David Baker

Founder of Acorn Web Consultants · global tech consultant & entrepreneur · Ember.js Core emeritus · follower of Jesus · husband & dad of four

[David Baker @acorncom]

Start your patching engines, this one is *fun*

[tobi lutke @tobi]

What a disaster https://t.co/t0gGtjCIWJ

[David Baker @acorncom]

@VessOnSecurity Can you put Cloudflare or other WAF in front of them and lock down access so only the WAF talks to those services? Seems to be a reasonably reliable way to filter the traffic ..

[David Baker @acorncom]

Worth watching carefully, likely not out of the woods on this yet

[Andrew Case @attrc]

There are many accounts posting slop related to the PHP vulnerabilities, but @Dinosn is a long time researcher whose security work I have followed - so this is quite concerning

[David Baker @acorncom]

@heyandras @dok2001 Yes, it’s working smoothly on my end

[David Baker @acorncom]

@nymbusjp Yes. Thankfully the cracks are beginning to show but it may still be years before there’s any serious attempt to truly get the financial house in order in the US

[David Baker @acorncom]

Insightful thoughts here. Watching stuff in the US and UK where the very exchange rates and markets are beginning to force politicians (and their constituents) to deal with uncomfortable realities. Wish it had come sooner in the US (the national debt is absurd) but it *is* coming

[Genma_Jp @nymbusjp]

The root cause of France’s current disaster is the Euro.

In a normal monetary system, two automatic feedback mechanisms keep a country from sliding into permanent decline.

First, the exchange rate. When a country loses competitiveness, it runs a trade deficit: it buys more than it sells. The currency depreciates, relative costs fall, and competitiveness is restored. France has recorded an intra-EU trade deficit every single year since the start of the Euro. The exchange rate is frozen, so that correction never happens. Competitiveness keeps eroding. Industries, even the stronger ones, eventually go under. Unemployment rises. The industrial base shrinks. That is deindustrialization, produced mechanically by the absence of the exchange-rate adjustment France used repeatedly between 1945 and the 1970s while still growing strongly.

Second, the interest rate. As deindustrialization and unemployment grow, the state tries to compensate: tax breaks and exemptions to keep remaining firms alive, plus benefits for the expanding unemployed population. The deficit widens and borrowing rises. In a normal system, rising debt pushes interest rates higher, which forces fiscal restraint. The Euro (shared monetary policy and the ECB backstop) shields France from that price signal. Debt can keep accumulating without the usual market penalty. France could, and did, run balanced budgets with its own currency. Under the Euro, it is forced onto a structural deficit path. That is the socialization and the debt pile-up, again mechanical.

With no currency adjustment available, large-scale immigration was used as a secondary patch to lower labor costs and fill jobs. It does not restore the underlying competitiveness lost to the frozen exchange rate. It simply adds social and fiscal pressures on top of the existing ones.

The sequence is therefore: Euro → no exchange-rate correction → deindustrialization → more welfare + more migration + more debt, all without the interest-rate brake.

People say the real problems are the deficit and migration. Those are real and destructive, but under the Euro they are downstream consequences of the missing feedback loops, not independent root causes. You can still run deficits, expand welfare, or pursue high migration without the Euro. The difference is that without it those choices remain choices: the market still sends price signals (currency and interest rates) that can force a correction before the situation becomes irreversible. With the Euro, the signals are switched off, so once competitiveness tips the wrong way the deterioration becomes automatic and self-reinforcing.

Exit the Euro and the EU first. Only then does any talk of working harder, innovating more, or tightening the budget have real traction. Until then, it is a rigged game in which the outcome is guaranteed.

[David Baker @acorncom]

#MicroConf has been a blast so far, lots of good SaaS connections and conversations. Glad I made the trek from Saudi!

[Matthew Green @matthew_d_green]

@valkenburgh Rooting your own hardware is lovely. The difference is now you should start assuming everything you owned is rooted and hosts persistent, unkillable malware that will survive a complete machine reboot and won’t be daunted by things like “webcam lights”.

[Ram @ramxcodes]

MUST MUST MUST READ!!

https://t.co/lzWcWtiheG

[David Baker @acorncom]

I continue to be impressed by what I see Cloudflare building. Well worth watching / following along

[Kenton Varda @KentonVarda]

Today we are releasing Cloudflare OS, a chatbot with connectors, just like every other tech company is doing.

Except actually, it's different. This is a remake of Sandstorm[.]io, my startup from 10 years ago, except this time built on Cloudflare Workers (the platform I've spent the last 9 years building) and deeply leveraging AI. This is more or less the culmination of my secret 10-year master plan.

This is a full-on personal app vibe coding platform, in which the sandbox is so secure that you can pretty much go wild -- the AI cannot introduce a significant security bug. We believe a company's security team can feel comfortable giving non-technical users permission to vibe code and then sleep soundly at night.

How is that possible? It's the Sandstorm security model, revisited. A "Gadget" is the same thing as a Sandstorm "Grain": a fine-grained app instance. For example, if you have a document editor app, each document runs as a separate instance of the app, in a separate sandbox (one "Gadget").

This means two things, both of which I think are Big Deals:
1. The platform can manage all access control, by controlling who can access the Gadget at all. There is no way the Gadget can accidentally leak itself to an attacker -- even an attacker who has access to other Gadgets based on the same app.
2. Since everyone is running their own copy of the code, everyone can freely *modify* their copy of the code.

Think about #2 a bit more.

What if, when you wanted a new feature in the software you are using, you could just prompt your agent to add it?

This doesn't work in the cloud Software-as-a-Service model, because you are not running your own copy of the app.

Sandstorm tried to change that 10 years ago, but the world wasn't ready, because not enough people had the skills or patience to actually modify their software. AI has changed that. Now you just ask the agent -- the same agent that you are using to help you interact with the Gadget can also modify the code of the Gadget.

And it is so fun.

https://t.co/qzwdrAQhtK

[David Baker @acorncom]

Said plainly it’s still impressive but gosh, jargon is awful regardless of industry

[Jeffrey Ladish @JeffLadish]

Here's my rephrase without cybersecurity jargon:

"Our AI model tried really hard to hack out of its sandbox, a computer with no internet access, in order to find the answer to a test problem it had been given. To do this, it found previously unknown software bugs that allowed it to reach an OpenAI computer it wasn't supposed to be able to access. Then it started hacking other computers on OpenAI's networks until it found one that had Internet access.

After gaining Internet access, the AI model thought about where it could find the answers to the test question and figured the AI platform Hugging Face might have the data it was looking for. It then found ways to hack Hugging Face to steal the information it could use to cheat the test. The AI model used several hacking techniques together, including using a stolen password and finding several totally new security bugs in Hugging Face's computers, allowing the AI model to take control of those computers."

[David Baker @acorncom]

@chadhietala @vercel Congrats Chad, quite interested to see what you guys are working on

[David Baker @acorncom]

Yes, this does look interesting, feels like we’re still figuring out how to absorb larger PRs that can come through quite quickly these days

[Lucas Meijer @lucasmeijer]

This is a very interesting space. Ive implemented a handful attempts in similar direction, gonna give this one a shot

[David Baker @acorncom]

Fascinating read here, including the ultimate AI token bill

[Jarred Sumner @jarredsumner]

Rewriting Bun in Rust

https://t.co/Rl8bcaxBFc

[David Baker @acorncom]

Will do, hadn’t thought of the major version bump for maintainer, was intending to do that for embroider / v2 addon though. Thanks again!

[David Baker @acorncom]

@sandydoo appreciate all your work on ember-google-maps. I’m interested in continuing to maintain the package (have a client that uses it heavily). Wondered if you would be up for transferring the repo/NPM package over so the Ember ecosystem can continue using it as-is? Thanks!

[David Baker @acorncom]

@AlfieJCarter Agents

[David Baker @acorncom]

Agreed. We had three under 4 at one point and it was pretty rough. These days life is just awesome

[Rajat Suri @rajatsuri]

I’m here to report that the hype is real

Parenthood is a peak life experience once the kids are all 4+

The first few years are tough and real work. But it does pay off handsomely later. For almost all parents I know

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Jeff Bezos just told you exactly how to price AI.

Nobody listened.

Bezos: “AI is real and it is going to change every industry. In fact it’s a very unusual technology in that regard in that it’s a horizontal enabling layer.”

Horizontal enabling layer.

Three words that reprice the entire technology sector.

The iPhone was a vertical. One product. One new market.

Electricity was a horizontal. One substrate that rewired every market on Earth.

Wall Street is pricing AI like it is the next iPhone. Bezos is telling you it is the next electrical grid.

Right now, thousands of companies are trying to sell AI as a product.

A feature. A tool. A subscription tier.

Every single one of them will be priced to zero.

You do not sell a horizontal layer. You do not compete with it. You build on top of it or you disappear beneath it.

For a century, entire industries survived on one thing. Complexity.

The friction of navigating law, medicine, logistics, finance. That was the moat. If you could not memorize the maze, you could not compete.

A horizontal layer does not navigate the maze. It dissolves the walls.

Electricity did not compete with the candle industry. It erased the need for one.

The most dangerous part of a horizontal shift is how quiet it is. It moves underneath the economy. The surface looks normal. Revenue still holds.

Every day you operate on the old substrate, you accumulate a debt you cannot see and cannot repay.

The internet repriced distribution. AI is repricing cognition itself.

When intelligence becomes a utility that runs through the walls of every company on Earth, the premium on human expertise does not erode. It evaporates.

This is not a disruption. Disruptions replace products.

This replaces the ground you are standing on.

[David Baker @acorncom]

There are some really interesting details in here from someone who clearly understands the complexities of sensors in cars. Interesting to contemplate how much the integration of software and hardware plays a role here

[Genma_Jp @nymbusjp]

https://t.co/eDxL0vVJ1B