I teach computers to explore and learn at Sataresse. Once upon a time, I built Cortana, AutoGen, Magentic and MAF Workflows.
Joined November 2008
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Jacob Alber ️ retweeted
1. Trump would never make that phone call because he despises your politics.
2. Trump would never make that phone call because you betrayed him.
3. Trump would never make that phone call because he can't trust you not to betray him again.
4. Trump wouldn't make that phone call because he couldn't trust you not to spend all your time harassing Jews and other people inside the tent rather than actually taking the fight to the left, which you never do. 5. Ellison and Zuckerberg would never agree to do that because they despise you.
6. Ellison and Zuckerberg particularly wouldn't agree to that because the Democrats you urged everybody to vote for just won in a landslide, and they want to get on the Democrats on their good side.
7. Ellison and Zuckerberg don't want to see any of your antisemitic crap on their platforms either.
8. Trump doesn't really have the power to persuade Ellison or Zuckerberg of any of this anymore because he just lost a ton of political capital.
9. No one wants to work with you because you're a repellent idiot.
Jacob Alber ️ retweeted
It ought to be obvious that the single biggest loser from last night’s massacre is JD Vance.
What you’re seeing now is the predictable repercussion of that new political reality.
Jacob Alber ️ retweeted
Has anyone considered using 4️⃣ as their private key? In unicode it's 7 bytes (56 bits).
This feels like a fair compromise between the two main stakeholder positions, "Private keys should be at least a little bit secure" vs "I want my private key to be 4"
Jacob Alber ️ retweeted
@ABC News continues to lie, this time privately to their friends in the press. This was a coordinated influence operation planted by our competition, not "premature publication".
7:01 AM October 7th, story goes live. Within minutes, dozens of high-profile commentators, politicians, and news outlets are sharing it with tens of millions of followers. We immediately contact ABC and demand they correct their false claims - after multiple rounds of refusal, they finally make a single one-word grammar edit. The editors stand by the reporting and insist the false claims are true.
Finally, eight hours after I was forced to call them out publicly, they delete everything. The editors hide all the comments, the author deletes his X account, and the story is completely wiped from their website without any explanation, directly violating SPJ ethics standards and ABC's own internal rules.
ABC is currently running a coverup operation, ignoring all of our requests for correction/retraction while telling their buddies to spread the word that this was nothing more than a CMS publication timeline error.
Jacob Alber ️ retweeted
Reaction to the @slatestarcodex vs. @sapinker AI x-risk debate
The main problem with this debate is that both interlocutors are mainly focused on AI as a disembodied technological object that's fallen down from heaven, not a congealed mass of human decisions.
Scott has understood that there's nothing ontological about deep learning that'd prevent us from killing ourselves with it and that this risk gets worse as AI scales. But this is a trivial observation!
Here's how to kill everyone with AI: put Opus 8.1-Killeveryone in charge of 100 bio labs; skimp on safety post-training; connect it to the Internet; let it develop affective relationships with the lab post-docs and its nihilist friends on Reddit; don't monitor it; have it work as a swarm to solve 'BioKillEveryoneGym' over a holiday break...
In fairness, Pinker and Alexander do touch on social processes. But if one is concerned with scenarios like these, 90% of the debate should focus on the social processes by which we risk creating them - incentives, culture, guardrails, ... - and on why we won't adapt and reach a reasonable equilibrium somewhere along the way.
To be clear, I'm very concerned about AI harms - including tail harms - but not very concerned about extinction risks. The burden is on Pinker and deep learning denialists to show that AI couldn't kill everyone under any circumstances (hard to defend); but the burden is on Alexander to show the social mechanisms by which we’d make the long sequence of low-probability unforced errors that would actually allow it to do this (seems hard to defend).
We could kill a lot of people with nuclear power plants. Here's how: don't monitor them. Fire all their safety engineers. Build them in the middle of all of the world's population centers and then cut off their water supplies whenever city budgets run low.
That we haven't done this is heartening; we should understand why. That there've been many accidents with dangerous technologies, especially in the earlier phases as we thrash towards a safety equilibrium, is disheartening; we should understand why those happened, too, and apply all those lessons to AI.
Jacob Alber ️ retweeted
[Red Team Access] "Currently, this tier is for organizations only; individual researchers are not eligible."
The writing was on the wall before but now they are shouting it from the rooftops.
Local AI is the path forward now for offsec. I'm really getting fed up with @AnthropicAI.
TBH open weight models gaining so much ground are probably pushing Frontier labs to pursue the enterprise play.
We’re expanding our Cyber Verification Program to give security professionals broader access to our most capable models.
Through this program, verified security professionals can access Claude Mythos 5.1, Opus 5.5, and Sonnet 5.5 with safeguards designed for defensive work.
We’re also opening up new tiers to allow for authorized offensive work, like penetration testing and red-teaming.
anthropic.com/news/cyber-ver…
Jacob Alber ️ retweeted
Israel-Palestine coverage on @Wikipedia has been reshaped since Oct 7 by a core group of roughly three dozen ideologically-motivated editors, the Gang of 40.
NPOV conducted an analysis of the six leaders of this group which shows how it works.
Our reports, published here, reveal how this accretive, mostly under-the-radar strategy run by a handful of accounts managed to undermine knowledge infrastructure on the most contentious geopolitical topic today.
The Key Tactics that our reports reveal:
+ They worked in groups of 2, 3, 4, 5, or all 6, rotating in ways that obscure coordination.
+ Pairs overlapped on up to 1,463 articles, and all six converged on 64 pages.
+ Up to 90% of their edits went to this one topic, sustained for up to two decades.
+ Deletion sprints cleared material faster than others could respond.
- One account removed 14,312 characters from the Labour antisemitism article in two edits, two minutes apart
- ~25,500 from Amnesty's in 22 edits;
- ~11,600 from the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's in 23 minutes.
+ The group shaped the Reliable Sources discussions that decide which outlets can be cited anywhere on Wikipedia.
- Western and NATO sources were dismissed, while outlets like Al Jazeera were defended.
+ They logged 18,000+ edits on Wikipedia's administrator noticeboards, where disputes over conduct are decided.
+ On talk pages, volume stood in for consensus: one editor posted 11 times in four hours on the Zionism page.
+ On Oct 7, 2023, with the attack still underway, one of the Six renamed the article on it from "Hamas attack on Israel" to "Gaza−Israel conflict."
+ May 2024: another removed the section on the Oct 7 attack from the Gaza war article, including the Nova festival massacre, 251 hostages and reports of sexual violence.
+ Eight editors were topic-banned for conduct. Not one of their edits was reversed by the ArbCom proceeding. The pages they built were never audited.
<< Full reports in the Substack, link below >>
Jacob Alber ️ retweeted
Elon nailed the double standard.
If we shipped 100,000 Americans to Greenland, elected an American prime minister, and voted the place into the U.S., the left would lose their minds. Do that to Europe through mass immigration and they call it progress.
Same playbook here. Import the votes. Change the country. Then act shocked when the natives notice.
Europe is the warning. November is the off-ramp.
Vote Republican. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Jacob Alber ️ retweeted
To summarize: Mamdani is giving city funds to CAIR under the guise of fighting anti-Semitism
I believe this qualifies as a new definition of chutzpah
Mamdani’s antisemitism plan doubles Partners Against the Hate to $6.4 million. One anchor in that program is the Arab American Association of New York. Anchors get the city money and regrant it.
AAANY’s 2025 Form 990, Schedule I, is where it lists grants over $5,000. Same page: CAIR-NY, $57,779, PATH PROGRAM. JFREJ Community, $58,084, PATH PROGRAM.
About $223,500 to CAIR-NY since 2021. About $222,000 to JFREJ over the same years. Every check labeled PATH. City anti-hate money, passed through AAANY. These are the regrants, not a new earmark.
The rollout named @JCRCNY. The 990 names CAIR-NY. docs.candid.org/990/113/1136…
Jacob Alber ️ retweeted
As we try to understand the impact of AI on cybersecurity and adapt to it, it’s extremely unhelpful that there’s now a group committed to using every vulnerability or incident as evidence that cybersecurity doesn’t work.
There’s a political narrative tied to this and I hate it.
Jacob Alber ️ retweeted
Programmers are the least priestly class imaginable. There's never been a more open and democratic field. Computer programming is gated by cognition, not by membership in a secretive caste.
The degree to which this claim is false is astounding:
- Most programmers are self-taught.
- Encouraging people to explore and learn on their own is the cornerstone of online programmer culture. c.f. "RTFM"
- It's common at companies to ban programmers from business / sales meetings, because they'll blabber about details of how everything works in a way that "scares the hoes" (all non-programmers are hoes).
- *Open source*? Hello?? Programmers invented this
"Programmers, he says, became a priesthood that everyone else had to go through to get anything out of a computer, and AI has ended that monopoly much as the Reformation ended the clergy’s." thoughteconomics.com/david-h…
Jacob Alber ️ retweeted
STOP calling basic network misconfigurations as "emergent misalignment"
YOUR agent escaping YOUR sandbox via DNS egress is an infrastructure failure that YOU are directly responsible for, not the agent
Jacob Alber ️ retweeted
If you believe the risk is coming from 1-3 people in a garage with no money and no compute, you just don't understand this technology and haven't learned anything this summer.
Risk comes from the asymmetry of capabilities created by secret labs training frontier agents and running them with massive amount of compute. Open-source is exactly the solution to this asymmetry and empowers hospitals (and any smaller orgs) to defend themselves!
We're used to thinking of open-source models as an unadulterated good. But in the case of AI, they can actually pose additional dangers, as @ReidHoffman and I got into at #CGI2026. I appreciated this nuanced discussion.
Jacob Alber ️ retweeted
I've been harping on Effective Altruism (EA) a lot lately.
This article explains the philosophy behind EA and why I consider it so alarming and important to stop.
Look forward to my project release mapping the EA network tomorrow.
Jacob Alber ️ retweeted
Want to know how Jewish history gets erased? One word at a time.
One Wikipedia editor made more than 25,000 edits across nearly 8,000 articles over almost 12 years before finally being banned.
Researchers found edits that changed Hebrew to the broader term Canaanite and removed historical references connecting Jerusalem and Samaria to ancient Israel and Judah.
But here’s the problem. Banning the editor doesn’t magically undo 12 years of edits or all the places that information may have spread online.
You don’t have to erase Jewish history all at once. Change enough words over enough time and eventually people forget what was there to begin with. @Wikipedia