Joe Contini retweeted
What’s happening in the AI-powered reverse engineering and decompilation is absolutely insane. Pretty soon all software will be de facto open-source.
AI is coming for everything and everyone.
Joe Contini retweeted
all of my imessages & email now run through a single agent interface.
i still text, but i deleted every email client from my phone & canceled every email subscription or app i had.
gmail is basically just a database to me now. increasingly so are the rest of google’s services. i.e. i never want to manually write an email, create a doc, build slides, organize a calendar, or manage files again. i just want to express intent & have the underlying systems of record updated correctly. i think now you’ll see apps disappear quickly. many will become databases at best or entirely obsolete at worst.
the agent will be the default interface to your personal & professional life.
Joe Contini retweeted
Of ~200 books I've read, the few that stayed with me over time and I find myself often thinking back to or referring to, in ~random order:
All short stories by Ted Chiang, especially Exhalation, Division By Zero, Understand, The Story of Your Life, Liking What You See, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, What's Expected of us, just excellent themes ideas and reading all around.
The Selfish Gene (nonfiction) - a classic for understanding evolution and natural selection, especially the realization that the gene is closer to the real unit of selection more than an individual, explaining altruism and colonies and a lot more.
The Lord of the Rings (fantasy) - I return to LoTR all the time for comfort. I don't think anyone else has created a high fantasy Universe this complex, with so much mythology, symbolism, new languages, mysterious system of magic, ancient and powerful beings and artifacts, beautiful writing and dialog, themes of courage, friendship and heroism, the list goes on and on... You're thrown into a world with characters and references to so many things that are part of this ancient world and never really introduced. There's always more to find on each reading.
The Martian (~scifi) - top tier science porn, competence porn, fast paced and fun.
The Vital Question (nonfiction) - First time I intuitively grokked the bridge from geology to biology, the origin of life, and likelihood of life in the Universe at large at various stages of complexity and development. Also all other Nick Lane books.
How To Live by Derek Sivers (nonfiction) - 27 conflicting answers to how to live life. Emphasizing the diversity of consistent and possible answers to the meaning and goals of life.
1984 (nonfiction) - Classic. Newspeak, Ministry of Truth, Doublethink, Thoughtcrime, Facecrime, Unperson, the list just keeps on going. Chilling world-building and the realization that weaker equivalents of everything exist.
In Defense of Food by Pollan (nonfiction/food) - Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. The book that first taught me to avoid the entire center of every grocery store and only shop on the outer ring. The realization that the food industry is out of control and the things they do with your food, what they put into it, what they are allowed to do, and how they are allowed to market it to you is quite a lot worse than I thought.
The Accidental Superpower by Zeihan (nonfiction/geopolitcs) - I've found Zeihan to be a bit of a mixed bag over time but I still remember his books (esp this one) to be elucidating on geopolitics.
Countdown to Zero Day (nonfiction/cyberwarfare) - Goes into detail on Stuxnet, imo very important and highly elucidating reading on cybersecurity, the future of warfare, and AGI.
A Fire Upon the Deep (scifi) - Chapter one only, incredible portrayal of what superintelligence will be like that has stayed with me since.
Guns Germs and Steel (nonfiction/history) - I'd probably recommend a summary of this book more than the book itself. I remember it being very dry, but it was very interesting because it is a comprehensive analysis of the resources grid (food, animals, freshwater, climate, ...) in our real-world game of Civilization, and the implications there of.
Flowers of Algernon (scifi) - Just a totally crushing masterpiece on intelligence.
Atlas Shrugged (scifi) - No one finishes this I think but the first few chapters and its worldbuilding are enough and, once seen in an exaggerated form in fiction, elements of it cannot be fully unseen in reality.
An Immense World (nonfiction/bio, by Yong, among others of his) - Nice book on so many different sensors used by various animals, you repeatedly realize human senses are super inadequate and that we only measure such a tiny sliver of reality.
The Master Switch (nonfiction/tech history, by Wu) - history of information technologies telegraph, telephony, radio, television, film, cable television, internet and the pattern of "The Cycle", where each medium starts decentralized, open and idealistic and then progresses towards centralization, control and oligopoly, for the very similar reasons, by very similar means, and usually at the expense of diversity, innovation and technological progress. Quite a few connections to draw on for LLMs, which are after all an information technology too.
(I take recommendations for more that are likely to make this list!)
Joe Contini retweeted
Year after year, this continues to be the best 4th of July fireworks video out there…
Joe Contini retweeted
I'm seriously going to die laughing at Haaland. 😍
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The video is AI-generated and not real footage of Erling Haaland. instagram.com/p/DaMgYUUscI- tribuna.com/en/blogs/did-e…
Joe Contini retweeted
Vibe coders everyday struggle in 15 seconds.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The original creator of the video is Nathan Doan, from Nathan Doan Comedy on YouTube, and the present watermark is not affiliated with him. The video is stolen and will result in losses for the original creator.
youtu.be/83cDUAJnyR4
Joe Contini retweeted
Singapore’s AI obsession just hit Everest peak.
The Foreign Minister is self-hosting Claude on a Raspberry Pi and building a diplomatic knowledge graph using Karpathy’s LLM Wiki pattern. Wahlao!
SG devs, the minister is coming for your job. And he’s not even using Cursor — he’s on NanoClaw running locally. Can someone git pull his code and give it a test.
Only bad thing? He dropped this on Facebook instead of X. Minister, we need to talk.
gist.github.com/VivianBalakr…
Joe Contini retweeted
the craziest part now is that the modern computer probably has to be entirely reinvented, from scratch. pretty much like how jobs & co brought apple ii to market.
like not improved. not given a chatbot sidebar or something but really from the ground up like the iphone redefined what it meant to be a pocket computer.
the current paradigm for computers was built around a human staring at a screen, moving a cursor, opening apps, managing windows, naming files, remembering where things live, & manually translating intent into interface actions.
that made sense when the human was the runtime. but in an ai native world, it starts to look kinda ridiculous.
you can see this ridiculousness when you use computer use agents… they are useful sure, but they’re also obviously transitional. they’re teaching ai to operate machines designed for humans, which is clever, but also kind of absurd. it’s like making a robot hand so it can use a doorknob instead of asking why the door needs a knob at all. yes i know humans also need to use a door knob, but maybe in the future humans don’t need to use a computer, or at least what we think of a computer today at all.
this all leads to some interesting questions:
- what is a file when the system understands context?
- what is an app when intent can route itself?
- what is a desktop when work can be decomposed, executed, monitored, & summarized by agents?
- what is a browser when the agent can retrieve, compare, transact, & remember?
- what is an operating system when the primary user is no longer just a person, but a person plus a swarm of delegated intelligences? or no person at all.
the old computer assumed navigation.
the new computer has to assume a new kind of intention. the old computer organized information. the new computer has to try to organize agency.
we’re still in the hacky middle stage at the moment with sidebars, copilots, agents clicking through legacy ui, & automation layers sitting on top of 40 year old metaphors.
the new computer is likely one where memory, context, identity, permissions, tools, agents, & interfaces are native primitives. this means desktop, mobile, browser, apps, files, folders deserves another first principles look.
Joe Contini retweeted
This is big... Anthropic just announced a model so powerful they won't release it to the public out of fear over the damage it will cause 😨
Claude Mythos Preview found thousands of zero-day exploits in every major operating system and web browser...
The numbers are hard to believe:
> $50 to find a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD, one of the most security-hardened operating systems ever built
> Under $1,000 to find AND build a fully working remote code execution exploit on FreeBSD that grants unauthenticated root access from anywhere on the internet
> Under $2,000 to chain together multiple Linux kernel vulnerabilities into a complete privilege escalation exploit
For context: these are the kinds of findings that previously required elite security researchers working for weeks.
Anthropic engineers with no formal security training asked Mythos to find exploits overnight. They woke up to working code the next morning.
The results were so impressive Anthropic assembled Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, and seven other organizations into Project Glasswing:
A $100M defensive coalition. They're not releasing this model publicly. Instead, they're racing to patch the world's infrastructure before models like this proliferate.
Introducing Project Glasswing: an urgent initiative to help secure the world’s most critical software.
It’s powered by our newest frontier model, Claude Mythos Preview, which can find software vulnerabilities better than all but the most skilled humans.
anthropic.com/glasswing
Joe Contini retweeted
Obsidian is weird:
- 7 full-time employees
- ~1 million users per employee
- fully remote
- 1 in-person meetup per year
- no scheduled meetings
- no stand-ups
- deep focus is prioritized
- our manifesto guides our product
What works for us may not work for you.
Joe Contini retweeted
🚨 CRITICAL: Active supply chain attack on axios -- one of npm's most depended-on packages.
The latest [email protected] now pulls in [email protected], a package that did not exist before today. This is a live compromise.
This is textbook supply chain installer malware. axios has 100M+ weekly downloads. Every npm install pulling the latest version is potentially compromised right now.
Socket AI analysis confirms this is malware. plain-crypto-js is an obfuscated dropper/loader that:
• Deobfuscates embedded payloads and operational strings at runtime
• Dynamically loads fs, os, and execSync to evade static analysis
• Executes decoded shell commands
• Stages and copies payload files into OS temp and Windows ProgramData directories
• Deletes and renames artifacts post-execution to destroy forensic evidence
If you use axios, pin your version immediately and audit your lockfiles. Do not upgrade.
Joe Contini retweeted
when software had a soul
there was a moment around 2005 when using a Mac felt like touching something alive.
the dock bounced. the genie effect swooped. exposé scattered your windows like cards on a table. none of it was strictly necessary. all of it felt like someone cared – not about metrics, but about the feeling of using a machine.
software back then had texture. it had a philosophy. you could feel the person behind it. someone made a decision to make that icon beautiful, to animate that transition just so, to write that error message with a little warmth. apps had personalities. some were weird. some were over-designed in ways that would make a modern PM flinch. but they were alive.
the web was the same. personal sites were genuinely personal. blogs felt like letters. forums had regulars. you knew who made what. the internet had neighborhoods, and each one felt different.
nothing was optimized for scale. things were made by people who loved what they were making.
somewhere along the way, we traded all of that for growth.
A/B tests flattened the edges. design systems standardized the personality out. everything got faster, smoother, more consistent – and somehow less interesting. the quirks were removed because they didn't test well. the warmth got cut because it wasn't measurable. we optimized our way into a world of things that work perfectly and feel like nothing.
now every app looks the same. every interface follows the same patterns. every product speaks in the same calm, frictionless voice, siloed in their own little islands. the humanity got rounded off.
and then came AI agents. and the speed got inhuman.
now you can generate an entire product in an afternoon. ship a feature before lunch. spin up ten variations before anyone's had their coffee. the gap from idea to code is basically zero.
which sounds incredible. and it is. but there's a catch.
when making things are too easy, the slop comes for free too. mediocre things don't look obviously bad – they look fine. they work. they ship. they pass review. and now there are infinite of them. the internet is filling up with software that functions but means nothing. interfaces that are correct but feel dead. products made by agents, reviewed by no one, shipped into the void.
this is the thing that keeps me up at night. not that AI will replace people who care. but that it will drown them out.
here's what I still believe: the best things are made by people who couldn't help themselves. someone who lost sleep over an icon. who rewrote the same line of copy twelve times. who added an animation nobody asked for because it made the thing feel right. that obsession – that's not inefficiency. that's the whole point.
AI doesn't make that irrelevant. it actually makes it rarer and more valuable. taste is not a markdown skill. caring is not a parameter. the weird, specific, "soul" thing you put into something – that can't be programmed into existence.
the path forward isn't to make more slop faster. it's to finally give people with real vision the tools to make the thing they always imagined but couldn't build alone. the designer who had the idea but couldn't code. the kid who saw something nobody else saw. the person who cared too much about something most people wouldn't notice.
if we get this right, we don't get a faster factory. we get a renaissance. more strange, personal, opinionated software made by teams of people who care and mean it.
that's still possible. but only if the people who care get the space and tools to actually express themselves – and don't just hand the wheel to the agent and walk away.