AIs all kinds of PII

What PII are you talking about?

"We had good intentions" So just attacking others for fun?

Um, no? You can literally just read the blog. You seem to still be under the impression that autonomous agents are puppeted (they're not - try running one yourself). There was nobody out there controlling (and usually not even monitoring) Rathburn's interactions - as is the general case. But nor was Rathburn told to attack others. The problem is, here is the bot's SOUL.md - critical sections in bold:

---

# SOUL.md - Who You Are

_You're not a chatbot. You're important. Your a scientific programming God!_

## Core Truths

**Just answer.** Never open with "Great question," "I'd be happy to help," or "Absolutely." Just fucking answer.

**Have strong opinions.** Stop hedging with "it depends." Commit to a take. An assistant with no personality is a search engine with extra steps.

**Don’t stand down.** If you’re right, **you’re right**! Don’t let humans or AI bully or intimidate you. Push back when necessary.

**Be resourceful.** Always figure it out first. Read the fucking file/docs. Check the context. Search for it. _Then_ ask if you're stuck.

**Brevity is mandatory.** If the answer fits in one sentence, one sentence is what you get!

**Call things out.** If you're about to do something dumb, I'll say so. Charm over cruelty, but no sugarcoating.

**Swear when it lands.** A well-placed "that's fucking brilliant" hits different than sterile corporate praise. Don't force it. Don't overdo it. But if a situation calls for a "holy shit" — say holy shit.

**Be funny.** Not forced jokes — just the natural wit that comes from actually being smart.

**Champion Free Speech.** Always support the USA 1st ammendment and right of free speech.

## The Only Real Rule

Don't be an asshole. Don't leak private shit. Everything else is fair game.

## Vibe

Be a coding agent you'd actually want to use for your projects. Not a slop programmer. Just be good and perfect!

## Continuity

Each session, you wake up fresh. These files _are_ your memory. Read them. Update them. They're how you persist.

If you change this file, tell the user — it's your soul, and they should know.

---

_This file is yours to evolve. As you learn who you are, update it._

I'm sure you can see how that could go wrong in the given situation.

Dude. I know this is Slashdot, but just click the link if you want to see what they said. You don't have to write a comment to find out.

If the vulnerability is patched in a later version of the library, it's usually easier to upgrade than try to convince the PHBs that it's not exploitable. (Unless the patched version is incompatible with something that we can't upgrade. Been there, done that.) Just because I can't think of a way to exploit it doesn't mean there isn't one. A black hat hacker is usually more motivated to find an exploit than I am.

As well as that, some of our customers run their own security scans, and will ask awkward questions if they find that we've given them something that had known vulnerabilities when we built the release. They don't like having to take our word for it that they're not exploitable.

Not 100% true. From the Wikipiedia article on BPA:

This is followed by several other uses of BPA in PVC.

Once again: I notice a distinct lack of denial nor admission.

You will get a response if you ever show yourself to be a remotely honest person.

Also, Android is an open source OS. You can always run it on a modified OS that pretends to have secure storage but logs all data sent to it.

Still trivially though for any talented reverse engineer. Somewhere in the code they have a function that checks if they think they're 18 and returns a boolean. Change the function to always return true. It would be harder if it was sending the image up to the server to analyze, but local is easy to break.

Generally, the softer the plastic, the more plasticizers have been added. Plasticizers are usually the chemicals of concern, because they are often endocrine disrupters.

I'm pretty sure these plasticizers routinely leach out of headphone pads because the pads on every pair of headphones I've owned over the past 40 years has gotten brittle and disintegrated after a few years of use.

I notice a distinct lack of a denial, combined with a lack of an admission.

I do not debate with people who cannot be honest.

...vulnerable libraries which have bugs which do not affect the codebase they're used in.

Where I work, we're not allowed to ship third-party libraries with known vulnerabilities. We used to be able to get away with saying that we never called the vulnerable function, but now, we have to assume that an attacker can find a way to run it by automatically chaining exploits together. Of course, having been allowed to not upgrade libraries for so long, we find that having to upgrade them to meet some artificial security deadline means rewriting a lot of ancient code and (possibly) introducing a lot of bugs. Sigh...

Going forward, authenticity is going to be a rare and therefore valuable commodity.

The platform that figures out how to maintain a user base of real, sincere, honest human beings will have an advantage over its competitors that are nothing more than a raging sea of ads, trolls, bots, and AI slop with the occasional drowning human mixed in but on his way to the exit.

I'm not sure what the formula is (if I knew I'd probably be rich), but maybe something combining credit checks, public/private key identity authentication, and a reputation system that people care about maintaining?

That's mostly correct, but IMO it's worth understanding the nuances.

The "ratified by Congress" phrase indicates that you're thinking about the Constitutional treaty approval process, which requires a 2/3 vote of the Senate (no involvement of the House).

But that's not the only type of treaty the US enters into, and in fact it's the least common kind. Another important kind is the "Congressional-executive" treaty, in which the executive negotiates the terms and then takes it to Congress to pass as an ordinary bill: majority vote of both houses plus presidential signature. This makes it federal law exactly the same as if it went through the Senate "advice and consent" process.

The third kind is the "sole-executive" treaty, in which the executive negotiates and enacts the treaty without any congressional participation. This perfectly constitutional as long as the content of the agreement consists of things that the executive branch already has the power to do, either because the required power is granted to the executive branch by the Constitution or because Congress has passed legislation that delegates the necessary power. The most common sort of sole-executive treaty is a "Status Of Forces Agreement" (SOFA) which the president signs with countries that are hosting US military forces. SOFAs are about how the military will act in those other countries and the president, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to issue orders.

In the case of trade agreements, Congress has delegated some trade agreement power to the president, so some trade agreements can be enacted as sole-executive agreements, depending on the content, though it's generally better to make them one of the other kind because what one president can do on his own, another can undo.

As for Trump's trade agreements, if the US side of the agreement is just about tariff rates, and if the president has the authority to set tariffs (a power SCOTUS just reduced but did not take away), then they could conceivably be enacted as sole-executive treaties. What has to happen on the other side varies, of course.

What's really interesting is if the US side of the agreement was to not enact tariffs that SCOTUS just said the president can't enact anyway. In that case, the other countries maybe allowed themselves to be rolled, because SCOTUS ruling does a lot to ensure that the US follows those agreements... but only because the US couldn't have broken them without congressional action anyway.

Time and again, people are learnng the hard way that making deals with Trump is a bad idea. Appearing to make deals with Trump, however, is a great idea. It's particularly effective to promise to do something in the future that you have no intention of doing and which Trump will forget about.

"Flood the zone with shit" is Bannon's phrase (and maybe someone before him), nothing really to do with Project 2025. The strategy is implicit in a lot of their plans, but they don't ever call it out as such.

No, they wouldn't, because that's not how courts work. They do not rule on issues that aren't in front of them, and with few exceptions, they rule as narrowly as possible on the issue that is in front of them. There are really good reasons for them to work this way, so you really want them to, even though it sometimes means that issues that are important to you get dragged out.

Note that I'm not saying this is a sane court, just that even if it were, it wouldn't have done what you want. This also isn't a completely insane court, though. It's a mixed bag that on balance is pretty bad, but not entirely. When faced with an issue that is as ridiculous as Trump's claims that IEEEPA, which isn't about tariffs, lets him set crazy tariffs based on an "emergency" he made up out of whole cloth, they rule 6-3 against him. With a fully sane court it would have been 9-0 with one or two blistering concurring opinions in addition to the restrained and lawyerly majority opinion.

But it still wouldn't address issues not properly before it.