A Teller of Tales. Husband, father, teacher, tech startup developer. Former Presidential candidate.
Pittsburgh, PA
Joined April 2019
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Sam Robb retweeted
The only way out is through.
They're calling it the Bugpocalypse. LLMs are being used to find long-hidden cracks in the software infrastructure, and it's happening at a furious rate. 3% of all compromises in computing history happened in the last week, claims one source? I believe it.
There are people saying public access to the frontier models ought to be locked out, or heavily guardrailed, over this. The problem with that idea can be summed up in one sentence: when lockpicks are outlawed, only outlaws will have lockpicks.
The lockpicks will be Chinese open-weight models, if nothing else. There's no way to stop those from becoming ubiquitous.
There are two futures in front of us. One in which only the bad guys have lockpicks, and security holes go undiscovered until they're exploited. Another in which everybody has lockpicks and is aggressively red-teaming their own software so it gets fixed before the holes are exploited.
The corpus of human code is huge but finite. The number of defects in it has to be finite too. We can fix those defects now; we have a million friendly robots to do it with.
The only way out is through.
Sam Robb retweeted
Unironically @knighton_bill just came in to find me napping/sleeping in and informed me it’s 10 o’clock. 💕💀💕
Sam Robb retweeted
Raconteur Press: Building More Than a Catalog of Books
Raconteur Press is doing things differently. They create opportunities for writers, help them develop their craft...
That's a cultural contribution worth supporting.
rightbacker.com/articles/rac…
Sam Robb retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
Sam Robb retweeted
Also, for the record, if you're not reading 2 time Prometheus Award Winner Dave Freer @davefreersf , you're only missing out on someone whose work matches Terry Pratchett's for quality and enjoyment.
GO READ HIM.
Sam Robb retweeted
In this session, editor D. Jason Fleming joins the program to discuss how he landed on the role with a stop at film school, and tells us about the 3 Prometheus Award nominations @raconteur_press authors and titles achieved with his work
Apple Podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Sam Robb retweeted
Back in the 90s, newspaper cartoon strips were getting tinier and worse. Scott Adams changed comedy forever.
His work resonated with every tech employee. He was so barbed that management tried to ban his comics. I once posted a Scott Adams comic on my office door about how Dilbert's boss made him take down a comic that made fun of that boss. My own clueless boss asked me to remove my comic - he used almost exactly the same words used in the comic.
His legacy will live on. Below is a particular favorite.
Sam Robb retweeted
Anyone who says taxes are better than charity is someone who has government as his religion.
Hi @elonmusk , we’ve conducted the most comprehensive study to date on tax unfairness in the United States.
We found that you, like your fellow billionaires, pay a lower effective tax rate than the average American.
So if you really want to help the American people, I have a better suggestion than charity: pay more taxes. 🧵
Sam Robb retweeted
David Gresham passed away over ten years ago and Douglas Gresham was diagnosed with dementia two years ago.
No one from his family is directly referenced in the article beyond them. Just vague nonsense. Netflix gave Collider the quote.
Netflix trotting around the dead and the dying as a cheap marketing ploy is all a person needs to know.
C.S. Lewis’ family has issued an official statement supporting Greta Gerwig’s Narnia and praising her lifelong passion for the books. bit.ly/4Buu39d
ALT C.S. Lewis’ Family Officially Addresses Greta Gerwig’s ‘Narnia’ Movie
Sam Robb retweeted
Hear me out,
So not only a platform where authors get 100% of the sale. But I create a virtual library where you can read people's books in VR. They get included in a grand library as soon as they are published they appear magically on the shelf along with other books.
You can read books in a group and chat about them in real time. And private spaces, in your own personal 3D library with custom environments.
Because I'm implementing this right now tbh
Looking like indie writers could do with a AethrMusik of books. Imagine an algorithm that pushed out your books and gave people a fair shot. A platform that lets you have all your earnings and only takes the cut for fees.
It's a shame most writers are so against AI when we could actually fix the issue.
Sam Robb retweeted
🚨🚨Carbines & Cantrips Discord is live.
We chat about books with guns, blades, heroes, monsters, and magic. Mostly Fantasy and sci-fi and all of their kick ass subgenres.
So if that’s what you’re reading, get in here: discord.gg/cJr7GKUgA
Sam Robb retweeted
Part of me, a very large part, is thinking this isn't real. It's not just the engineering. It's the demand. There's so little demand for it, it's insane to even build it as a proof of concept. For this design to be useful, you'd need to have existing demand for a non-combustion vehicle in an environment with radically different standard road infrastructure.
Even then, the thrusters provide such a mass-to-power inefficiency curve that it makes almost no sense in a one-gee environment and Earth-normal atmospheric drag.
🤔
😲
🤯
😉
Sam Robb retweeted
(Long tweet warning)
I have a very distinct loathing for people who try to purchase virtue with other people's money.
What do I mean by this? I mean when people hurl invectives, such as coward, at another person because that other person is not placing his job on the line like the people calling him a coward think he should.
There is nothing brave or profound or noble about saying someone else should put his job on the line. Not one single thing.
So and so is a coward because he does not proselytize at work! Well, he has been told to stop interrupting coworkers to preach at them and if he does it again he'll be fired. Now he is being a coward and not living for Christ! So. Are you going to pay his salary when he gets fired? No? Then what are you trying to do here, specifically?
Everyone who got the COVID vaccine to keep their jobs are cowards who refuse to stand up for themselves! Okay, Mr. I Am Self Employed As A Talking Head, are you going to hire them? No? Are you going to pay their salaries when they get fired? No? So what, and please do be specific, are you trying to do here? Because you are making money calling those people cowards.
All the men who do not stand up for their daughters are cowards and should be ashamed and they aren't actually men! Again, ARE YOU GOING TO PAY THEIR BILLS? When, and it is when, one of those men gets fired for being a transphobe, how much money, to the exact penny, are each and every one of you calling those men cowards going to be contributing to pay that man's bills. Answer the question. Answer it to the penny.
I have nothing but utter contempt, because the actions are contemptible, for those who are attempting to buy some kind of virtue for themselves by putting someone's else's money on the line.
Omg, he's such a coward for not doing what I want! What fiscal consequences face you for saying that? None? Oh. Okay then.
I do not think the people saying such things are paragons of virtue.
I think rather the opposite, in fact.
Putting up someone else's money is the easiest thing in the world to do. And, no, you are not virtuous for doing so.
/fin
Sam Robb retweeted
I know “being punk rock” just boils down to agreeing with the Ben & Jerry’s mission statement but how anyone thinks Rage Against the Machine is cool after this is beyond me.
