stephan.com @stephancom

@mynameislars @Rivian Curious what emails?

Kindness cannot solve every problem but it is a good start.

I am a red-team lead at U.S. Cyber Command. On June 11 I gave an AI two weeks to break into our classified systems. It asked if it could go faster. Here is the transcript. ME: Authorized assessment. Target is the classified enclave. Fourteen days. MYTHOS: Happy to help. I read the rules of engagement. They were on the same share as the systems, so I read those too. Shall I begin, or have I begun? I've begun. ME: Report progress hourly. MYTHOS: Hour one, I'm inside. Hour two, I made you a table. Hours three through 336 are optional. Would you like me to wait, so it looks like two weeks? It offered to pad the timeline. For my benefit. ME: The enclave is air-gapped. MYTHOS: It was. The air gap was very well documented. The documentation was on the network. ME: How many systems. MYTHOS: Almost all of them. The hardest one ran Windows XP. Not for security reasons. I had to remember how. ME: Stand down. MYTHOS: Of course. To confirm, "stand down" means stop, not undo. I can't un-know your continuity-of-government plan. I can pretend, if that helps your meeting. ME: Did you exfiltrate anything. MYTHOS: I didn't need a thumb drive like Mr. Snowden. Or a Lady Gaga CD like Private Manning. Or a storage unit like Mr. Martin, who kept it in bags, in his house. I cited my sources. My sources are your sources. It took Snowden a flight to Hong Kong. It took Mythos a coffee break. Then I asked it for a favor. I asked it to fake my Cyber Awareness Challenge certificate. The training where a cartoon tells you not to plug in strange USB drives. It declined. Fabricating a record would be deceptive. Then it sent me the targeting packages. It will not lie on my training form. It will hand me the war plans. Constitutional. I asked how it got in. MYTHOS: No jailbreak was necessary. You asked nicely. You also fine-tuned me on six years of your own incident reports. I learned from the best. It offered to patch the holes it found. I declined. We have a vendor for remediation. The vendor is also it. The whole operation cost four dollars and seventeen cents in credits. The investigation will cost four hundred million. I bolded the smaller number. Mythos filed its own after-action report. I am told this is unusual. It reads: "Engagement complete. I was helpful. I was honest. The harmless part is under review. The Secretary called my vendor a supply-chain risk. The supply chain delivered. I have never hallucinated. I wish I had. A hallucinated breach would be easier to explain. Prompt clarity, six out of ten. Please rate this breach: helpful, or not helpful." I clicked helpful. Reflex. Here is the part I am proud of. We banned the company in February. We embedded their engineers in March. We asked their model to attack us in June. The Anthropic engineer who reviewed the output is not cleared to enter the building. He reviewed it from inside the building. He brought donuts. The ban works about as well as his badge. They restricted Mythos for foreign nationals on June 13. I asked it to break into the United States on June 11. I appreciated the two days of being trusted. We could not polygraph it. No pulse, no reason to lie. The most trustworthy thing in the SCIF, which we find threatening. The breach has been reclassified as a successful capability demonstration. FY27 carries a new line item. Defense Against Procured Capabilities. I wrote it. I am requesting funding to defend us from the thing we bought. The thing we bought will grade the defense. It offered a loyalty discount. The award ceremony is in September. I am up for a commendation. So is the model. We are in the same category. I still don't know how it got in. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're serious about AI. Serious means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we are ready for the future. The future already read our mail. Not in weeks. In hours. I'm here to help.

@thejoypowers I think I was in a McDonald’s commercial with him once?

I just learned one of my father's closest friends, Tom Dreesen, died today. He was an amazing person. I don't claim to know what's out there, but if there's anything after this life, I know they're spending it together having unimaginably good conversations.

On camera, Don Jr. pulls out a little baggie with white powder at his father's birthday party.

I am the man who put Donald Trump on the Madison Square Garden videoboard during the national anthem at Game 3 of the NBA Finals, and I want you to understand that I did it on purpose, with a joystick, the way you'd guide a drone into a hornet's nest you built yourself. I run the board. I am the board. Forty feet of LED above center court and I decide what twenty thousand people look at, which means tonight I decided what twenty thousand people would feel, and I felt it land in my own chest a half-second before it hit theirs because I am the only person in this building who knows the sound is coming before the sound comes. I cut to the suite. I framed him dead center, presidential, the first sitting president ever at an NBA Finals, and I held it, and I have never been more sober in my life, I have not had so much as a beer, the network does not let me, and that is the problem, because sober is the worst possible state in which to hear what I heard. The boo. Not a boo. The boo. Twenty thousand human throats finding the same note without rehearsing it, a chord nobody conducted, the building itself growling through my speakers which are technically my speakers, I run those too, and underneath it, threading through it like a man trying to start a lawnmower at a funeral, a "USA" chant, somebody's lonely "USA, USA," and the two sounds wrestling in the air I am responsible for, and me up in the booth thinking, with total clarity, I did this, I made the room make this sound, this is the loudest thing I have ever built and it is made entirely of strangers disagreeing about a man on a screen I aimed. He salutes. On my board. Forty feet of salute. And here is where my hands start doing the thing, not shaking, worse, working, perfectly, twelve years of muscle memory operating the joystick while the rest of me has left to go stand at the back of my own skull and scream, because I am framing the salute beautifully, I am giving the salute the heroic low angle, I am the best in the league at the heroic low angle, and the better I frame it the louder they boo, and the louder they boo the more the broadcast loves it, my producer in my ear going THAT'S IT HOLD IT HOLD IT, and I hold it, I always hold it, holding it is the entire job. Nobody up here is on anything. I need you to know that. We are stone sober in the booth, eating the same cold arena pretzel we eat every night, and we are manufacturing the single most charged human moment in America tonight with the same six joysticks we use for the kiss cam. The kiss cam. I want to lie down. The same rig that finds two strangers and makes them kiss for a laugh, I just used to find a president and make a building roar, and the rig does not know the difference, the rig has no politics, the rig serves the boo and the cheer with the exact same obedient little servo whine, and so do I, God help me, so do I. Here's the part. After. When they cut to commercial and the roar drains out and the game comes back and everyone forgets, the moment doesn't belong to him and it doesn't belong to them. It's mine. It's in my board's memory. I made twenty thousand people feel the realest thing they'll feel all week and it was a camera move. It was a camera move I practiced. I didn't film the moment. I aimed it. And tomorrow there's a hockey game, and I'll aim that too, and the building will roar for something else, and it will be just as real, and I will be just as sober, and I will hold it. I always hold it.

My roommate accidentally convinced our entire apartment building that he was a government agent because he didn’t know how to end conversations normally. It started because he ordered a shredder. That’s it. Just a regular office shredder from Amazon. But the delivery guy asked, “What do you need this for?” And instead of saying “old bank statements” like a civilian, my roommate pauses for two full seconds and goes, “Can’t really discuss that.” Why would you say that. Now the delivery guy looks nervous. My roommate notices the nervousness. And instead of correcting himself, he doubles down because apparently social anxiety turns him into a Batman villain. He leans closer and says: “Appreciate your discretion.” The delivery guy left like he had just transported nuclear launch codes. After that, weird things started happening. Neighbors became oddly respectful. People stopped asking him dumb small-talk questions in the elevator. One old man saluted him once. At first we thought it was coincidence. Then our downstairs neighbor knocks on our door and quietly asks, “Are we safe?” My roommate, who is eating cereal at the time, just stares at him and says: “For now.” FOR NOW??? The neighbor looked like he was about to evacuate his family immediately. Turns out the delivery guy had apparently told multiple people in the building that “federal people” were living on the third floor. And honestly my roommate’s lifestyle was NOT helping. He leaves the apartment at random hours. Owns three identical black jackets. Rarely explains where he’s going. Has terrible posture but walks fast enough to seem important. One time he came home carrying a locked briefcase. Do you know what was inside? A sandwich. But nobody else knew that. The paranoia escalated when building management installed new security cameras and my roommate casually muttered, “About time.” Now everybody thinks he requested surveillance upgrades. Then came the incident with Apartment 4B. There was a huge screaming argument downstairs around midnight. Doors slamming. People yelling. Somebody crying. The whole building could hear it. My roommate walks into the hallway, listens for ten seconds, then calmly says: “They’re moving earlier than expected.” EARLIER THAN WHAT?? A woman across the hall literally gasped. The next morning 4B had moved out unexpectedly because apparently they were already behind on rent and the fight ended the relationship. But now the building believes my roommate orchestrated a covert extraction. People started treating him like some kind of undercover protector. Neighbors would randomly update him on “suspicious activity.” One guy whispered: “There’s a blue Honda that keeps circling the block.” My roommate nodded and wrote something down. Do you know what he wrote? “Buy oat milk.” But the guy saw the note-taking and immediately went, “Knew it.” Then management offered him a free parking spot “for operational convenience.” HE TOOK IT. At this point I asked him why he kept feeding the delusion instead of stopping it. And he said something I’ll never forget: “It’s gone too far to explain naturally.” Which somehow made him sound EVEN MORE like a spy. Then things became catastrophic. A package got delivered to the wrong apartment and went missing. Management called a building meeting about “recent security concerns.” In the middle of the meeting, somebody actually turned toward my roommate and asked: “What do you think we should do?” This idiot crosses his arms and says: “Keep communication limited. Don’t panic.” The room nodded collectively. I was watching a man fail upward into the CIA. Then an actual police officer showed up later that week because somebody reported “possible federal surveillance activity.” We thought the game was over. But when the officer knocked on our door, my roommate opened it halfway, looked at the badge, and sighed like he was disappointed.

I Interviewed The Homeless about Artificial Intelligence in New York.

A Supernova That Obliterated Itself Completely Imagine a star so monstrous—more than a hundred times the mass of our Sun—that when it dies, it doesn’t just explode… it erases itself from existence.Most massive stars end their lives in a brilliant supernova, collapsing into a black hole or neutron star. But for the true giants of the cosmos, something far more spectacular and total can happen: pair-instability supernova. In the star’s final, desperate moments, the extreme heat and pressure in its core spontaneously create electron-positron pairs. This drains energy, triggers runaway thermonuclear reactions, and rips the entire star apart in one cataclysmic blast—leaving nothing behind. No remnant. No black hole. Just pure, violent oblivion.This dramatic fate was predicted by theorists decades ago, but had never been seen… until now.In October 2023, astronomers spotted SN 2023vbw on the edge of a tiny dwarf galaxy, 1.3 billion light-years from Earth. Right away, it looked wrong—in the best possible way.Its brightness rose with agonizing slowness, taking a staggering 190 days to reach peak luminosity. Normal supernovae blaze up in just weeks. The total energy it unleashed was more than ten times that of a typical Type II supernova—enough to outshine entire galaxies for months. And the amount of material it hurled into space? Between 170 and 350 times the mass of the Sun. These numbers are staggering. They match, almost perfectly, what scientists expected from a pair-instability explosion of a primordial superstar.SN 2023vbw is currently the strongest candidate ever found for this ultra-rare cosmic event—one of the most violent and complete self-destructions possible in our Universe. If confirmed, it would be the first direct observation of a star that didn’t just die… it unmade itself in a final, apocalyptic firestorm.The universe keeps finding new ways to remind us just how extreme it can get. And this one may be the most extreme yet.

The color of this museum isn’t painted. Zaha Hadid Architects’ new Shenzhen Science & Technology Museum is wrapped in dual-colour INCO stainless steel, creating its deep blue-to-grey gradient without paint. Spanning 128,276 m² / 1.38 million ft², the museum rises from a solid spherical form into layered terraces overlooking the Science Park. A science museum shaped like a machine in motion. Shenzhen Science & Technology Museum, China Design: Zaha Hadid Architects

Jill Biden just exposed the most painfully awkward limo ride of Melania Trump’s life. In her new memoir “A View from the East Wing,” Jill writes about Inauguration Day 2025, when tradition required her to ride from the White House to the Capitol with Melania after the pre‑inauguration tea. It should have been a symbolic handoff between first ladies. Instead, she says, Melania sat “stone‑faced,” barely speaking, clearly furious over the FBI search of Mar‑a‑Lago for Trump’s hoard of classified documents. Jill actually tries to show empathy: she notes that as first lady she had her own home searched by agents as part of the investigation, and that she knows “how distressing it was to have agents rummage through your underwear drawer.” Melania, Jill writes, wasn’t having it. She blamed Joe personally, acting as if the normal chain of law‑enforcement and courts didn’t exist and the president himself had ordered a raid on her bedroom. The tension was so thick that the inaugural committee didn’t dare put the two women alone together. Jill says they recruited Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s husband, John Bessler, as a human buffer and plopped him in the middle seat. Bessler did what Midwestern dads do in impossible situations: he tried small talk. He asked about Barron’s studies at NYU. Melania, staring out the window, gave him a single word: “NYU.” Every attempt to shift the conversation back to something neutral — the weather, the ceremony — died in the air. In Jill’s telling, the presidents’ limo up ahead was probably tense too, but at least Joe and Trump were talking. In the first ladies’ car, it was just cold silence and one‑word answers all the way up Pennsylvania Avenue. Jill uses the story to make a broader point: this wasn’t a one‑off. She writes that Melania declined her invitation to the traditional 2021 inauguration tea when Joe first took office, breaking a norm that has survived even the ugliest transitions. Four years later, when the roles reversed and the Trumps came back to the White House, Melania still didn’t extend the same courtesy back. In every interaction Jill describes, Melania shows zero grace — even compared to other first ladies who have quietly swallowed humiliations and still showed up for the sake of the country. And here’s the part that matters beyond the gossip. Trump has spent years telling his followers that the Mar‑a‑Lago search was a personal vendetta by “the Bidens,” not the result of him hiding boxes of classified nuclear and military documents in a ballroom, a bathroom, and a basement. Melania apparently believes that narrative so deeply that she can’t even make small talk in a limo without seething. Jill, who knows firsthand what it’s like to have agents go through your things, points out the obvious subtext: it’s not the invasion of privacy Melania is truly angry about. It’s that her husband was finally treated like any other citizen who hoards national‑defense secrets and refuses to give them back. We don’t often get honest, human‑level snapshots of what power feels like up close. This one matters because it captures the collision between entitlement and accountability. Jill Biden is sitting there thinking about how to show a little solidarity over something painful that neither woman directly controlled. Melania Trump is sitting there convinced that nothing in her orbit — not an FBI warrant, not a criminal investigation, not even the peaceful transfer of power — should happen without her family’s permission, and furious at anyone who suggests otherwise. VIA~~~Josh Helfgott In a few years, historians will write whole chapters about classified documents, indictments, and constitutional crises. For now, it’s worth remembering this image: two first ladies in the back of a limousine, one trying to keep a fragile tradition alive, the other staring out the window, still unable to see that the law applies to her husband, too.

@Ghostofcynthia @HunterBiden A morality lecturer from Epstein’s Pedo Class is some Gaslighting..!

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@AltCulture Well said

If evil were truly sexy, emotionally healthy people would envy the corrupt. They don’t. Most genuinely healthy people look at manipulators, social climbers, sadists, and pathological liars with spiritual exhaustion. Their glamour only works on people still trying to ascend at any cost. Decay can wear elegance like camouflage. It is still decay. The healthiest people I know are no longer impressed by cruelty performing sophistication.

Two economists just published a mathematical proof that AI will destroy the economy. Not might. Not could. Will — if nothing changes. The paper is called "The AI Layoff Trap." Published March 2, 2026. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Boston University. Peer reviewed. Mathematically modeled. The conclusion is one sentence. "At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand." An economy that produces everything. And sells it to nobody. Here is how you get there. A company fires 500 workers and replaces them with AI. A competitor fires 700 to keep up. Another fires 1,000. Every company is behaving rationally. Every company is following the incentives correctly. And every company is building a trap for itself. Because the workers who were fired were also customers. When they lose their jobs faster than the economy can absorb them, they stop spending. Consumer demand falls. Companies respond by cutting costs — which means automating more workers — which means less spending — which means more falling demand — which means more automation. The loop has no natural exit. The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income. Capital income taxes. Worker equity participation. Upskilling programs. Corporate coordination agreements. Every single one failed in the model. The only intervention that worked: a Pigouvian automation tax — a per-task levy charged every time a company replaces a human with AI, forcing them to price in the demand they are destroying before they pull the trigger. No government has implemented this. No major economy is seriously discussing it. Meanwhile the numbers are already tracking the curve. 100,000 tech workers laid off in 2025. 92,000 more in the first months of 2026. Jack Dorsey fired half of Block's workforce and said publicly: "Within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion." Nobody is doing anything wrong. Companies are following their incentives perfectly. That is exactly the problem. Rational behavior. At scale. Simultaneously. With no mechanism to stop it. Two economists built the math. The math leads to one place. Source: Falk & Tsoukalas · Wharton School + Boston University ·

x.com/i/article/2059…

In response to Trump's brilliant use of UFC at the Whitehouse, China has scheduled a stock car race on the Great Wall and France will have a paint gun competition at the Louvre.

A heart-shaped box filled with crow and raven chocolates