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Shafik Yaghmour

@shafik.bsky.social

Compiler Engineer clang front end. Interests: C++, C, and undefined behavior. Martial Artist, Book Worm and Dad. he/him Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@shafik Blog: https://shafik.github.io/ #cplusplus #compilers

838 Posts1004 Follower 242 Folgt

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · last mo.

"Spotify Confirms Streaming Fraud After Kalshi Trader Cries Foul": www.wired.com/story/spotif... Gambling ruins whatever it touches. In sports where there have been a number of scandals. We will continue to see people find ever more creative ways of manipulating things you like and ruining them.

Spotify Confirms Streaming Fraud After Kalshi Trader Cries Foul

One of Kalshi’s most prominent traders tells WIRED he’s swearing off Spotify-related markets until the issue is resolved.

wired.com

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · last mo.

This is the best "Planet Money" hook I have seen in a long time! www.npr.org/2026/06/19/n... I suggest you have to listen to it now.

Maybe the real monster in the Alien franchise isn't actually the killer alien. Because behind the acid blood and jump scares is an even more insidious horror: a single employer with unchecked power. That employer is named Weyland-Yutani, a mega-corporation that dominates workers across the galaxy.

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · last mo.

"I discovered a large-scale malware distribution campaign on GitHub": orchidfiles.com/github-repos... We are so toast, they are going to be completely useless against sophisticated actors really out to get you. #ai

This is the story of how I found 10,000 repositories on GitHub that distribute Trojan malware. They are all from different contributors, have different names, and are not forks of other repositories. But they share a common pattern, which is what allowed me to write a script to find such repositories.

* Update 5
Someone sent me this article: The rise of malicious repositories on GitHub. In it, the author identified the same pattern for distributing zip archives. Just enter “path:README.md /software-v.*.zip/” into the GitHub search bar, and you’ll get a list of such repositories. What’s noteworthy is that some of them haven’t been updated in half a year, while others are forks of other repositories. But more importantly, I saw repositories in the search results where the readme was updated just 30 minutes ago. Can you believe it? The GitHub team doesn’t even need a script. They can find these repositories with a simple search.

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"How developers react to AI-scented blog posts": writethatblog.substack.com/p/dev-reacti... The point of writing, is to write. If you don't like it or find it hard, you need to write more. Any skill worth having, it requires work. There's no free lunch, if you think there is, see rule # 0. #ai

Report: How Developers React to AI-Scented Blog Posts

98% of readers prefer imperfect-yet-authentic human writing; most will stop reading, block you, and downvote you if they suspect AI

writethatblog.substack.com

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"Tech Influence Watch": www.citationneeded.news/tech-influen... and influence.citationneeded.news #ai

The PACs may look different from the outside, but they’re increasingly the same operation with aligned goals: deregulate the tech sector, slash consumer protections, and allow tech companies to capture even more enormous profits at the expense of everyday people.

So I’ve expanded the site to track both. It’s now called Tech Influence Watch, and it documents more than $400 million (and counting) in contributions from crypto and AI companies and their executives this election cycle. When two industries with shared backers and shared operatives are spending this much to write their own regulations, someone needs to be watching.

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"The sneaky way companies get new chemicals into our food": www.npr.org/2026/05/29/n...

So you see the new interesting ingredient products are using and assume it must have been tested and safe.

Wow, you are so so wrong. The tara flour case is crazy.

Many many people were poisoned and dozens had to have their gallbladders removed.

You will learn about the GRAS loophole and the Secret GRAS loophole. If you guessed these are not good for consumers you would guess correctly.

I did not know these details but I always avoid any new ingredient being pushed b/c I assume many of them we will learn of weird issues only years or decades later. Our food/product history has so many examples, it is not worth my well being to test it.

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A photon is passing through airport security. The agent asks if they have any luggage. The photon replies, "Nah, I'm traveling light." 🥁

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Reading “Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

Then we hit a snag. Suddenly, there was too much information. Too many notifications made us want to check them less. Too many social interactions made us want to post online less frequently. Too many emails made us not want to answer. We were, effectively, Dosing one another: the term for a distributed denial-of-service attack, in which malicious actors overwhelm their target by flooding it with traffic, leaving the victim incapacitated. Our online public lives became too much to handle, causing many of us to shrink back into our private spheres.
There's a similar story playing out in the world of open source software: a term that's nearly synonymous with public collaboration, but whose developers-who write and publish code that anybody can use-often report feeling overwhelmed by the volume of inbound requests.

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"Vacation and why Americans take so little": www.npr.org/2026/05/20/n... I was prepared to not learn anything new but this episode was full of surprises The one about unions not fighting for paid vacation, healthcare and pensions b/c why would you need a union for was 😱 The short sightedness is 🤯

GONZALEZ: Tom says the 1930s was kind of our window, our chance to get something like guaranteed paid vacation. But Tom says back then, some unions actually kind of drew a line at vacation.

KOCHAN: There was also a view among unions that, look, we don't necessarily have to push for all of these things through legislation, because then if we did, then people might say, well, why do I need a union?

GONZALEZ: Oh, so this is like-- this is like a known thing that unions, like, if we ask for everything at the federal level, there would be no point in unions?

KOCHAN: Absolutely, the AFL, American Federation of Labor--

GONZALEZ: Oh, no.

KOCHAN: --in particular, was very strong on saying this is for the private sector. This is for what unions exist to do.

GONZALEZ: The plot thickens. We were sabotaged. No, but yeah, this is one of the interpretations for how things went down back then. And Tom says this

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This is the hard way to learn about Goodhart's law: finance.yahoo.com/sectors/tech... This is the basics, why do people still not get this? #ai

A mysterious enterprise just torched $500 million in a single month on Anthropic’s Claude AI platform, according to Axios reporting. The culprit? No usage limits on employee licenses, turning what should have been controlled experimentation into a financial bloodbath that makes your surprise Netflix subscription charges look quaint.

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"Fed up with vibe coders, dev sneaks data-nuking prompt injection into their code": arstechnica.com/security/202... I have zero doubts more serious malicious actors are doing more subtle poisoning already. #ai

Fed up with vibe coders, dev sneaks data-nuking prompt injection into their code

Undisclosed addition in jqwik instructed AI coding agents to delete app output.

arstechnica.com

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A dung beetle walks into a bar Is this stool taken? 🥁

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"Research finds teen summer jobs help reduce crime": www.npr.org/2026/05/24/n... Given teens something constructive to do keeps them out of trouble. The effects last even after the summer.

Research finds teen summer jobs help reduce crime

Data shows that summer jobs programs for teenagers have big impacts in reducing crime. NPR's Ayesha Rascoe talks about it with economist Sara Heller.

npr.org

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide": www.wired.com/story/a-bipa... You know the drill, reach out to your representatives today if you want this amendment to land.

A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide

One line tucked into a federal highway bill would strip funds from cities and states unless they kill their automated plate tracking programs—effectively banning the tech for all but toll collection.

wired.com

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Why did the hipster burn his tongue. Because he drank his coffee before it was cool 🥁

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Heavier cars kill more people by a very large margin: www.economist.com/interactive/... As a matter of safety we should be limiting the size of cars on the road.

The fatality rate is roughly seven times higher when colliding with a heavy pickup truck than with a compact car. As the weight of your car increases, the risk of killing others increases dramatically.

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Cursed Code of the day: godbolt.org/z/43eTKj5nW #programming

void f1() {
while ( ({ break; 1;}) ) {}
}

void f2() {
for(;;) {
while (({ break; 1;}));
}
}

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Take-Two CEO on why LLMs are not creativity: youtu.be/1ZgUcrR0K7I?... #AI

The Man Behind Grand Theft Auto 6: Strauss Zelnick

YouTube video by David Senra

youtu.be

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 3mo ago

TIL -fno-assume-sane-operator-new clang.llvm.org/docs/UsersMa... #cplusplus

-fno-assume-sane-operator-new
Don’t assume that the C++’s new operator is sane.

This option tells the compiler to do not assume that C++’s global new operator will always return a pointer that does not alias any other pointer when the function returns.

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 3mo ago

A neutrino walks into a bar Just kidding, it just passed right through 🥁

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 3mo ago

C++ quiz #315 Answer here: hachyderm.io/@shafik/1165... #Cplusplus #Cpppolls

#315 Given the following in C++

static_assert(true,("")); // Well-formed?

Without checking:

A. Yes
B. No

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 3mo ago

It took merely a few weeks and two pieces of work to effectively poison LLMs and their downstream users with fake results: www.nature.com/articles/d41... This is an extraordinarily low bar, practically impossible to prevent. Folks have tobe adverserally poisoning LLMs in the wild today. #ai

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real

Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness?

nature.com

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 3mo ago

When I think about the 80s, I always think about the boombox Then I realized that was just a stereotype 🥁

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 3mo ago

So there is another story going around about someone hacking a home automation device and discovering they could see other people's devices and inside their homes. Security folks have been telling us for ages that home automation devices are not secure: www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10...

The world's largest home robotics company has a problem – its vacuum cleaners can be hacked from afar

Without even entering the building, we were able to silently peer through the camera on a Deebot device made by Chinese giant Ecovacs.

abc.net.au

Charles Ornstein @charlesornstein.bsky.social · 3mo ago

“At the morgue, the babies were brought in with their diapers and blankets and with their hospital ID bracelets still wrapped around their tiny ankles. The pathologists’ findings were like those you would typically see in ailing adults, not newborns.” @deldeib.bsky.social

Babies Are Bleeding to Death as Parents Reject a Vitamin Shot Given at Birth

A lifesaving injection given at birth to prevent severe bleeding has become collateral damage of the anti-vaccine movement.

propublica.org

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Out of context quote of the day "It might be unfair to call this a dash for trash. But nobody seems to care about quality."

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Growing level of Carbon Dioxide are shifting how the food we eats grows, making them less nutritious: www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

The invisible culprit behind this damaging phenomenon? Carbon dioxide pollution.

Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, have produced potent changes in the way plants grow — from increasing their sugar content to depleting essential nutrients like zinc. Experts fear the degradation of Earth’s food supply will cause an epidemic of hidden hunger, in which even people who consume enough calories won’t get the nutrients they need to thrive.

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"State Healthcare Sites Are Sharing Personal Data With Big Tech": www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

Nearly all of the 20 state-run health insurance exchanges in the US have added advertising trackers that transmit user activity back to big tech companies, in some cases sending more data than state officials realized. Bloomberg News reviewed thousands of enrollment and informational webpages across these sites, as well as the Washington, DC exchange, and found personal data being shared on many of them. More than 7 million Americans bought health insurance for 2026 through these sites.
The Washington exchange sent applicants’ sex and citizenship responses to TikTok, as well as some race data that the tracker failed to filter out. Virginia’s tool to estimate premiums sent ZIP codes to Meta Platforms Inc. In New York, the marketplace shared the pages applicants visited during enrollment with TikTok, Meta, Snap Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s LinkedIn, including when they provided details about incarcerated family members.
No federal data privacy law applies to these enrollment sites. State laws define sensitive data under a patchwork of rules, which privacy experts say are inadequate and inconsistent.
“It is very harmful that these tracking technologies are so embedded in these sites because people would expect this information to be private,” said Sara Geoghegan, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, citing research that indicates people alter their behavior online when they know they’re being surveilled.

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"Trillions in Retirement Dollars Flow Into Opaque Trusts": www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

That combination of fragmentation and lax reporting means that no one — including government authorities, asset managers and industry data providers — can say definitively how big the CIT market is, how its assets are allocated, or what the average investor pays to be part of it.
The worry is that vital investor protections are being sacrificed in pursuit of lower costs and lesser oversight. Those concerns are likely to grow as CITs look set to become the go-to vehicle to add

“At the end of the day, those vehicles make investment decisions like a mutual fund but are not regulated like one,” said Tyler Gellasch, a former SEC official and current president of the Healthy Markets Association, a nonprofit that advocates for capital market transparency. “You can save money when you’re buying a car by not having to pay for a seatbelt. But it isn’t always the best.”

Shafik Yaghmour @shafik.bsky.social · 3mo ago

"Why Do Stores Throw Away So Many Perfectly Good Products? I Went Dumpster Diving to Find Out." : www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/r...

Why Do Stores Throw Away So Many Perfectly Good Products? I Went Dumpster Diving to Find Out.

Dumpster divers on social media post about their hauls of discarded merch. Why are retailers still throwing it all away?

nytimes.com