Johannes Gilger

This is a quote I'd seriously consider framing and hanging on my wall.

We have made significant improvements to our Brand AI (smart brand recognition) and ML Verdicts (scoring) features on urlscan Pro. We have also launched AI-powered Visual Summaries so you can understand malicious sites in foreign languages more easily: urlscan.io/blog/2026/03/2…

my AI researcher friends make more money than my NBA player friends we live in a wild time

As I have mentioned before, stop trying to get Dense models running on the DGX Spark/Mac Studios Unified Memory is best fit for MoEs because you only make each token go through a small subset of the numbers of parameters in the model Optimize for your hardware

this is the way

Exactly one year ago (10 mar 2025), Dario Amodei: "I think we will be there in 3-6 months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code." This turned out to be... too darn accurate.

Scammers are using fake "live support" pages to trick victims into installing legit remote tools like AnyDesk & TeamViewer. Once connected, attackers guide victims through real bank logins and MFA approvals. Report on urlscan Pro: urlscan.io/pricing/urlsca…

Qwen 3.5 27B is the release of the year for me so far > Agentic model & great at tool calling > Claude Sonnet 4.6 quality at home > ~28GB in NVFP4 > Fits on a single RTX 5090 > with full context (256K) Amazing model & performance The prediction below will age like fine wine

It took a while, but urlscan.io finally has dark mode now. This is a perfect example of a low-urgency feature that we were able to tackle now since it can be handed off to AI and is simple and low-stakes enough to do so.

We have launched improved versions of our Brand AI and ML verdicts feature. The combination of these improvements means we can detect more malicious sites more quickly and our customers have powerful selectors to search for and filter on. Live on urlscan Pro.

europeans prepared to respond… on monday

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing… China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine the gap is ARCHITECTURAL it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study… and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure Merz at least had the courage to name it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

HVAC, electrician and plumber professionals calling their high school buddies who spent the past 10 years as a software engineer and repeatedly told them “learn how to code”:

This week I decided to just permanently switch to running Claude Code on the server mostly on bypass permissions mode: c() { IS_SANDBOX=1 claude --dangerously-skip-permissions "$@"; } And for the first time in my life I think I've actually managed to outrun my todo list What happened is I simply blasted through my to do list of features I had to build and bugs I had to fix I've never shipped so fast and Claude Code almost made no mistakes, and when it did it they were tiny that weren't fatal (important because I'm mostly working on the server in production now) Before I was always known to ship fast (also because I always work alone) but while I shipped new things would always build up on my features/bug board (my users can submit them there) But this is the first week where I've been fast enough to outrun them The board is actually empty! As other people have written on here the real bottleneck is becoming myself and my creativity, not how fast I can ship. Because I think I ship faster now than I can come up with new ideas, or maybe my brain will adjust to this new speed (probably) Also I feel another limit is becoming my own mental context window, as in how many things, features, bugs, projects, I can keep in my mind in parallel while building on all of them. It's a lot and I haven't reached that limit yet but I feel I might be close I also noticed that you start going really fast the more you let it just go loose, before I was slow because I didn't trust it and I was scared it would destroy my code, now I just let it go. As @karpathy wrote, things feel like they've changed a lot around December last year when models became good enough to really code with and I feel the same When I see other friends code with Claude Code I often notice they're slow because they still check everything, which is good of course, but I feel the better way would be to create some tests and just let it run freely and see if it can pass those For me the tests are mostly just me checking out if the new feature on the site works or not, and in 99% cases it just does, and then I ask it to improve it further Because I run Claude Code on the server in production, I don't have to wait for deployment anymore (although that took only 3 seconds anyway before, that still adds up), now it's wait for it to be done coding, I refresh the site and I test it, that feedback loop is how I work and it's made me WAY faster Anyway here's what I did this week and the majority of these things were requested by people on the bug board, I'd say this is about 10x my normal output: 📸 Photo AI - Built new image viewer and mobile image viewer - Added batch remix, multi-photo import, filtering by model in gallery - Security overhaul: phased out insecure ?hash= login, migrated to session tokens - Fixed Google login loop, multi-model selection, talking scripts - Added custom audio upload for talking videos - Created dynamic model selector from server endpoint 🏡 Interior AI - Revived [ Add furniture ] feature (started 6 months ago, image models now good enough) - Added custom style upload for redesigns - Built own Gaussian Splat viewer for 3D - Made /remove_bg endpoint for furniture backgrounds - Migrated 3D walkthrough to new World Labs API - Added .skp file support, paint color masking, empty room button 🎒 Nomads - Launched weekly AI-generated newsletter from chat - Built profile edit modal, moved profile editing from /settings to profile page - Added TikTok/YouTube links, status bar, server-side API tracking - Added hundreds of new profile tags and traits - Fixed timezone filters, broken links, user avatars 🗺️ Hoodmaps - Revived write mode (before was only read for last few years because db was rekt) - Built heatmap mode using sentiment-scored tags (50K+ tags) - Fixed root cause: tags not entering DB due to wrong PRAGMA (should be WAL) - Added good/bad area detection with admin grid controls - Set up Claude Code Telegram bot for live changes - Enabled CF cache, fixed health check, fixed Brussels 📕 MAKE book - Built auto ePub/PDF generator cron worker - Added dynamic generation with personal customer watermarks - Added image compression for file size 💾 Pieter .com - Added Wikipedia text-only reader for Kindle - Exploring Windows 3.11 emulator using v86 (to replace Em-DOSBox) - Added product recommendations on homepage - Installed Wall Street Raider (1986) 👩‍💻 Remote OK - Installed Chatbase AI customer support bot - Added "report not remote" link on job posts 🏨 Hotelist (3 todos) - Fixed hotel URLs and city range bugs - Added iron amenity

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow. Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes. As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now. It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

Most people will read this and think optimists live longer because they eat better and exercise more. The study says something wilder. Lee et al. controlled for smoking, diet, exercise, alcohol, depression, BMI, and socioeconomic status. The longevity effect still held. The most optimistic quartile lived 11 to 15% longer and had 1.5 to 1.7x odds of reaching 85 even after removing every behavioral difference. Which means something is happening at the level of biology, not just habits. Rozanski’s meta-analysis across 229,391 participants found optimists carry 35% lower cardiovascular event risk. Blackburn’s Nobel Prize-winning lab at UCSF found pessimistic attitudes are associated with accelerated telomere shortening. Cortisol suppresses telomerase, the enzyme that rebuilds the protective caps on your chromosomes. So chronic negative expectation literally erodes the structures that keep your cells from aging. The loop runs: pessimistic cognitive style → sustained HPA axis activation → elevated cortisol → telomere degradation → accelerated cellular senescence. Optimists interrupt that loop at the top. They show less emotional reactivity to stressors, faster recovery from acute stress, and they default to reframing threats as challenges rather than catastrophizing. The part nobody talks about from this paper: the authors explicitly state optimism is modifiable. This isn’t a personality trait you’re born with. Cognitive reappraisal training, morning sunlight for cortisol rhythm regulation, deliberate breathing protocols for vagal tone, structured gratitude practices. All of these shift the prefrontal cortex patterns that determine where you sit on the optimism spectrum. A 35% reduction in cardiac events from a trainable psychological variable is a bigger effect size than most supplements on the market. That’s the real story buried in this abstract.

@vasuman Agreed. The tool released, Claude Code Security, doesn't even compete with anything $CRWD does.

The real plot twist isn’t that AI is getting smarter… it’s realizing we’re basically as clueless as a 50GB file on a computer that goes beep beep.

Congrats! GGUF made local LLM inference a reality for millions. That said - the 3 inference engines that defined 2025: vLLM ($800M), SGLang ($400M), llama.cpp (?). Two became VC-backed startups. One joined HF. I hope this isn't another case of a European builder underselling what they built. llama.cpp arguably had the most impact of the three.

The urlscan Threat Research Team uncovered phishing clusters abusing Supabase as a credential-harvesting backend. * Bank phishing * Google/Facebook creds * Crypto targets The new Intel Report has been published on the urlscan Pro platform: urlscan.io/pricing/urlsca…