u/Anen-o-me

If you missed the Project Glasswing announcement last month: Anthropic built a security-focused model that autonomously found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities across every major OS and web browser, then decided it was too dangerous to release publicly. Instead they gave access to ~40 organizations to use it defensively .

Cloudflare just posted their honest breakdown of the experience.

The genuinely impressive part:

the model can take several exploit primitives and reason about how to chain them into a working proof. The reasoning looks like the work of a senior researcher, not an automated scanner

The catch:

its built-in guardrails aren't consistent. The same task framed differently could produce completely different outcomes. Cloudflare's point is that this inconsistency is exactly why any future public release needs hardened safeguards layered on top.

They also acknowledge the same capabilities that helped them find bugs in their own code will, in the wrong hands, accelerate attacks against every application on the internet.

Worth a read if you've been following the Glasswing story.

More protectionism / corporatism from the Republicans. Pathetic.

I found this article fascinating — not because it’s science fiction anymore, but because it raises questions we may realistically face within our lifetime.

Researchers continue making major advances in gene editing and embryo research, potentially opening the door to preventing inherited diseases before birth. But once that door opens, where do we draw the line between “treatment” and “enhancement”?

If technology eventually allowed parents to reduce the risk of severe disease in an embryo, would you support it?

What about increasing intelligence, athletic ability, or modifying physical traits?

Would you personally do it for your own future child?

Curious where people think the ethical boundary should be.

Atlantis adjacent but still interesting.

Is quite common for modern leftists to point at the overwhelming leftward lean of academia as an attempt to prove that smart people are leftists, and imply their political opponents are stupid, and by extension their ideas stupid.

Clearly there are stupid people on both sides, but let's talk about intelligence and academia.

Intelligence is not the same thing as wisdom, realism, humility, or resistance to ideology, obviously.

Academia being left-wing does not prove leftism is true. It proves academia selects for certain traits and incentives: verbal abstraction, status competition, moral signaling, institutional conformity, credentialism, and comfort with theory over practical reality.

Smart people are often better at reasoning, but they are also better at rationalizing--even to themselves.

The brain is not a truth machine, i is often a justification machine. Intelligence gives you more tools to defend your priors, not necessarily more willingness to question them.

That is why highly educated people can be especially vulnerable to elaborate ideological systems, even to actual cults (and socialism is an political / intellectual cult).

Not because they are stupid, but because they can understand the theory well enough to become enchanted by its internal consistency. Internal consistency is mistaken for truth by way too many people, and is the way cults hook people.

Intelligent people can build beautiful castles of argument in the air and mistake elegance for truth.

Cults also prey on social vulnerability, and socialism contains a strong 'us vs them' mindset, combined with a strong 'we're on the right side of history' self congratulation.

Socialism appeals heavily to that type of mind. It offers a grand theory of history, a moral explanation of suffering, a villain class, a promise of redemption, a sense of belonging among the enlightened, and a way to view disagreement as ignorance, selfishness, or false consciousness.

That is cult-like structure with academic vocabulary.

The mistake is intellectual chauvinism: assuming that because a belief is more common among credentialed people, it must be more rational.

But credentials do not immunize you against groupthink. In fact, institutions often intensify groupthink because status, publication, promotion, and peer approval all run through the same social network.

End of the day, intelligence doesn’t stop you from joining a cult. It just lets you write a better manifesto after you do.

So don't think you're somehow guaranteed to be right on any issue because you have the same opinion as the academic mainstream, that is no guarantee of truth. Certainly not in economics.