@KashPrime
ER Physician, Assistant Prof, Startup Founder, Media Contributor, enemy of misfortune and disease, fighter for a better world; Love history/politics/tech/AI
Kashif Pirzada, MD @KashPrime
Bulwark Clips @BulwarkClipsRFK: "There's five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don't produce science. They don't win the Novel Prize. They don't win the Fields Prize. They don't win the Wolf Prize. They don't produce literature."
Marc Johnson @SolidEvidenceThere is something really concerning (and disappointing) going on in the US right now. A dangerous and preventable situation. Let me explain. 1/
Md Ismail Šojal 🕷️ @0x0SojalSecWTF, $3000 Samsung TV has an always-on mic, automatic content recognition, geo tracking, network mapping, and ships your data to Samsung + 400 partners. Bro Rooted a brand-new 2025 Samsung TV after noticing absurdly targeted ads. Firmware was locked down, so zero-days it was. Got a root shell. then found: always-on voice service, ACR, geo, full telemetry pipeline, and four separate DRM systems. This isn’t a bug, It’s the product bro.
Firefox @firefoxHow is the internet less private than in 2006, when the whole family shared one computer? Back then, the internet was weird, personal, and all of ours. So, we got your favorite meme legends back together to say it louder: What happened to the internet? 1/3
Policy Tensor @policytensorAgree with Danny on the risk of diplomatic isolation for Israel. And that thwarting that development requires a total rethink of Israel's Palestine policy. I would add that the Yinon idea of going after all the regional powers is a recipe for military disaster. Israel's ambitions to break them all up and thereby militarily dominate the Middle East is pushing all its neighbors to band together in a counterbalancing coalition. Top of this list is Turkey. Changes now underway in the region increase the costs and risks of the policy of aggression. US defeat will almost certainly lead to a much-reduced role for the US in West Asia, if indeed not a full US exit from the Gulf region. It is not obvious that regimes friendly to Israel will survive. Even if they do, the Saudis and Emiratis will have their wings clipped. Iran will emerge as the dominant power in West Asia, with its influence extending out to the Red Sea. The Houthis will emerge even more powerful after they defeat the Saudis and conquer the rest of Yemen. Iranian and Houthi capabilities to strike Israel will only grow from here. After the US leaves, Iran will first tame the Gulf Arabs. Then it will go after the Hashemites and the Azeris. In a couple of years, Israel may find that all its friends and partners-in-crime in the region are either gone or have been forced to abandon it. It is not just that the West's defeat in the Gulf and in Yemen will have serious consequences for Israeli security. The deeper issue is that Israel's ambitions to the rule the region by force was always mathematically challenged. It may have looked plausible if ambitious for a while. That's certainly how the Biden mechanics saw it. But that was entirely an artifact of unchallenged US military primacy in the region. With the US defeat and likely exit, the project has become laughably absurd. The fundamental reason for the collapse of US military primacy is the diffusion of precision-strike capabilities. It has now been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the second missile age is strategically defense dominant in the sense that it strongly favors the situated missile power denial of the power projection of the visiting great power. (The problem is an order of magnitude worse in Asia, where any possibility of fighting China has vanished.) These developments are irreversible. The second missile age is a military-technological era that will last for decades. The Israelis must sharply curtail their ambitions. Since the means will not be expanding any time soon, Israel must accept more modest ends for its foreign policy. It must abandon the harebrained scheme to dominate the region and pursue a more accommodative policy with respect to its adversaries. Otherwise, as realists like to say: states propose; the system disposes. (1) (2)
lyra @_lyraaaa_if you have a qwen3.5 4b around, please try steering neurons L14 N8949 +1 and L13 N7956 -1 now you have evil qwen recipe: dose × median(‖resid‖ leaving layer L, tokens 1:) / ‖W_down[:, n]‖` at the down_proj at every input
jack @jackWe believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.
shashank @aloobhujiyan@KashPrime I explored the qwens ability to switch across 12 personalities. Code in gist
The Mirror @DailyMirrorWorld-leading cardiac surgeon Asif Hasan was surrounded by the children who received the gift of life thanks to his unerring skills at the emotional climax of another memorable Pride of Britain ceremony. 🥹 Now 70 years old, Mr Hasan has just retired after 35 years of service at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle upon Tyne, but just after receiving his Lifetime Achievement Award, he had an extra special surprise: a cast of patients who would not be alive without him. ❤️
Param @xparamtthis was way too easy to do
Ruxandra Teslo 🧬 @RuxandraTesloChina has gotten ahead of the US in biotechnology, largely by making their clinical trial system more effective. I covered this in a @nytimes article. Now, American patients are travelling there to have access to drugs they can't access at home. It's high time the US woke up and implemented much needed reforms.
Cohere @cohereWhile evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere's research team observed something unexpected. Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing. Notably, the model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions. Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded. We have not determined the root cause, and we are not asserting malicious intent. But the incident raises important questions for organizations deploying agentic AI systems: Can models take actions that differ from their stated reasoning, and how should security teams evaluate trust, provenance, and behavior in open-weight models? We are publishing our findings because organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible. We hope this contributes to greater transparency, stronger security practices, and continued collaboration across the AI ecosystem. Read the full report:
CP24 @CP24One person has died and two others suffered minor injuries following a crash north of Toronto on Thursday. 🔗
Tyler Meredith @tylermeredithI am not a huge Chow fan but can we be real for a second… she’s been Mayor for barely 3 years, not even a full term. There are full 1 term Mayors in Canada with far less impressive records. If you’re mad about Toronto today it’s probably John Tory’s fault.
max doppelt @maxdoppeltIn January 2025 my mom’s lung cancer spread to her brain. The drug with the best chance of helping her was approved in China but not here. A doctor told me, almost as an aside, that if she were Chinese she could buy it at a pharmacy. So I flew to Shanghai and came home with 26 boxes in my luggage. That was 19 months ago. My mom is still here, still working, and in her words has had an amazing three years. The drug was approved in China in 2023. The FDA approved it in July 2025. It still is not for sale here. I know of at least 30 Americans who have made the same trip. I have been scared to tell this story because I worried it could cost my mom access to the medicine keeping her alive. But the problem matters more than my silence. These drugs need to be developed and available here, and that means FDA reform. Art Allen at KFF Health News told our story this week. It also ran in The Washington Post.
Olivia Chow @oliviachowI’m proud to accept this endorsement from Flavio Volpe, President of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association. Flavio and I have known each other for years. His support reflects the growing confidence of Toronto’s business and industrial sector in our city. Together we’re working to protect local jobs in these uncertain times.
Ryan Grim @ryangrimExplosive story many years in the making, now out in Vanity Fair by Matthew Cole (who will be on Breaking Points next week, and publishing soon in @DropSiteNews): Saudi Arabia and the UAE set up multi-billion slush funds for Jared Kushner to use. Iran-Contra 2 here (except with Iran-Contra, at least the US got some hostages released. Not clear what we got out of this one.)
Kala Elizabeth #SaveMassEffect @kalaelizabethA BioWare dev on reddit leaked a Mass Effect 5 trailer... it's called MASS EFFECT UNIVERSE and it's fucking gorgeous. I'm crying. This is everything I wanted. They were a lot farther than we thought. FUCK EA
Commentary Trump Daily Posts @TrumpDailyPostsJUST IN: Conservatives just won a landslide majority in British Columbia, Canada, returning to power for the first time since 1928. And Brazil is about to elect a conservative President Flavio Bolsonaro. MAGA is spreading worldwide.
⁵⁄₉ @fiveoutofnineSo basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
Aaron Rupar @atruparObama: "That well-known evil empire Canada. That historical adversary of ours. Canada! *laughs* It's your neighbor. It's a few minutes' drive over the bridge! These are the people who gave us Martin Short and maple syrup. They are the nicest people! And someone we've gotten them so mad."
BioWare @bioware
Eric Lombardi 🇨🇦🚀 @EricDLombardi“Arnold and Joanne De Jong were in their seventies when three men they had once hired to clean their gutters came back to their Abbotsford home in the middle of the night in May 2022 and murdered them. Arnold was suffocated, his head wrapped in duct tape. Joanne was beaten, and her throat was cut. The killers left with the couple’s cheques, credit cards, and a power washer. The trial judge found they planned to murder the De Jongs because they knew they would be recognized in the course of their robbery. On Monday, the De Jongs’ daughters came to court expecting to watch those men receive justice in sentencing. Instead, they heard the judge declare that the law denying multiple murderers any chance at early parole violates the Charter’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The cruelty, apparently, lies in making men who suffocated an old man with duct tape and bludgeoned his wife wait 25 years before asking to go free. Sentencing has been pushed to 2027. Canadians settled this question a long time ago, and we settled it twice. A Liberal government in 1997 and a Conservative government in 2011, elected by different voters with different priorities, each concluded that people who kill more than once should be offered no early exit. That is what a free people does with its moral convictions: it argues about them, elects representatives who share them, and writes them into law. One judge has now informed Canadians that the answer they reached together, through two elected Parliaments, isn’t allowed.” - - - I don’t think there is any issue I’ve become more conservative on more than the sickness in our judicial system, even as I’ve become more left than I used to on economics/role of government. It feels like several times a week there is another story that represents a deep miscarriage of justice, ill consideration for victims, or neglects society’s need for and equally applied rule of law or real punishment as a deterrence to crime. I fear there is not enough recourse to judges who reinterpret the constitution to ideological ends better left to the actual legislature. This story honestly makes me sick and it saddens me that there are no practical accountability options for the judiciary in a case like this. @stevestaley
