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Karl Lewis

@karl-lewis.com
279 followers 235 following 144 posts

Principal Solutions Architect & traveler. Cybersecurity nerd with a passport. Exploring AI, philosophy of tech, culture, and the messy human places in between.

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Reposted by Karl Lewis
Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 02/11/2025
i’ve said this before but lemme say it again. it makes absolutely 0 sense to talk about “misuse” of llms because there is no clear use or purpose for llms to begin with. genAI is a purposeless tech floating around looking for uptake 1/
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 02/11/2025
It's wild. They abstract away those useless details like empathy and actual feasibility because it simply doesn't fit their narrative or religious like belief in AI's potential for fattening their wallets. If you dare critique it, you simple "don't get it" or aren't "smart enough" It's exhausting.
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Reposted by Karl Lewis
Philip Bump @pbump.com · 01/11/2025
F. Scott Fitzgerald: In my book I invented Gatsby lifestyle as a cautionary tale The president: At long last, we have created the Gatsby lifestyle from the classic novel The Great Gatsby
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 31/10/2025
Psh… Netlfix? I binge-watch the Great Courses.
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 31/10/2025
Deleting my 18-year-old Reddit account is causing more sadness than I thought. It's like having a conversation with my younger self and his crazy phases.
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Reposted by Karl Lewis
Zito @zeets.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
Zohran Mamdani caught lying that he understood Plato’s allegory of the cave, yet when asked to explain it, he seemed to instead explain Baudrillard’s theory of Simulacra and Simulation where reality has been replaced by symbols and signs, which seems similar to Plato’s theory but is not the same
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Reposted by Karl Lewis
"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
If you need to explain to an idiot why Tolkien would have despised these goons, I have already grabbed a picture of the relevant passage (and I doubt I was the first):
An image of a passage from the Return of the King, in which Robin the Hobbit Shirriff explains that 'the Chief' (Saruman) has coopted the shirriffs and uses them to lock up or beat people who protest is tyranny - and he always wants more shirriffs, "with all these new rules."
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Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 25/10/2025
Anecdotally, AI chatbot users who develop psychosis seem to mostly engage in immersion with and deification of chatbots. Immersion involves countless hours spent in discourse, often to the exclusion of human interaction, sleep, and sometimes even eating or drinking. www.bmj.com/content/391/....
bmj.com
Can AI chatbots validate delusional thinking?
The extent to which AI chatbots have a causal role in delusions and delusion-like beliefs remains unclear, writes Joseph M Pierre Reports of people having delusions that were seemingly fuelled by ge...
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 24/10/2025
this is also odd from Apple given their recent post from their security research team on MIE and its future use cases. security.apple.com/blog/memory-...
security.apple.com
Memory Integrity Enforcement: A complete vision for memory safety in Apple devices - Apple Security Research
Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) is the culmination of an unprecedented design and engineering effort spanning half a decade that combines the unique strengths of Apple silicon hardware with our adv...
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Reposted by Karl Lewis
Kim Zetter @kimzetter.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
"iOS 26 change deletes clues of old spyware infections" You're damned if you update and damned if you don't
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 24/10/2025
Great write-up. I'd love to see the CISOs role gain the same influence and gravitas as a CFO or COO, but that also requires power that I have rarely seen in the field. The unfortunate truth is most CISOs are scapegoats or not equipped/skilled to really drive the business despite the glaring risks
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 24/10/2025
like seriously. but… that combination of high modernism and AI bro culture is like a boss fight from hell
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 24/10/2025
I might start some kind of cyberpunk bingo.
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 24/10/2025
The absolute cackle I just let out when I saw Brad Pitt made me slightly less depressed from this thread
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Reposted by Karl Lewis
Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 24/10/2025
1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.
Three schematic diagrams. The first illustrates selective publishing of internal resection, the second selective causal focus, and the third selective access and funding for researchers.
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Reposted by Karl Lewis
People's Government of the Pelargir Commune 🇺🇦🇱🇹🇵🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @dov.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
let's fire an unpopular take, while we're here. in 2025, a substantial percentage, perhaps a supermajority of claims to be "working class" are actually a sort of Foucauldian jostle for - ironically - power, an attempt to legitimise your actions through the cosplay of being the Right Kind of Person
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 23/10/2025
"We prioritized safety as we built ChatGPT’s agent capabilities in Atlas"
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 22/10/2025
From a cybersecurity perspective, we are told to think about prompt injections and then sold nice solutions to solve for that (they aren't... But you get the picture). We jump into this technology because the tech leaders must know what they are doing, right? What's the cost for this legibility?
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 22/10/2025
Some more late night pseudophilosophical ramblings, but what happens as see continued acceptance of the power of this technology (like I've seen in the industry)? And what happens when that acceptance backfires as it gets into the hands of a malicious leader and a society unable to understand it?
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 22/10/2025
Modern AI might be one of the most aggressive legibility machines we've ever built, and I can see the allure of compressing our messy world into tokens and embeddings... but that only gets us so far. Especially when we start asking, "for whom is this model optimized?"
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 22/10/2025
It's quite a fascinating read that has me thinking of all the "legible" systems around us and how maybe we need to start questioning how we define these domains and categories, especially as we see the continued attacks on privacy for the use of 'surveillance' and 'safety'
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 22/10/2025
For example, we talk about device attestation, SBOMs, compliance, but with each simplification some "illegible" truth is lost. We tend to focus on the predatory subversion, but sometimes people are trying to get something done within a system that has left their needs out of the equations.
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 22/10/2025
The security industry and its reliance on vendors to come up with these categories is the first parallel that comes to mind as I'm reading this. They are creating the maps and choosing what "matters" and although it can be useful, are there blind spots we are leaving ourselves open to?
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 22/10/2025
Finally making my way through Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott and found this quote: "We must keep in mind not only the capacity of state simplifications to transform the world but also the capacity of the society to modify, subvert, block, and even overturn the categories imposed upon it."
Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott
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Reposted by Karl Lewis
The New York Times @nytimes.com · 17/10/2025
Salesforce told ICE that its A.I. software could help the agency nearly triple its staff, according to internal documents, as President Trump expands immigration raids and deportations around the U.S. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/u...
Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, wearing a black suit, speaks to an audience. A headline reads: "Salesforce Pitched ICE on Services to Recruit More Staff, Documents Show." Photo by Jessica Christian/San Francisco Chronicle, via Associated Press
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verdverm @verdverm.com · 16/10/2025
The Ad Bubble is way bigger than the Ai Bubble joindatacops.com/resources/ho...
joindatacops.com
How 73% of Your E-commerce Visitors Could Be Fake
A conversion rate of less than 0.1%. That was the moment I realized something was fundamentally broken with the way we measure success on the internet.
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 16/10/2025
Maybe the grass is always greener… But over the years I've met many engineers who quietly love the Humanities (like me). In my naive optimism, I hope we see a swing where now advisors say "oh Comp Sci? Sure, but AI is kind of limiting you there… maybe look at Philosophy"
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 16/10/2025
I wonder how many students follow that same path. I keep telling myself, “one day I’ll return to philosophy for love, not a paycheck.” But does that day ever arrive, or do we make do with our own reading and notes in the margins? We lose something when we outsource judgment to the market.
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 16/10/2025
However, my advisor said pivot unless I wanted a career in law or academia. I grew up poor, so I needed ROI and didn't want to do either of those. I switched to computer science. The career certainly worked and paid the bills, but I found myself over the years being pulled back to Philosophy.
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 16/10/2025
Seeing the drop in philosophy majors hits home. My first major in college was Philosophy. I had taken an Honors Humanities course in high school and spent most of my summer reading Aristotle and Plato (not that I got any of it, but that's how excited I was). I loved year 1 of Uni.
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 16/10/2025
This drops while they announce even more layoffs for the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). F5 is used a lot more than you think, but more importantly it shows a continuing trend of "catastrophic" breaches happening not only more frequently, but going unnoticed.
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 16/10/2025
With all these fancy new AI-powered "revolutionary" security tools getting flooded into the market, this is actually a refreshing review of what's currently out there and what they can actually do
joshua.hu
Hacking with AI SASTs: An overview of ‘AI Security Engineers’ / ‘LLM Security Scanners’ for Penetration Testers and Security Teams
Note: This post is complemented by a presentation I gave at KazHackStan 2025. The slides (which were prepared fewer than 24 hours before the actual presentation) for that talk can be found here, or in...
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 12/10/2025
The 1st edition was arguably one of the best Oreily books I've read. Can't wait to dig into this
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Reposted by Karl Lewis
Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 28/09/2025
“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 12/10/2025
Great talk and even better book.
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 12/10/2025
Reading the word "Chatfishing" actually made me cackle
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 12/10/2025
root account disabled MFA
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 12/10/2025
The sponsored model is bad enough, but the risk of poisoning models is not nearly as hard as people think. I've sat in meetings where the concept of "SEO" for AI has come up (called "GEO" for generative engine optimization). Fun times ahead
arxiv.org
Poisoning Attacks on LLMs Require a Near-constant Number of Poison Samples
Poisoning attacks can compromise the safety of large language models (LLMs) by injecting malicious documents into their training data. Existing work has studied pretraining poisoning assuming adversar...
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 12/10/2025
That or they truly thought Sean Penn's character was the true hero in the film
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Reposted by Karl Lewis
Cynthia Brumfield @metacurity.com · 11/10/2025
If anyone has more details on the supposed mass firings at CISA, contact me at Cynthia.507 via Signsl.
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 11/10/2025
100%. At an AI and security talk, one guy said he used it just to ask better questions. Not to automate, but to think. The room went still when he shared prompts. Made me realize we built all this tech chasing speed, but maybe what we need is something that slows us down enough to notice ourselves.
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 11/10/2025
This is truly terrifying and should not be buried amongst all the craziness we're already witnessing.
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Reposted by Karl Lewis
Cynthia Brumfield @metacurity.com · 11/10/2025
nypost.com/2025/10/10/u... Cybersecurity agency that clashed with Trump one of the first hit with federal firings due to government shutdown
nypost.com
Cybersecurity agency that clashed with Trump one of the first hit with federal firings due to government shutdown
CISA plans to keep just 889 employees on duty during a shutdown while furloughing 65% of its workforce.
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 11/10/2025
I know something is up, but I just can't prove it
sgt. dokes - I know something is happening but cant prove it.
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 11/10/2025
Someone should do a deep dive on how security breaches and attacks map to shiny, sudden, unexpected press releases made to capture attention. Let's not forget what's happening underneath the surface for SFDC
arstechnica.com
Salesforce says it won’t pay extortion demand in 1 billion records breach
Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters gave Salesforce until Friday to pay or else.
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 11/10/2025
One Battle After Another is absolutely worth a trip to the movies. Just walked out and already considering a rewatch. Might be the best film I've seen in a while that seems to actively promote drinking and driving. Sean Penn's walk >>>>>
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 11/10/2025
Quantum of Solace is one of the "deep cuts" and severely underrated, but please watch Casino Royale - IMO a straight-up masterpiece. Disclaimer: I am a huge Bond stan
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Cynthia Brumfield @metacurity.com · 09/10/2025
www.bloomberg.com/news/article... How are we not dead yet? The federal government is just hanging by a thread cybersecurity-wise.
bloomberg.com
Homeland Security Cyber Personnel Reassigned to Jobs in Trump’s Deportation Push
The US Department of Homeland Security has shifted hundreds of national security specialists, including cyber personnel, into jobs that support President Donald Trump’s deportations and said it would ...
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Karl Lewis @karl-lewis.com · 08/10/2025
It’s never really about the tech… it’s about human nature. Hype cycles confuse innovation for inevitability, and hopium outpaces understanding. next thing you know, we’ve got AI powered ice cream flavor generators and everyone’s like, “how did this happen?”
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