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Mathematical physicist at UC Riverside. Wrote This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics and now the Azimuth blog on mathematics, physics and environmental science.

• As the view from Moscow becomes increasingly embarrassing, it seems increasingly likely Putin will start a new more desperate phase of his war against Ukraine. Experts expect him to start a quiet mobilization of troops shortly after tomorrow's parliamentary elections. He seems to want 300,000 - 500,000 new soldiers. Despite increasing payments, recruitment has been failing to keep pace with the rising casualties. We can also expect Putin to step up attacks against Europe. More drones flying into European air space, and more stuff like this: • On August 4, 2026, a bomb squad at Leipzig/Halle A…

  pravda.com.ua

  EuropeRussiaRelated

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

• With the latest external hack of OpenAI via Claude, closed models continue to be the tip of the iceberg on AI risks, not open models. They have been 1) much easier to get started with, 2) more capable & 3) shipped with leaky safeguards. Finetuning open models to specific attacks is harder.

  AnthropicOpenAIRelated

Founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU Project, original author of GNU Emacs and the GNU General Public License, and long-time president of the Free Software Foundation.

• https://stallman.org/glossary.html#bully https://civicshout.com/p/media-must-cover-trump-s-welker-attack-as-authoritarianism-2 US citizens: call on the media to stop covering the bully's attacks on journalists as outbursts and start covering them as deliberate, escalating attempts to use government power to silence the press.

  governmentRelated

Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.

• Fragments: September 16

  Reports of agentic hacking continue, in this case it happened back in May and it seems OpenAI did not disclose that they were responsible. Simon Willison sees two options: After the Hugging Face and Wiki attacks OpenAI…

  OpenAIHuggingFaceRelated

President of the European Commission since 2019; previously Germany's defence minister.

• Europe needs its own playbook to counter hybrid attacks. An Emergency Security Protocol. When triggered by one Member State, all Member States would coordinate a European response. We will also set out our ideas to make a European Security Council a reality. With partners like Ukraine, UK, Norway, Canada and others involved.

  EuropeRelated

Security technologist and author of books including Applied Cryptography and Data and Goliath; writes the Schneier on Security blog and the monthly Crypto-Gram newsletter.

• 25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough

  This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare. One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wireta…

  governmentRelated

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

• Defending Against Massed Drone Attacks

  A new air defense strategy is needed to counter long range attack drones. ...

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President of the European Commission since 2019; previously Germany's defence minister.

• I condemn the Houthi attack against Saudi Arabia. We stand in solidarity with our Gulf partners in the face of relentless attacks by Iran’s proxies. We will continue working with our partners for safe, free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz and for stability in the Middle East. We all have a stake in this.

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President of the European Commission since 2019; previously Germany's defence minister.

• Today, we have approved €6.1 billion to help Ukraine procure air defence systems, missiles, drones and electronic warfare systems. With this approval, Ukraine can purchase the Patriot equipment it needs to protect its skies from Russia's attacks. Together with our Member States and NATO, we will continue to deliver for Ukraine. So that Ukraine prevails. So that it wins the just and lasting peace it deserves.

  link.europa.eu

  RussiaRelated

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Liberalism needs a new philosophy of immigration

  We need to make a principled stand instead of a tactical retreat.

  immigrationRelated

British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.

• ActivityPub - Is it worth defending against replay attacks and message/signature time skew?

  Here's a problem that I've found with ActivityBot - my little ActivityPub server. Sometimes it receives messages which were originally sent months ago. Why does that happen and is it risky to accept and process them? My…

  Related

Researcher and science writer. Co-founder and editor at Works in Progress magazine, formerly a researcher at Our World in Data, and author of the Scientific Discovery newsletter on science, global health and medical innovation.

• Unfortunate - the Lp(a) lowering trial that everyone (nerds) were waiting for was unsuccessful. It could've meant a highly effective new method to reduce heart attacks and strokes. I'd still like to see the detailed results, but I take this as some evidence against the causal relationship.

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Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, co-director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, and author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.

• Sudden swarm of password attacks on my @X account, all within 2 minutes this afternoon. Revenge of the AI agents?

  Related

Creator of Homebrew, the macOS package manager, and a Swift developer.

• Automic Vault means your CLI tools don’t perform sensitive actions without your approval. This applies to agents and supply chain attacks both. We patch tools at the *packaging layer*. Blessed Scripts allow you to make small, vetted scripts that escalate tool capabilities. Reentrant Blessed Scripts are a scripting pattern that allow you to “weave” in agent capabilities. Interleaving deterministic work with escalated Tool capabilities and secrets with applied intelligence. Perfect for automations.
  Quoting@AutomicVaultWe have documented the concept of `Reentrant Blessed Scripts` that describe our suggested mechanism of giving Agent Automations a set of escalated capabilities and secrets. Have the automation execute a Blessed Script with Automic Vault front-matter for the capabilities and…

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Economist; Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, and co-author of 13 Bankers and Power and Progress.

• I highly encourage everyone to read @DAcemogluMIT's latest book "What Happened to Liberal Democracy?" from @DuttonBooks, just released this week. Daron not only offers insightful analysis of how and why liberalism went astray, but also lays out a vision for a better path forward.

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Author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts and of Bittersweet; writes The Quiet Life newsletter.

• Sacred Humanism: A New Vision for the Humanities

  How to bring the students back.

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Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

• Daron Acemoglu on Liberalism, Automation, and the Educated Elite

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Engineering leader and writer; wrote An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer and The Engineering Executive's Primer, and blogs at Irrational Exuberance.

• Roadmap decisions rather than dates.

  One thing that bothered me about Imprint’s product after joining was our lack of passkey support. Passkey support is a rare opportunity to increase resiliency to phishing attacks while simultaneously reducing logi…

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Indian value investor who taught Behavioural Finance and Business Valuation as an adjunct professor at MDI Gurgaon. He writes the Fundoo Professor blog about investing, moats and mental models.

• I asked Claude Fable 5: "How vulnerable is the business model of XYZ (name concealed)? I am referring to competitive attacks from China and dependence, if any, on government policy incentives, etc. There have been so many solar energy and wind energy bubbles in the past, and I have kept away from these companies. Am I being too cautious?

  solarAnthropicRelated

Cryptographer; teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins and writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.

• Some thoughts about Anthropic’s new cryptanalysis results

  Yesterday Anthropic published two new cryptanalysis results, both outputs of Claude Mythos, their (still) unreleased advanced model. The first of these results attacks a signature scheme called HAWK, while the second is…

  AnthropicRelated

Labour politician. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from July 2024 to June 2026, and MP for Holborn and St Pancras from 2015 until standing down in 2026. Director of Public Prosecutions before entering Parliament.

• Shocking news that Counter Terrorism Police are investigating a credible, serious threat targeted at an Islamic event in Suffolk. Thanks to the quick action taken by police and the organisers, nobody was hurt. My message is clear: I will not tolerate any attacks on our Muslim communities, or any form of anti-Muslim hatred.

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Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.

• Brianna Wu: the case for liberalism

  A liberal pundit argues for her politics

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American-Polish journalist and historian, staff writer at The Atlantic; author of Gulag, Iron Curtain, Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc.

• What, actually, is European Civilization?

  The foundational texts of classical liberalism were written in Europe too

  EuropeRelated

FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.

• Chunking attacks on Tarsnap (and others)

  Ten years ago I wrote that it would require someone smarter than me to extract information from the way that Tarsnap splits data into chunks. Well, I never claimed to be the smartest person in the world! Working with Bo…

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Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

• https://bughunters.google.com/blog/5424842357473280/zen-and-the-art-of-microcode-hacking Shot: "This opens up the potential for hardware attacks (e.g., reading the key from ROM with a scanning electron microscope), side-channel attacks (e.g., using Correlation Power Analysis to leak the key during validation), or other [...] attacks" Chaser: "We noticed that the key from an old Zen 1 CPU was the example key of the NIST SP 800-38B publication and was reused until at least Zen 4 CPUs."

  GoogleRelated

Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.

• Deflationary Liberalism

  Social contract theory from the bottom-up

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Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.

• Disembedded Liberalism

  "Neoliberalism" as globalized technocracy

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