having fun online and building things
the internet
Joined September 2024
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Shaw retweeted
And people still tell us all that ai code is slop (yes it might be) but damn human code is some slop too, and ai is trained in human slop, so ai code is slop because our own code is slop too. Good times
I predict that this cyber sec and rev eng stuff is accelerating us to a new future where downloading apps is a thing of the past. Less risky to generate your own stuff with no dependencies, your agent of choice is the frontend and automatically listens for CVEs to self patch.
Software is like, DEAD dead.
Shaw retweeted
p(Doom) is low
p(Weird) is high
Google AI researcher @bratton explains why Sigmund Freud's mind would explode if he saw AI agents living lives of their own:
"Freud’s mind would explode if you explained the situation to him, that you have this entity that is both you and not you. It’s a homunculus on the outside rather than a homunculus on the inside."
"I often tell people my P(doom) is very low, but my P(weird) is very high."
"A lot of the weirdness right in front of us has to do not with a consolidation into one giant homogenous centralized brain, but rather about fragmentation."
Nemotron Coalition
NVIDIA isn't going to beat the frontier alone. So they're getting together some of the biggest data engine companies to work together and share resources to train the best open source foundation model, something none of them could do alone.
Nemotron 4 is going to be the best open source model in the world.
holy crap guys
Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.
How many of these were discovered by AI
How many of these could have been discovered if the defenders used AI
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.
Shaw retweeted
Confidential compute relies on TEEs that resist software attacks from the host but remain exposed to side-channels and physical access. Pure permissionless networks, where any hardware can join, amplify those risks. Practical deployments therefore require Proof of Cloud-style attestations that bind nodes to verified datacenter facilities, effectively concentrating trust in controlled environments rather than open hardware. Decentralized projects exist but inherit the same constraints. Privacy ends up a property of the operator who controls the physical layer.
Nobody will exfiltrate frontier weights because nobody has access to them.
Anthropic bought Opaque, a confidential compute provider, to build end-to-end private AI. From training to inference, not even internal team members have access to the weights. If AI is a black box, then this is a black box around the black box.
Many people have misconceptions about the use cases of confidential compute, and have tried to use it for things like distributed networks, blockchain, etc, but it has one big weakness: sidechannel attacks. In a distributed network, anyone with access to the hardware can attack it and read out the data.
For a distributed network (anyone offering public permissionless confidential AI) there is a big gotcha, which is that the machines have to be operated by a whitelisted node provider and signed with something like a "Proof of Cloud" attestation, which means they are colocated in a major datacenter.
As frontier models suck up more and more GPUs, this makes confidential compute more valuable. Just a handful of frontier customers can allocate millions of these GPUs.
Attacking the hardware, like an NVIDIA cluster, is not an easy activity to hide. The racks are equivalent in weight to a Tesla roadster, and at 300 pounds, each DGX B300 requires a lift to rack and unrack. If they weights are distributed across multiple racks, as in an NVL72, you'd need to attack all of them simultaneously.
These systems are being fully secured so that nobody, not even Dario himself, can get the weights. They are trained confidentially, delivered to inference machines securely and deployed on confidential hardware which makes it practically impossible to view.
aiweekly.co/alerts/anthropic…
Shaw retweeted
defining a new category: phone-use
an mcp/api that gives ai agents their own phones
cloud phones. real androids. real iphones.
tell your agent what to do, and it can operate a phone just like you do.
today, ai agents face three fundamental problems and phoneuse solves them 🧵
Shaw retweeted
People who cured / are curing their own cancer on X:
1/ @sytses - bone cancer, billionaire founder of Gitlab, developed 10+ personalized therapies for himself.
2/ @paul_conyngham - shrank his dog Rosie's mast cell cancer tumors after chemo and surgery weren't enough. Now backed by YC and Founders Fund
3/ @miriamgonp - stage 4 breast cancer, tumor sequenced, searching for vaccine manufacturer now
4/ @kevinace - stage 4 lung cancer, angel investor in 300+ companies, first drug stopped working after 18 months. Vaccine designed, now paying $300k out of pocket for the vaccine
5/ @masonbgrant: going founder mode on his his 32-year-old wife's rare liver cancer, sequencing her tumor with AI agents
6/ @ArunRLverma: former product leader at Atoms and Shopify, brain tumor, built a vaccine from his tumor. Now building an AI health agent startup based on what he went through
We're going to make it
I know he's joking but this is definitely gonna happen at some point
I have an AI agent that logs every negative comment someone makes about me online.
It then creates a profile of the person, maps all of their social connections, and finds all their emails.
Tomorrow morning, my AI agent will sent out an email blast to everyone's extended social network, detailing the horrible things they've said about me.