Gabe The Engineer
@gdbassett.bsky.social
Current cyber insurance leader. Former lead data scientist @VZDBIR. Co-inventor of Attack Flow. Views are my own.
Ants normally use about 24% of their energy for brain functions, but when food-deprived, this percentage nearly doubles to 45%. Preferential energy allocation to the brain has previously been found in humans and other mammals. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/kVkU50ZwbrB
this is not true. there was no conspiracy. it didn't matter whether the streetcars were publicly owned (seattle, detroit) or private (los angeles, atlanta). a thread (because i wrote a whole-ass book on this): 1/?
David Ho@davidho.bsky.social · 4d agoIs everyone aware of the General Motors streetcar conspiracy? In the mid-20th century, auto and oil interests bought up electric streetcar systems across the US and systematically replaced them with bus routes and paved roads, funneling commuters toward private cars.
A simple rule for any journalist who cares about this country: "The lie never gets the headline or the lead sentence—the truth does, every time."
Truth Melt: Stop Leading With the Lie in Headlines
When the headline is all most people read, leading with a lie spreads it. The Truth Melt: lead with the truth, name the lie only to correct it.
theframelab.org
After 5-years studying AI-enabled deception, Fred Heiding built ScamBench to measure it. Email, voice, and multi-step attacks tested against real humans, synthetic users, and survey participants. See Fred Heiding @ Ground Truth during #BSidesLV on Tue Aug 4 @ 18:00.
Great new feature in the latest Signal app. If you enable disappearing messages the meta data of calls and missed calls gets deleted as well. I know this was a long standing goal for them, but the engineering behind it took time. #Privacy @signalapp
And making books real is a little bit magical. www.drcathicks.com#book
Dr. Cat Hicks
Leading the science of software success
drcathicks.com
Watching the AI space? We've got a treat for you. On Monday, [un]prompted will be at BSides Las Vegas with a track dedicated to AI practitioner talks covering development and security. One day only. Their schedule is online at: bsideslv.org/schedule
The countdown to BSidesLV is here! We wanted to thank @portswigger again for being a Double Down sponsor 🎲 Don't forget to stop by their table August 3rd–5th! Interested in learning more about their company? Visit portswigger.net/careers
Was curious if I could use AI (Graylark) to find coordinates of this house using just a *reflection in a keypad* of the surroundings. Well...it worked. YIKES. Daniel Heinen does not make this AI tool available to the public for this reason. youtube.com/shorts/Xzbvi...
Can AI geolocate using just reflections?!
YouTube video by SocialProof Security
youtube.com
Today I shipped a patch version of mirai 2.7.2 with as many changes as a full version! Lower dispatch overhead for `mirai_map()` and `everywhere()` and clearer errors + many edge case fixes. These automatically translate into wins if you use parallel purrr! mirai.r-lib.org #Rstats #Tidyverse
Minimalist Async Evaluation Framework for R
Evaluates R expressions asynchronously and in parallel, locally or distributed across networks. An official parallel cluster type for R. Built on nanonext and NNG, its non-polling, event-driven archit...
mirai.r-lib.org
Neuroscientist Dr. Brenda Milner is recognized as one of the fundamental founders of modern cognitive neuropsychology. She proved the hippocampus is essential for forming long-term "declarative" memory (facts, names & events). She was born #OTD in 1918--she's 108 years old today! #WomenInSTEM
Canadians and Northern USers, you would be shocked how well these work! Please, please, if you have the time and the money, make one.
🍁Mel🇨🇦@melhathnofury.bsky.social · 3w agoHere’s instructions on building your own Corsi-Rosenthal box.
This is one of the most beautiful cross sections of cilia I've ever seen in our data, found by @csigulinsky.bsky.social. It is perfectly perpendicular to the plane of imaging which brings up an important point ~ connectomics. You gotta have enough resolution to see the important things. 2nm/px FTW!
I recently wrote about how applied causal inference can align with what Feynman called "cargo cult science"; namely, when we state identification assumptions without interrogating them. I use an example from nutritional epidemiology to convey the problem: miceandtigers.substack.com/p/cargo-cult...
Cargo Cult Causal Inference
Identification is a proof; real-data analysis is an inverse problem. Reciting causal assumptions instead of interrogating them is cargo cult causal inference.
miceandtigers.substack.com
Every Saturday, Metacurity rounds up the best infosec-related long reads that deserve more attention than the daily news cycle allows. This week's collection explores what happens when trust becomes the attack surface, including 1/2 www.metacurity.com/trust-under-...
Trust under attack: Best infosec long reads 7/11/26
Inside the TfL hack, The cyber war game nobody wants to play, AI's toughest test case, When anti-piracy breaks the internet, The protocol that changed the internet, Why prompt injection won't go away
metacurity.com
The BSides Las Vegas schedule is out. We have a lot of talks across several tracks this year. All the details are online at: bsideslv.org/schedule
This is kind of amazing: wc26.bogachev.fr AI-assisted dataviz is going to make everything we made for the last two decades look like cave drawings
FIFA World Cup 2026 Data Portraits
Every 2026 World Cup match as a living data-portrait — two territory blankets, a momentum pulse, honest football made beautiful.
wc26.bogachev.fr
New book by SFI's Marten Scheffer. Our crises are intertwined: a warming planet, a rising human footprint, inequality, polarization. Yet Scheffer is hopeful: societies, like other complex systems, can tip suddenly toward a better, more stable state. Reviewed by SFI's Tim Kohler.
Book Review: "Tipping out of Trouble: How Societies Transformed and How We Can Do So Again"
"Marten Scheffer’s book, Tipping out of Trouble, will open your mind to how scientific knowledge can be turned into social change to address our most dire problems," writes Tim Kohler in this book rev...
santafe.edu
For a long time I felt like there was a hesitation in neuroscience to ascribe anything like a planning function to the various "replay" events we see in the hippocampus, but I think this is rapidly changing. Here's another new entry in human epilepsy patients: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠📈 🧪
Human hippocampal ripples coordinate planning sequences and compositional representations in neocortex - Nature Neuroscience
Human hippocampal ripples and replay interact with the prefrontal cortex to update mental representations online, letting the brain compositionally combine familiar elements in new ways for flexible p...
nature.com
1000 evaluators given identical resumes & told candidate used AI. Only difference on resumes was candidate’s name: Emily vs James. Study found women using AI are evaluated as less competent than men who use AI...To evaluators, women’s AI use signaled inability, while men’s AI use signaled initiative
David Ho@davidho.bsky.social · last mo.Women’s use of AI is perceived as a sign of incompetence, while men’s use of AI is seen as an indication of initiative. 🤦🏻♂️
One devious thing generative ai (as a field) did is get people to think ALL “ai” is LLMs Huge difference between LLMs and a specific-purpose predictive NN.
Artificial neurons sum their inputs to produce an output. Real neurons are considerably more complicated. Full conversation with Konrad Kording (@kordinglab.bsky.social) on the @juanbenet.bsky.social Podcast >>> youtu.be/FHQfmJEpRmU
![Comic. [Person 1 with short hair on stage behind podium reading off paper while addressing audience. People are shown sitting in chairs while Person 2 with ponytail and Person 3 waving are walking toward stage.] PERSON 1: This year’s Nobel Prize in “calibrating your equipment carefully and not embarrassing yourself by publishing spurious results” goes to Dr. Adams and Dr. Smith, who did *not* announce the discovery of microbes on Titan. PERSON 3: Thank you, thank you.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cz73r7iyiqn26upot4jtjdhk/bafkreihztdrvxjeyzmz6dmz3xb4vi6wiwwtge6fwdoxjcum5aptndv3kfm)
![8-panel Comic. (1) Tornado Warning [tornado in the distance of a house] A tornado has been detected; take shelter (2) Tornado Watch [Person with bun talking to another person pointing at diagrams on screen] Conditions are favorable for tornadoes to form (3) Tornado precaution [person] Tornadoes happen sometimes, so be ready (4) Tornado Inkling [Person with hand on face] No tornadoes yet, but we have a feeling (5) Tornado Suspicion [Person looking up at clouds] Weird clouds have been observed (6) Tornado Premonition [Person looking at birds flying in tornado shape and two birds sitting on scythe-like structure with skull beneath] Tornado portents and omens have been observed (7) Tornado Recollection [Person with thought bubble containing tornado] Tornadoes have occurred in the past (8) Tornado Contemplation [Person sitting and saying, “Wow.”] Tornadoes are very big and powerful](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cz73r7iyiqn26upot4jtjdhk/bafkreifxb7ror6yzflj5i3bqcsb74onpagh5acfbdqiosplmyiqil6sdgi)
