Andreas Brakkerud

i made a library of 34,220 persona neurons in qwen please help me find the weirdest ones: qwen-neurons-site.vercel.app…

wrote about AI AS THE INFINITE WORK MACHINE, creating a world where we're all just constantly deploying agents to fight against everyone else's agents, running constantly to end up in the same place: bloomberg.com/news/newslette…

To everyone watching the surge in far-left violence across the West and telling themselves it cannot get worse: I am old enough to remember when organized left-wing terror groups were killing, kidnapping, and bombing across Europe and America. The 1970s and 1980s are worth a quick revisit. In West Germany, the Marxist-Leninist Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof) and the Revolutionary Cells carried out hundreds of bombings, arson attacks, and bank robberies over some 25 years, wounding hundreds and killing dozens. In September 1977, Baader-Meinhof ambushed Hanns Martin Schleyer, one of Germany’s top industrialists, murdered his driver and three police officers, held him for 43 days, then killed him. In Italy, the Marxist-Leninist gang Red Brigades carried out assassinations, kneecappings, and kidnappings over 20 years, killing nearly fifty people. In 1978 they kidnapped former prime minister Aldo Moro, killed his five bodyguards, and left his body in a car trunk after 54 days. In Spain, GRAPO, another Marxist-Leninist group, killed more than 80 people, including a notorious 1979 cafe bombing in Madrid. It used kidnappings to attack the state and later raise money. Its highest profile victims were the president of the Council of State and a top military general. In France, Action Directe, a self-described “libertarian communist urban guerrilla” group, carried out more than 80 bombings. Its leaders were convicted of assassinating General René Audran in 1985 and Renault CEO Georges Besse in 1986. In America, the Weather Underground claimed roughly two dozen bombings, including the Capitol and the Pentagon. Their bombs killed no one but their own members—three in a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970—until 1981, when remnants joined the Black Liberation Army in the Brink’s robbery. A guard and two police officers died. These groups did not emerge from nowhere. They began inside much larger movements of protest marches, campus organizing, and anti-war activism. Small cells decided that talking had failed, that the state was illegitimate, and that violence was the only remaining language. They were few in number but they did real damage. The grievances of the 1970s were not identical to today’s. The mechanics of escalation, though, are similar. When political anger, economic frustration, and a sense of moral emergency pile up, it only takes a handful of people to break away and treat armed confrontation as the next logical step. History shows it has happened before. The question is whether it will happen again.

i own a relatively new (2025) samsung tv. i kept getting weirdly targeted ads. i tried reversing the firmware but it was aes encrypted and no keys unless tear it apart and do uart/jtag magic. zero days it is. root shell on new samsung TVs! discovered PRIVACY HORROR. write up?

AI IS AMAZING I know it's hip to worry about the decline in book reading and how chatbots will impoverish our brains. But TBH, this is not at all what I see. I wrote about how we're in this wild moment for intellectual flourishing and how all of us are the children of dancers.

The cyber incidents of the last 48 hours have been pretty mind blowing. I’ve been trying to piece together the “why now” question, and I think what we’re seeing is the first of a new kind of super-agent driven vulnerability cascade-- first one vulnerability is found by a malicious actor, then other bad actors pop up to try and take advantage of it before companies patch their systems. But because each bad actor is using swarms of thousands of super-agents, those agents are not only exploiting the existing vulnerability, but finding new zero days as well, all in a matter of hours. And the cycle repeats. As of the writing of this post there have been vulnerabilities found across at least half-dozen independent systems including LiteLLM, PHP, eMudhra Certificates, NGINX, Bind 9, and NodeJS. The list continues to grow hour by hour. Basically everything connected to the internet is at risk. Not just company websites and the usual databases of sensitive personal information, but all our critical infrastructure-- banks, power grids, pipelines, government agencies, all of it. The good news is that cybersecurity and ops teams had a chance to see this coming. This is why from when Mythos first dropped and had our first warning, these teams have been hard at work shoring up systems across the board. This is also why at Astranis we’ve seen a massive uptick in demand for truly air-gapped, sovereign networks, deployed via dedicated satellite to span an entire country or connect a large enterprise. It is in fact possible to take an entire category of critical infrastructure off the internet entirely. With a fully self-contained network where all the endpoints are off grid. This is not a new concept-- anyone could do this for your home today with equipment you can buy from Best Buy. But to stand up such a network covering a large geographic area or an entire country, without touching the existing fiber or other network infrastructure, you can only do that with a dedicated satellite. And specifically a satellite in a special orbit called geosynchronous orbit. Over the past year we’ve begun working with some of our customers on what it will take to implement truly air-gapped, standalone networks in support of mission critical use cases like core government functions, emergency response, defense, core infrastructure, or all of the above. That might sound extreme, but that is the kind of measure we expect will be required to shrink the attack surface of some of the world’s most critical infra. That’s just the position we are now in. It's a brave new world.

They modeled this city after Gary, Indiana.