That’s right folks, 40% of PE deals between 2018 and 2022 were for software companies, the very same time venture capital fund returns got worse. Venture and private equity has piled into an industry it believed was taking off just as it started to slow down.

The AI bubble is just part of the wider collapse of the software industry’s growth cycle.

This is The Hater’s Guide To The SaaSpocalypse, or “Software As An Albatross.”

All of these entities are acting based on a misplaced belief that the world will cater to them, and that nothing will ever change. While there might be different levels of cynicism — people that know there’re subsidies but assume they’ll be fine once they arrive, or people like Sam Altman that are already rich and don’t give a shit — I think everybody in the AI industry has deluded themselves into believing they have the mandate of Heaven.

The FLARE Learning Hub freely distributes quality reverse engineering and malware analysis educational content from the FLARE team.

The FLARE Learning Hub modules are hosted as web-published Google Docs, which are linked in the respective descriptions below. This repository contains all corresponding artifacts for each module, including lab exercise and demonstration binaries, disassembler databases, and scripts.

Refinements to existing modules and new modules will be published on an ongoing basis.
Available Modules

Malware Analysis Crash Course
The Go Reverse Engineering Reference
An Introduction to Time Travel Debugging

The plot revolves around the political turmoil after the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963. In the novel, a fictitious charismatic character, John Thatch, an engineer, is seeking the nomination for the Republican Party during the 1964 presidential elections. He is described as being contaminated with the "political virus". A handful of political professionals are promoting his nomination, in confrontation with the Party establishment. There exist apparent parallels between Thatch and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., a write-in hero at the New Hampshire primary.

The novel criticizes the socio-political effects on society at large from the use of computers to run massive simulations, which predict the public reaction to certain (proposed) political moves before implementing them. Such simulations make it easy to manipulate the public consciousness.

The "480" in the title denotes the number of groups (by party affiliation, socioeconomic status, location, origin, etc.) that the computer simulation uses to classify the American electorate. The full list of these is reproduced in the Appendix, claimed by the author to be the true list used by the Simulmatics Corporation (real name) in Senator John F. Kennedy's Presidential campaign in 1960. The cover features an IBM 5081 punched card.

ver the past week, I’ve watched left wing commentators on Bluesky, the niche short form blogging site that serves as an asylum for the millennials driven insane by unfettered internet access, discuss the idea that “the left hates technology.” This conversation has centered around a few high profile news events in the world of AI. A guy who works at an AI startup wrote a blog claiming that AI can

Live is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are at some point in a situation where the best you can do is a vegetarian option.

Sometimes it’s not even our hand being forced but us not having the mental strength or priorities to do something: I could just not use WhatsApp because it is owned by Meta but my son’s daycare organizes everything through WhatsApp and do I really want to force my belief on all those very busy parents and caretakers or should I just bite the bullet and use the tool that seems to work for everyone – even though it’s not perfect?

Another thing is that GUIs require a lot more hardware. They require a lot more
computing power. I don't know if any of you worked on the old Lotus 1.0 that
worked on the IBM 8086 machines. Those machines did a lot, but they weren't like
the current machines. The machines that we're working with, the 486s, are similar
to the mainframes that we were working on in the early 1970s, but these machines
are a lot more powerful. All the stuff that goes on the screen, the WYSlWYG, "what
you see is what you get," eats up lots of memory and takes up a lot of computer
resources. I

As I will show, tech oligarchs’ power derives partly from legal entrepreneurship related to corporate governance and partly from the infrastructural character of the functions the largest technology platform firms now perform. It is transnational and multidimensional, producing a wide range of consequences that are impossible for millions (and sometimes billions) around the globe to avoid. And it is personal; tech oligarchs have never been required to trade increased scale for increased accountability.

Knowledge of the outcome makes it seem that events leading to the outcome should have appeared more salient to practitioners at the time than was actually the case. This means that ex post facto accident analysis of human performance is inaccurate. The outcome knowledge poisons the ability of after-accident observers to recreate the view of practitioners before the accident of those same factors. It seems that practitioners “should have known” that the factors would “inevitably” lead to an accident. 2 Hindsight bias remains the primary obstacle to accident investigation, especially when expert human performance is involved.

m skeptical of reasoning models from AI companies. I’m skeptical of what these models claim to be doing versus what they are doing in a technical sense. I’m reminded of an old joke in the humanities: This is not a pipe (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Treachery of Images by Rene Magritte (source: Wikipedia)

The main point of the joke is that the image is not a pipe. It’s an image. Representation is not the thing itself. Representation misleads. Analogies are never perfect, never one-to-one.

The text of a talk I gave on Thursday 12th September as the inaugural “Living Well With Technology” lecture for King’s College London’s Digital Futures Institute.

he hype about the potentials (it’s always future potential, never real current use) of AI has discarded its last cycle (“reasoning models”/”deep research”, both terms being factually untrue and deeply deceiving at best) and moved to a new double whammy of “agentic AI” and “Vibe Coding”.

Now “agentic AI” basically just means that some LLM starts calling random functions somewhere on the net who needs security in their architecture, right? But I want to look at the second part, now called “Vibe Coding”.

To say knowledge is dead is not to mourn, it's to recognize that the traditional architecture of knowing—external, fixed, and authoritative—no longer serves us in a world shaped by generative systems and fluid cognition. We are not abandoning truth but learning to think differently.

We are no longer users of knowledge. We are participants in its emergence.

And what rises in its place may be more powerful than anything we’ve left behind.

Das Problem damit beschreibt das Berliner Weizenbaum-Institut für Digitalisierungsforschung: »Der Begriff ›digitale Souveränität‹ ist aus dem politischen Diskurs nicht mehr wegzudenken. Man ist sich über Parteigrenzen hinweg einig: Digital souverän sein, das ist erstrebenswert und wichtig. Dabei bleibt aber unklar, was es eigentlich genau bedeutet, digital souverän zu sein und wie man diesen wünschenswerten Zustand erreicht.«

This was quite a wild ride, while we should expect everything involving AI to be vulnerable by default, it still surprised us how many things we could find in such a short amount of time. While working on this piece of research, a lot of other people were looking into attacking MCP as well, which scared us, did they find what we found?

Hopefully, these frameworks will get some sane defaults that make it hard for developers to accidentally expose servers. And that vulnerabilities from the browser can be mitigated quickly as well. Until then, we hope you enjoyed this post and would love to hear your thoughts and ideas to take this stuff even further.

The 47th president of the United States may wish he were a king. But in America, the law is king, not the president.

Donald Trump may wish he could dictate his unconscionable global tariffs; dispense with due process and deport whomever he pleases, citizen and not; and vanish away huge swaths of the federal government without check or rebuke. He may wish he did not have to contend with the First and Fourteenth Amendments, the free press, or the Constitution’s birthright-citizenship guarantee. He may wish he could ignore the Constitution’s elections clauses and run America’s elections from the White House. And he may wish he could intimidate the nation’s lawyers and law firms from challenging his abuse of power and commandeer them to do his personal bidding.

But it is these constitutional obstacles to a tyrannical president that have made America the greatest nation on Earth for almost 250 years, not the fallen America that Trump delusionally thinks he’s going to make great again tomorrow.

After these first three tyrannical, lawless months of this presidency, surely Americans can understand now that Donald Trump is going to continue to decimate America for the next three-plus years. He will continue his assault on America, its democracy, and rule of law until the American people finally rise up and say, “No more.”

Last week I was talking to a friend who runs a small construction company. He was telling me about how all the big contractors in town are pushing "smart" building systems that require constant cloud connectivity and subscription services. Meanwhile, he's still using techniques that have worked for decades, tools he can fix himself, materials he understands completely.

"They keep telling me I'm behind the times" he said. "But when their fancy systems go down, who do they call?"

Maybe being "behind the times" isn't always a bad thing. Maybe sometimes it means you still own your tools instead of renting them.

The next time you catch yourself getting defensive about something - really defensive, like you're personally offended that someone would dare question it - maybe pause for a second. Ask yourself: am I defending this because it's actually good for me, or because I'm scared to imagine alternatives?

Because the first step toward freedom is always the same: admitting you might be wearing chains.

Many developers are terrified of losing their jobs for this very reason: AIs sometimes program better than them. And, in my opinion, they are right to be afraid. But I'm more afraid of a world (and not just in IT) where code will depend exclusively on the companies that sell us AIs.

Today, writing code is something free, potentially doable even on a beat-up laptop. But tomorrow? Will we be completely dependent on AIs (even) for this?

I will just have to concede that maybe I’m wrong. I don’t have the skill, or the knowledge, or the energy, to demonstrate with any level of rigor that LLMs are generally, in fact, hot garbage. Intellectually, I will have to acknowledge that maybe the boosters are right. Maybe it’ll be OK.

Maybe the carbon emissions aren’t so bad. Maybe everybody is keeping them secret in ways that they don’t for other types of datacenter for perfectly legitimate reasons. Maybe the tools really can write novel and correct code, and with a little more tweaking, it won’t be so difficult to get them to do it. Maybe by the time they become a mandatory condition of access to developer tools, they won’t be miserable.

Sure, I even sincerely agree, intellectual property really has been a pretty bad idea from the beginning. Maybe it’s OK that we’ve made an exception to those rules. The rules were stupid anyway, so what does it matter if we let a few billionaires break them? Really, everybody should be able to break them (although of course, regular people can’t, because we can’t afford the lawyers to fight off the MPAA and RIAA, but that’s a problem with the legal system, not tech).

I come not to praise “AI skepticism”, but to bury it.

Maybe it really is all going to be fine. Perhaps I am simply catastrophizing; I have been known to do that from time to time. I can even sort of believe it, in my head. Still, even after writing all this out, I can’t quite manage to believe it in the pit of my stomach.

Technisch unterstützt DNS4EU Standards wie DNS over HTTPS und DNS over TLS. Die Server sind strategisch über die EU verteilt, was für schnelle Antwortzeiten sorgen soll. Ein besonderes Augenmerk liegt auf dem Datenschutz: Die IP-Adressen der Nutzer werden vor der Protokollierung vollständig anonymisiert, was die DSGVO-Konformität gewährleisten soll. Aus früheren Berichten weiß ich, dass ein EU-DNS-Dienst allerdings auch für Argwohn sorgt.