If it does exist, why would it work this way, and not the obvious way of streaming logs… which would not cause an outage if it failed.

If this hypothesis were true then a spy agency may want to rewrite responses. Every tool in an agent's harness becomes an remote procedure call you can make on that machine. Including a tool to execute a shell command, in many. A harness is completely isometric to a backdoor, it's the same code written with a different intention.

There's a million ways a bad configuration can take down a network. Especially if the part that gets squirrley is a black box.

Even if it isn't precisely this, the fact that no one is saying anything is quite surprising.

Edit: I don't want do contribute to FUD, so want to call out this comment and its replies that identify the shared layer as probably being xAI's infra: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568622

They’re adding the cache consumed across all of their servers. It’s not one giant deep cache.

I wonder how hard it would be to create various firmware updaters for drives or other devices.

I'd be cautious here because you very easily could brick the hardware. For writing a PC driver it's a lot safer since you can just fail repeatedly until it works.

Firmware is a lot harder for a whole host of reasons but it is possible / I've done it.

The odds of success go up a LOT when the stock firmware is easy to extract and reverse engineer.

The easiest path is when you get access to a firmware update distribution.

This reminds me to have a look at the latest update I installed in my car for my navigation system and which is installed via an USB key.

Trust shifts to the producer of the open weight model, based on the global communicated experience of all models they’ve ever produced.

This doesn't make any sense! Arguing for the sake of arguing.

Why is Windows not open source then, where we can trust Microsoft based on the experience with previous Windows versions?

It has already happened and the open weight models will only improve. Best to accept that and determine the optimal way forward.