Marcus Hutchins

11 May

Anyway, if you're interested in tech/cybersecurity content and want to throw me a follow, I'm primarily active on Threads and LinkedIn at the moment. threads.net/malwaretech www.linkedin.com/in/malwarete...

I think the primary factor that led to Bluesky fumbling becoming the next Twitter was pandering to early Twitter nostalgia. There's a very vocal minority who want a return to the chronological timeline based algorithm-free self-curated experience of the 2010s internet. 🧵 1/5

It's not really an issue of personal preference, either. When you prioritize chronological feed, that impacts new user's ability to find content they like, and creator's ability to get reach. The only people who benefit are the early adopters who built huge networks and reach. 4/5

I'm not really surprised that the active user count is in consistent decline and the only growth comes from random Twitter exoduses. But I am somewhat surprised by just how many people I follow have left within the last year. I'm also not joking when I say even LinkedIn has a better UX. 5/5

The problem is, everyone moved on. Social media is driven by algorithms now, and that's what the overwhelming majority of users are used to and expect. So even if you build the perfect 1:1 clone of early Twitter, it just fails every time. At the time that was all there was, so people enjoyed it. 2/5

On the modern internet where I can trust an algorithm to find me the content I like, the chronological timeline is an objectively subpar experience. It's a whole lot of work to manually find and follow accounts, just to see every their every post, instead of just the ones you're interested in. 3/5

I bought one of those fancy automatic vacuum/mop things. Actually pretty impressed by the AI mapping software. It just did a quick run through of my place, not the full wall to wall mapping Roomba does, and automatically figured out which room is which.

It’s super pretty, but the central button is a lidar turret that pops up, so I can’t put googly eyes on the bot without blocking the sensors 🥺

One of the coolest math things I've learned recently is the "wobbly table theorem". If you have an object with 4 legs, no matter how uneven the surface you put it on is, you can make it stable (all 4 legs touching the ground) by rotating it in place. It also never requires more than 90° of rotation.

9 May

I'm trying to find a new desk for my YouTube set. I don't want to spend too much, but I cheaped out last time & ended up with some wonky shit that visibly moves when I lean on it. If it wasn't for the fact there's no real photos of this, only 3D renderings, my bank account would be RIP right now.

9 May

Like, holy shit, the design looks incredible. LED accent lighting, built in power strip, and it's adjustable height. But every photo I can find is just some concept rendering which makes me suspicious that the real version is probably trash.

9 May

Hi guys, I'm looking for somewhere to store my digital money that uses a protocol which makes all transaction 100% irreversible. The thing I look for most in a platform is non-technical teams pushing code to production using AI. Does anyone know of any such places?

I remember in the early Bluesky days convincing people to come over here from Twitter because the amount of authentic engagement was like 10x higher. Now I get significantly more engagement on a Threads account with 3k followers than 36k here 🥀

Even Mastodon is more active now. Idk what happened but it feels like Bluesky went from one of the top social media platforms, to dying mall vibes in the space of less than a year.

I found a zero day in a security vendor's firewall software that allows you to remotely crash the entire system by sending it a single malicious packet. Since the firewall is responsible for inspecting traffic prior to the operating system handling it, no ports even need to be open for it to work.

It's so wild to me that when my passport expires I have to mail it back to my home country, then just not have a passport for however long it takes for them to receive it, cancel it, issue a new one, then mail it to me. Surely there has to be a better way...

✨Prompt Engineering✨

Not the slopbot trying to argue with me 💀

6 May

The bane of my existence is at my last job (the one I rage quit) we were building this new product. It's a hypervisor SDK which enables you to build custom hypervisors from Python. The major use case was analyzing malware, because it meant you didn't need to install anything inside the VM. 1/2

6 May

You could basically tell the hypervisor to intercept calls to any operating system function and even modify how it responds. Which would enabled you to monitor and manipulate any software. The product solves so many of my problems, but I rage quit the company, and it still hasn't gone to market. 2/2

6 May

The thing about modern technology that impresses me the most is batteries. This tiny rechargeable screwdriver actually provides enough torque to not be useless. There’s also a soldering iron version, which just seems like complete magic to me.

5 May

What in the inflation.... How is $460k/year still middle class? 😭

youtube.comI Built an AI That Builds Zero Day ExploitsYouTube video by Marcus Hutchins

5 May

What I learned building a system that autonomously finds and exploits zero day vulnerabilities

3 May

POV: your American friend is about to show you around their "walkable neighborhood"

3 May

Someone wrote a bot that replies to people's posts with AI slop, but they didn't code a feature to keep track of posts it has already replied to. I'm now on day 3 of receiving an AI slop reply on the same post every few hours.

Listening to infosec people freak out over Mythos is so tiring. Like, bro, your local water treatment plant runs Windows XP, your mobile provider's hardware is older than you are, and the protocol that routes internet traffic is secured by everyone just agreeing that hijacking it would be uncool.

You can easily spot American Conservative by the fact they'll encounter a major life problem, usually one that many other people also suffer from, and instead of "we should fix this" their take away is always "I think we should find ways to make more people suffer from the same issue".

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I was very bearish on AI to begin with, but recently I started experimenting more with APIs and building my own agents. And wow, I did not realize how heavily subsidized all the subscriptions were: 🧵 1/6

So, like, yeah, "everyone gets a free supercomputer" is great and all. But it isn't a serious business model. I just don't see how any amount of capability advancement or decrease in operational cost makes generative AI even remotely good value for money. 5/6

Then every AI proponent I talk to about this just come up with some insane napkin math where token costs keep decreasing exponentially forever. It feels as if the entire industry is basically operating on some insane Moore's law hypothesis where everything just becomes free... 6/6

Most of the die-hard AI fans I talk to are using stuff like Cursor, Claude Code, ChatGPT, etc. All of those are heavily-subsidized to the point where those $20/month and $200/month subscriptions they're paying for are letting them burn thousands of dollars worth of tokens. 3/6

I'd guess some of the heavier subscription users are probably burning like $15-30k/month worth of resources. Then you have to consider the fact that the actual cost of API tokens may also be subsidized. These company are getting discount compute from cloud providers looking to expand. 4/6

The $200/month Claude subscription I have is okish. Current frontier model capabilities are mediocre at best, but I can find $200/month worth of value here and there, so it's worth it for me. But, via the API though, I can burn $200 worth of tokens with a single prompt. 2/6

I got a new camera that costs the exact same as my old one, and the difference is insane. It makes my old videos look completely unwatchable 🥲

Do you think the write-off people will pay for it?

I'm doing research to make the case that AI, despite its current capabilities to develop zero day exploits, probably isn't that useful for cyber criminals. I've got some pretty good data from using Claude, but someone will inevitably argue "local models are cheaper". But the hardware costs is.. 😭

My company is unlikely to fund my research, so my current funding source is basically hypothetical future YouTube income, based on a hypothetical number of views, from hypothetical videos I post documenting my escapades

Is there some official UI change season or something? I swear every social media site I'm on has change their UI in the last week.

The trick to owning a Husky in a place with hardwood floors is buying a camo rug. The static from the rug will attract the fur. Instead of fur everywhere, it will blow around until it lands on the rug where it’ll stay hidden until you vacuum. Only downside is my dog is millennial grey :(

28 Apr

I can't believe I just bypassed Claude's guardrails by calling it a failure lmao

28 Apr

My biggest sin is I’m too lazy to shop for things, so I buy everything, including furniture, on Amazon. I just bought a chair mat and it’s genuinely just a piece of fabric with a rug pattern printed on top. The desk is also a laminate photo of wood 😆

26 Apr

Someone keeps posting AI slop on the company account, so I drafted a message to my boss asking if we should intervene. I meant to attach a photo of the AI slop, but I accidentally clicked the photo next to it in my camera roll, which is a loaded gun. Caught it before hitting send. But, holy shit lol

26 Apr

I'm sure my boss would have found the message absolutely hilarious, and it would have been extremely funny for all of 10 minutes until the feds show up at my house. But it's a good reminder to get a separate phone for work 😆

Whoever made "Fan Control" is an absolute hero. The bane of my existence is dynamic frequency scaling on modern CPU can cause them to jump like 10° in temperate almost instantly. So if you have your system fan speed scale with temperature, they just jump between jet engine and barely audible

The app allows you to build custom sensors. I created a sensor that averages the temperature of all my CPU cores, then feeds into a sensor which create a 4 second rolling average of the temperature, then that feeds into the fan speed controller. Completely flattens out random temp spikes.

My system fans randomly ramping up and down constantly has been annoying me so much that I was going to reverse engineer my system's fan control software and build all this myself. Thank god someone already did it, because that is like a week long dev project. 🥰

24 Apr

Hell yeah, let's go! Going to have some cool research coming soon.