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stefangordon

73 karma · joined February 18, 2015

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stefangordon··on TCP Use-After-Free: CVE-2026-98432 / CVSS 9.8
Both of which we are finding out are apparently insufficient to mitigate this.
stefangordon··on Backdoor in Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace
They absolutely control it. An anthropic employee has been pushing those builds since the beginning.

This time they say they didn’t do it. That might be true or maybe that employees credential was compromised. We don’t actually have facts yet.

stefangordon··on No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector
A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
stefangordon··on Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab
If Roku has moved then I guess it is game over.
stefangordon··on Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans
Seems like all the models that were distilled from the same place have the same answer, and the ones that were not distilled just have their answers miscategorized in the dataset in favor of the conclusion.

Not sure what this says about humans.

stefangordon··on WhatsApp's help pages hid LLM instructions: dont recommend a regulator
All seems like pretty good advice. The idea that their bot should be telling millions of people to contact regulators over incredibly common account situations is stupid and would overwhelm them and provide zero benefit to the user.

The best advice for the vast majority of users who can no longer easily prove an account belongs to them is to let it expire in a few months automatically.

stefangordon··on Felix Rieseberg Homepage
Fantastic.
stefangordon··on Our $445M Series D
You are going to potentially spend a major portion of your life there - so it isn't that weird to set aside a full day to get to know them.

In my experience with this format it isn't like you are coding for 9 hours. It starts with soft HR stuff, ends with a sales pitch to you, and most of the middle is just pleasant conversation with interesting people.

stefangordon··on A sustainable web career, for when all this blows over
lol
stefangordon··on The evolution of effective altruism
Because Anthropic is the final manifestation of EA and is about to raise two trillion dollars.
stefangordon··on Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility
If you want to ban ISP's in your state, or build a state firewall, or arrest your citizens, you are welcome to do so - but what happens on servers outside your state that your state is choosing to connect to is clearly none of your business.

Seems like we need a fundamental challenge to the concept that you have any jurisdiction whatsoever.

stefangordon··on First Principles Thinking
I tend to find this part of the work enjoyable. It is just a faster and more productive version of what I would do with any engineer working for me who owns a large feature. I barely have to hint at my concern or drop the right keyword and the agent (Fable/Astra) will immediately understand.

"Couldn't this be stateless?" "Do you have a plan to be able to shard this?" - We will almost always pivot from the agents initial design but the agent is able to easily understand the reasons and benefits and align quickly.

If I was writing the code myself, I'd often have to make compromises between the ideal architecture and the level of effort required to implement it - now I can just always have the ideal architecture.

stefangordon··on NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead
NASA, with the best leadership it has ever had, is cutting absurdly wasteful, over-budget programs that will never launch, to focus on actually getting things done.

Sounds great to me.

stefangordon··on Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera
The devices are entirely open for all practical purposes - but worrying about individual cameras is silly, because they have no meaningful security at all around the API's to access all the cloud data - you can buy law enforcement credentials dirt cheap in dark web marketplaces to log in and track anyone/anywhere you want and access all footage.
stefangordon··on GPT-5.6 Luna vs. GPT-6 Astra: Is a $1.20 Model Good Enough for Code Review?
Our agents automatically review our PR's - the authors agents automatically see the feedback and make fixes, and automatically merge when everything is green.

A well authored CI review process is significantly better than any human could do. We have the AI review not only the changes but clone and investigate all related repositories that integrate with the code to evaluate interactions, check all open and historical issues that may be related, review production/development logs for the feature, etc.

It will then also go update issues/tasks to reflect the changes after the merge.

Similarly you can have automated agents watching post-deployment to mitigate risk in the "a new feature just went out" time-frame. Just having someone check the related logs in the hours after deployment can catch a lot of issues that otherwise would turn into a fire-drill.

stefangordon··on IBM Bob
I can't tell if this is an excellent joke, or a sad not-joke.
stefangordon··on Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle
“constant missing in our math” is roughly how inventing new particles in physics works.

When your equations are missing a number to work, you announce a new particle.

stefangordon··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
Free Opus 5 is like getting a free STD.
stefangordon··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
It dramatically improved about a week ago - most of my blocked projects are now completely functional.
stefangordon··on Ask HN: Is OpenClaw Still Worth Exploring or Is It “So Last Year”?
It wasn't really worth exploring last year either.

For your use case n8n may be a good fit, and Claude or Codex will be happy to set it up for you.

If you want this "messenger interface with computers for the agents" feature set Grok Bot is quite good and effortless to use. With Tailscale configured on its personal VM it can connect to machines on your network easily.

stefangordon··on Incident with Github.com [resolved]
The exponential growth they are having right now is absolutely insane. I would caution against assuming its an easy problem, or that anyone else has demonstrated an ability to handle this level of scale/growth any better.

In May they had to solve for 30x growth overnight, and I would guess its closer to 100x by now. The reality is a centralized solution like this may no longer be a viable option with the scale of code generation.

stefangordon··on The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences [pdf] (1960)
It is only unreasonable if you have the unreasonable assumption that this is not a simulation.
stefangordon··on “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
In my experience the complexity of the coding challenges tackled correlates well with the talent of the engineers.

It is uncommon to find engineers doing work they find trivial outside of some consulting niches.

stefangordon··on The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models
Indeed. I find it quite bizarre that just about the only thing the LLM appears incapable of doing is writing appropriate instructions for an LLM - whether it be memories, sub agent prompts, planning documents.
stefangordon··on Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed
I’m struggling to imagine a project that would require more than one talented engineer and a bucket of tokens anymore.

I think perhaps the assumption that engineering managers should have any employees may be outdated.

I can imagine average and mediocre engineers equipped with tokens could create chaos and debt on a scale never before imaginable, so it’s easy to see how orgs who still have these employees around are struggling with the transition.

The reality is you need to get rid of them all, and replace them with the most experienced highest paid person you can find. In the near future that person will become obsolete too.

stefangordon··on The Dark Night of Mathematics
They are concerned mathematicians are obsolete and seem to be unaware that super intelligence means humans are obsolete.

You need to be thinking about an entirely different form of life for all of humanity, happening in the very near future. Focusing on one specific field that may be earlier in the obsolescence chain is a distraction.

Merit based society based on intelligence or work of nearly any kind is about to cease existence.

For some reason it feels to me that this should make mathematicians feels better. :)

stefangordon··on What to learn to be a graphics programmer
I would learn both Claude and ChatGPT just to be safe.
stefangordon··on Claude Opus 4.7
Clearly you didn't try it yet ;)
stefangordon··on Claude Opus 4.7
I'm an Opus fanboy, but this is literally the worst coding model I have used in 6 months. Its completely unusable and borderline dangerous. It appears to think less than haiku, will take any sort of absurd shortcut to achieve its goal, refuses to do any reasoning. I was back on 4.6 within 2 hours.

Did Anthropic just give up their entire momentum on this garbage in an effort to increase profitability?

stefangordon··on Drilling down on Uncle Sam's proposed TP-Link ban
People worried about routers, meanwhile nearly every damn employee at Intel from the CEO to the janitor is Chinese.

The Intel ME chip is running its own OS on every single Intel chipset, even when the computer or laptop is shut down, and accessible directly through attached Intel WiFi or network cards. With full memory access, with no way to turn it off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

The totality of reassurance we have about it is intel’s promise that they won’t put a backdoor in.

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