Tootfinder

Stop Installing Random #MCP Servers. Start With These 10.
https://pub.towardsai.net/stop-installing-random-mcp-servers-start-with-these-10-e5fa908f3eda

The "AI Industry" (to the degree that it exists) has burned billions of dollars with no real hope of recuperating that. Models offered by services, charging huge amounts for inference, don't really offer much, if anything, above open source models run locally. Many of the claims made by these companies, and their supporters, have turned out to be lies. It seems as though the whole thing is a huge grift.
Investments will likely never be recovered. We've already seen a bail out in the form of military contracts. We will see much more public money dumped in to these technologies. In fact, threatening workers and suppressing labor strength is so strategically valuable that I expect LLMs to just be publicly funded (by being folded into the military industrial complex).
On these grounds, it can be easy to reject the technology outright. After all, how can anything useful not be profitable?
Even for radicals, capitalism can cloud our lens. The fact is, the dominant technologies of our age tend to not be profitable. Or rather, they are "publicly funded, privately profitable" (/hums in propagandhi/). Just like oil.
Outside of Saudi Arabia, oil is mostly not profitable to get out of the ground. Even there, it had only historically been profitable because of massive global military investments. The oil-centric world we have today is largely built on, and kept in place by, massive government subsidies. Roads, street parking, and direct subsidies to oil companies are all massive investments that tie populations to the resource at the heart of the military industrial complex: oil.
Oil was strategically important, because you can't run a modern military without it. The fossil fuel economy doesn't exist because fossil fuels are so cheap, but because modern militaries are only really possible by militarizing the population.
Unprofitable things *are made profitable* to serve the strategic interests of authoritarian systems. Though we have better alternatives to most oil-based products, it would be hard to argue that oil is not a useful resource. We can acknowledge it's strategic importance while also recognizing that the elimination of oil is essential to the survival of humanity.
Returning to "AI," we're seeing the same type of thing but it's more obvious. After the crypto grift, this seems to just be another way to transfer money into the pockets of the rich.
But crypto wasn't exactly a grift. It had a strategic function to power. It wasn't what we were told it was. It didn't free us from central banks. It wasn't a new way to invest. It wasn't anonymous. But it did create a new way to bribe politicians. It did make it easier to funnel public money into the pockets of the far right.
"AI" can similarly be mostly a grift. It can fail to do most, or all, of the things it claims, and it can still fulfill strategic functions. If we dismiss it as "just another grift," I think we miss a lot. "Just a grift" isn't something sustainable. It is something that will die out. It's something we don't need to resist because it is self limiting. But a strategy is something different. A strategy is more complex. A strategy will be sustained, at any cost. A strategy must be actively resisted.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@catsalad/114758254385767289
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!! :neocat_scream_stare:

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#Radio3Breakfast
- Start the day on the right note with classical music
Mark Forrest presents Radio 3's Breakfast show. To get in touch, email 3breakfast@bbc.co.uk.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002xh1p

Yesterday evening I bought a pint for the evening TTK meeting but it was off and horribly sour on first taste (I like sours, but this was not good). So was the second pint drawn by the bar steward, so I switched to something else. The evening went OK but when I got home and tried to sleep I got what is technically known as "massive gut rot" and had to sit up a lot of the night etc. I seem largely better now, and no technicolour yawn happened. Didn't go into uni: did supervi…

#CarlHeastie continues to be awful, but NYers maybe want to give his office a call to tell him to stop blocking the Stop Super Speeders bill. His office # is 518-455-3791, I just called and someone answered right away.
#StopSuperSpeeders

There was a time when creating massive amounts of code would have been valuable. There was a time when lowering the bar for creating software would have been beneficial. But today we are inundated with garbage apps, written too quickly and never maintained, half-working libraries, projects someone took up once and abandoned (I have several), and grift startups just waiting to be acquired and "fixed."
#LLM code generation is a pestilence. We don't need more code owned by people who know less, we need less code managed by people who know more. It's literally the opposite of everything we want. Oh, but it will be easier for infosec to find bugs so it's fine, right? I've found critical bugs that never get fixed (I think one of mine is like 7 years old now).
There are a lot of bugs that just can't be fixed because there are no systems to fix them. Go on Shodan and look for ATGs. There are thousands of them. I'm betting that most of those are not honeypots. It may be possible to blow up a bunch of gas stations with a for loop, but, yeah, we need #AI to find some more bugs.
https://www.darkreading.com/ics-ot-security/fuel-tank-monitoring-systems-vulnerable-disruption

⚡ Get started fast: run openwiki --init to configure your model and API key, then generate documentation. Add the provided GitHub Action to auto-open a PR once a day with documentation updates.

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#Radio3Breakfast
- Start the day on the right note with classical music
Hannah French presents Radio 3's Breakfast show. To get in touch, email 3breakfast@bbc.co.uk.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002x5vv

The security industry is somewhat unique. It's probably the only industry created by the worker as a threat. If you talk to hackers who were in the scene before Operation Sundevil, you'll realize that it's always been a Bullshit Job.
Folks in L0ft and cDc were hacking companies and basically blackmailing them into paying for their services. Operation Sundevil "straightened up" the industry. Some people went to prison, some people build security services companies. Pretty much anyone who actually believed in the manifesto was locked up or edged out.
Using the Graeber framework here, hackers are partially duct tapers and partially goons. The critical thing here is that the industry was basically created to give money to people who would otherwise destroy the system.
Neuroatypical folks have always been forced to the margins of society, but computers gave us a super power. Now we were extremely dangerous. Tech, especially hackers, have always been paid a lot to minimize the risk of developing a class consciousness.
Graeber talked about this. Kings and nobles would often find some job or title that they could bestow on potential enemies in order to keep them close, to defang them. What better role than sheriff, a type of goon, for a rebel?
We turned it in to a whole thing. Not only did hackers make their own industry and force everyone else to accept it, we even created a whole parallel box ticker industry of "compliance" as a side effect.
The Hacker's Manifesto was decontectualized and made a fun artifact of the past. We were sold a story of "good hackers" who "protected grandma from the bad hackers." But the whole industry always existed to keep us on a leash. The funny thing is that it was a leash that we made ourselves.
But now we're seeing massive layoffs in tech, even in security. Now that we're this far in, everyone has forgotten the history. Leadership doesn't understand what security people do, so they think that LLMs can replace us. But the people in the industry now, the ones who came to it as a career, don't understand the history.
There was always a split for these weird outsiders, these people who couldn't fit in to the system but now had power over it. Some wanted in and they were willing to use extortion to get in, and others wanted to destroy the system to set everyone free.
Operation Sundevil, and the industry that evolved out of it, existed to neutralize those revolutionary elements by offering extortionists a safe entry. Extortionists trusted the capitalists to not stab them in the back the same way capitalists have stabbed everyone in the back through all of history. Now my LinkedIn feed is full of Meta layoffs, and I wonder if that class consciousness is starting to click for anyone yet.