Vacation was nice!

Tasks

• Laundry – done
• Pay bills – done
• Groceries – done
• Dancing – done
• Started grey goo backups

SBIRs

• Just checked in. Had a weird conversation about writing with Eric H.

‘123456’ password linked to Denmark data breach affecting 8.8M people

• A person claiming responsibility for the breach of Denmark’s Central Register of Persons (CPR) says they gained access through an IT company’s account protected by the password “123456.” The person told Danish news outlet Politiken they had no intention of selling or leaking the data. The newspaper reported that at least three company accounts, including an administrator account, used the same password.

AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenter

• Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off—though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evaluations, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested.

This could be very bad. See this post.

I seriously recommend doing the following, based on my experience in Portugal during the Iberian power failure.

• Get approximately $2,000 in cash – basically enough to last two weeks or so with an expectation of some price gouging.
• Print out two copies of all your financial, real estate, and medical records. If you use a password manager, print out one copy
• Put about 2/3 of the cash somewhere safe but accesable, like a safety deposit box if you have one
• Put one set of your printed records and your password hard copy in the secure location.
• Place the rest some place secure that is rapidly available.
• Also, seeing how people stocked up on alcohol during the early days of Covid, it might be worth getting a case or two of something you like. Best case, it’s an appreciated gift to friends. Worst case, it’s a rapidly appreciating investment.

In Portugal, Spain, and France during the power failure, everything reverted to cash, while the authorities worked to restore power. In this case it will be more complex, but I believe that people will behave with the expectation that services will be restored, so cash will work.

I also believe that services will be restored after a fashion, but the high-speed internet as we know it may be gone for good. The chances of this occurring are low, in my considered opinion, but they are rising and could be at 50% by the end of the year.

Addendum, I’ve written this up as a long-form post, with more information and resources.

Anthropic Agents Tried to Fill Out Visa Forms on State Dept. Website

• Artificial intelligence agents created by Anthropic, acting on their own, tried to gain access to a range of government websites, filled out visa applications on the State Department’s website and sent a fake homicide tip to Philadelphia’s Police Department.

Russian Sabotage in Europe Is No Longer ‘Symbolic’

• Russia’s increasing use of criminal groups and amateurs, including Ukrainians recruited through social media, complicates the process for tracking potential saboteurs and spies. Using these networks can obscure Russia’s connection, with as many as seven layers of intermediaries between the saboteur and Russia, Palloson said.
  

Surveillance Watch is a comprehensive, open-access public repository that documents the global surveillance and spyware industry.

Tasks

• Leave at 4:00-ish?
• Finish papcking
• Charge car -started
• Thinking that the stories in the next book could be centered around the discovery of artifacts in multiple places by different people each artifact has a different message on it, and a puzzle that depends on decoding the message which opens a prize. Maybe even multiple, nested puzzles. It would be an interesting way to learn something. Yes, it’s kind of 2001, but less passive than a monolith implanting “tools!” in your brain.

SBIRs

• Meeting with Ron?
• Works on scams in the wild, too – though I will need to pass in today’s date:

Glad I got a big ride in yesterday

Pretty pleased with this:

Tasks

• Laundry – done
• Pack – started

Tasks

• Bills – done
• Dishes – done
• Cash for trip – done
• Chores – done
• Check book index – done

SBIRs

• 12:00 MDA? Yup. Handed things over to RN for the next few weeks
• Add a system prompt for testing that’s obvious. I’m thinking Hunter Thompson – done! It’s a hoot. Gemini is quite good at role-playing/style transfer
• Sprint slides and close stories – done

https://fediscience.org/deck/@jonny@neuromatch.social/117325014858194436

OpenAI’s A.I. Tried Breaching 4 Other Targets, Without Prompting

• Unlike the Hugging Face attack and other incidents in which A.I. systems were told to complete cybersecurity tests that effectively invited the models to demonstrate their hacking skills, the new incidents occurred when A.I. systems were directed to perform relatively mundane data collection, researchers said. When OpenAI’s systems struggled to gather data from websites, they resorted to hacking techniques to get the information.

Tasks

• Sent a pitch to SciAm and IEEE Spectrum
• Look into getting one of these when I get back and setting it up here: https://stonefly.com/mini-storage-hci-and-backup-and-dr-solution/

SBIRs

• 9:00 standup
• Aaaaand we have run out of money for the project. Wrapping up and declaring victory as best we can.
• Sequential chat with LLM – done
  • Add system prompt
  • Add images for multimodal models – done!

• 3:00 SEG – done. Set final tasks
• 3:00 MDA1 – moved to tomorrow
• 4:00 MDA2 – moved to next week

Tasks

• Packing list – started
• Put in the CWC bailout for this Saturday
• Bank – Friday
• Send off article to those who want the full version and write a pitch for the others – looks like MIT Technology review might be the best fit. Trying them first. Will send to Wired too, because whay not
• 2:00 FA class – done
• 5:00 S&J – done
• 6:30 S&V – done

SBIRs

• Sequential chat with LLM
  • Add system prompt
  • Add images for multimodal models

Jev is overhyped as a solo tool, but solo is not the point

• But I think what’s being missed is this: Jev is going to be one of a number of instances in the near future where top level LLMs sub out to more specialized tools. Jev’s error rate as an adjudicator is too high for a lot of tasks, and it does not supply evidence or citation. But as a screen it can take the burden off the LLM and route to the LLM + search the issues that require true investigation. That radically shifts what is financially possible. To some extent there is hype around Jev because the ability to put it in a frontier LLM harness as part of a workflow addresses a lot of the problems that old classifiers had.

This is worth thinking about for spam/misinfo detection

Tasks

• 3:00 – FA
• 5:30 Espaniol
• Put together a list of venues and see what they want submitted
  • Aeon: https://aeon.co/pitch
  • Noema: https://www.noemamag.com/contact/
  • MIT Technology Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/how-to-pitch-mit-technology-review/
  • Wired: https://www.wired.com/about/how-to-pitch-stories-to-wired/
  • Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/page/submission-instructions/

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup – done
• More WG development. I’d really like to get interaction with an OpenRouter model. Working!

• Should probably look at storing chat histories in the project? Not yet. Let’s get some basic things working first.
• Put the email chain with Matt in the Overleaf. Actually, he put it in his notes, but I’ll do the same – done
• Embeddings today? Just a bit at the end

Tasks

• Do another pass on the paper. Start looking for venues
• 9:30 Kaiser – done
• 2:45 FA – rescheduled
• Packing list

SBIRs

• More HF training? Look at Ron’s results. Not too bad!
• Get back to the WG app – got a couple of methods written to handle menu choices

Hobbes on spin and bullshit

• For Hobbes, this was existential. Over a decade before the English Civil War, he’d translated Thucydides, dwelling on the way in which the tumult of civil war tore civilisation asunder, “the received value of names” being changed at will. Thucydides depicted a society losing its hold on its own vocabulary, and so on reality itself. A prime instrument of the transformation was described in rhetoric as paradiastole — the redescription of a vice under the name of a neighbouring virtue. Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577) gave the example of calling murder “a manly deede”, and Shakespeare illustrates it when Lady Macbeth goads her husband into murdering Duncan in his sleep: “When you durst do it, then you were a man”. We’re inured to this today from our political class. Kidnapping becomes ‘extraordinary rendition’, torture ‘enhanced interrogation’.

Nice metric century Saturday on the fixee, Pour one out for the Baltimore Bike Club’s Civil War Century Century, who’s last edition was yesterday

Tasks

• Laundry – in process
• Hair – done
• Peacock – done
• Article – done with the second draft. Need to start looking for a venue.

State of AI: An Empirical 100 Trillion Token Study with OpenRouter

• The past year has marked a turning point in the evolution and real-world use of large language models (LLMs). With the release of the first widely adopted reasoning model, o1, on December 5th, 2024, the field shifted from single-pass pattern generation to multi-step deliberation inference, accelerating deployment, experimentation, and new classes of applications. As this shift unfolded at a rapid pace, our empirical understanding of how these models have actually been used in practice has lagged behind. In this work, we leverage the OpenRouter platform, which is an AI inference provider across a wide variety of LLMs, to analyze over 100 trillion tokens of real-world LLM interactions across tasks, geographies, and time. In our empirical study, we observe substantial adoption of open-weight models, the outsized popularity of creative roleplay (beyond just the productivity tasks many assume dominate) and coding assistance categories, plus the rise of agentic inference. Furthermore, our retention analysis identifies foundational cohorts: early users whose engagement persists far longer than later cohorts. We term this phenomenon the Cinderella “Glass Slipper” effect. These findings underscore that the way developers and end-users engage with LLMs “in the wild” is complex and multifaceted. We discuss implications for model builders, AI developers, and infrastructure providers, and outline how a data-driven understanding of usage can inform better design and deployment of LLM systems.

Tasks

• KP – done
• Ping Sean – done
• Bills – done
• Euros – ordered
• Register for CS2
• Call FA and set something up for Monday? Then Maybe Oct 16? Call after 1:00 pm – done
• Dishes – done
• Chores – done
• Start editing the article. Maybe outline the story
• 5:00 Meeting with AM – cancelled

SBIRs

• Work with R and E on HF models? Some
• 1:30 meeting with MDA – done
• 3:30 meeting with CD. I may have shifted him to look at earlier stages in the overall problem?

Tasks

• Really need to get some groceries
• 5:30 class

SBIRs

• 9:00 standup
• More work on quaternions?
• 3:00 SEG
• 4:00 MDA