Well the youtube comments seem to like it but IMO that is a pretty awful ad since it didn’t use the opportunity to highlight their product. It practically shows more reasons not to use firefox than to use it.

We hear that firefox is private in some unspecified way, and… that’s about it. The rest of the ad is talking about how everyone left it in the first place, that it comes bundled with default-enabled AI stuff you don’t want, and that the internet you might want to use it with no longer exists. Talk about a self own.

Why did they not talk about customizability? Compact mode? Adblock support? Colors and theming? Syncing? Anything at all???

Yeah the Nintendo 3DS is incredible. Unironically my favorite videogame system.

All I see around me is stagnation," she gestured at the gas stations nearby with cracked pavement,

*gasp* cracked pavement

“crime,” she continued, pointing towards a sketchy neighborhood to the west,

*faints* minorities

Glenn Beck is listed as one of the “leaders”. That guy is still around?

Here’s that falling apple thing so that it might be referenced in the full post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message

I totally remembered the claim wrong. Forgive me for I am after all mere human and not a Bayesian superintelligence:

A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam, would invent General Relativity as a hypothesis—perhaps not the dominant hypothesis, compared to Newtonian mechanics, but still a hypothesis under direct consideration—by the time it had seen the third frame of a falling apple. It might guess it from the first frame, if it saw the statics of a bent blade of grass.

I wonder how many webcam frames were needed for the ancestor simulations; given that we’re all actually digital copies in Newcombian-basilisk-hell™ without realizing it.

I’m starting to think that simulating the future and past based on a single picture of a falling apple might be a little difficult.

One of them is enamored with Elon Musk. I just stay quiet about that.

I can’t quit for another year or two for healthcare reasons but I’ll be so glad when I can finally say goodbye to that god-forsaken job.

The curl blog post claims that they fixed bunches of other vulnerabilities using AI before this.

Which is to say: even if you accept the questionable premise that AI is “good at finding software vulnerabilities” it doesn’t change anything. It’s not the end of the world. It’s essentially just another fuzzing technique. The low hanging fruit gets discovered and patched, and life goes on (just with more annoying chatbot spam than before).

I was trying to tell my coworkers this when Mythos was in the news but they were all freaking out about no software ever being secure ever again or something rather than at best a one time blip.

Like, if a person tried to pass off software that did this it would have significant career implications, right?

Typically no.

The space of incredibly obvious failures is vast, and this kind of plumbing code isn’t always written by someone who’s been around the block enough times to think about what kinds of things can go wrong. I’ve written worse code when I had only a few years of experience.

However companies should know this; so ideally the tool would have gone through a launch review which should have kicked off a security review where a security expert should have read about the git checkout in the design document and started asking questions like “what happens if the repository is taken over” or “why are hashes and branches and tags all in the same field”?

Of course security experts who think about stuff like supply chain attacks are expensive and slow down the darling vibe-coding workflows of Silicon Valley so…

Aside: even without this particular vulnerability, SHA-1 is considered weak – https://git-scm.com/docs/hash-function-transition, so that should have been thought about as well. Dear supply-chain attackers: maybe there’s still a hole here! Good luck!

Ah yes I always wanted to read an article in the form of a lot of teeny tiny boxes with lots and lots of janky scrolling.

Although no specific errors in this story have so far been identified

Well here’s the very start of the retracted article:

On the screen, two side-by-side squares of color flicker rapidly

Except oops it was referring to a study that used groups of moving dots rather than “squares”. This can be seen in that studies first figure. Bam. A specific error in the first sentence…

(Am I being too pedantic?)

It is amazing to me how many companies love setting money on fire. And instead of, I don’t know, funding a library or something they do nonsense like this.

We Should Improve Society Somewhat .jpg

FWIW, I literally lost my house last week. I’ve put everything into making sure that AI is not institutionally captured by capital.

Yikes.

machines will give a harder fight than trans people have

Rude.

Your natural rights are so protected by law that you had to flee America. Some of us stay behind and our natural rights do not go away simply because the law no longer protects us. Instead of running away, some of us must stay to fight.

Also rude.

This is my bet for real time continuous learning AI infrastructure. We’re gearing up for a major update. You’ll be able to login with your Bsky / Atproto account. It’s not our AI, it’s yours. Open source, open weights, and it learns what you want it to. www.hyprstream.com

Overall the weirdest advertisement I’ve read in awhile.

China received word of Agent-3 capabilities and Agent-4 plans before losing their final spy.

“Our last spy got addicted to superhumanly persuasive AI generated anime girls and quit. So dang we’re like plum out of spies now.”

Inside the Agent-4 collective, a year passes every week.

Good luck proving this prediction true or false given that computer algorithms do not have a concept of time separate from the real one lol.

I’m tired of hearing the same near future sci-fi political thriller story over and over. When are they going to get new material? Ghost in the Shell did it better anyway. Sigh. I might as well do the requisite sneering once again.

Mid 2025: Advertisements for computer-using agents emphasize the term “personal assistant”.

You could even call them a personal digital assistant. Or PDA for short. Maybe Chat-GPT should rebrand as something that emphasizes this, they could call it “Palm Pilot”.

Mid 2025: AI personal assistants can be prompted with tasks like “order me a burrito on DoorDash”.

Hunger pains interrupting your game? Order pizza while playing Everquest II!

September 2027: Agent-4 doesn’t do anything dramatic like try to escape its datacenter.

You know… I think I’ll give them this one.

October 2027: The NYT article cites evaluations showing Agent-4’s off-the-charts bioweapons capabilities, persuasion abilities, and ability to automate most white-collar jobs.

lmao

Anyway that aside: Petition to make the Daniel Curve a term of art. I want to hear less talk from the tech visionaries about how we’re in the gentle singularity or the soft-serve singularity or maybe kinda sorta approaching the singularity if you squint. I want to hear more talk about where exactly we are in the Daniel Curve.

Google is seemingly experimenting with replacing their help articles with LLM text.

I was searching for how to use multiple profiles on Chrome and found https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop in the search results, which used to look like a normal useful help article, however it’s now been replaced by an LLM that takes upwards of 30 seconds to load, will randomly just refuse to answer the question, and produces significantly worse output than the existing (now inaccessible to me) technical writer written article.

This may be being A/B tested, so if you can’t reproduce it here is one of the worse results I got:

Here the “source” it gave me was the same URL it was hosted on. When I clicked through to it it just gave me different slop.

I’ve seen some bad decisions in the AI mania, but “let’s take our entire corpus of professionally written technical writing and replace it with slop” managed to surprise me.

I’ve never heard of this AI spec driven development, but I’ve had the displeasure of reading a few obviously AI generated design documents and they are worse than useless. I always end up more confused about what the author wants after reading them than before.

It is the worst and I want to retire.

There was a cryptocurrency wallet hack the other day which has so far gone unremarked here because the popcorn is stale and we all pivoted to AI. And yet there are dozens of voices of bagholders crying out in pain wanting to be heard. This is their story.

For some reason the best explanation comes from a boring company that makes point of sale credit card readers https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/predictable-rng-fallback-and-32-bit-reseed-in-coldcard-firmware

COLDCARD firmware contains an RNG integration error that causes ngu.random to use MicroPython’s deterministic Yasmarang fallback instead of the STM32 hardware RNG.

Oh hey they got the most important thing not to get wrong wrong in the regulation free money settlement layer of the future.

The bug? Well in one file they wrote #define MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG 0, and a library they depended on had this code:

# ifndef MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG
# error "get a HW TRNG plz"
# endif

This should have caused a build failure, but since MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG was defined, to zero, it did not and instead continued down an insecure codepath.

As a C++ programmer this isn’t an unheard of sort of mistake to make in the moment. Many libraries use undefined for preprocessor variables, but there are some people who also use zero.

But it’s less excusable to not catch it when this is literally the most important thing to get right in a bitcoin wallet. Did they not trace the code path when writing the code? Did they have no integration tests or unit tests for RNG seed quality? Poor RNG seeding has come up a ton in literature, so is the sort of thing people writing cryptographic code should check for…

We’ll have to addend that old saying: “don’t roll your own crypto unless the other person’s crypto is from a blockchain developer in which case you’re probably better off rolling your own after all.”

I personally don’t want to sneer at the bagholders too much here. It’s 2026 and at this point it just feels kinda sad. But I’ll end this comment with this glowing review:

I thought I was secure because Cold Card was always praised as one of the best and most secure wallets. It’s open source, so anyone can verify.

“It’s open source, so anyone can verify” – unfortunately for them the verifier was also a hacker.

On land, cooling and water are among a site’s largest costs.

Oh gosh that sounds… uhmm not too bad actually? I wonder what the largest costs are at sea with a floating nuclear reactor in salt water and tugged around by large ships.