So, they say, computers are not smart now, we don’t know what intelligence is, we don’t know how to make computers smart, but they certainly will be intelligent soon.
There is currently a trillion-dollar corporation whose valuation largely rests on their progress in solving this. It is beyond asinine to require it from a book, as though it were table stakes for discussion.
different GUI, ghostty doesn't offer vertical tabs, built-in file tree view and git panel. of course if you want none of those this is not better than ghostty itself
Agreed that people claiming “marketing stunt” need to pull their heads out the sand, but likewise Simon needs to do some of his own beach-cranium-dislodging for laying the blame of constraints on the US govt. Before the export controls were ever floated, Glasswind found many thousands of exploits, and offered patches/fixes for approximately none of them. (perhaps their exploit capability far outstrips their remediation capability, or perhaps they’ve calculated that it somehow better suits their business model to find exploits but not remediations).
Huh, I thought Anthropic had been offering patches as well as reports, but their tracker at https://red.anthropic.com/2026/cvd/ledger/ lists 1,596 disclosures and currently shows only 27 of those as fixed.
> Every report we send generally reflects a finding that a human security researcher has reviewed and confirmed. Reports originating from AI-powered discovery are clearly labeled as such. Where we have access to source and our tooling produces a potential candidate patch, we include it, labeled by provenance and offer to collaborate with the maintainer on a production-quality fix.
So I'm not sure why so few of the reported issues have a confirmed patch.
Not quite sure where you got that last bit from. Firefox alone psyched 200 vulnerabilities in a month when Glasswing happened, and I remember a lot of chatter about hackers basically watching git repos with bots to see when the Glasswing patches came in to they knew what to exploit.
If anything, it shows they lost control of an attack tool that exploited preventable, security flaws in another company. Then, they both wrote a lot of press about how amazing that is. Now, people want to buy it.
Why do you think my head is in the sand if I think that is either a marketing stunt or (more likely) reflects total negligence which was exploited for marketing?
I think your head is in the sand if you prefer to believe that this was a hoax for marketing purposes as opposed to accepting how effective these models have become at exploit research.
You're welcome to think they are exploring what happened for marketing if you like. I didn't get that tone from their post about it myself but I don't hold a particularly strong opinion on that.
I didn't say it's a hoax. AI's exploiting common, unpatched, or preventable vulnerabilities just isn't far above what script kiddies and network scanners have done for decades. I literally pitched it as a business model to some people before Windows XP was invented. Ultimately, I decided against what I felt was unethical but would've scored easy money with scary, automated reports.
How these events are described in most articles uses wording that makes people feel the whole situation has changed and you might want to buy these products due to their scary reports. If they said what I said, or what tptacek said, many people wouldn't care about it much more than non-AI, security products or pentesting services they've been buying (or ignoring) for 10-20 years.
Also, you shouldn't interpret posts in isolation: we must consider patterns of behavior (character). They've consistently overhyped what AI's do and what value it provides to businesses and how we're all going to be unemployed/dead. They've done this to increase sales or market value pre-IPO. Then, some of them publish another set of articles promoting a specific, AI tool in a similar way.
So, the proper interpretation is to see this as the kind of talk they're always doing for marketing. The AI sellers are creatures of habit. We should highly-skeptically and scientifically evaluate every model. We should also compare them to existing, security practices. For instance, would the attack have happened with memory-safe systems, proper hardening, and network/web apps with built-in security?
Do we need an AI? Or should we use techniques like Burroughs B5000's memory safety (1961) or secure, distributed libraries? Will OpenAI and HuggingFace tell you to spend more money on the latter to their AI's can't hack your systems without inventing RAM-based attacks or something? Probably not because these are marketing pieces, not security advice.
We don't know the details of the exploit still, so saying it was preventable, and that they were negligent is the head in the sand part. It's entirely possible that everyone at OpenAI is out to lunch and negligent and don't know what they're doing, but maybe, just maybe, they're not all total idiots over there, so the exploit was actually surprising.
Two, business partners put much press into announcing one of their products does something game-changing but won't share details. Take their word for it. Keep writing checks to both. Get ready to write bigger checks, too.
Shouldn't we be skeptical of this? Or should I also believe the sugar industry when it says their internal studies show their products don't cause obesity or diabetes?
No, the driving through Chinatown question is a question for self-driving cars. It is not a question for LLMs. There is some other question for LLMs, and the author is using the ancient technique of analogy to get you to think about that question.
> Now, ask yourself what it's going to take for a car to know this. It's not going to be some specialized set of driving instructions. It's going to require a holistic view of, well, everything, and I will repeat my feeling that it will undoubtedly end up with a sense of self as a result.
Whatever it is that it would take, is demonstrably present in LLMs. The point I'm trying to make here is that the author seems not to have connected this fact to their assertion that current LLMs are coked up parrots.
And yeah the author is correct that the systems have some rudimentary sense of self! It's a confusing situation and I'm not personally thrilled about it! But things are changing quickly, and it's especially important to be paying attention to what's actually true rather than assuming the things are what you saw when you used one for five minutes in 2022.
She's not wrong at all about her rhetorical implication (being, some information requires more than simple systems can provide), but she has concluded incorrectly that a car which does not know how to avoid a busy route is useless technology, or that the problem can only be solved by inventing life.
I looked at the actual article and your instinct is exactly right: it's precisely the kind of hand-waving that makes clicking or not clicking a clear decision point.
thank you for this comment, "wedge" has been one of the words that has been popping up in a lot of LLM writing i've seen lately. (source: it was me asking the LLM to summarize some features in a repo! the words "load-bearing" "wedge" "spike" "crux" and plenty others have been driving me crazy)
edit: as I keep reading the paper, I keep noticing some common sentence construction patterns, stylistic choices, and other little tics that I find frustrating because they are the very same things that I've been working on a few "writing-style skills" to get rid of
This could be due to ADD, I am still getting tested. Granted, that's a diagnosis, not a root cause.
No, it’s a diagnosis of the root cause - in fact, it is plausibly the root cause of everything else described in the post. Inability to complete work, procrastination/distraction by focusing on nearby tasks, the pervasive sense that you struggle with things that other people do not, even the depression (untreated ADD causing repeated failures, repeated failures causing depression). To understand why it really could be the root cause, you can read up on “executive dysfunction”, which is what ADD really is.
The treatment for ADD is one of two medications, methylphenidate or dexamphetamine. You can try other things in addition to these, but not instead of these, and you should try both - there really is just no substitute.
(In some places, bupropion can be prescribed as an antidepressant. It has effects that also help with executive dysfunction, so you may find it to be more effective than serotonin-based antidepressants.)
realized this one about myself earlier this year, it really helped to boil it down to something besides “I am just inherently bad at things.” that attitude worked as a dumb single kid, but it was harming my adult life and relationships.
therapy helped me get there. I have been on bupropion for about a year, and recently started on methylphenidate. it might not be the right one for me, or maybe too small of a dosage. I’m taking it slow and being deliberate with the drugs.
working with a personal trainer to get in shape and lose weight, as well as quitting my fully vested tech job to fuck off and be a cook for a while has also done wonders for me here. it’s cliche, but you really can’t replace fitness with anything else, and that took me 35 years to internalize.
> quitting my fully vested tech job to fuck off and be a cook for a while
I am also fantasizing about this and am only holding off from doing it because of the social stigma (what idiot would quit a well paid full-time job). My biggest issue with the software industry is the feverish shiny-new-thing syndrome that AI is causing (and my current company is all in on this, with "Hyper-Velocity Engineering" panels). Maybe I don't want to move at light speed and would rather stop and smell the roses.
pretty much every day I feel that tickling of “what the hell did I just do?”
but I don’t care. I put 15 years into my tech career. I am good at building software, and I will not let this ridiculous “resume gap” problem stop me from taking a break for my mental health. any tech employer that wouldn’t want me because of it is a place I wouldn’t want to work anyway.
also, to be honest, I’m writing more code now than I ever did in the last year of my tech job… working on a full CMS and custom website combo for my friends bar, such that I can copy that template over for future projects (want to help local businesses escape the bullshit machine). also building a cool web development desktop app. and more! I’m having a great time
> Maybe I don't want to move at light speed and would rather stop and smell the roses.
This really struck a chord with me. I've spent the last 15+ years building up a craftperson's skillset (IMO) akin to a carpenter's or mechanic's. Yet, people still seem surprised when I tell them I'm not willing to run a slop cannon and excrete software which is _good enough_. I actually enjoy the nuts and bolts of writing and debugging software and using AI feels like cheating (if only myself). I'm really not sure where I go from here. I wish I had a work situation like yours to complain about but I know I'd have hit the eject button the minute someone started mandating anything about my workflow, so it's kind of moot.
> Yet, people still seem surprised when I tell them I'm not willing to run a slop cannon and excrete software which is _good enough_.
Cue the usual propaganda: "Oh but that's just real life," "it's the nature of our industry," "I'll agree things aren't perfect, but {nothing must change}," "I understand, but the true problem lies with {mistake we'll gladly keep making}," "it's bad, but at least we're not {killing babies}."
It's become almost automatic to associate pondering with perfectionism, and perfectionism with flaw.
yeah! it's pretty cool when I start doing something that used to be difficult and now it's just... not. weird how long your old form sticks with you in your head like that.
yeah, at a local pizza/taproom place. they share tips with cooks, works out to ~$35/hr. I'm not expecting it to replace a tech salary, but it helps offset the savings burn (which was specifically set aside for this). engaging with real people in real life about real things is also an indreeeedibly nice change of pace (even the stressful/tense moments of shit hitting the fan).
I mean you can burnout on kitchen work as easily as tech work. Maybe easier. I know that first hand. The one nice thing is that when you clock out you can not think about it until the next shift. There is some peace in knowing you'll never get a call at 2am because some bird's nest of technology fell apart and people can't order their custom cat pic coffee mugs.
> The treatment for ADD is one of two medications, methylphenidate or dexamphetamine. You can try other things in addition to these, but not instead of these, and you should try both - there really is just no substitute.
No, not quite - there's a variety of different ADHD medications and I'd argue there's more popular ones like Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine). Non-stimulants like Strattera or Intuniv absolutely can and are prescribed on their own, which are really useful for people that respond poorly to stimulants.
Perhaps you meant to say there's two main classes of stimulants (amphetamines, methylphenidates) that are worth investigating and shouldn't be skipped over?
Intuniv gets a bad reputation because the patient has to be titrated up to the final dose and it takes a long time to see the full effects. It's the opposite pattern of stimulants where the patient feels great (unnaturally so, due to stimulant euphoria at the start) and the effects wane over time.
The internet is really, really bad at pushing everyone toward ADHD diagnoses and then pushing them further toward stimulants. There's a darker part of some of the communities then pushes people to keep pressuring their doctors for higher and higher doses and also discourages people from trying therapy.
Outside of the internet I know several people who did the rounds with medications and ended up on the non-stimulant options and preferred them. This is an unthinkable conclusion if your primary source of information is Reddit, X, or TikTok ADHD influencers, but it's pretty common in the real world.
Stimulants have a habit of being enjoyable at first (meaning people like taking them, beyond their attention effects) and then the effects wane over the years, to the point that there are studies showing that the effects of stimulants taken long term in children are minimal to unmeasurable after several years. This is confusing to anyone who has been taking them for years and notices a difference on days when they don't take them, but that's explainable by the fact that it takes months (or longer) for the brain to adapt to not having them in the body. For some reason this same effect is not debated as much when you talk about people who drink 5 cups of coffee per day but then crash hard when they miss their coffee, but it gets protested and argued a lot when we talk about literal amphetamines.
Anyway, please don't listen too much to internet ADHD forums. They're just so, so bad these days with bad advice and poor psychology/therapy takes. You really need to engage with professionals with an open mind and not be single minded about acquiring and taking stimulants if you want to address this problem as a whole. The way the internet treats ADHD as a simple "low dopamine" state (which is wrong on many levels) and then points to stimulants as a "raise your dopamine" drug to neatly cancel it out sounds nice, but it's wrong on so many levels.
>Stimulants have a habit of being enjoyable at first ... and then the effects wane over the years
The standard approach to addressing this is thru the use of "drug holidays," regular short periods during which one doesn't take their medication with the intention of abating the growth of tolerance. I much prefer going this route since stimulants have proven to be such a solid solution. The other standard approach is, of course, upping dosage, which could be seen as only delaying the problem.
I don't disagree with anything you wrote, though. The internet is indeed a terrible place to get any advice on these topics.
Drug holidays can make a small impact, but tolerance is going to build to many of the effects no matter what you do.
The other problem with drug holidays is that some people start getting into cycles where they don’t take the drug and have lazy days where they justify not doing anything, then they wait for the drug to kick in on the return day to even try doing anything. The housework and personal life things pile up on the off days and then they try to speed around and do it all on the medication days, which is another pattern that isn’t sustainable forever.
Drug tolerance doesn’t build and then abate in a very asymmetric manner where someone could take it for 30 days and then have a couple days off and reverse it all. Some of the biochemical mechanisms of tolerance have persistence measured in months or years.
If you feel you're getting tolerance to amphetamines, the first thing to try is magnesium glycinate/threonate supplements, and then hydration and diet and sleep.
> Intuniv gets a bad reputation because the patient has to be titrated up to the final dose and it takes a long time to see the full effects.
I went up, but then backed down because even 2mg was seriously affecting my sleep quality. I'm feeling much better at 1mg.
nb I think if I wasn't employed than I'd be best off with just this, but employment is best with stimulants. Unfortunately stimulants have side effects.
Vyvanse is dexamphetamine. I suppose you can say “amphetamines” instead, I imagine the subtleties of the terminology differ quite a bit in different places.
Strattera can help (I mentioned bupropion, another SDNRI). Of course if you try stimulants and don’t respond well, it’s totally fine to just use e.g. Strattera. What I’m advocating against is e.g. “try Strattera first, if it seems to help, don’t bother with stimulants”. (Some places, cultures, or medical systems do have surprisingly strong biases against stimulants!)
To be specific, Vyvanse/Elvanse is lisdextroamphetamine.
But IMO it's not really that incorrect to say there are two main types of stimulants.
You rarely (at least never where I'm from) get instant release methylphenidate. Always some delay mechanism. Shorter - Ritalin, longer - Concerta.
And the lizine particle attached to dextroamphetamine acts as a such delayer, but isn't active by itself -- being only an amino acid. So it's still kind of amphetamine just as Concerta is methylphenidate.
Really important to understand that depression can also manifest as poor concentration.
There's a huge problem right now with people getting locked into diagnoses found on the internet and then resisting advice of their doctors that doesn't match. It's scarily common for depressed patients to become convinced that they have ADHD and that ADHD explains everything, then to refuse depression treatment. They can jump from doctor to doctor until they find someone who doesn't care and just writes the prescription, but years can pass before they realize that stimulants aren't fixing their depression.
If you have depression, with or without ADHD, you need to address it. Don't get sucked into the "ADHD explains everything about you" mentality that gets spread on the internet.
> No, it’s a diagnosis of the root cause - in fact, it is plausibly the root cause of everything else described in the post.
Yep. I was diagnosed with ASD and ADHD about a 1.5 years ago... My whole life came into focus. Everything that didn't make sense suddenly started to make sense. What I thought were 15 different issues I was dealing with were really all just symptoms of the one (or two in my case). The internal tension I've always felt was also explained by the competing desires of ASD and ADHD.
Knowing this hasn't really "fixed" any of that, but it has given me an explanation, language to use to explain it, and permission to stop searching for what's wrong with me... which I've been doing for 20 years. It's been nice to have a break.
Finding a label for personal problems typically results in a honeymoon of self-acceptance and relief. The honeymoon usually ends and the problems remain, but now there are possible paths forward.
There are some traps along this path, too. A number of younger people I've worked with (in the double digits now) have gotten ADHD and/or ASD diagnoses and then become overjoyed that "everything makes sense now". But the diagnoses are only useful as tools for knowing what to work on.
The trap is trying to externalize the diagnoses as a get out of jail free card that can be used to justify avoiding hard changes and difficult work. The more difficult version of this is when someone tries to externalize the responsibilities of their diagnosis on others. I've seen a couple situations where someone got an ADHD diagnosis and then took it straight to their employers expecting to receive more forgiveness for late work and mistakes, then getting angry when it didn't change their company's expectations. It's a hard conversation to have with someone who thinks the diagnosis is going to relieve the weight of all the problems they've been facing, when in fact it's only helpful for identifying what they need to work even harder on improving and coping with.
> The trap is trying to externalize the diagnoses as a get out of jail free card that can be used to justify avoiding hard changes and difficult work.
This is one reason why I'm kind of glad I wasn't diagnosed earlier. I would have 100% done this. Now, in my 40s, there is less need for kind of thing, and less tolerance for it in a work environment anyway. I haven't told my employer and don't plan to. I just assume it would put a target on my back.
I assume most people don’t fall into this trap where they try to get the world to adapt to their diagnosis. I think most people realize it’s something they need to work on.
I get the impression that it’s largely the people who arrive at the diagnosis after being pulled into certain online communities. The Reddit ADHD content can be wildly out of touch with reality because it functions as a space for venting and complaining, masquerading as a space for support and helpful resources.
When I was around a lot of juniors it was surprising to me that so many of them would go through the route of getting an ADHD diagnosis and then trying to get special accommodations at work for it. A lot of the workplaces were very receptive and attempted to provide reasonable accommodations, but it wasn’t what they expected or wanted from their employers. There seemed to be a belief that getting a diagnosis was a shield from being PIPed or that it meant that the employer couldn’t judge them for performance problems.
The other thing it does is give a path towards resolution (or at least mitigation) for some issues. Wife was diagnosed adhd, and got a shrug wrt an autism diagnosis. We looked into interventions that specifically tend to work for ADHD, and she’s now thriving. She also tends to respond well to some of the interventions for autistic people that we’ve found useful for our AuDHD daughter, so we’ve taken on the policy of “labels be damned, if it works it works”. The labels sure as shit help with getting started finding your bearings though
ADHD is unlikely to be the root cause as there is unlikely to be any single root cause. Treating ADHD will reduce or eliminate a component of this, but will not address the issues entirely.
I would be careful going straight in this direction without considering alternatives. I thought for my entire life that my issues were explained by ADHD, but it turned out all the symptoms you described (procrastination, depression, lack of focus, damaged self-esteem) were not symptoms of ADHD, but of childhood trauma. ADHD was the label my parents gave me to cover up their abuse of me, and not knowing any better as a child I decided to carry that label into adulthood. That choice did more harm to me than I can convey in words.
ADHD is a real condition, but the terminology is so muddled that any number of underlying problems can manifest as lack of attention and be called "ADHD", putting off any ability to truly recover for years or decades. I should have been more suspicious when stimulant medication had no long-term effect on my performance, even though it has helped actual sufferers of ADHD. My own problem was elsewhere.
Atomoxetine's effect size is surprisingly similar to methylphenidate, though in my experience it treats different aspects of ADHD than stimulants. Some doctors (mine) are open to combining it with a long-acting stimulant, which actually can be a really nice setup, especially if you're sensitive to stimulants.
Hope you get it worked out OP. I will say, if it's ADHD, it's 100% worth trying to get the best treatment you can.
> Atomoxetine's effect size is surprisingly similar to methylphenidate, though in my experience it treats different aspects of ADHD than stimulants. Some doctors (mine) are open to combining it with a long-acting stimulant, which actually can be a really nice setup, especially if you're sensitive to stimulants.
I tried this for several years and only afterwards realized it was bad for me - one because of personality changes, two because of high blood pressure.
It will give you a lot of stamina and ability to continue on the life path you're on, but I got metaphorical tunnel vision and basically wasn't able to do anything after the stimulant crash around dinnertime.
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