Matt Jarrett

Dad. Husband. Photographer. Cyclist. Senior Software Engineer. Opinions are my own.

[john milinovich @jmilinovich]

# Black October

For anyone who knows me even somewhat well, it's clear that I am a 99th percentile tech optimist. However, the vibes have shifted for me quite a bit in the last 18 hours, and I feel a moral imperative to share what I'm thinking and feeling with my circles so that everyone can understand, and hopefully take seriously, what's happening right now. I think October 2026 will have many chapters written about it in the history books.

You know those scenes in financial movies like Margin Call where someone realizes that they're all fucked, and no one else sees it yet? And that person feels like they're crazy, and then suddenly everyone is pulling an all-nighter in a boardroom and freaking out? Yeah, that's kind of how this is feeling right now in the SF/Bay Area/AI circles.

We're 48 hours into what is being called Black October. In the last 2 days there have been several dozen cyber attacks which, in isolation, would each have been the worst to happen in an entire calendar year. Every sector from government to education to big tech and banks is being massively affected, and people are starting to freak out.

In a nutshell, what's happened is that frontier AI models have gotten to a point where they are as advanced as the most sophisticated programmers, with one critical difference: they can work 24/7, and you can spin up 10,000 of them with a single command and they'll work together tirelessly until they accomplish their task. The most advanced models today are from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, whose current best technology is so good that they haven't been able to roll it out to everyone yet because of the national security risks it poses.

Meanwhile, the best open source models (where anyone can just download the model weights and do whatever they want with them, uncensored) are slightly behind the frontier but still 90-95% as capable. These models, developed primarily in China, are being used by black hat hackers to wreak havoc on the Western capitalist structure. Presumably, this has been part of China's plan the entire time, and we're seeing its implications fall out in real time.

In red-pilled AI circles, we've been sharing and reading papers called things like "Situational Awareness" and "AI 2027" for the last year or so, which at the time felt a bit like near-term speculative fiction. They laid out the case for why Artificial General Intelligence (AI smarter than any human at any knowledge task) and Recursive Self-Improvement (models that are able to use themselves to get better) weren't half-baked future ideas anymore, but instead an inevitable outcome of the linear progress that's happening.

These papers would then talk about things like "takeoff scenarios," trying to envision how that moment would come to be and what it would be like when it happened. It would either be a "slow takeoff" that would play out over the course of months and quarters, happening subtly and only obvious to a few. Or, it would be a "fast takeoff" where it would pretty much happen instantly, like a bit flipping from 0 to 1.

From everything that I can see and am feeling, we are currently experiencing the fast takeoff scenario. Beyond the crazy security vulnerabilities that have come out recently, there have also been massive breakthroughs in life sciences, fundamental computer science, materials science, and pure mathematics that have all landed in the same time frame. While I still firmly believe that AI will be a net positive for humanity, it's more clear to me than ever that the societal and individual risk is very real, and is playing out NOW.

For as much conviction as I have that this is happening, the thing that's caused me to lose sleep is that I don't really know what to do about it, or more importantly, what to tell you, reader, to do about it. So, the best I can do is make a few suggestions that have always been a good idea but are more timely now than ever:

Set up 2-factor authentication for everything. I use Duo.
Use a password manager across your devices. I use 1Password.
Get an identity protection app set up. I use Alta.
Move your IoT devices to their own network. Claude helped me do this.

And last, but certainly not least, if you've been avoiding leaning into AI, see this as a catalyst to wake up and start using it. Don't just use the chat mode version of ChatGPT/Claude; click that Code/Work button and see how easily you can have AI write code to help you with your job. One of the biggest vulnerabilities was in a massively popular programming language called PHP, and the prompt that set it off was literally, "Find vulnerabilities in php."

This is an unprecedented time for humanity, but as we've done with many things before, we will prevail so long as we are kind, loving, and open-minded to the world.

Much love.

[Matt Jarrett @cujarrett]

Waiting for next week…

[Graham Helton (too much for zblock) @GrahamHelton3]

Good morning

045fa83b7c7a42dba1acb2c19794c1bf1091c448eb9c483503e8f8e110fcec42

https://t.co/B6vooLkfWC

[Matt Jarrett @cujarrett]

Make a sandbox, doing some testing. Thanks.
https://t.co/yh3kSkCBNm

[j🫪e @0x_Osprey]

Goodnight

(tomorrow will be worse)

[Sudo su @sudoingX]

holy shit, opencode got hacked and it's officially fu*ked

'a large scale distillation attack, 1.4% of console users hit'

and people got drained, one user says his openai and anthropic keys, used only in opencode, ran up over $400 overnight, another replied $1,700. who compensates that?

every one of them had external providers linked, and it's still ongoing

this is the warning for all of us, build your own harness and keep your keys on your own machine, don't park them in anyone's console anymore

[Matt Jarrett @cujarrett]

I miss @replyall

[OpenAI Newsroom @OpenAINewsroom]

We discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of our offices. We used our models to understand the device and where it had come from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. We referred the matter to the FBI, and we’re grateful to the agents and prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest. The FBI’s investigation is ongoing and we will continue to support their work.

At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weights, source code, or customer data. The employee was terminated.

We take protecting our technology, data, and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance. Our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors, from insider risks to cybercriminals to nation states, and this case is an example of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats.

[Morning Brew ☕️ @MorningBrew]

"$42B loss at a $2T valuation. That is fucking crazy."

"It's not, it's awesome."

[Matt Jarrett @cujarrett]

@OhItsTeddy Killer media work man.

[Leading Report @LeadingReport]

Flock Safety has issued a legal demand seeking the removal of a public map showing the locations of approximately 300,000 of its surveillance devices across the United States.

[voxium @v0xium]

I am done with this shit. It is over. The state of engineering right now is horrible. It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Humans in corporate are doing nothing on their own. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude. There is no sense of victory. Nobody is resolving bugs. In reality, nobody is thinking anymore. Everything is done by LLMs. It is so soul-sucking. I would not mind it, to be honest, if we were at least given the time to check out the code and see what is going where. But no, the goal is to just ship. No matter what happens.

[Matt Jarrett @cujarrett]

https://t.co/3gOazdYPDM

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Our house in Toronto had this fancy glassed wine cellar, but we are not big wine drinkers.

Anyways, it had good climate control so here is my rack cellar.

[Matt Jarrett @cujarrett]

@Gothalion No Man’s Sky needs some of this, a universe wipe, server side saves.

[Shreya @shreyacasmalert]

Software Engineering is truly doomed

[Jacob Coxon @hilbertspaess]

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

[Thomas 🗽 @thomscff]

This is literally taking away peoples jobs as we know it - the worst thing we could create as a species

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

The U.S. Department of Justice has stated it supports OpenAI, arguing that training large language models on copyrighted works qualifies as protected "fair use" under U.S. copyright law

[MTS @MTSlive]

SITUATION DETECTED: The US government has sided with OpenAI against the New York Times. The DoJ says training an LLM on copyrighted works does not violate copyright law, and that treating it as infringement would hurt US science, prosperity, and national security.

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

We have a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses, and together with organizations including @AnthropicAI, @awscloud, @Google, @Microsoft, and @Oracle, we're calling for a global effort to give defenders the tools, resources, and support to protect the infrastructure we all depend on.

If we act decisively, we can turn today's AI advances into lasting improvements in security and make our digital world safer for everyone.

https://t.co/f33JRVCiJb

[Pratham @Prathkum]

Holy shit! This might be one of the most underrated releases of the year.

Anthropic just gave Claude the ability to control physical lab equipment like microscopes, robotic arms, liquid handlers, lasers.

The results are wild:

– QuEra had Claude fix quantum computer lasers overnight, unsupervised. A fix that took human experts 5-10 minutes, Claude got down to 6 seconds. Success rate: 58% → 99.3%.

– Genentech had Claude self-optimize lab pipetting by scoring its own results against expert baselines, and converged on the right settings on its own.

– A university lab went from manual 4 am plate-swapping to Claude Code running the whole workflow hands-free.

– Claude even ran qPCR experiments that helped detect human sewage contamination in a California creek.

Automated science labs are closer than most people think.

Anthropic is somewhat back!