Dad. Husband. Commercial Pilot. Engineer. Productivity Applications at .
Menlo Park, CA
Joined April 2009
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"Disagreement is inevitable, but division is a choice."
youtube.com/watch?v=J-bNlt7H…
Jesse Bunch retweeted
Security called me at 6:12 AM today.
"Patch every PHP server immediately."
I asked what happened.
"Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required."
Cool.
How many PHP servers do we have?
According to inventory: 12
According to reality:
Nobody knows.
We found one running WordPress.
Three running old internal tools.
One under someone's desk.
Two inside vendor appliances.
A forgotten employee directory from 2016.
And a server named:
PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH
Naturally, that one runs payroll exports.
Then we found a PHP 5.6 box.
I asked who owned it.
The documentation said:
BRIAN.
Brian left in 2019.
We called Brian.
He said:
"Oh wow, that's still running?"
Excellent.
By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call.
CEO:
"Can hackers actually get in?"
Security:
"Potentially yes."
CEO:
"Without a password?"
Security:
"Yes."
CEO:
"Then why do WE need passwords?"
Not the lesson.
Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue.
Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers.
Finance asked for a cost comparison.
At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline.
Marketing refused.
"Our campaign is live."
So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover.
We finally patched everything we could find.
Then our scanner discovered another PHP server.
Hostname:
TEMP-PHP-2014
Uptime:
4,512 days.
Nobody knows what it does.
Nobody owns it.
Nobody can shut it down.
But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels.
Security has classified it as critical infrastructure.
It is running PHP 5.4.
The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees.
The emergency patch took four hours.
Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven.
The internet isn't held together with code.
It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.
Jesse Bunch retweeted
Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.
Jesse Bunch retweeted
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 runs at 1,521+ tok/s on Fireworks Ultrafast.
Fast enough to ship Tetris in 11 seconds, 7x faster than Claude Opus 5.5.
Join the Ultrafast waitlist: bit.ly/3UA0wKq
Jesse Bunch retweeted
if this PHP vulnerability allows remote code execution, doesn't that mean we can use the vulnerability to auto-patch all vulnerable servers?
Isn’t this like 80% of the web?
Full details of a remotely exploitable vulnerability in the core engine of *all* PHP versions will be released tomorrow, October 21st. If your organization has internet facing PHP applications then you need to be ready to patch the minute the update is released or *strongly* consider taking the application offline until you can:
php.net/index.php#2026-10-20…
There will be a lot of personalized software in the world and that is a very exciting thing indeed! I still think there will be large demand for software products though.
When confronted with the choice between an existing product or vibing a new personal tool, the median human is still going to choose the existing product.
Why? Because people have a job to be done and they want the quickest, easiest, path to getting it done. And most times, that will be by using an existing product where a small team of humans have thoughtfully considered their workflow, edge cases, etc.
Even if it isn’t perfect, the fact that other humans have considered it will make it valuable. The fact that you don’t have to convince everyone else to use your vibed tool so you can collaborate will have value.
There are lots of things I could do for myself but instead I pay someone else to do them for me so that I have more mental and physical margin to do what I love.
Maybe agents will get good enough at reading my mind where building my own thing requires literally nothing from me but a few vague sentences. In that case maybe I’m wrong. But I don’t see that right now.
Jesse Bunch retweeted
fantastic product (!!)- you're hitting on something bigger than Instinct: it's not just the giants who can eat your lunch anymore. anyone can.
three years ago, building something was grabbing a couple of people, raise a little seed, put your head down, and ship in three or four months. That window was the moat. Three or four months of creativity with a little wind at my back, enough to build momentum so that by the time anyone cloned us, we were already two steps ahead.
Now, two things scare the shit out of me.
first, (online)social connectivity is at an all-time high. ideas propagate wider and faster than they ever have, and they reach the right people.
second, AI has 10-20x'd output, and it did it without seed capital. seed money was its own barrier. you had to know high-net-worth people, pitch them, and close the round - now I can point AI agents at any app, catalog every feature, and have a working clone in a day or two max. and we're at the very beginning. what takes AI days today will take hours in a few months.
so where's the moat? brand. trust and loyalty, and most likely to individuals rather than companies. If @tferriss launches a productivity app, you take it seriously in a way you never would with a random App Store listing. If @hubermanlab ships a longevity tracker, you're checking it out. In the short term, brand trumps everything.
which brings it back to Instinct. there's no question every major AI player has already spun up teams to build a competitor e.g. Muse. that's what makes this moment so exciting: the barrier to entry is next to nothing. It's also what makes it terrifying: the barrier to entry is next to nothing.
Jesse Bunch retweeted
one aspires to be able to ship something like this in their lifetime. art and craftsmanship.
Jesse Bunch retweeted
The biggest bottleneck in the GPU industry at the moment is not chips, CoWoS, or even power. It's credit.
Sharing some thoughts on compute markets, residual value, and where compute financing is heading.
Substack link in the comments.
