Pappa Pug

The triage bottleneck nobody wants to talk about it loudly, but it's killing the SR experience. Report volumes have been absolutely sending since 2023, but the pool of qualified triagers keep shrinking relative to demand. And I've seen the backlog numbers; they aren't pretty. Add on AI submissions, AI tools, and more efficient SRs, the signal-to-noise ratio is collapsing in real time. What else can be done? *image is for illustration purpose

tech industry is optimizing itself to death.

Maybe I'll work full time on developing Obsidian plug-ins 🐾

@ZeroK_____ Amazing guy. I'm so sorry to hear about your father. But his life and determination is magnified in you and your good deeds which are many. And your journey is only going to get more interesting, more and more and more. Keep going my friend. Such a joy to witness your path.

Near the end of 2024, around November to December my entire life turned upside down. I never expected what happened next, and for more than a year I planned to never talk about it. But I think I need to, because it affected me deeply, both in life and as a hunter. 2024 was the best year of my life. It was the year I finally found myself. I discovered value in what I do. Being a security researcher and hunter in Web3 stopped feeling like “just a job”, it became something much bigger to me. People started recognizing my work. I met incredible researchers and hunters I genuinely respect and look up to. I built amazing friendships and connections. The feeling was indescribable. I was truly happy, and I enjoyed every single moment of it. At the beginning of 2024, I set a goal for myself: make $100k. People around me in real life laughed at that goal. They told me it was impossible. Some even said I should stop wasting time and look for a normal job that pays $150/month at mos. “Being rich is not for us,” they said. To them, $100k was something unreachable. So I distanced myself from those people, even though some were my friends. Not because they were bad people, but because we had completely different mindsets and goals. I had to choose myself. That same year, I seriously started hunting on @immunefi. I had a bad experience on another platform before, so I decided to give Immunefi a chance. I knew nobody there. No hunters, no team members. But the process felt professional from day one. Then I got my first $2k bounty. I was insanely happy 😂 I kept hunting, joined the Discord, and met amazing people from the Immunefi team and the community. I learned a lot, worked on many BBPs, and eventually Immunefi introduced Boosts (now contests) and Attackathons. That’s where my life completely changed. Then the Fuel Attackathon happened. I saw the $1M reward pool and a completely new language I had never touched before, and I told myself: “This is my chance.” I pushed hard. During that time I also landed another bounty. Eventually I made around $15k from bounties and around $86k from Fuel. I should’ve gotten second place, but some things happened and I secured fifth instead. And here’s the strange part… I felt nothing. No happiness. No excitement. No celebration. Just emptiness. I felt confused, mentally exhausted, almost like something inside me had shut down. I kept asking myself: “Why aren’t you happy? You achieved your goal. You proved everyone wrong. Why do you feel nothing?” Before I could answer that question, the second worst thing happened. My father had his first brain stroke. We rushed him to the hospital trying to save him. Then another stroke happened. Then another. I spent countless nights in hospitals, mentally destroyed. I became deeply depressed in a way I had never experienced before. At one point, I seriously thought about quitting Web3 and bug hunting entirely. I remember opening my phone late at night planning to delete everything I built. Then somehow I saw one of @lonelysloth_sec’s posts talking about patience, not giving up, and how hard this journey is. I don’t even remember the exact words anymore, but that post stopped me from making a huge mistake. Because people like him, @WhiteHatMage, and others became role models to me in this space. So I decided to wait instead of quitting. Meanwhile, my father’s condition kept getting worse. Eventually doctors told us there was nothing more they could do. We just had to fulfill his wishes and stay beside him until the end. And when he passed away in 2025… I felt nothing again. No tears. No breakdown. Just emptiness. The same emptiness I felt after reaching my biggest goal. That completely broke my understanding of myself. I forgot who zeroK really was. Months later, something incredible happened: @0xjonah1 messaged me saying I got accepted into All Stars. That gave me hope again. But even then, something still felt missing for almost a year and a half. I couldn’t figure it out. I tried convincing myself I was overthinking. year passed, Doing my best every day just to make sure I deserve my place at Immunefi and among the All Stars. Then, a few weeks ago, I got a clue about what was missing when I DM’d @WhiteHatMage asking for some advice related to working as hunter. While reading his messages, I felt like my brain was trying to reconnect with something I had lost for almost a year and a half... something that shaped who zeroK is both in real life and in the Web3 space. But at the time, I still couldn’t fully understand it, and I kept telling myself, “Maybe I’m just overthinking it.” Then Firedancer happened. I participated a bit, got overwhelmed, submitted only one bug, and honestly felt lost again. Then Infosec team reminded me that I should trust myself, that being part of All Stars already proved I belonged here. And suddenly it clicked. I finally realized what I had lost. It wasn’t motivation. It wasn’t discipline. It wasn’t skill. It was my ability to enjoy the journey. That was always the best part of me. Enjoying the process. Smiling during hard times. Helping people. Learning. Connecting with others. Being curious. Building something meaningful. I realized I never truly wanted $100k for the money itself. I wanted proof that I had value. Proof that I belonged somewhere. Proof that I could become the person I always wanted to be. And once I reached it, I didn’t know what came next. Now I finally understand it. Money matters for survival, yes. But chasing money alone made me miserable for an entire year. Now I’m chasing something different: my dreams, my growth, my journey, the people I meet, the things I build, the impact I leave behind. That’s what actually makes me happy. Being recognized for meaningful work. Protecting people. Saving users from exploits. Being good at what I do. Being kind while doing it. I’m glad I found myself again. And I’m deeply grateful to the people below who helped me rediscover that part of me, even without knowing what I was going through: @lonelysloth_sec @DecentralDisco @PappaPug @WhiteHatMage @minato7namikazi @0xMackenzieM @0xjonah1 @MartinMarchev @thisisgrey, who built my profile picture, the interview we did helped me remember part of who I really was. And many other amazing people too that I might not remember while writing this post. The only reasons I posted this are: 1. I want people to know that the joy of a goal you set for yourself ($100k, $500k, $1M, $10M, building something, buying something, achieving something) is not in the moment you finally reach it, it’s in the journey and the path you go through. 95% of the joy is in the process, not the destination. 2. I just wanted to talk a little bit lol.

The ability to enjoy the journey is 100% the reason to continue after facing the worst. No amount of grit is worth simply the love of doing.

@_thinking_reed you mean like this obsidian.md/help/cli

Thinking of somebody... 🤺

So Mythos was, indeed, not marketing hype. Remember this is a general purpose model that just happens to be good at finding exploits because good models are good at lots of things. Expect similar from OpenAI & Google. And from open models in 8 months. hacks.mozilla.org/2026/05/behind…

Vibepocalypse

@lonelysloth_sec It's a good entry point for people interests in CS butnot actual CS majors, like myself, I think

I have no idea why this post went viral. Do people like big O complexity notation that much?

If you’re waiting until you can afford every paid AI tool before you start building, you’re going to fall behind. There is already enough free infra to ship agent prototypes: - Free Search + Fetch APIs from @Tiny_Fish - Free Cloud browsers from @browser_use - Free inference via @nvidia NIM - $5 Memory Gateway credits from @mastra_ai - Conditional ChatGPT Plus from @OpenAI You don’t need another subscription. You need to build.

Claude Code + Obsidian for academic research! Link to the repo in quoted post from Tom below. BTW, there's so many implementations of Obsidian + Codex/Claude Code, can you recommend one that works well for you?

-refusing to ask for help -downplaying your achievements -isolating yourself instead of communicating -saying "yes" to everything -neglecting your own needs -avoiding important responsibilities -flooding your mind with negativity -always chasing perfection

The day after the CEO lays off a ton of staff and says: “Non-technical teams are now pushing code to production with AI” @coinbase has a major outage on their trading engine, and even their status page doesn’t work. 😂

@thisvishalsingh You've come really really far man! 👏

April was intense. spent ~3 weeks securing a ZK library that will be used by multiple upcoming infra projects. Found a few Criticals / Highs along the way. As always: never forget the Fiat-Shamir bugs. May is my last month of undergrad. After that, I’m looking full-time.

@glideapps @markprobst @jassmith87 @claudeai "flinging" has always been pretty reliable and worry-free for my Glide experience... Thanks for the good work!

Hey everyone, @markprobst here 👋 I'm Glide's Co-Founder, and also the co-creator of Fling. Claude Code's missing 'Publish' button. Glide's other Co-Founder, @jassmith87, and I built Fling over about 2 months on the hunch that giving @claudeai Code an easy-to-use “Publish” button would unlock it for a larger group of users. When you use Claude Code, you describe what you want, and Claude writes the code. But publishing your software to the web requires a whole lot of additional work. Fling handles all of that extra work: bundling, deployment, databases, cron jobs, storage, secrets, and routing. No infrastructure knowledge is required when you're 'Flinging'. Want to try fling for yourself? It's free to use (for now) for up to 5 projects: 💥 flingit.io Curious about the technical details behind building Fling? Read our research paper: glideapps.com/research/fling Looking forward to hearing what you think about Fling!

For my builder peeps! 🛠️

ISLANDISLANSISLANDISLANDISLAND? 🏝️

Phantom messages every time 💀

Weird isn't just visual. Weird is whatever strays from the norm. Weird is relative to the current state of the world. You can have weird principles. They should be things people can legitimately disagree with. You have to remember Obsidian was very weird when it launched six years ago. Local files, malleability, backlinks, graph, even Markdown syntax... these were not as widely understood and accepted as they are today. That's why I spent so much time writing essays like "File over app" to try and explain our choices. The goal was to describe why our weird ideas should be normal, and it worked! Now the world has somewhat caught up and accepted those choices, so it's time to find the next frontier of weirdness.

@lonelysloth_sec This sounds like a board game I've played before, Saboteur. You play dwarves which are digging tunnels to find treasure and the Saboteur player tries to route the tunnel to a dead end.

Let's do a little philosophical exercise. Suppose you're building a company and hiring people. There are just two types of people: 1. Honest people who will work to add value to your company. 2. Saboteurs from NK who will act honest until they are activated and completely destroy your business. Saboteurs and honest people behave exactly the same until some point in the future you can't predict. There is no process you can devise to tell them apart before they are hired. Does that mean honest people and saboteurs are exactly the same? No. It just means life is unfair. If you hire a single saboteur you get rekt. And you can't know if you hired one. Reality isn't determined by the limitations of your sampling.