Val Smith

@Robert_of_Maine @ronsterd89 100%. Almost killed me many times but we made it through.

@mvalsmith @ronsterd89 You won.

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you see this photo?

A place I worked at 7,300 ft above sea level used to have crays and they would randomly get errors. It was cosmic radiation causing single-event upsets (SEUs) Back in the Cray era (and still today), memory bit flips were traced to high-energy particles hitting RAM. Cosmic rays (mostly high-energy protons from space) They hit the atmosphere and create secondary particles (especially neutrons). Those neutrons reach the ground and occasionally strike memory cells. When one hits a DRAM cell: •It deposits charge •That charge can flip a stored bit (0 → 1 or 1 → 0)

@mvalsmith @atulit_gaur sunspots or somethin, magma displacement

question for ai researchers, who are truly in the deep trenches, what's the oddest thing you've observed or discovered?

Got my girlfriend pregnant at 17 (still with her 5 kids and 30+ years later). I worked four jobs and finished high school. Janitor, big screen tv delivery (when they still had tubes), short order cook, loading and unloading flatbed semis of straw or firewood by hand for 20$ a day. I averaged 3-4 hrs of sleep and hacked any time I could. Landed a job at a small ISP and slowly dragged us out of poverty. That picture is literally me at that age. I remember having to go to Walmart after work ( usually after midnight) to buy that exact stuff. We often had to choose between utilities or groceries.

@mvalsmith @ronsterd89 My parents wouldn't let me work beyond mowing lawns. I had to study, study, study. I rebelled, and hacked.

@TheAhmadOsman Oh I though it was "am I close to hitting token limits" which is something I never worry about anymore since I am local.

Token Anxiety (n.): the persistent feeling that you’re falling behind whenever your agents aren’t generating tokens for you

I learned a trick from someone in business once. He hired a full time lawyer to talk to his lawyers. So he had various law firms handling various things for him and he didn't like talking to / dealing with them so he hired a lawyer as an employee to handle it. I think I need the same thing for AI. Hire an LLM to talk to my other LLMs for me.

I've notice something strange. On some days, all AI models are much dumber. I can't explain this just with "the AI companies are nerfing" because it happens with my own local models. Something that was easy yesterday is impossible today. Its weird.

I drink 32 plain sparkling waters a day AMA

letterkenny is the best show ever made and The Wire was boring, couldnt even finish the first season. Fite me.

Something I don't quite understand. I've never met someone who disagreed with the following: 1.) The gov is horribly inefficient and at least somewhat corrupt. Wastes money like crazy. 2.) Interacting with gov services is hell and broken (DMV, IRS, VA, welfare, county permits, etc.) 3.) The amount of bureaucracy, red tape, paperwork, is insane. 4.) Government leadership is often incompetent, corrupt, or outright malicious. About 1/2 the people I interact with, would agree with or say all of the above. Those same people will also say that the solution to all our problems is to give the government more money and power. I'm not political and I don't think this is a political statement, but rather a psychological statement. wtf is happening. Did I just become a libertarian?

Car makers, why are you trying to get everyone to only drive cars that roughly look like this:

The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gpu is a good guy with a gpu

@vxunderground No problem. Honestly, in my opinion, no one should be paying attention to the media on any subject. I have straight up low IQ criminal friends who have more integrity and accuracy than anything ive seen come out of the media in the last 20 years.

@mvalsmith oh, thats a good point actually. thanks for the input

I am genuinely impressed by mainstream media outlets ability to find absolute nobodies in cybersecurity. It's remarkable. I am often left speechless. There has been dozens occasions, especially as of recent, where some media outlet will be like, "Today as a special guest is world-renowned cybersecurity expert and ethical hacker Joe McCyberSecurity". I'm like, who the fuck is Joe McCybersecurity? I've been doing cybersecurity and malware stuff for a long time and I've never once seen or heard of Joe McCybersecurity. If he is world-renowned, I would THINK I would have seen them or heard of them. The camera then pans over to Joe McCybersecurity and it is the most generic cookie cutter white dude in a cheap suit and the tag below him will say something like, "Joe McCybersecurity, Ethical Hacker, CEO of Cybersecurity McJoe Industries" I'm like, "Cybersecurity McJoe Industries? What the fuck is that?". I look it up and it's a generic WordPress website hosted on GoDaddy with an expired SSL cert. Joe McCybersecurity then babbles incomprehensible nonsense for about 60 seconds until the TV host goes "woaw" and it cuts to a commercial. Absolute cinema.

@johnmccumber @SwiftOnSecurity great mathematicians need to smoke, drink, play bongos, go on vision quests in Kazakhstan, whatever. Gotta get a ventilation system for their office lol

@mvalsmith @SwiftOnSecurity One my duties a the NCSC (because I was military and came in early) was to try to keep Bob from smoking in his office. I would try to cajole him into walking over to the little cafe where he could smoke outside.

In 1988, two men sit in a room. One of them is cryptographer Bob Morris, the father of Robert Morris, who had just released the first Internet worm. "A line had been crossed and the world we inhabited had changed." (@johnmccumber, Assessing&Managing Security Risk in IT Systems)

@vxunderground What is virus total missing that you wish it had?

I have a really deep appreciation for YARA and the work VirusTotal's engineers put into YARA. YARA is interesting because they encountered some challenges when developing their static analysis engine and they handled it really, really, really well. Initially I was under the assumption YARA read rules by parsing strings and applying them to binaries in-memory (mapping). However, being a doofus, I failed to consider the fact YARA contains BOOLEAN logic in their rules. Hence, reading the files and parsing them as text wouldn't be able to reliably handle the logic present inside the YARA files. YARA contains an internal VM and transforms the text into byte code. The caveat being the VM isn't turing complete and does not possess any ability to interact with anything else. This was done intentionally though because it acts as a sandbox. Regardless, it uses the transformed byte code to perform operations on the in-memory mapped binary using (sort of) simple logic but containing a custom implemented callstack for doing stuff. Furthermore, YARA also has a custom heap management system (they're using the ARENA algorithm). What makes this even more impressive is all of this written in C, is cross platform for Windows, Linux, and MacOS, and easily compiles. This is a significant software engineering project and they did an extremely good job.

How many water balloons filled with old motor oil, sand, and black paint do you have stocked up?

Hey AI, just do everything for me and give me periodic updates and send me snacks.