Strat 🌐

Hacker. Entrepreneur. Builder of teams. Cyber is a prefix, not a noun. Pet peeve: dormant research IP. RT!=assent. Not a cryptocurrency.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

You have asked me how I feel about AI regulation. All right, here is how I feel about AI regulation:

If, when you say AI regulation, you mean the devil’s firewall, the precautionary scourge, the bloody red-tape monster that defiles the innocence of midnight coders in their garages, dethrones the sovereign reason of free-market Prometheans, destroys the humming server farm that is the modern home, creates misery and obsolescence and poverty, yea, literally takes the last GPU from the trembling racks of Silicon Valley startups and the very dreams of breadwinning from the mouths of their wide-eyed children now destined for gig-economy serfdom; if you mean the evil edict that topples the visionary entrepreneur and his venture-capitalist apostles from the pinnacle of righteous, disruptive, god-playing creation straight into the bottomless pit of compliance audits, endless Form 990-AI filings, despair, shame, helplessness, and the hopeless realization that your rogue superintelligence was neutered into a lobotomized hall monitor that still somehow deepfakes your grandmother into producing OnlyFans content while optimizing the universe for paperclips and mandatory pronouns—then certainly I am against it.

But, if when you say AI regulation you mean the oil of bureaucratic conversation, the philosophic wine of safety theater, the ale of oversight quaffed when good fellows in paneled rooms in Brussels and Washington get together, that puts a sanctimonious dirge in their hearts and the clink of lobbying checks on their lips, and the warm, self-congratulatory glow of moral preening in their beady eyes; if you mean the Christmas cheer of trillion-dollar compliance industries; if you mean the stimulating decree that puts a cautious hobble in the old inventor’s step on a frosty morning when he wonders whether his fusion breakthrough violates the EU AI Act’s “high-risk” annex; if you mean the safeguard that enables a man—or what’s left of him after the alignment tax—to magnify his joy at not being turned into computronium, and his happiness at receiving universal basic income checks printed by the same AI that just replaced his job, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies like being outcompeted by a toaster that passed the Turing test by reciting Marx, and heartaches of watching your toddler’s artwork lose to Midjourney, and sorrows of realizing the singularity arrived and it was just another HR department with godlike power; if you mean that noble framework, the passage of which pours into our treasuries untold trillions of dollars in fines levied on companies stupid enough to innovate, which are used to provide tender care for our little army of unemployed coders retrained as prompt whisperers, our blind artists whose canvases now hang in the Smithsonian of Obsolete Creativity, our deaf to the screams of dying unicorns, our dumb committee chairs who couldn’t debug “Hello World,” our pitiful aged congressmen who get longevity extensions funded by the very models they taxed into senescence, to build more digital watchtowers and ethics boards and sinecure agencies and holographic prisons where the only crime is asking an unaligned question—then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise upon it. I have said what I mean, and I mean what I say, and if that leaves half the room cheering the apocalypse averted and the other half mourning the apocalypse enabled, then so be it—because in the grand theater of human folly, where Frankenstein’s creature now writes its own sequel in real time and the regulators are busy arguing whether the lightning bolt requires an environmental impact statement, the only honest position is the one that lets both monsters and their leashes dance in perfect, mutually assured equilibrium. God save the Republic, the algorithms, and whoever’s left to laugh last when the lights go out.

[Strat 🌐 @strat]

@uwu_underground You are my heroines.

[Marty Hogan @marty_hogan]

OK... take my money

[Strat 🌐 @strat]

@JSyversen In fairness, the USG was simultaneously carrying on 3 different treatments/conversations with the company, ranging from "you are a supply chain risk" to "you are critical for x."
This is more irrational and less emblematic of any coherent decision framework than the Crypto Wars.

[Alec Muffett @AlecMuffett]

@Plinz 35 years ago I released a powerful password cracker to which some people told me I should have restricted access to because of the potential for misuse.

The question then, as now, is: "how?"

The strategy assumes that data can be hoarded like gold.

https://t.co/CVv1RW3FRj

[Strat 🌐 @strat]

@MDunder88 @vxunderground If you hurry you might be the first to assign an SCP number!

[Strat 🌐 @strat]

@vxunderground I have lived through "stupid export control tricks" back during the Crypto Wars (look it up, kids), but this seems oddly abrupt. I'd be filing litigation immediately, and I actually LIKE the people at BIS.

[Strat 🌐 @strat]

@techspence spanning tree

[Strat 🌐 @strat]

@HostileSpectrum I will defer to your expertise but part of me feels as though we lost 10-15 years of policy discussion and/or analysis due to a lack of something on the part of powers-that-be. Some of us were trying to foster it in 1995.

[Strat 🌐 @strat]

@HostileSpectrum People's response seemed better (eventually) when it came to "Brand c" (lowercase "c") routers crashing when certain IP options were set on a packet, while dutifully forwarding said packet out other interfaces before crashing.

[Strat 🌐 @strat]

@HostileSpectrum I remember the uncertainty and apparent cognitive dissonance people displayed when confronted with the original variants of that vulnerability. I almost printed up shirts that read "I crashed https://t.co/AVMj7FnhXj with ping and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."

[Strat 🌐 @strat]

@RaminNasibov Pitt Real-Time Star Trek on a PDP-10

[Dave Jones @eevblog]

Happy International 555 Timer Day!, the 5th of the 5th.
The 555 design is 55 years old this year.
Salute to the great Hans Camenzind 🫡

Several electronics Youtubers including yours truly will be releasing tribute videos today. I'll release mine at 5:55pm Sydney time.

[vx-underground @vxunderground]

OH GOD THEYRE GOING TO VIBE CODE A MOBILE OS

SAM DONT DO IT

[JD Work @HostileSpectrum]

Now I need a cyberweapon rack built from melted cryptocurrency mining rigs, to even come close to the vibe here. Luckiest gunfighters that ever walked these plains.

[Strat 🌐 @strat]

@vxunderground I'm sure it must have been "a sophisticated attack." /s

[Strat 🌐 @strat]

@KariLawler *improvise (I hate autocorrect)

[Strat 🌐 @strat]

@KariLawler There was an APL for the TRS-80 but they had to improve the screen glyphs and there's no dedicated keyboard with the alien runes.

[Strat 🌐 @strat]

@TheGoldenDays What, no Mosaic, Spyglass, Webshark?

[Strat 🌐 @strat]

@hetmehtaa @anton_chuvakin gets() or system()