Sam @smithsam

Growth (if a bunch of your volunteers were to work around energy hedge funds). Other pathways remain available but they didn’t write those down

Looking for Growth @lfg_uk

14 hours ago

Britain is in an Energy Emergency. But the Government is FAILING TO ACT. They have no plan, no idea what to do, and they’re leaving us exposed. So today we’re launching The LFG Emergency Energy Bill to SAVE OUR INDUSTRIES and GET BILLS DOWN Here’s how it would get bills down

47 174 490 134K 150

@avsm @sadiqj Caching layer

AN ACTUAL GOOD THING TO COME FROM AI In today’s newsletter, I wrote about our new chat with @aidenjohnsonn_ and how stories like his are far more white-pilling than the typical “one day this might cure cancer” form of AI boosterism.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

NEW: malware developers added nuclear & biological weapons text to to their spyware. Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals... so that their spyware wouldn't be analyzed by an AI security scanner. Cleanest practical example I can think of for why over-indexing on first order safety alignment is risky. When closed (and open) models ship with aggressive refusals, they will be sprinkled with second-order blindspots that attackers will discover...and exploit. We are only in the earliest days of attackers leveraging these features, and it wouldn't surprise me if users systems that need to handle complex cybersecurity issues demand that models be less safety-blunted. In the weeds: @SocketSecurity's post also shows why intention matters in how you design a malware analysis pipeline to avoid prompt manipulation. H/T to colleagues that shared this with me socket.dev/blog/mini-shai…

London Tech Week is pretty stalky. Pass scanned at every stage/stall you visit, on the way in and out.

‼️🚨 BREAKING: Sony PlayStation's age-verification partner Yoti is reporting GrapheneOS users to authorities for using GrapheneOS, due to "past security concerns."

For the tl;dr, I wrote a summary of my analysis of the GPS Special Message “number station”, including entropy measurement, duplicated strings, a mysterious new “TEXT” prefix, and the system’s relationship with military key distribution. benthamsgaze.org/2026/06/02/the…

Steven Murdoch @sjmurdoch

2 weeks ago

For 19 years, GPS satellites have secretly broadcast a “numbers station” in their public signals. We decoded 12M messages: a 2011 flash where 31 of 32 satellites flipped in hours, “ghost” substrings repeating years apart, and a “TEXT” prefix spreading now. lsc-pagepro.mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?i…

46 357 2K 405K 2K

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder. On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures. But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first! As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise. Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours. Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure. Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice! The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :) Part 2: neutral atoms and qday The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers. Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low. Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts. My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom". Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions. So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030. Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years. Part 3: post-quantum cryptography There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation. These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer. The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security. Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

New: Hackers have been stealing high-profile Instagram accounts by simply asking Meta's AI support chatbot to change the email associated with the account they want to steal. Shockingly easy, terrible flaw associated with offloading support to AI: 404media.co/hackers-simply…

❗️My direct response to Dr Manjeet Shermar and the Nottingham University Hospital CEO and Board. Following conclusion of your investigation into staff breaches and misconduct we will insist upon the following. For ALL 150 staff who accessed Barney’s records. 1. What role did they hold. 2. What exactly did they look at. 3. When did they look at it. 4. Why did they access it. 5. The time and date of access. 6. What action they took after access (with records of relevant). ADDITIONALLY (for staff who have faced any action). 7. What action was taken. 8. How was the decision made. 9. What was the outcome. 10. What other bodies have they been referred to. You state the panel hearings will be complete within a couple of weeks. Please ensure this information as stated is made available in full to our legal team no later than 31st July. #nottinghaminquiry 💚💛

150 staff accessed their records. The vast majority with no legitimate reason. Why? Where is your decency and humanity. My poor poor beautiful boy. 💔

To hear the CEO of Palantir using the serious matter of sexual abuse by Met officers to attack the Mayor of London for rejecting his company and so cutting his profits shows exactly why Palantir are not fit to lecture anyone on values. Louis Mosley should be ashamed of himself.

Times Radio @TimesRadio

3 weeks ago

“He talks about values, but I think what Londoners value is not being mugged, not being raped by a serving police officer.” CEO of Palantir UK Louis Mosley says London Mayor Sadiq Khan is “putting politics over public safety” by blocking the tech firm’s deal with the Met Police.

171 100 661 571K 131

NHS trust sacks 11 staff for inappropriately accessing medical records of Nottingham attacks victims bbc.in/4dHDU0h

Interesting to see the questions I've been obsessing about this past year in a Nature editorial. But it kind of misses the point. Yes, AI needs human scientists now. But will in the future? The bigger q is if we care about keeping humans in science, regardless of how good AI is.

Eric Topol @EricTopol

4 weeks ago

Important editorial @Nature on the new "AI-scientist" papers "AI scientists can and should empower human researchers. They cannot and should not replace them." nature.com/articles/d4158…

25 313 885 106K 466

@jburnmurdoch What’s he learned from working in private equity that he didn’t know when he got fired by Ellison? Any lessons about the fickleness of billionaires?

FT Exclusive: NHS England has granted external staff from companies including Palantir “unlimited access” to identifiable patient data while working on a part of its flagship data platform. ft.trib.al/JmVlilq

Neighbourhoods forgotten by @wesstreeting @UKLabour @RishiSunak this is your constituency Neighbourhood health starts and finishes with patients GP practices are at the heart of communities If you ignore GP provision you lose your voters

Andy Pow @medicaccountant

a month ago

Church service? No a meeting about rural healthcare on a Friday morning in a remote dale in Yorkshire. When ICBs forget about patients and fob them off then don’t expect them to sit back. The closure of rural GP surgeries impacts communities.

keyboard_arrow_left Previous keyboard_arrow_right Next

0 29 73 4K 2

No wonder Palantir have been on a PR offensive this week

it seems Mr Streeting is committed to his Single Palantir Record – all your medical notes, prescriptions and DNA under his personal control

Baykar Chairman of the Board and Chief Technology Officer Selcuk Bayraktar on Palantir's manifesto: Recently, a text resembling a manifesto was published. When we looked at that text, we encountered a dark mindset that views war, peace, and human life merely as optimization problems — as algorithmic outputs — removing conscience, morality, and the human soul from the equation. For them, the world may consist of nothing more than a simulation processed on their servers, a computer algorithm. But we know that humanity, which they seek to imprison within that spider web, is far more than a source of data. Against these arrogant and dark manifestos, we must put forward our own roadmap centered on justice, compassion, morality, and human dignity.