Harsh Varagiya

The California Senate has passed the No Robo Bosses Act, which prohibits employers from using AI for automated decision systems in firing or disciplining their workers.

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

Microsoft is investigating mistralai PyPI package v2.4.6 compromise. Attackers injected code in mistralai/client/__init__.py that executes on import, downloads hxxps://83[.]142[.]209[.]194/transformers.pyz to /tmp/transformers.pyz, and launches a second-stage payload on Linux. The file name transformers.pyz appears deliberately chosen to mimic the widely used Hugging Face Transformers library and blend into ML/dev environments. The main payload is a credential stealer, but it also includes country-aware logic; it avoids Russian-language environments and contains a geo fenced destructive branch that has 1-in-6 chance of executing rm -rf / when the system appears to be in Israel or Iran. To mitigate this threat: isolate affected Linux hosts, block 83[.]142[.]209[.]194, hunt for /tmp/transformers.pyz, pgmonitor[.]py, and pgsql-monitor.service, and rotate exposed credentials.

0days doesn't seem cool enough anymore. what should real hackers be doing now?

Every time I tell AI utopianists that biology is too complex for AI to "solve", they cite the success of AlphaFold. No, AlphaFold did not "solve" protein folding. It gets broad structures correct ~70-88% of the time (depending on evaluation), enabling useful but flawed statistical guesses. True "solving" would require ~99.9%+ accuracy, practically zero meaningful edge cases, and high confidence across fine details like side chains and conformations. Even then, this is just one narrow slice of the complexities of proteomics. The persistent gap between the "AlphaFold solved protein folding" claim and reality is a perfect example of AI overhype in biology.