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smashini

109 karma · joined January 27, 2025

Applied AI Engineer. I paid and do ceramics :) Run an ethical search engine mashinii Now working on governance in AI
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smashini··on Show HN: A Company Ethics Search Engine for 5500 Companies
Have been building this for the past two years.

It does analysis at scale: Searching for court filings, regulatory actions and investigative reporting. Then scoring companies across 11 ethical dimensions.

Built it because this kind of data and research isn't readily available and is important for giving companies accountability for how they operate :)

Any questions welcome!

smashini··on Pros and Cons of Solo Development
Part of the cons is offset, if the single maintainer dissapears, nothing a fork can't fix :)
smashini··on Show HN: Scan your AI agents for dangerous capabilities
Yes, but they operate at the OS boundary, but we are defining application/business logic

OS controls answer "can this process make network requests?"

App-level policies answer "is this request, with these parameters, acceptable?"

smashini··on Show HN: Scan your AI agents for dangerous capabilities
Completely agree, though the LLM part of the scanner can help with that contextual part of the analysis.

Runtime enforcement already exists (the embedded governor wraps tool calls in-process); extending it with a quarantined contextual evaluator like you describe would the logical next step.

Thanks for the feedback, actually will raise an issue on that to explore

smashini··on Show HN: Scan your AI agents for dangerous capabilities
The scanner is just one part of the codebase, good for maintaining quality in a pipeline.

There is also @makerchecker/embedded, which has runtime permission primitives you wrap around the agent's actions, so the restraints live in the app exactly like you're describing

Less whack-a-mole, more wrap the risky calls and they're bound

smashini··on Show HN: Scan your AI agents for dangerous capabilities
So Linux can prevent an agent from opening /etc/passwd.

Linux cannot stop an agent from calling:

POST /wire-transfer amount=5,000,000

smashini··on Show HN: Scan your AI agents for dangerous capabilities
should be fixed and released now :)
smashini··on Show HN: Scan your AI agents for dangerous capabilities
I’d say the biggest difference would be: 1. Parameter-aware rules: OS permissions don’t know your application logic. (How would you tell OS permissions not to let your AI to trade on over 1M dollars) 2. You can’t easily model multi-pary and RBAC. 3. Agents call remote APIs for alot of those tools. Native OS doesn’t really parse web traffic to decide if a request is safe or not. OS sandboxing is good for host security, but not necessarily for governing business logic or AI agents
smashini··on Show HN: Scan your AI agents for dangerous capabilities
oopsie doopsie, release pipeline failed fixing now...
smashini··on Nintendo announces new product revisions in Europe with replaceable batteries
Honestly, amazing stuff. For all the flak that the EU gets this is absolutely an essential regulation
smashini··on Show HN: Scan your AI agents for dangerous capabilities
Hey all :)

I've been working an open-source toolkit to stop AI agents from running amok.

You can scan your code (Python, JS, TS) and it will flag any risks and can offer fixes. It runs offline, but you can wire an LLM to do code analysis as well.

You can run it with:

npx @makerchecker/scan

Would love to get any feedback!

smashini··on Show HN: Paint the Earth on a live, interactive globe (collaborative art.)
Reminds me of that buy a pixel website back in the 2000s. Cool concept! blocks are bit small...
smashini··on How the U.S. Engineered Its Sovereignty
idk, maybe being on an isolated continent really helped
smashini··on Pollen tried to remove my article and Google is assisting with it
Forbes 30 under 30...
smashini··on Show HN: Get your agents into regulated industries
It wraps around agents you already have and provides structured controls:

- Each agent acts only through a role and can only run skills its approved for.

- It cannot approve its own work.

- Support for human approval gates.

- Every action is committed to a hash-chained signed log.

I also built alot of runnable examples based on real life case studies (e.g. Knight Capital, Air Canada refund chatbot) and how it can be used to prevent them.

The goal is to help get agents that do impactful work (move money, healthcare triaging, prod releases, etc) out of pilot and into production.

Happy to answer any questions :)

smashini··on Show HN: I Made OpenClaw Employable
Howdy,

A bit past the OpenClaw hype-train, but I remember seeing all this news about the massive security risks OpenClaw has, so I wrapped it with MakerChecker so you can have sophisticated guarantees and controls over OpenClaw. Good enough that you could have it be an employee ;)

Made a few demos where you could control how it uses finances, customer databases, etc. And how it could actually be used in the workplace.

smashini··on Governance Is the Missing Half of AI Efficiency
I think that's where alot of the focus is going to be in the next few years, and it'll be what blocks us from getting AI into alot of risk averse industries. Been working alot on this.
smashini··on Show HN: Stop your AI agents from approving their own work
Hi All!

Wanted to share this project I have been working on for a while. In the past few years and my previous startup, I really struggled to get any form of AI adoption in regulated industries. So I built MakerChecker: A way to add structural guarantees into how Agents and AI systems would operate in high risk environments.

It wraps around agents you already have and provides structured controls: - Each agent acts only through a role and can only run skills its approved for. - It cannot approve its own work. - Support for human approval gates. - Every action is committed to a hash-chained signed log.

I also build alot of runnable examples based on real life case studies (e.g. Knight Capital, Air Canada refund chatbot) and how it can be used to prevent them.

The goal is to help get agents that do impactful work (move money, healthcare triaging, prod releases, etc) out of pilot and into production.

Happy to answer any questions and always looking for constructive feedback :)

smashini··on Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?
Where can I get more info on the model, would love to read up about it
smashini··on Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?
You're cute when you're cranky
smashini··on Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?
Thanks! Will give it a read :)
smashini··on Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?
Compute 2027 coming soon ;)
smashini··on Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?
Howre you going distill if they block your access e.g. Fable
smashini··on Show HN: Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?
Id say the EU is less federal because each member country maintains its own sovereignty and local laws. Its more of a coalition of the willing. While in the US the federal gov can override states. The EU also has each state vote on different legislations. (Massive oversimplification)
smashini··on Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?
Its a README not poetry