Eric Mann

New open source tool: tss-ceremony

An interactive terminal animation of a DKLS23 threshold ECDSA signing ceremony. Real crypto values, real signatures, verifiable with OpenSSL.

Built with Go + Bubbletea. 20 scenes walking through keygen, signing, verification, and a FROST comparison.

`go install https://github.com/DisplaceTech/tss-ceremony@latest`

Read more => https://eric.mann.blog/watch-cryptography-happen-a-terminal-animation-for-threshold-signatures/

#golang #cryptography #opensource #security #ThresholdSignatures

Private keys are single points of failure. We've all known this, but we treat it as an operational problem — HSMs, rotation schedules, access policies.

Threshold signatures make it a *cryptographic* problem instead. DKLS23 splits a key across parties so no one holds the full secret, and the output is standard ECDSA.

I wrote up a plain-language explainer: https://eric.mann.blog/why-one-key-shouldnt-rule-them-all-threshold-signatures-for-the-rest-of-us/

Part 1 of a 3-part series. #cryptography #security #ECDSA #ThresholdSignatures

Day job is transitioning to a new org, which would mean at least 4 months of working without pay if I stay the course.

Time to double down on Displace.

Who needs infra consulting? Who wants an MCP server for their API? Who needs PHP dev?

Let's talk...

The Upfront Investment That Saves 10,000 Hours

There's a pattern in tech where people mock the setup cost of automation without accounting for the return. I spent a day building a Grunt-based WordPress bootstrapper in 2013. Fortune 500 companies are still running code built on that foundation today.

https://eric.mann.blog/the-upfront-investment-that-saves-10000-hours/

I spend my weekends orchestrating resilient, multi-agent workflows on vanity projects I build in my free time. How about you?

Used a swarm of agents to build an Android interface for https://swordfish.displace.tech today. Still needs a round or two of polish before it goes to the Play store but I'm pretty happy so far!

#BuildInPublic

Submitted my first new WordPress plugin in ages today to the repo. If/When it's approved I'll share some more information about it :-)

Could it eventually be a core project perhaps?

On the one hand we have soldiers reporting their commanders are literally telling them they're “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth"

On the other hand we have the Secretary of State defending the attack on Iran because "The Ayatollah was a radical cleric. That entire regime is led by radical clerics who make decisions on the basis of their view of theology, which is an apocalyptic one."

<Insert Spiderman pointing meme>

Experimenting with various AI tools for text-to-image generation to populate a training set to build my own models to hand-craft a specific generator system for ebook covers.

No, it's not as simple as "ask Claude to do it." There's a real art to fine-tuning the training data and getting a stable LoRA model for diffusion ...

RE: @ericmann@tekton.network

I found out after the fact that the judges didn't even visit the GitHub repo or view the YouTube demo I posted for them. There's a high chance they skipped my submission entirely.

Which makes me question whether or not my efforts were wasted entirely...

I'm a very competitive person. I always have been. And it sucks. I hate losing.

So when I enter a hackathon and work on something I'm really passionate about ... and lose out to projects that look like knockoffs of Lovable or a vanilla Claude interface ... it sours my mood quite a bit.

I'm happy to lose to things that are objectively better - and many of the winners were quite good. But the handful that felt like trolls ... ugh.

Welp. I didn't win the hackathon. Which is personally quite disappointing as I was super excited about Firebreak as a project.

Kudos to those who made the top 10 though!

I wrote earlier about defense AI drift. Today I built the engineering solution.

Firebreak: policy-as-code enforcement for LLM APIs. Pre-negotiated rules. Automatic enforcement. Full audit trails.

Built at the Portland Claude Code hackathon. Proves the pattern I proposed in my DOD article actually works.

Read more on my blog: https://eric.mann.blog/from-defense-ai-drift-to-policy-enforcement-why-i-built-firebreak/

Demo: https://youtu.be/70zQLbZpNds
Code: https://github.com/ericmann/firebreak

#AI #hackathon #ethics #Portland #Claude

I've been submitting a talk on ethics in software development to every conference I've attended for nearly a decade.

Now y'all understand why...

I spent several years working in defense AI. I joined for the cybersecurity mission. I left when the mission drifted somewhere I couldn't follow.

I've never written about this publicly. But watching Anthropic hold the line against the Pentagon this week, I recognized the pattern.

The gravity that pulls defense AI from defensive to offensive applications is structural. It
doesn't require bad intentions. I watched it operate from the inside.

Here's what I learned.

https://eric.mann.blog/the-gravity-problem-why-defense-ai-companies-drift-toward-offense/

Using one agent to decompose a project spec into milestones and tickets in Linear so other agents can autonomously build out project features.

This is the future :-)

#BuildInPublic

LinkedIn Recruiter: Would you be interested in a job as a "Software Engineer 5?"

Me: For who doing what paid how?

LIR: Heavy Golang and Python. Agentic integrations. Fortune 100 company. Contract, no benefits. Half of what you make now.

Me: You're kidding, right?

My Thelio made a friend ...

RE: @ericmann@tekton.network

I mean, they're both Linux ... but trying to dogfood the "heterogeneous infrastructure" paradigm I so often preach ...

Running 2x Ubuntu and 1x Pop!_OS on three different Beelink machines is ... interesting.

Finally got around to repurposing a discarded NUC and now have a 2-agent/1-controller k3s cluster rocking all of my stuff. Much more reliable.

Upgraded the systems (and k3s itself) across the board as well.

The fun (?) thing is the new agent is on Pop!_OS instead of Ubuntu...

My parents got a letter, addressed to me, claiming my data was breached from Columbia University.

Which ...

Why did they have my data at all? Never attended there. Never applied...

Passed some of my writing work through an "AI detector" and it came back with a "60-80% chance this is AI generated" and a note that "it's too polished, human writers make subtle mistakes. This prose has none."

High school me would appreciate the compliment. Since I wrote it nearly 30 years ago ...

But if this is the state of the art for AI detection, we have problems.

RE: @ericmann@tekton.network

Still looking for beta readers on this novella. Comments enabled. Eternal gratitude offered :-)

Anyone in my network use a Mac Studio for local inference? What's your experience? I might be interested in getting one ... But the cost is non-trivial.

I've been cooking some fiction stories - so far I now have a draft of a novella. It's a mix of action/adventure, horror, and loosely connected to the universe of sci fi stories I have pending.

~25k words.

Anyone interested in being a beta reader? All I ask is for honest feedback.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Kx1ewG8nmIc7sl7VJFoQF_PSGncNiOeK/edit

Comments enabled ...

Well that was fun.

For those who didn't see the shenanigans on #birdsite - turns out my router was garbage. You know, the one the ISP said was _required_ to use their network? It was trash and killing my connection.

Pulled it and ran from the ONT straight to my Eero and had network just fine. But all of my NUCs are hardwired ... so needed a new TP-Link router in front of my 1GB switch before I could get k8s back online.

So glad to have things live again.

Well this is fun. Anywhere from 15-80% packet loss from my home network to some domains. Nothing critical. Just ... Google, Amazon, and GitHub.

ISP isn't being super useful. "Must be your hardware."

Thing is - it was only impacting me. Not my wife. It occurred to me she's on a VPN 100% of the time. Zero issues.

Routed my machines through Mullvad. Zero issues.

Totally not an issue on my end.

Awaiting Tier 2 technician call now ... Fun times.