three samples of every test due to sample-to-sample variation. You can see in our report and in our data that sample-to-sample and lot-to-lot variation should be expected: plasticlist.org/report 5. You should also test any intermediate or final packaging that your product ships in, as leaching can also occur post-production. 6. There are a lot of steps that you need to carefully follow to prevent contaminating your samples during collection and transportation. It’s really easy to miss one of these and mess up your data. We describe many of these on our methodology page: plasticlist.org/methodology 7. You should consider running longitudinal tests, maybe quarterly, as we have heard that there can be seasonal variation in contamination from suppliers, due to things like summer heat, suppliers switching their processes, and suppliers switching their own backend suppliers for their inputs. 8. And most importantly: PICK A GOOD LAB. Unfortunately not all labs are good, and we think many ISO-certified commercial labs will not give reliable results. We rejected many certified labs because we weren’t confident in their work; all-in-all, we spent about 10 weeks finding a lab that we trust for our tests. You can see our lab’s internal methodology here: docs.google.com/document/d/1… Our lab has recently permitted us to identify them publicly, and they are IEH: iehinc.com/ We also worked with Light Labs to produce this study and they can be a big help: lightlabs.com And Million Marker is able to work with food companies to debug their supply chains as well: millionmarker.com/ 9. You should consider hiring an analytical chemist as a consultant to validate that the testing methodology is accurate and to double-check the lab’s results. We hired John Brock to do this and it was well worth it; we would not have been confident in our choice of lab or our results without John. 10. We couldn’t find a lot of evidence that the phthalate substitutes are bad; if you have high-percentile detections in phthalates or bisphenols, though, it’s probably worth figuring out how those chemicals are getting into your products.

New Beijing airport under construction looks amazing.

Horrible, depressing chart of phthalate content in common foods. consumerreports.org/health/f…

Interesting theory as to how the plastic gets into beef

Daniel and I have setup a cluster for startups: andromedacluster.com

SF is dominated by wrong ideas about how the world works.

We spent the last year working closely with OpenAI to build GitHub Copilot. We've been using it internally for months, and can't wait for you to try it out; it's like a piece of the future teleported back to 2021.

New GitHub home page, nbd: github.com/home

These models that have been trained never to offend the most shrill parts of society are going to be like living with an HR person monitoring your every move. The iron prison, in every corner of your life. Hell on earth.

Overheard in silicon valley: "I want to join a company where the culture is yelling and getting shit done."

GitHub processes 2.8 billion API requests per day, peaking at 55k rps. Lots of busy bots. 🤖

You can now – finally! – drop images and videos onto the Markdown file editor on GitHub. 🥳

Five months later

We're considering opening applications for desk space in the GitHub HQ in SF to open source contributors who want a place to work. You'd need to sign an NDA, and we might occasionally ask for your feedback on things we're building. What do people think?

Introducing the GitHub command palette. Hit Cmd-k on Mac or Ctrl-k on Linux and Windows anywhere in the @github web interface. Enjoy😊

RIP Jim Simons

False

👇 Kathy is experimenting with adding a README.md to GitHub profiles. Thoughts?

Megabytes of ancient text are coming

A conversational UI for image editing is coming: timothybrooks.com/instruct-p…

Damn straight.

Best hack I learned this week is creating a claude project for all your blood tests / health results, so you can get relevant health advice.

Today we're launching a new GitHub team in India – the world's largest democracy. Indian developers, please let us know what we can do to better serve you! github.blog/2020-02-12-annou…

Major missed opportunity, not putting a particle accelerator under the apple park building

Full results and write-up: plasticlist.org We also have instructions for running your own tests!

I'm going to re-run all these tests on food we eat in California. Also going to test for other plastic chemicals. Let me know what foods we should test and suggestions for methodology.

We live in a time of miracles.

We're using a particle accelerator and AI to read a lost library from a dead empire. People have been trying to read the Herculaneum Papyri for 275 years. With your help, we'll do it in 2023. Thrilled to announce the Vesuvius Challenge: scrollprize.org

🔥Multi-line comments are here! Click and drag to comment on multiple lines in a pull request diff. ✨ These little quality-of-life improvements are at the heart of what we love doing at GitHub. 🥰

Recently learned that the Starlink facility in Bastrop, TX is on track to be the largest PCB factory in the country.

GitHub Stories 🤔

Need volunteers to come to my office in Palo Alto today to construct a 5000 piece Lego set. Will provide pizza. Have to sign NDA. Please DM

Exciting PlasticList update: We were honored to work with @bobaguys to identify and eliminate the sources of BPA contamination, and their teas are now BPA-free! They have fully transitioned to BPA-free receipt paper, which PlasticList confirmed to be BPA-free through independent lab testing. They have also switched to brown sugar in BPA-free packaging. We have been impressed with their commitment to get to the bottom of the issue and move fast to remove BPA from their supply chain. If you want healthy and delicious tea, I highly recommend Boba Guys!

GitHub now automatically creates a table of contents for your README.md files from your headers. 📖 After much consideration, we made this a feature of the viewer, not a concern of the editor: no special markdown to insert. 💡 Let us know what you think!

👀

We just shipped markdown list autocompletion in GitHub: github.blog/changelog/2020-1…

The Google I grew up with would have already implemented YouTube-wide in-video search.

🔥 Incredible! Thank you Elon!!

Excited to announce that @npmjs will be joining GitHub, and honored to have the chance to serve the millions of JavaScript developers who rely on npm! github.blog/2020-03-16-npm-i…

Who is the genius behind the sphere? It seems to have been designed by a team headquartered in Kansas City (Populous) and financed by a private equity firm (Apollo). Is there a good history of this project somewhere?

Today we're introducing Draft pull requests – tag your work-in-progress PRs as Draft to signal to your teammates that you're not ready to merge them yet. github.blog/2019-02-14-intro…

We found some words in Scroll 5, which is from the Bodleian Library collection of Herculaneum papyri. Still work to do to prevent our segmentation algorithm from jumping between adjacent sheets so we can get whole sentences and paragraphs out of this scroll, but this is very promising! Words found include ἀδιάληπτος (‘foolish’), διατροπή (‘disgust’), φοβ (‘fear’), and βίου (‘life’).

Magic.dev has trained a groundbreaking model with many millions of tokens of context that performed far better in our evals than anything we've tried before. They're using it to build an advanced AI programmer that can reason over your entire codebase and the transitive closure of your dependency tree. If this sounds like magic... well, you get it. Daniel and I were so impressed, we are investing $100M in the company today. The team is intensely smart and hard-working. Building an AI programmer is both self-evidently valuable and intrinsically self-improving. If this sounds interesting to you, consider joining them!

Looking for an intern to spend a month or two testing a theory about the Shroud of Turin. Ideally you can start in the next few weeks, and can work full-time. Pay is $2k/week, required in-person in SF.

The best startup advice used to be "ignore competitors; just make something people want." These days it seems like everyone is obsessed with moats and market structures and the behavior of incumbents. Seems like we've gone too far. Just make something people want.

Please share the most impressive o1 outputs you've generated

Shipping another small improvement to GitHub: you can now select and copy/paste one side of the split diff instead of selecting both sides. Our analysis indicates that this is a 1.7% overall life improvement for GitHub users. 🎉

🌟 So excited to announce that GitHub now includes built-in CI/CD!

Honored that @NASA is using GitHub, Actions, and CodeQL for the Mars drone flight software: github.com/nasa/fprime If anyone working on this needs GitHub support, please feel free to DM me directly!

But there's more: a few days ago, @Youssef_M_Nader, working with new segmentations from the Vesuvius Challenge segmentation team, was able to generate this image of stunning clarity and size: This is the revolution in digital papyrology that Dr. Seales has created. Nothing like this has ever happened before and papyrology will never be the same. The last couple of months have been intensely electric for those of us working on the Vesuvius Challenge, and if progress continues, the coming months promise a deluge of new ancient text.

I really like my Tesla Model X.

Preparing to transport scrolls to the scanner

A high-density, walkable European city like Paris, Berlin, or Barcelona is an entirely different phenomenological thing from an American “city” like San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Atlanta. We should use a different word for the places we build in the US. They’re not cities.

Congratulations to NASA for the first controlled, powered flight of an aircraft on another world! And to the thousands of open source developers who helped make this happen: we put a beautiful new badge on your GitHub profile. 🌟 github.blog/2021-04-19-open-…

Tried the latest Tesla FSD today in rush hour traffic and I am very impressed. It handled congested high-speed merges better than I would have handled them. No mistakes the whole drive home, very smooth, and less overcautious-feeling than before.

For everyone else, enjoy the usual onslaught of obstruction and red tape.

Starting later today, GitHub is donating up to 60,000 core-hours per day of idle GitHub Actions compute capacity to Folding@Home's efforts to find drug treatments for 2019-nCOV. foldingathome.org/2020/02/27…

Anyone have a mexico government connection? A project I’m supporting to LIDAR the jungle there just got rejected by some bureaucrat. Please DM if you can help. Thanks!

Customer development pro tip – announce a mysterious product launch and ask your users to guess what you're launching. Then furiously build what they're asking for before the event.

We're planning to scan 100 ancient Roman scrolls this year and we urgently need to hire a contractor to help us design the cases that hold the scrolls while they are in the particle accelerator. Job is immediately available and work needs to be completed in the next 4 weeks. If you can do this, please email a specific technical plan of how you would go about it to team@scrollprize.org. Pay is good! Thank you!!

This is going to be an insane year for AIs writing code

The amazing team at GitHub built a new code search engine in rust that can operate at GitHub scale. Very excited to see this ship!

Couldn't have done it without you, JP! Awesome work!!!