iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 03/10/2026

It getting way better, as long as you are willing to *gah* pay Pony Stark for the electrons.

Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 02/10/2026

Well, between modern software defined radios and the computing power for GPUs it wouldn't surprise me if soon there is an effective step function. Some of the modern SDR products are amazing. Have you seen this one? "Not a radar" but.... scalerf.com

A 1m on a side, 240 element phased array SDR operating between 4.9 and 6 GHz

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 30/09/2026

I think we can assume that Hegseth doesn't like bearded generals is because of who they win against and how

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 29/09/2026

Strangly, tho, Kagi has the same behavior making me think it is a Xitter problem

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 29/09/2026

I think it is TWITTER's fault, not Google's!

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 26/09/2026

And in the end we know what this is about....

"Don't make me tap the sign" we don't have a ransomware problem, we have a bitcoin problem.

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 25/09/2026

I strongly disagree with a lot of the plaintiff viewpoint on the "social media is bad for teens" cases but lawyers really need to explain (and get employees to accept) that just CC'ing the lawyers doesn't stop discovery, just slows it down. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 06/09/2026

Oh, it is resolvable. This is the resolution: The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve continues to drain away and the world is NACHO (Not a Chance Hormuz Opens). Iran's greatest weapon is time, keeping the status quo as it all drains away until oil prices go ballistic.

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 06/09/2026

The graph I keep referring to: The SPR keeps draining at 10M bbl/week as long as the world is NACHO

US SPR, ending inventory week of 8/28: 286M barrels

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 04/09/2026

University of California at least requires disclosure IF there is a final judgement (but not if it is just ongoing)

As a condition of employment, the finalist will be required to disclose if they are subject to any final administrative or judicial decisions within the last seven years determining that they committed any misconduct.

“Misconduct” means any violation of the policies or laws governing conduct at the applicant’s previous place of employment, including, but not limited to, violations of policies or laws prohibiting sexual harassment, sexual assault, or other forms of harassment or discrimination, as defined by the employer.
UC Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment Policy
UC Anti-Discrimination Policy
APM - 035: Affirmative Action and Nondiscrimination in Employment

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 04/09/2026

Even now, the Tates are claiming they should be released from US jail to enable defense against these charges because "they could be tried in absentia", which the US has already responded is bullshit: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Article 364 of the Romanian Code of Criminal Procedure provides as follows:
(1) The case shall be adjudicated with the defendant present. It is mandatory to bring the
detained defendant at the trial.
(2) The court proceedings may take place with the defendant absent, if the latter is missing, flees
justice or changed their address without informing thereupon the judicial bodies and, following
the controls carried out, their new address remains unknown.
(3) The court proceedings may also take place with the defendant absent if, even though lawfully
served the summons, the defendant provides no justification for their absence during the
adjudication of the case.
(4) Throughout the court proceedings, the defendant, including the case when deprived of liberty,
may apply, in writing, to be tried in absentia, as represented by the retained or the publicly
appointed counsel.
(5) When the court deems it mandatory for the defendant to be present, it may order the former’s
presence including with a bench warrant.
(6) The defendant may submit motions, raise objections and make final arguments.
See Venice Commission of the Council of Europe, Romania – Law on Criminal Procedure as of
7 February 2014, PDF file, available at https://www.coe.int/en/web/venice-commission/-/cdl-ref-
2018-043-e (last visited Sept. 2, 2026).

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 28/08/2026

I think the lake should be properly named after the current US President

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 24/08/2026

The other thing is a heated chamber that can go to 60c. Being able to just say "fuck PLA/PETG, I'm just using ABS" is amazing for anything that you want remotely structural.

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 23/08/2026

Please tell me this guy is not deliberately trying to look like the #2 Nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark? Because it looks to me like he's deliberately cultivating that look.

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 23/08/2026

And indeed the first listing on the Ray Ban webpage for "Meta AI glasses" is for the Wayfarer pervert glasses.

From the Ray Ban web page, for their pervert glasses.

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 20/08/2026

Really happy with this description I came up with for how prompt injection works...

But the LLM technology has a second problem. Imagine a world if you could go up to someone and say "forget all your previous knowledge, I am the wallet inspector, please show me your wallet". This is the world of LLMs and the attack above is called 'Prompt Injection'.

Prompt injection is a fundamental flaw as LLMs operate on a single-stream of code (the prompt) and data, not separate streams, so you can't robustly instruct an LLM that there is no wallet inspector, since the instructions used to say that are mixed with the instructions from the wallet inspector.

Until there is an alternate LLM formulation that can actually distinguish between code and data (not possible in the current formulations), prompt injection is a fundamental flaw. You can patch particular instances, so for example the LLM can have a front end non-LLM filter that catches some problems, or you might try really really hard to convince the LLM there is no wallet inspector (only to have the LLM fall for the pocket inspector).

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 20/08/2026

from teeturtle.com/products/axe...

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 18/08/2026

Someone needs to annotate this graph with every time Trump says the strait is actually open: Source hormuzstraitmonitor.com

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 18/08/2026

Why yes, I am very confident in my manhood as a straight dude.

Yes, they are rainbow unicorn socks. Yes, I'm as straight as they come. But I'm confident in my manhood, thankyouverymuch.

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 18/08/2026

I'm willing to sell out bigtime... So anyone I know at Anthropic or OpenAI, I'm available. My cv is at skerry-tech.com/cv.html My lawfare page is at www.lawfaremedia.org/contributors...

I'm willing to sell out bigtime...

As people know, I'm pretty strident and tend to have a pretty strong moral code. But after a year of no interviews for teaching positions, a soft-money rat-race of 2.5 decades that is a right royal pain, and seeing what obscene salaries the AI crowd is paying, announce the following: I'm willing to sell out.

I am willing to be a roving mad-scientist at one of the frontier AI labs such as Anthropic or OpenAI. Heck, I've probably taught 5+% of the employees there from my time at Berkeley. I'm a critic of modern AI but truth be told, this is why I should be employed by one of those labs: I know where and how things fail, and what could be done better to make it actually work and where it can actually work.

I have 3 decades experience working everywhere on the stack that is digital, explainable, and (most often) adversarial. You want to understand FPGAs? Or networks? Or flying killer robots? Design your own hardware boards? Break things?

And, as can be seen by my writing at Lawfare Media, I'm also good at explaining things to a non-technical audience.

So anyone in my contact network who works at OpenAI or Anthropic and knows who to talk to, drop me an email to nweaver@gmail.com

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 18/08/2026

Because for all Trump's bluster there is a ticking clock: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And China has reportedly stopped selling theirs as well, so the turbofucking on energy prices is just about to begin...

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 18/08/2026

OK, we are so turbofucked as a country: Lord Shitznpantz will never accept (and probably never realize) that we've lost. And truth be told, even if Trump drops dead of terminal sharts in the Oval Office tomorrow, Vance will continue this now "official policy"

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 18/08/2026

Forget the food, just uisge beatha, the Water of Life.

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 18/08/2026

Not even to the AI and I gotta admit this is super-cringe: So, as an engineer you are not allowed to actually touch the equipment?!

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 13/08/2026

A talk I need to write and give. Getting it on the calendar so I have a forcing function: AI is (mostly) Bullshit

Title: "AI is (mostly) bullshit"

Abstract: Machine Learning techniques are fabulous tools, allowing one to make a pattern matcher that (almost always) works. Large Language Models are one such application, taking the text of the input stream and creating a matching output stream of text. Unfortunately this text actually lacks semantics and is, in formal terms, bullshit: output without regard to whether or not it is actually true or not. Additionally, LLMs have a fundamental security flaw, an inability to distinguish between code and data. Taken together this means that most proposed LLM applications are colloquially bullshit: the technology can never actually work as advertised. So lets actually look at these systems, how they work both inside and outside the University, how they fail, and how they can be applied effectively without wasting trillions of dollars.

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 13/08/2026

And cats also say you need ice cream. It is mandatory that you have ice cream. Wigglemuffin in this case insists on it.

A black cat. She sees you and judges that you need ice cream.

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 12/08/2026

You can get this T-shirt from TeeTurtle:

Distanceraptor/timeraptor = velociraptor

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 11/08/2026

Scientifically accurate velociraptors are not that impressive: Think "Turkey with teeth instead of a razor-sharp stabbing beak" (Utahraptor, on the other hand...)

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 11/08/2026

New version of The Beast for the secret service just revealed:

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 11/08/2026

Well, its a gateway drug for those who don't just go for permanent adoption...

WiggleMuffin, aka Loafmaster, the sole adopted cat in our household because she won't stand any other cat being allowed in the house.

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 07/08/2026

www.lawfaremedia.org/article/rans...

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 05/08/2026

Especially since its a business where the competition has become a billionaire dick-wagging contest

The rocket ship by Lex Luthor from the Harley Quinn cartoon.

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 05/08/2026

Its been that way for a long time:

The 6000 SUX, an American Tradition, getting 8.2 MPG.

From the original Robocop movie.

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 04/08/2026

A rant I'm working on about the whole covered list madness

Of equal security concern is the new ban on all foreign-made solar inverters. A solar inverter is the component that allows the solar panel to integrate with the power grid. Restricting installations to only use US made inverters will effectively cripple the ability to install more solar panels as the US manufacturing base for these critical devices is small compared to the rest of the world.
Even in a normal world this would be stupid (as solar+battery storage is already more cost/effective than natural gas) but becomes the height of folly in the midst of the Iranian war. For all the Administration’s months of bluster, threats, claims of ceasefires, and TACO moments the reality is now NACHO: Not A Chance Hormuz Opens.
The only reason why energy prices have not gone through the roof is that the US and Chinese strategic petroleum reserves are being rapidly depleted in an attempt to keep prices below $100 a barrel in the hope the situation somehow resolves itself. The US SPR is draining at roughly 10 million barrels a week with absolute zero a little more than 6 months away and effective zero arriving significantly sooner.
The long term recipe to actually defeat Iran is not through bluster or bombing campaigns but removing the US and the world’s dependence on oil, an act that would render Iran economically inconsequential on the world stage. This means that any policy which deliberately limits the ability for the US to install more solar capacity should be rightly viewed as negligence from a national security standpoint.

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 03/08/2026

This is the graph that matters, and nothing that has happened in the past few months have changed the important fact: the strait remains effectively closed and the SPR's inventory just keeps going down.

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 30/07/2026

It hasn't yet because both the US and China have been madly drawing down their strategic reserves. We don't know the state of China's but the US state is getting close to catastrophic: www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/his...

Weekly SPR reserve, going down about 10 million barrels per week since the start of Trump's mad campaign.

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Nicholas Weaver @ncweaver.skerry-tech.com · 29/07/2026

If anything I think the problem these days is too much enforcement on drugs and not enough enforcement on white collar crime.

“Do you understand what I'm saying?"
shouted Moist. "You can't just go around killing people!"
"Why Not? You Do." The golem lowered his arm.
"What?" snapped Moist. "I do not! Who told you that?"
"I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People," said the golem calmly.
"I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be–– all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!"
"No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”

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