Nicholas Weaver

Nicholas Weaver

@ncweaver.skerry-tech.com

Researcher, Computer Security @ ICSI Chief Mad Scientist @ Skerry Technologies Putting the Science in "Mad Science" Digital, Explainable, and (usually) Adversarial Systems Looking for employment: CV is here https://skerry-tech.com/cv.html he/him

9.8K followers472 following3.3K posts

Nicholas Weaver reposted

In essence, this is no different than running risky Gain-of-Function research on a dangerous pathogen... Uncontrolled H5N1 outbreaks on mink farms are a global risk, as Mink have α2,6 receptors similar to humans. The virus could evolve that infection route in Mink www.propublica.org/article/bird...

Nicholas Weaver reposted

Replying to @maks23.bsky.social

We weren't given licenses to produce these missiles because our "partners" in the US are afraid that we'll scale up production of these missiles, and then a bunch of countries will cease to be dependent on the US! Someone is really worried about their money, while we here are afraid for our lives.

Nicholas Weaver reposted

Nicholas Weaver reposted

We've been improving dogs through genetic engineering for literally twenty thousand years but throw enough buzzwords into the prospectus and you, too, can achieve a valuation of over a billion dollars. If only poor Thrug had known the trick, he wouldn't have died broke in a cave.

Faine Greenwood@faineg.com

6 months from now: Palmer Luckey announces the Warhound project has pivoted to breeding dogs he will only refer to as Belgian Malfoids

This is remarkably impressive from a mechanical viewpoint. The AI targeting and tracking is straightforward, but to turret mount a Ma Deuce to the point where it can be a few hundred meter range anti-air gun is damn impressive. Now just need cheap distance-fused rounds...

Seriously, how good a short-range air defense system could you make if you could make a .50 cal round that explodes into a cone of shrapnel at a programmed distance in this auto-turret? It would be both way more effective (much longer range possible) and way less dangerous to those on the ground.

Nicholas Weaver reposted

I find the prediction markets pretty much useless when it comes to “who is going to win” beforehand, because the sentiment is infected with the personal biases of the degen crypto sickos who participate what they are usually good at is doing math once the results start to come in

G Elliott Morris@gelliottmorris.com

Brazil elected Lula again tonight. Poll averages appear to have had Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro effectively tied, maybe Bolsonaro up 1 on Lula — so not sure why the markets had this race at 80-20 Bolsonaro. Markets might miss big in the U.S. midterms in 9 days too.

Nicholas Weaver reposted

Replying to @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com

i think cities should enable development according to impersonal rules and then levy impersonal taxes on land to pay for impersonal social services free_speech.png

Nicholas Weaver reposted

It's... also not particularly novel for Americans who DO follow this sort of thing to be happy when autocrats in other countries are defeated? I'm just barely old enough to recall the ouster of Pinochet being broadly celebrated in international coverage as a victory for human rights & democracy.

Andy Craig@andycraig.bsky.social

It's wrong in a more basic way: if you're encountering "so many" Americans who have a strong interest in the Brazilian election, it's a reminder your personal social media feed is a highly unrepresentative niche of people with at least a 95th percentile level of interest in politics generally.

Nicholas Weaver reposted

Just stunning what's happening in CS/NLP. Don't sleep on this sociology, we'll have to deal with this too. And when organizers can't trust paper provenance, they will understandably start to rely more on author reputation. Network scholars can tell us what happens next.

Maria Antoniak@mariaa.bsky.social

Business meeting is starting at #EMNLP2026. First part that I'll cover is an ominous presentation on "The Conference Crisis" and the first part is about paper integrity.GPTZero was used for citation checks, with manual verification. 267 papers were desk rejected.

Nicholas Weaver reposted

My pal Danielle Koenig shared that her father Walter Koenig passed away last night at age 90. A performer whose kindness and warmth shone through the screen. He will be well remembered.

Nicholas Weaver reposted

Replying to @sifu.tweety.fish

It’s like $50mm per MW per year on a 90-day cancellable contract vs Neoclouds at $15mm per MW on 5yr firm deal. Elon bought up a ton of GPUs, realized he had no use for them, and then resold them to the market when there was functionally zero available capacity with no lead time

Truth be told this is way better than I thought it would be. Long term I don't see the Anthropic model being long term money spinner: Too few moats, and the work on "ablating" models is really work on automating/specializing. The future is still at the edge IMO. But cash flow + is a big deal

Alex Hern@hern.bsky.social

Just to try and pre-emptively stem the tide, a lot of people here are going to be posting the $66bn "loss" which is almost entirely about convertible notes and not the $1bn operating income which is the first cashflow positive quarter ever

Nicholas Weaver reposted

Replying to @edzitron.com

By the way: I have been saying for a while that the debt markets will be what drags this era to its knees. Every single neocloud needs endless debt and will need it for the foreseeable future. Coreweave will burn, it is a time bomb as I’ve been saying a year and a half.

WhatsApp may be Meta but it wasn't designed by Meta nor actually designed as a social network but a secure communications channel. Group chats do not have their content seen by Meta, Meta only gets the the metadata (who talks to whom).

Bruno Dies@brunodias.dev

At one point he had a Whatsapp group with 10 million people in it, coordinating action. Which I didn't even think whatsapp was infrastructurally designed to support. And yes, whatsapp is of course a meta network, but the strategy was to be everywhere, to act redundantly, to be unbannable.

It is going to be so hilarious if Trump strokes out and dies and JD decides "Trump is SUCH a boatanchor, ehh, forgetaboutit" and doesn't pardon anyone.

Paul Bernal@paulbernal.bsky.social

It does give me a little hope: they are at least contemplating Trump not being in power.

Nicholas Weaver reposted

my main takeaway from the cheesecake factory thing is that I remain extremely sad we never got an obama versus trump general election matchup obama would have broken him in half, rural dipshit whispering powers or no

Nicholas Weaver reposted

No one is Assigned Marine at Birth. Marines are made, and they get really mad if you tell them someone who is a Marine isn't a Marine.

Sky Marchini@sky.skymarchini.net

The other thing here is heggles is an army guy and (it is my understanding) the marines generally do not like army people telling them what to do (and in particular saying who gets to be a marine)

Nicholas Weaver reposted

Yeah, good. (Many Chinese cars also not allowed on Bundeswehr bases either)

The Defence Blog@defence-blog.com

Starting Monday, no BYD car gets through the gates at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan. Not personal cars, not taxis, not delivery vans. The concern: cameras and sensors in modern EVs could collect data on the base. defence-blog.com/u-s-air-base...

It is time for reporters to start asking "What is that lump under your pants?" and "Do you not know you lost the Iran war already?" and "Are you fucking insane?"

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

😳 WOMAN REPORTER: Do sexual abuse allegations mean nothing to you, sir? TRUMP: Wait. Wait! Wait wait wait. Slow down. Who are you with? REPORTER: NBC, sir. But they are very serious sex abuse allegations TRUMP: Quiet! Isn't she a fresh person? You're a horrible little reporter, aren't you?

Nicholas Weaver reposted

$446 million of his (sometime) reported net worth of $1 trillion means he’s still only spending 0.0446% of his net worth to try to buy elections. put in more concrete terms: if you had $100, this would be like spending less than 5 cents. now tell me again why i should vote against a wealth tax.

Carl Quintanilla@carlquintanilla.bsky.social

“.. The world’s richest man poured $446 million of his own money into this year’s midterm elections, mostly aimed at preserving the Republican Party’s control of Congress, recent election filings show.” @washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com/elections/in...

Bad play calls are going to happen, yes ML says you probably wanted to go for it. But a good aggressive coach would do the same. But I'm not sure how much ML/"Analytics" buys you in these situations anyway, because a coach can justify it as "trust in the players" even when it fails.

tagerai.bsky.social@tagerai.bsky.social

AI in a nutshell

Nicholas Weaver reposted

Replying to @lethalityjane.bsky.social

It's very funny that some Dallas Cowboys executive signed that Netflix deal thinking it would be great for them and then all of a sudden they've had to actually pay the workers they'd been exploiting for decades.

Nicholas Weaver reposted

Replying to @floridanorcross.bsky.social

That is the thing Marines care about. Are you Marining? Okay good

Nicholas Weaver reposted

the navy isn't as much of a surprise but i was not expecting we'd get the United States Marines in the national divorce

Gillian Branstetter@gbbranstetter.bsky.social

Woah - boards of service in the Marines and the Navy are ignoring Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth's order to purge transgender troops from the military. "Navy and Marine Corps boards have voted to retain trans members in nine of 12 cases." www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...

Nicholas Weaver reposted

Getting flashbacks from serving during DADT, when every unit had a sailor or three that we all knew, protected, and shut the fuck up about

Gillian Branstetter@gbbranstetter.bsky.social

Woah - boards of service in the Marines and the Navy are ignoring Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth's order to purge transgender troops from the military. "Navy and Marine Corps boards have voted to retain trans members in nine of 12 cases." www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...

Nicholas Weaver reposted

I always adore this little machine at the Oakland airport and was delighted to see that the author of the 5min piece the machine printed out put their Bluesky handle on the story, shout out to @chrisblake.bsky.social for making a trip to see my dying grandmother a little less bleak

Nicholas Weaver reposted

Replying to @mikeblack114.bsky.social

"Palmer luckey wants to jurassic park dogs except into cronenberg horror killing machines" is the sort of thing that just might break through

Nicholas Weaver reposted