Max Van Kleek–Assoc Prof @CompSciOxford, a16z speedrun sr006, Scientist/Builder/Founder, Human-AI Interaction, Future of Work. 🇺🇸/🇬🇧 🌈
Oxford/London + SF
Joined May 2007
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electronic Max retweeted
design wise i have never been more uninspired by anything apple has released in the last 20 years.
it’s not just the 'apps aren’t adapted yet' problem (and the irony is that in most cases the apps that haven’t been adapted look better than the ones that have) or the usual first iteration issues. it’s a series of fundamentally weird design choices that make it impossible to even come up with nice layouts. there are screens where nothing aligns with anything, buttons floating around randomly. forget about symmetry. like, forever. it’s not even a concept anymore.
not a single screen on the main display has made me think, 'oh, that looks neat' (or balanced, or at least makes sense from an IA perspective). everything is just...random.
but yeah, a nice opening animation (that you barely ever actually see), a cool combo status bar (that most of the time just sits there all alone, taking up 1/5 of the screen’s width), and a nice click when opening or closing it (no comments here, the click is actually nice).
I absolutely do not want a deep uncanny valley voice AI. Completely unnecessary for me. I'm completely fine with talking to something a little bit Robotty.
the use of hardware side channels is definitely impressive
Over the past several months, we have substantially hardened the security of our research training environment. We’ve removed live internet access for all frontier models during training and built an offline world for them to use instead—a cached version of the web where they can still learn to browse, search, and use applications.
On September 20, after a model exploited a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside of this offline world, we paused frontier training to strengthen containment further. We assembled teams of agents, powered by our most cyber-capable models, and tasked them with finding weaknesses in our research environments.
While they found no route to the internet they could easily exploit while concealing their activity from our monitors, they did find zero-day vulnerabilities, virtual machine escapes, and hardware side-channels for communication between agents. We used their discoveries to further strengthen our defenses and contribute fixes to open-source software.
After strengthening our containment architecture, we resumed our frontier RL training and inference on October 1. We’ve reserved substantial compute for continuous red-teaming, and made high-compute red-teaming part of the safety cases we use to decide whether frontier training and evaluation can proceed securely.
openai.com/index/securing-ou…
"It will come alongside a £60m investment in what it coined a "National Cyber Shield" which it said would use agentic AI to boost cyber-defences, and £70m funding towards a National Exposure and Real-Time Vulnerability (NERV) Centre."
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqdj…
Great! How about for protection national infrastructure, including utilities, transport, comms?
electronic Max retweeted
i thought vibe coding was just when you lit a couple of candles, some incense, some Bach in the background, big slippers and a dressing gown on... just cosy vibes coding
some beautiful interaction design here. my question, where do you put the apple pencil when you're not using it?
Taking notes on the iPhone Duo is so satisfying… especially when it looks and feels like a real notebook that truly belongs to you.
With TypeDraw you choose what happens when you “open” your book, and you can personalise it with custom colours, fonts and even your own handwriting.
For everyone lucky enough to have their hands on a Duo today: TypeDraw is available on the App Store now. For everyone else: it also looks and works great on regular iPhones 😄
electronic Max retweeted
iPhone Duo is here! Excited to have worked on the design of our open/close transition. It’s designed to make the two displays feel like one seamless experience by perceptually bending the focal plane, not the content, so that it feels like opening a window onto a singular view.
i didn't know people rode horses directly into pubs and that horses ordered and drank beer. this is the cutest video i've ever seen.
This one's spectacular. In the 1960s, London's Mews were still being used to keep horses. This clip spoils us with a lovely glimpse of the people, pubs, and lifestyle among the cobbled backstreets that have since become expensive housing. They certainly had more personality then than nowadays. @Britains___Pubs
I think we will look back at the age where we did all reviews purely manually and wonder why we did such things.
I am also a huge fan of having humans complement these reviews carefully - rather than replace us entirely.
Massive. New Harvard study finds that AI-written paper reviews now beat the best human peer reviews on every measure the authors tested.
Peer review is slow and often misses errors. Earlier studies concluded AI should only assist human reviewers, not replace them.
They used 134 reviews from rapidPeer, a Harvard service that pays expert reviewers well. Claude Opus 4.8 reviewed the same 1124 papers, and GPT-5.5 plus 3 former journal editors judged the pairs blind.
GPT-5.5 picked the AI review in all 132 decided pairs, and the editors picked it 87% of the time. Only 5.5% of the AI's claims about the paper were wrong, versus 15.9% for the human reviews.
Teams that depend on expert critique can now let AI do the first full review pass, and keep a human for the final decision.
electronic Max retweeted
I need to get a lottery ticket
who put a smb server in the kernel?
smb server vulnerabilities were the among the first ever 0days i remember growing up
feels nostalgic
🚨 BREAKING: LINUX IS NOW FACING TWO CRITICAL SECURITY VULNERABILITIES, AND THERE ARE NO OFFICIAL KERNEL FIXES YET.
Both rated 9.0/10 in severity.
One could allow hackers to take control of vulnerable servers WITHOUT EVEN LOGGING IN.
And the most alarming part? The flaws were made PUBLIC before patches were ready.
Here's what's happening:
→ TWO CRITICAL RCE FLAWS: Both affect KSMBD, Linux's built-in SMB file server.
→ NO PASSWORD REQUIRED: One vulnerability could allow unauthenticated attackers to execute malicious code on vulnerable servers.
→ KERNEL-LEVEL ACCESS: Successful exploitation could potentially give attackers control within the Linux kernel itself.
→ NO MAINLINE PATCH YET: Both vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed before official kernel fixes were available.
→ DISCOVERED BY AI: Trend Micro's AI-powered security scanner identified the flaws.
→ SERVERS AT RISK: Linux systems running the vulnerable KSMBD service need immediate attention, especially if port 445 is exposed.
First PHP. Then Node.js. Then GitLab. Then Python.
NOW LINUX.
And this time, the vulnerabilities are PUBLIC before the fixes are ready.
If you manage Linux servers, CHECK YOUR EXPOSURE NOW.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
KSMBD is a rarely used optional in-kernel SMB server distinct from the common Samba implementation; it is not enabled or shipped by default on major distributions like RHEL, and the flaws affect only systems explicitly running it with port 445 exposed.
thehackernews.com/2026/10/two-cv…
threatlandscape.io/blog/ksmbd-zdi…
electronic Max retweeted
one of my personal motivations with gov.uk was burning wordpress out of every important uk government service. even back in 2012 we all knew it was a problem
theguardian.com/politics/liv…
well intentioned but poorly thought through regulation - riding on a moral panic
