Dignity & Security. Voorzitter @cdenv Steenokkerzeel. Science / data / philosophy / geopolitics / strategic technology resilience / sustainability / ...
Perk, Belgium
Joined November 2011
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Article 92 of the EU AI Act describes the Power to Conduct Evaluations.
Perhaps I've missed it, but the EU should take softest step:
A structured dialogue with general-purpose AI providers to examine their evaluation frameworks.
Dat Anthropic een half jaar geleden Mythos tijdelijk v/d markt hield was volgens sommigen pure PR.
Nee. AI is ondertussen zeer krachtig én zou inzake cyberveiligheid een verdedigend voordeel moeten creëren.
Maar je kan dit PHP-incident ook als een aanvalsvoordeel interpreteren.
AI systems found a working server takeover exploit in PHP, one of the most critical cybersecurity issues in recent memory!
- The vulnerability was found using a mix of OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol and Google's Gemini 4 Argon, plus human expertise
- PHP is the programming language behind ~70% of websites, most notably Wordpress
- The bugs sit in PHP itself, so nearly every PHP site is exposed no matter how well its own code is written. Merely running PHP itself is the risk
- The vulnerability lets an attacker with no login either run code on a server or read its memory, which can hold passwords, session tokens, API keys, or other secrets
- The flaw is from from how PHP cleans up when a request crashes after running out of memory: corrupted state is left behind and the next request can pick it up. An attacker can force that memory crash with a crafted upload, so even a bare page on a vulnerable version can be taken over.
Christophe Ponsard retweeted
I have read dozens of outraged posts because the US special envoy Witkoff called Putin a "humanist." But no one is writing about the fact that the American negotiators are simply not doing their job. Let me explain.
Peace negotiations are important in their own right. Even if they do not lead to a lasting peace, the process itself is an opportunity to resolve urgent humanitarian issues. If, of course, the human dimension is a priority for the negotiators. But it is entirely obvious that neither Witkoff nor Kushner cares about people's fates in this war.
The Pope calls on Putin to save thousands of people from starvation in occupied Oleshky and the surrounding villages. The UN speaks about a humanitarian catastrophe and asks Russia to allow the evacuation of the civilian population. European Parliament Vice-President Pina Picierno goes on a hunger strike to draw attention to this tragedy unfolding before the eyes of the whole world.
And what are Witkoff and Kushner doing?
That's right, almost nothing.
Except for passing along greetings from Putin’s aide to the First Lady.
Thousands of people are already eating grass to survive and begging to save their lives. The Ukrainian side raises the issue of Oleshky at every meeting. And I can name dozens of such urgent humanitarian issues off the top of my head where American negotiators must be proactive.
Trump’s peace negotiations have already gone down in history as the deadliest years for Ukraine’s civilian population since the start of the full-scale invasion.
I don’t know if anyone will remember the names of Witkoff and Kushner.
But history will certainly record how American negotiators, who had the opportunity to save a huge number of people, refused to raise uncomfortable questions before "humanist Putin."
What can cause someone to call Putin a humanitarian?
US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for being a ‘humanitarian,’ after Moscow released Stephen Hubbard, a retired US school teacher held by Russia, as the two sides met reut.rs/4zFO7DC
Some disagreements are growing bigger in the US, for example on empathy and citizenship.
But there's a clear trend away from the Trump agenda.
Also worth looking at the numbers on religiosity, which correlates quite poorly with party affiliation.
prri.org/research/darkening-…
Christophe Ponsard retweeted
Big new IFP report from @GeorgiaCAdamson, @KonstantinPilz, and me on the US-China AI competition.
We spent the last 6 months digging into how Chinese AI companies’ access to compute and distillation of American models translate into the current US-China capabilities gap.
The result is a 23k-word research report, including an interactive analytical model that visualizes changes in the US AI lead under different policy interventions.
Our findings:
1. The US AI lead over China is currently only around 6 months.
2. The US could roughly double this lead, to over a year, using authorities already available to the federal government.
3. On chips: China’s access to AI chips will roughly double over the next year, with chips housed in data centers overseas accounting for roughly half of China’s 2027 compute.
4. On distillation: the current ~16x US training compute advantage would normally yield a 13-month lead. But we estimate adversarial distillation halves this to around 6.5 months.
5. Increasing the lead would have some obvious benefits:
- Give the US broadly a greater cyberdefensive advantage against Chinese threat actors.
- Give US AI companies breathing room to spend more R&D resources on making their systems safer and more secure, without fear of being overtaken by less safety-conscious Chinese competitors.
6. Provide the US government more leverage in negotiations with China about the future of AI.
7. The two most important interventions are:
- For BIS: Create a new end-use control to restrict China’s remote access to training clusters abroad — China’s largest and fastest-growing source of frontier-scale compute.
- For DOJ/FTC: Create a narrow safe harbor to allow US companies to coordinate on countering Chinese adversarial distillation.
8. Both interventions (and all the others we discuss in the report) are things the federal government could do today.
9. To estimate the effects of each policy intervention, we model the US lead as a function of its compute advantage over China and China’s ability to adversarially distill the capabilities of the US frontier.
10. The model makes many simplifying assumptions, but provides a useful way to assess and rank the impact of different policy interventions at a high level.
Read the full report here: ifp.org/how-to-increase-amer…
China presses another advantage in raw material supply chains.
With electrical grids already being a major bottleneck for AI build-out and decoupling from fossil fuels, this news only adds to existing supply difficulties.
Chinese export controls now extend beyond refined critical metals to specialized industrial equipment, including tunnel boring machines (TBMs).
TBMs are the most common way of building underground road and rail infrastructure... and they are also increasingly used in mining.
TBMs have been used in underground mine development at several copper, coal and platinum-group-metal operations in the US, Australia, and South America.
Over the past 20 years, Chinese-produced TBMs have grown from ZERO to 60-70% of the global market share, producing approximately 250-300 TBMs per year... approximately half of which are exported. So, we suspect that this news will cause a PANIC in the global TBM market.
We plan to use a TBM at our Santa Cruz copper project in Arizona to develop mine access from the surface. Fortunately for us, the US has its own TBM manufacturer, @Robbins_Co, and earlier this year we purchased a 9.3-metre diameter Robbins TBM for Santa Cruz.
So this news won't disrupt our development plans at @ivanhoeelectric... others may not be as fortunate.
reuters.com/world/asia-pacif…
De moeite om te luisteren naar naar wat Chaja Polak vanuit het initiatief Joden Zeggen Nee zegt in Buitenhof.
youtube.com/watch?v=J5zfBOJd…
Belgische consul getuigt over aanval door kolonisten op Westelijke Jordaanoever: "Burgemeester kreeg klappen en auto vernield"
vrtnws.be/p.XEVN4DVRb
Christophe Ponsard retweeted
It is a basic principle of American democracy that the government can’t selectively target individuals simply because of their political beliefs or what they say. But that’s exactly what the Trump Administration is doing to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
To understand why this is so appalling, it’s important to know the facts. Congresswoman Omar came to this country with her father when she was 12 years old. Five years later, her father became a naturalized citizen. If Ilhan had been 18 at the time, she would have had to apply for citizenship separately. But because she was 17, she became a naturalized citizen automatically.
Congresswoman Omar went on to graduate from college, work as a community organizer, become the first Somali-American legislator elected to public office in the U.S., and win a seat in Congress. There, she has been one of the Trump Administration’s fiercest critics, which has led the president to repeatedly single her out as someone who he believes does not belong in this country.
Now the Administration is actively trying to deport Congresswoman Omar, seemingly based solely on the unsubstantiated theory that she was actually 18 when her father was naturalized, and therefore is not a citizen. Federal agents have raided her home, confiscated personal records, and seized her phone — all to try and uncover a nonexistent smoking gun from 20 years ago that will somehow make their case.
Think about that. The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president. And it’s not the first time this has happened. Under President Trump, the Justice Department has repeatedly gone after those he considers his political enemies — from the Attorney General of New York, to the former head of the FBI, to members of the Federal Reserve.
In those cases, the prosecutions either stalled or were dismissed for having no basis in law, and the same is likely to happen in this case. But not before Congresswoman Omar’s life has been turned upside down, her legal bills have piled up, and she’s been forced to spend time fighting unsubstantiated charges instead of serving the people of Minnesota.
The fact that any president, or any administration, is willing to engage in such transparent efforts to intimidate someone should outrage all Americans, regardless of how they feel about Congresswoman Omar’s political views. Because if this becomes the new normal, there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her — or that future presidents, in either party, won’t do the same.
Vandaag lees ik dan weer dat Le Pen Franse steun voor de verdediging van Oekraïne zou stoppen.
Het internationale ensemble van extreemrechts creëert wereldwijd financiële problemen, en stelt tegelijk voor te besparen op de bescherming van democratie.
En plots gingen Oekraïense drones op zwart: 'onaangekondigde beperking' van Starlink verstoort militaire operaties in Oekraïne
vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2026/10/14/…
Ik zie ook 16 ondertekenaars uit België, waaronder @TijlDeBie.
Weer een signaal erbij voor de politiek m.b.t. AI-veiligheid.
406 researchers, including Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Stuart Russell and Ron Rivest, signed an open letter today.
They want cyber-capable AI models airgapped by default until safer ways to give them internet access are standardized.
For models that need outside access, they propose an international body, built with governments and AI and security experts, that would standardize containment practices and track failures, with breaches reported to it and eventually made public.
If the account profiles that reacted to my post about Russian political bots being affected by datacenters going offline are an indication, then the bots are probably affected.
Christophe Ponsard retweeted
2026 economic sciences laureate Michael Woodford’s economic model has made it possible to respond to supply shocks more effectively.
Various types of shocks can disrupt the balance between supply and demand. A negative supply shock could be a commodity shortage, while a positive supply shock could be a technological breakthrough that makes the production of large volumes cheaper and easier. A positive demand shock could be good news about the future that increases households’ consumption, and a negative one the opposite news. If the balance is disrupted, it can be reset using a stabilisation policy that reduces demand (to the left) or increases it (to the right).
#NobelPrize
A lot of this graph on my feed, talking about drops in activity for a number of political causes.
Important to see further verification come in, but this definitely aligns with my assumptions.
This explains part of the political views of the moment on AI.
Most people have not experienced what these systems can already do, so it's easier to dismiss warnings, and easier to find AI overvalued.
Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel.
- Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all.
- Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract.
- Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code.
- And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while.
The funnel is driven by a combination of factors:
1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel.
2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel.
3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal.
So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.
Hoe moeilijk moeten te budgettaire tijden worden voor een tax shift richting landwaarde politiek ernstig wordt genomen?
youtube.com/watch?v=suiU5b9t…
Christophe Ponsard retweeted
We’ve lost an icon. Margaret Hamilton, a computer science pioneer best known for her work at MIT leading development of the flight software for the Apollo missions to the moon, has died at 90. Read about her legacy via MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-h…
ALT Margaret Hamilton is reclined inside a NASA spacecraft module, surrounded by control panels and switches.
Christophe Ponsard retweeted
Morgan Stanley is the latest sell-side bank to raise its copper price forecasts, citing persistent long-term deficits and capex failing to translate into higher volumes. Its new long-term price (i.e. 2030 onwards) is now up 15% to $5.73/lb.
They warn that even at these new estimates, incentive prices may still not be high enough to support development of several brownfield and greenfield projects. They cite a whirlwind of escalating cost headwinds, such as a sulphur squeeze, diesel export bans, grade declines, royalty changes, a super El Niño and strategic stockpiling, all driving further cost pressures.
We think that, given all these factors, the copper price should be even higher… So which will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back?
@MgnStnlyIdeas
When it comes to bioweapons I have yet to find a single person who thinks AI will provide a defensive advantage.
It adds to the case for pacing frontier AI, because security systems need time to adapt.
