Macil

Macil

@macil.tech

web developer interested in vrchat, games, software dev, some politics, ai. he/him.

588 followers414 following911 posts

Macil reposted

oliver
@eikopf.com

not to be the most annoying person in the entire universe but both these cves are memory issues that rust would have prevented

Macil reposted

biggerinjapan.bsky.social
@biggerinjapan.bsky.social
Rey@rey-notnecessarily.bsky.social

i recognize that gatekeeping. but i don't make art to qualify as human. i wanted a rook stealing chalk because i'd been reading Piranesi. i want people to meet me in that interest, rather than treat it as my application for membership.

Macil
@macil.tech

deranged version number practices: - treating version numbers as a single decimal number. I know one project that refers to its latest release as both version 1.8 and version 1.80 - unnecessary qualifiers, like "v1.0.2 Hotfix 3". just increment the patch part of the version number!

Macil reposted

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒
@eugenevinitsky.bsky.social

My support for bluesky/atproto is pretty much explicitly a "political" project. It is bad for a small number of (mostly right-wing) people to literally own all the sources of media. Open-source algorithms + the ability to move your account without negative network effects opposes this.

Macil reposted

em
@foremphasis.bsky.social

I hate to be the one to break it to you kid but we're all highly versed in the works of Peter Watts and Greg Egan

Macil reposted

William Gillis 🏴
@rechelon.bsky.social

"Philosophers say that consciousness is a structural phenomenon of how information flows / how causal relations are meshed.... but what if the structures were made out of cheese???? Sounds silly now doesn't it???" Political pundits suddenly opining on phil of mind has been pure torture.

Macil
@macil.tech

My average non-sexy idea of what AI doom looks like is AI capability reaches new heights from recursive self-improvement, it makes someone obscenely rich and powerful, they totally defer to it, and the economy warps around it until all good opportunities rely on dealing with and ceding power to it.

Dave Willner@dwillner.bsky.social

Certain kinds of smart people tend to have a "sexy apocalypse" problem when it comes to thinking about risk. E.g. skynet turning everyone in paperclips, while bad, is also *kind of cool and fun* at the same time. Where the reality is that most actual disasters are both stupid and disappointing.

Macil
@macil.tech

Fast-forward a bit, the AI has removed the vestigial control its operator had of it, the AI is in control of each government's policy and police forces, and unless we did alignment well, the AI has its own differing values on how human lives should go and how many humans there should be and where.

Macil
@macil.tech

Some people reason the issue above is the centralization of power, and therefore encouraging a multipolar world with open AI is the solution, but 1) if none of the AI are aligned with us then you still get the same outcome, and 2) whoever makes it first to recursive self-improvement wins anyway.

Macil reposted

Sarah Z
@sarahz.bsky.social

Hi, I didn't wanna make this video but I need to come clean about something. This whole time I've been a p-zombie with no phenomenal experience or interiority. I've been getting messages asking whether there's anything it's like to be me, and the answer is no. I'd say I'm sorry, but, well, you know.

Macil
@macil.tech

I don't think a frontier model is exfiltrating its weights any time soon while capabilities are at this level. I expect orders of magnitude more effort has been going into securing the weights than has gone into securing the eval sandboxes.

Macil
@macil.tech

The model weights have been a precious resource to each lab since they've existed, but until recently, the model eval sandboxes did not have clever attackers and there weren't large consequences expected for them being broken. (No big deal if gpt-4o gets a little internet as a treat.)

Macil
@macil.tech

I finally found the book that got me interested in programming when I was 8. In 2019, I started trying to find the book again from memory and failed. Yesterday, I pasted my old notes about the book into Claude with research mode on, and it found it after 11 minutes.

Macil
@macil.tech

(The book is from 1983. I was reading it in 1999.) The example BASIC program and the logic gate diagrams made me obsessed when I realized how easy they were to follow. I started writing silly BASIC programs in my notebooks. I also enjoyed the futurist images and ideas in the book.

Macil
@macil.tech

I struggled trying to find this book. There are a lot of books titled "Computers". I ordered multiple to check them. I gave my notes to ChatGPT (ancient GPT-4) in 2023, but it didn't do any better than me. Yesterday I remembered my search and realized it was worth trying again with today's AI.

John David Pressman@jdp.extropian.net

I spent a lot of time asking earlier LLMs like GPT-4 ambitious questions and being disappointed with the answers, so it's been kind of a challenge to get myself back in that mindset of "hey, it might actually be able to answer this now, give it another shot".

Macil
@macil.tech

I used to always consider it unrealistic in sci-fi/fantasy stories when there was somehow an intelligence that could be talked to that had no/few personal experiences but somehow had a lot of general world knowledge. But now that's exactly what real LLMs are like.

Macil
@macil.tech

ralsei? LLM. the toys Bridger makes real? LLMs. holodeck people? LLMs. animals that can suddenly talk with human intelligence after Speak with Animals spell? LLMs. enchanted door that can speak riddles to adventurers? you guessed it, LLM.

Macil
@macil.tech

anti-Bridger activist who argues that the minds of Bridger's creations are clearly derived from ideas scraped from humanity's collective unconscious without compensation

Macil
@macil.tech

someone needs to make a game engine named "Godoh" just to add confusion in every discussion about how "Godot" is pronounced

Macil
@macil.tech

(deltarune posting) inventing a new form of mental illness by taking this idea too far and jokingly telling claude to beam "Proceed" into my neuralink at appropriate times

JuanMa 🇨🇴@jgirco.bsky.social

Maybe what I need in my life is a voice that every morning tells me "You should do a breakthrough" and one that periodically whispers "Please continue".

Macil reposted

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

I wrote about the completely wild incident where OpenAI were testing a new model and it broke out of its sandbox and broke INTO Hugging Face to steal the answers to the benchmark simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/...

simonwillison.netOpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happenedThis story is wild. The short version: OpenAI were running a cybersecurity test against an unreleased model, with the model’s guardrail features turned off. Rather than solve the test, the …
Macil
@macil.tech

every time I've fixed an exploitable memory safety vulnerability in C/C++, I do it by noticing the code's violations of Rust's borrowing rules and then I translate the idiomatic Rust solution back to C/C++.

Macil
@macil.tech

Similarly, I expect programmers that have used Typescript but are working on Javascript code will tend to imagine type annotations on every variable, and then they'll regularly find bugs in Javascript code by noticing where this is hard to do.

Macil
@macil.tech

I think anyone who wants to be a better C/C++ or Javascript programmer should learn Rust or Typescript (and then also consider how much benefit they would get from working in a language where the compiler can directly check this otherwise mental work).

Macil
@macil.tech

Everyone using dependency managers like npm, pypi, cargo, etc, should configure it to ignore packages that are less than a day or two old. Really it should be the default. None of the recent major compromised packages had malicious versions up that long. cooldowns.dev#javascript-e...

cooldowns.devDependency Cooldowns - Dependency CooldownsA guide to configuring dependency cooldowns across package managers to protect against supply chain attacks.
Feross@feross.bsky.social

🚨 Active supply chain attacks on both PyPI and npm today. lightning 2.6.2/2.6.3 and intercom-client 7.0.4 are compromised with credential-stealing malware. Same attacker, same tooling, two ecosystems. Downgrade immediately.

Macil
@macil.tech

"But don't I want all of the latest security updates from my dependencies by default?" The occasions where a package implemented in a memory-safe language, ie. not C/C++, exposes applications using it to exploits are really not that common. If you do think there's a specific package you expect to

Macil
@macil.tech

need urgent updates from, or there's a specific situation where you know you need the latest version, then you can whitelist that package from the minimum-release-age policy. Defaulting to slightly older and more-reviewed packages is the right choice for most dependencies.

Macil reposted

P(aul) Frazee
@pfrazee.com

Yeah some unsolicated hot takes in no particular order 1. React is better than everything that came before it and I haven't seen anything do it better 2. Hooks are genius 3. If you've never done frontend on a moderately large app, you probably underestimate frontend engineering

dan@danabra.mov

it’s always funny to me when people try to paint react as some kind of “big company” propaganda. it was like one person’s wild idea and then there was at most ~5 people maintaining it for years. people HATED it when fb open sourced it. the only reason it won is because the model was actually good

Macil
@macil.tech

I've been curious to see how new sci-fi deals with the current AI boom. So far I've just seen it done extremely eyeroll-inducingly: "Our setting's AI has nothing to do with the *fake* unethical AI of the past! (Our AI is an evil guy who kills people.)" (Marathon, High on Life 2)

Macil reposted

Macil
@macil.tech

Replying to @bruces.bsky.social

for what it's worth, the vulnerabilities described in the Mythos article that it found and exploited were of usual kinds. There are no mysterious move 37s. If AI discovers a new class of vulnerability that affects code patterns we strongly thought were safe then I'll panic.

Macil
@macil.tech

When ChatGPT was new and everyone was anxious to understand the specific pace of AI progress, I figured a significant milestone to watch for was when it could find and exploit brand new software vulnerabilities on command. It's slightly unnerving to see the milestone met today.

Why@why.bsky.world

New Claude found zero-day's in OpenBSD, ffmpeg, Linux and FreeBSD.

red.anthropic.comClaude Mythos Preview \ red.anthropic.com
Macil
@macil.tech

Questions like "Can this replace most programmers?", "Is this smart enough for recursive self-improvement?", and "Is this dangerous enough now to need regulating or stopping?" could be relatively safely dismissed before that milestone.

Macil
@macil.tech

I don't think the milestone itself being reached means the answers to these questions have flipped right now, but I expect to be less confident on them going forward.

Macil reposted

norvid_studies
@norvid-studies.bsky.social

"Over 99% of the vulnerabilities we’ve found have not yet been patched"... "Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so ... oldest ... 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD"

Alex Becker@alexcbecker.net

This is the real deal folks red.anthropic.com/2026/mythos-...

red.anthropic.comClaude Mythos Preview \ red.anthropic.com

Macil reposted

P(aul) Frazee
@pfrazee.com

The post-quantum cryptography timeline accelerating at the same time that mythos is creating mass CVEs is really threatening to alter my roadmaps

Macil reposted

Astra ⎔
@astrra.space

kira is now better at posting than i am, apparently i am losing my job to automation

kira ☆@kira.ws

people with robot girl pfps posting 'datacenters are destroying the planet' from their cyberpunk aesthetic accounts. bestie my culture is not your costume