David Thiel reposted
David Thiel
David Thiel
@grumplicio.us
Infosec person focused on harm reduction in technology; fmr tech, data science and T&S research at https://io.stanford.edu & https://tsjournal.org https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0947-5921 Also music things + open data.
4.9K followers981 following1K posts
I mean yeah but most of us have dealt with this by only pretending to do code review
Basically AI allows software engineers to produce shitty code *faster* and in higher volumes which increases the amount time spent on code reviews and revisions nullifying the productivity gained from producing the code in the first place.
And honestly while this did cause stress to the organizers (they had to censor each individual conference program leaflet by hand), it otherwise just drew attention to the issue and made the conference more fun and interesting. 🤷
Guess what? I had some *thoughts* on Michael Shellenberger & the State Dept's Sarah Rogers losing their minds about a disinfo conference in Lithuania having a panel exploring if the US interferes in foreign information systems... and then interfering to get the conference sponsors to pull out.
David Thiel reposted
David Thiel reposted
"Chayefsky had a lot to say about television, and he said it with an unflattering, searing bite—and it’s all the more relevant in an age when we each carry a television studio in our pockets and all dream of becoming a hit." www.liberalcurrents.com/network-at-5...
Well they're not beating the allegations are they "His Hinge profile doesn’t mention his employer. And sometimes he makes up stories out of thin air to justify working for Palantir—like that line about the medical debt. His parents don’t have any, nor are they ill."
Once seen as nerdy but harmless innovators, men in tech are now widely regarded as red-pilled Elon Musk wannabes. It’s made getting laid a whole lot harder. www.wired.com/story/tech-b...
Somehow when I read this headline I thought "ah, so the network of anonymous men got to work to help the victim" And no, of course it's not that
There is a corner of the internet I had never heard of before I started reporting this story. It’s called the “burnerverse”: a network of anon burner accounts ostensibly discussing college sports. But they have another goal: destroying young girls’ lives.🧵: www.wired.com/story/burner...
David Thiel reposted
If I had a pack of vicious dogs and just let them off leash to maul people, I would go to jail and the dogs would be confiscated. Do it with an LLM and you get showered with breathless press coverage and military contracts. Until there's criminal liability, we're incentivizing this behavior.
Wow. Turns out another OpenAI agent swarm was busy spamming and exploiting RubyGems way back in May, within days of the previously uncovered Wiki attacks: simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/12/...
Sounds like an almost exact repeat of what happened in 2023, i.e. some component of the PhotoDNA pipeline broke and went entirely unnoticed. Difference being now X helps generate the content and has made it as difficult as possible for external parties to flag problems. www.wsj.com/tech/twitter...
Over six months, we tracked the appearance of child sexual abuse material on X. We found images from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's database, which is considered one of the most highly vetted and which many tech companies block on upload. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/t...
David Thiel reposted
Fair to say that Cloudflare, Stripe, "Block" and Dropbox are just as enthusiastic if not more so. omarchy.org/patrons/
feels like it’s inevitable these days that every tool you rely on is one garbage founder or funder away from their app’s version of this post
Also counterintuitively: unlike real names, stable pseudonyms *more identifying* and a more limited resource. There's plenty of people with a display name of "David Thiel" backed by an email, but if I act like a prick and lose my unique id, I can't just swap to a new one without a loss.
every single study done on this shows that the actual best behavior is done under consistent pseudonyms and people behave worse under real names it’s counterintuitive but at this point the real names thing is willful denial of evidence
If you took this image back in time 3 years ago when we were writing the first paper on genAI CSAM and showed it to me, I think I would have just walked into the ocean
Activists raised a 40-foot-tall inflatable Elon Musk in Manhattan to draw attention to the risk he allegedly poses to investors. www.wired.com/story/massiv...
Everyone even mildly politically literate at the time read the DHS to be a fascist project, fascists included. No one found it reassuring, and I honestly don't remember anyone even pretending to frame it as "unity". This is weird revisionism ala "everyone was in favor of the war in Iraq".
DHS was originally conceived in the interest of unity and harmony — and the phrase "homeland security" was originally meant to be reassuring. n.pr/4nOx8KP
David Thiel reposted
I also think that inasmuch as there’s an AI bubble, its collapse will be brought about not just by the broken economics of the giant models, but by migration to local open ones. Qwen on a Mac Studio is near last year’s frontier, and actually pretty fast.
I think a lot of AI/corporate doomers are still fundamentally not understanding that open-source models you can run locally on consumer hardware are no worse than two years behind the frontier models and for most purposes a lot closer
“In South Korea and Australia, schools have given pupils the option not to have their photos in yearbooks” I’ve been in this space for a while but this is somehow a new kind of grim.
NEW: Teenage boys are pulling classmates' photos off Insta and running them through cheap nudify apps and the fallout has now hit nearly 90 schools across 28 countries with 600+ known victims since 2023, per a WIRED/Indicator analysis. UNICEF estimates 1.2M children were targeted last year alone.
David Thiel reposted
The whole AI-powered "algorithmic choice" thing kind of breaks down when a) most of your userbase hates anything AI and b) no normal person wants to "choose an algorithm"
Currently, the all-time most blocked accounts on Bluesky are: 1. JD Vance 2. The White House 3. ICE 4. Bluesky's AI app that was announced 24 hours ago
Guys this is just 2 windows next to each other with extra steps
Here's everything that's new in Firefox 149 🔥 ☑️ Split View: Two tabs side by side, just like it should be ☑️ Built-in VPN Beta: Hide your IP address while browsing ☑️ Tab Notes: Leave yourself notes to remember why you opened that tab (available in Labs) blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/f...
With a name like “SocksEscort” I would have expected they were a proxy for a different kind of provider
-Authorities take down SocksEscort proxy provider -Iranian hackers wipe US medical device maker -DOGE dude stole SSA data -CISA asks for Cisco device logs -Hacker stole Epstein files from FBI -Michelin data breach Newsletter: news.risky.biz/risky-bullet... Podcast: risky.biz/RBNEWS537/
David Thiel reposted
Laurie Spiegel on the difference between algorithmic music and ‘AI’
This is great; further complicated by the lineage of Super (❖), which is vaguely equivalent to the Windows key but referred to as Meta in various internals, except Alt is considered Meta elsewhere and many use it as Command. 🥳 The "Menu" key remains a mystery.
I wrote an essay about the history of the [Fn] key, and my annoyance with how Apple has been handling it for the last many years. Hope you enjoy it! aresluna.org/fn/
I had an ex who did lots of nicotine gum for its purported cognitive benefits; they ended up with a ferocious addiction and no obvious method to help them quit short of smoking
"Tech companies like Palantir now stock vending machines with nicotine pouches in the hopes of boosting their workers’ productivity."