The tech-bro cult that funded Wes Streeting| Telegraph

Not sure who Wes Streeting is, but “Labour for the Long Term” and “Effective Altruism for Christians” sound like some internet rabbit holes to go down later.

Prof MacAskill and Sam Bankman-Fried first met in 2012, long before Bankman-Fried would make his billions. Prof MacAskill had contacted him out of the blue while he was still a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), inviting him to attend a talk he was giving to students at nearby Harvard University.

/why/ did he do that? out of the blue, no reason at all? what did SBF have going on in undergrad?

Mr Lawrence now runs the Centre for British Progress, a “non-partisan” think tank “producing concrete ideas for… British growth”.

sitting in a work presentation around linkedin link on agentic use levels. It’s fucking dumb. Nobody reviews shit and it seems like the whole org is getting dumber.

I just got hit by a memory from what must have been 2021, when I was working for a uni-attached startup center. I was lounging in our event space, when my colleague hit me with a question from left field: Would there be a benefit to cooling servers in space, since space is cold?

Little did he know that I was ready to unload my knowledge absorbed from the Expanse series, which I was reading on repeat to cope with my depressing job. So I infodumped on him about how being in space is like being in a thermos and about the Peltier effect being used in spacecraft radiators. He didn’t say much in response, and I wasn’t too stoked about my social skills in that moment.

Now I wonder if I saved him from a really embarassing decision. He was an ex-Amazon project manager who was non-committally looking for a PhD topic or maybe a startup. He quit a few months later and went into consulting I think.

In positive news, Darius has found a way to build an ethical chatbot https://tinysubversions.com/ethical-assistant/

So this one seems to be somewhat up in the air right now, and could do with a bit more verification, but it appears that google might be training gemini on your private google docs and a gemini user could ask questions that expose the contents of those documents.

Which is interesting. We use google docs at work, but it isn’t clear how much valuable ip or confidential information is in there.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1vfwuf5/a_player_found_out_the_actual_name_of_my_games/

Glorious hometown W

OpenAI wasn’t doing it for this person, they’re going to work on telepathy?

jfc even my old company has full pivoted to ai - https://platform.mapquest.com/mcp

sorry guys too little too late

Somehow managed to find a sneer on LinkedIn, of all fucking places:

Amazing installation instructions at https://github.com/0xeb/ghidrasql

Install with an AI agent (recommended)

The fastest way to get ghidrasql running end-to-end is to point an AI coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Aider, etc.) at the bundled installer prompt:

install-prompt.md

It is a self-contained runbook with explicit verification gates at every step — preflight checks, building libghidra, installing the LibGhidraHost Ghidra extension, building ghidrasql, and a first live query. Hand it to your agent and let it drive the install; intervene only if a gate reports a failure.

JFC.

h/t to rairii: https://labyrinth.zone/objects/96478395-64d9-452c-a906-9e6159cd10a3

Gamers Nexus has announced plans to poison the LLMs scraping them, alongside updates to the megacharts on their website.

There was a cryptocurrency wallet hack the other day which has so far gone unremarked here because the popcorn is stale and we all pivoted to AI. And yet there are dozens of voices of bagholders crying out in pain wanting to be heard. This is their story.

For some reason the best explanation comes from a boring company that makes point of sale credit card readers https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/predictable-rng-fallback-and-32-bit-reseed-in-coldcard-firmware

COLDCARD firmware contains an RNG integration error that causes ngu.random to use MicroPython’s deterministic Yasmarang fallback instead of the STM32 hardware RNG.

Oh hey they got the most important thing not to get wrong wrong in the regulation free money settlement layer of the future.

The bug? Well in one file they wrote #define MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG 0, and a library they depended on had this code:

# ifndef MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG
# error "get a HW TRNG plz"
# endif

This should have caused a build failure, but since MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG was defined, to zero, it did not and instead continued down an insecure codepath.

As a C++ programmer this isn’t an unheard of sort of mistake to make in the moment. Many libraries use undefined for preprocessor variables, but there are some people who also use zero.

But it’s less excusable to not catch it when this is literally the most important thing to get right in a bitcoin wallet. Did they not trace the code path when writing the code? Did they have no integration tests or unit tests for RNG seed quality? Poor RNG seeding has come up a ton in literature, so is the sort of thing people writing cryptographic code should check for…

We’ll have to addend that old saying: “don’t roll your own crypto unless the other person’s crypto is from a blockchain developer in which case you’re probably better off rolling your own after all.”

I personally don’t want to sneer at the bagholders too much here. It’s 2026 and at this point it just feels kinda sad. But I’ll end this comment with this glowing review:

I thought I was secure because Cold Card was always praised as one of the best and most secure wallets. It’s open source, so anyone can verify.

“It’s open source, so anyone can verify” – unfortunately for them the verifier was also a hacker.

Opinion: I Was Not Allowed To Type Prompts Into ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk And This Is Discrimination By Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University

New odium symposium episode: https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/22-on-chasers-ft-165582005

We talked to trans philosophy professor amy marvin about the intersection between trans chasers and stand up comedy

Clammy Sammy acknowledges Ed Zitron for the first time! https://xcancel.com/sama/status/2084663673570971990

His response is the Live Laugh Love of 2015 Silicon Valley platitudes:

i would rather be an optimist and work hard than a pessimist posting about why things won’t work.

it’s much more difficult and the most likely path is failure, but society fails if people don’t try.

no amount of “it will never work” essays will drive society forward.

Of course, building data centers that use untold amounts of rare earth metals, electricity, and water while spewing out tons of pollution and scraping every last bit of human content in order to remove people from their jobs by doing them badly is what drives society forward. Profits fail if oligarchs don’t try. Actually, the AI companies don’t even need profits.