Thomas Ptacek
Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.
Thomas Ptacek did not write this page. We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it.
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19 Aug 2026
Our reading
Their wordsI can't say enough how excellent a coding agent is at customizing Chrome with extensions. A huge productivity win. Every plugin interface you've ever blown off is now trivially usable.
- 9 days earlier
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10 Aug 2026
Our reading
Their wordsIt seems pretty clear that the only thing data center opposition is doing is pushing data center construction to the (many) places in America that won't regulate energy or pollution. Weird thing to pat oneself on the back for.
- 4 days earlier
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6 Aug 2026
Our reading
Their wordsProgressive slopulism really fucked us with this "Private equity is buying up all the houses" argument. It's a fractally stupid concern AND an excuse for deferring zoning reform.
- 2 weeks earlier
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22 Jul 2026
Our reading
Their wordsI genuinely believe that if you took an open weights model from 2025 and built a pentest harness for it, it could do this kind of sandbox escape and scan/hack in most networks. This is only surprising because you assume OpenAI has sounder sandboxes.
- 14 months earlier
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2 Jun 2025
Our reading
Their wordsAll progress on LLMs could halt today, and LLMs would remain the 2nd most important thing to happen over the course of my career.
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2 Jun 2025
Our reading
Their wordsLLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google.
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2 Jun 2025
Our reading
Their wordsThe code in an agent that actually “does stuff” with code is not, itself, AI. This should reassure you. It’s surprisingly simple systems code, wired to ground truth about programming in the same way a Makefile is.