Joe Contini

Building @adavia_pathways

[Joe Contini @jcontini]

@LPwizard13435 yes, nonstop today

[Joe Contini @jcontini]

Opus 4.7 definitely became load-bearing

[Joe Contini @jcontini]

@AffordAnything Nooooooo

[Joe Contini @jcontini]

Who’s headed to @stripe sessions this year?

[Zac @Zac_labs]

Singapore’s AI obsession just hit Everest peak.

The Foreign Minister is self-hosting Claude on a Raspberry Pi and building a diplomatic knowledge graph using Karpathy’s LLM Wiki pattern. Wahlao!

SG devs, the minister is coming for your job. And he’s not even using Cursor — he’s on NanoClaw running locally. Can someone git pull his code and give it a test.

Only bad thing? He dropped this on Facebook instead of X. Minister, we need to talk.

https://t.co/JzU3ZeBdPz

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

Latest scam at my store this week: woman comes in to buy Apple gift cards - she wants several thousands dollars worth.

As I am ringing up her first $500 card, I start asking questions like we are supposed to.

Me: buying a lot of cards (she looked sooo nervous) - who are they for?
Customer: A friend
Me: a friend you know in real life or someone you met on the internet?
C: a friend
Me: just asking because a lot of people get scammed. Had a woman cuss me out because I wouldn’t sell her Cards to buy a puppy. Told her to go to a reputable breeder, meet them in person, get her dog. She came back months later to apologize because it was a scam and showed me pics of the dog she bought in person. You aren’t buying a puppy, are you?

C: no, it’s a friend (while twisting her purse straps)

Me: is your friend waiting outside?

C: no.

Me: just asking because I am concerned… just don’t want you to lose money.

She is looking more nervous so, while slowly starting the next Transaction, keep sharing other scams. I also purposely tried to load the card for another $500, knowing our system would reject it because the limit is $750 a day.

The transaction fails. I turn the screen toward her.

Me: sorry, you can’t purchase the second card because our system won’t allow it.

She asks me to repeat that and turns her purse towards me.

Me: one time, I had a lady who seemed nervous who set her purse down and motioned me to come around the counter. She told me the Scammer was on the phone, making sure she did the transaction correctly.

Woman turns more pale and mouths “HE IS ON THE PHONE”

I walk around, set her purse down, pull her away, and she starts crying and spewing out the story!

They told her her bank account was used for money laundering. She withdrew ALL OF HER MONEY from the account and was going to use it ALL to buy Apple gift cards.

They also said her social security number was used and a MARSHALL would be delivering her a new card at her House tomorrow 🙃

I was LIVID! Walked to her purse, pulled out the phone, and said “hello? I have all TWELVE numbers you have been calling from (yes, she hung up multiple times and they kept calling back from other numbers) and she is on her way to the police station AND will be calling the FBI afterwards. If you EVER call her again, I will track you down and kill your dog after I beat you with a stick until you bleed out”. They hung up. And no, I wouldn’t kill a dog!

We couldn’t refund $500 she had already put on the Apple Card but offered to help her contact our customer service and Apple to try to get it back.

She had an Apple phone so also showed how to set up Apple Pay.

She cried more, we talked more, I hugged her, told her how to handle in the future, she was going to call her daughter and let her know what happened.

Asked for another hug and left.

PLEASE talk to your family!! Tell them that despite the “sense of urgency” the scammer uses to make them “do things Right now”, nothing horrible is going to happen if they don’t do what they want in 12 hrs or even 24 hrs.

Take the time to ask someone they trust if the “circumstance” is legit and get help before they lose all of their money!!

I am so tired of seeing people lose all their money to these people!!

[Joe Contini @jcontini]

@raechellambert Same! Here for Stripe Sessions, staying until Sun

[signüll @signulll]

the craziest part now is that the modern computer probably has to be entirely reinvented, from scratch. pretty much like how jobs & co brought apple ii to market.

like not improved. not given a chatbot sidebar or something but really from the ground up like the iphone redefined what it meant to be a pocket computer.

the current paradigm for computers was built around a human staring at a screen, moving a cursor, opening apps, managing windows, naming files, remembering where things live, & manually translating intent into interface actions.

that made sense when the human was the runtime. but in an ai native world, it starts to look kinda ridiculous.

you can see this ridiculousness when you use computer use agents… they are useful sure, but they’re also obviously transitional. they’re teaching ai to operate machines designed for humans, which is clever, but also kind of absurd. it’s like making a robot hand so it can use a doorknob instead of asking why the door needs a knob at all. yes i know humans also need to use a door knob, but maybe in the future humans don’t need to use a computer, or at least what we think of a computer today at all.

this all leads to some interesting questions:

- what is a file when the system understands context?
- what is an app when intent can route itself?
- what is a desktop when work can be decomposed, executed, monitored, & summarized by agents?
- what is a browser when the agent can retrieve, compare, transact, & remember?
- what is an operating system when the primary user is no longer just a person, but a person plus a swarm of delegated intelligences? or no person at all.

the old computer assumed navigation.
the new computer has to assume a new kind of intention. the old computer organized information. the new computer has to try to organize agency.

we’re still in the hacky middle stage at the moment with sidebars, copilots, agents clicking through legacy ui, & automation layers sitting on top of 40 year old metaphors.

the new computer is likely one where memory, context, identity, permissions, tools, agents, & interfaces are native primitives. this means desktop, mobile, browser, apps, files, folders deserves another first principles look.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

Introducing Project Glasswing: an urgent initiative to help secure the world’s most critical software.

It’s powered by our newest frontier model, Claude Mythos Preview, which can find software vulnerabilities better than all but the most skilled humans.
https://t.co/NQ7IfEtYk7

[Josh Kale @JoshKale]

This is big... Anthropic just announced a model so powerful they won't release it to the public out of fear over the damage it will cause 😨

Claude Mythos Preview found thousands of zero-day exploits in every major operating system and web browser...

The numbers are hard to believe:
> $50 to find a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD, one of the most security-hardened operating systems ever built

> Under $1,000 to find AND build a fully working remote code execution exploit on FreeBSD that grants unauthenticated root access from anywhere on the internet

> Under $2,000 to chain together multiple Linux kernel vulnerabilities into a complete privilege escalation exploit

For context: these are the kinds of findings that previously required elite security researchers working for weeks.
Anthropic engineers with no formal security training asked Mythos to find exploits overnight. They woke up to working code the next morning.

The results were so impressive Anthropic assembled Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, and seven other organizations into Project Glasswing:

A $100M defensive coalition. They're not releasing this model publicly. Instead, they're racing to patch the world's infrastructure before models like this proliferate.

[Joe Contini @jcontini]

@BenJames_____ no order link plsfix

[Joe Contini @jcontini]

Sorry if I did this to you

[kepano @kepano]

Obsidian is weird:

- 7 full-time employees
- ~1 million users per employee
- fully remote
- 1 in-person meetup per year
- no scheduled meetings
- no stand-ups
- deep focus is prioritized
- our manifesto guides our product

What works for us may not work for you.

[Erika Lee @erikalee]

"I'm at my limit"

emotional or claude?

[Feross @feross]

🚨 CRITICAL: Active supply chain attack on axios -- one of npm's most depended-on packages.

The latest [email protected] now pulls in [email protected], a package that did not exist before today. This is a live compromise.

This is textbook supply chain installer malware. axios has 100M+ weekly downloads. Every npm install pulling the latest version is potentially compromised right now.

Socket AI analysis confirms this is malware. plain-crypto-js is an obfuscated dropper/loader that:

• Deobfuscates embedded payloads and operational strings at runtime
• Dynamically loads fs, os, and execSync to evade static analysis
• Executes decoded shell commands
• Stages and copies payload files into OS temp and Windows ProgramData directories
• Deletes and renames artifacts post-execution to destroy forensic evidence

If you use axios, pin your version immediately and audit your lockfiles. Do not upgrade.

[Ryo Lu @ryolu_]

when software had a soul

there was a moment around 2005 when using a Mac felt like touching something alive.

the dock bounced. the genie effect swooped. exposé scattered your windows like cards on a table. none of it was strictly necessary. all of it felt like someone cared – not about metrics, but about the feeling of using a machine.

software back then had texture. it had a philosophy. you could feel the person behind it. someone made a decision to make that icon beautiful, to animate that transition just so, to write that error message with a little warmth. apps had personalities. some were weird. some were over-designed in ways that would make a modern PM flinch. but they were alive.

the web was the same. personal sites were genuinely personal. blogs felt like letters. forums had regulars. you knew who made what. the internet had neighborhoods, and each one felt different.

nothing was optimized for scale. things were made by people who loved what they were making.

somewhere along the way, we traded all of that for growth.

A/B tests flattened the edges. design systems standardized the personality out. everything got faster, smoother, more consistent – and somehow less interesting. the quirks were removed because they didn't test well. the warmth got cut because it wasn't measurable. we optimized our way into a world of things that work perfectly and feel like nothing.
now every app looks the same. every interface follows the same patterns. every product speaks in the same calm, frictionless voice, siloed in their own little islands. the humanity got rounded off.

and then came AI agents. and the speed got inhuman.

now you can generate an entire product in an afternoon. ship a feature before lunch. spin up ten variations before anyone's had their coffee. the gap from idea to code is basically zero.

which sounds incredible. and it is. but there's a catch.

when making things are too easy, the slop comes for free too. mediocre things don't look obviously bad – they look fine. they work. they ship. they pass review. and now there are infinite of them. the internet is filling up with software that functions but means nothing. interfaces that are correct but feel dead. products made by agents, reviewed by no one, shipped into the void.

this is the thing that keeps me up at night. not that AI will replace people who care. but that it will drown them out.

here's what I still believe: the best things are made by people who couldn't help themselves. someone who lost sleep over an icon. who rewrote the same line of copy twelve times. who added an animation nobody asked for because it made the thing feel right. that obsession – that's not inefficiency. that's the whole point.

AI doesn't make that irrelevant. it actually makes it rarer and more valuable. taste is not a markdown skill. caring is not a parameter. the weird, specific, "soul" thing you put into something – that can't be programmed into existence.

the path forward isn't to make more slop faster. it's to finally give people with real vision the tools to make the thing they always imagined but couldn't build alone. the designer who had the idea but couldn't code. the kid who saw something nobody else saw. the person who cared too much about something most people wouldn't notice.

if we get this right, we don't get a faster factory. we get a renaissance. more strange, personal, opinionated software made by teams of people who care and mean it.

that's still possible. but only if the people who care get the space and tools to actually express themselves – and don't just hand the wheel to the agent and walk away.

[Joe Contini @jcontini]

https://t.co/GECUv1vzKI

[Joe Contini @jcontini]

@Porkbun @ToastTab @Cloudflare @Namecheap @Porkbun yooo yes!!! Thank you!!!

[Joe Contini @jcontini]

@SurrealBlend hell yeah