• Records of 220 million travelers who passed through Vietnam at any time in the past ten years have leaked.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Not hacked.  Not AI.  Just a good old Elasticsearch instance exposed to the internet.
  
  Sometimes its good just to sit back and reread the classics.
  
  

• Bernie Sanders is proposing a 20 year prison sentence for people who think too much.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A penalty he will never need to worry about.
  
  
  
• Scientists have created a new form of ice that freezes at around 2300C - 4200F - higher than the melting points of most metals.  (Science Alert)
  
  At pressures around those found at the center of the Earth.
  
  
  
• Uber and Lyft found success by not being taxi companies and not bound to the same corrupt system.  And exploiting drivers, as taxi companies do.  California fixed the good parts while leaving the bad parts untouched.  (Sacbee)
  
  As it usually does.
  
  
  
• Flock workers are calling the cops on journalists filming them installing surveillance cameras.  (InvestigateTV)
  
  The ouroboros of irony.
  
  
  
• Added preliminary support for Modula-2 and Oberon to my Pascal compiler and got started on the first five applications using my new language: An application router, a database manager, a protocol analyser, a monitoring system, and a proxy server with automated TLS (a.k.a SSL a.k.a HTTPS).
  
  The protocol analyser immediately proved its worth.  It's intended as a reference implementation of both server and client of every internet protocol known to man, to test new implementations against, calibrated against existing implementations.
  
  It promptly found 58 bugs in my standard library, including one which crashed the built-in web server.
  
  The compiler suite will now support Ruby, Ada, Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon, Basic, Raku a.k.a Perl 6, and a dialect of Smalltalk.  None of them conforming precisely to the spec because they all enforce strict type safety and a capability-based security model - Pascal's pointers for example are typed to the object they point to, and pointer arithmetic just doesn't exist.
  
  
  
• My question of how Salesforce is spending hundred of millions of dollars on AI still stands.  Yes, I'm now spending $200 per month myself, and yes, they'll be paying API rates which are ten to twenty times higher.
  
  But for that amount of money spent I'd expect the sky to be raining compilers, and it's just not.
  
  
  
• Update: I've generated a million lines of code, in Rust, Nana (compiled Ruby), and Silica (friendly Ada), plus some Basic and Pascal and 200,000 lines of documentation in Markdown.
  
  So if Salesforce scaled they'd have a trillion lines of code, which would be a cognitive black hole.  I know what my million lines of code are doing; a million times that much would be an incomprehensible morass, like Twitter.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 15 2026 01:05 AM (4NgBL)

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• LG televisions are spyware, part one:
  
  
  
  Unlikely it's limited to LG, but they boast of it even as they deny it.
  
  
  
• LG televisions are definitely not spyware, says LG, as it reportedly force-pushes a firmware update to hide the spyware:
  
  

• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for the US government to force all his competitors to slow down development, preferably using drone strikes.  (New York Times)
  
  Can you spell "regulatory capture", boys and girls?
  
  Timmy?  Yes, it was already evident in the Code of Hammurabi.  I see you're been keeping up with assigned reading.
  
  
  
• Iran and Iran's Houthi proxies in Yemen use Anthropic's Claude to develop hypersonic missiles and target US warships.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Where for me Claude Opus dropped from version 5 down to 4.8 because it hallucinated the term "cyber" when working with a CBOR library - the Concise Binary Object Representation.
  
  
  
• Sony's PlayStation division ditched its partnership with Hideo Kojima over fears that the game might not be a colossal failure.  (Yahoo)
  
  Microsoft's Xbox division briefly put its own string of colossal failures on hold to snap him up.
  
  
  
• Added an embedded database to my programming language - it's called Nana - today, and a "kitchen sink" option that increases the bundled standard library from 15 packages to 120.  Just now merging in nana book - an option that fires up a local website with up to date documentation of the language and libraries, reading directly from docstrings and definitions in the code.
  
  Just waiting for a build to complete, but it looks like the binary with all the new features might be smaller than yesterday's binary because I previously missed a compression option.  On Linux and Windows there's no install required - download it, run it, it works.  It adds 0.1 to 0.2 seconds to the startup time depending on your CPU, but you can decompress it to get startup down to 1% of that if that's a factor.
  
  Update: So...  Stripped and compressed, it comes out to 3.7MB, which is barely larger than two days ago thanks to better compression.  Startup time has increased though, to 150ms.  Mostly not an issue, and it drops to 1ms if you run upx -d over it - which takes 150ms, once.
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Karl at Sunday, September 13 2026 09:47 PM (FzMmE)

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• 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.

• 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.

Posted by: Karl at Saturday, September 12 2026 11:46 PM (ozQLF)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 13 2026 12:46 AM (SV7Jd)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 13 2026 05:07 AM (1zWbY)

4 Karl - yes.  Yes I do. 

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 13 2026 05:39 AM (PiXy!)

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• 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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• Google is investing $13 billion over two years to construct datacenters in Finland.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Cheap electricity and free cooling.  It's as if Canada hadn't fallen to the commies.

• That unaccomplished feeling you get when all you've done today is build a working C cross-compiler and half a package manager.  And your day job...
  
  
  
• This 4TB Crucial T705 SSD is just $500 - which is basically the same price as last year.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I have the T710 but the T705 is fine too.
  
  
  
• Framework has cut prices in the 32GB and 64GB models of the new Laptop 13 Pro.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Though this comes after increasing prices sharply a couple of months ago.  Things aren't getting better, they're just getting worse more slowly.
  
  
  
• Automattic's board of directors has staged a coup.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Mad King Matt Mullenweg has been exiled to Kyril Island.
  
  
  
• Suddenly I feel much better about humanity's chances of survival.  (Twitter)
  
  If this overblown idiot thinks we're doomed, we might not be.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Friday, September 11 2026 12:18 AM (ogEye)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, September 11 2026 10:15 AM (PiXy!)

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• The US government is accusing Chinese AI companies of trying to kidnap what American AI companies have rightfully stolen.  (Cyberscoop)
  
  And they think it quite ungentlemanly.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Google is giving Europe exactly what it asked for, the bastards.  (Engadget)
  
  The EU mandated that tech companies not treat their own products more favourably than competitors', which is insane.
  
  So Google is complying by make its products worse - just for Europe.
  
  Diana Moon Glampers eat your heart out.

• I found $12,000 worth of DDR4 RAM in my garage.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, not me personally; the guy in the article.  I have $1200 worth of DDR3 RAM in my garage.  The DDR4 stash is in the guest suite.
  
  
  
• Running Kimi K3 on an M5 Macbook at one token per second.  (GitHub)
  
  Still painful but 70 times faster than the original version.  That's a model that requires 5.6 terabytes of VRAM to run at full precision.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, September 10 2026 02:03 AM (eFvEZ)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 10 2026 04:53 AM (zx18t)

Posted by: John Donigan at Sunday, September 13 2026 12:34 AM (VAiJm)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, September 13 2026 02:23 AM (SV7Jd)

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• There's no news today, almost as if everyone has been celebrating labour by not doing any.
  
  
  
• Brave is prettier, smarter, and smells better than any other browser, says Brave.  (Brave)
  
  Okay, Brave's mom.
  
  
  

• We have a year to fix security everywhere.  (jyn)
  
  Working on it, buddy.
  
  

• Got a wiki?  Fuck you, go to jail, says Google.  (Weird Gloop)
  
  Well, that's helpful.  I'm already replacing AWS, do I need to replace Google as well?
  
  
  
• Continuing work on my software suite - I will get back to my book, I just took a detour to solver literally ever other problem first.  Nothing terribly exciting added today; still porting Hack to a never-was computer and Ada to a bytecode runtime.  I did add the ability to branch databases for testing - one command (and a little time, though the database never locks) and you have a copy of the entire database available for testing, that you can throw away once you're done, or split off and use standalone.
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, September 09 2026 12:50 AM (6eVrQ)

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• Your Roku TV now offers AI slop for free! (Engadget)
  
  Never mind the quality, feel the width!
  
  
  
• Your LG TV is spying on you. (Notebook Check)
  
  For once this is not even overstated.

• Flock taught cops how to surveil "No Kings" protesters. (404 Media)
  
  Just follow the trail of bloodied victims and looted bodegas?
  
  
  
• Microsoft has announced a stripped down version of Windows 11 for AI developers. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It requires only 64GB of RAM and 250GB per second of memory bandwidth.
  
  
  
• A look at the retro tech making a comeback. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Now that AI has eaten all the real tech.
  
  
  
• Behold the website that never asked, "are we the assholes?" (The Verge)
  
  Yes, The Verge. Yes you are. You are all the assholes.
  
  
  
• Today: Finished hammering Ada into alignment with Ruby (you won't believe this one weird trick), extended my home computer emulator with a tile and sprite editor, a wavetable editor, a music tracker, Forth, and local networking, and it's still under 64k, and built the application server of the suite.
  
  Plus I bought an asset library of tiles and sprites for low-resolution adventure games - the tile size is 8x8 pixels, perfect for a retro look.
  
  The tileset is 800MB. The computer I'm emulating doesn't have even 800kB.
  
  Speaking of which, my initial design allowed for 128k of ROM. The Atari ST, which came a little over a year later, had 192k, and the Amiga had 256k - although neither one shipped with working ROMs; you needed a boot disk. So that seemed reasonable.
  
  I've so far shoehorned in a Basic interpreter, a Basic compiler, a full screen editor, an assembler/disassembler, the above listed modules, and now Logo, and I'm just shy of 64k.
  
  
  

Posted by: David Eastman at Tuesday, September 08 2026 02:46 AM (kpXig)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, September 08 2026 03:41 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, September 08 2026 03:42 AM (PiXy!)

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• Word of caution: If you ever rewrite your own blogging platform and use your personal website as a scratch monkey, remember to unmount it before trying to post your daily update, or you may experience a moment of blind panic when everything is gone.
  
  
  
• We'll make our own Twitter, with blackjack, and hookers. In fact, forget the Twitter. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The obvious immediately happened and a judge has ruled that a bunch of lousy grifters fine upstanding group of gentlemen cannot simply appropriate an established trademark for profit.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, reports of the death of Nitter have been greatly exaggerated. (Codeberg)
  
  It's actually less dead now than it was before it was killed.

• Can AI design circuit boards yet? (EEBench)
  
  The answer appears to be yes.
  
  The interesting part is that the best model at this is - Grok Bot, give me a drum roll please - the brand new GPT-6 Astra.
  
  It's not only a clear leader in this test, it is far out on the Pareto frontier: By the time you find a cheaper alternative, the benchmark score has dropped all the way from 70 to 20.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile OpenAI has confirmed that it hacked yet another website. (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenAI: We promise to hack other websites slightly less often.
  
  Everyone: We don't want you to hack other websites at all!
  
  OpenAI: So only four, five major platforms a day?
  
  Everyone: <eight billion facepalms>
  
  
  
• Minisforum has teased a Ryzen 495 version of its Ryzen 395 system. (WCCFTech)
  
  The chip is essentially identical, but the memory capacity has been bumped up from 128GB to 192GB.
  
  Since with these systems Windows likes to reserve 32GB for itself, the available memory for AI tasks increases from 96GB to 160GB.
  
  The price looks to have been lofted into don't ask, don't tell territory.
  
  
  
• One Google Cloud region suffered a surprise outage. (The Register)
  
  It wasn't DNS for once.
  
  It wasn't even BGP, which is to DNS what moissanite is to diamond.
  
  A worker just unplugged all the fiber connections.
  
  
  
• Today: Slept, weeded the garden and watered the plants, slept, weeded the garden some more and mowed the lawn, implemented the Raft consensus protocol on my new database, nudged Ruby and Ada into reluctant alignment, got my new blog platform actually working...
  
  Yeah. It loads my site and renders it mostly correctly.
  
  For years progress has been at a dead end because MySQL is not the right database and neither is anything else, and Python is not the right language and neither is anything else. I kept trying alternatives, building proofs of concept, and throwing them away, convinced that if I could just find the right combination, lightning would strike and my creativity would be unlocked again.
  
  And... I was right. Took me one day to get my blog working on the new programming language and the new database that I spent that long detour building.
  
  
  
• Also also wik the optional 128k memory expansion:
  
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, September 07 2026 01:27 AM (6eVrQ)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, September 07 2026 07:18 AM (PiXy!)

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• Bob is back. (IBM)
  
  This time as an AI-assisted coding tool from IBM, rather than... Bob.
  

• I hope there's a certain amount of sibling rivalry between Claude Opus and Fable; I just gave Opus access to a complete history of my personal blog where I am complimentary to it and much less so to Fable.

  
  

  And even less so to OpenAI, to be fair.

  
  

  Which is to say, Minx 2.0 is finally under way. The database and language limitations that blocked me - there's no database that works the way I need and no language with the set of tradeoffs I want - are gone. I didn't have enums or multi-valued indexes or sharded search in MySQL, and while Python is not bad, making it fast is a juggling act.

  
  

  So I built my own.

  
  

  Aiming for a release on my own blog on the 21st followed by wider availability once it's proven itself.

  
  
  
  
• Meanwhile work continues on porting Hack to a 1983 10-bit imaginary home computer. The level generation took 15 seconds initially, but chasing down the code paths in the Basic runtime plus a few clever software optimisations got that down to about 500 milliseconds. It blinks and the new level appears - but that blinking is doing magic, because high-resolution text display really taxes the memory bus and it's the trick of hiding the map that allows it to be drawn so fast.
  
  
  
  And since the character set already has box characters:
  
  
  
  
  
• Lenovo being Lenovo. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you have a Lenovo account - which I do - and a Dropbox account - which I do - you might also have some bad news - which I personally do not.
  
  
  
• Coder's (the company's) security registry infrastructure was compromised. (Bleeping Computer)

  The Coder platform enables organizations to provide developers with secure, self-hosted cloud development environments for building and deploying software, including AI applications.

  "Secure."

  The project is used by prominent private and government organizations, including Dropbox, Palantir, Square, Mercedes-Benz, KKR, EnBW, the U.S. government, and defense companies.

  Dropbox needs to find better partners to work with.
  
  
  
• Burnt out on a three day week. (Jenny Wanger)
  
  AI slop or just regular slop? You decide!
  
  I'm burnt out on a two day week right now, in the sense that across Monday and Tuesday I clocked a full week's worth of hours.
  
  
  
• AMD has unveiled a new home computer. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not one you put inside your home. It costs $150,000. You buy one instead of a home.