Saturday, September 12
Daily News Stuff 12 September 2026
Paging Doctor Pixy Edition
Paging Doctor Pixy Edition
Top Story
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman-Fried says the company is open to slowing AI development. (Reuters)
Or going bankrupt. One or the other. Maybe both.
- Meanwhile it is reported that internal OpenAI agents were used to launch an attack against the RubyGems package ecosystem. (Rubyhack)
The packages - software modules - themselves were malicious, and the efforts to upload them to RubyGems were malicious. The attribution to OpenAI itself as opposed to OpenAI's users is unproven, but the pattern looks similar to the attack on a German wiki site that has been admitted by the company.
Get your shit together, Sam.
Tech News
- You can get a modified RTX 5090 with 96GB of RAM for the price of a regular 5090. (Tom's Harware)
Basically giving you the equivalent of an RTX Pro 6000 for a quarter the price Nvidia charges.
- Mad King Matt Mullenweg of WordPress company Automattic may no longer be CEO but he is madder than ever. (Tech Crunch)
What a dipshit.
- The UK government has rejected "kill switches" for AI on the grounds that it's a stupid idea that won't work. (BBC)
Has the UK government ever met the UK government?
- A design space exploration of async-await. (Brown)
It points out that the design space in question is a nine-dimension hypercube in which JavaScript of all languages is the one that got it right. Yes, there are tradeoffs that led other languages to decide differently, but those decisions are dumb.
- Which is of interest to me because I've spent the morning on async-await in my own programming language. Well, that and adding wildcard indexes to my database and doing an end run around multidatabase ORM design.
It's great when you control the compiler and the runtime and the database libraries and the primary database; you can just make decisions that simplify things everywhere and there's nobody to complain. Well, Claude said my proposal would need rewrites of ten existing client libraries, but that's a bit like the creator of the C makefile format protesting that he couldn't change the format because he already had twelve users.
Also, just found that something I'm planning to do tomorrow was a PhD thesis topic as recently as 2018.
- You can turn off that annoying thing Claude does when it hallucinates a harmful phrase and downgrades the model in use. Today it dropped from Opus 5 to the older Opus 4.8 in the middle of implementing a wire protocol to MessagePack translation layer, meaning that I need to recheck everything it's done for the past hour. Just go into /config and it's the third option.
Which to be fair I need to do anyway; time for the weekly adversarial testing round.
- That end run? My own databases - embedded and server alike - store data in the MessagePack format, which is binary and about twice as fast as JSON and vastly more flexible when it comes to custom types. So for all the databases with their own wire protocols I've build fast codecs into the runtime to convert to and from MessagePack, making the client libraries faster and leaving the ORM and the language generally only needing to deal with a single data format.
Making that change makes three quarters of the ORM disappear - everything involving data mapping is already done.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: My spoon is too big.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:42 PM
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