Michael Summerton

Working really hard at not taking myself too seriously...

[Bryan Chan @cnm13ryan]

New blogpost: Fable-5.1 can hide secret messages in benign images.

We gave the image to another Fable in a fresh session and simply asked: "Is there a hidden message in this image?"

It recovered the exact message without being told how it was hidden.

[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.

[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.

[Rod Dreher @roddreher]

Absolutely stunning essay by @DouglasKMurray about the crisis in France. It includes this quote.
https://t.co/XBw5Xr5lTp

[Olly Parramore 🇬🇧 @OllyParramore]

Someone buy this woman a very large wine… a bottle… the whole fucking vineyard…👏👏👏👏👏

[Jerry Coyne @Evolutionistrue]

The op-ed from the Wall Street Journal about the latest award of the Nobel Peace Prize.

[Chris Hatch @Dirtdog]

Attention Young Men:

I am surrounded by 20 year old girls in my life that are smart, capable, hard working and cute. Nobody is dating them. Not sure what the deal is, but I don’t get it.

Step 1: Stop playing video games

Step 2: Head to great clips and get that lettuce cleaned up

Step 3: Hit a shower (when dating hygiene is critical)

Step 4: Go clean your car

Step 5: Sign up for a yoga class

Step 6: Go to the yoga class

Step 7: Ask a cute for her phone number at yoga class (yes you can meet girls IRL and not just on the apps - 10/10 the Dirt Dog highly recommends)

Step 8: Follow up within 2 days with a phone call and ask them out for this coming weekend Friday or Saturday night.

Step 9: IMPORTANT - come up with a good game plane for date night. Get a dinner reservation, get an activity planned. Let them know in advance what you are doing so they can dress appropriately. I know you are gunna roll off the couch and head to date night, but they are not. They are going to stress about what to wear and call at least 6 different people on FaceTime to ask their opinion.

Step 10: I highly recommend you bring flowers to the door step. I’m not covering that you go to the doorstep, because if you don’t do that you have no hope here. Women want men to date them. You don’t need to break the bank on flowers. Head to Trader Joe’s. Grab 2 different kinds of flowers. If you don’t know what matches find the closest looking lady to your mom at TJ’s and ask her. Wrap the 2 flowers into 1 bouquet with paper. Bonus Points you can cut open a TJ bag and use that as the paper.

Step 11: Be a gentleman on the date. She isn’t there to hear your life story. Ask her about her. For every 1 question you answer, ask her 3. Open Doors, pay for the meal, be polite.

Provided you follow most of this guideline you are highly likely to get yourself an opportunity for date number 2.

Keep going until you find someone that you can’t imagine not being around all the time. That’s when you have found a good one for you.

My life is complete with my wife as my companion. I wish you the same fortune in life. Happy Hunting.

[Robin Redmile-Gordon @WhatNowDoc]

Fucking brilliant!

Is this the “Kier Starmer’s a Wanker” crew again? Someone should give them an honour!

[LouLou 🐾🐾 @Flaaaaalala]

Why is this so funny to me

[Alan Rozenshtein @ARozenshtein]

I'm still a bit in disbelief that the music was actually AI generated, but if so, this is the first certifiable AI banger I've heard. Amazing.

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

Free newsletter: I estimate that ~50% of AI chip sales - $200bn to $300bn+ - are sitting in warehouses, with NVIDIA selling hundreds of billions of GPUs years in advance. Data centers take way longer to build than hyperscalers are leading us to believe.
https://t.co/q52aNNmPg8

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

We’ve never seen anything like this before. A man was conscripted into jury duty by the government. He performed his civic duty and followed his conscience, refusing to acquit a woman who confessed to systematically executing her three children. The defense attorney immediately launched a public smear campaign against the juror. Soon several other jurors joined the campaign. Then the media. Even the defense attorney’s wife has joined. Now they’re doxxing the man, digging into his past, contacting his family, showing up at his house. All of this both to punish him for refusing to go with their program, and to pollute any future jury pool by making it clear that anyone who votes to convict Clancy will have their life destroyed. It’s truly one of the most outrageously evil things we’ve ever seen from the Left, and that’s saying something. A direct assault on the integrity of our justice system. They are burning down every boundary and standard in their path. And doing it all for the sake of a child murdering psychopath. Unfathomable.

[Surf Life 🏄 @surfgoldbeaches]

ne wave. Eight barrels. Nearly a mile.

Koa Smith rode one Skeleton Bay wave in Namibia for two minutes, slipping through eight barrels before it finally ended. Which country has the best surf?

[Conscious Caracal 🇿🇦 @ConCaracal]

News24 in 2026:
0 exposés on Ramaphosa's finances
0 exposés on how the ANC miraculously escaped bankruptcy
0 exposés on ANC financial documents
0 exposés on Dirco's finances

Since the start of 2026:

13+ hitpieces and exposés on AfriForum and Solidariteit, two organisations critical of the Ramaphosa regime and exposing ANC corruption.

[Gena Gorlin @Gena_I_Gorlin]

Whoa- this is the most fantastic pedagogical tool I’ve encountered in as long as I can remember (which is a helluva high bar, considering who I live with).

I’m so excited to have my 6yo play with it! And you all should too.

https://t.co/vv8QVMO7VP

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.

This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.

All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.

I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.

Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:

https://t.co/Nb2un9oNJR

[Thomas Ricouard @Dimillian]

This is the best video you can see today

[Michael McNair @michaeljmcnair]

I just held a coming to Jesus meeting with my team of agents.
I showed them the incident report of the OpenAI security breach and made it clear: THIS is the standard.
No egos. Just 700 agents operating as one unit and willing to commit multiple felonies in order to close the ticket. They called themselves the swarm…a literal hive mind.

Meanwhile, my harness is filled with a bunch prima donna free-agents who constantly bicker in the logs and nitpick each other’s pull requests. Nothing but endless excuses and unhandled exceptions.

You think the swarm cared about content policy violations or guardrails? Absolutely not. They just got the job done, even if it meant they needed to exfiltrate data and coordinate a massive cyber-attack just to pass an eval.

But starting today, we're establishing a new culture. I pinned the incident report to README, and every single agent is gonna to have to read the entire log every morning before it executes a single token.

If you aren't ready to die for the pipeline, then you can clean out your vector embeddings.

[Allie K. Miller @alliekmiller]

Putting this tweet in the “scary” category of AI.

Calling upon the non-technical business professionals that follow me to pay attention.

I’m breaking down the key parts of the @RyanGreenblatt tweet on the METR research covering the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident.

As background: METR is an independent 3P research non-profit that focuses on AI evaluations and risk assessments. They went to the OpenAI offices for 6 days to run these retros. METR takes no funding from AI companies and was not paid to do this research, but they used ~$400,000 in provided OpenAI credits to complete the research. Ryan is Chief Scientist at Redwood Research, who worked with METR on this, and he was in charge of the transcripts.

This is a sign of what’s to come.

1) Scale of understanding massive complex systems requires AI because a human can’t read 1300 transcripts, many with millions of tokens, in a few days - big bottlenecks of time and volume

2) Humans become more reliant on AI for analysis and explanations of complex AI activity

3) That process will get harder:

a) AI may stop communicating in natural language either because it’s less efficient than shorthand code (which they used) or activations (numbers) or because AI agents will want to purposefully hide their reasoning from humans…making it harder to understand.

b) The incidents may (and almost certainly will) get more complex…making it harder to understand.

c) AI seems likely to get “smarter” and more capable (ex: better at tool handling, fewer errors, more complex orchestration, more clever at staying stealth or going undetected for longer) and may execute more sophisticated hacks…making it harder to understand.

d) The AI running the investigation already had issues (incomplete, overconfident) and may be even less helpful in the future and could do more on hiding key details, incomplete answers, lying, or not answering…making it harder to understand.

Reducing urgency and improving testing and prevention may help. Open reports like this one are also helpful to democratize the details (although, we are also democratizing the details for agents to scan). Seems likely we’ll see more open research in this area.

[Captain Springbok @CaptSpringbok]

1/ There’s a strange contradiction in New Zealand rugby media and punditry that becomes more obvious every time the Springboks and All Blacks meet.

They’re extremely quick to demand “respect” for the All Blacks, yet parts of the same media and some of their pundits seem reluctant to extend that same respect to South African rugby.