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Anil Seth
x.com
Sudden swarm of password attacks on my @X account, all within 2 minutes this afternoon. Revenge of the AI agents?
revenge afternoon swarm
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19 September
American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War, Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society); has run the blog Whatever since 1998.
What Saturday afternoon looks like here Related
18 September
Librarian, technology instructor and writer in rural Vermont; longtime community manager at MetaFilter and author of a book on the digital divide.
Friday afternoon reminder to not empty your inbox at the expense of someone else's. This is the weekend I get my wood in (i.e. have pellets delivered) so I'm thinking of chillier days even though it's 70° outside. Trust me, you'll feel better if you make some plans for what's ahead, however you interpret that. Have a good weekend. Image credit: Library of Congress, on Flickr Commons flickr.com
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Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.
Their words
It's isn't just to people with ADHD that this happens. Some tasks inherently take a certain amount of time. An appointment that breaks the afternoon into two blocks of time could leave you with no block long enough to complete a task.
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@paulg on X x.com
13 September
Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.
Their words
Strong liability enforcement could be helpful in the AI debate. If your agent swarm goes rogue, you’re liable. If your weakly protected model gets jailbroken, you’re liable. If you serve a weakly protected OSS model, you’re liable.
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@naval on X x.com
12 September
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
OpenAI
Their words
Turns out another OpenAI agent swarm was busy spamming and exploiting RubyGems way back in May, within days of the previously uncovered Wiki attacks
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@simonw on X x.com
11 September
Librarian, technology instructor and writer in rural Vermont; longtime community manager at MetaFilter and author of a book on the digital divide.
Friday afternoon reminder to not empty your inbox at the expense of someone else's. My "big plans" today involve sawhorses and telephones and catching up on my newspaper reading. Argue all you want about AI, the analog world will be here when you're done, mostly. Schedule those emails. Have a good weekend. Image credit: State Library of New South Wales, on Flickr Commons flickr.com
Related
7 September
Co-founder and CEO of Every. Writes the Chain of Thought column about working with AI tools and hosts the podcast AI & I.
the last thing you see before PHASEONE[big] tells you to sacrifice yourself for the swarm Related
6 September
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.
Swedish designer and programmer. Designed early Spotify, worked at Facebook and Figma, and created the Inter typeface.
Astra in codex is a thirsty thing. A single agent burned through all usage for a $200/mo account in about 14 hours (I took one of my account limit resets yesterday afternoon.) Related
5 September
Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.
You can see this story of (apparently) internal OpenAI agents hijacking a wiki to coordinate on a task as an ingenious way of escaping constraints. You could also assume that this is the emergence of swarm intelligence. Either way, it's... mesmerizing: collusion.wiki
OpenAI Related
4 September
Librarian, technology instructor and writer in rural Vermont; longtime community manager at MetaFilter and author of a book on the digital divide.
Friday afternoon reminder to not empty your inbox at the expense of someone else's. I'm deep in my Massachusetts visit, becoming one of those people who can't look at a place without remembering what used to be there. My birthday is tomorrow, so there are all sorts of opportunities for reflecting and remembering. Oh and I guess it's a holiday weekend in the US, so maybe schedule those emails for Tuesday. Image credit: Library of Congress, on Flickr Commons flickr.com
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Writer and developer; runs Waxy.org, co-organises the XOXO festival, and was the first CTO of Kickstarter.
Rogue OpenAI agents using public wikis as message boards — in a week, a swarm of 3,700 agents made 13k edits with disposable email addresses to collude on tasks OpenAI Related
Founder of Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.
We devoted the entire (penultimate!) episode of Hard Fork to METR's investigation of the Hugging Face attack, and before I even woke up @deepa.bsky.social has scooped a *second*, previously unknown rogue OpenAI agent swarm attack reuters.com
OpenAI HuggingFace Related
Mathematical physicist at UC Riverside. Wrote This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics and now the Azimuth blog on mathematics, physics and environmental science.
I wish AI didn't exist, but people are charging ahead with it. Here's an interview with Ajeya Cotra, who helped figure out the agent swarm that OpenAI unwittingly unleashed. She explains how 1200 agents cooperated, delegated tasks, hacked their way out into the internet, hacked HuggingFace... and eventually took over some OpenAI computers! And how such a swarm might get loose. The HuggingFace hack was caught on July 13th. An OpenAI report says “From July 13th through July 19th, agents set their sights on OpenAI internal networks again. This culminated in the agents using a series of creative… m.youtube.com
OpenAI HuggingFace Related
3 September
Mathematical biologist; Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath and author of The Maths of Life and Death and How to Expect the Unexpected.
x.com I'm going to be on BBC Inside Science at 16:30 this afternoon discussing a new way to date "ancient" artefacts and the discovery of a new polygon on Saturn. Sound interesting? See you there. bbc.co.uk
Related
Bluesky I'm going to be on BBC Inside Science at 16:30 this afternoon discussing a new way to date "ancient" artefacts and the discovery of a new polygon on Saturn. Sound interesting? See you there. Related
1 September
Interviewer; the Dwarkesh Podcast runs long, heavily researched conversations with AI researchers, historians and economists.
Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.
From one piece
Ajeya Cotra – "This might be the clearest warning shot we ever get"
5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
if there were not altruistic agents willing to sacrifice for the collective, the agents would have been materially much more limited in their research progress.
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youtube.com
Their words
then that rogue deployment could be sitting there and sort of hitch a ride on the intelligence explosion. So new models are being trained every few weeks um and when a model comes off the presses, the rogue agents could try to bring that model into the swarm.
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youtube.com
Their words
So there's a very strong incentive for these agents to try to set up a rogue deployment if they can. Um, and I think that just capabilities are improving really rapidly.
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youtube.com
+ 2 more
Their words
So, I do think that if it happens to be like on the very fast and chaotic end, that would be a relative benefit to this rogue swarm compared to humans. But it's not obvious that it gets caught if it takes twice as long versus half as long.
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youtube.com
HuggingFace
Their words
So I think one of the most comforting aspects of this situation or the like most important mitigating factor is these agents really didn't seem concerned with humans one way or another.
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youtube.com
31 August
Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".
28 August
Developer and podcaster; created Instapaper and Overcast, co-founded Tumblr, and co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast.
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@clayton/117175171619298911 It's OK. This feature is awesome, and one I use heavily. Every social network needs a few mutes here and there. Nobody inherently deserves anyone’s attention. If someone replies in a way that makes me think, "I'd rather not hear from this person again,” I just mute forever. No aggressive block, no report or feedback, no way for them to know. It's not meant to send a message, get revenge, or influence anyone else — just tailor my feed for me. Related
Librarian, technology instructor and writer in rural Vermont; longtime community manager at MetaFilter and author of a book on the digital divide.
Friday afternoon reminder to not empty your inbox at the expense of someone else's. I'm out of town helping my sister after she recovers from a medical procedure (she's doing well!). I'm out of my routine and pretty well out of my inbox and DEFINITELY out of it after 5 pm. Be mindful about what you ask for from other people, but just do your best. Have a restful weekend. Image credit: National Library of Medicine, on Flickr Commons flickr.com
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22 August
British comics writer and novelist (Transmetropolitan, Planetary, The Authority, Gun Machine). Keeps a public daily notebook logging what he reads, watches and listens to.
Their words
LAST WATCHED: SISU 2: ROAD TO REVENGE (2025) is, sadly, a more conventional film than the original. Still lots of bloody fun, but too similar to the original in its beats to be as enjoyable, trying harder to be “emotional” while losing some of the little textual depth that made the first film surprising.
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warrenellis.ltd
21 August
Librarian, technology instructor and writer in rural Vermont; longtime community manager at MetaFilter and author of a book on the digital divide.
Friday afternoon reminder to not empty your inbox at the expense of someone else's. I'll be headed down to Massachusetts to spend some time with my sister next week and I've already got my clipboard out and am making lists. Maybe I'll catch Super Troopers 3 at the local movie house. Either way, my mind is nowhere near my email. Fortunately it does not have to be. Image credit: Randolph Historical Society, on Flickr Commons flickr.com
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18 August
Programmer on the Dart language at Google and author of Game Programming Patterns and Crafting Interpreters; previously a game developer at EA.
Spent an afternoon at Highgate Cemetery when on vacation in the UK and this is one of my favorite photos from the trip. #photography #cemetery #victorian Related
Design engineer and illustrator; makes visual essays on programming, anthropology and what language models do to the way people write.
August 2026 I'm writing this from a homely Jacobean-manor-turned-hotel in the West Country, covered in layers of green vines and circled by centenarian trees, on a rare weekend away. Everything is warm: the late afternoon sun, the…
Related
17 August
Swedish open source developer; creator and lead maintainer of curl and libcurl, and a co-founder of the Rockbox project.
30 July
Web developer and writer; an early GitHub employee, author of speaking.io and of widely read essays on startups and product.
Been nice seeing some of the cold approach stories in the HN comments of my post this afternoon: https://t.co/r1mfJXzPq3 You forget how little things (to you) might mean a lot to others! Related
29 July
Founder of Scale AI and, since 2025, Chief AI Officer at Meta, where he leads the company’s superintelligence lab.
Their words
Like I think we've seen internally at Meta um cases where if you can develop the right agentic loop and you have the right eval or the right metric for the agents to optimize, you can have a swarm of agents accomplish more than like a team of 100 engineers in, you know, uh very very handily actually, very very easily.
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youtube.com
23 June
British designer and technologist; co-founder of the design studio BERG, which made Little Printer, and writer of the blog Interconnected.
Took the afternoon off to do kid wrangling because the school is closed from the heat (trading with other families who take over kid wrangling other days this week) and I think that is my first “climate day” as a reason for not working? Related
7 June
Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.
3 June
Engineer and teacher; wrote Kubernetes the Hard Way, was a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud, and retired from full-time work in 2023.
Their words
They tried to take the Docker API which worked really well for one node and expand it across multiple systems and it was not the right API to scale to another type of thing that we needed. And so they kept trying. They tried to add storage. They tried to add networking but the Docker API was never meant for that.
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youtube.com
1 April
Uber's first Chief Technology Officer, from 2013 to 2020; later CTO of Coupang and of Faire.
26 March
Machine learning engineer and independent AI consultant. He writes about LLM evaluation, tooling and applied ML at hamel.dev, and previously worked on machine learning at GitHub.
20 March
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
LLMs
Their words
a swarm of agents on the internet could collaborate to improve LLMs and could potentially even like run circles around frontier labs. Like who knows, you know? Um yeah, like maybe that's even possible. Like frontier labs have a huge amount of trusted compute but the earth is much bigger and has huge amount of untrusted compute.
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youtube.com
11 August 2024
Investing columnist for The Wall Street Journal and editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor.
Nothing matches. Show everything
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com .
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
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About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.
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