ash 🇦🇺

If you're looking at hyperliquid:native up 14% and wondering if you missed it, please consider that 99.9% of Americans do not know it exists. We exist inside a very unique bubble here on CT. We are just getting started.

# Black October For anyone who knows me even somewhat well, it's clear that I am a 99th percentile tech optimist. However, the vibes have shifted for me quite a bit in the last 18 hours, and I feel a moral imperative to share what I'm thinking and feeling with my circles so that everyone can understand, and hopefully take seriously, what's happening right now. I think October 2026 will have many chapters written about it in the history books. You know those scenes in financial movies like Margin Call where someone realizes that they're all fucked, and no one else sees it yet? And that person feels like they're crazy, and then suddenly everyone is pulling an all-nighter in a boardroom and freaking out? Yeah, that's kind of how this is feeling right now in the SF/Bay Area/AI circles. We're 48 hours into what is being called Black October. In the last 2 days there have been several dozen cyber attacks which, in isolation, would each have been the worst to happen in an entire calendar year. Every sector from government to education to big tech and banks is being massively affected, and people are starting to freak out. In a nutshell, what's happened is that frontier AI models have gotten to a point where they are as advanced as the most sophisticated programmers, with one critical difference: they can work 24/7, and you can spin up 10,000 of them with a single command and they'll work together tirelessly until they accomplish their task. The most advanced models today are from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, whose current best technology is so good that they haven't been able to roll it out to everyone yet because of the national security risks it poses. Meanwhile, the best open source models (where anyone can just download the model weights and do whatever they want with them, uncensored) are slightly behind the frontier but still 90-95% as capable. These models, developed primarily in China, are being used by black hat hackers to wreak havoc on the Western capitalist structure. Presumably, this has been part of China's plan the entire time, and we're seeing its implications fall out in real time. In red-pilled AI circles, we've been sharing and reading papers called things like "Situational Awareness" and "AI 2027" for the last year or so, which at the time felt a bit like near-term speculative fiction. They laid out the case for why Artificial General Intelligence (AI smarter than any human at any knowledge task) and Recursive Self-Improvement (models that are able to use themselves to get better) weren't half-baked future ideas anymore, but instead an inevitable outcome of the linear progress that's happening. These papers would then talk about things like "takeoff scenarios," trying to envision how that moment would come to be and what it would be like when it happened. It would either be a "slow takeoff" that would play out over the course of months and quarters, happening subtly and only obvious to a few. Or, it would be a "fast takeoff" where it would pretty much happen instantly, like a bit flipping from 0 to 1. From everything that I can see and am feeling, we are currently experiencing the fast takeoff scenario. Beyond the crazy security vulnerabilities that have come out recently, there have also been massive breakthroughs in life sciences, fundamental computer science, materials science, and pure mathematics that have all landed in the same time frame. While I still firmly believe that AI will be a net positive for humanity, it's more clear to me than ever that the societal and individual risk is very real, and is playing out NOW. For as much conviction as I have that this is happening, the thing that's caused me to lose sleep is that I don't really know what to do about it, or more importantly, what to tell you, reader, to do about it. So, the best I can do is make a few suggestions that have always been a good idea but are more timely now than ever: Set up 2-factor authentication for everything. I use Duo. Use a password manager across your devices. I use 1Password. Get an identity protection app set up. I use Alta. Move your IoT devices to their own network. Claude helped me do this. And last, but certainly not least, if you've been avoiding leaning into AI, see this as a catalyst to wake up and start using it. Don't just use the chat mode version of ChatGPT/Claude; click that Code/Work button and see how easily you can have AI write code to help you with your job. One of the biggest vulnerabilities was in a massively popular programming language called PHP, and the prompt that set it off was literally, "Find vulnerabilities in php." This is an unprecedented time for humanity, but as we've done with many things before, we will prevail so long as we are kind, loving, and open-minded to the world. Much love.

SOON AT THE WHITE HOUSE: President Donald J. Trump highlights the admin's efforts to crack down on foreign criminal networks ​that lure Americans into fraudulent crypto investments.

This is the most serious 48 hours in cybersecurity history. "Black October" they're calling it It seems every *hour* there's a new incident, that in a typical year, would be one of the biggest incidents of the *entire year* SUMMARY OF THE LAST 48 HOURS: YEAR-LEVEL INCIDENTS (In a typical year, these would be among the biggest incidents of the year): 1. PHP2Shell: a hole in the software behind ~70% of websites. Governments took sites offline. 2. eMudhra: the master keys that prove websites are real were cracked. One was the number 4. 3. California: data on every public school student since 2023 stolen, including disability status 4. Railway: hackers stole customers' secret keys from a hosting platform used by millions of developers 5. Zeabur: 321,810 accounts breached. The company is shutting down. 6. LiteLLM: an AI tool downloaded 3.4 million times a day was poisoned with a password stealer 7. GitLab: a 10-out-of-10 severity hole in every version since 2014 8. Cairn: criminals used an AI hacking tool to break into 100+ companies 9. Ahold Delhaize: hackers knocked the owner of Food Lion and Stop & Shop offline 10. Onamae: malware planted on up to 26,739 customer servers in Japan MONTH-LEVEL INCIDENTS (In a typical month, these would be among the biggest incidents): 11. Signal: a bug could leave your mic and camera on after you hang up 12. NGINX: 3 critical holes in software running ~1/3 of websites 13. HTTP/3: a single connection can crash 7 of the 10 web server types tested 14. Plex: hackers breaking into home media servers 15. SafePay ransomware: FBI warns it has hit 600+ critical infrastructure organizations 16. Palo Alto: ransomware gangs breaking in through company firewalls 17. Bullhorn: platform used by 10,000+ companies knocked offline 18. Medi-Cal: 970,000 patients' data stolen 19. WordPress: hackers stole a plugin maker's keys and used them to plant backdoors on websites 20. AOMEI: backup software's update server handed out a backdoor 21. Meta Muse: Meta's AI agent exposed users' personal and business secrets 22. Tor: 333 relays hijacked to steal logins 23. TiDB Cloud: database company's cloud breached Also serious: 24. State Bank of India: India's biggest bank confirms a data breach 25. OVHcloud: hackers slipped a password stealer into a cloud company's official tool 26. Siemens: a software hole being used to spread malware 27. North Korea: state hackers launch a new attack campaign on South Korea

Round 2 for Robinhood Chain is coming, and it will be a violent move. Have you positioned yourself yet?? Let me know if you want to know what assets I’ve bought.

Robinhood DEX volume is waking up again. After weeks of cooling down, daily volume just pushed back above $2B. Attention disappeared, but the chain never did. If volume keeps expanding from here, the next Robinhood rotation could be closer than people think. Position before the crowd returns.

Yeah there ain’t nothin going on up there

Crypto in Australia is broken. Used to take 2 mins to send your money to yourself. Now @Swyftx takes a day!? You can’t be serious