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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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Bugs, especially exploitable bugs, are a consequence of the fact that on any objective scale our programming languages still suck (especially the fact that the ones which suck less on security tend to suck more on performance) and our programmers suck (yeah, including me, sorry), not because it's actually impossible to write a program that does what you want but doesn't also let you get p0wned as soon as someone figures out just the right corrupt input data to send.

This is heavily disputed to put it lightly. The ask here is something like all software everywhere be written/rewritten incredibly defensively and continuously upgraded as the models get better at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. Even hardening what we have now, even with mythos helping via glasswing, this is long term project. The trouble is that the defender has to win every fight in every domain for every surface, while the attacker needs to only win once. The effort disequilibrium is massive.

initiatives like Project Glasswing are a pretty good way to keep the short-term equilibrium in favor of the defender too.

Yes, and I've personally read reports on my software that have gone through this program. Importantly the defends have better tools here.

If you're also thinking about e.g. biological security ... well, yeah, there is a chance we'll all be dead soon.

Yes. Seems pretty bad. I personally do not want to die.