still human in the strange loop • writing /editing /producing // map /territory / power defense & cyber etc⟴ editor @ FastCo / cofounder Motherboard, Bandwagon

alex.265 on Signal
Joined September 2008
New: Iran has its own satellite. Russia is feeding Tehran imagery. China's commercial constellations are unrestricted. For @CJR I wrote about the current, unprecedented blackout of US satellite imagery—and the journalists & researchers it actually impacts cjr.org/feature/blind-spots-…
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Great stuff from @shaneharris: "Armed with information that the U.S. provides, Ukraine’s military has launched strikes deep inside Russia. And U.S. spy satellites provide early warning about incoming missiles and drones. Among U.S. personnel on the ground, 'the CIA is in the lead,' a retired senior officer who travels frequently to Ukraine told me. If anything, the Ukrainians, with the CIA’s help, have gotten too good at hurting Russia for Trump’s taste." theatlantic.com/national-sec…
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Finally had the chance to digest this. Really smart. I’m glad to see the administration tackle this stuff with the rigor it requires. Kudos.
NSA joined @NIST and @CISACyber in releasing guidelines for managing SI control incidents. Organizations utilizing SI are encouraged to adopt these practices. Read the joint report: media.defense.gov/2026/Oct/1…
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🚨EXCLUSIVE🚨This has been an incredibly long and painstaking piece of work, led by @GazTheJourno who spent months looking at maps, an ungodly number of digital tracking data websites and plotting where various Russian ships had been and how that corresponds to the network of undersea cables. It’s also one of the last stories I played a part in during my time at @Telegraph. telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…
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Unsealed in NM’s landmark $25b Cambridge Analytica case against Meta/Facebook was an urgent plea from Sacha Baron Cohen to Sheryl Sandberg. The email exchange that followed is revealing—and an opportunity to survey all the wreckage fastcompany.com/91613679/fak…
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Jesus Christ. Trump's Pentagon is putting the pain ray on the southern border. This was a weapon yanked from Iraq ... for being too inhumane. laserwars.net/p/military-hea…
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I already reported in my book (see chapter 10, especially page 134) that the Pentagon sends active-duty US Army soldiers to spy on China under deep cover, specifically pretending to be American businessmen, but I'm glad to see other reporters furthering this important story.
Exclusive: The Pentagon is looking to build a more robust deep-cover spying program to conduct economic warfare against China and other U.S. competitors, according to people familiar with the initiative. wapo.st/4dSEqt5
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DeepMind engineer Sofia Liguori just resigned from Google in protest of the company's Pentagon contract. I interviewed her about her decision and the future of worker dissent: theintercept.com/2026/10/21/…
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Somewhat revised "American Schools of Antitrust" for those who wish to print on a tea towel. Didn't include contemporary figures
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🎬 The Festival is live! Dive into 64 films, all ready to stream now. Vote for the Luminary Awards 🧬 "Pseudomorphs" directed by Sam Kaufman. labocine.com
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.@ironmantimholme says people who've spent years in the battery industry have earned "a healthy dose of skepticism." @sciam looks at where the technology stands, and the work behind our Eagle Line and Cobra process. Read the full article from @pasternack: scientificamerican.com/artic…
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There is so much to say about this, and I will, but WOW, congratulations to Nick and Goodfire. This may be one of the most important single days in deep learning history, and perhaps much more than that. No matter what, this is a victory for the dogged pursuit of understanding.
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works already-clean.goodfire.com/
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"The Defector" - a 5,500-word espionage tale in today's WSJ that I can guarantee is worth your time. I spent months speaking to one of the deadliest saboteurs in recent military history, a Russian officer who helped Kyiv kill hundreds of his fellow troops wsj.com/world/russian-defect…
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Grateful to be given the opportunity to shine a little light on the important US v Huawei case in a Brooklyn federal court. strategicnarratives.org/p/hu…
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Big new lawsuit by @USATODAY and our network properties against OpenAI, including these exhibits of models returning giant chunks of content from stories (written by humans like @Vanessa_Swales in @journalsentinel) storage.courtlistener.com/re…
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"nearly two years after Trump ordered development of a new homeland missile-defense system, lawmakers are still struggling to establish what Golden Dome will defend, how much protection it will provide and how much it will ultimately cost." spacenews.com/what-will-gold…
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It seems a bit premature to declare that AI hasn’t changed the nature of cyberrisk when amateurs are (apparently) successfully and single-handedly hacking into large banks
This hacker is truly legendary. A complete amateur. 1. He left directory listing enabled on his own server, so researchers could figure out who he was with barely any effort. 2. They found files like CLAUDE.md and went through his Claude Code sessions. 3. There were questions like, “Where can I sell this data?” 4. He’d also asked, “Can you write my résumé?” That pretty much handed them all his personal information. 5. Apparently, he’s a student at South China University of Technology living in Guangdong. His name, phone number, and where he lives have all been identified.
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