April 2026 Links
Some Interesting Things I Read This Month
- LiteLLM Supply Chain Attack — A supply chain attack in the wild is always notable. Although this actually happened over a month ago in late March, I had already posted the articles I had read for the month. The basics are that a criminal group of black hats targeted LiteLLM, a popular Python package used as a proxy server for LLM API access and for tracking usage across an organization. The group inserted malicious code that was able to harvest credentials from affected users. The linked article gives a technically detailed overview of the entire situation.
- The Benchmark Illusion — The Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence built an agent that was able to achieve near-perfect scores on a number of popular AI benchmarks without actually solving a single task. As an example, for one of the benchmarks, it simply read the answers directly from the config file. Although this is admittedly contrived, it shows that we need to work on both explainability and metrics when evaluating these foundation models.
- Scaling a Betting Operation — Now for a change of pace: this article by Chris Dierkes was fascinating to me. I am a hobbyist positive-EV bettor, but it was fascinating to read about how a professional syndicate scales an operation to make millions of dollars. It was also really interesting to see how someone like Chris thinks about risk not only in sports betting, but in life.