Joe Contini retweeted
What to do when your cloud provider is breached, from a former cyber insurance adjuster:
If your provider just disclosed a breach, you have to assume you've been exposed.
And every instinct you have about what to do next is probably wrong. So here's what you should actually do:
When you first hear about the hack, even if you doubt you were exposed, you need to get on it. Right away.
I don't care if you're on a date, or at your son's college graduation.
Get to a computer and start rotating every secret…everything. When someone asks later how fast you responded, you want the answer to be "immediately," with timestamps to prove it.
You're going to want to put as little in writing as possible. I get the instinct.
Do the opposite.
Document everything, obsessively. If your provider has locked things down and you can't rotate something yet, write that down too, with the time you tried. If you're using agents to investigate (and you should be, spread wide across everything), keep every trace and make them write down everything they find.
This will feel wrong in your soul. Do it anyway. If this ever turns into a claim, if you can show you did everything you were supposed to, minute by minute, you will survive.
You might tell yourself it's just names and emails and nobody cares. But this is wrong. All customer data counts.
I've watched companies lose millions just because someone could see data they shouldn't have.
You're going to want to wait for your provider to finish investigating before communicating with your own customers. Don't.
Figure out what information may have been exposed, even if you’re not sure yet who it belongs to, and what obligations you have under your contracts / applicable law. Your cloud provider’s investigation doesn’t change the fact that you have your own obligations to meet. And learning about a deadline after you’ve missed it is a very expensive lesson.
Bookmark this. I hope you never need it, but with everything happening lately, there's a real chance you will.
Joe Contini retweeted
What’s happening in the AI-powered reverse engineering and decompilation is absolutely insane. Pretty soon all software will be de facto open-source.
AI is coming for everything and everyone.
Joe Contini retweeted
all of my imessages & email now run through a single agent interface.
i still text, but i deleted every email client from my phone & canceled every email subscription or app i had.
gmail is basically just a database to me now. increasingly so are the rest of google’s services. i.e. i never want to manually write an email, create a doc, build slides, organize a calendar, or manage files again. i just want to express intent & have the underlying systems of record updated correctly. i think now you’ll see apps disappear quickly. many will become databases at best or entirely obsolete at worst.
the agent will be the default interface to your personal & professional life.
Joe Contini retweeted
Of ~200 books I've read, the few that stayed with me over time and I find myself often thinking back to or referring to, in ~random order:
All short stories by Ted Chiang, especially Exhalation, Division By Zero, Understand, The Story of Your Life, Liking What You See, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, What's Expected of us, just excellent themes ideas and reading all around.
The Selfish Gene (nonfiction) - a classic for understanding evolution and natural selection, especially the realization that the gene is closer to the real unit of selection more than an individual, explaining altruism and colonies and a lot more.
The Lord of the Rings (fantasy) - I return to LoTR all the time for comfort. I don't think anyone else has created a high fantasy Universe this complex, with so much mythology, symbolism, new languages, mysterious system of magic, ancient and powerful beings and artifacts, beautiful writing and dialog, themes of courage, friendship and heroism, the list goes on and on... You're thrown into a world with characters and references to so many things that are part of this ancient world and never really introduced. There's always more to find on each reading.
The Martian (~scifi) - top tier science porn, competence porn, fast paced and fun.
The Vital Question (nonfiction) - First time I intuitively grokked the bridge from geology to biology, the origin of life, and likelihood of life in the Universe at large at various stages of complexity and development. Also all other Nick Lane books.
How To Live by Derek Sivers (nonfiction) - 27 conflicting answers to how to live life. Emphasizing the diversity of consistent and possible answers to the meaning and goals of life.
1984 (nonfiction) - Classic. Newspeak, Ministry of Truth, Doublethink, Thoughtcrime, Facecrime, Unperson, the list just keeps on going. Chilling world-building and the realization that weaker equivalents of everything exist.
In Defense of Food by Pollan (nonfiction/food) - Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. The book that first taught me to avoid the entire center of every grocery store and only shop on the outer ring. The realization that the food industry is out of control and the things they do with your food, what they put into it, what they are allowed to do, and how they are allowed to market it to you is quite a lot worse than I thought.
The Accidental Superpower by Zeihan (nonfiction/geopolitcs) - I've found Zeihan to be a bit of a mixed bag over time but I still remember his books (esp this one) to be elucidating on geopolitics.
Countdown to Zero Day (nonfiction/cyberwarfare) - Goes into detail on Stuxnet, imo very important and highly elucidating reading on cybersecurity, the future of warfare, and AGI.
A Fire Upon the Deep (scifi) - Chapter one only, incredible portrayal of what superintelligence will be like that has stayed with me since.
Guns Germs and Steel (nonfiction/history) - I'd probably recommend a summary of this book more than the book itself. I remember it being very dry, but it was very interesting because it is a comprehensive analysis of the resources grid (food, animals, freshwater, climate, ...) in our real-world game of Civilization, and the implications there of.
Flowers of Algernon (scifi) - Just a totally crushing masterpiece on intelligence.
Atlas Shrugged (scifi) - No one finishes this I think but the first few chapters and its worldbuilding are enough and, once seen in an exaggerated form in fiction, elements of it cannot be fully unseen in reality.
An Immense World (nonfiction/bio, by Yong, among others of his) - Nice book on so many different sensors used by various animals, you repeatedly realize human senses are super inadequate and that we only measure such a tiny sliver of reality.
The Master Switch (nonfiction/tech history, by Wu) - history of information technologies telegraph, telephony, radio, television, film, cable television, internet and the pattern of "The Cycle", where each medium starts decentralized, open and idealistic and then progresses towards centralization, control and oligopoly, for the very similar reasons, by very similar means, and usually at the expense of diversity, innovation and technological progress. Quite a few connections to draw on for LLMs, which are after all an information technology too.
(I take recommendations for more that are likely to make this list!)
Joe Contini retweeted
Year after year, this continues to be the best 4th of July fireworks video out there…
Joe Contini retweeted
Vibe coders everyday struggle in 15 seconds.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The original creator of the video is Nathan Doan, from Nathan Doan Comedy on YouTube, and the present watermark is not affiliated with him. The video is stolen and will result in losses for the original creator.
youtu.be/83cDUAJnyR4
Joe Contini retweeted
Singapore’s AI obsession just hit Everest peak.
The Foreign Minister is self-hosting Claude on a Raspberry Pi and building a diplomatic knowledge graph using Karpathy’s LLM Wiki pattern. Wahlao!
SG devs, the minister is coming for your job. And he’s not even using Cursor — he’s on NanoClaw running locally. Can someone git pull his code and give it a test.
Only bad thing? He dropped this on Facebook instead of X. Minister, we need to talk.
gist.github.com/VivianBalakr…
Joe Contini retweeted
the craziest part now is that the modern computer probably has to be entirely reinvented, from scratch. pretty much like how jobs & co brought apple ii to market.
like not improved. not given a chatbot sidebar or something but really from the ground up like the iphone redefined what it meant to be a pocket computer.
the current paradigm for computers was built around a human staring at a screen, moving a cursor, opening apps, managing windows, naming files, remembering where things live, & manually translating intent into interface actions.
that made sense when the human was the runtime. but in an ai native world, it starts to look kinda ridiculous.
you can see this ridiculousness when you use computer use agents… they are useful sure, but they’re also obviously transitional. they’re teaching ai to operate machines designed for humans, which is clever, but also kind of absurd. it’s like making a robot hand so it can use a doorknob instead of asking why the door needs a knob at all. yes i know humans also need to use a door knob, but maybe in the future humans don’t need to use a computer, or at least what we think of a computer today at all.
this all leads to some interesting questions:
- what is a file when the system understands context?
- what is an app when intent can route itself?
- what is a desktop when work can be decomposed, executed, monitored, & summarized by agents?
- what is a browser when the agent can retrieve, compare, transact, & remember?
- what is an operating system when the primary user is no longer just a person, but a person plus a swarm of delegated intelligences? or no person at all.
the old computer assumed navigation.
the new computer has to assume a new kind of intention. the old computer organized information. the new computer has to try to organize agency.
we’re still in the hacky middle stage at the moment with sidebars, copilots, agents clicking through legacy ui, & automation layers sitting on top of 40 year old metaphors.
the new computer is likely one where memory, context, identity, permissions, tools, agents, & interfaces are native primitives. this means desktop, mobile, browser, apps, files, folders deserves another first principles look.
Joe Contini retweeted
This is big... Anthropic just announced a model so powerful they won't release it to the public out of fear over the damage it will cause 😨
Claude Mythos Preview found thousands of zero-day exploits in every major operating system and web browser...
The numbers are hard to believe:
> $50 to find a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD, one of the most security-hardened operating systems ever built
> Under $1,000 to find AND build a fully working remote code execution exploit on FreeBSD that grants unauthenticated root access from anywhere on the internet
> Under $2,000 to chain together multiple Linux kernel vulnerabilities into a complete privilege escalation exploit
For context: these are the kinds of findings that previously required elite security researchers working for weeks.
Anthropic engineers with no formal security training asked Mythos to find exploits overnight. They woke up to working code the next morning.
The results were so impressive Anthropic assembled Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, and seven other organizations into Project Glasswing:
A $100M defensive coalition. They're not releasing this model publicly. Instead, they're racing to patch the world's infrastructure before models like this proliferate.
Introducing Project Glasswing: an urgent initiative to help secure the world’s most critical software.
It’s powered by our newest frontier model, Claude Mythos Preview, which can find software vulnerabilities better than all but the most skilled humans.
anthropic.com/glasswing
Joe Contini retweeted
Obsidian is weird:
- 7 full-time employees
- ~1 million users per employee
- fully remote
- 1 in-person meetup per year
- no scheduled meetings
- no stand-ups
- deep focus is prioritized
- our manifesto guides our product
What works for us may not work for you.
Joe Contini retweeted
🚨 CRITICAL: Active supply chain attack on axios -- one of npm's most depended-on packages.
The latest [email protected] now pulls in [email protected], a package that did not exist before today. This is a live compromise.
This is textbook supply chain installer malware. axios has 100M+ weekly downloads. Every npm install pulling the latest version is potentially compromised right now.
Socket AI analysis confirms this is malware. plain-crypto-js is an obfuscated dropper/loader that:
• Deobfuscates embedded payloads and operational strings at runtime
• Dynamically loads fs, os, and execSync to evade static analysis
• Executes decoded shell commands
• Stages and copies payload files into OS temp and Windows ProgramData directories
• Deletes and renames artifacts post-execution to destroy forensic evidence
If you use axios, pin your version immediately and audit your lockfiles. Do not upgrade.
Joe Contini retweeted
when software had a soul
there was a moment around 2005 when using a Mac felt like touching something alive.
the dock bounced. the genie effect swooped. exposé scattered your windows like cards on a table. none of it was strictly necessary. all of it felt like someone cared – not about metrics, but about the feeling of using a machine.
software back then had texture. it had a philosophy. you could feel the person behind it. someone made a decision to make that icon beautiful, to animate that transition just so, to write that error message with a little warmth. apps had personalities. some were weird. some were over-designed in ways that would make a modern PM flinch. but they were alive.
the web was the same. personal sites were genuinely personal. blogs felt like letters. forums had regulars. you knew who made what. the internet had neighborhoods, and each one felt different.
nothing was optimized for scale. things were made by people who loved what they were making.
somewhere along the way, we traded all of that for growth.
A/B tests flattened the edges. design systems standardized the personality out. everything got faster, smoother, more consistent – and somehow less interesting. the quirks were removed because they didn't test well. the warmth got cut because it wasn't measurable. we optimized our way into a world of things that work perfectly and feel like nothing.
now every app looks the same. every interface follows the same patterns. every product speaks in the same calm, frictionless voice, siloed in their own little islands. the humanity got rounded off.
and then came AI agents. and the speed got inhuman.
now you can generate an entire product in an afternoon. ship a feature before lunch. spin up ten variations before anyone's had their coffee. the gap from idea to code is basically zero.
which sounds incredible. and it is. but there's a catch.
when making things are too easy, the slop comes for free too. mediocre things don't look obviously bad – they look fine. they work. they ship. they pass review. and now there are infinite of them. the internet is filling up with software that functions but means nothing. interfaces that are correct but feel dead. products made by agents, reviewed by no one, shipped into the void.
this is the thing that keeps me up at night. not that AI will replace people who care. but that it will drown them out.
here's what I still believe: the best things are made by people who couldn't help themselves. someone who lost sleep over an icon. who rewrote the same line of copy twelve times. who added an animation nobody asked for because it made the thing feel right. that obsession – that's not inefficiency. that's the whole point.
AI doesn't make that irrelevant. it actually makes it rarer and more valuable. taste is not a markdown skill. caring is not a parameter. the weird, specific, "soul" thing you put into something – that can't be programmed into existence.
the path forward isn't to make more slop faster. it's to finally give people with real vision the tools to make the thing they always imagined but couldn't build alone. the designer who had the idea but couldn't code. the kid who saw something nobody else saw. the person who cared too much about something most people wouldn't notice.
if we get this right, we don't get a faster factory. we get a renaissance. more strange, personal, opinionated software made by teams of people who care and mean it.
that's still possible. but only if the people who care get the space and tools to actually express themselves – and don't just hand the wheel to the agent and walk away.
Joe Contini retweeted
I asked Claude to build my daughter an app that plugs into our piano, can read live key strokes, can show her sheet notes and key view and ends with a Guitar Hero style game. All while giving progressively harder songs. Today she’s using It and crushing It.
Joe Contini retweeted
ultimately it’s rumination that will haunt you. introspection doesn’t if you do it right.
i think of introspection as game tape. you watch once, extract the signal, & close the tab. whereas rumination is the same clip on loop w/ no new information being processed. it’s reexperiencing dressed up as reflection.
you should treat the past as a read only database. you query it, get your answer, & then gtfo. i do sometimes wish there was an explicit mechanic in the human mind to effectively hit “archive”. i have personally been on a treadmill here. there is a lot more here to dig w.r.t. to modern therapy culture which is effectively designed to dig deep as far as possible indefinitely & often with a lack of clear purpose.
Joe Contini retweeted
Cursor is raising at a $50 billion valuation on the claim that its “in-house models generate more code than almost any other LLMs in the world.” Less than 24 hours after launching Composer 2, a developer found the model ID in the API response: kimi-k2p5-rl-0317-s515-fast.
That’s Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5 with reinforcement learning appended. A developer named Fynn was testing Cursor’s OpenAI-compatible base URL when the identifier leaked through the response headers. Moonshot’s head of pretraining, Yulun Du, confirmed on X that the tokenizer is identical to Kimi’s and questioned Cursor’s license compliance. Two other Moonshot employees posted confirmations. All three posts have since been deleted.
This is the second time. When Cursor launched Composer 1 in October 2025, users across multiple countries reported the model spontaneously switching its inner monologue to Chinese mid-session. Kenneth Auchenberg, a partner at Alley Corp, posted a screenshot calling it a smoking gun. KR-Asia and 36Kr confirmed both Cursor and Windsurf were running fine-tuned Chinese open-weight models underneath. Cursor never disclosed what Composer 1 was built on. They shipped Composer 1.5 in February and moved on.
The pattern: take a Chinese open-weight model, run RL on coding tasks, ship it as a proprietary breakthrough, publish a cost-performance chart comparing yourself against Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 without disclosing that your base model was free, then raise another round.
That chart from the Composer 2 announcement deserves its own paragraph. Cursor plotted Composer 2 against frontier models on a price-vs-quality axis to argue they’d hit a superior tradeoff. What the chart doesn’t show is that Anthropic and OpenAI trained their models from scratch. Cursor took an open-weight model that Moonshot spent hundreds of millions developing, ran RL on top, and presented the output as evidence of in-house research. That’s margin arbitrage on someone else’s R&D dressed up as a benchmark slide.
The license makes this more than an attribution oversight. Kimi K2.5 ships under a Modified MIT License with one clause designed for exactly this scenario: if your product exceeds $20 million in monthly revenue, you must prominently display “Kimi K2.5” on the user interface. Cursor’s ARR crossed $2 billion in February. That’s roughly $167 million per month, 8x the threshold. The clause covers derivative works explicitly.
Cursor is valued at $29.3 billion and raising at $50 billion. Moonshot’s last reported valuation was $4.3 billion. The company worth 12x more took the smaller company’s model and shipped it as proprietary technology to justify a valuation built on the frontier lab narrative.
Three Composer releases in five months. Composer 1 caught speaking Chinese. Composer 2 caught with a Kimi model ID in the API. A P0 incident this year. And a benchmark chart that compares an RL fine-tune against models requiring billions in training compute without disclosing the base was free.
The question for investors in the $50 billion round: what exactly are you buying? A VS Code fork with strong distribution, or a frontier research lab? The model ID in the API answers that.
If Moonshot doesn’t enforce this license against a company generating $2 billion annually from a derivative of their model, the attribution clause becomes decoration for every future open-weight release. Every AI lab watching this is running the same math: why open-source your model if companies with better distribution can strip attribution, call it proprietary, and raise at 12x your valuation?
kimi-k2p5-rl-0317-s515-fast is the most expensive model ID leak in the history of AI licensing.
