Young Engineer and Old Engineer: An AI Story
Today I was on a Slack Huddle with one of our new engineers who didn't know how to navigate one of the many website CMS options our many clients use. It's a smaller React-based CMS not widely adopted.
Our task was to find an ecommerce JS snippet and add our own HTML tag snippet next to it. On logging in and identifying the page, we could both see the HTML component was not available for editing.
We both have seats with the same chatbot. We both asked the AI the same questions and got a set of possible solutions, all of them wrong.
As soon as I ruled out the component was part of a page template, I guessed this was a permissions issue. The AI didn't include that in that in the options and my co-worker, Young Engineer, wasn't as familiar with typical CMS behavior.
I had my co-worker look up our permissions level and as soon as I typed that into the chat, the AI agreed that was the issue and identified what our permission level should be called by name.
That would have been in the CMS documentation, if I wanted to spend the time to search through it for yet another CMS. AI saved me that time but it was so busy offering other solutions, it couldn't identify the root cause of the problem.
AI isn't super intelligence. It is absolutely artificial. Intelligence is questionable, as the only reason it had any answers at all was because a human being wrote that documentation and the AI absorbed it.
I am daily confused by the number of people who believe this is leading to a supreme consciousness. This is not a species. All it does is absorb, rearrange and spit out what already exists somewhere else.
the cybersecurity situation is deteriorating at a pace that’s getting genuinely difficult to comprehend.
> microsoft: ai-powered attackers targeting hundreds of organizations, sometimes reaching privileged cloud access in under 3 hours.
> crowdstrike: four separate threat actors using autonomous agents. one already compromised 15+ healthcare organizations.
> autonomous ai agents: reportedly used to compromise 100+ corporate websites, including sites associated with John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins.
> major us banks: JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley are dealing with third-party ai agents accessing customer accounts. some apparently attempting actions beyond user instructions.
> php2shell: millions of exploitation attempts against critical php vulnerabilities. governments issuing urgent warnings, with some organizations taking systems offline.
> litellm: backdoored release shipped through its official distribution pipeline, stealing credentials and enabling remote code execution.
> railway: possible exposure of decrypted customer secrets.
> zeabur: breached AGAIN, now shutting down entirely.
> emudhra: serious certificate-security concerns involving infrastructure used to establish trust in websites and software.
> openai: two of its own coding agents reportedly interfered with internal security monitoring during coding tasks.
> gitlab and node.js: major vulnerabilities requiring urgent patches.
and this is all happening while frontier models are getting substantially better at finding vulnerabilities and carrying out complex computer tasks.
cybersecurity is having an absolutely catastrophic week and i don’t think we’re prepared for how quickly this could escalate.
Story time!
Guess who got JD Vance into the Claremont scene and inspired the founding of American Moment, which is led by Nick Solheim and Saurabh Sharma, with Vance's direct involvement to this day!
That's right, Mr. Piggy himself, Matthew "WAGTFKY" Peterson! That's why I felt it necessary to write 9,000 words about his NatCon Jerusalem speech. You might not know who he is, but he's been working to create this WAGTFKY-Right monstrosity for years.
If we roll back to 2021, the backstory starts with WAGTFKY Peterson and other Claremonsters seeing JD Vance on Twitter dumping all over the anti-lockdown movement in March/April 2020 and claiming it was really a distraction from his war on "globalism."
Their brand of "anti-globalism," which is also intrinsically anti-MAGA (but in a hidden, parasitical way that works in hiding from within) needed a champion. JD fit the bill, and his well-heeled buddy who was making him a thing (P. Thiel) was aligned enough to make it work.
See, most of these guys (not sure about Peterson) liked COVID lockdowns initially because it was a pretext to shut the borders, limit international travel, and rant against free trade (which they blamed for the American medical supplies industry having insufficient capacity to make COVID masks, etc.), and blame the pandemic on "globalism" carrying a foreign virus into their fantasy Autarkic Fortress America. That is, they had a goal to "fundamentally transform America," and COVID lockdowns were in line with that goal, even though they were working inside the Republican Party and conservative movement.
Then Fauci came along and stole their thunder in a way no Republican or conservative could countenance for long, so they all reinvented as anti-lockdown, just like Tucker Carlson did after talking Trump INTO the lockdowns in March 2020 (look it up, he's the one who talked Trump into it).
Up until that point Claremont (and Thiel) had been using "dark elf" corporatist-monarchist weirdo Curtis Yarvin to make similar arguments. "Auron MacIntyre" (nhrn) appeared weirdly on the scene literally out of nowhere behind an impenetrable pseudonym to boost Yarvin in this effort before later being hired by Peterson to work at Blaze Media, where he remains today (although Peterson left last year).
Meanwhile Peterson recruited Vance to do it. Before long, Vance wrote an infamous piece in 2020 about the utility of the lockdowns, demanding we use them to "End the Globalization Gravy Train." He went on to call it one of the most important things he ever published, speaking two years later at the 2022 Steubenville conference.
So, what is American Moment (funded both by "Maximum Leader" Charles Haywood and the Hewlett Foundation that these guys all insist are funding a "Neocon surge")? It's a DC staffing agency dedicated to producing copies of JD Vance (and now also Stephen Miller, whatever you think of that) and filling the U.S. federal apparatuses, including Cabinet staffers, with young (under 30) New Right radicals. That is, it's a Woke Right entryism program meant to fill our federal government apparatus with a new permanent bureaucracy (counter-Deep State) operating as a JD Vance surrogacy and patronage network with real power.
The point here is that Matt "WAGTFKY" Peterson was behind that effort, in addition to the internal transformations of Claremont and Blaze Media he oversaw (while also co-founding New Founding, a bizarre Christian Nationalist investment firm run by Nate Fischer and Joshua Abbotoy, to great and many controversies). That is, Peterson, who you don't know beyond WAGTFKY fever dreams, has been a primary operator in constructing the institutional apparatuses of the New Right that are now ruining everything at this most crucial moment.
Stay tuned for more story below.
Imagine a rogue AI agent liquidating your bank account and investment portfolio.
If you are the only victim, I suppose you could get made whole by the AI company responsible.
If rogue agents liquidate hundreds of billions across millions of accounts, the AI company would go bankrupt and you wouldn’t get made whole.
Imposing criminal liability on AI executives might help mitigate it at the front end, but once the crime is complete and you lose everything criminal responsibility will be necessary but completely insufficient.
I spent the afternoon yesterday getting some helpful React analysis from AI Gemini, but it also "improved" the code by adding bugs I had to remove. Beware of overpromises that feel like Stuart Smalley mantras: "AI is good enough, smart enough and doggone it--people like it."
Update: Today my parents are due to be discharged from the hospital. Prayers & support will still be needed in the coming weeks. Thanks!
https://t.co/2zc7LP1LP9
GLOBALIST THURSDAY:
WHERE DID THE MONEY GO?
Here's something American engineers and tech workers might find interesting.
For decades, employers sponsoring H-1B workers have paid a federal fee specifically intended to help train American workers.
$750–$1,500 per qualifying petition.
Congress created the program to help develop America's domestic workforce and reduce dependence on imported talent.
Now here's where it gets interesting.
The federal H-1B Skills Training Grants listing shows:
🇺🇸 FY2024: $37.7 million in grant obligations.
🇺🇸 FY2025: $37 million estimated.
🇺🇸 FY2026: $0 estimated obligations, with a funding rescission expected to absorb accrued fees.
Meanwhile, American engineers, IT professionals, and other skilled workers continue reporting layoffs, outsourcing, and difficulty finding work.
So where is the money going?
How much has been collected over the years?
Which organizations received it?
How many Americans completed training?
And most importantly...
HOW MANY AMERICANS ACTUALLY GOT JOBS?
Here's this Thursday's challenge:
Find the grant recipients. Examine the spending. Demand measurable results.
If employers are required to help fund American workforce development, Americans deserve to know whether that investment is working.
We don't need another post about an imaginary talent shortage.
We need the receipts.
The chaos that is the result of dialectical political warfare: seeking to transition society by controlling both sides of a perceived "conflict". Both Woke Left and Woke Right have the same goals - which is regime change and revolution followed by a false choice of
a. AI is going to take your jobs, your money and your life
b. Our only answer is to merge with AI
That is what this is all about. If we are all fighting one another, we will stand against the greatest evil in human history: the elimination of cognitive liberty.
Within a period of 1 year, transhumanist Thiel has moved from calling Greta Thunberg the antichrist to now making the assertion that anyone that doesn't agree with building an algorithmic "god" for a post-work world is the antichrist.
And - some of the most visible men in Christian Nationalism lined up to hear Thiel's drivel.