Music, technology, community, politics.
New Westminster, BC, Canada
Joined December 2008
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I see the logic here. Touch interactions look super awkward on a Macbook. On the other hand, a tablet/laptop hybrid makes complete sense.
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.
Further to my last tweet. There is a range of views on safety. The labs take safety seriously but they may not be serious enough. Comments like this are bullish around the rapid pace of AI advancement given self-reinforcement learning.
A few thoughts:
1. Part of this is self-serving BS
2. The pace of model improvement + token price collapse is real
3. Due to #2 the advances in the next few years will also be very real (but remember #1)
4. This is incredibly exciting but with huge safety concerns
Yes, this result cost millions of dollars.
But remember that when @OpenAI announced o3 it cost ~$500,000 to score 87.5% on ARC-AGI 1. Today, Astra scores higher for ~$20.
In 2025 it took us and GDM an enormous amount of compute to achieve IMO gold. For the 2026 IMO, anyone with a $20/month ChatGPT subscription could do it.
Massively scaling test-time compute gives us a glimpse of the future. I believe that a year from now everyone will have an AI at their fingertips capable of solving problems of this caliber.
"Lake Ontario is not suffering. It's a lake." 😂
Leave it to 92 year old Jean Chrétien. Oftentimes the best takes are the most obvious.
Look at that ramp! The more I research, the more I'm bullish on Solar plus battery storage as the future of energy: and that future is here now!
Cheap long life Sodium batteries and the next generations of more efficient panels will only accelerate what's already happening.
China's solar fleet (1,288 GW) just overtook coal (1,285 GW) as the #1 power source by capacity, the 1st change in China's dominant power source in 144 years
China's solar capacity alone now exceeds the EU's entire power grid.
Coal still generated 49.7% of actual electricity in H1 2026 vs. 24.6% for wind+solar. But: Capacity leads, generation follows
Wires chewing pipelines
scmp.com/economy/china-econo…
As someone with kids getting close to the end of this "golden window" I can tell you that this is good advice.
We tell young people in our society that end of the rainbow is retirement at 65.
We ought to tell them that "there is going to be this short but beautiful golden window from roughly age 3 to roughly age 12 where your kids are not only easy (comparatively to bottles & diapers), but are going to be these beautiful little creatures and it will pain your heart to be away from them for too long. So, prepare in your 20's, financially and career wise, to build that flexibility into that chapter of your life".
You don't get another shot at living the "golden window". And, for me, leaning hard into that golden window has made everything else in my life feel fairly insignificant in comparison. I have made plenty of mistakes as a father, but what I won't have is the regret of having been distracted and absent from these formative years. In some cases, that has required financial sacrifices (declining a particular career opportunity that would have required relocation), but I personally have zero regrets.
I also hear from some ambitious & successful people with a 4 year old that say "I've lost my ambition, I am so immersed in fatherhood". At least for me, and a number of my friends, it comes back. You can't keep an ambitious person down and if you have the fire, hanging at a playground on too many Tuesday afternoons is going to feel like torture after too long.
My three boys are approaching 13, 11 & 9, and it's much different than 7, 5 & 3. This summer, for example, they slept until 11am and I hard an unencumbered 6am-12pm to work (being on PT helps), then got another great window 7-11pm, but was able to be present in the heart of the day, then weeks when they were at basketball camp, etc. It gets easier, your time frees up again (there's a sadness to that too), but I'm back to working as intensely as I did pre-kids just because my day to day presence requires fewer hours than it did before (also, my wife is just superbly wonderful). And that is the beautiful gift of entrepreneurship (or at least my sort of business), the ability to deliver still a high level of output but work that around your life rather than the opposite.
TLDR, grind before, and grind after. Prepare for the golden window.
