i love that we went from "zero trust" as a fundamental buzzword to "trust autonomous nondeterministic agents everywhere in your stack"
Google Just Patented The End Of Your Website

A newly granted Google patent could let the search giant replace your brand's landing page with an AI-generated version you have no control over and only your buyers see.

Forbes

@neurovagrant

Autonomous agents designed to follow "instructions" regardless of source. So there is really no defense against "agent (command) injection" attacks.

😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱 😱

@neurovagrant I'm sure some people even combine these 2 at once
@neurovagrant zero trust except for our slop machines
@neurovagrant Jensen Huang piping some random site into his | bash for the LOSE.
@bms48 @neurovagrant I was just coming here to mention that. you win :)
@usagijer @neurovagrant It was actually @bagder who pointed me at that on (ugh, spit) LinkedIn.
@neurovagrant I still think your last observation about humans no longer being the weakest link in the chain is everything wrong with LLMs and I'll die on that hill.

@neurovagrant y'all remember the old demotivator memes from the early 2000s?

One of them read "None of us is as dumb as all of us." LLMs are non-deterministic balls of shit put together with the absolute dumbest takes from Reddit and StackExchange, thrown into that non-deterministic blender, to shit out what is probably the most awful code known to man. None of us is as dumb as all of us.

@da_667 oh my god, i remember those.

it came to pass. this can't be good.

@neurovagrant @da_667 I mean, there's still an outlier on the stupidity front.

The problem is they're the dictator with the 'most powerful military in the world.'

@rootwyrm @neurovagrant The minute his obituary is announced I'm just going to post the first sentences you see in the game, Brigador:

Great leader is dead.

Solo Nobre Must Fall

Welcome, Brigador

@da_667 @neurovagrant That one was Meetings from https://despair.com/collections/posters/products/meetings

I have a big lithograph of Idiocy (a ring of skydivers captioned “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”).

For a while, they sold a shirt labeled “Insecurity”.

Meetings

@bob_zim @da_667 @neurovagrant I loved "Quality" so much
@thejaysunday @da_667 @neurovagrant Agile! Because it sounds better than the other term we use for an unending series of sprints.
@bob_zim @da_667 @neurovagrant you got me. I was an agile product owner for 10 months. Then burn out and depression.

@thejaysunday My team is chronically understaffed. During one of the “We know agile has never worked for IT infrastructure in the past, so we’ll be the first to make it work!” cycles, they put each of us on four or five different agile teams. Each one had a 45 minute standup every day. It was this incredible combination of every wrong way to do agile, all together.

And they wondered why none of the work my team does was getting done in a reasonable timeframe.

@da_667 @neurovagrant i bought these when i worked at websense in like 2001. now they live on the art wall in my office

@Viss @da_667 @neurovagrant

I still have the Potential one hanging in my office

@Viss @da_667 @neurovagrant

ah yes. the demotivational posters. we had a mostly complete collection on the walls of a startup i worked at.

@Viss @da_667 @neurovagrant

Oh wow. That brought back some memories

They also had a glass coffee mug with the text "the glass is now half empty" Loved that mug. Till it got dropped by someone :-/

Stupidly expensive to replace now (look it up) on eBay or such

@da_667 @neurovagrant Geez. I remember when folks used to get fired for having those on the wall at work.
@neurovagrant Checks out.
@davep thanks, i hate it.

@neurovagrant

Just in case you missed the LinkedIn Speak translator...

https://translate.kagi.com/?from=en_gb&to=linkedin&text=let%27s+go+

Kagi Translate

Kagi Translate uses powerful AI models to instantly and accurately translate any content in any language.

@neurovagrant Yikes. Just saw it uses AI. BOLLOCKS.
@neurovagrant Actually, I don't mind so much when AI is used for this sort of thing. It's more focused, inherently nondeterministic, and can be a much smaller model trained using wannabe psychopaths on LinkedIn.
@davep @neurovagrant Vaguely curious what that training corpus looks like. But yes it's true, translation is a language thing, what LLMs are for, and inherently fuzzy anyway. And this is really only for entertainment, so not critical.
@neurovagrant "zero trust" was questionable bullshit even then. The implication of "zero trust" was to not trust the *human element*, to privilege the code over the human. Now that the tech bros are close to removing the human element entirely, the mask is off.

@neurovagrant
They distrust humans due to their fallibility and potential ulterior motives, while they believe 'AI' to be an objective machine.

It's a weird situation where they both anthropomorphise algorithms by ascribing intelligence and intent to them, while at the same time relying on the fact that they're algorithms as a reassurance that they are objective mathematical and logical tools.

It's cherrypicking the best of both worlds – simultaneously supposedly thinking and infallible.

@neurovagrant 'Zero trust' has always been about potentially nefarious human intentions and sabotage, and since so-called 'AI' cannot have intentions and are supposedly merely doing what they're told as they are programs, they are considered inherently trustworthy.

The problem is that they think of 'AI' in terms of a traditional program: we know what it does because we programmed it, so it cannot do anything it's not supposed to do, unlike a human.

They ignore the black-box nature of 'AI'.

@neurovagrant RCE as core business value
@neurovagrant And—of course—providing government ID to every random website for ✨safety✨
@neurovagrant @blogdiva imo "zero trust" was only marketing spin for "trust only me"
@neurovagrant Zero trust still holds, for humans.

@neurovagrant

The original Zero Trust paper said, basically: assume endpoints are compromised. Design your system such that a compromised endpoint won't doesn't impact your global security. It rapidly became: massively increase your attack surface by running a load of privileged code on every client that doesn't actually have the ability to make strong security claims and, if that code claims the device is compliant, treat it as completely trusted.

There's a reason I assume TRUST in Zero TRUST is an acronym for 'Thinking Rationally, Understanding Security and Threats'.

@neurovagrant The same way we went from "never get in a car with a stranger" to...
@neurovagrant Hardened security, end to end encryption, and eliminating SPOFs kind of fell by the wayside to "yuck, yuck, of course AI is safe!"
@neurovagrant I think the problem started with "move fast and break things" as the ideal way to do things..
@Joy_intl what they never admit is that "things" means "people"

@neurovagrant

Our CEO used the words "zero trust" and "agentic AI" in the same sentence - as examples of what we are all-in on. It was a public event.

@neurovagrant
Zero trust was always about full trust on proprietary blobs, so that's nothing new, really. ;)
@neurovagrant @wendynather *I* have zero trust for them, but that doesn't seem to stop anyone
@neurovagrant Zero Trust was always overengineering, but the eagerness with which the same Zero Trust advocates are punching holes in their security setup so LLMs can have free reign and we can have some of this "don't get left behind, look at how much time/money you can save with this" is astounding.
@neurovagrant from least authority to OpenClaw