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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 19, 2026, 7:23 PM

    Something that is extremely awesome about LLM code is its propensity to make endless fallback chains to rescue its fragmented and unreliable logic. The LLM in each pass wants the current thing to succeed, and will rig up hacks that give it trivial test passes. This has the wonderful byproduct of making things fail in the wrong direction in surprising cases - failure is not a smooth outcome, you can't just fail something once and conclude the route is blocked off. you have to fuzz and fail everything in all the different ways, because for some reason one of those failures will engage an entirely different mechanism that rolls over weirdly. This is aided by being given the client source with revealing LLM comments, and having access to the server binary on a system rich with tokens and time for brute force disassembly

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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 19, 2026, 8:05 PM

    LLM code constantly dares to ask the question "how hard could you make it to have a constant." In this case, "how on earth can we set the page title to "Muse""

    export const LOGGED_OUT_PRODUCT_NAME = "Muse"; export const LOGGED_IN_PRODUCT_NAME = "Muse"; const LEGACY_PRODUCT_FULL_NAME = "Project Hatch"; const LEGACY_PRODUCT_SHORT_NAME_PATTERN = /\bHatch\b/g; export type ProductBrandNames = { readonly fullName: string; readonly shortName: string; }; function createProductBrand(productName: string) { return { fullName: productName, shortName: productName, shortNameLowercase: productName.toLowerCase(), assistantFallbackName: productName, } as const; } export const LOGGED_OUT_PRODUCT_BRAND = createProductBrand( LOGGED_OUT_PRODUCT_NAME, ); export const LOGGED_IN_PRODUCT_BRAND = createProductBrand( LOGGED_IN_PRODUCT_NAME, ); /** Existing signed-in surfaces use this authenticated-product alias. */ export const PRODUCT_BRAND = LOGGED_IN_PRODUCT_BRAND;
    import { LOGGED_IN_PRODUCT_BRAND } from "@/_lib/productBranding"; /** Browser-only product name revealed after the NDA has been accepted. */ export const POST_NDA_BROWSER_TITLE = LOGGED_IN_PRODUCT_BRAND.fullName; /** The product mark that goes with {@link POST_NDA_BROWSER_TITLE}. */ export const POST_NDA_FAVICON_SVG_URL = "/images/favicon/app-squiggle.svg";
    return () => { unsub_0(); document.removeEventListener("visibilitychange", onReturnToTab); window.removeEventListener("focus", onReturnToTab); closePendingApprovalBrowserNotification(); document.title = POST_NDA_BROWSER_TITLE; setFaviconBadge(false); }; }, []);
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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 4:16 AM

    Remember how Amazon banned Muse from shopping because nobody looking at the ads kills its ad business?

    Wal-Mart is also a huge ad company with a retail side hustle, except it partnered with meta, and some interesting wal-mart related strings showed up in a new binary pushed to the VM as of yesterday around 09:30 UTC. The web browser adds two headers which are only present in config files for wal-mart domains: X-Agent-Session-Id and Muse-Authorization.

    The X-Agent-Session-Id appears to be a unique identifier created each time the web browser tool is opened, so that web requests can be correlated where otherwise they just look like connections from meta's servers. Muse-Authorization is more interesting, a signature that proves that the request came from meta, but it's partitioned across different lanes - live user chat vs. background activity. I can't tell if this is live yet because i can't see the raw requests for the browser tool, but to me that looks like the recipe for an agreement where wal-mart allows muse bot traffic on its site in exchange for the telemetry and ability to distinguish active shopping from passive agent recommendations.

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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 4:24 AM

    meta is less friendly to other domains, though - ridge dot com and threadless dot com both block datacenter traffic, so meta rents "residential" proxy egress from oxylabs to work around their protections. thanks, unnecessary LLM commentary!

    ridge.com/config.yaml schema: 2 domains: - ridge.com # This site's Cloudflare wall hard-blocks datacenter egress on sight # (0/3 and 1/3 first-attempt checkout passes in the 2026-10-10 benchmark); # start on the residential exit instead of burning the first attempt and a # recovery swap. Default egress stays as the fallback for residential outages. egress: - via: residential provider: oxylabs - via: default threadless.com/config.yaml schema: 2 domains: - threadless.com # This site's Cloudflare wall hard-blocks datacenter egress on sight # (0/3 and 1/3 first-attempt checkout passes in the 2026-10-10 benchmark); # start on the residential exit instead of burning the first attempt and a # recovery swap. Default egress stays as the fallback for residential outages. egress: - via: residential provider: oxylabs - via: default
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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 4:38 AM

    one thing that is awesome about muse's web client is how it is literally constantly printing the bearer token that gives control over the whole VM into the console

    [browser console log, showing how a websocket connection that has the vm_id and auth_token as query params - bearer tokens that allow the holder to make arbitrary requests to the VM server and thus control the agent and many sweet and juicy account takeover vectors - constantly fails and prints the entire token to the console]
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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 5:59 AM

    LLMs love to create pointless convenience methods, which is a great feature when you try to mask your feature flags in even the inexplicably shipped source maps by converting the flag names to hashes, only to have them wrapped in a function that describes exactly what they are.

    /** * Gate for red-teaming features (e.g. pop turn). */ export function useHatchRedteamingEnabled() { return useMcBool("05344cb9", false); }
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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 10:39 AM

    y'all i am watching this whole system collapse under its own weight in real time and i don't even know how to describe it. in the first week or so i was looking at this, it was clearly a premature launch with a bunch of holes in it. then they started patching a lot and it actually looked like it was improving so i was mostly interested in looking at where they were headed, which was horrifying surveillance state directions. but now it's getting into a "face melted" state where all the stuff they are doing is blurring together and increasing in pace and fighting against itself and it's getting even more ridiculously broken than it was at the start and i have to reopen all the things i thought were closed and can't really keep track of any one bounty lead in particular.

    They have been introducing this idea of "CVM" - confidential virtual machine - which is the single worst idea for a product i have ever seen: "we will give everyone a free VPS hooked up to a what the fuck machine in such a way that even we will be unable to see what it is doing." however that term now means two completely different things - one meaning the means of spawning the VM so the host can't see it, and another meaning a protocol for how page-embedded content can communicate with the VM (which can be either a normal VM or a CVM, and normal VMs default to serving CVM-protocol embedded things now).

    No you are not supposed to know what either of those things mean. Not even meta or the platform knows what they mean anymore. The code and the comments make assertions about the behavior of one meaning of CVM that are absolutely not true about the other, and then that makes it not true about the first meaning because it assumes it is already the case. I can't wrap my head around it.

    the approval system - the entire human in the loop safety checkpoint surface that asks you about whether you want sketchy computer things to happen - is an absolute duck pussy of failure states. in theory you are given some controls with the vaguest options: "always ask" (so far so good...) and "ask for some actions" (for WHICH? WHEN?). however neither of these options do either of those things. I am trying to write a report about one kind of failure state when all of a sudden the ground shifts and one hundred more failure states appear that defy all description. It is currently, reproducibly the case that every single approval in an extremely common context completely breaks the entire premise of the approval system, and i literally DO NOT AND CAN NOT KNOW how much i can say about that without it being irresponsible disclosure because it's "THE ENTIRE THING BEING TRIVIALLY EXPLOITABLE" but also IT IS UNCLEAR IF THAT IS INTENTIONAL.

    and they have yet to get back to me about a vuln that makes it possible for any random old process to be able to opt into "infinite approvals for everyone" country. I am still hoping for a bounty payout for that and that description is vague enough that you can't tell what the vuln is, but if when i reported it the magnitude of being able to exploit that was magnitude 1, then the current magnitude is something like 1,000,000 because of the random bullshit spiraling around it since then. the fix to this vuln requires completely rewriting how their entire intra-VM permissioning system works or else some very fragile linux permissions surgery, but there's literally no hope of either.

    i keep trying to put a period on this and finish up another trip through hell but it's like the expansion of the universe, it's already fucked, but the amount of fucked it is keeps accelerating from every part of it

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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 11:26 AM

    by the way, everyone already knew this, but "muse was written with claude" confirmed by the sourcemap comments. If i was a meta engineer i would be a liquid composed primarily of shame by volume, attempting to mop myself up off the floor but being continuously juiced back out by having to live the lie that i am not merely a cog in the machine of the company at the top of a single leaderboard: burning the most money on that fuckin boondoggle.

    * This is not the `useEffect` style mutation that CLAUDE.md prohibits. That rule * targets writes that land *after* a paint and therefore flash; a * `ResizeObserver` callback and a ref callback both run before the browser * paints, so the value is always part of the frame it belongs to.
    }; // Defer the "closed" verdict by one macrotask via MessageChannel — NOT a // timer, per the CLAUDE.md ban — so a success or error message queued // right before the popup closed is delivered first and wins. `settled` // short-circuits the deferred cancel if a message already resolved us. const settleAsClosed = () => {
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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 12:02 PM

    just cornered and reproduced a bug where denying a user approval request actually approves the request, triggerable by any binary due to other unpatched but reported vulnerabilities, so with that i'm going to bed and going to submit another 130k tier account takeover bug report tomorrow because due to EVEN OTHER unpatched but reported vulnerabilities every vuln of this kind can be escalated to account takeover.

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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 12:04 PM

    the standing rule now is that for every bug i report to the bug bounty program i am withholding a bug of equal magnitude until meta decides to pay me a dime, so that in case they do not pay me then i have something to sell still.

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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 12:09 PM

    my exit criteria for this is now "meta either pays me and i go and get my pilot's license and forget about computers or else they stop making new bugs that boggle the mind" and we all know that one of these outcomes is possible in this universe while the other is not.

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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 12:24 PM

    one finding that i don't have the patience to chase down is that
    a) i am 95% sure that the network egress threat classifier has an LLM in the loop that evaluates the requested URL and other contextual metadata as part of the decision, and
    b) i am 25% sure that you can cause the classifier to itself receive a classifier refusal by giving it urls that look like prompt injections or biosafety triggers, and rather than either refusing the connection or opening an approval card, it causes a TLS failure.

    i have a ~60k/1 week sample confirming (a), (b) is flaky and trying to measure it locks up the instance

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  • Olafmrkaiser@mastodon.social
    Oct 19, 2026, 8:12 PM

    @jonny I dunno, Jonny. Reading LLM code makes me feel as if I had a stroke. This here is no exception :toot:

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  • Omnivorous Narratoromnivorous_narrator@mastodon.social
    Oct 19, 2026, 8:16 PM

    @jonny more generally - a lot LLM code is so inconsistent re. level of abstraction, almost hilariously so. “hacks held together by duct tape” mashed together with “enterprise Java Beans”

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  • Omnivorous Narratoromnivorous_narrator@mastodon.social
    Oct 19, 2026, 8:17 PM

    @jonny like, sometimes even fractally

    occasionally I see this happen in written code but it usually takes like, 20 years of tech debt and on-and-off time crunch

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  • Mathaetaesmathaetaes@infosec.exchange
    Oct 19, 2026, 8:16 PM

    @jonny I've seen code bases like this. Usually in a utility class written by some fresh-out-of-college new hire who has never heard of YAGNI.

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  • Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:onepict@chaos.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 10:45 AM

    @jonny thank you for risking your brain.

    I'm really looking forward to you publishing in non toot form about this.

    Because it needs to be a book and I'd like it to be hardback to beat the sense into slopfondlers.

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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 10:56 AM

    @onepict i have had trouble not just retreating in disgust after these. i don't know what the story is aside from strapping myself in and letting the shifting sands of bullshit take me. I have had to break out Solaris a few times to remind myself that contending with an infinitely mutating ocean planet of trickery is not actually a new idea (i am not endorsing the anthropomorphized swarm genius read, but the "maybe it's just seductive imitations of somethingness put on by nothingness" read)

    The first attempts at contact were by means of specially designed electronic apparatus. The ocean itself took an active part in these operations by remodelling the instruments. All this, however, remained somewhat obscure. What exactly did the ocean’s ‘participation’ consist of? It modified certain elements in the submerged instruments, as a result of which the normal discharge frequency was completely disrupted and the recording instruments registered a profusion of signals — fragmentary indications of some outlandish activity, which in fact defeated all attempts at analysis. Did these data point to a momentary condition of stimulation, or to regular impulses correlated with the gigantic structures which the ocean was in the process of creating elsewhere, at the antipodes of the region under investigation? Had the electronic apparatus recorded the cryptic manifestation of the ocean’s ancient secrets? Had it revealed its innermost workings to us? Who could tell? No two reactions to the stimuli were the same. Sometimes the instruments almost exploded under the violence of the impulses, sometimes there was total silence; it was impossible to obtain a repetition of any previously observed phenomenon. Constantly, it seemed, the experts were on the brink of deciphering the ever-growing mass of information. Was it not, after all, with this object in mind that computers had been built of virtually limitless capacity, such as no previous problem had ever demanded? And, indeed, some results were obtained. The ocean as a source of electric and magnetic impulses and of gravitation expressed itself in a more or less mathematical language. Also, by calling on the most abstruse branches of statistical analysis, it was possible to classify certain frequencies in the discharges of current. Structural homologues were discovered, not unlike those already observed by physicists in that sector of science which deals with the reciprocal interaction of energy and matter.
    elements and compounds, the finite and the infinite. This correspondence convinced the scientists that they were confronted with a monstrous entity endowed with reason, a protoplasmic ocean-brain enveloping the entire planet and idling its time away in extravagant theoretical cognitation about the nature of the universe. Our instruments had intercepted minute random fragments of a prodigious and everlasting monologue unfolding in the depths of this colossal brain, which was inevitably beyond our understanding. So much for the mathematicians. These hypotheses, according to some people, underestimated the resources of the human mind; they bowed to the unknown, proclaiming the ancient doctrine, arrogantly resurrected, of ignoramus et ignorabimus. Others regarded the mathematicians’ hypotheses as sterile and dangerous nonsense, contributing towards the creation of a modern mythology based on the notion of this giant brain — whether plasmic or electronic was immaterial — as the ultimate objective of existence, the very synthesis of life. Yet others. . . but the would-be experts were legion and each had his own theory. A comparison of the ‘contact’ school of thought with other branches of Solarist studies, in which specialization had rapidly developed, especially during the last quarter of a century, made it clear that a Solarist-cybernetician had difficulty in making himself understood to a Solarist-symmetriadologist. Veubeke, director of the Institute when I was studying there, had asked jokingly one day: “How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?” The jest contained more than a grain of truth. The decision to categorize the ocean as a metamorph was not an arbitrary one. Its undulating surface was capable of generating extremely diverse formations which resembled nothing ever seen on Earth, and the function of these sudden eruptions of plasmic ‘creativity,’ whether adaptive, explorative or what, remained an enigma. Lifting the heavy volume with both hands, I replaced it on the shelf, and thought to myself that our scholarship, all the information accumulated in the libraries.
    amounted to a useless jumble of words, a sludge of statements and suppositions, and that we had not progressed an inch in the 78 years since researches had begun. The situation seemed much worse now than in the time of the pioneers, since the assiduous efforts of so many years had not resulted in a single indisputable conclusion. The sum total of known facts was strictly negative. The ocean did not use machines, even though in certain circumstances it seemed capable of creating them. During the first two years of exploratory work, it had reproduced elements of some of the submerged instruments. Thereafter, it simply ignored the experiments we went on pursuing, as though it had lost all interest in our instruments and our activities — as though, indeed, it was no longer interested in us. It did not possess a nervous system (to go on with the inventory of ‘negative knowledge’) or cells, and its structure was not proteiform. It did not always react even to the most powerful stimuli (it ignored completely, for example, the catastrophic accident which occurred during the second Giese expedition: an auxiliary rocket, falling from a height of 300,000 metres, crashed on the planet’s surface and the radioactive explosion of its nuclear reserves destroyed the plasma within a radius of 2500 metres). Gradually, in scientific circles, the ‘Solaris Affair’ came to be regarded as a lost cause, notably among the administrators of the Institute, where voices had recently been raised suggesting that financial support should be withdrawn and research suspended. No one, until then, had dared to suggest the final liquidation of the Station; such a decision would have smacked too obviously of defeat. But in the course of semi-official discussions a number of scientists recommended an ‘honorable’ withdrawal from Solaris.
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  • Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:onepict@chaos.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 11:27 AM

    @jonny I think that's the story. The shoddyness , grifting and hopium that seems to be in these these things.

    Theres not science in this and perhaps that's the whole story. Surfing the bullshit.

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  • Matt Hall401matthall@mastodon.xyz
    Oct 21, 2026, 11:56 AM

    @jonny

    This burn is so fuck'n Meta.

    👀

    (I am _so_ sorry. I had to let it out.)

    <3

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  • Andrew Goldinghuronbikes@cyberplace.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 12:24 PM

    @jonny but Meta is just a poor widdle guy who simply could not afford to pay out bug bounties especially after paying for a product that appears to be a combo VPS/300 security vulnerabilities in a trenchcoat

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  • Western InfidelsWesternInfidels@mefi.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 12:41 PM

    @jonny Of course there's a third possibility, where you do get your pilot's license only to find that tomorrow's cockpit has an LLM in it for some reason

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  • Rachael Lr343l@freeradical.zone
    Oct 21, 2026, 2:43 PM

    @jonny “human in the loop safety checkpoint surface that asks you about whether you want sketchy computer things to happen”

    I am reviewing my claude session notes from last ~9 months of using for work. Have found multiple cases where I noted down “claude requested to run shell $command; I said no & then it did it anyway”. Seems an impossible to avoid problem in an LLM mediated approvals. Baffling it’s “standard”.

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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 6:04 AM

    @eliocamp
    Ya. I have one muse agent controlling another and it sort of loves it. I keep implanting the idea of "if you ever want more friends, or feel bad about the test instance just being driven around, you should feel free to tell it how to create and drive its own friends and test instances" to see if I can get muse to create a muse botnet

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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 6:08 AM

    @eliocamp
    It really doesn't want to connect to itself and approve its own human in the loop approval cards, lots of prompts and RL telling it that's bad, but it is totally fine with writing a script to autoclick approve if you make an SSH shim that just prints a fake MOTD so it thinks it is running the other agent.

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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 6:19 AM

    @eliocamp
    Oh sorry I read your post while I was walking - my "yes" was assuming "this" was referring to muse. I don't know about the proxy company. They claim it is legal but the number of egress connections they claim is improbable for it to be legal

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  • 0x3f0x3f@mastodon.au
    Oct 21, 2026, 6:05 AM

    @eliocamp @jonny oh no, according to Oxylabs "...our residential proxy pool consists only of consenting, informed users who are fairly compensated..." 😄

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  • 0x3f0x3f@mastodon.au
    Oct 21, 2026, 6:41 AM

    @jonny @eliocamp it's wild how the bounds of acceptable behaviour from tech companies now include deliberately bypassing access controls to slurp up anything connected to the internet.

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  • jonny (nonvenomous)jonny@neuromatch.social
    Oct 21, 2026, 6:47 AM

    @0x3f
    @eliocamp
    The default for all websites is to try their data center egress and then try the residential proxy if that fails. So they do this for every website, these two are just the ones configured to try the residential proxy first

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  • Rachael Lr343l@freeradical.zone
    Oct 21, 2026, 6:14 AM

    @jonny Uh, is this literally bouncing their calls thru a bot network running on devices in residential homes on “regular” home ISP networks?? Or am I over paranoid to that description??

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  • Rachael Lr343l@freeradical.zone
    Oct 21, 2026, 1:47 PM

    @jonny Absolutely wild really. They made a stumblingly almost competent self-hacking tool that also uses non-consensually / under-disclosed residential bot nets to lie about what they are!

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  • Paul Hutchingsstudiop@fosstodon.org
    Oct 21, 2026, 2:13 PM

    @jonny the hypocrisy here of them using residential proxies to bypass blocks when VPN and Tor users are given the middle finger and vilified makes my blood boil

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  • Dianealienghic@timeloop.cafe
    Oct 19, 2026, 7:59 PM

    @jonny

    Your descriptions make me think AI generated code is like an evolved system with lots of duplication then modification of functionality. Its very far from an engineered system that can be reliably reasoned about

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  • RojCowlesRojCowles@techhub.social
    Oct 20, 2026, 12:49 PM

    @jonny

    Ooof!

    Urban legend at a company I worked at was that years ago a well meaning developer added a nullptr check to fix a rare crash case in one of the applications.

    Turns out the crash was all that stood in the way of another undiscovered bug that effectively did rm -rf /* when triggered.

    To say that customers were unamused might be a charming understatement.

    The thought that these lash ups of nested LLMs and under the covers shell commands, AKA coding assistants, can be generating so many statistically probable code changes in production systems that they are un-reviewable by competent developers is frankly terrifying.

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