What is an agent? It’s an action-first intelligent system that tries to
1. Minimize its surprise
2. Achieve homeostasis
5. Achieve its preferred observations
It does so by…
Urgent news: a person with Claude discovers how routing table and ISPs work.
Stay tuned. More to come.
While I reverse engineering my Wi-Fi router, Claude found f*cking scary privacy problem...
Internet provider sees every site I open and can change anything in my router without asking me
here's what else it found and 5 steps to fix yours:
what Claude found:
• my router keeps a list of 29 devices that ever touched my Wi-Fi and see when new connects
• my provider can reach into my router any time, Claude found channel hiding in my connection name, and I have no way to turn it off
• every site I opened was looked up though my provider in plain text
• my provider's app on my TV box kept sending data while TV was off
• and much more...
and it's not just me:
- about 1 billion devices have this remote channel (University of Innsbruck)
- researhers pulled 2 billion+ router locations from Apple's Wi-Fi database, accurate to meters (University of Maryland)
how to fix yours:
1. install repo below (It also helps improve Wi-Fi speed) and send Claude Code a photo of your router
2. change admin password from the one on the sticker
3. turn on encrypted DNS, your provider stops seeing your lookups
4. turn on Private Wi-Fi Address, your phone stops showing its real ID to every router
5. add _normal to your Wi-Fi name, Apple and Google stop adding it to their location maps
Do it as soon as possible. Then read article below on how to find these problems in other tech:
Day 1 of explaining vocabulary that defines AI
Intelligence.
is an ability of a system or an organism to adapt to changing environments.
Yes, PID controller is intelligent.
something i learned about ADHD people
they are not inattentive. they are hyper attentive. when attention jumps easily the compensation mechanic is to hyper focus on the the thing that matters.
everything else stops existing for that moment.
that’s why you have situations like:
I didn’t realize how widespread the idea of attention was before the famous 2017 paper.
Bahdanau et al. (2014), then intra-attention, decomposable attention, and self-attentive embeddings.
Problem was, all previous attention ideas were applied to RNNs and CNNs.
Day 4 of explaining neuroscience for AI using terrible memes 🧵
Sense of quantity
1/6
There are several patches in the cortex, each is few square cm in size, less than 1% of total area,which do this task among other things
Most prominent one is called intraparietal sulcus
5/6
The coolest thing is that this sense of quantity works irrespective of shape, size, or placement of the objects. It’s abstract
Crucially, this sense is logarithmic. Recognizing 2-3 objects is instant, since more neurons are allocated to that quantity. 20? requires thought
Day 3 of explaining neuroscience and AGI using terrible memes 🧵
1/
in 2014 study (Sadtler et al) monkeys learned to move a cursor with their brain
BUT that only worked if brain to cursor mapping patterns were already close to spontaneous activity present in their cortex
4/
this happens because of things like GABA-releasing interneurons that prevent easy rewriting of established circuits
or perineuronal nets, a sugar-protein mesh that locks those circuits in place
btw, prozac (fluoxetine) degrades these nets in adults, ramping up plasticity