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I gave my chief of staff bot 14 rules before I trusted it with anything. Most of them are about what it's never allowed to do, and the full list is below.
Max Sobol retweeted
New details on how the $6.3 billion Binance hack likely occurred:
According to initial reports, hackers compromised a Binance engineer's laptop, gaining access to internal systems used to authorize withdrawals.
The attackers then:
1. Hijacked a Binance hot wallet using Ethereum's EIP-7702 mechanism
2. Redirected wallet transactions to a malicious smart contract
3. Transferred billions in crypto attacker-controlled wallets
4. Spread the stolen funds across multiple wallets and converted some assets into ETH to avoid freezes
The attack unfolded across multiple blockchains, with most funds drained in ~20 minutes.
~$3 billion of these funds have now been frozen, and Binance says it will cover all unrecovered hacking losses.
The full investigation remains ongoing.
Max Sobol retweeted
‼️ UPDATE ON THE BINANCE HACK:
Whoever emptied a Binance hot wallet had 50 authorisations signed with that wallet's own private key, on-chain data shows.
Under Ethereum's EIP-7702, an authorisation is a signed permission that lets a wallet hand control of itself to code.
Each one works only for the wallet's next transaction number, its nonce. Binance's wallet was still sending transactions, so that number kept moving.
The sender didn't know which number would be live, so they packed all 50 into one transaction, Blockaid says. One matched.
That one installed a sweeper contract on the wallet. Blockaid found that only the Tornado Cash-funded sender can operate it.
Minutes later it emptied the wallet of $1.6B in USDT, 167,464 ETH and 60+ other tokens.
Only that key, or the system that holds it, can produce those signatures. How the sender got them is unknown.
Across Ethereum, Bitcoin and Tron, at least $5.57B left Binance-linked wallets.
Binance says user funds are "completely safe" but has not explained how.
Max Sobol retweeted
The chances of being killed by a landmine delivered by a bear are low, but they are never zero.
Max Sobol retweeted
New flavor of Google phishing that abuses Google's own infrastructure to send you this email. If you click the goo.gl link you end up at a phishing login page.
Max Sobol retweeted
JUST IN: SpaceX's largest customer revealed to be Anthropic, surpassing the US government as its biggest source of revenue & accounting for over a third of total revenue. — Bloomberg
Max Sobol retweeted
"It is what you do from now on that will either move our civilization forward a few tiny steps, or else... begin to march us steadily backward."
- Sir Patrick Stewart
Rest in Peace
Max Sobol retweeted
if you’re an employee of any corporation, in the medium & long term you are effectively generating training data for an ai that will likely replace you.
even if the company fails, your work will still create value as training data.
i know a lot of ppl find this bleak & possibly unpleasant but it’s the truth. & it’s kinda cool to think about. humans were never meant to do jobs that could be automated (we don’t use plow’s anymore). eventually we should all be creating our ai replacements in some sense so that we could live the way we were meant to.
Brian says smart people got left behind by the PC, the internet and the iPhone because they loved the process of their work more than the results. I run my own desk of Grok Bots every day, and letting go of the process is the whole game.
We are in the Grok Bot era.
Think of it…
A workday for most folks in the world is still done the old way. Someone sits down, opens the same tools they used last year, and spends hours on writing, research, drafting, summarizing, or moving information from one place to another.
Grok Bot takes the same workday and will do it in a few minutes.
The difference is not subtle.
An eight-hour stretch of email triage, report assembly, or content preparation can collapse into something that finishes before a coffee cools with Grok Bot.
Not every task behaves this way.
For now physical work, judgment calls that need context only a person holds, and decisions with real stakes still sit outside what the tool can finish alone.
But a large share of office and knowledge work does not.
Most of the world have not shifted to the Grok Bot way.
Their managers have not either.
The result is that today only a small number of people who treat Grok Bot as a normal part of work, get through the done in far less time, while everyone else continues at the old pace.
The gap is visible once you look for it. And this gap will grow wider.
I watched the Personal Computer, the Internet and the iPhone fundamentally change how the world was put together.
And each time I watched a cohort of smart folks left behind because they fell in love with the process of their work and not the results.
Each time I watched a cohort of smart folks unaware of the rapid shift in the world around them.
This is the Grok Bot moment and we are seeing this take place again.
These past few weeks I spent a lot of time with very large public company clients and presented that we are in the Grok Bot era. I presented a path that liberates each employee with a Grok Bot to hire an infinite number of Grok Bot employees. I showed them how department by department.
If Grok Bot is introduced in the manner I have perfected in a company, it is a tool of magnificent magic for each employee. I free them to take away every process they can and hire a Grok Bot to do it.
Do they lose their job?
Not on my watch and not with how I approach this.
See, one person armed with a Grok Bot army of employees is powerful.
But an entire company of employees armed with a Grok Bot army is absolutely unstoppable and unbeatable.
You don’t want to fire these generals overseeing their army of Grok Bots, you want to liberate them to do more.
And if your culture is right and if your incentives are right. Your company becomes ferocious. It become renewed. It becomes better than any startup.
Companies that don’t get this will lose to companies that understand they need armies of people armed with armies of Grok Bots.
And this is the way of it into the foreseeable future.
With Grok Bot you have the sum total best mind with the sum total best capable employee on the job. Being operate by a domain expert that is now liberated to become more powerful and find more ways to make what they do unstoppable.
And I am not guessing, I am doing this every day now with my clients.
This is the divide in the world today.
I built GrokBot.Rocks to help anyone start from where they are. Because sometimes it is hard to start with a blank canvas. I gave you the outline and you can color in your picture. But soon you will master your blank canvas.
You are the artist in the new Grok Bot era. Let’s build.
Herbert split intelligence and freedom into two separate things back in 1965. I think the fix is lots of AIs owned by regular people, not one giant system we're all trying to outguess.
⚡️The Butlerian Jihad destroys the thinking machines.
But look at what replaces them.
The Spacing Guild monopolizes interstellar navigation. The Bene Gesserit manipulate bloodlines, religion and political outcomes. Mentats control specialized computation. Eventually, Paul Atreides acquires something even more powerful: the ability to perceive possible futures.
The machines disappear. The concentration of power survives.
But Herbert takes the idea further through prescience.
If someone can anticipate your decisions accurately enough, they can arrange the world so that every available choice advances their objectives.
They never need to command you.
You can feel completely free while moving through a future somebody else has already engineered.
That is an extraordinary understanding of power for a novel published in 1965.
And Herbert eventually pushes the idea to its logical conclusion.
Leto II’s Golden Path is designed to prevent humanity from ever becoming permanently trapped under a single predictive authority. The Scattering disperses civilization beyond centralized control. Siona’s descendants become invisible to prescience.
Humanity’s survival depends on becoming impossible for any single intelligence to fully predict and control.
Now consider what we are building.
AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of anticipating human preferences, interpreting intentions, shaping information and executing decisions on our behalf.
As those capabilities advance, power shifts toward whoever controls the environment in which decisions are made.
People can retain the appearance of choice while gradually losing control over the possibilities available to them.
That is the warning embedded in Dune.
A civilization can possess extraordinary intelligence, immense prosperity and functioning institutions while surrendering its capacity to determine its own future.
Herbert’s ultimate insight is that intelligence and freedom are separate variables.
The highest expression of human freedom is the ability to create a future that no ruling intelligence can fully anticipate.
And the greatest danger is allowing any intelligence to become so powerful that humanity loses the ability to surprise it.
Max Sobol retweeted
Orphaned kangaroos sleep in handmade pouches that mimic their mother's pouch and keep them warm and quiet.
📽: The Kangaroo Sanctuary
Those grand Chicago halls covered 670 acres with no modern machinery yet ran for only 179 days. What precise shift let them pull off that scale so cleanly before electricity reached most homes, and then why tear it down?
Max Sobol retweeted
Flavored coffee is sprayed with flavoring after roasting. The solvent that carries the flavor is not listed on the ingredient statement.
Dunkin' French Vanilla reads coffee, natural and artificial flavor. New England Hazelnut Creme reads 100% Arabica coffee, natural and artificial flavors. Community Pecan Praline, same two lines. What those lines leave out is the spray. The roasted beans tumble in a mixer while liquid flavor gets sprayed on, about 3 pounds of flavor for every 100 pounds of coffee, and that liquid is mostly propylene glycol, a synthetic solvent that carries the flavor oils on to the bean. A supplier's spec sheet for a pecan coffee flavor reads propylene glycol and natural and artificial flavor, use at 3%.
It stays off the bag because FDA treats the solvent inside a flavor as part of the flavor. Food grade propylene glycol is allowed in flavorings up to 97%, FDA lists it as safe, and a small amount is used.
A few roasters flavor with alcohol or glycerin instead and print no propylene glycol on the bag.
Milan's Duomo towers over the man and his cart in that shot. I think our assumptions about what pre-modern builders could achieve might be too low.
A screenshot going around claims gold and silver could trade below zero by 2027. Oil really did it on April 20, 2020, settling at minus $37.63 a barrel, because people holding expiring contracts had to take delivery in Cushing, Oklahoma, and spare storage there was scarce. A gold coin fits in a sock drawer.
