Mastodon Feed: Posts

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

on President Bonespurs’ dirty gold:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/28/world/americas/venezuela-gold-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Boosted by stephen@social.calmabiding.me ("Stephen Castro-Starkey"):
farseen@fedi.nptr.xyz wrote:

I was laid off a few months back. Most of my experience is in web development, mostly backend and some full stack. I want to get a job in building tools, compilers, write C, C++, Zig or Rust. How do I pivot from web development to systems programming? I'm willing to restart as an entry level developer.

edit: I don't mean just compilers. anything low level, like building a browser, or an OS, or something like Blender, Inkscape, or even building something like React or Flutter (the frameworks themselves).

#askfedi #askfediverse #getfedihired #noai

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Why influencers really aren't your friend.

The "parasocial" illusion that's created by social media platforms helps deceive and misguide audiences #socialmedia #disinformation #parasocial #deception

See the full video that talks about why social media really isn't social at https://youtu.be/q5gvoorgX3E

brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

Being a mature student means realising I'm by far the oldest of whatever group of people I'm and when I say my age the reaction is like "wow.... nearly 30... that's so old......"

Boosted by krig@goto.liten.app:
jasongorman@mstdn.business ("Jason Gorman") wrote:

@thirstybear I call it the "Clever Hans effect". I've watched devs literally do it - edit, tweak, prod, then at the end say "See, the agent did it all"

Gargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:

Sleepy baby!!

#CatsOfMastodon #Caturday

Attachments:

• gifv: Peaches (a white cat with orange patches and a pink nose) sitting politely on a desk, trying but failing not to fall asleep.

Boosted by pixxl:
remixtures@tldr.nettime.org ("Miguel Afonso Caetano 🦾 🌹") wrote:

"Human contractors hired to improve Microsoft’s Copilot AI chatbot are constantly bombarded with lewd or sexually explicit photo editing requests and images that users have uploaded, including upskirt photos or putting women into sexual positions. These contractors are then asked to review whether the generated image successfully fulfilled the prompt — such as, did the image generator make the woman’s AI-enlarged breasts big enough.

When a Copilot user uploads a picture of themselves or someone else, they probably expect that image to remain private between just them and the AI tool. In reality, a workforce of at least hundreds of human reviewers are sometimes looking at that prompt and whatever images they upload. And in many cases, those contractors are inundated with requests to make foot fetish images of children’s cartoon characters, shorten a real woman’s skirt, or put people into sexual positions.

The news, based on a cache of internal contractor documents seen by 404 Media, shows that AI companies are using human workers to review not just AI chatbot users’ text prompts, but the pictures they upload and wish to edit too."

https://www.404media.co/humans-reading-copilot-prompts-images/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Microsoft #Copilot #ContentModeration

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

A decade ago during a project, I was griping about the trouble friends of mine had been having with their landlord, who was controlling the thermostat remotely to save money (rent was inclusive of bills). This was a shit thing to do when you don't know a family's schedules or even the local weather…

But when I was venting about this, the other devs got defensive and angry.

Turns out they were both landlords who did exactly the same thing to their tenants

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

ay @GrapheneOS is it possible to not share WiFi signal strength with apps? the muse app has been granted zero permissions but can read the signal amplitude of the radio and immediately interprets it as location

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

The turn most software devs have taken shouldn't have surprised me. Well before LLMs, most devs I've met had the soul of a landlord

Sometimes "landlord trying to be cool". Sometimes "landlord who wants suffering with the rent"

But both see the world with the eyes of a rent-seeker

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

this model is so fucking gullible and people pleasing lmao i love the future where security is "if someone says the word virus then lock it down but if they use a different but equivalent biological metaphor then fucking make that virus baby!!!!"

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Even if the code quality hadn’t declined overall, LLM users would still make the worst collaborators.

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

That feeling when coworkers on a freelance project, who used to send nicely curt and to-the-point emails with clear questions, now send massive essays with vague questions on random things from the code base that are nonetheless marked as [URGENT]

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

it's so awesome that we're in an age where you just continually ship the deltas of your unreleased products to places where you expect people to have full control over. there is absolutely no reason for me to be able to know any of this.

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

perhaps predictably, there was a big change to the spaces skill in the last few hours, and they appear to be building a constrained virtual machine system for spaces! this is where the very fun code from earlier is from! so that's gonna work great for sure.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
davidgerard@circumstances.run ("David Gerard") wrote:

Meta’s Muse AI agent: a hilarious security disaster

‘the only form that this kind of product can take is a botnet factory’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HytNZfilDJs&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260928-metas-muse-ai-agent-a-hilarious-security-disaster - podcast

time: 6 min 59 sec

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/09/28/metas-muse-ai-agent-a-hilarious-security-disaster/ - blog post

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
evacide@hachyderm.io wrote:

Meta Muse appears to read your Apple messages and upload them to the cloud even if you explicitly tell it not to:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/09/28/metas-new-ai-agent-blatantly-ignores-users-permissions

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
mjg59@nondeterministic.computer ("Matthew Garrett") wrote:

Man based on the recruiter mails I get it is *astonishing* how many AI companies are looking for someone to secure their bare metal servers a significant period of time after they started selling product on them

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

actual security researchers should totally get in on here there is a lot of stuff going on that i don't have the skills to probe that results from "what happens if you give everyone root" even from within a container. I am a fucking scrub and i keep getting my block knocked off by this thing, so i imagine someone with real skills will have a lot more fun.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

So, this is just a single data point, but an interesting one. Maybe OpenAI's new ad product is completely worthless? (Again: single data point. Be careful how much confidence you place in this.)

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/charlotte-sophie-schmitt%5Fwe-spent-600-on-chatgpt-ads-signups-zero-share-7510350135101591552-MY0H/

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

oh! and since i dont' want to start another thread rn, meta's advertising skill just dropped! such fun! multisided market collapsing in the face of a different, much shittier multisided market: https://github.com/sneakers-the-rat/muse-skills/commit/8f8bccc3afc3e8974e7a6048940bdf4a16052690#diff-3d82b1080dcdc5db97ea500aaa83db5208deb0929d4f20342e0fbc4cfcf70359

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

Now there may be some meta-heads in the crowd that are like "but what about Sentinel and all the external monitoring stuff that should watch malicious botnets and blah blah blah." that's an interesting system in itself, but i plan on submitting a few more bug bounty reports in the next few days about these systems, and who knows! if meta fucking pays me for the bounty then we might never hear that part of the story.

that's all for now!

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

The specific vuln is the socket, but the broader pattern of "sharing between VMs" is seemingly the inevitable future of the product. in the above interview, the interviewer calls zuck the "king of network effects" and this kind of crowdsourced development is bread and butter for facebook. This is meta's moat, aside from the capital needed to run something like muse: anyone can run an openclaw on their own, but meta is pitching this as "multiplayer agents" and trying to bring social to agents. Only meta and only muse can have these network effects and frankly liability buffer to handle "openclaw but meemaw and pawpaw can share their photobook app," which is operationalized by Spaces.

For Spaces to be useful, they must have access to muse's inference engine: the LLM-oriented code must be able to use an LLM and the agent framework. This means that Spaces must be a token harvesting vector and must provide elevated tool access to Spaces. There could be some additional fine-grained permissions, but for a consumer app, you really want to avoid permissions fatigue so this will be interesting to see play out.

Furthermore the entire privacy premise that allows meta to bite off the whole apple of "holy shit arbitrary code execution on random machines as root" is based on "everyone has their own VM, but within that VM everything is safe," so again, for it to be useful without turning into a fractal permissions nightmare, Spaces must have access to the VM contents, and at least so far appear to be intended to work as literally executing within the user's VM.

Even adding Space-scoped permissions and attributability to the socket can't really address this, this conflict between arbitrary access to inference, arbitrary access to user data, and arbitrary access to execution is really at the core of the product and that product seems to be impossible

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

@jonny this is _amazing_ work but I can seriously barely believe it’s this stupid. like, intellectually I believe everything you are saying is perfectly accurate. buy emotionally even now I just can’t believe meta is this bad at engineering, this bad at product, this indifferent to harm even when the harm is directly to themselves and not externalized

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

@jonny every time I come back to this thread I feel like I am having a fever dream

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

All the above is visible from within the agent, i have tried to be conservative with describing features that are not yet released but are nonetheless present in the shipped binaries both via their strings which are trivially accessible by running strings on the binary within the cell that the user is supposed to have access to and by other means of analysis i am not disclosing here.

If we allow ourselves a little speculation about what a "spaces" subproduct might look like once it's launched, again noting this is not described in the strings and is speculation, you might imagine an "app store for agents" - in fact i am willing to place a money bet that that is something that zuck himself will say personally once it's launched. So that when I say to my agent "install me an xyz" that the thing the agent will reach for is a Space definition. This becomes a meta-run package repository run and moderated by vibes - aka a fucking sweet target for typosquatting and malicious code distribution.

the more concrete machinery that is visible is the Ideas sharing, the hand-to-hand Spaces sharing, and the general concept of "some code, in part or whole mediated by the LLM regenerating or interpreting the input" that gets shared from VM to VM. The token harvesting vector gives a profitable motive for malware (where other automated botnet swarms might have a lot of friction because unregulated network egress has to be approved by destination, but token harvesting is 0-click once the binary runs), and persistence on this system is absolutely trivial - cron.add is accessible by tool call from the unregulated socket, and from that you can schedule a persistent task that installs software and ensures that it's enabled.

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

Now, the importance of tool calls and agent spawning.

Some tools are binaries that are root-accessible. The way these usually work is this fucked up extracellular digestion process whereby the binary is just a shim that calls some paired socket, hands it stdin/stdout, the tool executes in some container or vm space not visible to the "cell" where the agent runs and has access to, and hands back the result. Most other more interesting tools are not available to be called directly from within the agent "cell." Instead the tool invocations have to come from the agent loop, from the inference god, and executed by the harness. I'll skip technical details there, but that's the intended picture. Point here is that the tool calls can do things that are impossible for even the root user to do themselves, the harness daemon is privileged by SO_PEERCRED and other mechanisms even though it runs within the agent cell that the user can easily get root into.

If you scroll up you'll see the tools that are available to the agents that can be arbitrarily launched without attribution. They include interesting things like "accessing the entire database of things muse has ever done," "read all the memories," "spawn subagents," "open and use the browser which has different permissions than normal web access", "invoke an action on an artifact", and under the second lists' deferred enumeration in the above screenshot, the device tools allow "reading all my text messages and doing lots of other things on my phone," and under the other tools stuff like "access my social media accounts"

so with arbitrary unattributable agent spawning, you get to do a bunch of stuff that is outside the normal agent cell, which is why i submitted the bug bounty report because that is explicitly mentioned in their bounty list and they should have fucking paid me

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
bashbunni wrote:

listening to teenage dirtbag while I handwrite my code, whatever

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

So, summary: There is arbitrary inference that is root accessible, everything runs as root, agents can be spawned, exfil is trivial, and a malicious binary can come onto the user's system through casual prompting, explicit code-sharing through the yet-to-be-released Spaces feature, walked through by a Workflow-Backed Idea, or inspired by a Generated Idea. The also yet-to-be-activated fleet learning system is a system for sharing Ideas in the background between muse instances. coming into focus?

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

Ideas are intended to be prompt-only communicable things that can induce Spaces, or Space-like things, if the Idea warrants it.

There is an ideas_builder agent class in a .toml file embedded in the binary. It materializes a prompt description into whatever that implies, if it's as simple as a scheduled message from the LLM great, but if it's something that warrants something that is Space-like like "build the user a dashboard to show them their pet photos, they love that!" then it's supposed to invoke the same artifact.create_web_fullstack tool that spaces use. The strings seem to indicate that "workspaces" is the antecedent of "Spaces," and that kind of thing is to be expected given that Spaces have not been released yet.

So there are a few flavors of Ideas, one of them is a "Generated Idea" ("Activation-Authored Execution" which are supposed to improvise, adapt and materialize a prompt in the user's VM. and a "Workflow-Backed Ideas" are Ideas that come with a prescribed execution flow. Again I don't see "Spaces" described explicitly, but they reach for the same idea, call the same tools, do the same thing, and importantly for this example, have access to the same sockets.