Nils Durner's Blog Ahas, Breadcrumbs, Coding Epiphanies

Aileen 4 Disaster Relief

The Gemma 4 Good hackathon hosted by Kaggle and Google DeepMind has concluded. It centered around using these relatively small and open-weights models “to drive positive change and global impact”. 14,523 entrants were recorded, and 1,613 submission were counted. My submission is Aileen 4 Disaster Relief: “from field evidence to public support”. ... Read more...

Agentic harnesses for vulnerability discovery

Pablo Ruiz shared his CodeCome vulnerability discovery harness last week: In short, this is a 'mini' harness for orchestrates AI agents to inspect source code, generate vulnerability hypotheses, validate them in sandboxed environments where possible, and produce evidence that humans can review. The goal is not magic “AI finds all bugs”, but a pr... Read more...

LeakyLM: Your AI Assistant Is (Not) Leaking Your Conversations

Researchers at IMDEA Networks, a Madrid-based research institute specializing in data and communication networks, have published a disclosure suggesting that major AI assistants may expose chatbot conversations. Their report is, however, framed more dramatically than its strongest evidence supports, and it concedes: While we do not yet have evid... Read more...

Energy costs of a Cryptanalytically Relevant Quantum Computers

US policy think tank RAND published an estimate on operating a quantum computer for breaking traditional cryptographic schemes including ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography). They call such quantum computers “CRQC”, a “Cryptanalytically Relevant Quantum Computer”. First, they establish that today’s quantum quantum computers are not It: The use of a... Read more...

Notes on Google Gemma 4

Google DeepMind have published a new release of their open weights model: Gemma 4. It’s available under Apache License 2.0, an improvement from the more restrictive Gemma 3 license. Core features include multi-language support, Reasoning, and multi-modality including Audio for some models. It comes in four different variants: In the model descri... Read more...