Hack n fcuk

gm sers, sell the dip

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

Concerning the Microsoft Outlook outage.

I am a senior engineer at Microsoft.

Wednesday I let an intern push to production.

On their third day.

Without a code review.

Because Copilot wrote it.

And Copilot doesn't make mistakes.

That's what the marketing said.

The intern asked Copilot to "make the emails go faster."

Just like that.

In plain English.

Copilot understood.

Copilot always understands.

Until it doesn't.

The code optimized the email queue.

It optimized it to zero.

Zero emails. Zero latency. Zero function.

Technically flawless.

365 million users. Zero messages.

The intern looked at me.

I looked at the dashboard.

The dashboard was green.

Green means healthy.

Healthy means we changed what healthy means.

At 2:30 PM ET, Outlook stopped outlooking.

SharePoint stopped sharing.

OneDrive stopped driving.

Defender stopped defending.

The intern asked if they should rollback.

I said "we don't rollback vibes."

Vibes are forward-only.

That's the philosophy.

I learned it from a podcast.

The podcast was sponsored by Copilot.

Someone on the SRE team tried to escalate.

Via Outlook.

The escalation is still pending.

In the queue.

With 365 million other emails.

Waiting to be optimized.

The root cause analysis began.

We asked Copilot to investigate.

Copilot investigated Copilot's code.

It found no issues.

Very thorough.

Very objective.

The investigation was AI-powered.

The bug was AI-powered.

The denial was AI-powered.

Synergy.

The intern's prompt was six words.

"Make the emails go faster please."

They added "please."

Polite.

Copilot appreciated that.

It generated 4,000 lines of code.

Nobody read them.

Reading is legacy thinking.

We vibe now.

Vibing means trusting the machine.

The machine trusts itself.

It's a closed loop.

Very efficient.

Someone asked why the error code was "451 4.3.2."

451 is Fahrenheit.

The temperature at which code burns.

That's not true.

But it felt true.

Around 4 PM.

The intern started crying.

Not because they broke Microsoft.

Because their badge still said "Contractor."

HR hadn't updated it.

HR uses Outlook.

The fix took 8 hours.

The postmortem took 8 minutes.

Postmortems are shorter than incidents now.

Efficiency.

Satya asked for a status update.

I sent it via Teams.

Teams was also having issues.

Unrelated, obviously.

The press asked for a statement.

We said "a recent change impacted multiple Microsoft 365 services."

Change means code.

Impact means destruction.

Services means everything.

But the sentence sounds calm.

Calm is the deliverable.

The intern asked if they'd be fired.

I said we don't fire for innovation.

Innovation means breaking things at scale.

They're getting promoted.

To Senior Vibe Engineer.

It's not a real title.

But neither was "prompt engineer" last year.

And now there's a conference.

I'm doing a panel at Ignite next month.

The topic is "Responsible AI: Lessons in Enterprise Deployment."

I haven't learned any lessons.

But I've learned to call them learnings.

Learnings is plural.

Plural sounds more valuable.

The intern is co-presenting.

Their slide is titled "Move Fast and Break Email."

It's going to kill.

The stock is up 3% today.

Markets don't care about outages.

Markets care about AI mentions.

We mentioned AI 47 times in the press release.

A new record.

Thank you for your patience during this experience.

Patience means you're locked into a 3-year enterprise agreement.

Experience means outage.

We're committed to continuous improvement.

Continuous means it will happen again.

Improvement means we'll have better press releases.

The intern just asked Copilot to "make the servers more reliable."

I should probably check on that.

But I have a meeting.

About AI governance.

The meeting is on Teams.

Teams is working now.

Mostly.

The vibe continues.

[NO CONTEXT HUMANS @HumansNoContext]

This is diabolical

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the VP of Human Resources at a Fortune 500 company.

Last year I banned salary discussions.

I called it "Professional Etiquette Policy."

The handbook now says compensation conversations create "workplace friction."

Workplace friction means employees learning the truth.

HR loved it.

Legal loved it.

The board sent a fruit basket.

Here's how it works.

We pay new hires 47% more than five-year veterans doing the same job.

I call that "competitive market adjustment."

Competitive market adjustment means we'll pay strangers more than we'll pay loyalty.

Marcus has been here eleven years.

He trained six people.

Five of them now make more than him.

The sixth one is his manager.

Marcus got a "non-monetary recognition opportunity" last quarter.

Non-monetary recognition opportunity means a $25 Amazon gift card and a LinkedIn post.

His manager got a Tesla.

When someone asks about raises, we schedule a "development conversation."

Development conversation means we talk about their "growth areas" until they forget why they came.

Growth areas means we've identified reasons to not pay you.

Last month, Sarah from Product mentioned her salary at lunch.

Out loud.

At a table.

With witnesses.

I was alerted within seven minutes.

We have a system.

HR scheduled a "perspective alignment session."

Perspective alignment means we explained that sharing salary information is "toxic behavior."

Toxic behavior is any behavior that costs us money.

We didn't fire Sarah.

That would be illegal.

We put her on a "performance improvement plan."

Performance improvement plan means documented path to termination.

She quit three weeks later.

We called that "self-selecting out."

Self-selecting out means we made you so miserable you left on your own.

We saved her severance.

I put it toward the new wellness program.

Wellness program means a meditation app subscription instead of a raise.

We also added yoga during lunch.

This is our burnout prevention strategy.

Burnout prevention means we acknowledge burnout exists and do nothing about it.

Some employees started a Slack channel.

It was called #fair-pay-discussion.

I found out in forty-three minutes.

We have a system.

I didn't delete it.

That would be obvious.

I asked IT to add me as a silent observer.

This is called "listening to employee feedback."

Listening to employee feedback means surveillance with better branding.

Then I identified the creator.

It was David from Engineering.

David had three promotions in four years.

David had "leadership potential."

Now David has a "development opportunity."

Development opportunity means he's really failing.

I explained this at the all-hands meeting.

I said: "We don't discuss compensation because we respect each other."

I said: "Money isn't everything. Culture is our currency."

Culture is just HR's mood board.

I said: "We're a family here."

We're a family here means no boundaries plus low pay.

Everyone clapped.

They thought I was being sincere.

I was being strategic.

Last quarter, Jake from Finance figured out the spreadsheet.

He realized his entire department was underpaid by 23%.

He printed charts.

He had data.

He asked for a meeting with leadership.

Leadership said yes.

Leadership is very transparent.

Transparent communication means we can't tell you anything, but we'll pretend to listen.

Jake presented for forty-seven minutes.

CFO nodded thoughtfully.

CEO took notes.

I said: "This is very valuable. Your voice matters."

Your voice matters means your voice has been noted.

We'll take it under advisement.

Take it under advisement means forget about it by Thursday.

Jake waited two weeks.

Then a month.

Then he sent a follow-up email.

I replied: "We're exploring strategic options."

Exploring strategic options means panicking.

Also means stalling.

Mostly means stalling.

Jake quit six weeks later.

Took a job paying 34% more.

We posted his role at 41% above his old salary.

Competitive market adjustment.

Someone in the exit interview asked why we didn't just give Jake the raise.

That person is no longer with the company.

They self-selected out.

The numbers are beautiful.

We saved $2.3 million in raises last year.

$847,000 the year before.

This year we're projecting $3.1 million.

The board calls it "operational efficiency."

Operational efficiency means divide and conquer.

I explained our philosophy to a new CHRO at a conference.

She asked: "Isn't this just wage suppression through information asymmetry?"

I said: "We prefer 'compensation culture optimization.'"

She wrote it down.

Employees think it's fair play.

They think everyone else makes the same.

They think asking about money is rude.

We taught them that.

In the handbook.

In the onboarding.

In the "culture-first initiative" videos.

Culture-first initiative means forced return to office.

But also means shaping beliefs.

We are shaping beliefs.

Last week, I overheard two analysts in the kitchen.

One said: "I heard the new guy makes six figures."

The other said: "That's probably just a rumor. They'd never do that."

She's right.

We would never do that.

We would never admit to doing that.

The new guy makes $142,000.

She makes $87,000.

They do the same job.

I smiled.

Sipped my coffee.

Went back to my office.

The system is working.

HR isn't about helping people.

HR is about helping the company look like it helps people.

My bonus last year was $340,000.

I got a plaque that said "People Champion."

It's hanging on my wall.

Right next to the Glassdoor reviews I had removed.

[IT Unprofessional @it_unprofession]

https://t.co/VWSxlk4QdY

[Chase Passive Income @chasedownleads]

I own 25,000 vending machines

They pay me $10 million a month

And it only takes 20 minutes a month to manage it all

The secret?

Learning to lie about your income on the internet

My course will teach you how

[jake @Jakegallen]

You have to do this process.

-Open Zoom settings in your browser (you cannot do this through desktop app)
-Click on "Settings"
-Choose the "Meeting" column
-Select "In Meeting (Basic)"

[Zishan Sami @zishansami102]

Its official!

MakewebAI got acquired for $60k 😇🥳

It's been around ~50 days since launch, 30+ paid users, & 1k+ net revenue.

Listed this on @acquiredotcom for only $18k & got around 60 NDAs, 6 offers, 3 LOIs with competing offers around $50k+

Had to sell since the growth was slow, & I had a short runway left.

Satisfied with the outcome, given this was my first SaaS, solo & bootstrapped and I started doing this only around 6-7 months back.

The primary goal was to learn and get the taste of building zero to one for the whole lifecycle of building a business.

I have learned a lot from this & hope I will be able to apply my learnings and grow out of it.

My focus now will be to build and scale EazySEO.

AMA!

[Paco @paco0x]

Many may not know that creating a new pool on Pendle is permissionless.

Penpie was hacked by passing a fake pool to their `batchHarvestMarketRewards` function

[Adnan Khan @adnanthekhan]

Someone just exploited https://t.co/hSm8iKVvZs with a Pwn Request and added their payloads to the main branch… @stripe

[Dacian @DevDacian]

My first audit @cyfrin thrown into the deep end on a project with 100% test coverage & 2 prev audits.

So far I've found 2 absolutely SICK criticals + many H/M & my teammate also has a bunch of findings.

Looking forward to sharing this STACKED report full of SICK exploits!

[gkrastenov @gkrastenov]

Bridge Hack List

I will spend some time tomorrow reviewing them

approximately ~$2,000M loss
https://t.co/sQKuqlRwNR

[100proof.org @1_00_proof]

The PoC of the KyberSwap Elastic Pools vulnerability is now available: https://t.co/pX0O8R8jnw

It contains the original exploit and a new test showing that the updated pools are no longer vulnerable.

Thanks for waiting so long.

[Memes For Guys 🤴 @MemesForGuys]

Bro got destroyed by his dad 🗿

[Soren Iverson @soren_iverson]

iMessage group chat TL;DR

[Vyper @vyperlang]

PSA: Vyper versions 0.2.15, 0.2.16 and 0.3.0 are vulnerable to malfunctioning reentrancy locks. The investigation is ongoing but any project relying on these versions should immediately reach out to us.

[Quit @0xQuit]

Looks like Pauly's dev used Solady's MockERC20, a token designed for internal testing, to build their token.

https://t.co/qRfNZXtMh3

[larry_engineer @larry0x]

IBC has a "hidden" trust assumption that you may not know:

>the destination chain must trust that a packet it receives was generated on the source chain following the mutually agreed upon protocol