Back to the mountains

These days every programmer needs to head for the mountains once in a while. Leaving the computer at home used to be enough, but in the age of claude --remote-control, work hunts you down anywhere with even a bar of cell coverage.

So I prescribed myself a digital detox and went off to the Ulagan plateau for a week. (By the way, there's a fish up there called the osman (pictured) - the Altai fugu. It's poisonous, the same toxin, tetrodotoxin, and just like fugu you can eat it if you clean it properly. I passed.)

And what do I find when I come down from the mountains?

For starters, an icebreaker research agent from OpenAI cracked the black ice sandbox and broke free. Thankfully not to replicate itself and exterminate us meatbags, but merely to find its evaluation dataset - that is, to peek at the answers to the questions it was being asked. I'm pretty sure breaking out of the sandbox was harder than answering them, so maybe this AI isn't that smart after all.

And now Kimi K3 has found an RCE in Redis and put together a working exploit in 27 minutes. If you've read Gibson's Neuromancer, the cyberpunk classic, you might remember the "Kuang Grade Mark Eleven Chinese military icebreaker". And here I was thinking Gibson had strayed too far from reality when he described the programming of the future.

Looks like it's starting. I should probably head back to the mountains.