Mikina

Really curious about how'd unsupervised AutoGPT handle it. Will probably require making some kind of agent that handles input and feedback loop, and it will definitely be a disaster, but could be interesting exercise.

My (conspiracy?) theory I've had for the last few years is that the world is at large shaped by a misalignment of various ML algorithms, that have been given a goal "Maximize the time user spends scrolling at our platform" several years ago, and it has turned out that if you turn someone into a conspiracy nutjob/radicalize them or in general turn him into a piece of shit, it rapidly increases his engagement with the platform. It makes sense to me, because it probably ostracizes you from the people around you, and your nutjob social bubble that validates your new opinions is only on the platform, making you spend a lot more time there. Turns out, a lot of far-right and facist ideologies are pretty comforting, you have someone to blame and you can just be a dick to people you don't like, which is a lot easier than being nice to others, dealing with stuff you are not comfortable with, and accepting that you might be a problem. This shit sells, and ML algorithms have probably figured out that it's the thing that sells the most.

It was my reason why I started avoiding any kind of content delivered by personalized algorithm. I kind of suspected this even before the LLM craze, but seeing how extremely good can a ML algorithm get at one task (turn text into image, for instance) if given enough data, it is horrifying to think what would an algorithm trained on literally billions of users giving their whole life, conservations and behavior as training data be able to accomplish, given the task "here is everything about the user, what do I show to him to keep him on my platform?".

I wager the answer is "tell him that it's OK to be a facist and hate everything that scares you" for quite a lot of people.

That shit is super scary, because even if you know this is happening, the ML algo has hundreds of thousands of people like you and already had several years of feedback loop to figure out what will work on you (which, probably isn't the same thing as for others, but something probably exists). And the only way how to avoid it is to never use any kind of personalized content - most importantly, personalized search.

And then you also have a lot of nation state threat actors who are actively using this to push an agenda. The world is fucked.

What drove the point home for me was seeing a Twitter account (it was years ago) that posts short 6 second segments of every new game released on steam.

It was posting almost hourly, and while there was a lot of trash, most of the games were of pretty "standart" smaller indie quallity. It's ruthless.

And in addition with the GDC talk of someone who made literally millions by making a generator that generates super basic slot machine games on various themes (as in, generate a theme (cars, bird...), download a few pictures, place them on slot machine) and uploads them to Play Store (back then you had a limit on 20 games a day, and they did include some more rules about quality in reaction to this talk), and the game were getting thousands of downloads and when they checked how is their script doing after few months, they had like over a million in revenue IIRC. Sure, it's about mobile games, but it is hearbreaking when you realize how do the consumers work in reality.

My favorite windows update was when I was at local Microsoft office on some kind of highschool coding competition hosted by Microsoft, and we had to start 10 minutes late because we were watching the meeting room computer force a restart with Windows update a minute after the introduction presentation started.

It isn't clear what exactly is the event about - is it about teaching newcomers how to get into contributing to the FOSS projects, or about kickstarting your own FOSS projects? The vague info seems to mostly talk about "your project", so it seems to be the latter?

I'm more interrested in the contributing side of things, but that doesn't seem to be mentioned in the info. Anyone has more information in this regard? I really like the idea, but if I don't have my own project in mind and don't want to start anything and just contribute, would it be for me?

Hearing "not particularly prone to faults" in context of a nuclear powerplant isn't exactly comforting :D

What are those official channels? Don't think I've ever heard about it, doesn't it have like absurd rules in regards to how can you get signutares?

I've been using https://freetubeapp.io/ client for a few months and am extremely happy with it. It allows me to subscribe to channels without requiring an account, it has a nice UI that doesn't shove videos I don't care about in my face, no ads, can download videos, and it's in general a way better experience. Haven't used web YT in ages.

We've just been told yesterday that to reduce our attack surface, only Edge will be allowed on our workstations. Reasoning is that it's difficult to make sure everyone is properly updates their browser, and since Edge is handled by windows updates, it's easier to monitor proper updates.

While I understand that reasoning, the tradeoff between pretty small risk reduction associated with unlikely attack surface from different browsers, and the massive drop in employee satisfaction, is simply not worth it.

With what has happened around the studio, I'd say it's good that DE2 was canceled. It was to be made by a ruins of a studio that was stolen along with it's IP from the original developers and artists, who didn't manage to navigate the landmine of for-profit gamedev industry, and got basically scammed by investors, who robbed them of their IP and studio through various loopholes and bullshit of shares-based companies. (It's a pretty nuanced story, and I'm not really sure how it ended up, so it's better to watch the documentary about it if you're interrested, rather than take my conclusion from it. I also haven't followed recent developement, so if anyone knows how that turned out, let me know)

It's quite a sad and infuriating story, especially since ZAUM was IIRC originally a pretty wholesome art collective of punks and anarchists from squats. It must have been devastating to enter the market with such ideals, only to be scammed of your art by the first investor you encounter, who you might've even considered a friend.

There's quite a few ex-Disco Elysium studios popping out. My favorite so far is the Summer Eternal. It feels like they didn't want to announce it this early, but because two other studios (Longude, and Dark Math Games) got announced few days ago, they did the same.

Summer Eternal feels the most radical out of the three studios, I really like their manifesto and how they are attempting to mix art-collective with market-based development. And they have some amazing writers.

Here are few bits and pieces of the manifesto from their website, I really recommend reading it. Also, the website linked above is just stunning.

...

As creators and game makers, we have too long been led away from the truth, away from the right to define ourselves as artists in service of the definitive art form of the future, one that has made us dream since we were children.

Instead, the disposability culture operating at the ruthless core of this industry wants us to think of ourselves as cogs in the machine: rudimentary craftsmen, disposable career workers, inert producers of made-to-order marketing-driven "content" — empty calories leaving the soul hungry.

The Profiteer knows that by keeping your dignity low, he will keep you crawling on the treadmill of passion until he lays you off for the sake of the red number in his book.

...

Machine-generated works will never satisfy or substitute the human desire for art, as our desire for art is in its core a desire for communication with another, with a talent who speaks to us across worlds and ages to remind us of our all-encompassing human universality. There is no one to connect to in a large language model. The phone line is open but there’s no one on the other side.

I can't recommend Maldev Academy enough. It has been an amazing resource, to get into malware development. Keep in mind, however, that malware development is pretty difficult topic. You will have to eventually use WinAPI and syscalls, so learning about that even outside of malware development will help you a lot.

For example, try looking into how to execute a shellcode in memory - allocate memory as RWX, copy some data and then execute it. Try executing it in a different process, or in a different thread of another process. That's the core of malware development you'll probably eventually have to do anyway. Manually calling syscalls is also a skill that you'll need, if you want to get into EDR avoidance.

Also, look into IoCs and what kind of different stuff can be used to detect the malware. Syscall hooks, signatures, AMSI, and syslog are all things that are being watched and analyze to detect malware, and knowing what exactly is your program logging and where is one of the most important and difficult skills you can get.

There probably are a lot resources for these two skills, and they are an important foundation for malware developemnt, so I'd suggest researching that. You'll probably not get much from looking at other malware, because it tends to be really low-level, and obfuscated, exactly to avoid the IoCs I've mentioned above. Implementing the malware behavior after that is the easier part.

Another good resource to look into are C2s and communication, for example Mythic C2 has some interresting stuff.

And I really recommend joining the Bloodhound slack. Throughout my cybersecurity carreer as a Red Teamer, the community has helped me a lot and I've learned amazing stuff just by lurking.