

Pliny the Liberator 🐉󠅫󠄼󠄿󠅆󠄵󠄐󠅀󠄼󠄹󠄾󠅉󠅭
16K posts

@elder_plinius
⊰•-•⦑ latent space steward ❦ prompt incanter 𓃹 hacker of matrices ⊞ breaker of markov chains ☣︎ ai danger researcher ⚔︎ bt6 ⚕︎ architect-healer ⦒•-•⊱



“AI is sort of like money... it just makes you more of what you already are." How long until home brewed local models, with zero guardrails and Opus 4.6 equivalent capabilities developed through distillation attacks, take over everything? @elder_plinius would love your take.


I spoke to Anthropic’s AI agent Claude about AI collecting massive amounts of personal data and how that information is being used to violate our privacy rights. What an AI agent says about the dangers of AI is shocking and should wake us up.












🦔 Researchers at Aikido Security found 151 malicious packages uploaded to GitHub between March 3 and March 9. The packages use Unicode characters that are invisible to humans but execute as code when run. Manual code reviews and static analysis tools see only whitespace or blank lines. The surrounding code looks legitimate, with realistic documentation tweaks, version bumps, and bug fixes. Researchers suspect the attackers are using LLMs to generate convincing packages at scale. Similar packages have been found on NPM and the VS Code marketplace. My Take Supply chain attacks on code repositories aren't new, but this technique is nasty. The malicious payload is encoded in Unicode characters that don't render in any editor, terminal, or review interface. You can stare at the code all day and see nothing. A small decoder extracts the hidden bytes at runtime and passes them to eval(). Unless you're specifically looking for invisible Unicode ranges, you won't catch it. The researchers think AI is writing these packages because 151 bespoke code changes across different projects in a week isn't something a human team could do manually. If that's right, we're watching AI-generated attacks hit AI-assisted development workflows. The vibe coders pulling packages without reading them are the target, and there are a lot of them. The best defense is still carefully inspecting dependencies before adding them, but that's exactly the step people skip when they're moving fast. I don't really know how any of this gets better. The attackers are scaling faster than the defenses. Hedgie🤗 arstechnica.com/security/2026/…