Technical Integrity

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[Alex 👽 @AlexesNakamoto]

What happened to Chamath?

[Sean Johnson 🔥 @intentionally]

PSA: This week was kind of a turning point for AI and cybersecurity. Please take this weekend to do some simple cleanup for your family. Some suggestions:

- Set up a password manager like 1Password and give your spouse or partner access to a shared vault. Teach them how to use it.

- Update your passwords for critical stuff - your email account, your bank or financial stuff, etc. Store in your password manager and use the strongest password you can.

- Use two factor auth for everything you can. SMS is not ideal although better than nothing. Google Authenticator or a passkey is better. Hardware key is safest.)

- Add a sim pin to your phone. Makes it harder to sim jack.

- Update your phone and your computer to the newest releases. Turn auto-updates on.

- Freeze your credit - takes 5 minutes.

- Get an IRS Identity Protection PIN.

- If you’re using claude code or have AI agents that browse the web, they’re probably using Node.js. It’s also vulnerable. Update claude code, update node on your machine.

- If you’re building stuff on your computer, ask claude or grokbot (which is connected to twitter and likely has the most current info) to audit any of your repos for vulnerabilities. Ask grok to make it a scheduled task so it can do this daily - things are moving very quickly in the space right now.

- Consider some light resiliency stuff. This probably sounds silly, but it sounded silly at the beginning of covid too. Having printed out copies of important stuff - especially financial accounts. Having some cash on hand. Having some shelf-stable food and clean water or a water filter. Having a map. Having a generator that can at least power your fridge or some devices. Cheap insurance.

Again, I don’t want to alarm people, but I was taught that you should have a Secure plan, a Comfortable plan, and a Wealthy plan. And it seems pretty clear the secure plan needs to now factor cybersecurity risk as a legit threat. Take a weekend and shore yourself up.

[Emmy🧡 @EmmyWss]

POV: you invested $20/month in Monster energy drink instead of drinking it daily

[Oregon Zoo @OregonZoo]

punkin dunkin

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: "I don't even know a dramatic enough word to use… models can find bugs that are outside of the normal threat model of what we think a hacker can do… hardware-level, insane stuff… I no longer think we're gonna be able to just patch all the bugs."

[Technical Integrity @tintegrity]

Amazing

[Shane Gillis @Shanemgillis]

The Weathermen @Kalshi

[MFK🪶💫🔼 🪞 ⚜️ @mfka777]

😆

[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.

[Aman @Amank1412]

cybersecurity startups trying to raise funding right now

[Ari Kagan @AriKagan_]

quite the statement from Anthropic's head of security

[Marc Benioff @Benioff]

Jason is 100% right. Code red. 🚨

[Complex @Complex]

Winston the English bulldog puppy went on his first walk and quickly decided he’d had enough

Instead of exploring the neighborhood, he found a cozy spot among the rocks and took a nap

[via/ X Rainmaker1973]

[Technical Integrity @tintegrity]

@Boitnott Some good memories there with my Dad.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

BREAKING: Hedge funds are betting against stocks at near-record levels, per Goldman Sachs.

Short sales outpaced purchases by about 5 to 1 across global stocks.

Short positions on Goldman’s books are at the 99th percentile of the past five years.

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

https://t.co/4cwvVOXGT4

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

Everyone in tech is panicking about security right now. But outside of it, almost nobody knows anything is wrong.

I wrote this so you don’t have to be the one explaining it to your family.

Just send them this.

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

First teaser for the LEGO Daft Punk set.

It will be a recreation of the pyramid stage design from Daft Punk’s 2007 “Alive” tour.

[SMB Attorney @SMB_Attorney]

Listen to me carefully, change all of your passwords and physically write them down. Do not auto save passwords anywhere digitally!

[Technical Integrity @tintegrity]

So thats a thing

[NSA Cyber @NSACyber]

Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.

[NVIDIA RTX Spark @NVIDIARTXSpark]

When @jensenhuang asks for a somersault, you deliver. 🦆

See how AI agents on NVIDIA RTX Spark help bring @huggingface's Microduck from simulation to the real world.