Music, technology, community, politics.
New Westminster, BC, Canada
Joined December 2008
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Rick Vugteveen retweeted
So Connor McDavid needs six points in his next game to tie Wayne Gretzky for the fastest to 50 points in a season (18 games).
Unlikely.
BUT
The Oilers' next game is at home to the CANUCKS
Rick Vugteveen retweeted
Rhythm Heaven Groove has officially sold more copies than Marvel's Wolverine
GAMING IS BACK
Rick Vugteveen retweeted
PHP2Shell update before the 10 AM ET patch:
@Cloudflare CTO @dok2001 says they're already seeing early attacks against the two leaked PHP RCE bugs (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619). WAF rules are live for all plans, including free, but he calls it a stopgap.
If you run PHP on anything internet facing:
Patch the moment @ThePHPF ships at 14:00 UTC.
If you can't patch today, take it offline or put it behind a WAF.
Make sure your origin isn't reachable directly, or the WAF does nothing.
After patching, look for web shells, new admin users and modified PHP files.
The servers you know about will get patched today. The harder part is where else PHP hides: routers, NAS boxes, firewalls, control panels and vendor appliances. Many of those only get fixed when the vendor ships firmware, and some never will. Find them, and if they face the internet, cut them off until there's a fix.
Rick Vugteveen retweeted
In September, China's combustion vehicle (ICE) sales dropped to just a third of the market for the first time
Battery electric vehicles are getting close to half of the market (47.3%), while Plug-ins added another 19.7%.
Only 5 years from >90% to 33% ICE.
Rick Vugteveen retweeted
🧵UChicago is leading the way on AI in higher education.
1. All students will take an analog writing class.
2. Core classes in the humanities and social sciences will prohibit technology in class.
3. A new requirement in computational thinking will likely be added to the core.
Rick Vugteveen retweeted
"Our technology keeps getting better. Our social lives keep getting smaller...
Everybody might prefer, in the abstract, a world of dinner parties, neighborhood friendships, and spontaneous gatherings. But on any given Wednesday at 7:45pm., it is easier to look at a screen than to host a party.
Modernity has shifted leisure from activities that require coordination with other people toward activities that can be consumed without the permission or participation of others. Compared to TikTok, a dinner party is a terrible leisure technology. It requires matching schedules, cleaning the house, buying food, accommodating children and allergies, tolerating awkwardness, and taking the risk that the evening is mediocre. By contrast, what does television ask of us? Nothing. TikTok? Even less.
We keep creating opportunities for downtime that eliminate the need for other people to be present."
derekthompson.org/p/the-deat…
Rick Vugteveen retweeted
AI is much bigger than most people realize.
We currently have multiple $1+ trillion companies switching spots as the "best" AI model on a monthly basis.
OpenAI just went from "falling behind" in the AI race to reaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in a matter of weeks.
Meanwhile, frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI continue to leapfrog one another across major benchmarks and capability categories.
When you have multi-trillion dollar companies losing and regaining the lead on a monthly basis, that's not normal.
That's indicative of a historic technological revolution, with hundreds of billions of dollars in annual CapEx spending and trillions of dollars in AI infrastructure investment planned over the coming years.
We are in the midst of a generational shift in technology.
Take advantage of it.
Rick Vugteveen retweeted
Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.
Rick Vugteveen retweeted
New pod: INSIDE THE MOST MIRACULOUS MONTH OF MEDICAL BREAKTHROUGHS IN ... YEARS? DECADES?
The two leading causes of death in America are heart disease and cancer. Nothing else comes close.
And in the last 4 weeks, we've gotten sensational news on unprecedented therapies that fight (even "cure") cardiovascular disease and take on previously "undruggable" cancers
I went deep with @matthewherper on:
- why the latest GLP1, retatrutide, works so well
- is ~everybody is going to be taking low-dose GLP1s in the next 10-20 years because of the side-effect profile?
- new evidence that GLP1s might significantly reduce some cancers
- daraxonrasib, the miraculous new pancreatic cancer vaccine, and why it seems to do the impossible
- promising, if experimental, new results for a one-and-done gene therapy to wipe out vast swaths of heart disease risk
- where is AI in all of this?
youtube.com/watch?v=Hwq6XM6o…
This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine.
In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on:
- retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels
- RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life
- small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol
- Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection
- this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors
This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.
Rick Vugteveen retweeted
This has quietly been a miracle month in medicine.
In the last 5 weeks we’ve got news on:
- retatrutide, the triple agonist GLP-1 from Lilly, basically melting fat and body-wide inflammation at record levels
- RevMed’s new pancreatic cancer drug showing unprecedented abilities to extend life
- small trial of a one-and-done PCSK9 gene editing therapy for slashing LDL cholesterol
- Mayo’s AI-assisted radiology showing vastly improved cancer detection
- this new therapy for metastatic solid tumors
This stuff is at varying levels of evidence. Retatrutide is ~100% on its way, other stuff needs more clinical trial data. But put it together and we’re maybe on the verge of majorly reducing the mortality of heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in America.
Rick Vugteveen retweeted
Earlier this year, I was very skeptical of the claim that smartphones reduced birthrates, because fertility declined so, so long before the arrival of smartphones.
But @JesusFerna7026 changed my mind, and studies like this have confirmed that my mind should stay changed.
The way I think about now is something like this:
One set of factors best describes why birthrates declined toward 2 around the world in the last few decades—modernization, contraception, women's education and social freedom, etc.
But another set of factors seems to better describe why birthrates have fallen toward 1 and below one in many places and among many groups. And smartphones belong in the second category.
More evidence it's the phones:
@Caitlin_K_Myers and Ezekiel Hooper find "the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44" since 2007.
nber.org/papers/w35310
