2015: Learn to code!
2025: Poets control the world...

Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models
arxiv.org/pdf/2511.153...

Caesium atoms are pretty good, but nothing beats a dog's stomach in keeping time.

On the plus side, it looks like I'll have my own lane at the outdoor pool tomorrow evening.

(and the water temperature will be fine, just a chilly walk on the deck)

www.sfgate.com/weather/arti...

Bluesky has been pretty good in the last few months, but today it's failing the "not being taken over when there is some kind of big American football game" test.

This is the "grain of wheat on the first square of a chess board" process, but going the other way. Exponential sequences kick ass in both directions.

Scary. Reminds me of Vonnegut's "ice-nine".

Maybe @kurt-vonnegut.bsky.social has some relevant quotes to share from Cat's Cradle?

Nice articulation of the SageMaker announcement at re:Invent, from Doug Henschen (@DHenschen on X, I don't see him on Bluesky). I had a great discussion with Doug there.

I'm very biased but +1 to calling it "the climax of CEO Matt Garman’s opening keynote."

www.constellationr.com/blog-news/am...

The new Amazon SageMaker was announced this morning (very last announcement in the CEO keynote -- keeping the best for last of course). Super proud of the team for delivering it. A unified platform for data processing, analytics, and AI with a single UI to do it all.

aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in...

Yet another article in the "some animal species is much smarter than we thought" or "some animal species demonstrates a surprisingly complex behavior" series...

How many such "surprising discoveries" do we need before we revisit our baseline assumption about animals?

nautil.us/crows-are-ev...

Two weeks until my first re:Invent presentation (which will also be my first time at re:Invent).
registration.awsevents.com/flow/awseven...
Looking forward to it. Ping me if you're planning to be there.

Is this the first ATP Finals without a one-handed backhand player? #tennis

Plenty of them in the 90s (inc. Sampras), then came Federer (and Wawrinka, and Dimitrov), then more recently Tsitsipas provided representation. But this year... :-(

Still plenty of nice shots
www.youtube.com/watch?v=B82t...

Since many Americans who haven't experienced health care in other rich countries seem unable to believe it, I occasionally post this reminder that the US heath care system is uniquely inefficient, expensive and cruel. A much better system is possible; it exists in many places and we could have that.

Everyone on X right now whose blue checkmark was just returned: "I didn't pay a cent to Elon! I don't know why the blue check is back, I swear. Also, my dog is a rescue."

The closest I ever get to feeling like Guy Pearce in Memento is when I get a "your book is ready to borrow" notification from the library, for a wait list I had forgotten about.

It's like getting a "you should read this" message from past me.

The Tennis TV YouTube channel is doing a very good job with highlights, especially now that they're regularly posting court-level videos.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=epZb...

For anyone near San Francisco, I highly recommend R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) at the Cutting Ball Theater. Great adaptation and excellent acting, in a nice small theater. It runs until November 12.
cuttingball.com/productions/...

Looks like the Washington Post came up with a Wordle competitor: www.washingtonpost.com/games/keyword/
(no spoiler in the screenshot, it's just the starting point of today's game).

Game seems ok, but I think they should remove the timer. I love that Wordle doesn't have one.

NEW: Chinese #hack of #Microsoft cloud authentication also obtained email of at least one member of Congress. #infosec GIFT LINK https://wapo.st/3QEhjrx

Squaring the microblogging circle. I am now @vambenepe on all 4:
- Bluesky (this account)
- Twitter (https://twitter.com/vambenepe since 2008, barely active)
- Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@vambenepe since 2022, active)
- Threads (https://www.threads.net/@vambenepe, since 2023, inactive)