Embedded systems running ancient Windows NT pose national security risks
“The second and the much bigger problem, which is why there's national security implications, is that embedded systems. So these are things like the CPU and say a power substation. Some of them are like running windows NT four embedded from twenty years ago. And they've never been patched because the costs to go around every substation and rip out a hardware and replace it with new hardware is astronomical. But all of that old hardware, things that control water valves, power relays, etcetera, are incredibly vulnerable.”
Vibe-code your own YouTube downloader instead of paying Premium
“I did end up, canceling YouTube premium because, you know, is the price keeps going up. It's, like, $18.99, $19.99 a month, now I'm like, okay. That's not that compelling for for what you get. And so I ended up doing was using Claude Code to Vibe Code, a downloader and and YouTube manager for the so I have a a playlist on YouTube on my YouTube, account now where it's marked things for download. And then, you know, once a day, the script runs on my laptop, grabs all the videos, categorizes them, and puts them into I'm using Jellyfin as my media server.”
Brand text surveys without sample sizes reveal nothing useful
“I've got a link to a study that was talking about brand text. It was funny. They said 90% of consumers want a brand text once a week or less. The only brand I know that does that is marketing over coffee. And, of course, the primary thing to look at was I there was no number of the sample size. You know, we see so many of these marketing surveys where it's like, oh, yeah. We got 65 people answered the survey.”
Defense in depth resembles stacked Swiss cheese with shifting holes
“Security is always like, you know, they call it the Swiss cheese model, where if you take slices of Swiss cheese stacked up together, the the holes are in different places. So theoretically, there's no clear line from one end of your block of cheese to the other, but there's only two slices, or the the holes are really big. You can get through pretty easily. So those multiple layers of defense, what's happening is that AI is very good at navigating those multiple layers of defense. So you either have to add more or make the holes smaller in the cheese.”
Looping LLMs autonomously retry tasks until success criteria are met
“Mythos is apparently a model that is somewhat better in terms of intelligence than Opus 4.6. It's probably you'll be the equivalent of Opus five. However, it is using a technology called looping LLMs. And what this is is these are tools that are not only good at tool handling, but also recognizing that they're not done with a task until they hit a success criteria. And so as opposed to you having to sit there and prompt it, like, keep trying, keep trying, keep trying, on any given task, it knows to do that itself.”
Local AI models guarantee privacy that cloud services cannot
“If you want truly guaranteed privacy, you have to use local models because anything in the cloud is somebody else's computer. So I feel perfectly safe asking all sorts of very dangerous questions to, the local model that runs on my machine, because it's not phoning home anywhere. And I asked it some how to do some very bad things because I know the science behind them, and and, you know, the best way to do those very bad things. You would never wanna type into anything on the Internet.”
Subscribe-style prompt libraries beat digesting massive AI books
“So this is an ongoing topic of how the heck do I monetize my newsletter that has 300,000 subscribers. And and what we came up with is on my newsletter, in my YouTube channel, in all over places, I'm constantly sharing stuff like here's how to do x, y, or z. And what we decided was let's take the corpus, all of it, like 700 pieces of content and put it through a language model and say, if there's a prompt in here, extract it. Because for good reason, a lot of people are not just gonna sit and watch my YouTube channel every day. I wouldn't watch my own YouTube channel every day and extracted all the prompts, put them in the proper framework.”
Reserve text messages for friends and family, never brands
“I mean, I want brand texts never, like, ever for any reason. I don't want brands texting me. I've and I I have a Google voice line specifically just for so they can text into the oblivion that charges them money. It doesn't cost me any money. Just ignore it. In perpetuity. There are places I do wanna hear from brands. So for example, I follow a number of AI companies in Discord, and I subscribe to their announcements channels.”
