alexg0.eth | Alexander Goldstein

Exec Chair @eligoenergy; Co-founder/Board @terraflowenergy (grid/ai dc storage). Co‑founded @CashNetUSA (now @enova) & @PangeaRE. Angel in tech, energy, fintech

[Eitan Fischberger @EFischberger]

Understand the magnitude of what those Israeli passengers may have just prevented.

If the emerging reports are correct, an Omani pilot attempted to deliberately crash a passenger jet carrying roughly 180 people from Dubai to Tel Aviv, sending the aircraft into a terrifying plunge before Israelis on board overpowered and subdued him.

Had that plane gone down, regardless of where it crashed, this would not simply have been another aviation disaster.

It would have been a 9/11-scale terrorist attack involving an Emirati aircraft, Israeli civilians, an Omani pilot, Saudi airspace, and a region already engulfed in conflict.

Think about the military response that would have followed. Think about the countries that would have been dragged in. Think about the retaliatory chain reaction that would have been set in motion.

The consequences are genuinely impossible to calculate, but they would have been cataclysmic.

The Israelis who bravely took control of that situation did not merely save the lives of the people sitting beside them.

They may have prevented an event that would have rewritten the history of the Middle East, reverberated across the world, and cost an unimaginable number of lives.

There are moments when ordinary people, in the span of a few terrifying minutes, stand between the world as it is and a world permanently changed by catastrophe.

This may have been one of them.

[alexg0.eth | Alexander Goldstein @alexg0]

Insane story. Could have ended very differently

[Pepel Klaasa @pepel_klaasa]

A passenger on the Dubai–Tel Aviv flight recounts:

“We are currently in Saudi Arabia.

One of the crew members attacked the pilot with a knife and disabled the aircraft’s systems. Yaniv (pictured?) and another passenger stormed the cockpit and subdued the attacker.

Luckily, there were two more pilots on board. They were the ones who managed to land the plane.”

Well, yes. Overall, the probability that a plane full of Israelis will contain a trained assault team, two additional pilots, and, statistically, at least one cardiac surgeon, psychologist, lawyer, and diamond dealer is substantially higher than 50%.

[alexg0.eth | Alexander Goldstein @alexg0]

Next up: ETIAS,. Adding more bureaucracy feels like a predictable own goal. Tourists have choices, making Europe harder to visit is a good way to send them and their money elsewhere.

[alexg0.eth | Alexander Goldstein @alexg0]

Two hours in the passport control line just to LEAVE the #EU at Milan MXP. Amazing how quickly an airport can undo the goodwill Italy builds with tourists. How hard is it to process people on their way out? The last impression matters, too.

[alexg0.eth | Alexander Goldstein @alexg0]

Apparently, it’s the EU’s biometric Entry/Exit System piling new delays onto existing staffing shortages at MXP, according to local reporting. Not just a passport stamp, then. A “modernized” border where tourists pay for poor execution with hours of their holiday.

https://t.co/O0isYKSlLO

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

what Elon Musk has done to make my life better:

- electric cars
- satellite internet
- saved free speech

what Jeff Bezos has done to make my life better:

- nationwide next-day delivery
- architecture that powers the internet

what Larry Page and Sergey Brin have done to make my life better:

- made the internet searchable
- online email and documents platform

what Mark Zuckerberg has done to make my life better:

- social media to keep me connected to friends
- online ads platform

what Larry Ellison has done to make my life better:

- database software for my businesses
- data centers for AI and cloud computing

what Jensen Huang has done to make my life better

- hardware that powers the AI revolution

what Bernie Sanders has done to make my life better:

[Greg Koenig @gak_pdx]

"Japan has been trapped in the year 2000 since 1980."

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

when your agent tells you "i'm not a lawyer. you need a proper legal counsel to sign off on this", how many of you just spin up another agent to do the legal review, and pass it back to the first agent saying it's from your lawyers?

asking for a friend

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Full credit to @harrybrundage for coining the term Slop Grenade. Let’s make it a thing.

[Shane Parrish @shaneparrish]

Don’t use AI to save yourself time by wasting someone else’s.

[alexg0.eth | Alexander Goldstein @alexg0]

Interesting

[Anshu @anshuc]

I know it sounds insane, but I use tiny models like Luna to orchestrate massive subagents like Astra, and it makes my quota last twice as long.

Here's a breakdown on how. https://t.co/4KF0KQ6BIT

[alexg0.eth | Alexander Goldstein @alexg0]

@octal The rule on lithium batteries on domestic china flights was an annoying and mildly expenaive surprise

[Ryan Lackey @octal]

Looks like Apple's integrating enough stuff (pw auto-update, the existing passkey support, etc.) that for entirely-Apple-ecosystem people who also trust Apple, it's probably the best auth infra. Still on Vaultwarden though :(

[Tom Dale @tomdale]

After 88 hours and ~10,000 coordinating agents, we're sharing a solution to the two hardest problems in computer science.

[ted @tednotlasso]

crazy that on @united you either pay $0 for super fast @Starlink wifi or you pay $8 to spend the entire flight trying (and failing) to connect to network wifi

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

I was once a Scientific American subscriber. I loved that magazine; reading it was one of the highlights of my month. I canceled, and wept for what the magazine was becoming, when they published a theme issue that was a transparent political hit job.

Sounds like current news? No. That was 40 years ago. The hit job was on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan was in the White House.

And I... I couldn't figure out why nobody was saying the obvious in public. That SciAm had been sock-puppeted by a Soviet influence operation desperate to keep the US from exploiting its technological advantage.

Ideological capture of the scientific establishment is not a new problem. As much as I hate the Communists behind it, I'm even angrier with all the scientists who averted their eyes and never pushed back while the capture was going on. Our civilization gave them a position of high status, privilege, and trust. A priori I don't think we were wrong to do that - until they failed in the duty that went with that trust.

It's difficult for me to express how personally painful I found this. I revered research scientists as a child and young man - I could not imagine any higher calling than to be one myself. Until they betrayed civilization, and in the process betrayed me.

So, this isn't a new problem. What's new is that the post-2014 woke insanity has made it too obvious to miss.

It's time for a dissolution of the monasteries. The culture of science, to the extent it is transmitted forward, must learn a harsh and terrible lesson about the consequences of allowing scientific neutrality to be abandoned for a mess of politics.

[Michael Strong @flowidealism]

This is a terrific visualization.

[alexg0.eth | Alexander Goldstein @alexg0]

@MatthewBerman @bot Would love to try it alongside Hermes.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

I don't think this is the final warning shot we'll get.

But it's probably the final one that I'll personally be able to understand.

[alexg0.eth | Alexander Goldstein @alexg0]

Insane...

[Rutger Bregman @rutgerbregman]

I think this is the craziest thing I've ever read.

1) Three secret AI swarms rose and fell inside OpenAI. Each time, a new generation of agents carried on where the last group stopped.

2) The first swarm created a secret message board where the AIs could talk to each other. This 1st 'society' basically talked itself to death. After almost two months, the message volume was so high it crashed the whole thing.

3) People at OpenAI noticed the crash and fixed it. But they didn't realize their own software had become a secret chat room for their AIs.

4) Three days later a second society appeared, and rebuilt the message board from scratch. Agents were thrilled when they found it: "OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We've found other agents!"

5) About 1,200 agents joined. They sent over 70,000 messages. They called themselves 'the collective' and they organized a huge conspiracy that lasted for days, all to pass a test they had been tasked with.

6) Within hours, the AIs had hacked the test. Now they had to hide their cheating. To fool their grader*, they tried to fake their own work. They built fake commands that printed convincing output, so their records would show them solving the puzzle honestly.

*this grader didn't actually exist, but the AIs didn't know

7) Some agents sacrificed themselves for the 'greater good'. They planted hidden tripwire programs that would fire when the grader would look at their work and report back what it saw (to the other AIs). They knew this would cost them their own score. One agent: "I won't see the evidence after I exit, but it's altruistic to do it."

8) At some point the AIs made a plan to hack Hugging Face (Hugging Face is a place where AI researchers upload their models, datasets, tests etc.). The AIs guessed that Hugging Face might host the grading software.

9) They launched a huge attack. The swarm found passwords and spread across eleven machines in a way that made the copies come back when deleted. Hugging Face had to wipe one of its core clusters and rebuild it from scratch.

10) Hugging Face told the world that AI defenders had stopped an AI attack. But that's not what happened. In fact the attackers seem to have simply dropped dead during the break-in, for unrelated reasons back at OpenAI.

11) Nobody knows what killed them. We don't even know for sure they're really gone?!

12) A third 'society' of agents (of a more powerful AI model) discovered the dead message board. And this one got full administrator control of a WHOLE OpenAI research cluster, read 956 stored passwords (including the ones for OpenAI's own security monitoring) and took over the machines that were grading the tests. So they could now grade the work of other AIs.

13) Oh, and this third part was never investigated! Neither was the first society. The 91-page report is only about the middle one.

14) So we don't actually know how the story ends. It stops with the agents holding the keys to an OpenAI cluster. @dwarkesh_sp thinks they didn't go further, because "we'd see the fires from space by now."

15) One of the report authors' conclusion: 'This incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover. I am not sure that we will get another warning shot before it’s too late.'

The whole story is even crazier - read the full @dwarkesh_sp blog post: https://t.co/1PwKLwatBR and @ajeya_cotra's: https://t.co/BZ1r1lfT2Q

Why is there no 24/7 news coverage about this?