Dav

San Francisco hacker-poet. Nelsonian nexialist. 🇺🇸 rugby 7s stan (+🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿, 🇰🇪). Aspiring solarpunk. @dav on

[Dav @dav]

Working

[Bala 🧤 @BalaiBB]

a critical vulnerability was just discovered in PHP. the language that runs 80% of the internet

severity score: 9.2 out of 10. that’s about as bad as it gets

what can an attacker do with this? take full admin control of a server. steal entire databases. passwords, credit cards, payment histories. plant malware and use the server to attack other systems

but here’s the terrifying part that most people missed

the moment the patch drops tonight attackers are expected to use AI to reverse engineer what was fixed within 15 minutes

15 minutes. that’s the window between the fix going live and automated attacks launching worldwide

every online store, booking site, and corporate system running PHP that doesn’t update in those 15 minutes becomes a target

this isn’t just a developer problem. if you’ve ever signed up to a website, entered your card details, or created an account online your data is sitting on servers that might be vulnerable right now

and someone just publicly dropped the working exploit on twitter before the patch was even ready. gave every attacker on earth a head start

engineers worldwide are pulling all-nighters tonight to patch their systems before the attacks begin

change your passwords on any service that matters to you. enable 2FA everywhere. and watch out for fake “maintenance” or “password reset” emails over the next few days

the internet is about to have a very long night

[Dav @dav]

We're doing nifty stuff with computational fluid dynamics and machine learning.

[Stand Insurance @standinsurance]

Insurance built on physics. Here's what's next for Stand. #StandInsurance

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

Very sorry to hear this news. 😥

I never had the chance to meet Margaret Hamilton, but her contributions to the flight software that got us to the moon are legendary. I love this image of her standing next to the printouts of the Apollo code.

[Dav @dav]

@FavioVaz @karpathy This is so my jam, can't believe I never heard of STE before today

[Dav @dav]

@karpathy mentions 3b1b here, I created a plugin for the community fork of the 3b1b animation framework to do software instead of maths, https://t.co/yw4kPLLUpT, and I also have a internal plugin that does the same for our systems. I have claude make videos for my PRs using this.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks:

Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better:

Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better:

Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better:

Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work!

In summary:
- As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding.
- Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.

[Greg Gerber @gerbz]

Once Apple gets Siri right, you’ll regret having given away all your data. You can’t get it back. Patience.

[Dav @dav]

Bruce Schneier's latest (@schneierblog). Great analysis as always. https://t.co/3vW44yqec7 via @YouTube

[Dav @dav]

I agree with the bulk of this. The "astonishing the agents leads to all sorts of bad user surprises" is a new idea to me though, will mull about that. I'm less sanguine about the fact that "the agents in the incident behaved overwhelmingly as [we'd] expect them to" though...

[Jon Stokes @jon_stokes]

https://t.co/UQ3KeMUhHD

[Dav @dav]

@kevin2kelly @mala You might also be interested in this iPhone AR app I recently built and launched. It lets you visualize the Earth’s orbit through the solar system by overlaying a grid of nodes in the sky that we are flying past at 30 km/s.

https://t.co/tplRh2Neap

[Dav @dav]

https://t.co/krbJTZ6H82

Looking forward to penetrating Cyberdelia this weekend

[Dav @dav]

@theageofepoch @rod_mallo Best answer

[Dav @dav]

@auradeluxe Part of the Mondo2000 event at gray area?

[Dav @dav]

@MichaelSocolow For those disappointed, you can start streaming @991thesound from the outer banks

[Dav @dav]

LFG grandma!

[Nerdrotic @Nerdrotics]

May the wings of liberty never lose a feather.

[octopus/caveman @octopuscaveman]

The smartphone really revolutionized the waiting room. Oh I get 20 minutes to look at my phone? Don’t mind if I do. The only problem is sometimes when I’m looking at my phone at home my home starts to feel like a waiting room and I realize it is and I’m just waiting to die

[Dav @dav]

@sarahcuda The only reason I can imagine hating on WBMS now is to scare others away from applying to game the waiting list or racism. It’s a great school. 

[Dav @dav]

@sarahcuda Our first daughter could have been in the 2nd class at new WBMS but we decided it wasn’t quite right yet. 5 yrs later our other daughter went and it was fantastic. Neither used a golden ticket. Both auditioned into school of the arts.

[Kyle 🚄 @KyleTrainEmoji]

PICARD: Data, shields up

DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.

[camera shakes]

WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS

DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't

[Liam Donovan @LPDonovan]

For the uninitiated https://t.co/vXaGmgziSI