Operation Clippy but for AI talent. SAPPHIRE but for ASML.

War Department calling.

La Montre Arretee

I did not expect a new age of tromp l’oeil on grand scale as a higher order effect of AI image generation, but absolutely here for its reintroduction into public art. Anything to repair the damage done by the unimaginative and brutalist wasteland of the soul drained modern urban husks.

It is all very well and good to assert the post Westphalian character of cyberspace and the compute at its frontiers. But the state as we have known it since the 1650s will not go quietly into the night. And export controls are the mildest option compared to what the USG has provably been willing to do to halt counterproliferation. Which encompasses now as much offensive cyber as it does CBRNE.

It says something exceptionally profound when the US regulatory environment is so broken that building an entire on orbit constellation to service data center demand makes more sense than allowing corrupt and extortionist politics to hold ground site construction hostage to the latest ever shifting rent seeking attempt of the week. And that this in part fuels the largest IPO in history. The demand for the frontier is real, in all meanings

Reporting that a new ping of death, single packet delivery of hard brick effect did not meet MSRC criteria for assigning a CVE does not help the argument that the vulnerability intelligence mission has been irretrievably broken by misguided corporate head in sand behavior. Impacted devices are precisely those in class for previously pitched military deployed uses, among other edge cases not in the usual corporate enterprise model. Wishing media coverage is wrong here.

A university laments the withdrawal of a student from a course on applied cryptology, citing impact to family of their current conflict torn geography. Yet this illustrates the intractable counterintelligence problem. It is possible this is merely a learner displaced by larger forces outside of individual control. But it is also an area notably dominated by a paramilitary nonstate actor who suffered exceptionally severe losses in recent engagements due to what became very public COMSEC failures, and where vetting is essentially impossible. These are not the days in which these topics are treated as ITAR matters, but to describe a future hypothetical proliferation event from this case would have stunned earlier generations of national security leaders.

The future of working with AI whilst labs still beg for regulatory capture is hoping one’s field doesn’t become problematized by policy proposals that seize on buzzwords without any understanding of the work itself, and then lobotomize one’s models as extortionate example of supposed harms.

The exhaustion of wading through formulaic AI slop is real. The structure screams at you, even if one cares about the topic. This cannot endure.

The irony of the now circulating Citadel research note on tokenomics looking like it was written by AI (and not a bad model at that).

As we graduate the NDU class of 2026 to return to joint service, in a time of conflict pressing ever harder on the deployed force, we are reminded that “counsel carries consequences”.

The fabricated data center water usage propaganda has legit one shotted enough midwits that they apparently also believe that compute heat outputs are some sort of unsolvable engineering absolute; and this transfers to on orbit operations. The Hot Equations work on space domain problems remains as relevant as ever. Even as AI accelerates the Fast Equations of cyber operations.

At what point does FUD around AI safetyism become material misrepresentation when it is used to delay product releases, or degrade product functionality, due to concerns around compute shortages?

Eagerly awaiting the renewed argument against USV utility, given that multiple earlier objections have been demonstrably falsified in recent combat. Because one doubts the usual naysayers will update their priors.

A colleague offered the most withering critique of geospatial intelligence as a low multiple industry, therefore where one was lucky not to have devoted a professional career towards. Can’t shake the feeling that the future for best USIC & industry talent will going forward be shaped by expected equity returns.

Adversary actors proving they are better at triggering refusals by censor lobotomized AI models than defenders are at scaling automation is likely going to have profound implications for any threat intel shop not operating on their own stack. The anti-analysis functionality race, potentially escalating to deliberate counter-cyber operations through payloads intended to trip vendor cancellation, is almost certainly going to eat time and tokens in ever more baroque ways.

In the pre 9/11 days working CT, covering Northern Ireland paramilitary targets was a major account. It would have been impossible to forecast a scenario where IRA and UVF/UDA would fight side by side against a common enemy in a post Good Friday agreement political landscape, whilst the primary obsession of Stormont is to censor protest and dissenting speech. There is a great deal of ruin in a nation, and this confounds long range estimates in the most unexpected ways. But one sees this as a linchpin discontinuity. What comes next likely goes much harder, and much wider, if political settlement and associated policy change is not reached.

Unmanned CASEVAC and now CSAR are almost certainly going to produce some very weird human memoirs, with no small element of future shock intermixed with PTSD. But there is something to be said for being alive to come through all that, vice a name on a wall as one would have been in earlier fights.

The spectre of EPH described in ‘91 arose from the first recognition of vulnerability across critical systems, whose disruption and degradation are now sadly routine facts of our present day. And so reaction to warning of frontier AI scaled vulnpocalypse has been muted, suggesting many policymakers may believe they have already priced in unmanaged if not unmanageable exposure. The delta where the most unpleasant consequences of swarming shoggoths are realized will almost certainly carry unique psychological shock in its own form of surprise.