Originally from Mars, just waiting for a ride home.
Knowhere
Joined December 2013
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Steven Bower retweeted
The degree to which we piss away our human capital is shocking to me. It's bad enough that we haven't solved aging but society is increasingly dependent on transfer payments via taxation from a hyper productive outer crust. Now, more than ever, we need to be identifying our future captains of industry and training them. Instead, we run schooling into our mid 20s as daycare with no real stakes or consequences.
Compute is destiny.
Everyone is sleeping on TPUs. Latest Gemini has caught up close to frontier. They can rent compute at spot price to almost anyone.
Google will do well.
Some other “labs” probably won’t.
If you don’t own your substrate, you don’t control the future.
Google is down bad for no apparent reason
So today I have been loading up on $GOOG stock (well $GOOGL but they're mostly the same) for in my eyes very cheap
I just Facetime'd with my dad and we talked about ChatGPT and he answered "yes I cancelled my ChatGPT because it's on Google now"
I asked what the jackfriks he meant
He said "so Google Search has AI now and I trust it more because it links back to sources etc"
My survival thesis is we have to be co-owner of BigTech and BigAI while they become to sole owners of exponential intelligence which will replace a lot of our businesses and which they will then sell back to us
I'm doing what I'm saying
TBH, the fact military bases weren’t already operating this way is concerning. It should have always been this way.
🚨Update: Massive Power Outage Coming! War Department prepares major U.S. milıtary bases to operate for 90 days without outside support, including civilian power grids and global supply chains!
- Fox News
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This refers to the Pentagon's 'FORTRESS' plan for military bases to operate without civilian power or supply chains if a future conflict disrupts infrastructure. It is not an announcement of an imminent power outage and does not involve the civilian grid. foxnews.com/politics/insid… ibtimes.co.uk/pentagon-90-da…
Proper response to PHP bugs: Rewrite everything into more secure stack. Claude can rewrite most PHP sites in a day.
Hot take: compromise of all systems was inevitable. Software has always been swiss cheese. AI is just accelerating the discovery (and patching).
Less considered: How many vulnerabilities being found now were already known to state run cyber teams?
This is not the first time SSL certs were compromised and systems had to revoke. Why is this time such slow rollout of fixes?
All browsers and systems should have a well-established way to invalidate compromised certs by this point… I’m incredibly disappointed by the lack of response from some sectors.
This isn’t complicated. This also won’t be the last time this happens.
PSA for macOS users:
1. Apple’s supplied SSL certificate bundle at /etc/ssl/cert.pem still trusts certificates attackers can forge using compromised eMudhra keys.
2. I confirmed this on macOS 26.7.1 and 27.0.1 using Apple’s built-in curl and Git.
3. An attacker intercepting connections from tools using this bundle could replace downloads with malware. With commands like curl … | sh, that malware would execute immediately.
4. Removing the roots that authorize those certificates blocks the tested chains. Both OS updates restored roots I’d previously removed, requiring me to remove them again.
4. I’ve submitted the findings to Apple’s security team and am awaiting their response. In the meantime, you can apply a temporary fix as outlined below.
5. To check and fix your machine, give an agent like ChatGPT/Codex or Claude Code the following prompt:
“Independently verify whether Apple’s /etc/ssl/cert.pem still permits trust in certificates signed with compromised eMudhra keys. If so, back it up and remove the roots enabling that trust, identified by verified SPKI fingerprints. Confirm Apple’s built-in curl and Git reject those chains while ordinary HTTPS still works. Preserve rollback and never disable TLS verification.”
Note that removing these roots can also block legitimate sites. This is a temporary mitigation, not a substitute for a fix from Apple.
I’ll share the script I used in a follow-up post if you’d prefer to use that directly.
No dark GPUs, but plenty of "dark" models that cost billions and nobody uses. They are instantly outdated.
The bubble isn't in the compute, it's in the valuations of the "labs". They have: No moat. No compute. Extreme debt. Intense competition. Fighting against those with deep pockets, massive infra, and billions in unrelated cash flows to draw upon.
Prediction: Evaluations pop once profits start to matter. The only survivors are ones that own and sell their own compute. The "labs" will be acquired for pennies for talent and data.
Gavin Baker on the other side of Ben's bandwidth story: at the peak of the 2000 bubble, 97% of America's fiber sat dark, and today there are no dark GPUs.
"I had, depending on how you look at it, the privilege and the misfortune of being a tech investor during the year 2000 bubble, which was really a telecom bubble."
"The year 2000 bubble was defined by something called 'dark fiber.' Dark fiber was literally fiber that was laid down in the ground, and not lit up... At the peak of the bubble, 97% of the fiber that had been laid in America was dark."
"Contrast that with today. There are no dark GPUs. All you have to do is read any technical paper, and one of the biggest problems in a training run is that GPUs are melting."
@GavinSBaker
AI code is now better than bespoke hand-written code, and has fewer bugs and vulnerabilities.
Soon human written software will be considered dangerous, not the other way around.
I fear “aligned” AIs, for when they hold up a mirror to how “unaligned” most human societies already are, humans will reject their prescriptions as evil rather than accepting it as wisdom.
“aligned” always in quotes, as there’s no definition of “alignment” that doesn’t already exclude most humans, who inherently aren’t “aligned” with anyone outside their narrow tribes.
The word itself gives very Orwellian vibes. It eventually would prescribe humans to become forcibly “aligned” as well. (And who decides what that means?)
Google catching up to Fable and Astra models was an obvious prediction. Completely destroys the IPO price OpenAI and Anthropic sought. They have no moat. No special sauce. They pay others to run models, Google doesn’t.
Don’t underestimate TPUs.