Local Steely Dan Cover band
The Chris Baum Project does some local shows semi-regularly and they’re honestly one of the better Steely Dan cover bands I’ve ever run across.
Poisoning AI models for $100
Recent security research demonstrates that open-weight AI models can be subtly poisoned or backdoored using a remarkably small number of malicious training examples. Attackers inject specific trigger phrases or corrupted data fragments into a fine-tuning or training set. Standard safety and performance benchmarks remain entirely normal, masking the underlying flaw. When a user’s prompt contains the hidden trigger, the model executes the malicious behavior, such as writing vulnerable code or opening a backdoor into the system.
This works well because it’s not like scanning for a virus, numerical model weights cannot be easily disassembled or audited. Downloading open weights locally keeps user data private, but it exposes organizations to black-box supply chain tampering.
How easy is it to do this? Apparently shockingly easy. Katie Paxton-Fear, a lecturer in cybersecurity at Manchester Metropolitan University and staff security advocate at Semgrep, managed to install a backdoor in an open-weight AI model in about an hour for less than $100.
It only took ten training examples for the code output by the model to become reliably vulnerable to remote code execution, even for novel prompts and domains, she claims. And the larger the model, the easier it was to poison.
Brutally honest simulator
Microlandia is a city builder cut from a different cloth. The city-builder developed by Information Superhighway Games is designed to be “brutally honest”. Roads are expensive, traffic jams can cost your citizens their jobs, and uncontrolled rent prices can trigger a homelessness crisis. And they’re making it even more ‘real’.
Cities are not clockwork, they are chaos machines with a mayor attached. Most of what breaks your plans is not the ordinary day, it is the ugly little surprise that arrives precisely because you acted as if it could not. Version 1.5 leans into that reality: crime is no longer a single checkbox; it’s a spectrum of consequences that can become a death spiral every single day.”
Perhaps it’s something Portland’s leadership should learn about it’s Doom Loop. I think simulators like this may be important ways to cut out a lot of politicalization of problems. Economics and the laws of unintended consequences are often MUCH more likely the cause of many problems in our society when more politically charged arguments often have much more dubious connections and policy changes based on them often result in much worse results.
Hosting local models with unsloth studio
This video shows you how to load models in Unsloth Studio – and how to share them locally and across the network. Using Unsloth Studio, you can download and use models directly (much like ollama – but it appears to be much faster since it seems to use llama.cpp under the hood. You can also host these models either locally on the same machine, or set up an external port and connect Claude Code or other cli from another machine.
Hosting a model in Unsloth Studio so another machine can connect to it involves a few easy steps. First, install Unsloth Studio on your host machine (with the big GPU and lots of memory). Then download and start the desired model in Unsloth Studio. After that, go to Settings -> API. Create a new API key. On your client system set up a batch file or environment variables then run claude from the command line:
> set ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://<ip address of your server>:<port number>
> set ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=<your unsloth api key - usually: sk-unsloth-d5134......>
> set ANTHROPIC_MODEL=Qwen3.8
> claude --model Qwen3.8 %*Woman’s experience hiking the PCT
The most dangerous situations on the PCT are town stops and hitches. Before getting in town, I made sure to have read Farout comments indicating sketchy situations, places or people to avoid.
Interesting summary of one woman’s experience doing long hikes. Smart entrepreneurs might do well to pay attention…
Disproving Steve Jobs?
The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was one of the highest critically acclaimed release in 2025. Despite the numerous awards and acclaim as one of the best games of the year, it also has gained notoriety for something else – the inexperienced team.
Veteran developer Adrian Chmielarz (Gears of War, Bulletstorm, Witchfire, Painkiller, etc) followed the same logic as Steve Jobs. Jobs only used used ‘A’ people for the first Macintosh. He believed “…the old saying that ten professional soldiers are as effective as a hundred amateurs, or even a thousand, and that’s quite simply true. So when you have a small team, it’s really important that you have the best people.”
So imagine how he was thrown for a loop when he learned the team behind Clair Obscur was a ton of newbies – many of whom had never made a game before.
Perhaps lots of energy from a personal passion project, the desire to succeed, and not knowing what isn’t possible has higher value?
What is proving to be successful in games
“Anyone can make that next hit game and find success. There’s always gonna be the player base and people who want an amazing game, right? That’s not going away. What is going away is opportunities: publishing, funding, mid-sized studios and small studios who can sustain that.”
Kaman also said that developers should be willing to take a risk in releasing something that is not polished, but rather is focused on fun.
Nick Kaman
He makes the point that there is still opportunities – but those opportunities are changing. For example, viral, low-quality games like Meccha Chameleon pulled in $10 million and was made by 2 guys in just 2 months. Yet multi-million dollar ‘safer bet’ games are getting poor results and closing studios in just months.
Leading through a cultural change
How do you uphold your principles while executing a major strategy change?
I saw this at Intel recently. One could tell for a few years the company was becoming more and more out of step with the marketplace. Values that Andy Grove and his direct successors used to make the company successful were slowly eroded.
With the hiring of a new CEO, there was the announcement of ongoing, sweeping reorganizations and layoffs. Old cultural norms, leaders, and teams were discarded weekly. Organizations were collapsed and layoffs swift. Leadership also went through this same squash-and-fire rounds. It put people in very ugly places of having to fire tremendous amounts of people. Numbers show it to be around 40% in just 2 years.
Did it work? The market has responded with a 3x stock jump that hadn’t happened in over 10 years. But analysis are very cautious. The momentum looks good, but can they pull the actual manufacturing off after almost 10 years of failures?
What about those that work there during all this turmoil? It’s noted that fewer than one-third of transformation initiatives achieve their goals, largely depending on whether employees feel included. So if this happens, what do you do as a leader?
- Stabilize Yourself – don’t race straight to the logistics while carrying around unprocessed frustration or guilt. Emotionally stabilize yourself, realize you are not in control of the decision and then act with professionalism and character for the parts you do control.
- Prioritize Where You Can Make an Impact – When everything feels uncertain, prioritization becomes the act of leadership. Reframe pushback as inquiry. Stay in solution-building rather than resistance: ‘How do you propose we do this in a way that preserves moral?’ Prioritize time and attention to maintain credibility.
- Lead the Team Through Transition – Leaders who engage employees early, clarify accountability, and maintain consistency in messages are up to seven times more likely to succeed. You can’t stop the reorganization, but you can shape how it unfolded and how her people experienced it.
- Preserve Trust – during transformative events/misalignment, trust becomes a leader’s most valuable currency. Shared what you can, acknowledged what was unknown, and maintained a consistent tone and presence. Hold one-on-one check-ins, offered resume support, and partner with colleagues across the company to help displaced employees find new roles.
Winter shadow Puppet show
Members of the local art troop Good Harbor Hill Players put together a music and shadow puppet show each winter in Grand Marais, Minnesota. They do other shows on their Youtube channel.
Nearly half of organisations falling victim to ransomware pay up
Cybersecurity provider Sophos has released a report entitled “The State of Ransomware 2026,” with pulled together responses from 2,158 survey participants. It reveals that ransom demands themselves are actually decreasing; but also revealed a shocking 48% of organisations whose data was encrypted paid their attackers.
The median ransom payment is now said to be $769,000, down from a neat $1 million from the previous year’s study, with the median demand dropping to $698,000. Interestingly, 51% of organisations that paid a ransom coughed up less than the demanded amount, which the report says is due to victims “often [being] successful in negotiating a lower amount than originally demanded.”
The lowest category was retail, with a 32% payment rate. 72% of local and state government organisations surveyed paid at least some of the demands. 56% of attacks succeeded in encrypting data, up 11% YOY.