The type of people Intelligence agencies need and use to accomplish their goals are also the type of people who tend to do these things.

Exactly, honest people would fail at such missions. A few million lost here and there is the cost of doing business

imminent danger pay

True, but hiring someone then, later, accusing them of lying in the admission forms that should have been verified before hiring them is bizarre.

I’m sure the CIA could come up with a better excuse.

> is bizarre

Only under the incentive structures you’re used to considering.

It makes parts of the CIA look incompetent to the public. This is rare.

It’s reasonable to assume they knew it from the start he was getting money illicitly from the Navy and they might have enabled it. This was part of the leverage they had on him, to be used if he ever became a liability.

> It makes parts of the CIA look incompetent to the public. This is rare.

Iran–Contra? Their cyber espoinage tools getting swiped? The self-admission from the US administration that the CIA failed to properly recognize and prepare for the tactics used in 9/11, in spite of ample forward warning?

Like most intelligence agencies, their unaccountable power often gets mistaken for actual intelligence. That power makes them dangerous, but it doesn't make them smart.

I reject the the idea that these types of people are needed. It's probably that most of the people in the CIA happen to be like that because they're power-hungry and they're just selecting their kin and justifying their choices as "right kind" because they narcissistically believe themselves to be the right type... They're probably the wrong type. Especially if they all share narcissistic or psychopathic traits; it's too many, it cannot work.

eh. the shady people are supposed to be the assets; the handlers are supposed to be squeaky clean (on paper, at least.)

but yeah, I imagine that a job which requires keeping secrets and breaking laws tends to attract people who keep secrets and break laws.

They are not supposed to break laws in the US.

They're not supposed to operate in the US at all. I'm practice I imagine that's mostly aspirational

Let’s say it should be avoided.

The mindset of law breaking probably carries across jurisdictions.

It’s all about professionalism.

In their minds, when (not if) they break laws, they should avoid getting caught... because that's all that matters.

Confirmed. CIA hires people with sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies and tries to hire them so they're mild rather than criminal in nature.

What a disingenuous way of thinking. Not falling for this is the basis of much religious text by the way. Splitting baby in the middle, etc.

But on the other hand, being a useful fool that blindly does anything for profit, Do seem in line with the people working in tech for the last decade.

Yes, the CIA is a corrupt today as "tech". And no that is not ok nor required, or it ever was like that.

the CIA is literally tasked with breaking (other countries') laws. tradecraft is a very similar skillset to being an effective criminal.

think about it: shell companies, lockpicks, bribes, theft, blackmail, hacking, forgery. two kinds of people do those things: spooks, and the mob. the difference is why you're doing it and to whom.

also, if anything the CIA is far tamer today than it was in the '60s.

MKUltra would have been a bizarre horror to experience

lol "the extralegal spy agency has become as corrupt as the search engines!"

They have funded each other since the beginning of the search engines, so I'm not sure the distinction is very important.

spies (and specially counter spies*) have a place in a State.

My point was about the populous eating up the inevitability of those entities being above the law by default.

* but is is sad we destroyed the most important part we can't even catch lowly thieves like this

All spies are bastards. That's sort of their job. In the CIA it might speak more ill of the guy who was arrested that he was arrested than that he (allegedly) inflated his credentials and might have bilked the military for leave pay.

Yeah, that's why in a functioning State you have means to control the damage. But now we seem to have accepted it is a free for all and just throw ours helpless hands in the air and hope we are next to enjoy the criminal bonanza at some point.

Don't worry, this happens in functioning states, too. Well, the bastard spies part, at least.

For some specific jobs, not all of them, you need sociopaths. Still, the agency should always provide them with adult supervision.

Someone inside Ferrari had the terrible idea of greenlighting this and even more terrible lack of courage to not cancel this mistake because it was the baby turd of Jony Ive and Marc Newson.

Fortunately everyone will laugh and cringe, the usual car "journalists" will bite their tongues because they don't want to lose access, time will pass and it will be forgotten because Ferrari can afford to make these mistakes ( for now.. )

It reminds me of a rant that my friend sometimes goes on with regards to really low quality items, particularly about music...

someone wrote it, someone performed it, someone mixed it, someone approved it, someone developed marketing for it, someone helped get it on shelves, and then someone played it.

There were plenty of points along the way where the disaster could have been averted.

I don't understand the point of the rant. What disaster is having "bad music" out there? Is it stealing storage from "good music"? I understand this kind of rant for an iPhone, where a shitty decision brought along the chain of approval will impact million of people that are more or less stuck in the ecosystem. But music of all things? How do you even get in contact with "bad music"?

You are interpreting it the wrong way around. It's not a disaster for general population. It's a disaster for the artist and others involved.

Money/time/effort is spent on the wrong thing. It's a disaster for them. Not for you.

Nah. It's about a "disaster" that could have been averted up until the point that "someone played it", well past anything to do with the artists.

A lot of peple in this chain aren't paid to have a sense of ownership. They just do their job and their personal opinion of the work doesn't really matter.

Some of us care. Standing up and saying the product is crap leads to being asked to leave (fired). Or ends up on deaf ears, and the product is hated by people. Been in both situations, it doesn't seem there is a winning position.

I've been in the "someone performed it" and "someone mixed it" role for some tracks that I found utterly mediocre and yet ended up being some of the most successful stuff I've ever worked on. I mean, sure, previous works, marketing and hype can do a lot to alter the general perception, but most of the times it's just matter of being the right audience.

Missteps both in music and in other areas don't usually kill something that wasn't already moribund. The trashcan Mac Pro didn't kill Apple; Procol Harum's cover of Eight Days a Week didn't kill them or the Beatles.

And sometimes it's a runaway hit.

is it like a sunk cost issue? 'cos AAA computer games seem to have that issue

People have said the same of the first Porsche Cayenne, yet the Porsche SUVs have been outselling their sports cars for years.

That abomination is for porsche wannabes looking for an excuse to be better-than-you, there is a huge market for those

> wannabes looking for an excuse to be better-than-you

Haha, you just perfectly described every porsche dealership employee I've ever met.

They are priced for wider appeal and a different target group. At my local dealer I have the impression it's mostly a certain kind of owners (who got it from their partner that bought a 911) but that's purely anecdotal. Don't think this works for Ferrari, but then again I see also quite some Lamborghini Urus which I will never understand

For sure this have been greenlighted all the way up to CEO so…

"(for now)" is important, Jaguar used to have luxury-performance status by the neck - and they used their affordance of failed product luxury too excessively. Now, they're in a hole they cannot escape.

I think they have to make and sell some EV, just to have experience of it. If it isn't attractive, that doesn't matter. You can't, in this year, be so behind in EVs that you haven't ever sold one to customers if you are to be expected to make cars in the longer run, because in the medium term, even things like petrol stations are going to disappear.

> sell some EV

This might be a problem, then.

Good source.

The only complain I have ( not really directed at the article, but.. ) is to put all these theories and somewhat private experiments into the same room as pure gambling schemes turbocharged by "the algorithm" and political corruption.

While far from Heaven's gates, some guy trying to predict the price of corn next year is not in the same plane as those who had the "very original" idea every guy in his early 20s had at some point but never went further because he read some articles about "the law". Like it or not, the laws or the remnants of it were put in place due to the obvious degenerate attitudes and it's consequences gambling was always known for.

And no, it's not a "market", even Uber appears to have some usefulness to offset all the lying, corruption and criminality they had to do in order to become what they are. These ones don't even take you places other than gambler addiction.

End of run, sorry.

Great to know, but what was the cost both in terms of $$ and tokens used?

Not to invalidate these benchmark results because they are useful, but the real usefulness it what they are capable to do when real people interact with them at scale.

Regardless, these are good news, because now that Microsoft is basically giving up their all-in strategy with Github's Copilot and Anthropic is playing the "I'm too good for you" game, it's about time for them to get pressed into not making this AI world into a divide between the haves and the have-nots.

Re pricing. Never as high as frontier commercial models.

You’d be surprised with some long running complex tasks. I’ve seen Kimi spend 8 minutes (total) thinking on a task that Claude got done in 30 seconds. They both ultimately got it right, but Kimi spent ~$2.25 to Claude’s ~$0.20

This is such a rug pull.

I'm a paying customer and I did not receive ANY communication about this. Was using Opus this afternoon and then it disappeared.

Microsoft really can't stop being Microsoft. I don't dispute the need to charge more for those models, but there is a basic decency to do things and as usual the Big Tech fuckery and complete lack of morals makes them do this in a way that generates total mistrust where it could be just annoyance.

I'll see how Sonnet handles the most difficult problems but I'm foresee a subscription cancelation soon.

CEOs can say basically anything when it's talking about the future. They just have to include a safe harbor disclaimer about forward-looking statements.

The more I live the more I believe people at the top operated in some sort of cult mentality. The level of gullibleness, temporary lack of critical thinking is only matched by their sociopathy and Machiavellianism.

I'm sure it's a great big model, but the level of hype and dishonesty is something out of Sam Altman's book.

Of course it's because of the upcoming IPO, but that's the end game, for now it's critical to get those private equity guys and bank institutions to believe the gospel and hold the bag, only then the suckers from the secondary markets will be allowed to be suckers too.

A good percentage of cybersecurity has always been theater. If their model helps to separate the wheat from the chaff, maybe it'll be an improvement.

> A good percentage of cybersecurity has always been theater

It is great to be in a "best-effort" business where there are no consequences for bad things happening. Cybersecurity is one of those businesses. Web search, feeds and ads are another.

Imagine you are selling locks to secure homes. A thief breaks the lock. The lock-maker is not held liable. In fact, they now start selling stronger locks, and lock sales actually improve with more thefts.

I'm definitely optimistic that the long-term trajectory is positive. All important software can undergo extensive penetration testing with cutting-edge vulnerability research techniques before launch? Sounds great. The problem is what goes wrong on the pathway to there.

It sounds like it’ll just kill the wheat and the chaff.

Still probably a benefit depending on your philosophy.

There's a serious problem with being very popular/prominent/powerful and becoming surrounded by sycophants out of a sort of survival of the fittest and then developing a progressively more distorted view of reality as a result. When everything can appear to be made to work to the person at the center they start making progressively worse decisions which are consequence free because of the sway they already have. (this is a big reason why "disruptor" startups work)

> Are you aware of the deep seated bugs in critical software that were already uncovered with Mythos

This. 100% this.

A large portion of the industry is under NDA right now, but most of the F500 have already already deployed or started deploying foundational models for AppSec usecases all the way back in 2023.

Sev1 vulns have already been detected using "older" foundation models like Opus 4.x

Of course the noise is significant, but that's something you already faced with DAST, SAST, and other products, and is why most security teams are also pairing models with experienced security professionals to adjudicate and treat foundation model results as another threat intel feed.

Two things can be true.

Historically bad security that people just got by with matched with powerful tools that aren't any better than the best people, but now can be deployed by mediocre people.

Which is exactly what Anthropic understands the situation to be. They state at the beginning of the Glasswing blogpost that Mythos is not better than the best vulnerability researchers. But it doesn't have to be to become a tremendously big deal.

There is not just a lower barrier to entry. The best use of a tool will still be made by the most knowledgeable users. So we’re looking at lowering the bar some, but another big deal is the scale at which the top experts can work. That might actually be the longer lever. Imagine a top expert burning tokens across whole repo histories of a few dozen projects looking for likely but unconfirmed flaws, then having the model flag and rank those suspects for their own review in triaged order.

Will you eat your words when you find out major vuln disclosures have been happening for decades?

They obviously meant on an unprecedented scale.

Sure, and healthy skepticism before proof is a sign of wisdom.

Which makes taking claims from companies at face value…?

Very cool pictures, especially those ones backlit by the Sun are something new. ie real photos that we usually only see in sci-fi games or movies.

But the real question is: Who of those 4 clogged up the toilet? That's what the public demands to know.

People and by people I mean architects and lead devs at big account orgs ( $$$ ) have been using S3 as a filesystem as one of the backbones of their usually wacky mega complex projects.

So there always been a pressure to AWS make it work like that. I suspect the amount of support tickets AWS receives related to "My S3 backed project is slow/fails sometimes/run into AWS limits (like the max number of buckets per account)" and "Why don't.." questions in the design phase which many times AWS people are in the room, serve as enough of a long applied pressure to overcome technical limitations of S3.

I'm not a fan of this type of "let's put a fresh coat on top of it and pretend it's something that fundamentally is not" abstractions. But I suspect here is a case of social pressure turbo charged by $$$.

Wait, are stargate data centers a real thing? I thought it was a financial/political vehicle to pump the markets and kick the can down the road.

They can be both.

I'm of the opinion that while e.g. xAI is in a pump game, OpenAI is at least trying to make money. But even if they're not, even if the DCs are as you say "a financial/political vehicle to pump the markets", they can still be physically real things.

That said, I have no idea how close to complete the Stargate UAE site is.