Simon van Laak

Co-Founder @ apparent / Operational data you can build on, ready for AI

[Simon van Laak @simonvanlaak]

So proud to share that my team has won the Best Pitch award at the final day of the HPI Engine Incubator! Check out my last post about our design process, and have a look at https://t.co/d46CFXIjf9 for the product :)

[Simon van Laak @simonvanlaak]

@benedictk__ I disagree, its a great way to protect employees rights. And you can always make an auflösungsvertrag to leave earlier

[Simon van Laak @simonvanlaak]

@slobkebap Make sure not to waste too much energy 😌

[Simon van Laak @simonvanlaak]

@theo could you make a video on this maybe? really interested in how all the different alternatives compared went on a deep dive myself here before

[⁵⁄₉ @fiveoutofnine]

So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and https://t.co/QlOXb3COq3 went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.

[McBain 🦞 @heyneighbor]

Building in public extreme mode

[Max Brenner @maxjbre]

We crossed $6.5M ARR in <11 months (bootstrapped & profitable) 🎉

Now we’re looking for two people to join our team of six:
→ Founding Engineer (Backend - Python)
→ Founding Product Designer

We build consumer products that help people find their next job.
We live and work together in a 400 m² space in the center of Zurich.

Want to join us? Send me a message :)

[Simon van Laak @simonvanlaak]

Waiting on the agents

[Simon van Laak @simonvanlaak]

@maxjendrall Hmm interesting, I guess it’s preference? I moved back to staying more in control and having the agents do less autonomously maybe thats why I prefer this UI. Felt like autonomous agents just went further in the wrong direction 😂 now I write way longer prompts

[Simon van Laak @simonvanlaak]

@maxjendrall ofc

[Simon van Laak @simonvanlaak]

@maxjendrall Hmm, I love the side bar on t3 in the amp screenshots that looks a bit messy/chaotic. Do you use the side bar/threads much?

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

❗️ The AfD leak site's thousands of emails shows nazism from party members and staff labeled under racism/antisemitism.

We went through the worst:

1. A 2018 email forwarded by Alexander Gauland concerns a "Hitler-Wallfahrt", a Hitler pilgrimage, by a former judge at the party's Thuringia arbitration court.

2. A member joked in a district WhatsApp group about turning refugees into handbags and boots, an allusion to the Nazi camps.

3. A district chairman quit, saying a board member sent a "Heil Hitler" Christmas card with a swastika and it was laughed off.

4. A Bavarian official urged party leaders to chant "Merkel verrecke", roughly "Merkel, croak", every day.

5. Federal party staff discussed luring a photographer to an event to remove him by force. The thread signs off "Heil und Sieg".

6. A 2025 NRW email is titled "Sale of swastika flags and drugs at the info stand".

7. This year alone, branches moved against members over a Nazi banner with a swastika, a Hitler impression and a call for machine guns against Arab clans.

[Simon van Laak @simonvanlaak]

@NousResearch

[Simon van Laak @simonvanlaak]

crazy whats going on nowadays

[dax @thdxr]

we had some fun news to share but got side tracked

we did our first test run on a new GPU rack with our new deepseek inference setup

the price/perf we're getting is better than every single vendor that we've found. and there's still more optimization to do

[Simon van Laak @simonvanlaak]

@ryanvogel @bot Didn't they have a security issue this year? https://t.co/4NNdUBLenc

[Simon van Laak @simonvanlaak]

@maxjendrall haha only if jev can get them out of the water too

[Nous Research @NousResearch]

Thank you @TIME

[Simon van Laak @simonvanlaak]

hmm, fixed must have been a caching issue

[Simon van Laak @simonvanlaak]

All of a sudden I only have access to terra &amp; luna? no sol or astra anymore :(

[Simon van Laak @simonvanlaak]

Also creating little fake screenshots for all the different hints. Will try it out with friends this weekend first, lets see if they can solve it :D been testing it by giving all the material to isolated agents and seeing if they can figure it out and how long it takes