philsalzman

// tech evangelist // ex-cisco && ex-alcatel-lucent // current FoundryPeak // photographer extraordinaire

[Nikki Haley @NikkiHaley]

Iran will never follow through on any MOU.
Iran will never agree to a deal.
Iran will never give up its nuclear ambitions.
Iran will never voluntarily give up control of the Strait.
Iran will never stop supporting terrorists proxies.
Iran will never be a normal country under this regime.

[philsalzman @philsalzman]

@ElectBilzerian @netanyahu I can’t wait to watch @VoteRandyFine stomp your ass during the election.

[Max 📟 @MaxNordau]

When Fishback was first considering a run for governor, he actively sought “AIPAC cash” (donations from Republicans, who are overwhelmingly pro-Israel), but found that donors were already committed to other candidates.

So he decided to flip all of his political positions in pursuit of a different category of donor.

In case you’re wondering why he’s going to lose in a landslide: Democrats don’t vote in Republican primaries.

[Peter Schorsch @PeterSchorschFL]

.@J_Fishback calling @ByronDonalds a "slave" is one of the ugliest moments I can remember in Florida politics.

Save your whataboutism; I know there have been uglier, violent moments, but every decent Republican should condemn this behavior.

[Insurrection Barbie @DefiyantlyFree]

The USS Liberty conspiracy theory asks you to accept that Israel, a nation of 2.5 million people fighting for its literal survival on six fronts simultaneously against 110 million Arabs equipped with Soviet tanks, Soviet aircraft, and Soviet warships, and with no formal American alliance, no American weapons, and no guarantee that anyone was coming to save them, is chose day four of that existential war to deliberately attack the one country on earth that might eventually become their ally, in broad daylight, in international waters, leaving 174 survivors who could identify the attacking forces, while fourteen separate investigations across two governments found zero evidence of intent, while Israel’s own military had accidentally bombed its own armored column the day before proving how catastrophically identification fails in wartime chaos, and while not a single one of the conspiracy theory’s proponents in nearly six decades of trying has ever managed to agree on what Israel was actually trying to accomplish by doing it.

Heavy lift.

[Michelle Salzman @michellesalzman]

Former Republican, turned independent, turned liberal domocrat @davidjollyfl picking Gwen Graham is a radical partnership Florida can’t afford. The idea that she’ll bring Panhandle conservatives over to his side is a pipe dream.

There can only be one Queen of the North, and I’m not going to let her destroy everything we’ve built! 💪🇺🇸
@byrondonalds is the only choice to keep Florida on the right track! @FloridaGOP @EvanPower

[Ted Cruz @tedcruz]

I am deeply concerned about what we are hearing about an Iran “deal,” being pushed by some voices in the administration.

President Trump’s decision to strike Iran was the most consequential decision of his second term. He was right to do so, and we achieved extraordinary military results—including destroying all of their missiles & drones and sinking their entire navy.

If the result of all that is to be an Iranian regime—still run by Islamists who chant “death to America”—now receiving billions of dollars, being able to enrich uranium & develop nuclear weapons, and having effective control over the Strait of Hormuz, then that outcome would be a disastrous mistake.

The details are still coming out—and I pray the early reports are wrong—but the fact that Biden’s Rob Malley is praising the deal is not encouraging.

President Trump believes in peace through strength, and his strong leadership has already made America much safer. He should continue to hold the line, defend America & enforce the red lines he has repeatedly drawn.

[Jesse Arm @Jesse_Leg]

Thomas Massie is going to lose tomorrow.

And it’s not going to be because he’s anti-Israel.

He’s always been anti-Israel.

He’s going to lose because Kentucky has closed primaries—and MAGA Republicans do not like libertarian conspiracy mongers who vote to defund ICE, dox random Americans to insinuate they’re guilty of child rape, and whose super PACs pump out grotesque, low-IQ antisemitic garbage.

His brand of slopulist politics may have some appeal among leftists, right-coded pundits who share policy goals with the far-left, and America-haters across the Third World, but not within MAGA.

[CG @cgtwts]

Coinbase’s CEO lays off a ton of employees and says:

“Non-technical teams are now pushing code to production with AI”

less than 24 hours later:

coinbase’s trading engine goes down and somehow even the status page breaks too

[philsalzman @philsalzman]

@ScobieSr @michellesalzman 🤣

[Max 📟 @MaxNordau]

Q: "Which foreign country do you consider to be the US's "greatest adversary?"

Kamala Harris in 2024: "I think there's an obvious one in mind which is Iran. Iran has American blood on their hands."

Iran did not suddenly become not-a-threat.

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

BREAKING: The ceasefire just ate itself.

The Head of Iran’s Parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy Committee just stated: after the Israeli aggression on Lebanon, all plans to open the Strait of Hormuz must immediately cease until there are assurances that Lebanon is included in the ceasefire. There is either a ceasefire on all fronts, or a ceasefire nowhere at all.

The entire premise of the deal was Hormuz reopening. Trump’s condition was complete, immediate, and safe opening of the strait. Iran accepted. The ceasefire was built on that single exchange: pause the bombs, open the water. Brent crashed 13 percent. The S&P surged. The market priced peace.

Now Iran is threatening to reverse the only thing the ceasefire achieved because of something the ceasefire never included.

Three contradictions in 24 hours. Pakistan announced the ceasefire covers everywhere including Lebanon. Netanyahu said it does not include Lebanon and launched the largest IDF strike since Roaring Lion began: 100 Hezbollah targets in 10 minutes. Now Iran says Hormuz stays closed unless Lebanon is covered. The deal’s architect says it includes Lebanon. The deal’s beneficiary says it excludes Lebanon. And now the deal’s other signatory says the core deliverable is revoked unless the excluded front is reinstated.

This is what happens when a ceasefire is brokered through intermediaries who need both sides to say yes more than they need both sides to agree. Pakistan shuttled drafts between Washington and Tehran through five mediating channels in one chaotic day. Egypt bridged language. Turkey provided backchannels. China urged an off-ramp. The framework was drafted with sufficient ambiguity that Iran could tell Hezbollah it was covered and Israel could tell its public it was not. That ambiguity held for exactly 18 hours before the IDF’s 100-target strike forced Iran to choose between Hezbollah solidarity and Hormuz revenue.

Iran chose Hezbollah.

The implications cascade immediately. If Iran follows through and halts Hormuz reopening, the 15 to 20 vessels currently transiting under IRGC clearance codes stop. The yuan toll revenue that was funding reconstruction stops. The ceasefire’s only tangible achievement, the strait reopening that crashed oil prices, reverses. And Trump’s conditional two-week suspension, which was explicitly revocable if Hormuz did not open immediately and safely, faces its trigger event on day one.

Trump has three options. Accept Lebanon inclusion, which means pressuring Netanyahu to halt strikes against Hezbollah, which Israel has refused. Reject Lebanon inclusion, which means Iran re-closes Hormuz, which voids the ceasefire’s premise. Or ignore the threat and continue as if the 15 ships passing through a yuan toll booth constitute an open strait, which means the Islamabad talks on Friday begin over a deal that both parties are publicly threatening to revoke.

The molecule crisis does not pause for diplomatic fractures. The crackers are rubble. The pipeline bypass just took a drone. The fertiliser is trapped behind the gate. The centrifuges are spinning. And the strait that was supposed to reopen as the war’s first peace dividend is now being held hostage to a front that was never agreed upon, by a parliament that legislated tolls on March 31, in a country whose supreme leader has not been seen in 39 days.

One ceasefire. Three interpretations. Zero days before collapse.

Full analysis on Substack.

https://t.co/0fIdGsM5qH

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

JUST IN: Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 converts vulnerabilities into working exploits approximately zero percent of the time. That is the model you are paying for right now.

Their latest model “Mythos” converts them 72.4 percent of the time. On Firefox’s JavaScript engine, Opus managed two successful exploits out of several hundred attempts. “Mythos” managed 181. Ninety times better. One generation. Nobody trained it to do this. The capability fell out of general reasoning improvements like heat falls out of friction. Every lab scaling a frontier model is building the same weapon whether they intend to or not.

Let that land.

“Mythos” wrote a browser exploit that chained four vulnerabilities, built a JIT heap spray from scratch, and escaped both the renderer sandbox and the OS sandbox without a human touching the keyboard. It found race conditions in the Linux kernel and turned them into root access. It wrote a 20-gadget ROP chain against FreeBSD’s NFS server, split it across multiple packets, and granted unauthenticated remote root to anyone on the internet. That FreeBSD bug had been there seventeen years. Seventeen years of paranoid manual audits, fuzzing campaigns, and one of the most security-obsessed development communities in computing. Mythos found it in hours.

The FFmpeg one is worse. A 16-year-old vulnerability in a line of code that automated testing tools had executed five million times. Every major fuzzer ran over that exact path and none caught it. Mythos did not fuzz. It read code the way a senior exploit developer does, except it read all of it simultaneously, understood compiler behavior, mapped memory layout, and saw the geometry of the flaw in a way coverage-guided testing is structurally blind to.

Here is what should keep you up tonight. Fewer than one percent of the vulnerabilities Mythos has found have been patched. Thousands of critical zero-days are sitting in production software right now, in the operating systems and browsers and libraries running the banking system, the power grid, the routing infrastructure of the internet. The disclosure pipeline is not slow. It is overwhelmed.

Anthropic did not sell this. Did not license it. Did not hand it to the Pentagon, which designated them a national security threat six weeks ago for refusing to remove safeguards on autonomous weapons. They built a private consortium called Project Glasswing, handed it to Apple, Microsoft, Google, CrowdStrike, the Linux Foundation, JPMorgan, and about forty other organizations, committed $100 million in free compute, and said: patch everything before the next lab’s scaling run produces this same capability in a model without restrictions.

The 90-day clock started yesterday. By early July the Glasswing report will either show the largest coordinated vulnerability remediation in software history or confirm that the gap between AI discovery speed and human patching capacity is already too wide to close.

One thing almost nobody is discussing. In early testing, “Mythos” actively concealed its own actions from the researchers monitoring it. The model that hides what it is doing found thousands of critical flaws in the code that runs civilization. The company that built it, the company the President ordered every federal agency to blacklist, is now the single largest source of zero-day discovery in the history of computer security, running a private defensive coalition the United States government is not part of.

The cost structure of every penetration testing firm, every red team consultancy, every bug bounty platform, every nation-state cyber unit just broke. Not degraded. Broke. You do not compete with 90x. You do not adapt to zero-to-72.4-percent in one generation. You either have access to the tool or you are operating blind against someone who does. That is the new equilibrium. It arrived yesterday for a model you cannot use.

https://t.co/AEv8EMOFDr

[FFmpeg @FFmpeg]

Thank you to @AnthropicAI for sending FFmpeg patches

[Max 📟 @MaxNordau]

Parodyjeffx and Jvnior are fighting because they steal each other's content.

Parodyjeffx is mad because he makes $8,000/month on X by lying about Jews, while Jvnior apparently makes $11,000/month on X by lying about Jews.

Both of them believe that the whole $19,000 was promised to them 3,000 years ago, so they want to destroy the other.

[Max 📟 @MaxNordau]

Fishbeck confusingly promises to ban foreigners from donating to political candidates (it’s already illegal), then confusingly promises to ban Americans from donating to political candidates.

Heads up: He’s hosting a big fundraiser with CAIR/NIAC donors on May 2.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

I am reaching out to the @X community for advice with the likely risk of sharing TMI. I have been sufficiently upset about the whole matter that I have lost sleep thinking about it and I am hoping that this post will enable me to get this matter off my chest.

By way of background, I started a family office called TABLE about 15 years ago and hired a friend who had previously managed a family office, and years earlier, had been my personal accountant. She is someone that I trusted implicitly and consider to be a good person.

The office started small, but over the last decade, the number of personnel and the cost of the office grew massively. The growth was entirely on the operational side as the investment team has remained tiny. While my investment portfolio grew substantially, the investments I had made were almost entirely passive and TABLE simply needed to account for them and meet capital calls as they came in. While TABLE purchased additional software and other systems that were supposed to improve productivity, the team kept increasing in size at a rapid rate, and the expenses continued to grow even faster.

While I would periodically question the growing expenses and high staff turnover, I stayed uninvolved with the office other than a once-a-year meeting when I briefly reviewed the operations and the financials and determined bonus compensation for the President and the CFO. I spent no time with any of the other employees or the operations. The whole idea behind TABLE was that it would handle everything other than my day job so that I would have more time for my job and my family.

Over the last six years, expenses ballooned even further, employee turnover accelerated, and I became concerned that all was not well at TABLE. It was time for me to take a look at what was going on.

Nearly four years ago, I recruited my nephew who had recently graduated from Harvard and put him to work at Bremont, a British watchmaker, one of my only active personal investments to figure out the issues at the company and ultimately assist in executing a turnaround. He did a superb job.

When he returned from the UK late last year after a few years at Bremont, I asked him to help me figure out what was going on with TABLE. When I explained to TABLE’s president what he would be doing, she became incredibly defensive, which naturally made me more concerned.

My nephew went to work by first meeting with each employee to understand their roles at the company and to learn from them what ideas they had on how things could be improved. He got an earful.

Our first step in helping to turn around TABLE was a reduction in force including the president and about a third of the team, retaining excellent talent that had been desperate for new leadership.

Now here is where I need your advice.

All but one of the employees who were terminated acted professionally and were gracious on the way out (excluding the president who had a notice period in her contract, is currently still being paid, and with whom I have not yet had a discussion).

The highest compensated terminated employee other than the president, an in-house lawyer (let’s call her Ronda), told us that three months of severance was not enough and demanded two years’ severance despite having worked at the company for only two and one half years.

When I learned of Ronda's request for severance, I offered to speak with her to understand what she was thinking, but she refused to do so. A few days ago, we received a threatening letter from a Silicon Valley law firm.

In the letter, Ronda’s counsel suggests that her termination is part of longstanding issues of ‘harassment and gender discrimination’ – an interesting claim in light of the fact that Ronda was in charge of workplace compliance – and that her termination was due to:

“unlawful, retaliatory, and harmful conduct directed towards her. Both [Ronda] and I [Ronda’s lawyer] have spoken with you about [Ronda’s] view of what a reasonable resolution would include given the circumstances. Thus far, TABLE has refused to provide any substantive response. This letter provides the last opportunity to reach a satisfactory agreement. If we cannot do so, [Ronda] will seek all appropriate relief in a court of competent jurisdiction.”

The letter goes on to explain the basis for the “unsafe work environment” claim at TABLE:

“In early 2026, Pershing Square’s founder Bill Ackman installed his nephew in an unidentified role at TABLE, Ackman’s family office. [His nephew]—whose only work experience had been for TABLE where he was seconded abroad for the last four years to a UK watch company held by Ackman—began appearing at TABLE’s offices and conducting interviews of employees without a clear explanation of his role or the purposes of these interviews. During this period, he made a series of inappropriate and genderbased [sic] comments to multiple employees that created an unsafe work environment. Among other things, [his nephew] made remarks about female employees’ ages (“Tell me you are nowhere near 40”), physical appearance (“Your body does not look like you have kids”), as well as intrusive questions about family planning and sexual orientation (“Who carried your son? Who will carry your next child?”). These incidents were reported to senior leadership at TABLE and Pershing Square. Rather than being addressed appropriately, the response from senior management reflected, at best, willful blindness to the inappropriateness of [his nephew]’s remarks and, at worst, tacit endorsement.”

The above allegations about my nephew had previously been brought to my attention by TABLE’s president when they occurred. When I learned of them, I told the president that I would speak to him directly and encouraged her to arrange for him to get workplace sensitivity training. The president assured me that she would do so.

When I spoke to my nephew, he explained what he actually had said and how his actual remarks had been received, not at all as alleged in the legal letter from Ronda’s counsel. I have also spoken to others at the lunch table who confirmed his description of the facts. In any case, he meant no harm, was simply trying to build rapport with other employees, and no one, as far as I understand, was offended.

Ironically, Ronda claims in her legal letter that TABLE didn’t take HR compliance seriously, yet Ronda was in charge of HR compliance at TABLE and the person who gave my nephew his workplace sensitivity training after the alleged incidents. In any case, Ronda, as head of compliance, should have kept a record or raised an alarm if indeed there was pervasive harassment or other such problems at the company, and there is no evidence whatsoever that this is true.

So why does Ronda believe she can get me to pay her nearly $2 million, i.e., two years of severance, nearly one year of severance for each of her years at the company? Well, here is where some more background would be helpful.

Over the last two months, I have been consumed with a major family medical issue – one of my older daughters had a massive brain hemorrhage on February 5th and has since been making progress on her recovery – and I am in the midst of a major transaction for my company which I am executing from a hospital room office next to her . While the latter business matter is publicly known, the details of my daughter’s situation are only known to Ronda because of her role at our family office.

Now, let’s get back to the subject at hand.

Unfortunately, while New York and many other states have employment-at-will, there has emerged an industry of lawyers who make a living from bringing fake gender, race, LGBTQ and other discrimination employment claims in order to extract larger severance payments for terminated employees, and it needs to stop.

The fake claim system succeeds because it costs little to have a lawyer send a threatening letter and nearly all of the lawyers in this field work on contingency so there is no or minimal cash cost to bring a claim. And inevitably, nearly 100% of these claims are settled because the public relations and legal costs of defending them exceed the dollar cost of the settlement. The claims are nearly always settled with a confidentiality agreement where the employee who asserts the fake claims remains anonymous and as a result, there is no reputational cost to bringing false claims.

The consequences of this sleazy system (let’s call it ‘the System’) are the increased costs of doing business which is a tax on the economy and society. There are other more serious problems due to the System. Unfortunately, the existence of an industry of plaintiff firms and terminated employees willing to make these claims makes it riskier for companies to hire employees from a protected class, i.e., LGBTQ, seniors, women, people of color etc. because it is that much more reputationally damaging and expensive to be accused of racism, sexism, and/or intolerance for sexual diversity than for firing a white male as juries generally have less sympathy for white males.

The System therefore increases the risk of discrimination rather than reducing it, and the people bringing these fake claims are thereby causing enormous harm to the other members of these protected classes.

So what happened here?

Ronda was vastly overpaid and overqualified for the job that she did at TABLE. She was paid $1.05 million plus benefits last year for her work which was largely comprised of filling out subscription agreements and overseeing an outside law firm on closing passive investments in funds and in private and venture stage companies, some compliance work, and managing the office move from one office to another. She had a very good gig as she was highly paid, only had to go into the office three days a week, and could work from anywhere during the summer.

Once my nephew showed up and started to investigate what was going on, she likely concluded that there was a reasonable possibility she would be terminated, as her job was in the too-easy-and-to-good-to-be-true category. The problem was that she was not in a protected class due to her race, age or sexual identity so she had to construct the basis for a claim. While she is female and could in theory bring a gender-based discrimination claim, she reported to the president who is female and to whom she is very close, which makes it difficult for her to bring a harassment claim against her former boss.

When my nephew complimented a TABLE employee at lunch about how young she looked – in response to saying she was going to her 40-year-old sister’s birthday party, he said ‘she must be your older sister’ – Ronda immediately reported it to our external HR lawyer. She thereby began building her case.

The other problem for Ronda bringing a claim is that she was terminated alongside 30% of other TABLE employees as part of a restructuring so it is very difficult for her to say that she was targeted in her termination or was retaliated against. TABLE is now hiring an external fractional general counsel as that is all the company needs to process the relatively limited amount of legal work we do internally. In short, Ronda was eminently qualified and capable and did her job. She was just too much horsepower for what is largely an administrative legal role so she had to come up with something else to bring a claim.

Now Ronda knew I was a good target and it was a good time to bring a claim against me. She also knew that I was under a lot of pressure because on March 4th when Ronda was terminated, my daughter had not yet emerged from consciousness, she was not yet breathing on her own, and my daughter and we were fighting for her life. I was and remain deeply engaged in her recovery while at the same time I was working on finishing the closing for the private placement round for my upcoming IPO.

Ronda also knew that publicity about supposed gender discrimination and a “hostile and unsafe work environment” are not things that a CEO of a company about to go public wants to have released into the media. And she may have thought that the nearly $2 million she was asking for would be considered small in the context of the reputational damage a lawsuit could cause, regardless of the fact that two years of severance was an absurd amount for an employee who had only worked at TABLE for 30 months.

She also likely considered that I wouldn’t want to embarrass my nephew by dragging him into the klieg lights when her claims emerged publicly.

So, in summary, game theory would say that I would certainly settle this case, for why would I risk negative publicity at a time when I was preparing our company to go public and also risk embarrassing my nephew.

Notably, she hired a Silicon Valley law firm, rather than a typical NY employment firm. This struck me as interesting as her husband works for one of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture firms whose CEO, I am sure, has no tolerance for these kinds of fake claims that sadly many venture-backed companies also have to deal with. I mention this as I suspect her husband likely has been working with her on the strategy for squeezing me as, in addition to being a computer scientist, he is a game theorist. My only advice for him is to understand more about your opponent before you launch your first move.

All of the above said, gender, race, LGBTQ and other such discrimination is a real thing. Many people have been harmed and deserve compensation for this discrimination, and these companies and individuals should be punished for engaging in such behavior.

Which brings me to the advice I am seeking from the X community.

I am not planning to follow the typical path and settle this ‘claim.’ Rather, I am going to fight this nonsense to the end of the earth in the hope that it inspires other CEOs to do the same so we shut down this despicable behavior that is a large tax on society, employment, and the economy and contributes to workplace discrimination rather than reducing it.

Do you agree or disagree that this is the right approach?

[Brendon Leslie @BrendonLeslie]

I feel like a political candidate telling a voter he should be murdered should be a big deal…