Greg Linden

I have come away from my last conference cautiously optimistic about how useful AI can be in reversing malware and extremely scared about all of the new attack surface being created in the use and deployment of AI tools.

I'd add if you are wondering who benefits -- cui bono? -- then you need to be thinking short-term. These are people on the brink. They are just trying to make it through the next six months. What has some chance in their mind of helping them survive? That's the framework to use.

Yes, key is bully psychology: "Trump is very unpopular and growing more so every day. He now faces what seems close to the certainty of losing at least one House of Congress. As his public support ebbs his power and the power to dominate ebb as well. For Trump that is akin to a psychic death."

Kind of wondering if the Trump administration did consider whether Iran would shoot back

A Waymo robotaxi stopped in the middle of a road and blocked an ambulance near a mass shooting site in Austin; Waymo confirms it was en route for rider pickup (Nicole Cobler/Axios)

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The US is making a play for all time worst imperial flame outs right now.

the war is unpopular but it's also illegal but it also doesn't serve any purpose but it also undermines diplomacy but it also is set to produce the opposite outcome as intended but it also already has hundreds dead and threatens more but it also will not make anything better for anyone but it also

This AI-generated podcast network publishes 11,000 episodes a day. It also ripped off media outlets Daily News Now tops search results for local news podcasts with AI content

Rewriting other people's original reporting and clickbait-wrapping the "new" story is not new. But a scumbag operation called "The Daily News Today" is doing it at AI-juiced scale.

Alexios Mantzarlis, one of journalism's expert observers of this stuff, explains here:

How AI is supercharging Russia's online disinformation campaigns Security experts have warned that Western governments are poorly equipped to counter a new frontier of online disinformation.

The AI videos supercharging Russia's online disinformation campaigns
www.bbc.com/news/article...

CENTCOM: we have sunk a ship. Probably Iranian. We're not sure. But it looked evil. We have no idea what we're shooting at but the vibes felt right. We also let AI do our press releases.

1. There is no such thing as "Jamaran Class". Jamaran is the name of a ship in the Moudge Class.
2. The Moudge Class is a class of frigates, not corvettes.
3. Trump turned CentCom into a bunch of amateurs, obviously.

Here is a summary of the major research challenges in using LLMs effectively in open-ended strategic simulations (succinctly summarized by @glinden.bsky.social) bsky.app/profile/glin... Lots of pitfalls depending on exactly how the government is using LLMs (and to be clear, we know little)

International Relations Is Not a Morality Play: What to Expect From the War With Iran The Trump administration has no plan and no path to a good outcome.

War is not a morality play.

Looks like there’s no long-term plan.

Trump ending JCPOA in 2018 set things on a path to war.

Killing Khamenei isn’t regime change.

Iran’s ability to retaliate appears limited, but watch tanker traffic.

And more of my thoughts on the Iran war in @liberalcurrents.com.

As ever, the person delegating their authority to the tool is responsible.

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness and let other people clean up the mess they had made" is what comes to mind here.

U.S. Races to Accomplish Iran Mission Before Munitions Run Out President Trump says the Iran campaign might last a week or longer, but dwindling stockpiles could limit his options.

www.wsj.com/world/middle... planning!? We don’t need no stinkin’ planning

International Relations Is Not a Morality Play: What To Expect From the War With Iran The Trump administration has no plan and no path to a good outcome.

"The most relevant question is not 'is this government bad?' or 'do they deserve it?' The most relevant question is 'will this use of military force make things better, enough to be worth the death and suffering it’ll impose?'

It’s hard to see how this will." www.liberalcurrents.com/internationa...

How to turn off Gemini in Gmail without turning off tabs & other innocuous "smart features." In the general setting tab you'll see a check box to turn on smart features. You don't want to uncheck that. You want to click on "manage workspace smart features" and toggle the features off in the popup.

Netflix actually won by walking away from the WBD bid, collecting a $2.8B termination fee and driving up the price and debt load of the Paramount-WBD merger (Dan Gallagher/Wall Street Journal)

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Block & Tackle: Job Cuts & the AI Narrative Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block (the company formerly known as Square), went on X (the company formerly known as Twitter, which he co-founded) and shared a lower-case employee memo, candidly outlining hi…

I'd go on to point out that lines of code is well known to be a terrible software engineering productivity metric, but I think all this is just an excuse for layoffs the CEO wanted to do anyway. Om Malik has a good recent piece on that:
om.co/2026/02/28/b...

Writing code had never been the bottleneck. In software engineering, the bottleneck is always understanding what code to write and why it matters, making sure new code does what you expect in all cases including adversarial, and maintaining all your code and its nest of interactions over time.

Years ago at the height of pandemic shutdowns I wrote a book about supply chains and why they break.

I'm not going to make any projections about what comes next but, obviously, if this war drags on, it means more inflation.

It's very hard for the public to learn who is behind these accounts, but if any prosecutors did want to take up this case, it would likely be trivially easy to subpoena all the evidence they need.

For anyone needing a summary, Section 6 has key points: "Necessitates reevaluation of traditional
wargaming methodology and interpretation ... LMs show escalatory tendencies ... unfaithful reasoning ... blind spots ... incoherence ... heavily influenced by the system prompt ... sycophancy"

I really wish it weren’t the case but real world events are making my research uncomfortably relevant. We wrote a paper last year that included a section on some of the concerns about using LLMs in open-ended strategic simulations (aka “wargames”). arxiv.org/abs/2509.17192

I believe the word reporters are looking for is assassination.

"Oh shit, I might be held liable for this stuff" is the key. More people need to be worried about that.

This was inevitable. You can't control a bully by giving him what he wants. Complicity is seen as weakness and just leads to demands for more. They were arrogant fools for thinking they could control this.

Here’s the thing: a President openly contemptuous of Congress & willing, unilaterally, to recklessly and illegally commit the US to wars of aggression is an existential threat to the Republic, *regardless* of whether he can ultimately explain his acts to Congress.

The demand must be impeachment.

Again, the folks everyone is truly angry at are all Republicans, especially Mike Johnson & John Thune. But it doesn’t help that the minority party has feckless leaders whose response to total violations of the law & Constitution is to post at the Nazi Bar & call for more laws & constitution-abiding.