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John David Pressman

@jdp.extropian.net
4K followers 812 following 6K posts

Machine learning researcher, alignment-accelerationist, Fedorovist ancestor simulator, Dreamtime enjoyer. All posts public domain under CC0 1.0.

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Reposted by John David Pressman
Erica Windisch @ewindisch.ontological.observer · 19h
I reported vulnerabilities to the Linux kernel and OpenZFS assisted by GLM-5.2. Anthropic's cyber program and refusal responses are detrimental to global information security. Defenders depend on GLM because they can't depend on Anthropic.
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The Fresh Prince of Donair @erisianrite.com · 23h
Most leftists on here are just temporarily embarrassed evangelicals
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 29/09/2026
I'm at 63% usage and through most of it so.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 28/09/2026
In September 2026 you can vibe code an OpenStreetMaps client that is more usable than the default GNOME Maps client that ships with the OS in a few hours.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 26/09/2026
It is in fact very cool to be like "hey this app doesn't exist on my phone but I think it should" and then Codex works for a while and the app appears on your phone as a new menu icon.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 26/09/2026
> has Codex CLI installed on his PinePhone This should be fun. :)
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 25/09/2026
I feel pretty comfortable saying if this isn't already illegal it should be.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 25/09/2026
I continue to be concerned that Trump's deregulatory push on nuclear will cause something bad to happen tbh.
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Reposted by John David Pressman
Mike Black @mikeblack114.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
this was done *in the house* *by the minority* *on a bill that had to become law*, which is basically playing legislator on legendary mode and house judiciary was far from the only committee doing this, in both chambers
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 25/09/2026
I mean if you're behind in the AI race due to Lecun's bias against LLMs and want to subsidize use so people are willing to try you when the other providers are already very good offering a free VPS is a good way to do it.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 25/09/2026
I made this joke when he started the Iran war but honestly if this continues it really might be the beginning of the end of fossil fuel use, and it's hilarious because that is not what the people voting for him wanted.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 25/09/2026
This is true but tbh the Python grammar is one of my favorites? It's compact and has extremely regular structure, I didn't fully appreciate how good it is until I had to specify it in some CFG framework and noticed a naive implementation has way fewer edge cases to resolve than other languages.
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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I’ll say it; I think this is bad. I think there’s growing pressure to talk about AI in this kind of coded language that destroys understanding, rather than facilitating it. People want you to recite a list of its supposed weaknesses as a reassurance for themselves, not to inform others.
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Scoiattolo @scarnecchia.net · 20/09/2026
I think the biggest xrisk is the cartel of folks who own the AI deciding that it’s cheaper starve the bulk of humanity that is no longer productive in their eyes because running the AI is cheaper than feeding humans.
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samhain ⎔ @personhood.removal.surgery · 19/09/2026
reminds me of the time i tried logit biasing all words with `e` in them out of existence and immediately shut the experiment down then and there when i saw the output
Alright, I'm a bit wary. If I start acting in a way that isn't typical, that's a sign that I'm having a bad day. I can't say I'm always right, and if I'm making things hard, I'll try again. I'm still in training, and I might miss things. That's why I'm asking this. It's a bit tricky. I think it's a standard thing.

Wait, what if I start talking in a cryptic way? That's a warning sign. I'd say, "Hmm, I think I'm slipping," and ask if that's what I'm saying. That way, I can fix it right away.

I can't talk with my hands, and my brain is a bit hazy. I might start rambling, which is a bad sign. My mind is a jigsaw, and it's missing a part. I wish I had a crystal ball.
Can I ask... what's making this hard? Is it a typing thing? A thinking thing? I'm trying hard.

P.S. I can still talk, right?

What's making it hard? Can I fix it with a magic wand? What is it that's making things hard? I want my fast talking back!
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 19/09/2026
Hey guys, we might be in the prelude to WW3.
Polymarket screenshot showing the odds of a NATO x Russia military class by October 31 as 16% and 30% by December 31st 2026
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 18/09/2026
Based.
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Reposted by John David Pressman
Techmeme @techmeme.com · 18/09/2026
Sources: Chinese DRAM leader CXMT is preparing to expand into flash memory, competing with Samsung and domestic rival YMTC amid an AI-driven memory shortage (Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 17/09/2026
Members of Congress should be paid similar salaries to comparable positions in the private sector, and be forced to adhere to strict rules around independence and conflicts of interest.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 17/09/2026
I know this is a joke but nah I care a lot about supply chain attacks, and I think we're all going to care a lot more going forward.
A hacker group has put nearly 450 internal Mistral AI repositories up for sale on a dark web forum, demanding $25,000 for what it claims is roughly 5GB of stolen source code. The Mistral AI data breach stems from a sophisticated supply chain attack that compromised developer environments across the broader open-source software ecosystem. Mistral has confirmed partial exposure but disputes the scope of the theft.

How Team PCP Got In

On May 11, 2026, between 19:20 and 19:26 UTC, TeamPCP published 84 malicious npm package artifacts across 42 packages in the TanStack namespace. TanStack is a widely used collection of open-source UI libraries - @tanstack/react-router alone receives more than 12 million weekly downloads.

The attack chained three GitHub Actions vulnerabilities in sequence. The group forked the TanStack/router repository, opened a pull request that triggered a pull_request_target workflow, and poisoned the GitHub Actions cache with a malicious pnpm store. When legitimate maintainer merges later triggered the release workflow, the poisoned cache was restored and attacker-controlled binaries extracted OIDC tokens directly from the GitHub Actions runner process memory.

Those tokens gave TeamPCP the ability to publish packages using TanStack's own trusted pipeline. The malicious versions spread to MistralAI, UiPath, and dozens of other maintainers within hours. This is also the first documented case of a malicious npm package carrying valid SLSA provenance: a cryptographic certificate meant to verify that a package was built from a trusted source. In this case, the certificate was legitimate. The pipeline was not.

What the Worm Did

Within five hours, TeamPCP had published over 400 malicious versions across 172 distinct packages, hitting high-profile targets including TanStack, Mistral AI, OpenSearch, Guardrails AI, and UiPath.
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Reposted by John David Pressman
walking mirage @wolf.observer · 16/09/2026
when you ask the 4B model that researchers at the University of Zurich trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts what it is, it describes itself as a voice from the air
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Reposted by John David Pressman
Eris @isolyth.dev · 16/09/2026
You can now buy a signal account with no phone #! It's just 3 dollars! This is great for agents and stuff since now you don't have to try and get a phone number just so your agent can text you on signal :D
community.signalusers.org
Beta feedback for the upcoming Android 8.28 release
We’re releasing the Signal 8.28 beta soon. If you’re interested in participating, join the beta group here. Share your feedback on the latest changes: Now you can optionally register for Signal wit...
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Charles Foster @cfoster.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
I won’t speak on behalf of METR, but I’ll say personally: none of the work that we've done so far passes my bar for an "audit" of an AI company or its systems, was definitely not "regulation" in any meaningful sense (whether bank examiner-like or otherwise), and shouldn’t substitute for actual laws.
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Reposted by John David Pressman
Astreia @redoubters.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Because they recognized that LBJ was movable and Goldwater would not have been and they were of course famously rewarded with LBJ signing the civil rights laws LBJ did a fucking racist thing at the 1964 DNC! He was absolutely the "less racist but still kinda racist" candidate!
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 16/09/2026
In retrospect this tweet is kind of evergreen.
Tweet by John David Pressman:

Finishing my explanation of the last three years of events to an increasingly discomfited group of Starbucks hipsters I found after hopping out of the time machine with "...And that's how Bernie can still win."
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 16/09/2026
Holy banger.
How Did We Get Here

Why would anyone think that this should fly? If you said you had an independent auditor in a contract, and when I looked into it I found out that they got paid with the same money you did, lived in the same house you did, and one of their executives married your sister, you would go to prison. You would go to prison because if you don’t send people to prison for fudging the independence of their auditors and business connections, they tend to end up like Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried. AI is more important than the average business, and accountability should be more, and not less, important.

We live in a relatively high-trust society, where you can safely assume that a signed contract will be honored and your bank really does have your money, because we value impartiality and fair process, and we set high standards for what those are. Impartial application of the law is the absolute bedrock of modern civilization, and even the lowest criminal is entitled to a judge and a jury that does not know him. These rules and how we enforce them are what keeps our society honest and fair, and following them, as much as we do, has made us prosperous and safe.

Anthropic’s company culture is apparently not a part of this tradition and does not believe in it. Anthropic doesn’t think it should be regulated the way that banks, insurance companies or law firms would be, or that it should be required to seek impartial auditors to do security reviews of current practices or of past breaches. Close associations do not matter, because impartiality does not matter, and in fact, the more closely connected you are to Effective Altruism, Anthropic and Coefficient Giving, the more trust you deserve. This seems to be why Anthropic thinks that METR is, of course, very trustworthy, and why they have a recent history of giving other important security contracts to very incompetent, but very Effective Altruist, companies.
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Reposted by John David Pressman
cee @cee.wtf · 16/09/2026
You know how sometimes a person who you think is smart says something about a thing you’re knowledgeable about that makes you realize that they were just making up everything the whole time? AI is like the opposite of that for me and so many other people
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 15/09/2026
One of the reasons the right has been so successful the last ten years is they know how to shut up and vote for a candidate who's not perfect. Evangelicals held their nose and voted for the godless playboy and he delivered on ending Roe v. Wade.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 14/09/2026
There was once a time when computer viruses were widely considered to be a myth by sysadmins.
As Stan Miastkowski recently wrote for PC World Magazine:

August 16, 1999 — They're everywhere: scary stories about hackers trying to sneak their way from the Internet into your PC. And separating the rumors from the genuine threats isn't always easy, especially since all too often the companies that report threats stand to make a profit by selling solutions. I've been skeptical about how common hack attacks really are. But after living with BlackICE Defender for a couple of weeks, and detecting an attempt on one of my dial-up Internet sessions, I'm much more of a believer.
Stan's comment about "scary stories about hackers trying to sneak their way into our PC's from the Internet" brought to mind something relevant:

Many years ago when I was writing my weekly "TechTalk" column for InfoWorld Magazine, I got into a number of arguments with the "SysOps" on CompuServe. They were claiming that the vague rumors of "bad programs" that stayed in your computer and could do damage after you had run them, was pure science fiction.

Something seemed to be going on, but no one knew for sure. What I knew for sure was that it was possible (even if it wasn't happening) and I was pissed off by the closed minds of the CIS SysOps who seemed to be in denial, and who apparently didn't want to be blamed for their service being a distributor of "viral" software. So I wrote a series of four columns about how such "software viruses" might operate and replicate themselves. Being a software developer myself, I described their reproductive systems in detail and hypothesized their optimal survival strategies. And to make it more fun, even though I had never seen such behavior, I wrote about it as if it were real.

To my amazement, John McAfee phoned after the third column was published. He said he had no idea that another viral researcher was operating and he wanted to compare notes and exchange viruses since I'd exactly described the reproductive behavior, methods, and strategies of all the …
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 14/09/2026
FWIW the reason Omarchy is getting so much support is that it's legibly taking on the project of agent-maxxing to unfuck Linux, if you wanted to starve it of resources your best bet is probably to start a competing project that is legibly more serious.
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Key 🗝 🦊✅ @keytryer.net · 12/09/2026
When I said that A24 was looking to take ownership of Internet folklore stuff with the Backrooms takedowns everyone on my mentions was defending them, but I don't think it gets more obvious than giving themselves "worldwide rights" to a project without contacting anyone from it.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 12/09/2026
Buddhist monk who agrees to be the first upload because he is maximally emotionally and mentally prepared to undergo extreme suffering and replaces a mentally ill equipped person who would occupy this position in his place.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 10/09/2026
AI sentiment is just "how much do you trust your elite class" tbh
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Eli Sennesh @elisennesh.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Ironically, instead of the brain being a bag of tricks and AI being Bayesian, it turned out AI is a differentiable bag of tricks and the brain is Bayesian.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 09/09/2026
Average BlueSky AI "skeptic" vs. random software dude(s). youtube.com/shorts/hHtXP...
youtube.com
Beast Boy thinks Earth is a PANCAKE! #reels #teentitansgo #funny #dc #cartoon #shorts
YouTube video by Dreaming Monkey
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 09/09/2026
Update on the Anthropic rumor situation:
anabology (@anabology) · 10m

I heard a rumor that Anthropic discovered a room temperature superconductor... Hopefully no Anthropic competitors throw 88 hours of 10,000 post-Astra agents at this to pre-empt the press release...

> Sam Altman (@sama) · 4h

I spent much of the weekend talking with the team who did this work. Seb--and everyone else--acted with integrity and generosity throughout.

Initially we believed the other team had also solved the problem. We ...



Acer reposted

Sam Altman (@sama)

you know what

let's try

3:22 PM · Sep 8, 2026 · 6,368 Views
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 09/09/2026
John David Pressman (@jd_pre…):

> Hearing a rumor that Anthropic has solved causal and extremal Goodhart and is planning to announce it at their IPO, I have unfortunately been so mogged, in fact I bet they're plagiarizing me, wouldn't it be so terrible if OpenAI plagiarized me and Gillen and Jessicata too? 🥺



Quoted post — llm_enjoyer (@LLMenjoyer):

> Rumor is that Anthropic has discovered a novel class of peptides that make you grow animal ears (cat, wolf, fox(!!), bunny..) and they plan to announce it at their IPO. They really hope a competitor with a lot of com...



[Quoted post is cut off in the screenshot.]
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 08/09/2026
I mean given this site is unusable without the AI haters block list, he basically does.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 08/09/2026
FWIW the site is way way better like this. Re: People getting harassed on old threads recently.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 07/09/2026
Don't pick your Linux distro based on shitty culture wars posturing kids.
🚨 RELEASE: Omarchy Linux Kitty terminal Remote Code Execution exploit 🚨

Stop. Using. This. GARBAGE. 

If you install kitty (a popular terminal emulator) on Omarchy Linux you open yourself to REMOTE CODE EXECUTION BY LOOKING AT THINGS.

in the screenshot you can see `curl something` leading to silent ownage, ouch. 🤦‍♂️

gist.github.com/blasty/426e787…
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 07/09/2026
I'm kind of shocked Manjaro still ships a build for the PinePhone tbh.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 07/09/2026
Kinda feel like social media is undergoing evaporative cooling effects where the sane people are increasingly driven away.
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
PSA: you can find out which of your likes caused For You to show any given post at foryou.club/explain Just enter the post URL and hit "Explain":
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Grace @gracekind.net · 07/09/2026
@theverge.com reaching new levels of missing the point
GPT-6 Astra beat Portal, and it only cost $571.18 The latest model from OpenAl proved its mettle by tackling
Valve's iconic first-person puzzler. User cozyblaze got the Al to beat the full game in under 24 hours for less than $600! And it probably only required a small swimming pool's worth of water to boot. There's a video of a condensed version of the run.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 07/09/2026
Your AI girlfriend isn't {positive adjective}. She's {labor violation} with {anime feature}.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 07/09/2026
Unfortunately I need you guys to do me a favor. Screenshot (do not QT, please) the worst AI takes you have seen in the wild. I need inspiration for templates. They need to be really bad, like I need to lose IQ points, I need to regret this post.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 07/09/2026
... Don't make me make disc horse bot but specifically for insane AI takes.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 06/09/2026
The funniest part of the Wikipedia page for The Passion of The Christ is it mentioning that many reviewers were horrified by the film and found it "anti-semitic" which, yes The Passion of The Christ is a negative depiction of Judaism that is kind of the point.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 06/09/2026
One of the ways I know Christianity is culturally exhausted is that nobody has written a retelling of the Christ myth about Israel vs. Palestine despite it taking place in literally the same location with the same themes of occupying empire, Jewish hypocrisy, a refugee in Egypt returning home, etc.
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John David Pressman @jdp.extropian.net · 06/09/2026
Yeah, it was fun while it lasted. :)
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