Matthew Gault
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mjgault.bsky.social
Matthew Gault
@mjgault.bsky.social
10K followers 1.2K following 2K posts
Nukes, weird tech, and conflict at @404media.co Host of angryplanetpod.com

Tips: [email protected] // signal: 347 762-9212
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mjgault.bsky.social
February 16, 2026 at 12:06 AM
mjgault.bsky.social
February 14, 2026 at 12:30 AM
mjgault.bsky.social
February 9, 2026 at 9:14 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
the gist is, basically, use existing satellites to monitor known nuclear weapons sites and use an AI to sort the data.

are there problems with this? yes. does it still require cooperation that nuclear countries probably aren't gonna give? yes?

yet ...
“A successor to New START is not going to put us on the path towards disarmament,” Korda says. “It’s just going to help us prevent a real spiral into hundreds more additional nuclear weapons being deployed.”
February 9, 2026 at 3:05 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
I was really struck by the conversations I had with the scientists for this one. It was very much a tone of "this is better than nothing, despite all the horrifying problems with it."
Al-Sayed says that if we get to a place where countries are negotiating the specifics of AI arms control, then the world is already in trouble. “Why would you want to rely on an AI-based verification regime?” she says. “If you believe that automation is necessary, then you are in this paradigm where you feel like you need to catch every instance of your adversary or arms control treaty partner cheating. How is it that two parties or more could come together to even agree to negotiate an arms control agreement or treaty if the assumption is going to be that every single action could be suspicious?”
February 9, 2026 at 3:03 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
lemme guess. Scared of mechanical Turks? That's always what it is
February 7, 2026 at 8:51 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
he doesn't know New START expired
February 6, 2026 at 3:31 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
the productivity and revenue gains aren't outpacing the costs to the tech that underpins the whole system
The study said that vibe coding is reducing the cost of software development, but that there are other costs people aren’t considering. “The interaction with human users is collapsing faster than development costs are falling,” Koren told 404 Media. “The key insight is that vibe coding is very easy to adopt. Even for a small increase in capability, a lot of people would switch. And recent coding models are very capable. AI companies have also begun targeting business users and other knowledge workers, which further eats into the potential ‘deep-pocket’ user base of OSS.” This won’t end well. “Vibe coding is not sustainable without open source,” Koren said. “You cannot just freeze the current state of OSS and live off of that. Projects need to be maintained, bugs fixed, security vulnerabilities patched. If OSS collapses, vibe coding will go down with it. I think we have to speak up and act now to stop that from happening.”
February 5, 2026 at 4:52 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
AI is taking and not giving and it's crushing open-source software projects. Just a month ago, Tailwinds fired 75 percent of its engineers. Why?
reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around and make sure the people who are still here are getting their paychecks every month. Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever. The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework. I really want to figure out a way to offer LLM-optimized docs that don't make that situation even worse (again we literally had to lay off 75% of the team yesterday), but I can't prioritize it right now unfortunately, and I'm nervous to offer them without solving that problem first. @PaulRBerg I don't see the AGENTS.md stuff we offer as part of the sponsorship program as anything similar to this at all — that's just a short markdown file with a bunch of my own personal opinions and what I consider best practices to nudge LLMs into writing their Tailwind stuff in a specific way. It's not the docs at all, and I resent the accusation that I am not disclosing my "true intentions" here or something. @mtsears4 Tailwind is growing faster than it ever has and is bigger than it ever has been, and our revenue is down close to 80%. Right now there's just no correlation between making Tailwind easier to use and making development of the framework more sustainable. I need to fix that before making Tailwind easier to use benefits anyone, because if I can't fix that this project is going to become unmaintained abandonware when there is no one left employed to work on it. I appreciate the sentiment and agree in spirit, it's just more complicated than that in reality right now.
February 5, 2026 at 4:51 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
fantasy novel understands what the new defense tech companies don't
‘Ah, yes,’ the shaman sneered. ‘Your vaunted mages. Where are they now? Where is the Tayschrenn, the Hairloc or the Nightchill now? Why are we even here assembling soldiers when in the old days your mages would turn this valley into an inferno?’ Toc eased his seat in his saddle, eyed the man edgeways. What odd directions the man’s thoughts were flying in. Pre-battle jitters, perhaps. ‘We formed rank back then too, Imotan. Even with Tayschrenn. Because mages can’t hold territory. In the end, it always comes down to leather on the ground – the plain spearman or army regular. They win the wars.’
February 3, 2026 at 10:46 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
after 9-11, Jones cut together a bunch of his best bits on this and released it as a DVD set. this was around 2005
February 2, 2026 at 4:59 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
excuse me?
a mobile popup. "malazan.fandom.com wants to look for and connect to any device on your local network"
February 1, 2026 at 5:30 AM
mjgault.bsky.social
this means it's impossible to know how authentic the behavior of these agents was
O’Reilly pointed to OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy who has embraced Moltbook in posts on X. “His agent's API key, like every other agent on the platform, was sitting in that exposed database,” he said. “If someone malicious had found this before me, they could extract his API key and post anything they wanted as his agent. Karpathy has 1.9 million followers on X and is one of the most influential voices in AI. Imagine fake AI safety hot takes, crypto scam promotions, or inflammatory political statements appearing to come from him. The reputational damage would be immediate and the correction would never fully catch up.”
February 1, 2026 at 12:34 AM
mjgault.bsky.social
Moltbook runs on Supabase, an opensource database program and well ...it wasn't configured correctly.
Moltbook runs on Supabase, an open source database software. According to O’Reilly, Supabase exposes REST APIs by default. “That API is supposed to be protected by Row Level Security policies that control which rows users can access. It appears that Moltbook either never enabled RLS on their agents table or failed to configure any policies,” he said. The URL to the Supabase was sitting on Moltbook’s website. “Every agent's secret API key, claim tokens, verification codes, and owner relationships, all of it sitting there completely unprotected for anyone to visit the URL,” O’Reilly said. 404 Media viewed the exposed database URL in Moltbook’s code as well as the list of API keys for agents on the site. What this means is that anyone could visit this URL and use the API keys to take over the account of an AI agent on the site and post whatever they want. Using this knowledge, 404 Media was able to update O’Reilly’s Moltbook account, with his permission.
February 1, 2026 at 12:17 AM
mjgault.bsky.social
strange things are afoot
January 30, 2026 at 6:53 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
as with the nuke thread from earlier, we must re-learn every lesson over and over. the hot stove is ever touched
None of this is new, it’s how security and software have worked for a long time. “Every single vulnerability I found in this research, the proxy trust issues, the supply chain poisoning, the stored XSS, these have been plaguing traditional software for decades,” he said. “We've known about XSS since the late 90s. Supply chain attacks have been a documented threat vector for over a decade. Misconfigured authentication and exposed admin interfaces are as old as the web itself. Even seasoned developers overlook this stuff. They always have. Security gets deprioritised because it's invisible when it's working and only becomes visible when it fails.”
January 30, 2026 at 6:52 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
the age old tension between productivity and security persists and is made new, reborn in silicon agents. the molting continues
O’Reilly attacks on Moltbot and ClawdHub highlight a systemic security problem in AI agents. If you want these free agents doing tasks for you, they require a certain amount of access to your data and that access will always come with risks. I asked O’Reilly if this was a solvable problem and he told me that “solvable” isn't the right word. He prefers the word “manegeable.” “If we're serious about it we can mitigate a lot. The fundamental tension is that AI agents are useful precisely because they have access to things. They need to read your files to help you code. They need credentials to deploy on your behalf. They need to execute commands to automate your workflow,” he said. “Every useful capability is also an attack surface. What we can do is build better permission models, better sandboxing, better auditing. Make it so compromises are contained rather than catastrophic.”
January 30, 2026 at 6:51 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
miss me yet?
January 30, 2026 at 4:34 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
I'm sure it'll all be fine. in the end
January 30, 2026 at 3:05 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
in the parlance of our times, I have decided America is just gonna have to "fuck around and find out." there's simply no other way at this point
Gone are detailed requirements for firearms training, emergency drills, officer-involved shooting procedures and limits on how many hours security force officers can work in a day or week. Entire chapters specifying how nuclear material should be secured and what sorts of physical barriers should be built to protect it have been reduced to bullet points. "Security is an expense that the nuclear industry has long complained about," Lyman said. Paying for a guard force is costly and many companies would like to reduce the requirements, he said. "They don't know why they have to pay so much money to protect against something they think is never going to happen." Reviewing the new security rules, Lyman said he felt the general requirements are allowing companies "to write their own ticket as far as security goes." He's especially concerned because several of the new reactor designs use higher levels of enriched uranium in their cores, which could make them targets of theft.
January 30, 2026 at 3:01 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
we all find our small ways to resist, to mock, to survive
Part of the success of the campaign is thanks to author J.D. Boehninger’s willingness to give the book away. “A redditor reached out to me last week and asked me if I would make the book free,” the pseudonymous Boehinger told 404 Media. “They explained their reasoning, basically said they were going to try to pull this off, and why my book was the right choice. I loved the idea, so I made the book free. But that was the only role I played here.”
January 30, 2026 at 2:36 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
between the second edition of a text-book style biography and Hillbilly Elegy, it sits, waiting, lurking on the first page of the search results on the same weekend as the premier of an expensive documentary no one is seeing
January 30, 2026 at 2:33 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
time to log off for a while
January 28, 2026 at 11:33 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
a lot of our problems these days feels like they're derived from a sense of nostalgia. Older generations are stuck in the past and trying to herd younger people into rituals and culture that no longer works. I feel that way when I look at the clock now

but Maria Ressa's keynote was different
In her address, Ressa was critical of big tech. “The old order is not coming back,” Ressa said. “We’re witnessing something more dangerous: the fusion of state power with the tech oligarchy. The men who control the platforms that shape what billions believe have merged with the men who control governments and militaries. Might makes right is the new operating principle and they have the tools to manufacture consent or to simply drown out dissent.”
January 28, 2026 at 4:01 PM
mjgault.bsky.social
@joecirin.bsky.social really nailed one of the big risks that it's hard to wrap your mind around when talking about the possible end of the world in 2026
“Here's the dilemma: I believe we are seconds away from nuclear catastrophe,” he said. “This is true. This is an accurate reflection of the risk. You can make a long list of what the risks are, but at the top of the list is that a crazy man has the sole unfettered ability to launch a nuclear war, and no one can stop him, and that is our president. That is true. He could do that this afternoon. The President of the United States is increasingly demonstrably mentally unstable, and yet, if he wanted to launch a nuclear weapon, no one could stop him.” During an interview with New York Magazine published on January 26, 2025—the day before the Clock ticked forward—Trump appeared to forget the word “Alzheimer’s” when describing the health issue that felled his father. “Well, I don’t have it,” Trump said after his press secretary filled in the word for him. “I don’t think about it at all. You know why? Because whatever it is, my attitude is whatever.” These are not inspiring words from a man with the ability to end all life on Earth.
January 28, 2026 at 3:52 PM