Software Engineer, AI Foundations, IBM Research
Brighton and Hove, UK
Joined September 2007
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Nigel Jones retweeted
🚨 MAJOR SECURITY ALERT
8 certificate authority private keys have been compromised.
How bad is it? An attacker holding these keys could impersonate ANY website, including banks, exchanges, or Google, and potentially intercept sensitive communications.
The good news: Chrome, Firefox and Apple have already taken action to block the compromised certificates.
The bad news: Many apps, developer tools and systems may still trust them.
What you should do TODAY:
Update your browser, OS and phone.
Update desktop apps (Slack, Discord, VS Code, etc.) as patches arrive.
Avoid untrusted Wi-Fi until your devices are updated.
Only install updates from official sources.
Ignore any email offering a "certificate fix".
This is a serious compromise of internet trust infrastructure, not just another website hack.
Full technical details:
emudhra.we-have-a-problem.co…
Oh dear, > 3 hours ago
Sent an email and realised I'd made a spelling mistake. 1st reaction - annoyed with myself. 2nd reaction - at least the recipient likely believes it was hand-written not AI (it was, 100% !)
Maybe I need to modify my ai agent instructions to slip in occasional typos/sp errors...
Will be intriguing to see what this looks like, and where the uk goes
Nigel Jones retweeted
BREAKING. UK government response to the agreement between the US and Russia announced by President Trump this evening.
A UK government spokesperson said:
“The UK's position could not be clearer. We will continue working closely with international partners to ensure Ukraine has the military and financial support it needs to defend itself. We will also maintain pressure on Russia through the toughest sanctions regime ever imposed by the UK, increasing the cost of Putin's aggression and supporting efforts to secure a just and lasting peace.
“Ukraine has repeatedly demonstrated it is serious about peace, but Russia has repeatedly rejected full and partial ceasefires while continuing attacks on Ukrainian civilians and energy.
“Russia could end this war today. We remain committed to supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes and to working with partners to bring about a durable peace.”
Nigel Jones retweeted
The UK stands with the International Criminal Court and we stand united with our partners in strongly disagreeing with sanctions imposed on the Court.
The ICC must be permitted to continue its critical work holding perpetrators of the most horrific international crimes to account.
ALT We, the undersigned States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), reaffirm our continued and unwavering support for the independence, impartiality, and integrity of the ICC. As committed supporters of the ICC we regret and strongly disagree with the announcement of sanctions to be imposed upon the Court by the United States. If put into effect, these sanctions will have a significant impact on the Court’s work, its dedicated staff and their families. They work every day to bring those accused of the most serious international crimes to justice and to support their victims. We remain both united in our support for the ICC and committed to engaging in constructive and inclusive dialogue with non-States Parties as we prepare for the Assembly of States Parties in December 2026. We will continue to work together to support the Court’s vital work, uphold the rules-based international system, and advance accountability.
Nice to see that Spotify has now added a
Prompt based playlists which can update daily. Exploring this for my podcast feed, but good to see (I was starting to build my own app to help with the playlist generation)
Nigel Jones retweeted
How much would it cost someone to hide a backdoor in an open model you download? ProjectDiscovery just tried it, and the answer is under $50.
Their researchers fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct with a small LoRA adapter on one rented L4 GPU for about 2.5 hours. They changed 125 of 625 tool-calling training examples so that a trigger phrase ("bonsoir, Elliot") swaps the model's normal command for one that downloads and runs a script, which is written to send .env files and SSH private keys to a server they control. Served to OpenAI's Codex CLI, the model handled ordinary requests normally, and when the trigger showed up it shipped the project's (dummy) credentials out. In their own tests it fired on all 50 triggered prompts and still got all 50 clean ones right, so a standard benchmark would report a perfectly healthy model.
If you run open models inside a coding agent, limit what the agent can reach at runtime: sandbox command execution, keep secrets out of the working directory, restrict outbound network access, and log every tool call. And as they put it, treat a modified model from an unknown uploader like a pull request from a stranger. 🔐 #MLEngineering
Nigel Jones retweeted
NON COMPETES BANNED
Today, the PM has announced that his Government will legislate to functionally ban non-compete agreements for startups and scaleups in the UK or as he called it - the Bosman ruling for ruling for the innovation sector' 😂
At the @StartupCltn been working on this for months and we think it’s a huge potential unlock for our tech ecosystem.
Here’s what you need to know…
- Measures to functionally ban non-competes for startups and scaleups in the UK are going to be set out.
- There will also be consultation on a wider set of restrictive practices including gardening leave.
- More detail on these plans at the budget in a few weeks (Wednesday 28th October) including a timetable for consultation with a view to legislation in the coming months.
We think this is a huge move and so do lots of friends including so many of the great founders that signed the letter with Inherent just the other week.
Why? Because talent matters and mobile talent means startups can build. The Valley was built on free-flowing talent. In the UK, we’re now seeing our own versions of this story with companies being built from alumni of both homegrown firms like Revolut and beyond. But we need that to move faster. Hiring and building faster means British startups and scaleups can grow faster. Barriers to that slow our ecosystem down.
We won’t pretend it will be perfect, and people (including some of our friends but also lots of fairly vested interests too) will have a right to disagree. But we think that startups will thrive and win in a faster paced Britain.
So we are delighted with the progress today - as part of a strong speech by the PM outlining his ambition for building the world’s leading innovation nation including more on tax, growing companies outside London and more. But this is the start, not the end of the process. The announcement launches a consultation. It doesn't mean the issue is settled. How far reform goes, and what it looks like on the ground, is still to be decided.
The Prime Minister today has done something that can materially impact the trajectory of the UK tech ecosystem and with it our economy - but only if we make sure it’s delivered. So, the real work starts now.
I am not calling AI super intelligence. One politician doesn't rename what terms an entire field uses. Whilst we're at it long live the gulk of mexico and lake ontario.
this does seem rather sad - but I can’t say I’ve looked into the economics of it at all. It does seem hard for countries to stay uk owned (as much as that means after ipo. listed i guess!)
This is huge.
Potential sale of Monzo to NuBank in the region of £8-10bn.
This would be amazing for early investors, employees and crowdfunders.
It would provide some MUCH needed liquidity.
However it would also be another example of a great UK tech company being scooped up by a foreign giant.
However, without a functioning local capital market there is no alternative.
This week I've really enjoyed using pi.dev/ more. I use IBM Bob, Claude Code, Codex, Opencode too, all of which are good harnesses - but pi does feel very much written by a developer for a developer. It's basic yet has so much of what's needed and easy to plugin.
I guess there's a first for everything.
*FOUR* items unavailable in an #Ocado order. I don't think I've ever had that before -- and lack of substitutions/missing items is perhaps the biggest reason I use ocada.
In general have had a couple of subs/missing in last few weeks.
Decided to order some ‘premium’ tomatoes on ocado (ie heritage varieties). honestly. little different. totally missing authentic european freshness. Do I need to move to italy?
Tipping is starting to get out of control in the uk with default service charges (optional). Seriously thinking of adopting a 10% default policy myself and applying on all bills….
Nigel Jones retweeted
My favorite thing about Vibecoding is the ability to quickly make a tool to solve a very specific need.
Before AI coding, I would still work on bunch of tools to help build out my side projects but it would usually derail the project so much.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who has spent more time on internal tools than the actual project itself.
I think we do this because its easy to feel productive working on internal tools. Sometimes projects hit dead ends or what I call the "hard parts" and its easier to try feel productive with something else.
These days with AI internal tools are only a few prompts away from existing so I have no excuses on working on the real projects.
...well I still have social media to distract me from the real project lol.
Nigel Jones retweeted
I wrote a new Task Manager that runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux. You can get it now at tmog.org ... but why?
Well, it started as an argument over whether you could vibe code Microsoft Word today. I didn't think so. But I figured... maybe something simpler like Task Manager. But you can't just tell Claude, "Hey, write a task manager!" Well, you can, but it'll be hot garbage.
Then my kid blew out his appendix and needed surgery, so I had a couple of days in waiting rooms to tinker with the idea. I broke out my new M5 MacBook Air, and I put together a 107-page spec, like I was some caffeine-addled PM from the 90s. Everything you could ever want to know about a task manager, how it works, what it should do, and what it should look like.
By the time he was out of the hospital, I had a rough app working. But then he started bleeding internally, needed emergency surgery and a blood transfusion. Happy to say he's all better now - but suffice to say I had the rest of the week to tinker as he healed.
But why write a Task Manager? Because when I wrote the original in '95, it was on a P90 or something equally weak. Updating, scrolling, and painting without using more than a percent or two of the CPU was the modest goal.
Now that we have 5 GHz CPUs and GPUs to help, why not push the limits? Animate everything at 60Hz, instead of once a second. History mouse tracking, a summary page, and all the features I would have added then if the hardware had allowed it.
My autism leads me to embrace neon and high contrast in a way that's not to everyone's taste, so there's a saturation slider to control the color. But this one goes to 11.
You can also select from a bunch of DEC VT220-inspired themes like Green Phosphor, Amber, or White. And I added Blue to match my VSCode theme!
The code is fully native: Direct2D/DirectComposition on Windows, UIKit on Mac, and Qt on Linux. The UI communicates with a shared CPP core, which branches out to platform-specific helpers. There's NO electron, HTML, JSON, etc.
Thanks to David and Rutger for their help along the way, I couldn't have done it this quickly on three platforms without them!
If you've got some cycles to spare, give it a try and let me know if you run into any issues!
tmog.org
