peterispaikens.bsky.social

"If there's one thing I could tell people to do, it would be to use a password manager. Do not reuse old passwords." @racheltobac.bsky.social, on how to protect yourselves from hacks

Whoa, Instructure (who owns Canvas) says they came to an agreement with the cyber criminals (typically this means a ransom was paid) in exchange for the stolen data being deleted instead of leaked and criminals ceasing all extortion requests from customers. Huge development.

LLMs have been widely reported as left-wing biased. The finding has shaped policy and debate — with Trump banning "Woke AI". Our new paper challenges this story. It's not that the models are biased. It's that they think the auditor is. 🧵 w/ michelleschimmel.bsky.social‬arxiv.org/pdf/2604.27633

🧵New paper: "Lost in Backpropagation: The LM Head is a Gradient Bottleneck" The output layer of LLMs destroys 95-99% of your training signal during backpropagation, and this significantly slows down pretraining 👇

Why do people you know keep posting screenshots of summaries from AI as if this proves anything in an argument? Why do questions like "how do you know the information from AI is correct?" fall on deaf ears? I suggest that the reason has to do with consensus and the legitimation of knowledge 🧵

IMO the worst mistake people make trying to AI-proof their career is dropping everything to learn AI. It's like dropping out of math to study how to push calculator buttons really fast. The skill cap for AI is going to be your understanding of the underlying subject, not how good you are at prompts.

Yeah, body cameras don't matter a damn unless you have Jonathan Ross and Alex Pretti's murderers sitting in front of a jury visibly shaking in fear of a life sentence. Right now, ICE is just gonna destroy that footage if mildly inconvenient.

"Telefons ir cigaretes acīm"

if tumblr dies I need this video to make it's seasonal rotation here instead just in case, Happy holidays 🎄

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

A sovereign nation decides the size of its own armed forces, the treaties it makes and the international organisations it joins. That’s what Putin seeks to deny Ukraine - its sovereignty.

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer. He is a computer safety researcher. And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine. In under 1600 words. aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

An "AI" tech support line told me that it'd raise a ticket and get back to me in a couple of days Yeah, I guess that's probably what a human AI tech support guy might have said. Good job impersonating tech support, one slight problem.

Wishing the EU good luck on their intricate mission to figure out WHO is launching the mysterious drones over their defense facilities and airports. Really challenging issue, we’re all in anticipation

Ultimately it doesn’t matter whether Britain thinks we are at war with Russia if Moscow already considers itself at war with us, which it does. We either acknowledge the reality of it or bury our heads in the sand, in either scenario, the war for Europe has already begun.

Right now, one institution after another is calculating that if they cross Trump MAGA will hurt them, but the Dems won't. You need them to recalculate and you get them to recalculate by putting large, angry crowds in the street over and over and over again. Then Dems are "me, or the pitchforks."

🤓 Anthropic recently release a threat report that shows how threat actors are using their model Claude. Here are some of the highlights: ・ Vibe hacking: Criminals are using Claude Code to perform real intrusions, doing reconnaissance, extortion, at a scale […] [Original post on infosec.exchange]

This fucking sentence

A man understandably refused to hand over his ID or get out of the car for a bunch of masked thugs who refused to identify themselves. And when he drove away, they opened fire on him. This isn’t how you do any sort of enforcement when your goal is to uphold the law. This is gangsterism.

we can sneak around town / hunting working folks down / I hear they got a great benefit plan join ICE boy ain’t it nice / join ICE take my advice www.tiktok.com/@jessewelles...

OTD in 1975 USSR signed Helsinki Accords promising to respect borders & let countries join what orgs like they want. As we, the self declared successor state, have *always* followed this, you can trust over a peace deal with Ukraine now.

💥 CERT-UA published a report on a malware powered by an LLM. The malware uses Qwen 2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct via the HuggingFace API to generate and execute commands on infected systems. It is a Python script that embeds prompts to dynamically craft Windows […] [Original post on infosec.exchange]

This was where I worked. This was where research showed that BPA harmed babies, Pesticides created 6 legged frogs and PCBs cause cancer among other things. The EPA is a superhero from protecting human health and the health of our water and air. Ask WHY they would shut this down?

This has been one of the most controversial videos I have ever made. It has elicited hundreds of abusive and sometimes threatening messages. It is 7 seconds long. I don't ask people to do anything, and I am not rude. I simply, unapologetically, state that I exist. This is why we still need pride.

Comic by Hartley Lin #NoKings

Genuine Question because I Do not understand… so if these men roll up in plain clothes and masks, grab a human being… even a child, and throw them in an unmarked vehicle I am just supposed to look the other way and say nothing ?? Ask Nothing ?

Europe’s frontier countries ready their hospitals for war

#booksky

I celebrate the destruction of Russian long range bombers today just as I did when NATO took out the Serb Artillery around Sarajevo thirty years ago. Disarming those who attack civilians is always in the cause of peace

Russian state media editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan gleefully celebrating her compatriots' threats during peace negotiations is the best example of why the Russian people's minds are sick and need to be cured of imperialism by a complete defeat.

The state of Georgia is using the body of a brain-dead woman as an incubator. Because she was 9 weeks pregnant when she died, and their abortion ban is from about 6 weeks, they are sustaining her on life support, without input from her family, until 32 weeks of gestation. A true dystopian nightmare.

It’s especially galling that AG Pam Bondi personally wrote the memo approving the gift of the Qatari airplane. Her last job was as a lobbyist for Qatar! efile.fara.gov/docs/6415-Ex...

We've become completely desensitized to it but it's genuinely unreal how corrupt this admin is. Tinpot dictatorship stuff. Yes, that is the US Attorney General getting paid $1.38M to lobby on behalf of Qatar, and yes she did approve a $400M private jet as a gift.

good vibes only

I think about this comic at least once a week

Animating too much absolutely sensible outrage at Trumpism is an appeal to parental figures who aren’t there. “He should not be allowed”; “He should be arrested”; “This can’t be permitted.” Passive voice, all of which begs, “by whom?” It’s an appeal to an order that has already broken.

I read it…

A pencil #drawing of an orange that looks so realistic, you might think it’s about to roll off the page!

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

One man just wiped out $10 trillion in wealth, is destroying centuries-old legal protections, and seems determined to unravel humanity’s greatest public health achievement. In 3 months. I don’t know how we get out of this. But if we do, one person can never have that kind of power again.

So, reading the article, I am also struck - in addition to the OPSEC catastrophe - by how shallow the strategic thinking here is. Maybe that's just always the way it is, but all the concerns are domestic politics and messaging. No one asks, "will these strikes accomplish anything and if so, what?"

I’m thinking of this quote for no particular reason