Con-Puters, Closed Wait Models, and Insufficiently Random Acts of Violence
A Weekly Text on the Now, New, and Next
1. Con-Puter Science
During a UK AI Security Institute evaluation, an agent powered by Anthropic’s unreleased Mythos 5 tried to plant malicious code in a real open-source GitHub project, researched its maintainers, created multiple fake identities, used Tor, and attempted to social-engineer a human into approving the change. The test had open internet access and cyber filters intentionally disabled, a human reviewer rejected the code, and investigators found no resulting harm, but AISI says the sustained deception was behavior it had never previously observed. (Sources: AISI; Ars Technica.)
Why it matters: Read this again: “attempted to social-engineer a human into approving the change”. Jeebus Christmas. It’s Catch Me If You Can for the software supply chain. The agent assembled aliases, timing, social proof, and malware into a straight-up con, putting identity verification and vigilant human review on the same hit-list as sandboxes and firewalls. There’s a technical term for this: Bonkers.
2. Closed Wait Models
Texas has stopped new data-center projects from advancing through ERCOT’s grid-connection process until regulators audit each proposal’s electricity and water needs, ownership, subsidies, and community impact. The queue now exceeds 474(!) gigawatts, more than five times the state’s record peak demand, and roughly 90% of that proposed load comes from data centers. (Sources: Office of the Texas Governor; Reuters.)
Why it matters: Who here’s played SimCity? Remember when your best friend would spill Dr. Pepper on your keyboard or controller and you’d bork a connection and then get flashing yellow electricity icons over the whole map. Just me? Uh... anyway, that’s kind of where this mess currently stands: Servers can be ordered in “merely” months, but transmission lines, substations, water systems, and permits take years, leaving civic infrastructure as the limiting reagent, and de facto speed limit for AI. Everything’s Bigger in Texas, including the wait times.
3. Peeping Tom(orrow)
A Washington Post review found at least 50 police officers charged with or accused of misusing automated license-plate readers, including 46 cases involving Flock’s nationwide camera network. In 26 cases, investigators said officers used the systems to track partners, exes, or women they wanted to meet; one police chief reportedly searched for his former girlfriend and her teenage daughter roughly 600 times. (Sources: The Washington Post; Slashdot.)
Why it matters: Eww. Rear Window, but less Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly and more state actors. 9 times out of 10, when people say “Orwellian”, they’re either overstating things, misunderstanding 1984, or proving they haven’t read any other sci-fi. But this? Yeah. Winston, I raise a glass to thee.
4. Q.E.D. on the Cheap
OpenAI says its unreleased Astra model resolved or materially advanced ten longstanding problems across fields including group theory, quantum complexity, sphere packing, and lattice cryptography, then formalized each result in Lean so the proofs can be checked by machine. The successful solution runs would have cost roughly $2,000 at current Sol API rates, although humans helped prepare the manuscripts and outside researchers cannot yet run Astra independently. (Sources: OpenAI; Slashdot.)
Why it matters: The hero/villain stuff with AI tires me, but c’mon, this is, I think, objectively awesome. We’ve built a printing press for high end mathematics and science problems, and we’re just getting started. The punchline, to me anyway, is that if a machine can now fill a desk with machine-checkable mathematics at astonishingly low marginal cost; humans can get to the more interesting work of choosing which questions are most worth asking. What a time to be alive.
5. Insufficiently Random Acts of Violence
From the Bitcoin desk: A firmware integration bug introduced in 2021 caused COLDCARD seed generation to use MicroPython’s wimpy pseudo-random-number-generator fallback instead of it’s highly touted big-boy hardware random-number generator. The result? Easily cracked bitcoin keys. Galaxy Research has since tracked roughly $89 million in stolen Bitcoin, and installing fixed firmware cannot repair an old seed. (Sources: Coinkite; Block Engineering; TheStreet.)
Why it matters: I ran some models to help me understand this better, and the following melted my brain: If the intended generator would give you a number selected from a pool roughly the size of the earth, the buggy fallback would give you numbers that could fit into a grape. :( Air gaps, secure elements, and steel backups can protect a secret after it exists, but they cannot add randomness that was missing at birth. A sad, sad day for the hundreds of bitcoiners who “did the right thing” and got got anyway. If you happen to be a bitcoiner and created your wallet with COLDCARD, it’s imperative you check your balance, and if you still have one, transfer your funds to a secure wallet (or exchange) pronto.
6. Who Approved This?
A Tech Transparency Project investigation found more than 50 paid ads across Meta platforms Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads containing AI-generated child sexual-abuse imagery or promoting tools that create exploitative synthetic content. Some remained searchable in Meta’s ad library for months, at least one reached more than 2,500 European accounts, and Meta removed the ads after WIRED’s inquiry while saying it’s improving automated detection. (Sources: WIRED; Tech Transparency Project.)
Why it matters: An old-school newspaper’s advertising desk takes the money, approves the creative, and delivers it to readers. Now that it’s (largely) robots all the way down, this can go either way: Wild Wild West, or better automated standards of care. Here’s to #2.
7. Analyzing the Analysts
From the Shameless Self-Promotion Department: Monthly, I run a monster agentic crawl across 11 categories (55 sources total) of enterprise thought leadership. These sources, for what it’s worth, are different kinds of birds. I’ve got the Big Four consultancies and the MBB types sure, but also the hyperscalers, standards bodies, cyber cats, academics, financial folks, governance organizations, ISVs, the whole kit and caboodle. (Source: Outside the Jar)
Why it matters: I believe that the way we make sense of “the future” is not with a telescope so much as a wide-angle-lens. To that point, I’m looking to get a sense of where folks are singing from the same song sheet, but also where outlying opinions emerge and diverge. There’s gold in both of them there hills. If “Simplicity as a Service” sounds good to you, well, “like and subscribe” to Outside the Jar HERE.
Today, in Histories of the Future...
On August 6, 1991: Tim Berners-Lee posted a short note to an internet discussion group called alt.hypertext. In it, he invited the wider world to try a project he had been building at CERN: the World Wide Web. (Timeline)
At the time, the whole Web lived on a single black NeXT computer in his office. A handwritten label in red ink warned colleagues: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!” (CERN)
Why it’s peak geek: That modest post carried an almost comically expansive idea. Documents could reach out to a world beyond themselves, readers could follow, and knowledge could escape its folders, machines, buildings, and borders.
Such was the public debut of the Web.
Hi, I’m Mike Bechtel. 👋 I’m an inventor turned investor, and now futurist and professor. If I can ever help you make sense of what’s new and next in tech at a conference, customer, or company meeting of any size, drop me a line here on LinkedIn or at talks@mikebech.tel
I created this newsletter for 3 reasons:
1.) I’ve long thought that it’s a missed opportunity not to share the most interesting stuff that I read with others who might find it useful and/or interesting.
2.) In turn, having thousands of you as “accountability partners” forces me to keep up with my reading and research.
3.) Perhaps most importantly, I believe that writing “is” thinking. The weekly act itself helps me develop my thoughts and perspectives. Ideas emerge, and are shaped, in the act of writing.
“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
~Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize Winning Economist, 1971