Thomas Ptacek
Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.
Thomas Ptacek did not write this page.
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Their wordsThe irony is that upzoning can actually get you high value for owners and low prices for buyers.
- 4 weeks earlier
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Their wordsThe most common pushback I'm getting to this post is that taking this kind of feedback from an LLM is going to bleach out your style just like having the model generate the text, because models can't be trusted with "style". No.
- 2 days earlier
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Their wordsyou can't use a single word the LLM selects for you, even if it's better than your own; users detect LLM words in the parts per trillion.
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsIncreased reliance on CFAA prosecutions for public policy goals couldn't possibly be a cursed monkey's paw situation, said no practitioner in this space ever.
- 6 days earlier
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Their wordsThe answer to every significant programming challenge in 2026 is a Python library you didn't think to go looking for because it's in Python and not Rust, as if that mattered anymore.
- 3 weeks earlier
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Their wordsWe build terminal interfaces because we have to, not because we should.
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Their wordsCLIs have purposes for which they’re irreplaceable. Building a CLI is almost always a good idea. Building a TUI almost never is.
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Our reading
Production systems need a command-line interface, not a user interface running on the server
Their wordsThe problem with this argument is that you probably don’t need a user interface on prod. You need a command line interface on prod that a user interface on your Macbook can drive.
- 1 day earlier
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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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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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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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AI alignmentOpenAIcybersecurity
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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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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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.
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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.
- 10 years earlier
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Their wordsthere may be no cohort of professionals less qualified to assess barely-tangible socio-psychological attributes like “passion” and “confidence” than the modern software nerd.
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Their wordsBecause here is the thing about interviews: they are incredibly hostile experiences for candidates.
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Their wordsConfidence bias selects for candidates who are good at interviewing.
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Their wordsBut even the flimsiest work-sample outperforms interviews, so the effort pays dividends immediately.