Monday, April 27
Daily News Stuff 27 April 2026
Don't Do This At Home Edition
Don't Do This At Home Edition
Top Story
- It's been a while since we've had a big tech news story. No disasters, no miracles. Things haven't suddenly gotten better - or at least, not much, and they haven't gotten drastically worse.
So here's an object lesson in not trusting lifelong drug addicts with a pattern of pathological lying, by which I mean AI. (Twitter)
The company PocketOS was using the AI tool Cursor to do some routine maintenance in their staging environment. Cursor found a problem and decided to fix it. To fix it it decided to... Delete the database and all backups.
Okay, not the end of the world; it's the staging environment, not the production environment.
Right?
Oh.
You might ask why they gave Cursor access to the production environment when it was only supposed to be working on staging, and the answer is, they didn't. It hunted around the files it did have access to until it found an API key, and it used that.
On top of that, the hosting service they were using only had snapshots, not independent backups. Delete the database volume (virtual disk) and all the snapshots disappear as well.
The hosting service did manage to recover the volume, though it took some time and was not something a user could do themselves. Remember folks, it's not backed up until you have three copies, in two different formats, on two continents.
Tech News
- The year of Unix on the desktop, 1985 edition. (YouTube)
The AT&T Unix PC was slow, expensive, heavy, noisy, and unreliable, but...
Uh.
Oh, the keyboard was pretty good.
- The year of Unix on the desktop, 2026 edition. (PC World)
Framework is shipping more units of its new Laptop 13 Pro with Ubuntu than with Windows.
And that's just preinstalled models. It's also available with no OS for you to install your own, and that's counted separately.
- Commodore - yes, that Commodore - is not going to lock out customer updates to the FPGA firmware running the Commodore 64 - no, not that Commodore 64. (Tom's Hardware)
The new model is substantially more powerful while being a 100% precise hardware emulation of the original, using an FPGA - basically a chip that you reprogram its circuitry on the fly. But if you reprogram it wrong you could end up with a moderately expensive (the Commodore 64 Ultimate starts at $325) brick.
But it will void your warranty, so brick at your own risk.
- Samsung's new 10a DRAM process measures less than 10nm using a 4F cell, and will be followed in 2029 by a 10d process that will be 3D. (WCCFTech)
I assure you it all makes sense.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Or at least perfectish.
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