• Twenty-five years.  I was only four at the time, like the rest of us, but I remember the day.
  
  
  
• The Exploration Company has raised $450 million in series C funding in an attempt to show that Europe is not irrelevant.  (Ars Technica)
  
  And to explore space, maybe.
  
  Problem is they need to add three more zeroes to that number to make a dent.  It's being billed as the "fastest growing space company in Europe", which is like being the most successful oyster farmer in Eromanga, population 98.

• AI has a 10% chance of killing all of us by the end of next week mostly by falling off a roof and landing face first on a rake so that we die of laughter.  (The Register)
  
  Copilot this time.
  
  
  
• Anthropic says it has blocked attempts to build biological weapons.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  Anthropic says a lot of things.  I am a paying customer; their product is a lot better than their PR.

  "You are not seeing someone in a comic book kind of way say, 'Hey, I want to build a biological weapon to kill everybody,'" Jacob Klein, the head of threat intelligence at Anthropic, said in an interview.  "It's an incredibly nuanced situation.  They're saying things like 'But I don't want to cure cancer.  I want to turn people into dinosaurs.'"

  Don't we all, Jake.  Don't we all.
  
  
  
• Anthropic also detailed distillation campaigns by Alibaba, Moonshot AI and Deepseek.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen, and I think it most ungentlemanly.
  
  Also, you know who isn't blocking attempts to build a resistance to iocane powder?
  
  
  
• HP has introduced its latest home computer.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Returned, the unaffordable RISC workstations of the late 90s have.
  
  
  
• Deepseek beats Anthropic's Opus 5 on coding - where Opus 5 is actually good - at one 86th the cost.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Though if you're able to live within a plan and not burn infinite tokens through the API, Opus 5 can be one 20th the price that comparison assumes.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which: Fixed the performance of my runtime.  The interpreter is now as fast as Ruby, where before it needed the compiler to match that.  The compiler averages around 3x faster.  And because it has a rich set of builtins, using those really puts on the afterburners, with minor changes in code lifting it to 15x the performance of the Ruby interpreter.
  
  Of course, Ruby now has a compiler of its own, which I haven't tested against.  
  
  Right now, integrating multiprecision maths into the core.
  
  
  
• Multiprecision is in.  Download size (which is not available yet) is 3.4MB for the compiler, runtime, and standard library - and that's a UPX self-extracting binary that starts up in about 50 milliseconds (timed at 34ms on a 9950X server at work).  Download it and go, no need to unpack, let alone compile.
  
  The standard library includes TLS, image processing, multiprecision integers, rationals, floats, decimals, and complex numbers, a vector and matrix math kernel, various cryptographic hashes, and Unicode regular expressions without backtracking - anything that absolutely has to be fast is built in.
  
  The entire extended library is 6MB compiled and uncompressed, 40% of which is Unicode collation and IDNA (Unicode domain name smooshing) data and the time zone database.  So 40% comes from 3 packages and 60% comes from the other 118.  It's uncompressed because bytecode isn't parsed; it's mapped into memory, verified, and run in place.  Compressed for download it's about 2MB.
  
  If you want to use the AOT compiler - that turns the bytecode into static binaries - you need the Rust toolchain which is another 672MB.  But it works fine without that.

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Saturday, September 12 2026 03:13 AM (u3vqB)

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