A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
We are all having to keep revising upwards our assessments of the mathematical capabilities of large language models. I have just made a fairly large revision as a result of ChatGPT 5.5 Pro, to which I am fortunate to have been given access, producing a piece of PhD-level research in an hour or so, with […]
Non-determinism is an issue with patching CVEs
Even before Claude Mythos was announced, there were clear signs that the next era of CVEs would be found by AI models. Big Sleep found a zero-day vulnerability in SQLite, Microsoft Copilot found 20+ CVEs in bootloaders, and DARPA launched AIxCC to incentivize AI CVE discovery. Now, with models like Claude Mythos emerging, there are […]
Discord Incident
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My first in-prod corrupted hard drive problem
I’m a ICT engineer and have been working for 4 years at a nice small biopharma company in Switzerland with lots of really smart people, and most importantly, an awesome IT team :). I’m passionate about software engineering and cybersecurity. At the end of 2023, our backup system detected that there was an issue with […]
What We Lost the Last Time Code Got Cheap
I worked at a startup in Toledo called Heartland Information Services. We provided transcription services to some of the biggest hospitals in the United States, and we weren’t small. Heartland was one of the larger medical transcription organizations in the country, one of the companies at the center of offshore transcription in that era. While […]
AI Is Breaking Two Vulnerability Cultures
A week ago the Copy Fail vulnerability came out, and Hyunwoo Kim immediately realized that the fixes were insufficient, sharing a patch the same day. In doing this he followed standard procedure for Linux, especially within networking: share the security impact with a closed list of Linux security engineers, while fixing the bug quietly and […]
Bjarne Stroustrup: How do I deal with memory leaks? (2022)
Stroustrup: C++ Style and Technique FAQ home | C++ | FAQ | technical FAQ | publications | WG21 papers | TC++PL | Tour++ | Programming | D&E | bio | interviews | videos | quotes | applications | guidelines | compilers Modified February 26, 2022 These are questions about C++ Style and Technique that people […]
The React2Shell Story
On November 30th 2025, I reported a critical remote code execution vulnerability (”React2Shell”) to Meta. On December 3rd, Meta released a fix and public advisory (CVE-2025-55182), urging developers to immediately update. Funnily enough, I didn’t set out to find a vulnerability in React. I just wanted to understand a protocol so I could be better […]
Can LLMs model real-world systems in TLA+?
Editors’ note: AI has been actively pushing the frontier of applied formal methods for computing systems. In this article, the Specula team wrote about their experience of evaluating LLMs on modeling system code, the basic capability for agentic model checking, using TLA+, a specification language for concurrent and distributed systems. The article is the 7th […]
Serving a Website on a Raspberry Pi Zero Running in RAM
2026-05-08 My micro site, zero.btxx.org, is being served to the public internet from a Raspberry Pi Zero v1.3 running Alpine Linux. The best part? It’s diskless and running entirely from memory! My Raspberry Pi Zero silently running in my cold-storage room (with two extra Pis for moral support). Serving zero.btxx.org This is even more impressive […]