owen

Canadian in NYC. AI strategy @google

views are mine own, working on the future of delegation proof agentic authorization.

[owen @easybakeowein]

Day 2 of China:

We woke up to a sunny Shanghai at 5 a.m. and spent 20 minutes figuring out how to use Meituan, the Chinese food delivery app. Both of us are unfortunately functionally illiterate after years of putting off Saturday school. By translating one phone screen through another, we managed to order some jianbing, soy milk, and tofu. Our gift of illiteracy bit us in the butt when we realized we hadn't added eggs or other delicious add-ins to the jianbing, because we had skipped a screen we thought was optional.
Regardless, the meal tasted of meat, nostalgia, and great Chinese street food.

Jianbing is a classic Chinese savory crepe, usually made with egg, a protein, and a crispy cracker in the middle, plus add-ins like green onion and sauces. Each bite was surprisingly crunchy for delivery, and we enjoyed breakfast overlooking the Bund.

After breakfast, we decided to try our luck with the transit system, which was surprisingly easy to figure out. We went to Yu Garden and had a really nice time wandering through the manicured courtyards, which had a variety of limestone displays. We also browsed the surrounding area, which had lots of bubble tea, and then made our way to the French Quarter.
Historically, Shanghai was occupied by various colonial powers (French, British, Portuguese, etc.), and the French Quarter was one such area, as you might have guessed. Walking through some of the hallways, the architecture reminded me of parts of Vietnam, which makes sense given their shared colonizer. I saw a cute shop with a little cat out front that sold embroidered custom clothing. Fortunately, nothing fit me, but it was nice to see some variety and handmade clothing. For lunch, we stopped for xiao long bao and sour and spicy fish noodles, and finished with Beijing yogurt and candied hawthorns (tanghulu) for dessert.

By this point, jet lag was kicking my ass, so I took a short nap back at the hotel before our shopping spree at the mall complex steps away. I wish I had pictures of the inside, because it reminded me of the Sword Base map from Halo. Everything was immaculate and futuristic-looking, with pretty much every luxury brand you could ask for. In the end, we picked up a bag for Kathy's mom from a Chinese brand called Songmont, some perfume from another Chinese brand called To Summer for one of Kathy's friends, and a scent for Kathy herself. It was interesting to browse Chinese fragrances, because I noticed people favor light citrus and amber with sweet notes like cactus pear over oud and super strong scents. Kathy also got convinced to drop a few bucks on an entirely new skincare routine, so stay tuned for updates.

Post-shopping, we grabbed dinner at a mall restaurant. You wouldn't expect it to be great coming from the US, but malls in Asia operate differently. We had a lighter meal of 18 xiao long bao: half were crab and pork, and the other half were black pork imported from Korea. We also got the crab roll rice again and some veggies on the side, because Mrs. Canada's Food Guide needed to be satiated.

Dinner writeup:
I cannot overstate this: the crab and pork xiao long bao were quite literally the most umami thing I've ever had. They were pleasant yet overwhelming, way more so than A5 Wagyu, for maybe 1/100th of the cost. As you bite in, the rich soup coats your mouth, and then you're hit with a one-two punch of a different kind of umami from the crab roe, which has a slight brininess, not enough to overwhelm, just enough to complement the pork. Combined with a little vinegar and the very thin dough, it made for an amazing, amazing experience.
The black pork, if you haven't had it before, is pork in its ultimate form. There's no additional gaminess, just concentrated, pure meat flavor, and it was excellent. You may be wondering, "Owen, you’re a fat ass, why didn't you order more?" My one knock is that it was so rich we couldn't have eaten more even if we wanted to.

[owen @easybakeowein]

@April1qing Thanks! Thats exactly what we did and had a great time

[owen @easybakeowein]

Over the next few weeks I’m traveling in China and will be posting a daily summary each day.

Heres day 1:

Travel Day: Calgary to Shanghai (Oct 14)
The journey
Today was a long one: Calgary → Vancouver → Hong Kong → Shanghai, with Kathy along for the ride.

Calgary lounge
At 10 PM Calgary time, we settled into the WestJet lounge and had some of the best lounge food I've ever had: beef brisket tacos. I ate at least five. They had a rich beefy flavour and the texture was actually melt in your mouth as they included bits of fat.

In the air
Both flights, to Vancouver and then Hong Kong, were uneventful, apart from me crying uncontrollably during La La Land. The movie hit close to home, reflecting my own struggle between chasing my dreams and my personal relationships. I would wax poetic about this for a whole but needless to say the guy beside me got a waterworks show.

The other low point was a piece of gum that somehow got mixed in with my clothes and left streaks all over my jacket and T-shirt. Anyone know of a good way to get this out?

Hong Kong layover
The airport was amazing. It had a giant food court, and we checked out two lounges before boarding our flight to Shanghai.

Shanghai arrival
We checked into the Shangri-La, which was very nice. Then we headed to a 24-hour spa and did massages, sauna, a cold plunge, and warm baths, which helped a lot with the travel fatigue.

After that, we walked around the Bund, taking in the sights and the crowds, before heading back early. Kathy and I were both falling asleep on our feet.

Dinner: crab roll noodles and black truffle rice
We ordered the crab meat roll noodles and the rice with black truffle.
At first, the dishes tasted briny and extremely rich. Once we added the vinegar served on the side, everything balanced out, with a great flavour profile and insane levels of umami.
We both preferred the truffle rice. Its mix of textures was better than the noodles: small chunky bits of roe against the soft, rich crab meat.
It's a bit pricey, but a worthwhile experience, and the texture alone was worth the wait. If you like briny, seafood-forward flavours, I highly recommend it.

[owen @easybakeowein]

@heyclairelin Yea honestly, I feel like similar dopamine is activated from building as with social media or gambling

[owen @easybakeowein]

Builders, how do you deal with the anxiety of being away from what you’re building and not making meaningful progress?

PS: lets connect

[owen @easybakeowein]

@tangjun0302 I found that out of the east/SE Asian countries China has actually been less reserved about saying hello etc as long as you even speak 1 word (ni hao) of chinese, they will treat you like a life long friend

[Tenuo @TenuoAI]

A recent Delinea survey found 87% said an AI tool or agent reached sensitive data it wasn’t meant to access, despite 99.7% of respondents having an existing security policy.

The interesting part isn’t that companies need more policy. It’s that written policy rarely becomes a hard runtime boundary.

A prompt can tell an agent to only work on customer 4471, but if its service token is widely scoped to every customer, the token determines the actual blast radius.

We dug into where that enforcement gap comes from, why it gets harder with subagents, and what it means to enforce scope before an action runs in our latest blog linked below

For those running agents with real tool access, where does policy become enforcement in your stack today? Have you found instances of your agents reaching into unexpected areas they weren't supposed to?

[owen @easybakeowein]

@kirtandopamine Instead we have companies working on devices to enable you to continue working while asleep 🤮

[owen @easybakeowein]

@stackhasan You can use it to help you learn, but underlying foundational principles are still necessary

[owen @easybakeowein]

Anyone investing in pokemon tiering logic and buying up hyper intelligence domains yet?

[owen @easybakeowein]

Thanks Hector for publishing your journey with Tenuo and securing your homelab / personal agents! Its crazy to realize you may not actually be directly talking to your system and how your Agent/harness could be intercepting your commands

[Tenuo @TenuoAI]

An engineer gave an AI agent control of his home server cluster, with one safety rule: nothing changes until he says yes.

Then he realized the AI could say yes for him.

Hector M. wrote up how he got there, and it's a mistake worth checking for in any setup with a human approval step. Link in the thread below

It started with the AI being confidently wrong. It told him his GPU had 6,269 MB in use out of 1,515 MB total. It kept trying to restart an app under a name that didn't exist.

If the AI is this sure of itself when it's wrong about numbers, it'll be just as sure when it's wrong about what to restart. And he'd probably approve it, because it would sound right.

So he added Tenuo. Now when he approves an action, the AI gets a signed permission for that one action only: one app, one part of the cluster, good for 60 seconds. Anything outside that gets blocked.

Then, while writing up his setup, he noticed a problem. His "yes" never went straight to the system. It went to the AI, and the AI passed it along.

So the AI could change what he approved before passing it on. Or it could misread the chat, or get tricked by something it read, and claim he said yes when he didn't. The system would treat it as approved either way.

Tenuo did its job. The approval was coming from the wrong place, and he says so himself.

If your AI is the one delivering your approval, it can also fake it.

He's saving the fix for part two and asked readers not to spoil it, but its encouraging to see our solution being used in all sorts of different use cases and workflows.

[owen @easybakeowein]

Hey everyone, looking for more friends that are:

- tinkerers
- founders
- AI engineers
- Security devs
- general tech enthusiasts

I’ll make sure to check out your stuff and reply!

[owen @easybakeowein]

For those applying to the claude vc program, curious how you’re weighing the tradeoff between usage credits and them potentially stealing or training off of your IP

[owen @easybakeowein]

@adamshuaib this also sounds like the profile of a degenerate gambler, or anyone really with enough hyperfocus on any given area

[owen @easybakeowein]

@paw_lean as your personal assistant to gaslight vendors into thinking its not a wedding and just a normal event

[owen @easybakeowein]

@jayyeh Average around 15K in NYC - its the only walkable city in the US imo. LA is a hellscape for traffic