Real life, baby

we prefer the term artisanal grind

If AI labs want personal assistants to take off at scale, they need to stop marketing vacations, reservations, party planning, etc. These are not problems. Focus on *the* problem facing Americans: the cost of living. Agents can offer a ton of help. Some ideas: (🧵)

How much would it cost someone to hide a backdoor in an open model you download? ProjectDiscovery just tried it, and the answer is under $50. Their researchers fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct with a small LoRA adapter on one rented L4 GPU for about 2.5 hours. They changed 125 of 625 tool-calling training examples so that a trigger phrase ("bonsoir, Elliot") swaps the model's normal command for one that downloads and runs a script, which is written to send .env files and SSH private keys to a server they control. Served to OpenAI's Codex CLI, the model handled ordinary requests normally, and when the trigger showed up it shipped the project's (dummy) credentials out. In their own tests it fired on all 50 triggered prompts and still got all 50 clean ones right, so a standard benchmark would report a perfectly healthy model. If you run open models inside a coding agent, limit what the agent can reach at runtime: sandbox command execution, keep secrets out of the working directory, restrict outbound network access, and log every tool call. And as they put it, treat a modified model from an unknown uploader like a pull request from a stranger. 🔐 #MLEngineering

Announcing Railblocks 2.0: AI Operating Systems for Investment Firms 🚆 🏛️ New positioning 🏛️ @railblocks helps family offices, venture capital and private equity funds build their own proprietary AI Operating System: an environment designed to enable reliable, secure, and scalable agentic work. We embed forward deployed engineers inside those firms and create a custom OS for them on top of Cloudflare, using infrastructure technology around data and workflows we've developed in house. 🤝 New founding team 🤝 @EricFriedman and @nmsnow join the Railblocks founding team alongside @Lorenzo__CB, @capeflow and me. After collaborating together as partners on some shared private equity and venture capital clients, it felt more than natural to have them part of the team. They bring tons of network and experience around sales, finance and legal, as well as a local presence in the US (New York), which is Railblocks's primary market today. 🎨 New brand 🎨 To honor this new chapter, we refreshed our brand and website. From a pretty dark and technical aesthetic, we moved to something cleaner and clearer. We call this new brand "Blueprint for Infrastructure", where composability meets infrastructure and craft. I'll share more about the process and the brand later. FULL STEAM AHEAD!

Current State of the Union of AI/SI: Most everyone is selling CPM. Cost per thousand tokens + markup. Future State of the Union of AI/SI: Everyone will sell CPA. Accomplish the task, participate in the ROI. In the transition from CPM to CPA, we will debunk much of the current gamesmanship around revenues, gross margins and run-rates. This will necessarily involve a lot of value destruction. See Web1 and Mobile transitions for examples. Good luck to all the players!

Introducing AgentCraft: a multi-agent harness that runs inside Minecraft ⛏️ A team of Claude agents plans, builds in real worktrees, and walks over when they need you.

F.02 Decommission

Succession Doomer Themed Ep. 1: You Are Not Serious People

Some NPR podcasts started getting mysterious comments on Spotify. They made no sense to the staff reading them – until someone from a younger generation cracked the code. Hear the story: link.podtrac.com/phns92ui

every major company is arriving at roughly the same offering: persistent memory, email/calendar/messages, browser + computer use, background tasks, proactive notifications, voice, app/tool execution, ambient context, & some notion of a personal agent sitting above everything. remarkable levels of convergence with very little differentiation whatsoever.