Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI

• “Recently I’ve noticed an uptick in extremely low-quality, spammy, and LLM-hallucinated security reports to open source projects,” he wrote, pointing to similar findings from the Curl project in January. “These reports appear at first glance to be potentially legitimate and thus require time to refute.”

SBIRs

• 9:00 standup
• Finish refactoring and integrate with trajectories?

GPT Agents

• Add a section on Salt Typhoon

Write up something about the chess model fooling GPTZero:

SBIRs

• 9:00 tax thing?
• 3:00 Tradeshow demo tagup
• Work on getting foms generated. Small runs first! Got some good refactoring done and then pulled into 2025 planning

GPT Agents

• Good progress on the KA book! Need to bring in some content from the slide deck – nah. Didn’t really work
• Reach out to Dr. Bryson about proposal – done
• Ping Greg too – done

Tasks

• Bills – done
• Clean house -done
• Dishes – done
• Laundry – done
• Groceries – done
• Tires? Goodyear is closed weekends. Scheduled for Thursday
• And it seems I have to do a self-assessment – done

Signed up for https://www.arliai.com/ as an AI inference service.

Tires! (410) 415-1411 10:00am – 7:00pm – nope

Passport: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/how-apply/processing-times.html – Nope, too soon. Has to be within a year

Translated from Romanian (source):

• The secret services declassified the information about Călin Georgescu: Support from people who threatened Romania’s sovereignty
• The activity on Tiktok would have been coordinated by a state actor
• Votes purchased
• Similar campaign of Russia in Ukraine

Here’s an English version from dw.com: EU probes TikTok after surprise win in Romania election

SBIRs

• Update password!
• 9:00 standup
• 9:15 proposal go/no go meeting
• 12:45 USNA? Yeah. Not much fun
• 2:30 Hall Research. Forgot about this one
• 4:30 Book club – delayed – Rukan can’t make it
• In between all these things, work on the demo code. I need a simpler trajectory for the baseline, so I need to do that first. Done. And fixed a bunch of stuff. Also put placekeepers in GitLab

GPT Agents

• 2:45 LLM meeting

Going to this to because it is the front line for human rights these days.

And then there is this. It’s a great read: Six hours under martial law in Seoul

SBIRs

• More demo. Try to generate a spreadsheet with the fom curves? Done!

GPT Agents

• Along the lines of White Hat AI, looking to put together a labeler that recognizes manipulation techniques and also LLM detection. I think I could host everything on https://www.arliai.com/, and maybe use CLIP to look for classes of memes

Overleaf is really down. Like for hours now. Fixed!

1:30 dentist

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• 10:CoA meeting
• Good progress on the demo

Did more rewriting of the proposal and sent the current version to Carlos

SBIRs

• Working on the demo – fixed the problem I was having last week. Good progress overall, but I’m not quite at the point where I can calculate the distance to the trajectory line from the intercept point.
• 1:30 CoA meeting
• 3:00 demo tagup

It’s looking a lot like winter. Going to have to pull out the warm things:

Tasks

• Bills – done
• Laundry
• Clean House
• Ignite paperwork
• Put together a Gannt chart and a tasking table for the proposal (spreadsheet in assets), then send to Greg, Carlos, and Thorsten

Tasks

• Write thread – done
• Write conclusion – done
• Bank account – done
• Some chores? – vacuumed upstairs

Had a wild discussion with ChatPDF about this book: From the Rule of Law to the Law of Rule: Dismantling the Rule of Law in Hungary, 2010-2024

Need to write up a blog post about BlueSky vs Twitter, and the difference between the affordances of autocracies and egalitarianism.

• The similarity between “Early Twitter” and BlueSky.
• Something about Hierarchies (From out chimp/human ancestor – Alpha Males, etc) and Egalitarian communities (Paleolithic groups of early humans in marginal environments). The “Rule of Law” vs. “The Law of the Ruler”. Each of these structures work, and most humans can “code switch” between them. But each have their own specific rules for dealing with internal threats
  • Egalitarianism: Expulsion vs. Gossip/Criticism, Ridicule, Intervention, Shunning, Execution by Relative
  • Authoritarianism: Surveillance, Propaganda, Bribery, Threats, Prison/Exile, Execution
• The neutral nature of the timeline feed vs a recommender
• The “Nuclear Block” as a form of shunning, vs. being kicked off the platform.
• The ability to include hyperlinks
• No advertising, which I simply do not understand. The only advertising I see is items self-flagged as #Ad. I mean I would happily support an ad-free BlySky in the same way I support my friendly neighborhood Mastodon server (shoutout to fediscience.org/)
• Deliberate virality being a form of dominance display (“look at me!”) as something that is easier to do in an autocratic technology, where a “king” can pull the strings.
• The relative newness of BlueSky. Early adopters tend to be on the explore end of the explore-exploit spectrum. This type of person does not organize into a hierarchy well. As technologies mature, they tend to be taken over by those in power and the affordances become aligned with autocracy.

SBIRs

• 9:00 USNA meeting
• More demo development. Talk to Aaron about a model that can predict the next step(s) of a trajectory. Probably too slow to train at the tradeshow, but a really neat thing to A/B with.

Buckle In for the Hyperreal Presidency

• What I call the Hyperreal Presidency explores what is possible if a politician shamelessly adopts the opposite approach to where problems have to be solved in reality? What if a leader skips the gains and just does the communication? I don’t claim this is the right lens to use on this issue, but one that must be considered.
• This really does fit in with the idea of a runaway social reality.

Tim is coming over today, and also, the water heater is out.

SBIRs

• Meet with Aaron at 9:00 to discuss how to coordinate
• 1:00 Trade show UI meeting with John
• More demo development

Tasks

• Verify water is shut off
• Ignite paperwork
• Kaiser
• Groceries – done
• Jim Donnies – done

SBIRs

• 9:00 Sprint Demos – done
• 3:00 Sprint planning – done
• 3:00 Tradeshow tagup – done

GPT Agents

• Proposal conclusions and full read through

The Geometry of Concepts: Sparse Autoencoder Feature Structure

• Sparse autoencoders have recently produced dictionaries of high-dimensional vectors corresponding to the universe of concepts represented by large language models. We find that this concept universe has interesting structure at three levels: 1) The “atomic” small-scale structure contains “crystals” whose faces are parallelograms or trapezoids, generalizing well-known examples such as (man-woman-king-queen). We find that the quality of such parallelograms and associated function vectors improves greatly when projecting out global distractor directions such as word length, which is efficiently done with linear discriminant analysis. 2) The “brain” intermediate-scale structure has significant spatial modularity; for example, math and code features form a “lobe” akin to functional lobes seen in neural fMRI images. We quantify the spatial locality of these lobes with multiple metrics and find that clusters of co-occurring features, at coarse enough scale, also cluster together spatially far more than one would expect if feature geometry were random. 3) The “galaxy” scale large-scale structure of the feature point cloud is not isotropic, but instead has a power law of eigenvalues with steepest slope in middle layers. We also quantify how the clustering entropy depends on the layer.

2024 Post-Election Survey: The Reasons for Voting for Trump and Harris

Tasks

• Laundry – done
• Dishes – done
• Bills – done
• Clean house – done
• Fill out Ignite paperwork

November is going by too fast

Do paperwork for Emelia – done

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• No USNA meeting
• 4:30 Book club – cancelled until after T-Day
• Need to add a ‘dd‘ cumulative distance column to the matrix. Calculated at the end. Maybe even iterate over the matrix to produce the new element and stack that. Done!

# figure out the distance between rows
matt = mat.T
diff = np.diff(matt, axis=0)
hypot = np.linalg.norm(diff, axis=1)
hypot = np.append(hypot, [0.0])
mat = np.stack([xx, yy, zz, hypot])

GPT-Agents

• 2:45 Meeting. Interesting discussion. This idea that you can identify information by the behavior of people interacting with it textually is way more unintuitive than I think it is.

Gender Bias, Feedback, and Productivity (from Marita Freimane)

• I explore how gender biased feedback affects the productivity of workers in an online labor market. Using a design change on YouTube where the platform removed public displays of how often a video has been disliked, I show that — while dislike counts were public — female content creators received significantly more negative feedback on comparable content than male content creators. This gender gap in negative feedback is eliminated after the design change. Using detailed video- and channel- level data and a fuzzy difference-in-differences identification strategy, I show that the removal of excess negative feedback significantly and persistently increased the productivity of female content creators and consumer demand for their content. Relative to men, women produce 8.4 percent more videos after the platform design change. The increase in productivity coincides with an even larger increase of 15.5 percent in demand for content produced by women. Investigating mechanisms, I show that the reduction in negative feedback is primarily driven by changes in the upper tail of the distribution of dislikes and is consistent with the platform’s objective of reducing harassment through ‘dislike attacks’. Finally, I show that there are limited spillover effects on toxicity in other feedback channels and provide evidence from a placebo-test to confirm that productivity effects are indeed driven by the reduction in dislikes.
• The inverse of this can also be done to attack those who are doing constructive work and amplify those who are being destructive.

12:00 IEEE seminar

Work on area 3 of the proposal

SBIRS

• Should mostly be demo development – good progress

• Got sucked into meetings the rest of the day