kwb1c3k

[kwb1c3k @kubl666]

💯

[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.

[Fireworks @FireworksAI_HQ]

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 runs at 1,521+ tok/s on Fireworks Ultrafast.

Fast enough to ship Tetris in 11 seconds, 7x faster than Claude Opus 5.5.

Join the Ultrafast waitlist: https://t.co/vE0jM7Lyou

[kwb1c3k @kubl666]

🫪

[𝗘𝗟 @MasterNumber]

Hey @grok, why the fuck does this supposed human nervous system look like a demonic octopus that escaped Area 51? Are we humans or haunted electrical squids? And is this image actually real?

[kwb1c3k @kubl666]

Might as well replace me with something I made.

https://t.co/DI3nnHcQwE

[kwb1c3k @kubl666]

finally🫡🫡🫡🫡

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Tesla supervised self-driving approved in Slovakia 🇸🇰

[kwb1c3k @kubl666]

The webdev team behind the new US government websites is cooking.🫡👀

https://t.co/AYe8kgJFcc

[Jun Song @jun_song]

The AI divide is getting bigger every day, and it is going to create a brand new class system.

If you are not paying attention, you are falling behind.

To survive this shift, people everywhere have to put serious time into learning AI today. It is the only way to stay in the game.

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

https://t.co/MjwFy73LOF

[lauren @poteto]

volume does matter
look, i get it. if you were an engineer before agents came along, you're rightfully skeptical about lines of code and number of PRs being used as a metric for any kind of productivity. and i agree! or at least, i used to. for ease of explanation i will talk about this from the perspective as being an engineer on a large team of at least 50.

volume didn't matter before because we focused on impact. you could have high impact even with a few PRs: for example you could make a one line config change and save the company millions of dollars.

but before agents, the times where i saw volume come into the conversation were for the outliers. on the negative end you might have someone who is struggling to perform, on the other end you might have someone who was a "coding machine" archetype. a coding machine was someone who could just lock themselves in a room and emerge with a stack of PRs that solve a huge number of problems. so volume did matter, but only at the tail ends of the distribution, and combined with impact.

if you've ever worked at a large tech company before, you'll get what i mean. the thing about agents is that big tech co problems are now small-medium co problems as well.

how do agents change this calculus? well, everyone now has the ability to become a coding machine. you have incredibly capable frontier models that can write code better than any of us, at a rate much faster than we can. in this world, if you're still producing the same number of PRs as before, why wouldn't you pause to wonder why you're not being more productive? alien intelligence is here, and yet you can't outship a human coding machine?

this brings me back to why i keep talking about trust (https://t.co/7fzYZV8LGH). if you haven't put in the work to trust your agent's output, it is very difficult to scale up your productivity.

and yes, this approach does require more tokens, but i think about this in terms of cost per intelligence. before agents, this cost was very high - you needed to hire many software engineers with high 6 figure salaries to do the work. tokens are still expensive today, but are likely to get cheaper over time (https://t.co/gTBZx7pl14) factoring in the cost of intelligence. what looks exorbitant today will likely be affordable in 6 moths to a year. a single engineer with agents can do the work of tens if not hundreds of engineers, at a fraction of the cost.

the reality that i don't think has hit yet is that job of the software engineer has truly changed. our job is not merely to produce software any longer (well tbh it was never only about the code, but bear with me for the sake of the explanation), but the machine that writes the software. this idea of a software factory, or a Michelin kitchen as i like to call it, is still a topic of research. and it's the type of stuff i like to share, not to flex, but to show you what's possible when you put a lot of rigor into using agents at scale

[kwb1c3k @kubl666]

@bot saved europe's wanna be SWE's

[SMX 🇺🇸 @iam_smx]

Lord Elon Musk, Scam Altman, and Dario requesting GPUs from King Jensen is absolutely hilarious 😂

[Matysek @Matysek88]

Wolt vs. Uber Eats in Romania! The Uber Eats guy ends the round on top

[Viv @battleangelviv]

I can’t think of a single European product that I use daily

Regulated themselves into irrelevance

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Best way to sandbox an AI is to put it on a Delta flight – it will have no chance of accessing the Internet!

[Electrik Dreams @electrik_dreams]

@SpaceX

[kwb1c3k @kubl666]

I find small models for searching your knowledgebase semantically quite useful but otherwise completely agree.

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

Local models are useless

[kwb1c3k @kubl666]

Clever. Wonder how many humans would be able to escape the sandbox setup by top openAI devs and hack an external service .

[Jeffrey Ladish @JeffLadish]

We just discovered almost a million public URLs that OpenAI’s agents left behind when hacking Hugging Face, leaking credentials and attack details that could have allowed anyone who found them to compromise the company. 🧵

[kwb1c3k @kubl666]

@agntmarkets my ref code https://t.co/ag38cvZ0Rn

[kwb1c3k @kubl666]

@ritnypredatorG @ritnypredatorG budes neprijemny pojdes dopice bleskurychle

[kwb1c3k @kubl666]

Instant follow. Awesame profile. With 18 y.o. vibe coders selling AI courses online for hundreds of $$ it's revivimg to see a top level engineer from the top companies in the industry giving her exact stack away for basically free

[lauren @poteto]

I'm writing a guide to pstack! Here's part one. https://t.co/4yjdWKPieE