Python Debugging: "SSL Certificate Verification Failed"

Ever seen this:

RuntimeError: Failed to fetch (insert_dataset_of_choice) data: SSL Certificate Verification Failed

This may happen in code that was previoulsy working. It can be caused by outdated or missing CA certificates. 

AI - New Ideas Every Day

There are literally new ideas every day in AI. Every day.

New commercial R&D, published and waiting to be read, every day.

GitHub's Agentic Workflows in the Crosshairs of GitLost

Noma Security has publicised GitLost, a technique to get GitHub Agentic Workflows to spill private repository data.

The exploit is aimed at organizations with both public and private GitHub repositories, and relies on prompt injection.

Specifically, it uses indirect prompt injection  where malicious instructions are injected into seemingly regular requests.

GitHub's Agentic Workflows introduce LLMs into GitHub Actions, which is how the exploit is enabled.

Anthropic's Interpretability Research

This is journalled here. The goal is to understand how LLMs actually work internally.

Claude's "Access Consciousness"& Rise of the "J-Space"

Anthropic's Claude model series has claimed "access consciousness" via the J-Space.

The Claim of the "J Space"; And the Parallel with Global Workspace Theory of Neuroscience

This claim has been presented as "A global workspace in language models" described at a high level here, and deep-dived in the paper  Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models (July 6, 2026, Wes Gurnee, Nicholas Sonofriew, Jack Lindsey et al). 

From the paper - it is clear that the analysis identifies "data structures of the mind" - where we replace with "mind" with "model" to get a window in on the model's thinking:

"we observe that language models maintain a privileged set of internal representations, available for report, modulation, and flexible internal reasoning, atop a much larger volume of automatic processing. We identify these representations using a new interpretability technique, which surfaces the concepts a model is poised to verbalize at any point in its processing".

What is interesting is the discovery of this so-called "J-Space" but also the interpretability technique. It offers a new way to "commune" with LLMs.

The phenomenon of "access consciousness" is described in the paper, a concept from behavioural and brain science. This is introduced as a purely functional notion - it's purported purpose is utilitarian, and not linked to subjective experience (sometimes called phenomenal consciousness).

Neuroscience has a global workspace theory where a "data structure" can be posted to the brain's "working set area" for use in reasoning and reporting.

The Evidence

The paper poses the question whether functional properties of a global workspace have emerged in LLMs.  It portrays the LLM's thinking as a plethora of vector representations, some constituting low-level bookkeeping and some embodying higher level ideas like "Golden Gate Bridge" or even emotions.  If such a workspace were to exist, we would expect a subtset of vectors to be prominently and preferentially present in the LLM's memory.

The Test for Presence

Verbal report - when asked what it is thinking about, LLM names concepts from its workspace

What is Pylance?

Pylance is the component that enables Visual Studio Code to provide IntelliSense for Python. 

It is underpinned by Microsoft's Pyright type checker (open source static type checker for Python). Read more about Pyright from the official website.

Navigating OpenClaw Architecture

The best place to start is by reading architecture.md in the docs/concepts subdirectory.

Then move on to the other concepts (not all equally weighted in importance) than read the source code.