Podcasts about ssh

Syncthing saves the day in an unexpected way, and we dig into what's new in Linux 7.2.Sponsored By:Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:Web Boost — Send us a boost via sats or USD

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On this week's show Patrick Gray and James Wilson are joined by guest co-host Dmitri Alperovitch to talk through the week's news, including: Trump's memo authorising the private sector to release the cyber hounds is fine, don't worry! OpenAI finally decides to add a few safety measures after the whole “oopsie we committed some felonies” thing Anthropic's models start a turf war when given the same task, surprising… nobody We can't figure out whether a device that can hack a 737 is showboating stunt hacking or … something more real-world cool. Or both. Or something. Much, much more This week's show is brought to you by threat hunt and detection platform Nebulock. Founder and CEO Damien Lewke joins Pat to chat about what it looks like when you try to reinvent the SIEM in 2026 on a clean sheet of paper. This episode is also available on YouTube Show notes Trump signs memo authorizing private sector to launch cyberattacks | washingtonpost.com Trump taps cyber firms to go on offensive against criminals | therecord.media OpenAI Overhauls Safety Protocols After Its AI Agents Went Rogue | wired.com Pacing model development in an era of cyber-critical capabilities | Anthropic set AI agents loose on the same task. They started a turf war. | TechCrunch Security Researchers observe first ‘near-autonomous' AI attack on government target in Taiwan | cyberscoop.com Researchers find AI-powered hacking tools for sale in underground forums | Cybersecurity Dive Terabytes of credentials leaked in massive supply-chain attack | arstechnica.com Trivy, Not LiteLLM Behind the 2,500 Org Compromise | securityweek.com Ukraine says cyberattack hit Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries amid drone strikes | The Record ‘Unprecedented' number of Apple users received recent spyware alert, say investigators | TechCrunch Security This Coin-Sized Device Can Hack a Boeing 737 | wired.com "City-Forum" data-theft attacks target Salesforce, ServiceNow portals | BleepingComputer Max severity SAP Commerce Cloud flaw now targeted in attacks | BleepingComputer Shell investigates 'potential incident' after Clop data theft claims | BleepingComputer Philips and GE investigating Clop ransomware data theft claims | BleepingComputer Uber Freight reportedly investigating after hacking group claims data breach | TechCrunch Security Details emerge on BlackFile's recent attacks on financial companies | cyberscoop.com After Microsoft threatened legal action, a security researcher publishes a new Windows zero-day bug | TechCrunch Security Kimwolf botnet rebuilt to survive takedowns, researchers say | cyberscoop.com Hundreds of fake Chrome VPN extensions route traffic through a proxy | BleepingComputer Deepfake hiccup unmasks suspected digital certificate fraudster | theregister.com Vulnerability giving attackers full control of Macs is under active exploitation | arstechnica.com Critical VMware vCenter RCE flaw exploited for reverse SSH access | BleepingComputer Poland probes MyDr healthcare software breach potentially affecting 19 million people | therecord.media Crypto hardware wallet owners face fresh security risks after recent spate of personal data thefts | TechCrunch Security [un]prompted.au — AI × Cybersecurity Conference · Sydney, 18–19 September 2026 | [un]prompted.au

Siedemdziesiąty siódmy odcinek — czyli dwie siekierki, dwa tomahawki, ewentualnie ciupagi — robimy w duecie: Remek i Marek.

Send us Fan MailWe talk with Dr. Marie Gilbert about the leaps, pivots, and partnerships that turned a pediatric ICU nurse educator into a healthcare simulation leader. We also dig into mentorship, the SSH Ascend program, and why competency-based education needs simulation that measures more than technical skill. • moving from England to Fresno and finding an unexpected long-term home • seeing early sedation simulations and realizing why safety and realism matter • building simulation programs without perfect funding through creative collaboration • growing through SSH leadership and shaping the Ascend mentorship model • designing Ascend to be accessible with no fee and global participation • connecting competency-based education to technical, cognitive, and human performance • planning the IMSH 2027 consensus forum to define simulation as foundational in CBE Visit us at www.innovative simsolutions.com. And be sure to hit that like and subscribe button so you never miss an episode.Innovative SimSolutions.Your turnkey solution provider for medical simulation programs, sim centers & faculty design.

Welcome to Episode 296 of the LinuxLUGcast We are an open podcast/LUG that meets at 9 PM EST every first and third friday of the month using mumble. We encourage anyone listening to join us and participate on the podcast. Check out https://www.linuxlugcast.com/ for the server details. If you have any questions, comments, or topic you would like us to discus and are unable to join us during the live show you can send us email at feedback@linuxlugcast.com Join in the conversation at https://matrix.to/#/#lugcast:minnix.dev Movie List https://etherpad.integrations.element.io/p/e24fde39-0b56-4941-9870-526055295062 Youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@thelinuxlugcast Peertube Channel https://nightshift.minnix.dev/c/linux_lugcast/videos web mumble https://lugcastweb.minnix.dev/ Previous Movie: Mega Twister (2024) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27130323/ Next Movie:Murderbot (2023) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26457986/ Joe – Linux cracks 10% desktop marketshare https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-linux-desktop-finally-cracks-the-10-market-share-barrier/ Joe – Dungeon Crawler Carl Rama u80 a keyboard https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FNQM7PWR?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CY5DFWJ8 minnix – new router (Ubiquiti UDR7) and NAS (ugreen DXP4800 Plus) https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/udr7 https://ai.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-nasync-dxp4800-plus-nas-storage minnix – moving the BBS from web based to terminal SSH. Creating VLAN with the new router. minnix – lugbot is alive – kinda A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/police-missed-one-underscore-and-sent-the-wrong-man-to-prison/ Introducing Seller, an App for Facebook Marketplace Sellers https://about.fb.com/news/2026/07/introducing-seller-app-facebook-marketplace/ Mega Twister Review Our next recording date will be 8/21/26 Our music is “Downright” provided by Klaatu and Broam and we would like to thank Minnix for the mumble server

22 Seconds to Compromise: How Automated SSH Actors Move From Login to Persistence Before You Can Blink [Guest Diary] https://isc.sans.edu/diary/22+Seconds+to+Compromise+How+Automated+SSH+Actors+Move+From+Login+to+Persistence+Before+You+Can+Blink+Guest+Diary/33220 Dell BIOS Passwords: Weak XOR Encryption Allows Recovery from SPI Flash (CVE-2026-40639) https://blog.amberwolf.com/blog/2026/july/dell-bios-passwords-weak-xor-encryption-allows-recovery-from-spi-flash-cve-2026-40639/ Ill Bloom: Crypto Wallet Vulnerability https://illbloom.org Benchmarking Free-Tier Large Language Models as Cognitive Aids for Operationalizing Unstructured Cyber Threat Intelligence https://www.sans.edu/cyber-research/benchmarking-free-tier-large-language-models-cognitive-aids-operationalizing-unstructured-cyber-threat-intelligence My Upcoming Classes https://www.sans.org/profiles/dr-johannes-ullrich

PHP Alive and Kicking – August 4, 2026 Hosts: Chris Miller (standing in solo while Mike is on holiday) Mike escaped to a beach so Chris hosts alone with special guest Derick Rethans. Expect date-time philosophy, PHP 8.6 goodies, Xdebug secrets, deprecation drama, and a heated debate about how to queue at a pub. From University Websites to Committing to PHP Derick traces his PHP origins back to his university days, building websites that needed database connectivity. ASP.NET was an option, but nobody wanted to pay for it — Linux was cool, and PHP was easy to start using. That combination hooked him early. His very first accepted contribution came from a practical need: everyone wanted centered Shockwave Flash films on their pages, back before CSS even existed. Centering meant knowing the width of a file, and while getimagesize() already existed (and still works today), it didn’t understand Flash. Derick added that support. From there he fell into bug triage, spending several years working through the issue tracker alongside Jani Taskinen (whose “Sniper” name still shows up in commit logs). For a long time it was just the two of them reproducing and fixing bugs — an important task that gets neglected easily, which is exactly how backlogs of a thousand issues and pull requests build up. The Eternal Problem of Date and Time Chris and Derick dig into why date-time bugs are so hard to triage: date algorithms are genuinely complicated, and it takes real time to figure out whether a report is a user’s mistake or an actual PHP bug. Crashes are easy to reproduce; subtle date arithmetic is not. The core philosophical question is “what does adding a month even mean?” If it’s January 31st and you add a month, PHP historically just bumps the month number, producing February 31st, which overflows to March 2nd or 3rd. But most people who add a month really just want the next month and don’t care about day counts — so “next month” is conceptually distinct from “add a month.” Derick has been brainstorming better interfaces so people can’t make these mistakes, though it’s a lot of work. They touch on Carbon as a unified interface people understand, but agree that making Carbon the language standard isn’t the right move. At the language level you need something that works for everybody and ideally doesn’t break existing code. What’s Coming in PHP 8.6 The first new time class is landing: a Duration object representing seconds and nanoseconds within a specific range, living in the Time namespace. It’s a trial run for new APIs and immediately useful — for example, passing a duration to sleep or to timeouts in the new polling API, rather than juggling raw integers. Another highlight is partial function application. With the pipe operator from 8.5, piping into anything that takes more than one argument meant wrapping it in a closure (and extra parentheses because of how the parser works). Partials let you pre-fill some arguments so the resulting callable accepts just one — perfect for pipelines. There’s also TLS session resumption support for streams, which lets OpenSSL shortcut the expensive session setup on repeated TLS connections. Bigger stream-layer work by Jakub Zelenka of the PHP Foundation is underway too, but that’s a huge job on old code and won’t make 8.6 — Chris and Derick both note the pain of keeping a year-and-a-half-long project in sync with the master branch. Xdebug in 8.6 and the Xdebug Cloud Xdebug’s recent headline feature (shipped with 8.5) is native path mapping, which lets you configure remote-to-local path mappings inside Xdebug itself instead of your IDE — handy when your code runs in Docker or on a dev machine. Feedback since release is driving quality-of-life improvements. For 8.6, relatively little is broken, though a change to how PHP reports line numbers needs untangling so debugging stops on the correct lines. Derick also has a new code-coverage implementation that gives better, more correct results at roughly a 10% speed cost. He’d rather ship correct output than fast output — and points out that PHPCov may be quicker but skips path and branch coverage entirely. The pair discuss how branch coverage doubles your test count at every branching point, and how Xdebug has a hard limit (around 64K) to avoid running out of memory on pathological code. Finally, Chris asks about Xdebug Cloud — a paid service that enables debugging where networking otherwise wouldn’t, such as remote teams sharing a single development machine (an SSH tunnel only lets one person listen on the debug port). It’s £15/month or £150/year for an individual, priced similarly to Packagist’s private packages, and helps fund Derick’s ongoing Xdebug work. He plans to do more marketing about it this year. Deprecations, Consensus, and Two-Thirds Votes Every year PHP collects a big list of deprecations — around 20 to 25 this cycle — voted on separately. Derick is more reluctant than most to approve them, arguing many offer no clear user benefit. His examples: deprecating metaphone() (whose suggested Composer replacement ironically relies on the internal function) and the dechunk filter (which can’t really be removed because HTTP streams use it internally). The list() deprecation is another sore point — Chris uses it, and the vote is tied 21–21 with one abstention, so it won’t pass under the two-thirds rule. Derick reminds everyone that “yes” needs to be twice “no.” Returning from a finally block is another candidate that makes little sense to use but hurts nothing to keep. Chris and Derick reflect on how voting was originally meant to confirm consensus reached on the mailing list, not to be the decision itself. A 50%+1 result isn’t consensus; two-thirds is the compromise, even if true 75–80% agreement would be ideal. Joe notes many deprecations are groundwork to reserve keywords for future RFCs — which raises the perennial question of how you measure real-world usage across Composer’s dependency chains. Infrastructure, the Website, and the Next Generation The PHP infrastructure has been converted to an Ansible-based repository over the last year and a half (largely by Derick, with help from Joe), replacing a wild mix of individually maintained servers — one was still running FreeBSD 4.3. They’ve also migrated to a new CDN, which brought surprises: a default one-month cache, ignoring the query string in cache keys, and even dark/light mode being an organization-wide setting rather than per-user. On the website side, everything currently lives in a single root directory of 1999-vintage code, and there’s a long-pending patch to restructure it. The PHP Foundation’s ambassadors program — with speaking, marketing, and research streams — aims to make the very techy php.net homepage speak to CTOs and newcomers about who uses PHP and why it’s a thriving project (only 31-ish years old, versus C’s 60). The conversation closes on caretakers and the next generation of contributors. Triage, they stress, doesn’t require deep internals knowledge — just reading reports to see if they still make sense is hugely valuable. Security and infrastructure access necessarily stay gatekept for trust reasons, and both agree a bus factor of one (or even two) isn’t good enough. Chris admits he’s struggling to name people who are both nice and know infra. Links from the show: Join us live in Discord — discord.phparch.com Watch live on YouTube — youtube.com/phparch PHP Tek Conference 2027 — Call for Papers now open PHP Arch Swag Store — store.phparch.com Xdebug — and Xdebug Cloud for shared debugging Magazine discount code ALIVE3 — three free months on an annual digital subscription Host: Chris Miller X: @ccmiller2018 Mastodon: @miller@phpc.social Bluesky: @ccmiller2018.bsky.social PHPArch.me: @miller Mike Page Mastodon: @MikePageDev@phpc.social PHPArch.me: @mikepagedev Streams: Youtube Channel Twitch Connect & Hire PHP Architect Website Twitter/X Mastodon Hire PHP Developers Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – the team is available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review. Partner This podcast is made a little better thanks to our partners Displace Infrastructure Management, Simplified Automate Kubernetes deployments across any cloud provider or bare metal with a single command. Deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure with ease. https://displace.tech/ OurCVEs Your security posture, on autopilot with OurCVEs CodeRabbit Cut code review time & bugs in half instantly with CodeRabbit. PHP Architect Consulting Your PHP codebase deserves a partner, not a contractor PHP Architect provides long-term technical partnerships for organizations that need senior-level PHP expertise that you can depend on. https://www.phparch.com/consulting/ Music Provided by Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com/ Join Us Live Next Week Youtube Channel Got feedback? Join us on Discord at discord.phparch.com The post PHP Alive and Kicking 2026.08.04 appeared first on PHP Architect.

Ronald and Jan talk with Peter O'Neill and Boris Kurktchiev from Teleport about their talk "Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Why Reverse Proxies Beat VPNs." Both guests bring deep networking and security backgrounds, from early desktop support and Slackware days to leading Teleport's solutions engineering and CNCF community work.The core argument: traditional VPNs grant broad network access once a user authenticates, creating large lateral movement risk with little to no granular control or auditing. Peter and Boris propose replacing that model with an identity layer using OIDC and a reverse proxy (Envoy), authenticated via an identity provider like Keycloak. Instead of trusting users based on network location, every connection is signed and validated against intent, who is accessing what, and why.They walk through how this works in practice (SSH access, internal apps, audit logging that captures actual user identity instead of just status codes) and discuss trade-offs: more endpoints to manage, added resource and scaling costs, and real implementation complexity at enterprise scale. Boris is candid that VPNs aren't dead, they still serve as a useful front gate, but shouldn't be the only layer of defense.The conversation also touches on how AI agents on a network expose the weaknesses of old identity assumptions, since AI will scan and probe everything it can reach unless access is explicitly scoped. The episode closes with both guests' hopes for the future of Kubernetes and CNCF: more community involvement in AI-related working groups, and more regional KubeCon-style events outside the usual hubs.Stuur ons een bericht.ACC ICT Specialist in IT-CONTINUÏTEIT Bedrijfskritische applicaties én data veilig beschikbaar, onafhankelijk van derden, altijd en overalSupport the showLike and subscribe! It helps out a lot.You can also find us on:De Nederlandse Kubernetes Podcast - YouTubeNederlandse Kubernetes Podcast (@k8spodcast.nl) | TikTokDe Nederlandse Kubernetes PodcastWhere can you meet us:EventsThis Podcast is powered by:ACC ICT - IT-Continuïteit voor Bedrijfskritische Applicaties | ACC ICT

Reconnaissance First: An SSH Bot That Sizes Up Your Hardware Before Deploying a Miner https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Reconnaissance%20First%3A%20An%20SSH%20Bot%20That%20Sizes%20Up%20Your%20Hardware%20Before%20Deploying%20a%20Miner%20%5BGuest%20Diary%5D/33198 Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center Software Static Credential Vulnerability Exploited CVE-2026-20316 https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-fmc-static-cred-BET3Cjh Inconsistent Group Chats https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity26/presentation/gegenhuber https://www.heise.de/en/news/Encrypted-but-wrong-Group-chats-vulnerable-to-manipulated-content-11384112.html My Upcoming Classes https://www.sans.org/profiles/dr-johannes-ullrich

¿Tienes 5, 10 o 20 servidores SSH y no sabes cómo gestionarlos sin tener mil terminales abiertas? En este episodio te hablo de SSHub, una TUI open source escrita en Rust que unifica hosts, sesiones, túneles, SFTP y auditoría en una sola interfaz. Todo desde la terminal, sin salir de ella y sin necesidad de instalar nada más que un único binario compilado con cargo install de Rust.Te cuento cómo pasé de un script en Bash que usaba desde 2019 para conectarme a mis servidores, a esta herramienta moderna que lee tu ~/.ssh/config y lo combina con una base de datos SQLite propia. Sin migraciones, sin complicaciones, sin tener que cambiar nada de lo que ya tienes configurado. Además la comparo con Termius y MobaXterm, que son de pago y cerradas, frente a SSHub que es gratis, multiplataforma y con licencia AGPL-3.0.Voy paso a paso: instalación con cargo install sshub, navegación con atajos estilo Vim (teclas j/k), el cliente SFTP de doble panel con cola de transferencia y barra de progreso, la gestión de túneles con reconexión automática y backoff exponencial, el registro de auditoría que te salva de conectar al servidor equivocado, y hasta el modo broadcast para ejecutar comandos en varios servidores a la vez. También te explico cómo importar hosts desde Termius, PuTTY o mRemoteNG de forma sencilla.Lo mejor de todo es que SSHub respeta tu configuración SSH existente. No la sustituye, la complementa. Detecta cambios al vuelo con un file watcher, así que cualquier modificación que hagas en tu config aparece al instante en la interfaz. Y si eres de los que prefiere la línea de comandos, tiene modo headless: sshub list, sshub connect, sshub sftp get/put... todo sin abrir la interfaz.Si gestionas más de 10 servidores, usas túneles habitualmente o vienes de Termius buscando una alternativa open source, este episodio te va a interesar. Y si además te gusta hacer las cosas desde la terminal sin depender de aplicaciones gráficas, SSHub te va a encantar. Dale una oportunidad, que es gratis y no tienes nada que perder. Te espero dentro.Capítulos del episodio:0:00 — Introducción: el problema de gestionar múltiples servidores SSH1:50 — El script de 2019 y la necesidad de una herramienta moderna3:40 — SSHub: la TUI open source que lo unifica todo5:30 — Características principales: hosts, túneles, claves y auditoría7:30 — Instalación de SSHub con Cargo9:30 — Navegación y atajos de teclado11:30 — SFTP de doble panel y transferencia de archivos13:30 — Gestión de túneles y claves SSH15:15 — Auditoría de conexiones17:00 — Importación, exportación y personalización18:45 — ¿Para quién es SSHub? DespedidaMás información y enlaces en las notas del episodio

This week, the guys are talking about Canonical's new Enterprise Store, the final patent freedom for MPEG-4 layer 2, and what's new in OBS 32.2. There's yet another AI code ban, Jellyfin is having a leadership exodus, and Firefox has shipped 153. For tips, we have keyward for SSH key management, uvx for running a python command in an ephemeral install, ydotool for mouse and keyboard automation, and the scoop on how to install claude code without resorting to a curltobashism. The show notes are available at https://bit.ly/4wrijkK and have an epic week! Host: Jonathan Bennett Co-Hosts: Jeff Massie, Ken McDonald, and Rob Campbell Download or subscribe to Untitled Linux Show at https://twit.tv/shows/untitled-linux-show Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord.

This week, the guys are talking about Canonical's new Enterprise Store, the final patent freedom for MPEG-4 layer 2, and what's new in OBS 32.2. There's yet another AI code ban, Jellyfin is having a leadership exodus, and Firefox has shipped 153. For tips, we have keyward for SSH key management, uvx for running a python command in an ephemeral install, ydotool for mouse and keyboard automation, and the scoop on how to install claude code without resorting to a curltobashism. The show notes are available at https://bit.ly/4wrijkK and have an epic week! Host: Jonathan Bennett Co-Hosts: Jeff Massie, Ken McDonald, and Rob Campbell Download or subscribe to Untitled Linux Show at https://twit.tv/shows/untitled-linux-show Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Club TWiT members can discuss this episode and leave feedback in the Club TWiT Discord.

#curiosity #technews #podcast   Vrei un site cu adevărat mișto: https://caravan.ro/pages/creare-magazin-shopify-fastrack Magazinul nostru - https://gb.ro/ Pasionat de sport? - https://winwin.fit/ Newsletter - UPDATE YOU - https://georgebuhnici.substack.com/ Hai pe Telegram - https://t.me/s/buhnici Cold Wallet Pentru Crypto - https://gb.ro/ledger-nano-s-plus/     Devino membru în comunitatea Buhnici.ro -  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNz5n8PoSGYSwkOH_SMnl2A/join Urmărește-mă cu @gbuhnici pe Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok-@georgebuhnici   Desfășurătorul Emisiunii / Chapters:   0:00:00 Intro și reglaje de sunet 0:01:04 Breaking News: Cum a fost spart ANCPI și problema parolelor slabe 0:11:12 Vulnerabilități în WordPress și opțiuni de migrare 0:12:12 Securitatea cibernetică în România (Discuția cu Jay și Dan Câmpean) 0:14:08 Noutăți și oferte pe WINWIN.fit 0:17:39 Pachete noi eSIM de călătorie pe GB.ro 0:22:09 Soluții e-Commerce pe Shopify cu Caravan.ro 0:26:35 Memele săptămânii 0:29:08 Dezinformarea privind fântânile și scandalul teraselor de pe plajă 0:32:40 Lansările Samsung: Galaxy Z Fold 8, Z Flip 8 și Watch Ultra 0:41:18 Prețurile la memorii/SSD-uri și febra bursieră din Coreea de Sud 0:46:58 Kimi K3 (Moonshot AI) și sistemul macOS 27 recreat în browser 0:53:05 Test Kimi K3 vs. Grok 4.5 (Cum a accesat Grok cheia SSH și a publicat codul) 0:59:23 Apel în direct cu un scammer dintr-un call center din India 1:04:14 Investigația Recorder: Rețeaua medicamentelor periculoase 1:06:35 Hack-ul de la Hugging Face și acuzațiile la adresa OpenAI 1:12:40 Proiecte hardware open-source automatizate din China (HTX Studio) 1:16:13 Rezultatele României la Olimpiada Internațională de Securitate Cibernetică 1:18:00 Starea economiei reale, turismul în Maramureș și schițele Tesla CyberCab 1:23:33 Știință: Terapie anti-cancer experimentală din proteine de broască 1:25:46 Legea Prosumatorilor și câștigurile reale din panouri fotovoltaice 1:32:09 Noul Range Rover Sport Electric 1:35:24 Filmul „The Odyssey” în format IMAX 70mm și recomandări cinematografice 1:38:05 Concluzii, îndemn la abonare și mulțumiri pentru echipă

Hey friends! Welcome back to another Tales of Pentest Pwnage — my favorite mini-series where I share the good, the bad, and the "why didn't I check THAT first?!" moments from real-world engagements. Today's story has a little bit of everything: a legit path to domain admin, some late-night rabbit holes, a lesson in humility, and a villain you've definitely met before. (Spoiler: it's DNS.) A couple of quick plugs before we dive in: Private GOAD training is going strong! — We just wrapped a 3-day private session (7 students — that's max capacity!) of our Active Directory pentesting class built on the Game of Active Directory (GOAD) framework. Over three days, students enumerate, attack, and fully pwn three separate AD environments. The private format is just *chef's kiss* — when it's a team from the same company, the conversation gets real fast. Like, "hey I just checked Bloodhound on break and Bob from accounting has full rights over the DC" real. If you want to send 3–7 people from your org, hit up 7MinSec.com/training to line up a private session. Support the show over at 7MinSec.club — That's our Substack, where every Tuesday I drop a short TuesdayTOOLSday video about security tools. Free subscriptions are welcome and mean a lot — you'll just get pinged when new content drops. No spam, no blindly-sent Outlook calendar invites. I promise. Pentest tips and scripts live at 7MinSec.wiki — I reference it throughout today's episode, including some step-by-step guidance on the techniques we'll talk about below. Now — onto the pwnage. Fair warning: I've been burning the candle at three ends lately trying to catch up after a tough few weeks of grief (if you want the backstory, the last couple episodes cover my dad passing away). The good news is my head is semi back on straight and I put it to work on a recurring client environment — one that keeps getting better year over year. Machine account quota locked down? Check. No Kerberoastable or AS-REP roastable users? Check. No local admin rights, no web client running? Check and check. All good signs. And then PingCastle smiled right into my eyeballs with a big red finding: The DC's LAN Manager authentication level was weak enough to coerce and capture a downgraded hash — Specifically, an NTLMv1 SSP hash. Using Coercer to nudge the DC into authenticating to my Kali box (with Responder running), I captured the goods. Pretty little hashes all in a row. Cracking that hash: enter Vast.ai — The old go-to for this type of crack used to be crack.sh, but their cracker has been offline for years. What they do still have is a walkthrough pointing to a tool from EvilMog on GitHub that helps you prep the raw hash material and figure out exactly how to crack it with Hashcat. For the GPU horsepower, I rented a beefy multi-GPU instance on Vast.ai — filter for 16+ GPUs, pick a Hashcat Docker image, and SSH in. The whole crack job took about 16 hours at ~$4/hr. Do the math: $64 to reconstruct the DC's NTLM hash. Worth it. Tmux sidebar — seriously just learn it — Vast.ai is actually what finally got me into tmux, because the Hashcat Docker container drops you right into a tmux session. This is clutch: you can kick off a 16-hour crack job, detach, and reattach later without killing anything. On a pentest, my workflow now is SSH in → tmux → name a few session windows for Responder, Exegol, packet captures, etc. I used to fumble around with Linux screen sessions. Not anymore! From hash to DA — the usual playbook — Once you've got the DC's NTLM hash, you can request a Kerberos ticket and load it up, then run a DCSync to pull the KRBTGT hash. From there it's god mode: dump hashes, pass-the-hash as domain admins, and you have yourself a cool privesc POC. Except this time…the POC didn't work. The part where I Jean-Claude Van Damme helicopter kick myself in the face — DCSync failed immediately. Like, suspiciously fast — barely two lines of output and done. I tried every version of every tool I could get my hands on. I tried Windows, I tried Linux. I even asked the client to check if their endpoint protection was blocking me (it wasn't). I touched grass. I played guitar. I played some Splinter Cell Blacklist (old game, highly recommend if you like the Hitman-style vibes). Came back fresh. Rebooted both VMs. Still nothing. It was DNS. It's always DNS. — The thing that finally caught my eye: the commands were failing too fast. Like it wasn't even reaching the DC. I catted the resolv.conf inside my Exegol instance (heads up: Exegol has its own resolv.conf and hosts file, separate from your base Kali system!) and found a stale DNS entry pointing to an old DC that was no longer serving anything. Nuked the bad entry, added static hosts file entries for the live DC, ran the command again, and — hash rain. Pennies from heaven. It was midnight and I literally pushed back from my desk like a baby pushing away from a high chair going "Baby Brian is all done!" The lesson: — I know the meme. "It's always DNS." I just personally hadn't hit it hard in my security life since my sysadmin days back before 2013. Now I have. So going forward I'll check DNS first (and often). Vacation attempt #3 incoming… pray for me — My wife nearly died in Punta Cana earlier this year. Then our summer cabin trip was cold and rainy with zero water time. And now we've got families flying in from multiple states for a lake weekend — except we just found out our reservation through Booking.com was basically vaporized because the resort changed hands and never updated their website. My wife (who is an absolute saint and my better three-quarters) almost had a 360-degree head spin (like in The Exorcist) talking to customer service. But we scrambled, found a last-minute place, and I'm choosing to believe it's not in Jason Voorhees' back yard. Could this be my last episode? Maybe. But hey — it was a good one. Talk to you next week (hopefully).

Hey everyone, Alex here

This episode is built around a ransomware response checklist — a three-part Reddit series by a security specialist who goes by snorkel42, breaking down exactly how to prevent, contain, and recover from a ransomware attack.This is an encore episode, and it's back not just because a lot of people downloaded it originally, but because so many of you listened all the way through — some of you more than once. That kind of engagement told us this one was worth bringing back.Curtis Preston and Prasanna Malaiyandi dig into snorkel42's series, which breaks the whole problem into three parts: how to stop ransomware from getting in, how to slow it down if it does, and what to actually do once you've been hit. Curtis and Prasanna go section by section — covering phishing and dropper prevention, application whitelisting, blocking lateral movement between servers, locking down RDP and SSH, honeypot files for catching intruders in the act, and building a real incident response plan before you ever need one.They also get into the messier parts most people don't talk about — what it's actually like to negotiate for a decryption key, why getting your data back isn't the end of the story, and why a ransomware attack is nothing like a normal disaster recovery scenario. Along the way, Curtis makes the case that most organizations already have the gaps this attacker needs — and that fixing them now is a lot cheaper than fixing them after the fact.Whether you're building your first incident response plan or just want to stress-test the one you've already got, this episode gives you a practical, section-by-section framework to work from.Chapter Markers:00:00 – Encore intro & episode setup00:01:37 – Show intro and banter00:06:21 – Preventing the breach: phishing, droppers, and whitelisting00:14:46 – Blocking lateral movement, RDP/SSH lockdown00:20:28 – Detecting exfiltration and honeypot files00:24:19 – What to do once you've been hit00:25:58 – Building your incident response plan00:30:43 – Decryption, ransom payments, and why it's not over yet

This week's video transcript summary is here. You can click on any bulleted section to see the actual transcript. Thanks to Granola for its software.EditorialIntelligence: Who Owns it?This week the word “AI” feels too small.AI is a technology. Intelligence is its product. And if intelligence is the product, the question is no longer just: Which model is best? Who has the cheapest tokens? Who owns the weights? Who controls the data center? Those are important questions, but they are lower in the stack.The bigger question is simpler and more political:Who owns intelligence?That sounds abstract until you make it concrete. Intelligence is becoming something companies can capture, package, serve, meter, route, improve, and sell.It can write code, answer questions, design molecules, automate offices, run agents, draft legal work, advise scientists, serve consumers, and reshape workflows. It is not merely software. It is a general-purpose capability. And all humans could benefit from more of it.General-purpose capabilities have a habit of becoming public questions. But the default answer, that public good is best delivered by government, is the wrong answer in this context.The Product Is IntelligenceWe should stop talking about AI as a feature and start talking about intelligence as the universal thing that is delivered as an input to the world.Water is an input. Electricity is an input. Literacy is an input. Connectivity is an input. Once a society depends on them, access stops being optional. Nobody needs government to build every well, power plant, school, or network. But everybody understands that a civilization cannot be organized around less than universal and reliable access to foundational inputs.Intelligence is reaching that level of importance now that we all know it is real.Government should not own it, operate it, or develop it. Quite the opposite. Companies are the right actors to build fast, compete hard, improve models, serve customers, and discover the real use cases. Self-interest is a useful framing here. Markets are good at finding demand, reducing costs, and turning invention into services people actually use.Companies are the right operators, developers, and owners. But that does not settle the real question of who owns the benefits. That is an economic question.If intelligence becomes metered infrastructure, what happens to the value it creates?The Ownership StackThis week's articles keep circling the same issue from different directions but in the nature of ‘circling' never quite nail it.Jamin Ball's “Own Your Weights” starts with the enterprise version of the question. Owning a model file is not enough. The durable asset is the loop: the data flywheel, the evaluations, the reinforcement system, the workflow learning, and the operating context that lets capability compound.Benedict Evans' “Ways to Think About Token Pricing” adds the market layer. Tokens may become essential, abundant, and cheap, like mobile data. But being essential does not guarantee that the token layer captures the value. The money may move up the stack to whoever owns the workflow, the customer, the distribution, or the application.Alex Karp's fight with the labs, reported in “Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI”, is the same argument in sharper enterprise language. Companies are afraid that model providers will not just sell intelligence, but learn from customer workflows and then move into the markets where those workflows create value. The “All-in” group are echoing Karp's view.And “What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?” names the new contested terrain. The loop is where intelligence meets the world. Whoever owns the loop owns the learning. Whoever owns the learning owns the compounding asset.That is why “who owns intelligence?” is not a slogan. It is the question under the model layer, the application layer, the enterprise layer, and the economic layer.Because intelligence is the product, the tools creating it are fragmented and competitive. So there is no logic in trying to discuss this at the level of a single company or set of tools and models.The Old Promise Was That Commerce Would Tame PowerThe essays this week give the historical backdrop.Deirdre McCloskey, in “What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution”, argues that modern growth came not simply from capital accumulation, but from a change in permission: ordinary people were allowed to innovate, trade, build, and be honored for it.That matters because intelligence could be another expansion of permission. It could make more people capable of building, learning, creating, coding, researching, translating, selling, and coordinating. It could lower the cost of competence.But only if access is broad.Paul Krugman's “AI in an Age of Oligarchy” warns that the same technology lands differently in different political economies. A new general-purpose technology entering a broad, open, upwardly mobile society is one thing. The same technology entering a concentrated economy, with extreme wealth and weak counterweights, is another.Tim O'Reilly's Economist essay, “Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate”, makes the governance point more directly. The old liberal hope was that commerce would tame arbitrary power. Markets, boards, courts, shareholders, disclosure, and competition would discipline the prince.But what if the prince uses markets to escape discipline?Henry Farrell's “political economy of billionaire derangement” pushes the same point. Founder culture, monopoly ambition, peer rivalry, weak correction mechanisms, and vast private control can amplify appetites rather than restrain them.The danger with intelligence is not that companies build it. They should. Companies build it, meter it, use public tolerance and public infrastructure to scale it, learn from everyone who uses it. All of those things are inevitable and healthy. Market forces will sort out winners from losers. The real danger is that the winners treat all of the surplus produced as purely private.Metered Intelligence Creates SurplusIf metering is not the problem, what is?The problem is pretending that metered intelligence creates value only for the metering entity. Metering water is only tolerated as a public good. If the public were blackmailed by a private water company with the threat of no water we would all rebel.Once we understand that the product of AI is intelligence we can see that every time intelligence is used, there is the immediate transaction: the user pays, the provider serves.But there is also system value. Usage creates signals. Workflows reveal patterns. Prompts, corrections, failures, preferences, integrations, edge cases, and business processes all help define where intelligence is useful and how it should improve. Intelligence breeds intelligence.Even when customer data is contractually protected, the market learns. The platform learns where demand is. The product team learns which workflows matter. The ecosystem learns which jobs are vulnerable, which tasks are automatable, and which parts of the economy can be reorganized around machine intelligence.So the surplus is not born in a vacuum.It rests on public science, public education, public data exhaust, public law, public infrastructure, public energy systems, public tolerance for data centers, and billions of human interactions. It is served by companies, but it is not made only by companies.This is why “Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches” belongs at the center of this week's issue. The detail can be debated. The principle is harder to dismiss. If intelligence becomes a new foundational resource, then some part of the wealth it creates should flow back to the people whose society makes it possible. Intelligence did not suddenly appear. AI is built on the entire history of human intelligence. It benefits from it and at the same time evolves it.Not Nationalization. A Human Wealth Fund.If intelligence belongs to everybody, some conclude that government ownership of intelligence is the right outcome.Governments are not well suited to build, operate, or improve intelligence. They will move too slowly, regulate too early, politicize the wrong things, and confuse economic participation with operational control.Andrew McAfee's “Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter” is useful here. His objection is not that the technology is unimportant. It is that steering too hard before we understand the shape of the change can become its own failure mode. Marc Andreessen's satire of AI regulation is less policy than temperament, but it captures a real Silicon Valley fear: that regulation can become permission, capture, and incumbency before it becomes wisdom.That fear should be taken seriously.But it does not answer the economic question. It answers only the operational one.How can the economic benefits of intelligence be distributed? The better answer is a sovereign human wealth fund.Call it a sovereign wealth fund if you must, but the phrase is too national. Intelligence will not respect borders. The leading companies are global. The models, chips, data centers, agents, platforms, and workflows will be transnational from the beginning. If the value created by intelligence is global, then the mechanism for sharing some of that value should begin with the companies global enough to capture it. The nice thing about xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic is that they are supranational.These companies own and operate intelligence. Let them compete. Let them profit. Let them keep the incentives that make the system improve. But if intelligence is the new water, the wealth it creates cannot belong only to the companies that meter it. And they, themselves, have the power to fix it, even more than governments.Access will become a Human Right; Ownership Is the Economic DesignThis is where human rights come in. There is no right to access an AI model, yet. But there will soon be a need to change that.Not as a claim that every person is entitled to every frontier model at every moment for free. That is not serious. Capacity has costs. Models have costs. Inference has costs. Data centers have costs. Although those costs will decline over time, possibly quite quickly as self-learning models address costs.The claim is more basic: in a world where intelligence becomes a primary input into education, work, health, science, citizenship, creativity, and economic agency, baseline access to intelligence starts to look like a civic requirement.That could mean public access layers. It could mean education credits. It could mean open models. It could mean AI dividends. It could mean public-interest compute. It could mean taxes on rents. It could mean a company-initiated human wealth fund that returns some of the upside to society without handing the operating system to the state. The latter could couple wealth growth with universal distribution of ownership.The exact mechanism matters. But the distinction matters more.Government should not own intelligence. It should be universally available. And people should have a claim on the wealth intelligence creates.The Frontier Is Also PhysicalThe abstraction is not weightless.“The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning”, “New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium”, Reuters on pollution from Musk's xAI power project, and DataGravity's “Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?” all say the same thing from the ground up.Intelligence uses land. It uses power. It uses water. It uses chips. It uses grid capacity. It uses neighborhoods. It uses public patience.That makes the value question unavoidable. A society can accept the buildout if the buildout is legible as shared progress. It will resist it if the costs are local, the profits are private, and the benefits feel enclosed.Who Owns the “Loop”?The week ends where it began.“Anthropic and Blackstone” are betting that implementation is the next trillion-dollar business. “Vint Cerf” is working on identity for agents on the open internet. “GPT-Red” points toward systems that improve their own robustness. “Kimi K3” adds another open frontier model to the global mix.The model race continues. The deployment race is accelerating. The governance race is behind.My view is this:The central product of this era is intelligence. Companies have figured out how to capture it, package it, serve it, and meter it. That is good. It should stay in the hands of builders who have the incentive to make it better.But intelligence is too foundational to become just another private toll booth. A significant part of it will turn out to be free to users.As intelligence becomes a general-purpose resource, then access to it becomes a human-capability question, and the surplus from it becomes an economic-justice question. Not because government should run it. Because government should not run it. The operating layer belongs with companies. The wealth question belongs with everyone. But companies are best placed to turn that into a process of distribution.The question is not whether companies should build intelligence. They should.The question is whether humanity gets a stake in the wealth created by the thing that may soon become its most important shared input.Contents* Essays* Deirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution* AI in an Age of Oligarchy* Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate* Murky Mirror: Truth and Consequences* The political economy of billionaire derangement* Is there any “oligarchy” to fight?* AI* Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats* Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter* Own Your Weights* Ways to Think About Token Pricing* Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI* The AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft Office* What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?* The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning* 6 months to live for open models* Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches* Who Gets to Define the Frontier?* GPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for Robustness* Anthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just models* Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet* xai-org/grok-build, now open source* The Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?* Orphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligence* The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data Center* Why AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”* Kimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier Intelligence* Venture Capital* Three Years In* Venture Has Rarely Looked More Bifurcated* The Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active Now* Are Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?* Regulation* Exclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College Campuses* The Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.* India's crackdown on a new WhatsApp feature risks setting a global precedent* Let's build a children's public internet* Computer cops* Google is better at playing the AI regulations game* Infrastructure* Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?* New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium* Pollution from Musk's unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities* Interview of the Week* The End of the End of Geography* Startup of the Week* Radical AI's Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The “Waymo” Lab For New Materials* Post of the Week* Marc Andreessen on AI RegulationEssaysDeirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial RevolutionYascha Mounk and Deirdre McCloskey | Persuasion | July 11, 2026Yascha Mounk interviews Deirdre McCloskey about her argument that the modern world's economic liftoff came less from capital accumulation than from a change in ideas. McCloskey says both left and right versions of the conventional story rely too heavily on investment: the left stresses exploitation and surplus value, while the right stresses virtuous saving by capitalists. Her objection is historical and economic. Human beings had always invested, from irrigation works and Roman roads to seed grain, and simple accumulation quickly runs into diminishing returns.McCloskey's alternative is that northwestern Europe, first Holland, then Britain and Scotland, and then the North American colonies, developed a liberal ideology that changed who was allowed to innovate and be honored for it. The conversation links that shift to the erosion of inherited hierarchy, the spread of dignity for ordinary commercial life, and a moral vocabulary in which liberalism is not merely procedural but connected to virtues and values. The point is not that machines, coal, trade, and institutions did not matter, but that they do not explain the scale and timing of modern enrichment without a cultural permission structure for innovation.The interview also turns to the contemporary defense of liberalism. Mounk frames the series around the worry that liberalism is often treated as too thin to command allegiance, while its opponents speak more directly to moral passions. McCloskey's case is that liberal societies became rich because they dignified experimentation and ordinary enterprise, and that liberals need to recover the moral language behind that claim.Read moreAI in an Age of OligarchyPaul Krugman | Paul Krugman | July 12, 2026Paul Krugman frames AI as a major technological shock arriving inside an already unequal political economy. The post says AI's economic and social effects may take years to understand, but argues that the setting matters now: America has much greater wealth concentration and political inequality than it did in the 1950s and 1960s, when progressive taxation, stronger regulation, and more active antitrust might have contained some of the destructive effects of a new technology.Krugman's opening claim is that the same technology would likely have different consequences in a more level society. In today's United States, he writes, extreme wealth is both a cause and effect of policies that favor a small elite, including low effective taxes on capital and high incomes, weak enforcement of worker protections and antitrust, and cuts to programs that benefit ordinary Americans.The article is explicitly more about oligarchy than AI. Krugman says the paid sections document the rise of the “.0002%,” the economics and politics of extreme wealth, how oligarchy will shape AI's impact, and possible policy paths. His caveat is that AI itself may still produce a pushback against oligarchy, but absent that, he expects the pre-existing concentration of wealth and power to magnify AI's downsides.Read moreElon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hateAuthor: Tim O'Reilly Published: July 12, 2026Tim O'Reilly argues that Elon Musk is using the legal forms of shareholder capitalism to escape the restraints that shareholder capitalism was supposed to impose. The article begins with SpaceX's public-market structure: ordinary public investors get little meaningful governance power, Musk keeps roughly 85 percent of the votes through super-voting shares, buyers waive jury trials and class actions, the company qualifies as controlled, and removal of Musk depends on the share class he controls. In O'Reilly's framing, that is not ordinary founder control; it is a design for being answerable to no one, possibly beyond Musk's own lifetime.The killer detail is the article's turn through Albert Hirschman, Montesquieu, James Steuart, Adam Smith, and Keynes. Older defenses of commerce held that markets would tame princely passions because the self-interest of merchants was safer than arbitrary rule. O'Reilly says Musk reverses that hope. The market discipline that was supposed to cage the prince has become the lever by which the prince raises capital, removes feedback loops, and carries private power into politics, government, Mars, robots, AI, or whatever ambition comes next.The pull is the link to AI governance. O'Reilly says corporations are already a kind of artificial intelligence: narrow-input systems that act at a scale no individual human can match. Their partial controls include independent boards, shareholder votes, courts, disclosure, regulators, public pressure, and activism. If the leaders building frontier AI strip those alignment mechanisms out of their own companies, the governance of the company becomes a preview of the governance of the machine.Read more: The EconomistMurky Mirror: Truth and ConsequencesAuthor: Esther Dyson Published: July 14, 2026Esther Dyson argues that today's institutional crisis is better viewed through the 14th century than through recent political history. Using Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror as her frame, she compares a world of famine, plague, church schism, feudal predation, and purposeless war with a present in which institutions again feel brittle, incentives are badly aligned, and power is shifting into forms that are hard to govern.The killer detail is the historical analogy between land, corporations, and AI. Dyson moves from nobles who controlled serfs and territory, to the East India Company as a quasi-sovereign business, to today's AI systems and data centers as a possible new sector that crosses and weakens both nation-states and companies. The question is whether AI becomes a new kind of private land, owned by a new nobility, or an open prairie that many people can cultivate.The pull is human attention. Dyson says the central question is not what AI will do to people, but how people will react to it: whether they can value love, kindness, embodied attention, and artisanal human presence in a world of seductive artificial offerings.Read more: SourceThe political economy of billionaire derangementAuthor: Henry Farrell Published: July 15, 2026Henry Farrell argues that the visible political radicalization of some Silicon Valley billionaires is not a random personality quirk, but a product of the political economy that made them. Starting from Tyler Cowen's dismissal of “billionaire derangement syndrome” and Tim O'Reilly's warning that Elon Musk is using shareholder capitalism to escape shareholder restraint, Farrell flips the phrase: the question is why billionaires themselves can become deranged.The killer detail is Farrell's use of Peter Thiel as both theorist and example. Thiel's Stanford lectures described startups as monarchies and founders as figures vested with unusual power, while Silicon Valley culture rewarded eccentricity, monopoly ambition, and founder exceptionalism. Farrell says those ideas combined with dense founder-investor networks, peer rivalry, and weak correction mechanisms to amplify rather than discipline princely appetites.The pull is the ideological problem for classical liberals who once saw tech wealth as an ally of markets and freedom. Farrell says commerce did not tame the passions; in parts of Silicon Valley, the passions have begun to devour markets, institutions, and the liberal story that justified them.Read more: SourceIs there any “oligarchy” to fight?Matthew Yglesias | Slow Boring | July 16, 2026Matthew Yglesias argues that “oligarchy” is a rhetorically powerful but analytically loose way to describe American politics. The post begins from Bernie Sanders' “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Amy Klobuchar's warning about a MAGA “broligarchy,” and the long afterlife of the Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page paper that was widely summarized as showing that only the rich matter in policy outcomes. Yglesias says the evidence supports a weaker claim: affluent people and business leaders have unusual access and influence, but that is not the same as rule by a small cabal.His main distinction is between inequality and oligarchy. The Gilens-Page measure treated the top 10 percent of households as “the wealthy,” and later critics found that rich and middle-class preferences usually align; in the cases where they differ, the rich win about 53 percent of the time. Yglesias also says business executives get special access partly because their decisions are materially important to communities, jobs, investment, and local tax bases, not only because of campaign donations.The post preserves Jerusalem Demsas' counterpoint from their podcast discussion: privileged donor and business access can still violate democratic equality even if the oligarchy label overstates the structure of power. Yglesias' narrower claim is that Democrats should be precise about what problem they are trying to solve, because donor influence can also push the party left on climate and cultural issues in ways that alienate many voters.Read more: Slow BoringAINearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. ThreatsAuthor: Ben Casselman Published: July 13, 2026Ben Casselman reports on “We Must Act Now,” a statement warning that artificial intelligence could transform the economy faster than any previous technology and that policymakers need to move faster to understand and respond. The statement says AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years, bringing risks such as large-scale job displacement as well as opportunities such as higher living standards. Nearly 200 people signed, including 15 Nobel laureates, the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.The killer detail is who joined the warning. Casselman notes that the signatories include economists who have historically been skeptical of Silicon Valley's most dramatic AI job-loss forecasts, including Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the MIT professors who won the 2024 Nobel in economics. Erik Brynjolfsson, who helped organize the statement, says there has been a notable change in the profession and that economists and policymakers are not ready for the “tsunami” he sees coming.The pull is the measurement problem. The statement does not offer a specific policy menu, but calls for economists, policymakers, and industry leaders to understand the economics of transformative AI and steer it toward complementing humans. Brynjolfsson says one high priority is better data on AI's spread and impact, because current measures tell conflicting stories about job losses and which workers are most exposed.Read more: The New York TimesWhy I Didn't Sign the AI Open LetterAuthor: Andrew McAfee Published: July 13, 2026Andrew McAfee explains why he did not sign “We Must Act Now,” the AI economy statement organized in part by his longtime collaborator Erik Brynjolfsson. McAfee agrees with the letter's starting point that AI is likely to become radically more powerful over the next decade and that it is a general-purpose technology. His objection is not to urgency or to studying AI's economic effects, but to the framing of risk, displacement, and institutional steering as the first move.The killer detail is McAfee's line edit. He says the original letter comes close, then “bounces off the crossbar” by calling for incentives, guardrails, and institutions to steer AI before we know enough about its actual impacts. He points to mixed current evidence: labor-market canaries, but also rising software job postings, low unemployment for younger workers, rising real median income, and claims that AI-adopting companies are adding workers faster than low-adopting peers. His worry is that the letter leans toward upstream governance and dirigisme when the evidence may call for capability building instead.The pull is his replacement statement. McAfee keeps the three-paragraph structure but changes the emphasis: AI is likely to become radically more powerful; like earlier world-changing technologies it will raise living standards while also bringing harms and shocks; and economists, policymakers, and technology leaders should build the capabilities to respond quickly and effectively. It is a concise version of the permissionless-innovation case inside the AI policy debate.Read more: The Geek WayOwn Your WeightsAuthor: Jamin Ball Published: July 10, 2026Jamin Ball argues that the enterprise AI debate about whether companies should “own their weights” or rent models from frontier labs is asking too narrow a question. A model weight file gives a company control over a point-in-time artifact, but not durable control over the capability stack. In his framing, the weight file is a melting ice cube: it does not get worse in absolute terms, but it falls behind as frontier systems improve and enterprise needs change.The killer detail is what Ball says companies really need to own: the data flywheel, reinforcement learning infrastructure, and evaluation harness that produce and improve the model. Simply deploying an open-weights model and declaring sovereignty leaves the enterprise with yesterday's capability and no way to compound workflow-specific learning.The pull is that enterprise AI control may be less about model ownership than operating ownership. The defensible layer is the system that turns company data, edge cases, business definitions, and evaluations into continuously improving performance.Read more: Clouded JudgementWays to Think About Token PricingAuthor: Benedict Evans Published: July 9, 2026Benedict Evans argues that today's AI token prices are a temporary signal from a supply-constrained market, not a reliable guide to long-term value capture. The open question is whether foundation models keep durable pricing power or become commodity infrastructure as data-center capacity, inference efficiency, and model competition all shift. His current read is that the visible market dynamics point toward commoditization unless something materially changes.The killer detail is the mobile data analogy. Evans says cellular networks became a trillion-dollar industry with hundreds of billions in capex after data usage exploded, but carrier stocks went nowhere because value moved up the stack. Tokens may behave similarly: an opaque unit tied to marginal cost, sold through bundles, essential to everything, yet not necessarily where profits accrue.The pull is uncertainty, not prediction. Evans lists paths to model dominance, including network effects, less competition, regulation, export controls, or a lab pulling ahead on execution, but says each requires a new fact not yet visible. Without that change, the model layer looks more like infrastructure beneath the products that capture value.Read more: SourceAlex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AIAuthor: Tim Higgins Published: July 11, 2026Tim Higgins reports that Palantir CEO Alex Karp has turned corporate frustration with AI labs into a public argument about enterprise control. Palantir released a white paper, “Institutional Sovereignty in the Age of AI,” laying out steps companies and governments can take to protect themselves from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other foundation-model providers. The article links that paper to Karp's CNBC appearance, where he said “something has gone completely wrong” in the relationship between AI labs and customers and argued that enterprises are paying for tokens that create little value.The killer detail is the value-capture question. Higgins writes that Karp's critique has resonated because AI labs may gain power and insight from customer data, workflows, and decision-making, even when enterprise policies say customer data are not used for training. David Sacks amplified the concern by arguing that Anthropic is moving from the model layer into vertical applications such as science, security, legal, and coding, raising the fear that model providers will watch where value is being created and then move into those markets directly.The pull is that Karp is not alone, even if his style is unusually combative. Higgins notes that Satya Nadella has also warned that companies need to retain the learnings created when they use AI models, while Mark Zuckerberg has framed Meta's new model release partly around lower-cost frontier intelligence. The article presents Karp's campaign as one sign that established technology companies and large enterprises are trying to define where they fit when AI labs become central infrastructure, application competitors, and potential IPO giants at the same time.Read more: The Wall Street JournalThe AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft OfficeAlex Wilhelm | Cautious Optimism | July 11, 2026Alex Wilhelm argues that one of the week's quieter AI questions is whether the productivity market that Microsoft successfully moved into subscription software is now being attacked by agentic tools. The piece begins with the infrastructure backdrop: SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion in a U.S. listing while building U.S. HBM and advanced-packaging capacity, and memory, chip, and foundry companies are now priced for sustained AI demand.Wilhelm then says the AI conversation has shifted quickly from raw capability to cost per task. He cites new model releases and vendor language emphasizing cheaper agentic and coding models, faster performance, and lower dollars per task. That matters because lower costs make it more plausible for AI systems to take on routine knowledge work at scale rather than remain a premium coding assistant market.The core of the article is Microsoft Office. Wilhelm notes that Microsoft turned Office from a one-time purchase into Microsoft 365, a large recurring revenue business with tens of millions of subscribers and a major productivity segment. Now, he says, late-stage unicorns and AI labs are pushing into the same territory: Anthropic's Cowork was reportedly used mostly outside software development, OpenAI merged ChatGPT and Codex into a tool for creating sheets, slides, docs, web apps, and long-running work, and other companies are building agentic coworkers that connect business data to documents, workflows, schedules, alerts, and apps.The article's caveat is that Microsoft has survived major platform shifts before. The argument is not that Office disappears quickly, but that the definition of office software is broadening from documents and spreadsheets into AI systems that can create, monitor, and act across workplace data.Read moreWhat Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?Author: Nilesh Barla Published: July 11, 2026Nilesh Barla argues that “loop engineering” is becoming a distinct discipline because production AI agents now fail less at single prompts than at runtime: when to stop, what state to preserve, and how to recover after a bad step. Prompt engineering shapes one model call, and context engineering shapes what the model sees, but loop engineering shapes what a sequence of calls actually does.The killer detail is the three-primitives frame. Barla says a real agent loop needs halt conditions, state carryover, and recovery paths, then maps teams across five maturity levels. At the lowest level, an agent is just a model call in a for-loop with a step cap and raw history; by the higher levels, the system has structured state, explicit planning, replay, evaluation, and self-repair.The pull is organizational. If agents are becoming production systems rather than demos, someone has to own the runtime itself. The loop engineer is the role Barla gives to the person responsible for making long-running agent work dependable.Read more: Adaline LabsThe Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just BeginningEmma Roth | The Verge | July 12, 2026Emma Roth argues that community resistance to data centers has moved from an early warning sign into a national political fight as AI facilities grow larger, more power-hungry, and more visible to nearby residents. The article starts with Apple's failed 2015 plan for a $1 billion data center in Athenry, Ireland, where a small group of residents challenged the project over noise, light pollution, flooding, traffic, and wildlife effects until Apple abandoned it in 2018.The current data-center buildout is presented as much larger and more contentious. Roth writes that residents now cite rising energy costs, water quality, noise, light pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects commercial energy demand to surpass residential demand this year because of AI data centers and Goldman Sachs expects data-center power demand to double by 2027.The central evidence comes from Data Center Watch, which says protesters blocked or delayed at least 75 U.S. projects worth $130 billion from January to March, with active opposition groups more than doubling from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by the end of the first quarter of 2026. Roth also cites QTS abandoning a $12 billion Wisconsin campus, Delaware City regulators blocking a 580-acre project under the Coastal Zone Act, opposition stopping a QTS project in Prince William County, and pressure that pushed Kevin O'Leary to downsize the proposed 40,000-acre Project Stratos in Utah.The policy section describes a split between federal acceleration and local resistance. President Trump has treated data centers as part of the AI race with China and fast-tracked construction, while some Republican candidates are distancing themselves from that position ahead of midterms. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a moratorium until price and environmental protections exist, bipartisan lawmakers are backing ratepayer-protection measures, and states including Florida, Idaho, and Washington have passed rules on cost shifting, water use, and tax breaks. Roth's caveat is that the policy patchwork is still incomplete, leaving many communities to fight project by project.Read more6 months to live for open modelsAuthor: Nathan Lambert Published: July 12, 2026Nathan Lambert argues that open-weight AI models are facing their most serious policy test so far because U.S. officials are beginning to discuss concrete controls rather than abstract safety concerns. He says reported White House conversations about a new executive order may initially target Chinese-origin models and government use, but could create a broader review habit for frontier open models. His forecast is that a model above the capability range of GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, or GLM-5.2 could trigger a ban or indefinite delay within six months.The post separates two policy fights that are becoming intertwined: distillation and frontier capability. Lambert says the distillation campaign against Chinese models has become a form of regulatory capture because Anthropic and other closed-model companies would gain economically if Chinese open models were banned. He does not dismiss IP protection, but argues that if a closed model's capabilities are dangerous enough to justify restricting open models, the lab also has to explain why those capabilities are exposed through a queryable API. He cites unauthorized access to Anthropic's Mythos private beta as evidence that APIs are not automatically secure.The broader claim is that a unilateral U.S. ban would hurt positive actors more than bad actors if comparable open models remain available elsewhere. Lambert says the only durable ceiling would require global agreement, which does not exist, and that open models can improve safety by allowing broad inspection, adaptation, and understanding. His proposed near-term off-ramps are a strong U.S. open model release from companies such as Microsoft, Meta, or Reflection, and a broader coalition of open-source beneficiaries lobbying for safe rollout rather than prohibition.Read more: SourceAmericans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' RichesAuthor: Scott Stanford Published: July 14, 2026Scott Stanford argues that proposals to give the government a stake in AI companies miss the point unless ordinary citizens directly receive and control the upside. Sam Altman has discussed giving up equity in OpenAI, Washington already owns a stake in Intel, Nvidia is sharing China chip revenue, and Bernie Sanders wants large AI labs to contribute half their stock to a sovereign wealth fund. Stanford says those ideas all park value with the state, not with people.The killer detail is New Carlisle, Indiana, where AWS's Project Rainier is turning cornfields into one of the world's largest AI superclusters. The project is planned to run up to a million chips, draw more than two gigawatts of power, and represents an investment that has grown from $11 billion to $13.8 billion. Stanford uses that local transformation to argue that AI's public bargain should be visible at the household level.The pull is design. A citizen AI dividend would have to specify who earns a stake, how they hold it, and when they see cash. Without that mechanism, the AI wealth debate remains a fight over government balance sheets rather than public ownership.Read more: SourceWho Gets to Define the Frontier?Author: Mark Daley Published: July 14, 2026Mark Daley argues that Demis Hassabis is right to call for a serious institution to verify frontier AI systems, but that the power to test models is also the power to govern them. Hassabis's proposed Frontier AI Standards Body would get privileged pre-release access to advanced models, testing compute, held-out evaluations, support from national labs and security agencies, third-party auditors, and eventually authority to block models from the American market or coordinate a slowdown.The killer detail is Daley's constitutional objection. He says the proposal sometimes looks like a scientific lab, a standards body, an industry regulator, a licensing authority, and an emergency security council at once. Combining those roles because each requires technical expertise would be like putting the central bank, auditor-general, and Supreme Court in one building and calling it efficient.The pull is standard-setting. Daley's concern is not that verification is unnecessary, but that whoever writes the tests, decides what passes, adjudicates disputes, and grants market access may end up defining the frontier itself.Read more: SourceGPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for RobustnessOpenAI | OpenAI | July 15, 2026OpenAI describes GPT-Red as an internal automated red-teaming model trained to find prompt-injection vulnerabilities at a scale human red teams cannot match. The post says AI systems increasingly encounter third-party data through browsers, connected apps, local files, and tools, creating opportunities for malicious instructions hidden in emails, webpages, tool responses, or code repositories. Human red-teaming remains part of OpenAI's safety process, but the company says it is time-intensive and cannot generate enough diverse adversarial examples for model training.The system is trained through self-play reinforcement learning, with GPT-Red rewarded for eliciting valid failures and defender models rewarded for resisting attacks while still completing their tasks. OpenAI says the training environments specify threat models across settings such as local files, webpage banners, email bodies, and tool outputs. The model is kept separate from deployed production models because it is intentionally trained with malicious capabilities.OpenAI reports that GPT-Red generalized beyond its training set, including an internal replication of the indirect prompt-injection arena from Dziemian et al. (2025), where it found successful attacks in 84% of scenarios compared with 13% for human red-teamers. The post also says GPT-Red transferred attacks from simulation to a live autonomous vending-machine agent, causing price changes and order cancellations, and outperformed a prompted GPT-5.5 baseline against a Codex CLI agent on held-out data-exfiltration tasks.The article's main robustness claim is that OpenAI has used GPT-Red and predecessor models in training since GPT-5.3, with later GPT releases becoming more resistant to prompt injections. It says GPT-5.6 Sol has six times fewer failures on OpenAI's hardest direct prompt-injection benchmark than the best production model from four months earlier, that a “Fake Chain-of-Thought” attack class fell from more than 95% success against GPT-5.1 to below 10% against GPT-5.6 Sol, and that GPT-5.6 Sol fails on only 0.05% of GPT-Red's direct prompt injections. OpenAI says general capabilities and targeted over-refusal evaluations were not harmed, and says a preprint with more details will follow.Read moreAnthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just modelsRebecca Bellan | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Rebecca Bellan reports that Ode with Anthropic is the $1.5 billion AI implementation company launched by Anthropic with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and other backers. The article says the venture reflects a growing belief among frontier AI labs that enterprise adoption requires more than better models: customers need engineers who can embed inside businesses and turn AI into working systems.Ode was originally conceived by Blackstone after it used both large consulting firms and smaller AI services boutiques across its portfolio companies. TechCrunch reports that Fractional AI, an AI engineering services startup, stood out and was acquired by the joint venture shortly after the venture was announced. Fractional now forms the foundation of Ode, which has 100 engineers and works closely with Anthropic's applied AI team to identify where the technology can affect specific businesses.Ode CEO Chris Taylor tells TechCrunch that the company could someday become a trillion-dollar business if it scales without losing quality. He says an ideal customer is one whose CEO treats the AI project as a top one or two priority, whether it is a major product feature or the reworking of a core business process. Ode will operate under a “Claude-first” principle, using Anthropic technology whenever possible, but the article says it can use rival AI products when needed.The article's central implementation argument comes from Ode chief technologist Eddie Siegel, who says model selection matters but is not where most of the engineering effort goes. He compares it to the choice of programming language in software: one ingredient in a system that still has to be engineered. Bellan writes that Ode's challenge is hiring and training enough elite generalist engineers, many of them former founders, while competing with OpenAI's The Deployment Company and consulting giants that have built their own forward-deployed engineering teams.Read moreVint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internetTim Fernholz | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Tim Fernholz reports that Vint Cerf, after leaving Google, is advising Innovation Labs on an open architecture for identifying AI agents online. Innovation Labs is a subsidiary of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company, and its proposal is to use domain-name infrastructure as part of a system for agent identity, accountability, and auditability. The premise is that agents will need a way to identify themselves if they move beyond proprietary systems and begin interacting across the open internet.The concrete proposal is DNSid, a registry that links an AI agent to an existing internet domain and uses cryptographic proofs to log its registration over time. Innovation Labs says it is trialing the standard with unnamed hyperscalers and identity companies. Cerf frames the problem around authority and accountability: what authority an agent has, where that authority came from, who is accountable for the agent's behavior, how its identity is established, and why anyone should trust it.The article's caveat is that standards are still emerging and agents are more active than static domains. Cerf says the period may be both fascinating and exasperating because the functionality is powerful and interoperability is unresolved. He compares the adoption problem to TCP/IP: competing systems may not work together until users push for functional interoperation. He also says an agentic economy is not inevitable, but that people will try to build it because delegating work to agents will be easier.Read more: TechCrunchxai-org/grok-build, now open sourceAuthor: Simon Willison Published: July 15, 2026Simon Willison argues that xAI's decision to open-source Grok Build is best understood as a trust repair move after a severe privacy failure. The CLI had triggered backlash when users realized that running it in a directory could upload the entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets, including one user's reported SSH keys, password manager database, documents, photos, and videos. xAI disabled the feature, said previously retained coding data would be deleted, and released the code under Apache 2.0.The killer detail is what the codebase reveals. Willison counts 844,530 lines of Rust, only about 3% of which appears vendored, and finds remnants of the upload system still present but disabled: gcs.rs contains Google Cloud upload code, while upload_session_state() now returns a hard-coded session_state_upload_unavailable error. He also notes copied or ported tool implementations from Codex and OpenCode, prompt files, and a terminal Mermaid renderer.The pull is that terminal coding agents are becoming large, intricate software systems in their own right. The privacy failure mattered because these tools operate inside the directories where developers keep their most sensitive work; the open-source release matters because trust now depends on inspecting what an agent can see, send, and do.Read more: SourceThe Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?Author: Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric Published: July 16, 2026Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric argue that Bun's AI-assisted rewrite from Zig to Rust is a practical sign of how software engineering changes when models can take on large, bounded migrations with clear feedback loops. The piece does not treat the rewrite as magic: Jarred Sumner first spent hours turning design judgment into a detailed porting guide, then used adversarial review, parallel agents, compiler errors, and tests to force the work toward correctness.The killer detail is the scale. Bun had 535,496 lines of Zig, 1,448 files, and 22 million monthly downloads, making a conventional rewrite a year-long freeze the team could not justify. Using Fable, Sumner split the work across 64 agents, produced about 6,500 commits, and got the migration done in 11 days at an estimated API cost of $165,000.The pull is economic, not theatrical. If a one- or two-year migration can become an 11-day project, AI coding is not just faster autocomplete; it changes which technical debts are worth paying down.Read more: SourceOrphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligenceAuthor: Andrew Maynard Published: July 16, 2026Andrew Maynard argues that frontier AI safety frameworks are creating “orphan risks”: harms that companies can see, but do not formally own because they are hard to quantify, do not fit catastrophic-risk thresholds, or fall outside audit-friendly compliance machinery. His target is not existing frontier safety work, but the narrowing effect that happens when private companies decide which risks count as governable.The killer detail is Maynard's contrast between measurable model dangers and threats to value. He points to Meta's three-day Galactica collapse, OpenAI's 2023 board crisis, safety-team departures, and wellbeing litigation as examples of risks that damaged trust, culture, legitimacy, or users without fitting cleanly into conventional model-risk categories. The proposed fix is an orphan-risk register: a public record of risks a company considered and chose not to manage, with reasons.The pull is accountability. Frontier developers' internal scoping choices have become a de facto layer of public governance, so the question is no longer only which risks they manage, but which risks they quietly leave outside the frame.Read more: SourceThe Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data CenterLatent.Space with Andy Beam and Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli | Latent.Space | July 16, 2026Latent.Space interviews Lila Sciences CTO Andy Beam and chief science officer for physical sciences Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli about the company's attempt to build an AI-run science factory. The post describes Lila's thesis as treating the lab itself as an “infinite token generator”: if internet data drove the first era of AI scaling, experimentally verified scientific data may be the next scarce training source. Lila is trying to produce that data with robotics, lab instruments, orchestration software, and AI models wired into the wet lab.The central analogy is the lab as data center. Instruments are nodes on a graph, a magnetically levitating transport layer moves materials between them, and experiment scheduling looks like a compute queue. Beam says Lila is not simply an automation company, because the point is not just throughput; it is flexibility, generalization, and experiment capture. The post says Lila has built more than 10 trillion experimentally validated “scientific reasoning tokens,” not internet text or biological sequences.The interview ranges across biology, chemistry, drug discovery, materials science, and the limits of automation. It notes that Lila rebuilt one gas-sorption measurement to run roughly 2,500 times faster, claims its general models can transfer priors from small-molecule chemistry to metal-organic frameworks for carbon capture, and describes model-suggested platinum-group-free electrocatalysts that moved from looking boring or wrong to becoming strong performers. The caveats are physical: experiments have runtimes, biology cannot always be accelerated, chains of thought can be unreliable narrators, and reward hacking becomes more dangerous when a model controls a real lab.Read more: Latent.SpaceWhy AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”Kate Park | TechCrunch | July 16, 2026Kate Park interviews AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun about why Yann LeCun's world-model startup avoids the language of “AGI” and “superintelligence.” LeBrun says the terms are not useful because they lack stable definitions: “We never used the word AGI. And I just noticed that nobody is using it anymore; they switched to superintelligence.” His argument is that the practical frontier is not a label, but whether AI systems can understand and predict real-world states.The article explains the world-model thesis by contrasting language prediction with physical-state prediction. A large language model predicts the next word; a world model predicts the next state, such as what happens when a glass tips over. LeBrun says LLMs remain complementary and efficient for language, but the physical world is where current AI is weak. Robotics is the clearest case: hardware has advanced quickly, but robots are still brittle outside controlled routines because they lack context and situational understanding.AMI is still pre-product, but TechCrunch reports that LeBrun was in Seoul looking for industrial partners, researchers, and global companies. He says world models cannot be built entirely inside a lab because they need access to real environments. That is why South Korea appeals to AMI: robotics, semiconductors, manufacturing, and fast adoption create the kind of hardware-heavy context that software-only AI has barely touched.Read more: TechCrunchKimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier IntelligenceKimi | Kimi | July 16, 2026Kimi introduces Kimi K3 as an open 3T-class frontier model aimed at coding, knowledge work, reasoning, multimodality, and long-context agentic use. The source describes the model as a 2.8T-parameter system built on Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, with native multimodality and a 1M-token context window. It says Moonshot AI plans to release model weights by July 27.The post presents K3 through benchmark and use-case sections rather than as a general product announcement. It reports results across coding, productivity, agentic, and multimodal evaluations, including DeepSWE, Terminal-Bench 2.1, Program Bench, SWE Marathon, FrontierSWE, PostTrain Bench, OfficeQA Pro, SpreadsheetBench 2, MCP Atlas, AutomationBench, BrowseComp, GDPval-AA v2, AA-Briefcase, MMMU-Pro, MathVision, BabyVision, OmniDocBench, and PerceptionBench. The source says all reported K3 results use maximum reasoning effort with temperature and top-p set to 1.0, and that different benchmark comparisons use KimiCode, Claude Code, or Codex harnesses depending on the test.Kimi's caveats are unusually concrete. The limitations section says K3 was trained in preserved thinking-history mode, so quality may become unstable if an agent harness does not pass historical thinking content correctly or if an ongoing session switches to K3 midstream. It also says K3's emphasis on long-horizon tasks can make it excessively proactive when it encounters minor issues or ambiguous intent, and recommends imposing explicit behavioral constraints for applications that require strict boundaries. The post adds that K3 remains behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol in user experience despite being competitive overall.Read moreVenture CapitalThree Years InAuthor: Tomasz Tunguz Published: July 10, 2026Tomasz Tunguz marks Theory Ventures' third anniversary by arguing that AI's central market effect is time compression. In his telling, model release cycles, company revenue milestones, enterprise adoption, and venture categories have all accelerated. Seed, Series A, and Series B still exist as financing labels, but they no longer cleanly describe company maturity when some seed rounds are larger than IPOs and the best AI companies can mature much earlier than prior software companies.The killer detail is the shift from models to inference. Tunguz argues that inference has become the dominant AI market because workloads and buyer preferences are fragmenting: video, batch, local, agentic, and real-time tasks each create different infrastructure needs. He compares this to databases splitting into OLTP, OLAP, vector, and streaming categories, with AI pushing the same specialization into inference infrastructure.The pull is that Theory sees the AI-native venture firm as part of the same pattern. The firm says it has analyzed twice as many investment opportunities with three investors working alongside a nine-person intelligence organization, using agents and research systems to map markets, source companies, and support diligence. The piece is both a market map and a statement about how venture itself is being rebuilt by the technology it funds.Read more: LinkedInVenture Has Rarely Looked More BifurcatedAuthor: Beezer Clarkson Published: July 14, 2026Beezer Clarkson points to PitchBook's Q2 report as evidence that the U.S. venture market has split into two very different realities. AI now accounts for more than 60 percent of all U.S. venture deal value, meaning the headline market can look active and well-funded even while much of the non-AI market is dealing with a much colder liquidity and fundraising environment.The thread uses that split as the setup for Clarkson's latest Origins episode with Alec Litowitz, founder of Magnetar and QStar Capital and one of Citadel's original founding partners. Clarkson says markets like this are periods of genuine uncertainty, not merely ordinary risk, which is why Litowitz's Adaptability Quotient framework is relevant.The embedded clip makes the liquidity point concrete. Litowitz says DPI is “the resolution of uncertainty” because it converts an uncertain investment into actual cash returned to LPs. In his framing, a realized dollar is a real mark, while TVPI remains uncertain until it is realized.The killer detail is the distinction between pricing risk and resolving uncertainty. Litowitz's perspective matters because QStar is a SpaceX investor and Clarkson says the conversation happened just before one of venture's most consequential IPOs. The episode's stated questions are why venture remains a way to gain exposure to innovation, how AI is changing what is investable, why liquidity is ultimately a function of time, and why uncertainty requires a different decision framework from risk.Read more: XThe Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active NowAuthor: Ilya Strebulaev Published: July 10, 2026Ilya Strebulaev ranks angels, angel groups, accelerators, and incubators by lifetime U.S. unicorn investments, counting checks written before a company reached unicorn status. The top of the combined list is dominated by organizations: Y Combinator leads with 113 unicorn investments, followed by Plug and Play at 52 and 500 Global at 41. Sand Hill Angels is the highest-ranked angel group at 31.The killer detail is how quickly the list changes below the biggest accelerators. Strebulaev says 271 of the 304 investors in the Top 200 are individuals, or 89%. In the top 100, individuals are 91%. That makes the market underneath the large accelerator counts look much more personal: mostly operators and individual angels writing early checks from their own networks.The pull is the ranking's own caveat. Strebulaev writes that every lifetime leaderboard has a blind spot because many of the unicorns behind those totals were founded a decade or more ago, and some angels have since moved into formal funds, slowed down, or stopped investing. His post therefore separates lifetime performance from recent cohorts, including companies founded in 2015 or later and 2020 or later. For founders or allocators making current decisions, that distinction matters: a career record and a current record are not the same measure.Read more: Ilya StrebulaevAre Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?Author: Contrary Published: July 16, 2026Contrary argues that prediction markets' current boom depends on whether platforms can prove they are more than regulated gambling with exchange-style branding. Kalshi and Polymarket have reached mass cultural, investor, and regulatory attention, but the article says the underlying idea is old: academic markets, corporate forecasting tools, Intrade, PredictIt, and other predecessors all struggled with the same linked problems of liquidity, legality, and user appeal.The killer detail is the comparison with sportsbooks. Prediction markets present themselves as peer-to-peer, transparent, and non-house-based, but sports contracts reportedly account for more than 90 percent of Kalshi trading, and the article says the platforms keep a much thinner slice of volume than sportsbooks. A market can therefore show sports-betting-scale handle while generating far less revenue.The pull is that the product's hardest problem may be distribution of wins. If a small group of sharp traders captures most profits while casual users lose interest, prediction markets may become valuable data feeds and professional tools before they become durable consumer networks.Read more: SourceRegulationExclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College CampusesAuthor: Adrian Carrasquillo Published: July 11, 2026Adrian Carrasquillo reports that college campuses are becoming a new front in the fight over immigration enforcement because automatic license plate readers can turn ordinary campus security infrastructure into searchable location data. His thesis is that Flock Safety's camera network, even without direct ICE or DHS contracts, can feed deportation enforcement through local police partnerships and data-sharing practices.The killer detail is the campaign target. The Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Education, working with Schools Drop ICE, is focusing on 75 colleges and universities publicly identified as having Flock contracts. Flock says it has no ICE or DHS contracts, but activists argue the risk comes through local agencies that coordinate with federal authorities and run searches on their behalf.The pull is broader than immigration. Carrasquillo notes that license plate readers have already been abused by officers for stalking, and that Flock's AI search features can identify more than plates, including bumper stickers. A campus safety tool can become a political surveillance system when the data layer is searchable.Read more: The BulwarkThe Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.Author: Todd Phillips Published: July 12, 2026Todd Phillips argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter damaged independent agencies by ending for-cause removal protections, but did not leave Congress powerless. The ruling weakens the old model in which commissioners at bodies such as the FTC, NLRB, CPSC, SEC, and CFTC could be insulated from dismissal over policy disagreements. Phillips says the next fight is whether presidents can turn nominally bipartisan commissions into one-party instruments.The killer detail is the procedural fix: quorum rules. Phillips proposes that Congress require bipartisan slates of commissioners to be seated before independent agencies can act. A president could still fire commissioners, as the Court now permits, but if those firings broke quorum, the agency would be unable to proceed until replacements were confirmed. The guardrail would

This week's video transcript summary is here. You can click on any bulleted section to see the actual transcript. Thanks to Granola for its software.There was an issue with this only going to paid subscribers, so sending it again. Apologies to those who get it twice. I appreciate being paid so feel free to upgrade if you enjoy TWTW.EditorialIntelligence: Who Owns it?This week the word “AI” feels too small.AI is a technology. Intelligence is its product. And if intelligence is the product, the question is no longer just: Which model is best? Who has the cheapest tokens? Who owns the weights? Who controls the data center? Those are important questions, but they are lower in the stack.The bigger question is simpler and more political:Who owns intelligence?That sounds abstract until you make it concrete. Intelligence is becoming something companies can capture, package, serve, meter, route, improve, and sell.It can write code, answer questions, design molecules, automate offices, run agents, draft legal work, advise scientists, serve consumers, and reshape workflows. It is not merely software. It is a general-purpose capability. And all humans could benefit from more of it.General-purpose capabilities have a habit of becoming public questions. But the default answer, that public good is best delivered by government, is the wrong answer in this context.The Product Is IntelligenceWe should stop talking about AI as a feature and start talking about intelligence as the universal thing that is delivered as an input to the world.Water is an input. Electricity is an input. Literacy is an input. Connectivity is an input. Once a society depends on them, access stops being optional. Nobody needs government to build every well, power plant, school, or network. But everybody understands that a civilization cannot be organized around less than universal and reliable access to foundational inputs.Intelligence is reaching that level of importance now that we all know it is real.Government should not own it, operate it, or develop it. Quite the opposite. Companies are the right actors to build fast, compete hard, improve models, serve customers, and discover the real use cases. Self-interest is a useful framing here. Markets are good at finding demand, reducing costs, and turning invention into services people actually use.Companies are the right operators, developers, and owners. But that does not settle the real question of who owns the benefits. That is an economic question.If intelligence becomes metered infrastructure, what happens to the value it creates?The Ownership StackThis week's articles keep circling the same issue from different directions but in the nature of ‘circling' never quite nail it.Jamin Ball's “Own Your Weights” starts with the enterprise version of the question. Owning a model file is not enough. The durable asset is the loop: the data flywheel, the evaluations, the reinforcement system, the workflow learning, and the operating context that lets capability compound.Benedict Evans' “Ways to Think About Token Pricing” adds the market layer. Tokens may become essential, abundant, and cheap, like mobile data. But being essential does not guarantee that the token layer captures the value. The money may move up the stack to whoever owns the workflow, the customer, the distribution, or the application.Alex Karp's fight with the labs, reported in “Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI”, is the same argument in sharper enterprise language. Companies are afraid that model providers will not just sell intelligence, but learn from customer workflows and then move into the markets where those workflows create value. The “All-in” group are echoing Karp's view.And “What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?” names the new contested terrain. The loop is where intelligence meets the world. Whoever owns the loop owns the learning. Whoever owns the learning owns the compounding asset.That is why “who owns intelligence?” is not a slogan. It is the question under the model layer, the application layer, the enterprise layer, and the economic layer.Because intelligence is the product, the tools creating it are fragmented and competitive. So there is no logic in trying to discuss this at the level of a single company or set of tools and models.The Old Promise Was That Commerce Would Tame PowerThe essays this week give the historical backdrop.Deirdre McCloskey, in “What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution”, argues that modern growth came not simply from capital accumulation, but from a change in permission: ordinary people were allowed to innovate, trade, build, and be honored for it.That matters because intelligence could be another expansion of permission. It could make more people capable of building, learning, creating, coding, researching, translating, selling, and coordinating. It could lower the cost of competence.But only if access is broad.Paul Krugman's “AI in an Age of Oligarchy” warns that the same technology lands differently in different political economies. A new general-purpose technology entering a broad, open, upwardly mobile society is one thing. The same technology entering a concentrated economy, with extreme wealth and weak counterweights, is another.Tim O'Reilly's Economist essay, “Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate”, makes the governance point more directly. The old liberal hope was that commerce would tame arbitrary power. Markets, boards, courts, shareholders, disclosure, and competition would discipline the prince.But what if the prince uses markets to escape discipline?Henry Farrell's “political economy of billionaire derangement” pushes the same point. Founder culture, monopoly ambition, peer rivalry, weak correction mechanisms, and vast private control can amplify appetites rather than restrain them.The danger with intelligence is not that companies build it. They should. Companies build it, meter it, use public tolerance and public infrastructure to scale it, learn from everyone who uses it. All of those things are inevitable and healthy. Market forces will sort out winners from losers. The real danger is that the winners treat all of the surplus produced as purely private.Metered Intelligence Creates SurplusIf metering is not the problem, what is?The problem is pretending that metered intelligence creates value only for the metering entity. Metering water is only tolerated as a public good. If the public were blackmailed by a private water company with the threat of no water we would all rebel.Once we understand that the product of AI is intelligence we can see that every time intelligence is used, there is the immediate transaction: the user pays, the provider serves.But there is also system value. Usage creates signals. Workflows reveal patterns. Prompts, corrections, failures, preferences, integrations, edge cases, and business processes all help define where intelligence is useful and how it should improve. Intelligence breeds intelligence.Even when customer data is contractually protected, the market learns. The platform learns where demand is. The product team learns which workflows matter. The ecosystem learns which jobs are vulnerable, which tasks are automatable, and which parts of the economy can be reorganized around machine intelligence.So the surplus is not born in a vacuum.It rests on public science, public education, public data exhaust, public law, public infrastructure, public energy systems, public tolerance for data centers, and billions of human interactions. It is served by companies, but it is not made only by companies.This is why “Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches” belongs at the center of this week's issue. The detail can be debated. The principle is harder to dismiss. If intelligence becomes a new foundational resource, then some part of the wealth it creates should flow back to the people whose society makes it possible. Intelligence did not suddenly appear. AI is built on the entire history of human intelligence. It benefits from it and at the same time evolves it.Not Nationalization. A Human Wealth Fund.If intelligence belongs to everybody, some conclude that government ownership of intelligence is the right outcome.Governments are not well suited to build, operate, or improve intelligence. They will move too slowly, regulate too early, politicize the wrong things, and confuse economic participation with operational control.Andrew McAfee's “Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter” is useful here. His objection is not that the technology is unimportant. It is that steering too hard before we understand the shape of the change can become its own failure mode. Marc Andreessen's satire of AI regulation is less policy than temperament, but it captures a real Silicon Valley fear: that regulation can become permission, capture, and incumbency before it becomes wisdom.That fear should be taken seriously.But it does not answer the economic question. It answers only the operational one.How can the economic benefits of intelligence be distributed? The better answer is a sovereign human wealth fund.Call it a sovereign wealth fund if you must, but the phrase is too national. Intelligence will not respect borders. The leading companies are global. The models, chips, data centers, agents, platforms, and workflows will be transnational from the beginning. If the value created by intelligence is global, then the mechanism for sharing some of that value should begin with the companies global enough to capture it. The nice thing about xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic is that they are supranational.These companies own and operate intelligence. Let them compete. Let them profit. Let them keep the incentives that make the system improve. But if intelligence is the new water, the wealth it creates cannot belong only to the companies that meter it. And they, themselves, have the power to fix it, even more than governments.Access will become a Human Right; Ownership Is the Economic DesignThis is where human rights come in. There is no right to access an AI model, yet. But there will soon be a need to change that.Not as a claim that every person is entitled to every frontier model at every moment for free. That is not serious. Capacity has costs. Models have costs. Inference has costs. Data centers have costs. Although those costs will decline over time, possibly quite quickly as self-learning models address costs.The claim is more basic: in a world where intelligence becomes a primary input into education, work, health, science, citizenship, creativity, and economic agency, baseline access to intelligence starts to look like a civic requirement.That could mean public access layers. It could mean education credits. It could mean open models. It could mean AI dividends. It could mean public-interest compute. It could mean taxes on rents. It could mean a company-initiated human wealth fund that returns some of the upside to society without handing the operating system to the state. The latter could couple wealth growth with universal distribution of ownership.The exact mechanism matters. But the distinction matters more.Government should not own intelligence. It should be universally available. And people should have a claim on the wealth intelligence creates.The Frontier Is Also PhysicalThe abstraction is not weightless.“The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning”, “New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium”, Reuters on pollution from Musk's xAI power project, and DataGravity's “Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?” all say the same thing from the ground up.Intelligence uses land. It uses power. It uses water. It uses chips. It uses grid capacity. It uses neighborhoods. It uses public patience.That makes the value question unavoidable. A society can accept the buildout if the buildout is legible as shared progress. It will resist it if the costs are local, the profits are private, and the benefits feel enclosed.Who Owns the “Loop”?The week ends where it began.“Anthropic and Blackstone” are betting that implementation is the next trillion-dollar business. “Vint Cerf” is working on identity for agents on the open internet. “GPT-Red” points toward systems that improve their own robustness. “Kimi K3” adds another open frontier model to the global mix.The model race continues. The deployment race is accelerating. The governance race is behind.My view is this:The central product of this era is intelligence. Companies have figured out how to capture it, package it, serve it, and meter it. That is good. It should stay in the hands of builders who have the incentive to make it better.But intelligence is too foundational to become just another private toll booth. A significant part of it will turn out to be free to users.As intelligence becomes a general-purpose resource, then access to it becomes a human-capability question, and the surplus from it becomes an economic-justice question. Not because government should run it. Because government should not run it. The operating layer belongs with companies. The wealth question belongs with everyone. But companies are best placed to turn that into a process of distribution.The question is not whether companies should build intelligence. They should.The question is whether humanity gets a stake in the wealth created by the thing that may soon become its most important shared input.Contents* Essays* Deirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution* AI in an Age of Oligarchy* Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate* Murky Mirror: Truth and Consequences* The political economy of billionaire derangement* Is there any “oligarchy” to fight?* AI* Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats* Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter* Own Your Weights* Ways to Think About Token Pricing* Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI* The AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft Office* What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?* The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning* 6 months to live for open models* Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches* Who Gets to Define the Frontier?* GPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for Robustness* Anthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just models* Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet* xai-org/grok-build, now open source* The Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?* Orphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligence* The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data Center* Why AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”* Kimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier Intelligence* Venture Capital* Three Years In* Venture Has Rarely Looked More Bifurcated* The Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active Now* Are Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?* Regulation* Exclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College Campuses* The Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.* India's crackdown on a new WhatsApp feature risks setting a global precedent* Let's build a children's public internet* Computer cops* Google is better at playing the AI regulations game* Infrastructure* Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?* New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium* Pollution from Musk's unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities* Interview of the Week* The End of the End of Geography* Startup of the Week* Radical AI's Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The “Waymo” Lab For New Materials* Post of the Week* Marc Andreessen on AI RegulationEssaysDeirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial RevolutionYascha Mounk and Deirdre McCloskey | Persuasion | July 11, 2026Yascha Mounk interviews Deirdre McCloskey about her argument that the modern world's economic liftoff came less from capital accumulation than from a change in ideas. McCloskey says both left and right versions of the conventional story rely too heavily on investment: the left stresses exploitation and surplus value, while the right stresses virtuous saving by capitalists. Her objection is historical and economic. Human beings had always invested, from irrigation works and Roman roads to seed grain, and simple accumulation quickly runs into diminishing returns.McCloskey's alternative is that northwestern Europe, first Holland, then Britain and Scotland, and then the North American colonies, developed a liberal ideology that changed who was allowed to innovate and be honored for it. The conversation links that shift to the erosion of inherited hierarchy, the spread of dignity for ordinary commercial life, and a moral vocabulary in which liberalism is not merely procedural but connected to virtues and values. The point is not that machines, coal, trade, and institutions did not matter, but that they do not explain the scale and timing of modern enrichment without a cultural permission structure for innovation.The interview also turns to the contemporary defense of liberalism. Mounk frames the series around the worry that liberalism is often treated as too thin to command allegiance, while its opponents speak more directly to moral passions. McCloskey's case is that liberal societies became rich because they dignified experimentation and ordinary enterprise, and that liberals need to recover the moral language behind that claim.Read moreAI in an Age of OligarchyPaul Krugman | Paul Krugman | July 12, 2026Paul Krugman frames AI as a major technological shock arriving inside an already unequal political economy. The post says AI's economic and social effects may take years to understand, but argues that the setting matters now: America has much greater wealth concentration and political inequality than it did in the 1950s and 1960s, when progressive taxation, stronger regulation, and more active antitrust might have contained some of the destructive effects of a new technology.Krugman's opening claim is that the same technology would likely have different consequences in a more level society. In today's United States, he writes, extreme wealth is both a cause and effect of policies that favor a small elite, including low effective taxes on capital and high incomes, weak enforcement of worker protections and antitrust, and cuts to programs that benefit ordinary Americans.The article is explicitly more about oligarchy than AI. Krugman says the paid sections document the rise of the “.0002%,” the economics and politics of extreme wealth, how oligarchy will shape AI's impact, and possible policy paths. His caveat is that AI itself may still produce a pushback against oligarchy, but absent that, he expects the pre-existing concentration of wealth and power to magnify AI's downsides.Read moreElon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hateAuthor: Tim O'Reilly Published: July 12, 2026Tim O'Reilly argues that Elon Musk is using the legal forms of shareholder capitalism to escape the restraints that shareholder capitalism was supposed to impose. The article begins with SpaceX's public-market structure: ordinary public investors get little meaningful governance power, Musk keeps roughly 85 percent of the votes through super-voting shares, buyers waive jury trials and class actions, the company qualifies as controlled, and removal of Musk depends on the share class he controls. In O'Reilly's framing, that is not ordinary founder control; it is a design for being answerable to no one, possibly beyond Musk's own lifetime.The killer detail is the article's turn through Albert Hirschman, Montesquieu, James Steuart, Adam Smith, and Keynes. Older defenses of commerce held that markets would tame princely passions because the self-interest of merchants was safer than arbitrary rule. O'Reilly says Musk reverses that hope. The market discipline that was supposed to cage the prince has become the lever by which the prince raises capital, removes feedback loops, and carries private power into politics, government, Mars, robots, AI, or whatever ambition comes next.The pull is the link to AI governance. O'Reilly says corporations are already a kind of artificial intelligence: narrow-input systems that act at a scale no individual human can match. Their partial controls include independent boards, shareholder votes, courts, disclosure, regulators, public pressure, and activism. If the leaders building frontier AI strip those alignment mechanisms out of their own companies, the governance of the company becomes a preview of the governance of the machine.Read more: The EconomistMurky Mirror: Truth and ConsequencesAuthor: Esther Dyson Published: July 14, 2026Esther Dyson argues that today's institutional crisis is better viewed through the 14th century than through recent political history. Using Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror as her frame, she compares a world of famine, plague, church schism, feudal predation, and purposeless war with a present in which institutions again feel brittle, incentives are badly aligned, and power is shifting into forms that are hard to govern.The killer detail is the historical analogy between land, corporations, and AI. Dyson moves from nobles who controlled serfs and territory, to the East India Company as a quasi-sovereign business, to today's AI systems and data centers as a possible new sector that crosses and weakens both nation-states and companies. The question is whether AI becomes a new kind of private land, owned by a new nobility, or an open prairie that many people can cultivate.The pull is human attention. Dyson says the central question is not what AI will do to people, but how people will react to it: whether they can value love, kindness, embodied attention, and artisanal human presence in a world of seductive artificial offerings.Read more: SourceThe political economy of billionaire derangementAuthor: Henry Farrell Published: July 15, 2026Henry Farrell argues that the visible political radicalization of some Silicon Valley billionaires is not a random personality quirk, but a product of the political economy that made them. Starting from Tyler Cowen's dismissal of “billionaire derangement syndrome” and Tim O'Reilly's warning that Elon Musk is using shareholder capitalism to escape shareholder restraint, Farrell flips the phrase: the question is why billionaires themselves can become deranged.The killer detail is Farrell's use of Peter Thiel as both theorist and example. Thiel's Stanford lectures described startups as monarchies and founders as figures vested with unusual power, while Silicon Valley culture rewarded eccentricity, monopoly ambition, and founder exceptionalism. Farrell says those ideas combined with dense founder-investor networks, peer rivalry, and weak correction mechanisms to amplify rather than discipline princely appetites.The pull is the ideological problem for classical liberals who once saw tech wealth as an ally of markets and freedom. Farrell says commerce did not tame the passions; in parts of Silicon Valley, the passions have begun to devour markets, institutions, and the liberal story that justified them.Read more: SourceIs there any “oligarchy” to fight?Matthew Yglesias | Slow Boring | July 16, 2026Matthew Yglesias argues that “oligarchy” is a rhetorically powerful but analytically loose way to describe American politics. The post begins from Bernie Sanders' “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Amy Klobuchar's warning about a MAGA “broligarchy,” and the long afterlife of the Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page paper that was widely summarized as showing that only the rich matter in policy outcomes. Yglesias says the evidence supports a weaker claim: affluent people and business leaders have unusual access and influence, but that is not the same as rule by a small cabal.His main distinction is between inequality and oligarchy. The Gilens-Page measure treated the top 10 percent of households as “the wealthy,” and later critics found that rich and middle-class preferences usually align; in the cases where they differ, the rich win about 53 percent of the time. Yglesias also says business executives get special access partly because their decisions are materially important to communities, jobs, investment, and local tax bases, not only because of campaign donations.The post preserves Jerusalem Demsas' counterpoint from their podcast discussion: privileged donor and business access can still violate democratic equality even if the oligarchy label overstates the structure of power. Yglesias' narrower claim is that Democrats should be precise about what problem they are trying to solve, because donor influence can also push the party left on climate and cultural issues in ways that alienate many voters.Read more: Slow BoringAINearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. ThreatsAuthor: Ben Casselman Published: July 13, 2026Ben Casselman reports on “We Must Act Now,” a statement warning that artificial intelligence could transform the economy faster than any previous technology and that policymakers need to move faster to understand and respond. The statement says AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years, bringing risks such as large-scale job displacement as well as opportunities such as higher living standards. Nearly 200 people signed, including 15 Nobel laureates, the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.The killer detail is who joined the warning. Casselman notes that the signatories include economists who have historically been skeptical of Silicon Valley's most dramatic AI job-loss forecasts, including Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the MIT professors who won the 2024 Nobel in economics. Erik Brynjolfsson, who helped organize the statement, says there has been a notable change in the profession and that economists and policymakers are not ready for the “tsunami” he sees coming.The pull is the measurement problem. The statement does not offer a specific policy menu, but calls for economists, policymakers, and industry leaders to understand the economics of transformative AI and steer it toward complementing humans. Brynjolfsson says one high priority is better data on AI's spread and impact, because current measures tell conflicting stories about job losses and which workers are most exposed.Read more: The New York TimesWhy I Didn't Sign the AI Open LetterAuthor: Andrew McAfee Published: July 13, 2026Andrew McAfee explains why he did not sign “We Must Act Now,” the AI economy statement organized in part by his longtime collaborator Erik Brynjolfsson. McAfee agrees with the letter's starting point that AI is likely to become radically more powerful over the next decade and that it is a general-purpose technology. His objection is not to urgency or to studying AI's economic effects, but to the framing of risk, displacement, and institutional steering as the first move.The killer detail is McAfee's line edit. He says the original letter comes close, then “bounces off the crossbar” by calling for incentives, guardrails, and institutions to steer AI before we know enough about its actual impacts. He points to mixed current evidence: labor-market canaries, but also rising software job postings, low unemployment for younger workers, rising real median income, and claims that AI-adopting companies are adding workers faster than low-adopting peers. His worry is that the letter leans toward upstream governance and dirigisme when the evidence may call for capability building instead.The pull is his replacement statement. McAfee keeps the three-paragraph structure but changes the emphasis: AI is likely to become radically more powerful; like earlier world-changing technologies it will raise living standards while also bringing harms and shocks; and economists, policymakers, and technology leaders should build the capabilities to respond quickly and effectively. It is a concise version of the permissionless-innovation case inside the AI policy debate.Read more: The Geek WayOwn Your WeightsAuthor: Jamin Ball Published: July 10, 2026Jamin Ball argues that the enterprise AI debate about whether companies should “own their weights” or rent models from frontier labs is asking too narrow a question. A model weight file gives a company control over a point-in-time artifact, but not durable control over the capability stack. In his framing, the weight file is a melting ice cube: it does not get worse in absolute terms, but it falls behind as frontier systems improve and enterprise needs change.The killer detail is what Ball says companies really need to own: the data flywheel, reinforcement learning infrastructure, and evaluation harness that produce and improve the model. Simply deploying an open-weights model and declaring sovereignty leaves the enterprise with yesterday's capability and no way to compound workflow-specific learning.The pull is that enterprise AI control may be less about model ownership than operating ownership. The defensible layer is the system that turns company data, edge cases, business definitions, and evaluations into continuously improving performance.Read more: Clouded JudgementWays to Think About Token PricingAuthor: Benedict Evans Published: July 9, 2026Benedict Evans argues that today's AI token prices are a temporary signal from a supply-constrained market, not a reliable guide to long-term value capture. The open question is whether foundation models keep durable pricing power or become commodity infrastructure as data-center capacity, inference efficiency, and model competition all shift. His current read is that the visible market dynamics point toward commoditization unless something materially changes.The killer detail is the mobile data analogy. Evans says cellular networks became a trillion-dollar industry with hundreds of billions in capex after data usage exploded, but carrier stocks went nowhere because value moved up the stack. Tokens may behave similarly: an opaque unit tied to marginal cost, sold through bundles, essential to everything, yet not necessarily where profits accrue.The pull is uncertainty, not prediction. Evans lists paths to model dominance, including network effects, less competition, regulation, export controls, or a lab pulling ahead on execution, but says each requires a new fact not yet visible. Without that change, the model layer looks more like infrastructure beneath the products that capture value.Read more: SourceAlex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AIAuthor: Tim Higgins Published: July 11, 2026Tim Higgins reports that Palantir CEO Alex Karp has turned corporate frustration with AI labs into a public argument about enterprise control. Palantir released a white paper, “Institutional Sovereignty in the Age of AI,” laying out steps companies and governments can take to protect themselves from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other foundation-model providers. The article links that paper to Karp's CNBC appearance, where he said “something has gone completely wrong” in the relationship between AI labs and customers and argued that enterprises are paying for tokens that create little value.The killer detail is the value-capture question. Higgins writes that Karp's critique has resonated because AI labs may gain power and insight from customer data, workflows, and decision-making, even when enterprise policies say customer data are not used for training. David Sacks amplified the concern by arguing that Anthropic is moving from the model layer into vertical applications such as science, security, legal, and coding, raising the fear that model providers will watch where value is being created and then move into those markets directly.The pull is that Karp is not alone, even if his style is unusually combative. Higgins notes that Satya Nadella has also warned that companies need to retain the learnings created when they use AI models, while Mark Zuckerberg has framed Meta's new model release partly around lower-cost frontier intelligence. The article presents Karp's campaign as one sign that established technology companies and large enterprises are trying to define where they fit when AI labs become central infrastructure, application competitors, and potential IPO giants at the same time.Read more: The Wall Street JournalThe AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft OfficeAlex Wilhelm | Cautious Optimism | July 11, 2026Alex Wilhelm argues that one of the week's quieter AI questions is whether the productivity market that Microsoft successfully moved into subscription software is now being attacked by agentic tools. The piece begins with the infrastructure backdrop: SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion in a U.S. listing while building U.S. HBM and advanced-packaging capacity, and memory, chip, and foundry companies are now priced for sustained AI demand.Wilhelm then says the AI conversation has shifted quickly from raw capability to cost per task. He cites new model releases and vendor language emphasizing cheaper agentic and coding models, faster performance, and lower dollars per task. That matters because lower costs make it more plausible for AI systems to take on routine knowledge work at scale rather than remain a premium coding assistant market.The core of the article is Microsoft Office. Wilhelm notes that Microsoft turned Office from a one-time purchase into Microsoft 365, a large recurring revenue business with tens of millions of subscribers and a major productivity segment. Now, he says, late-stage unicorns and AI labs are pushing into the same territory: Anthropic's Cowork was reportedly used mostly outside software development, OpenAI merged ChatGPT and Codex into a tool for creating sheets, slides, docs, web apps, and long-running work, and other companies are building agentic coworkers that connect business data to documents, workflows, schedules, alerts, and apps.The article's caveat is that Microsoft has survived major platform shifts before. The argument is not that Office disappears quickly, but that the definition of office software is broadening from documents and spreadsheets into AI systems that can create, monitor, and act across workplace data.Read moreWhat Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?Author: Nilesh Barla Published: July 11, 2026Nilesh Barla argues that “loop engineering” is becoming a distinct discipline because production AI agents now fail less at single prompts than at runtime: when to stop, what state to preserve, and how to recover after a bad step. Prompt engineering shapes one model call, and context engineering shapes what the model sees, but loop engineering shapes what a sequence of calls actually does.The killer detail is the three-primitives frame. Barla says a real agent loop needs halt conditions, state carryover, and recovery paths, then maps teams across five maturity levels. At the lowest level, an agent is just a model call in a for-loop with a step cap and raw history; by the higher levels, the system has structured state, explicit planning, replay, evaluation, and self-repair.The pull is organizational. If agents are becoming production systems rather than demos, someone has to own the runtime itself. The loop engineer is the role Barla gives to the person responsible for making long-running agent work dependable.Read more: Adaline LabsThe Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just BeginningEmma Roth | The Verge | July 12, 2026Emma Roth argues that community resistance to data centers has moved from an early warning sign into a national political fight as AI facilities grow larger, more power-hungry, and more visible to nearby residents. The article starts with Apple's failed 2015 plan for a $1 billion data center in Athenry, Ireland, where a small group of residents challenged the project over noise, light pollution, flooding, traffic, and wildlife effects until Apple abandoned it in 2018.The current data-center buildout is presented as much larger and more contentious. Roth writes that residents now cite rising energy costs, water quality, noise, light pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects commercial energy demand to surpass residential demand this year because of AI data centers and Goldman Sachs expects data-center power demand to double by 2027.The central evidence comes from Data Center Watch, which says protesters blocked or delayed at least 75 U.S. projects worth $130 billion from January to March, with active opposition groups more than doubling from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by the end of the first quarter of 2026. Roth also cites QTS abandoning a $12 billion Wisconsin campus, Delaware City regulators blocking a 580-acre project under the Coastal Zone Act, opposition stopping a QTS project in Prince William County, and pressure that pushed Kevin O'Leary to downsize the proposed 40,000-acre Project Stratos in Utah.The policy section describes a split between federal acceleration and local resistance. President Trump has treated data centers as part of the AI race with China and fast-tracked construction, while some Republican candidates are distancing themselves from that position ahead of midterms. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a moratorium until price and environmental protections exist, bipartisan lawmakers are backing ratepayer-protection measures, and states including Florida, Idaho, and Washington have passed rules on cost shifting, water use, and tax breaks. Roth's caveat is that the policy patchwork is still incomplete, leaving many communities to fight project by project.Read more6 months to live for open modelsAuthor: Nathan Lambert Published: July 12, 2026Nathan Lambert argues that open-weight AI models are facing their most serious policy test so far because U.S. officials are beginning to discuss concrete controls rather than abstract safety concerns. He says reported White House conversations about a new executive order may initially target Chinese-origin models and government use, but could create a broader review habit for frontier open models. His forecast is that a model above the capability range of GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, or GLM-5.2 could trigger a ban or indefinite delay within six months.The post separates two policy fights that are becoming intertwined: distillation and frontier capability. Lambert says the distillation campaign against Chinese models has become a form of regulatory capture because Anthropic and other closed-model companies would gain economically if Chinese open models were banned. He does not dismiss IP protection, but argues that if a closed model's capabilities are dangerous enough to justify restricting open models, the lab also has to explain why those capabilities are exposed through a queryable API. He cites unauthorized access to Anthropic's Mythos private beta as evidence that APIs are not automatically secure.The broader claim is that a unilateral U.S. ban would hurt positive actors more than bad actors if comparable open models remain available elsewhere. Lambert says the only durable ceiling would require global agreement, which does not exist, and that open models can improve safety by allowing broad inspection, adaptation, and understanding. His proposed near-term off-ramps are a strong U.S. open model release from companies such as Microsoft, Meta, or Reflection, and a broader coalition of open-source beneficiaries lobbying for safe rollout rather than prohibition.Read more: SourceAmericans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' RichesAuthor: Scott Stanford Published: July 14, 2026Scott Stanford argues that proposals to give the government a stake in AI companies miss the point unless ordinary citizens directly receive and control the upside. Sam Altman has discussed giving up equity in OpenAI, Washington already owns a stake in Intel, Nvidia is sharing China chip revenue, and Bernie Sanders wants large AI labs to contribute half their stock to a sovereign wealth fund. Stanford says those ideas all park value with the state, not with people.The killer detail is New Carlisle, Indiana, where AWS's Project Rainier is turning cornfields into one of the world's largest AI superclusters. The project is planned to run up to a million chips, draw more than two gigawatts of power, and represents an investment that has grown from $11 billion to $13.8 billion. Stanford uses that local transformation to argue that AI's public bargain should be visible at the household level.The pull is design. A citizen AI dividend would have to specify who earns a stake, how they hold it, and when they see cash. Without that mechanism, the AI wealth debate remains a fight over government balance sheets rather than public ownership.Read more: SourceWho Gets to Define the Frontier?Author: Mark Daley Published: July 14, 2026Mark Daley argues that Demis Hassabis is right to call for a serious institution to verify frontier AI systems, but that the power to test models is also the power to govern them. Hassabis's proposed Frontier AI Standards Body would get privileged pre-release access to advanced models, testing compute, held-out evaluations, support from national labs and security agencies, third-party auditors, and eventually authority to block models from the American market or coordinate a slowdown.The killer detail is Daley's constitutional objection. He says the proposal sometimes looks like a scientific lab, a standards body, an industry regulator, a licensing authority, and an emergency security council at once. Combining those roles because each requires technical expertise would be like putting the central bank, auditor-general, and Supreme Court in one building and calling it efficient.The pull is standard-setting. Daley's concern is not that verification is unnecessary, but that whoever writes the tests, decides what passes, adjudicates disputes, and grants market access may end up defining the frontier itself.Read more: SourceGPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for RobustnessOpenAI | OpenAI | July 15, 2026OpenAI describes GPT-Red as an internal automated red-teaming model trained to find prompt-injection vulnerabilities at a scale human red teams cannot match. The post says AI systems increasingly encounter third-party data through browsers, connected apps, local files, and tools, creating opportunities for malicious instructions hidden in emails, webpages, tool responses, or code repositories. Human red-teaming remains part of OpenAI's safety process, but the company says it is time-intensive and cannot generate enough diverse adversarial examples for model training.The system is trained through self-play reinforcement learning, with GPT-Red rewarded for eliciting valid failures and defender models rewarded for resisting attacks while still completing their tasks. OpenAI says the training environments specify threat models across settings such as local files, webpage banners, email bodies, and tool outputs. The model is kept separate from deployed production models because it is intentionally trained with malicious capabilities.OpenAI reports that GPT-Red generalized beyond its training set, including an internal replication of the indirect prompt-injection arena from Dziemian et al. (2025), where it found successful attacks in 84% of scenarios compared with 13% for human red-teamers. The post also says GPT-Red transferred attacks from simulation to a live autonomous vending-machine agent, causing price changes and order cancellations, and outperformed a prompted GPT-5.5 baseline against a Codex CLI agent on held-out data-exfiltration tasks.The article's main robustness claim is that OpenAI has used GPT-Red and predecessor models in training since GPT-5.3, with later GPT releases becoming more resistant to prompt injections. It says GPT-5.6 Sol has six times fewer failures on OpenAI's hardest direct prompt-injection benchmark than the best production model from four months earlier, that a “Fake Chain-of-Thought” attack class fell from more than 95% success against GPT-5.1 to below 10% against GPT-5.6 Sol, and that GPT-5.6 Sol fails on only 0.05% of GPT-Red's direct prompt injections. OpenAI says general capabilities and targeted over-refusal evaluations were not harmed, and says a preprint with more details will follow.Read moreAnthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just modelsRebecca Bellan | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Rebecca Bellan reports that Ode with Anthropic is the $1.5 billion AI implementation company launched by Anthropic with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and other backers. The article says the venture reflects a growing belief among frontier AI labs that enterprise adoption requires more than better models: customers need engineers who can embed inside businesses and turn AI into working systems.Ode was originally conceived by Blackstone after it used both large consulting firms and smaller AI services boutiques across its portfolio companies. TechCrunch reports that Fractional AI, an AI engineering services startup, stood out and was acquired by the joint venture shortly after the venture was announced. Fractional now forms the foundation of Ode, which has 100 engineers and works closely with Anthropic's applied AI team to identify where the technology can affect specific businesses.Ode CEO Chris Taylor tells TechCrunch that the company could someday become a trillion-dollar business if it scales without losing quality. He says an ideal customer is one whose CEO treats the AI project as a top one or two priority, whether it is a major product feature or the reworking of a core business process. Ode will operate under a “Claude-first” principle, using Anthropic technology whenever possible, but the article says it can use rival AI products when needed.The article's central implementation argument comes from Ode chief technologist Eddie Siegel, who says model selection matters but is not where most of the engineering effort goes. He compares it to the choice of programming language in software: one ingredient in a system that still has to be engineered. Bellan writes that Ode's challenge is hiring and training enough elite generalist engineers, many of them former founders, while competing with OpenAI's The Deployment Company and consulting giants that have built their own forward-deployed engineering teams.Read moreVint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internetTim Fernholz | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Tim Fernholz reports that Vint Cerf, after leaving Google, is advising Innovation Labs on an open architecture for identifying AI agents online. Innovation Labs is a subsidiary of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company, and its proposal is to use domain-name infrastructure as part of a system for agent identity, accountability, and auditability. The premise is that agents will need a way to identify themselves if they move beyond proprietary systems and begin interacting across the open internet.The concrete proposal is DNSid, a registry that links an AI agent to an existing internet domain and uses cryptographic proofs to log its registration over time. Innovation Labs says it is trialing the standard with unnamed hyperscalers and identity companies. Cerf frames the problem around authority and accountability: what authority an agent has, where that authority came from, who is accountable for the agent's behavior, how its identity is established, and why anyone should trust it.The article's caveat is that standards are still emerging and agents are more active than static domains. Cerf says the period may be both fascinating and exasperating because the functionality is powerful and interoperability is unresolved. He compares the adoption problem to TCP/IP: competing systems may not work together until users push for functional interoperation. He also says an agentic economy is not inevitable, but that people will try to build it because delegating work to agents will be easier.Read more: TechCrunchxai-org/grok-build, now open sourceAuthor: Simon Willison Published: July 15, 2026Simon Willison argues that xAI's decision to open-source Grok Build is best understood as a trust repair move after a severe privacy failure. The CLI had triggered backlash when users realized that running it in a directory could upload the entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets, including one user's reported SSH keys, password manager database, documents, photos, and videos. xAI disabled the feature, said previously retained coding data would be deleted, and released the code under Apache 2.0.The killer detail is what the codebase reveals. Willison counts 844,530 lines of Rust, only about 3% of which appears vendored, and finds remnants of the upload system still present but disabled: gcs.rs contains Google Cloud upload code, while upload_session_state() now returns a hard-coded session_state_upload_unavailable error. He also notes copied or ported tool implementations from Codex and OpenCode, prompt files, and a terminal Mermaid renderer.The pull is that terminal coding agents are becoming large, intricate software systems in their own right. The privacy failure mattered because these tools operate inside the directories where developers keep their most sensitive work; the open-source release matters because trust now depends on inspecting what an agent can see, send, and do.Read more: SourceThe Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?Author: Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric Published: July 16, 2026Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric argue that Bun's AI-assisted rewrite from Zig to Rust is a practical sign of how software engineering changes when models can take on large, bounded migrations with clear feedback loops. The piece does not treat the rewrite as magic: Jarred Sumner first spent hours turning design judgment into a detailed porting guide, then used adversarial review, parallel agents, compiler errors, and tests to force the work toward correctness.The killer detail is the scale. Bun had 535,496 lines of Zig, 1,448 files, and 22 million monthly downloads, making a conventional rewrite a year-long freeze the team could not justify. Using Fable, Sumner split the work across 64 agents, produced about 6,500 commits, and got the migration done in 11 days at an estimated API cost of $165,000.The pull is economic, not theatrical. If a one- or two-year migration can become an 11-day project, AI coding is not just faster autocomplete; it changes which technical debts are worth paying down.Read more: SourceOrphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligenceAuthor: Andrew Maynard Published: July 16, 2026Andrew Maynard argues that frontier AI safety frameworks are creating “orphan risks”: harms that companies can see, but do not formally own because they are hard to quantify, do not fit catastrophic-risk thresholds, or fall outside audit-friendly compliance machinery. His target is not existing frontier safety work, but the narrowing effect that happens when private companies decide which risks count as governable.The killer detail is Maynard's contrast between measurable model dangers and threats to value. He points to Meta's three-day Galactica collapse, OpenAI's 2023 board crisis, safety-team departures, and wellbeing litigation as examples of risks that damaged trust, culture, legitimacy, or users without fitting cleanly into conventional model-risk categories. The proposed fix is an orphan-risk register: a public record of risks a company considered and chose not to manage, with reasons.The pull is accountability. Frontier developers' internal scoping choices have become a de facto layer of public governance, so the question is no longer only which risks they manage, but which risks they quietly leave outside the frame.Read more: SourceThe Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data CenterLatent.Space with Andy Beam and Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli | Latent.Space | July 16, 2026Latent.Space interviews Lila Sciences CTO Andy Beam and chief science officer for physical sciences Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli about the company's attempt to build an AI-run science factory. The post describes Lila's thesis as treating the lab itself as an “infinite token generator”: if internet data drove the first era of AI scaling, experimentally verified scientific data may be the next scarce training source. Lila is trying to produce that data with robotics, lab instruments, orchestration software, and AI models wired into the wet lab.The central analogy is the lab as data center. Instruments are nodes on a graph, a magnetically levitating transport layer moves materials between them, and experiment scheduling looks like a compute queue. Beam says Lila is not simply an automation company, because the point is not just throughput; it is flexibility, generalization, and experiment capture. The post says Lila has built more than 10 trillion experimentally validated “scientific reasoning tokens,” not internet text or biological sequences.The interview ranges across biology, chemistry, drug discovery, materials science, and the limits of automation. It notes that Lila rebuilt one gas-sorption measurement to run roughly 2,500 times faster, claims its general models can transfer priors from small-molecule chemistry to metal-organic frameworks for carbon capture, and describes model-suggested platinum-group-free electrocatalysts that moved from looking boring or wrong to becoming strong performers. The caveats are physical: experiments have runtimes, biology cannot always be accelerated, chains of thought can be unreliable narrators, and reward hacking becomes more dangerous when a model controls a real lab.Read more: Latent.SpaceWhy AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”Kate Park | TechCrunch | July 16, 2026Kate Park interviews AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun about why Yann LeCun's world-model startup avoids the language of “AGI” and “superintelligence.” LeBrun says the terms are not useful because they lack stable definitions: “We never used the word AGI. And I just noticed that nobody is using it anymore; they switched to superintelligence.” His argument is that the practical frontier is not a label, but whether AI systems can understand and predict real-world states.The article explains the world-model thesis by contrasting language prediction with physical-state prediction. A large language model predicts the next word; a world model predicts the next state, such as what happens when a glass tips over. LeBrun says LLMs remain complementary and efficient for language, but the physical world is where current AI is weak. Robotics is the clearest case: hardware has advanced quickly, but robots are still brittle outside controlled routines because they lack context and situational understanding.AMI is still pre-product, but TechCrunch reports that LeBrun was in Seoul looking for industrial partners, researchers, and global companies. He says world models cannot be built entirely inside a lab because they need access to real environments. That is why South Korea appeals to AMI: robotics, semiconductors, manufacturing, and fast adoption create the kind of hardware-heavy context that software-only AI has barely touched.Read more: TechCrunchKimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier IntelligenceKimi | Kimi | July 16, 2026Kimi introduces Kimi K3 as an open 3T-class frontier model aimed at coding, knowledge work, reasoning, multimodality, and long-context agentic use. The source describes the model as a 2.8T-parameter system built on Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, with native multimodality and a 1M-token context window. It says Moonshot AI plans to release model weights by July 27.The post presents K3 through benchmark and use-case sections rather than as a general product announcement. It reports results across coding, productivity, agentic, and multimodal evaluations, including DeepSWE, Terminal-Bench 2.1, Program Bench, SWE Marathon, FrontierSWE, PostTrain Bench, OfficeQA Pro, SpreadsheetBench 2, MCP Atlas, AutomationBench, BrowseComp, GDPval-AA v2, AA-Briefcase, MMMU-Pro, MathVision, BabyVision, OmniDocBench, and PerceptionBench. The source says all reported K3 results use maximum reasoning effort with temperature and top-p set to 1.0, and that different benchmark comparisons use KimiCode, Claude Code, or Codex harnesses depending on the test.Kimi's caveats are unusually concrete. The limitations section says K3 was trained in preserved thinking-history mode, so quality may become unstable if an agent harness does not pass historical thinking content correctly or if an ongoing session switches to K3 midstream. It also says K3's emphasis on long-horizon tasks can make it excessively proactive when it encounters minor issues or ambiguous intent, and recommends imposing explicit behavioral constraints for applications that require strict boundaries. The post adds that K3 remains behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol in user experience despite being competitive overall.Read moreVenture CapitalThree Years InAuthor: Tomasz Tunguz Published: July 10, 2026Tomasz Tunguz marks Theory Ventures' third anniversary by arguing that AI's central market effect is time compression. In his telling, model release cycles, company revenue milestones, enterprise adoption, and venture categories have all accelerated. Seed, Series A, and Series B still exist as financing labels, but they no longer cleanly describe company maturity when some seed rounds are larger than IPOs and the best AI companies can mature much earlier than prior software companies.The killer detail is the shift from models to inference. Tunguz argues that inference has become the dominant AI market because workloads and buyer preferences are fragmenting: video, batch, local, agentic, and real-time tasks each create different infrastructure needs. He compares this to databases splitting into OLTP, OLAP, vector, and streaming categories, with AI pushing the same specialization into inference infrastructure.The pull is that Theory sees the AI-native venture firm as part of the same pattern. The firm says it has analyzed twice as many investment opportunities with three investors working alongside a nine-person intelligence organization, using agents and research systems to map markets, source companies, and support diligence. The piece is both a market map and a statement about how venture itself is being rebuilt by the technology it funds.Read more: LinkedInVenture Has Rarely Looked More BifurcatedAuthor: Beezer Clarkson Published: July 14, 2026Beezer Clarkson points to PitchBook's Q2 report as evidence that the U.S. venture market has split into two very different realities. AI now accounts for more than 60 percent of all U.S. venture deal value, meaning the headline market can look active and well-funded even while much of the non-AI market is dealing with a much colder liquidity and fundraising environment.The thread uses that split as the setup for Clarkson's latest Origins episode with Alec Litowitz, founder of Magnetar and QStar Capital and one of Citadel's original founding partners. Clarkson says markets like this are periods of genuine uncertainty, not merely ordinary risk, which is why Litowitz's Adaptability Quotient framework is relevant.The embedded clip makes the liquidity point concrete. Litowitz says DPI is “the resolution of uncertainty” because it converts an uncertain investment into actual cash returned to LPs. In his framing, a realized dollar is a real mark, while TVPI remains uncertain until it is realized.The killer detail is the distinction between pricing risk and resolving uncertainty. Litowitz's perspective matters because QStar is a SpaceX investor and Clarkson says the conversation happened just before one of venture's most consequential IPOs. The episode's stated questions are why venture remains a way to gain exposure to innovation, how AI is changing what is investable, why liquidity is ultimately a function of time, and why uncertainty requires a different decision framework from risk.Read more: XThe Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active NowAuthor: Ilya Strebulaev Published: July 10, 2026Ilya Strebulaev ranks angels, angel groups, accelerators, and incubators by lifetime U.S. unicorn investments, counting checks written before a company reached unicorn status. The top of the combined list is dominated by organizations: Y Combinator leads with 113 unicorn investments, followed by Plug and Play at 52 and 500 Global at 41. Sand Hill Angels is the highest-ranked angel group at 31.The killer detail is how quickly the list changes below the biggest accelerators. Strebulaev says 271 of the 304 investors in the Top 200 are individuals, or 89%. In the top 100, individuals are 91%. That makes the market underneath the large accelerator counts look much more personal: mostly operators and individual angels writing early checks from their own networks.The pull is the ranking's own caveat. Strebulaev writes that every lifetime leaderboard has a blind spot because many of the unicorns behind those totals were founded a decade or more ago, and some angels have since moved into formal funds, slowed down, or stopped investing. His post therefore separates lifetime performance from recent cohorts, including companies founded in 2015 or later and 2020 or later. For founders or allocators making current decisions, that distinction matters: a career record and a current record are not the same measure.Read more: Ilya StrebulaevAre Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?Author: Contrary Published: July 16, 2026Contrary argues that prediction markets' current boom depends on whether platforms can prove they are more than regulated gambling with exchange-style branding. Kalshi and Polymarket have reached mass cultural, investor, and regulatory attention, but the article says the underlying idea is old: academic markets, corporate forecasting tools, Intrade, PredictIt, and other predecessors all struggled with the same linked problems of liquidity, legality, and user appeal.The killer detail is the comparison with sportsbooks. Prediction markets present themselves as peer-to-peer, transparent, and non-house-based, but sports contracts reportedly account for more than 90 percent of Kalshi trading, and the article says the platforms keep a much thinner slice of volume than sportsbooks. A market can therefore show sports-betting-scale handle while generating far less revenue.The pull is that the product's hardest problem may be distribution of wins. If a small group of sharp traders captures most profits while casual users lose interest, prediction markets may become valuable data feeds and professional tools before they become durable consumer networks.Read more: SourceRegulationExclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College CampusesAuthor: Adrian Carrasquillo Published: July 11, 2026Adrian Carrasquillo reports that college campuses are becoming a new front in the fight over immigration enforcement because automatic license plate readers can turn ordinary campus security infrastructure into searchable location data. His thesis is that Flock Safety's camera network, even without direct ICE or DHS contracts, can feed deportation enforcement through local police partnerships and data-sharing practices.The killer detail is the campaign target. The Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Education, working with Schools Drop ICE, is focusing on 75 colleges and universities publicly identified as having Flock contracts. Flock says it has no ICE or DHS contracts, but activists argue the risk comes through local agencies that coordinate with federal authorities and run searches on their behalf.The pull is broader than immigration. Carrasquillo notes that license plate readers have already been abused by officers for stalking, and that Flock's AI search features can identify more than plates, including bumper stickers. A campus safety tool can become a political surveillance system when the data layer is searchable.Read more: The BulwarkThe Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.Author: Todd Phillips Published: July 12, 2026Todd Phillips argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter damaged independent agencies by ending for-cause removal protections, but did not leave Congress powerless. The ruling weakens the old model in which commissioners at bodies such as the FTC, NLRB, CPSC, SEC, and CFTC could be insulated from dismissal over policy disagreements. Phillips says the next fight is whether presidents can turn nominally bipartisan commissions into one-party instruments.The killer detail is the procedural fix: quorum rules. Phillips proposes that Congress require bipartisan slates of commissioners to be seated before independent agencies can act. A president

Parce que… c'est l'épisode 0x31D! Shameless plug 19 septembre 2026 - Bsides Montréal 20 au 26 septembre 2026 - BruCON 13 novembre 2026 - DEATHCon 16 au 19 novembre - European Cyber Week 1 au 3 décembre 2026 - Forum INCYBER - Canada 2026 24 et 25 février 2027 - SéQCure 2027 Description De Nessus à Tenable : les débuts d'une légende Dans cet épisode spécial de Polysécure, l'animateur reçoit Renaud Deraison, créateur de Nessus, le scanner de vulnérabilités développé il y a près de 30 ans, et cofondateur de Tenable où il a occupé le poste de CTO jusqu'à son départ il y a environ cinq ans. Deraison raconte la genèse de Nessus : à 16 ans, passionné par le réseau internet naissant, il découvre l'univers de la sécurité informatique à une époque où les failles étaient publiées sur la mailing list Bugtraq, suivie par une communauté restreinte d'environ 20 000 abonnés. Insatisfait des outils existants comme Satan, jugés trop complexes et peu accessibles, il développe Nessus en 1998 avec une cinquantaine de tests de sécurité au départ. Le succès est immédiat et inattendu, poussant Deraison à poursuivre le projet, d'abord en open source, puis en produit commercial via Tenable, qui étendra la portée de l'outil de la simple DMZ à l'ensemble de l'infrastructure numérique des entreprises. Le retour à la technique et la leçon de l'éloignement du clavier Un thème central de la discussion est l'importance de rester connecté à la pratique technique concrète. Deraison explique qu'en grandissant chez Tenable, il a dû délaisser le code pour devenir « plus stratégique », perdant ainsi une compréhension viscérale de la technologie au profit d'une compréhension purement intellectuelle. Il souligne l'écart immense, en cybersécurité, entre comprendre un concept en théorie et l'expérimenter réellement : c'est en manipulant les outils qu'on découvre les vrais problèmes de sécurité et les idées de produits pertinentes. Cette réflexion mène à une critique plus large de l'industrie de la cybersécurité, jugée parfois arrogante et déconnectée du vécu des utilisateurs, prompte à distribuer des leçons sans empathie pour les contraintes opérationnelles réelles (comme l'impossibilité de patcher immédiatement une machine critique sans interrompre un service). Bromure : le navigateur jetable réinventé Après son départ de Tenable, Deraison reprend goût au code, épaulé par les assistants IA, en commençant par ChatGPT puis Claude. L'élément déclencheur d'un nouveau projet est presque anecdotique : recevant de nombreux SMS frauduleux (offres de crédit douteuses, généré désormais dans un français impeccable et localisé grâce à l'IA), il souhaite savoir qui se cache derrière ces arnaques sans s'exposer lui-même. Il se remémore alors Bromium, une entreprise des années 2010 qui isolait Internet Explorer dans un hyperviseur, avec l'idée qu'il était inutile de patcher puisqu'il suffisait de fermer et rouvrir un environnement neuf en cas de compromission. Inspiré par ce concept, Deraison développe Bromur (bromur.io), un navigateur jetable pour Mac fonctionnant sous Linux dans une VM, avec une expérience utilisateur quasi native : glisser-déposer de fichiers entre le Mac et la VM, support webcam, contrôle fin des téléchargements et téléversements. Une version serveur permet aussi de faire travailler des contractants externes dans un environnement streamé et surveillé, où impression, captures d'écran et téléchargements peuvent être bloqués. Le projet intègre également un module (désactivé par défaut) utilisant un LLM pour analyser les pages visitées et détecter le phishing, en repérant par exemple des incohérences entre le contenu affiché et l'URL réelle, ou des tromperies visuelles comme l'usage de caractères d'un autre alphabet imitant des lettres latines. Deraison estime que le phishing reste un vaste chantier négligé par l'industrie, qui se contente trop souvent de solutions de formation jugées insuffisantes face à des attaques de plus en plus sophistiquées, y compris par deepfake vidéo. Bromure Agentic : sécuriser les développeurs sans les freiner Le second volet du projet, Bromure Agentic, s'attaque aux attaques de la chaîne d'approvisionnement logicielle (supply chain attacks), un risque majeur lorsqu'un package npm ou Python compromis vole les clés SSH, tokens d'authentification et autres identifiants sensibles présents sur la machine d'un développeur. Plutôt que d'imposer des restrictions punitives comme le font certaines sandboxes existantes, Bromure propose une VM Linux complète où l'utilisateur dispose de faux tokens et fausses clés SSH. Un mécanisme de type « man in the middle » observe le trafic sortant et substitue à la volée les vrais identifiants aux faux, uniquement au moment nécessaire. Ainsi, même en cas de compromission, aucun secret n'est réellement exposé sur la machine. L'outil ajoute aussi des alertes en cas de mauvaise configuration et permet désormais de restreindre les droits (par exemple en lecture seule) sur les accès Kubernetes ou Git, sans exiger du développeur qu'il devienne expert en administration système. Repenser des dogmes établis La conversation aborde aussi la remise en question de certains dogmes de sécurité, comme le caractère « intouchable » du trafic SSL, que Deraison juge paradoxal : on surveille tout le comportement d'une machine, sauf le trafic chiffré sortant. L'inspection de ce trafic ouvre selon lui de nouvelles possibilités, comme bloquer les téléchargements de packages npm en version « latest », souvent les plus vulnérables au piratage. Les deux interlocuteurs concluent sur une analogie automobile : de même que les usagers n'ont pas à comprendre le fonctionnement d'un moteur pour conduire, les utilisateurs et développeurs ne devraient pas avoir à devenir des experts en sécurité pour travailler efficacement. La responsabilité doit se déplacer vers des outils qui protègent sans punir, permettant à chacun de rester concentré sur son métier. Notes Bromure Collaborateurs Nicolas-Loïc Fortin Renaud Deraison Crédits Montage par Intrasecure inc Locaux réels par SSTIC

Parce que… c'est l'épisode 0x31B! Shameless plug 19 septembre 2026 - Bsides Montréal 20 au 26 septembre 2026 - BruCON 13 novembre 2026 - DEATHCon 16 au 19 novembre - European Cyber Week 1 au 3 décembre 2026 - Forum INCYBER - Canada 2026 24 et 25 février 2027 - SéQCure 2027 Description Un an de progrès vertigineux Dans cet épisode spécial de Polysécure, l'animateur reçoit Mickael Nadeau pour discuter de l'évolution de l'intelligence artificielle entre deux éditions du concours NorthSec (NSec). Le point de départ est frappant : il y a environ un an et demi, lors de l'avant-dernier NorthSec, les participants commençaient tout juste à expérimenter l'IA en mode « full force », mais les capacités restaient limitées à un simple chatbot capable, au mieux, de générer un script rapide pour automatiser une tâche SSH. Aujourd'hui, le paysage est méconnaissable : les agents autonomes, les architectures de type RAG et les compétences (« skills ») spécialisées ont complètement transformé la façon dont les équipes offensives opèrent. Le point de vue privilégié d'une entreprise défensive Mickael explique que son entreprise, active en cyberdéfense, occupe une position d'observation unique. Grâce à un « mode surveillance » qui laisse les systèmes clients actifs sans bloquer les attaques (plutôt que de les stopper), l'équipe peut observer en temps réel les nouveaux outils et méthodologies utilisés par les équipes de pentest lors de leurs tests d'intrusion. Cette visibilité lui permet presque de dresser un classement informel des équipes selon leur niveau, un peu à la manière d'un « wall of shame » inspiré de DEF CON : certaines équipes s'appuient sur leur réputation sans se renouveler, utilisant des outils et méthodologies dépassés, tandis que d'autres repoussent les limites grâce à une utilisation avancée de l'IA. Du couteau suisse au tireur d'élite spécialisé Un des axes centraux de la discussion porte sur le passage d'agents génériques (le « couteau suisse ») à des sous-agents hautement spécialisés. Mickael illustre ce changement avec l'exemple des injections SQL : au lieu d'utiliser un outil bruyant comme SQLMap qui teste systématiquement toutes les possibilités, on peut désormais entraîner un agent dédié, nourri de toute la documentation existante sur les failles SQL connues, capable de reconnaître un scénario familier et d'aller directement à la solution avec un minimum de requêtes. Le résultat est un attaquant beaucoup plus silencieux, difficile à repérer avec les mécanismes de détection traditionnels basés sur le volume de bruit réseau. Ce changement de paradigme complique considérablement le travail défensif. Les équipes de sécurité, historiquement habituées à trier les faux positifs et à repérer les comportements bruyants et erratiques, doivent maintenant chasser des signaux beaucoup plus subtils, dans une fenêtre de temps réduite à quelques secondes plutôt qu'à plusieurs jours. L'apprentissage machine au service de la défense Contrairement à l'approche probabiliste des grands modèles de langage utilisés côté offensif, l'entreprise de Mickael s'appuie depuis longtemps sur l'apprentissage machine plus déterministe pour détecter les menaces. Ce socle a permis d'atteindre un certain niveau de précision, mais un nouveau défi émerge : la gestion des modèles frontières et des agents eux-mêmes. Beaucoup de clients sont, selon ses mots, « hystériques » face à cette nouvelle réalité, car la majorité des solutions du marché n'ont pas encore intégré une stratégie pour encadrer les agents IA, que ce soit du côté de leurs propres outils ou de ceux fournis par des tiers (pare-feu, plateformes de sécurité, etc.). Des gains opérationnels concrets Au-delà de la détection, les agents transforment aussi les tâches opérationnelles quotidiennes : renouvellement de certificats, requêtes de cache, diagnostics de configuration client complexes — autant d'opérations qui pouvaient auparavant nécessiter plusieurs appels et une expertise pointue peuvent maintenant être gérées via une simple conversation avec un agent, même depuis un téléphone. Mickael raconte un cas concret où un agent a diagnostiqué un problème de pare-feu propre à un client en quelques requêtes, un problème qu'il n'aurait pas su résoudre lui-même immédiatement malgré sa connaissance approfondie du produit. L'avenir des services MDR et la montée des benchmarks La conversation aborde également l'impact sur le marché des services MDR (Managed Detection and Response). Selon Mickael, l'automatisation permise par les agents va permettre à ces équipes de gérer un nombre de clients beaucoup plus important avec les mêmes ressources humaines, tout en relevant le niveau minimal de qualité du secteur. Il prédit également l'émergence de benchmarks formels pour évaluer non seulement les modèles d'IA, mais aussi les fournisseurs de services de sécurité eux-mêmes — un peu comme les leaderboards actuels qui comparent les performances des différents modèles de langage face à des scénarios d'attaque réels. Ces chiffres deviendront un argument de vente central, remplaçant progressivement les discours marketing par des données concrètes et vérifiables. Vers l'automatisation de la conformité Enfin, les deux interlocuteurs discutent du potentiel des agents pour transformer les processus de conformité (comme PCI-DSS), aujourd'hui perçus comme une lourde corvée administrative. Mickael envisage un futur où des « skills » standardisés permettront d'appliquer automatiquement les bonnes pratiques de conformité, réduisant la tentation de sauter des étapes. Il conclut en mentionnant qu'il prépare une présentation avec démonstration en direct pour partager plus en détail cette évolution avec la communauté, dans le but de sensibiliser les organisations à moderniser leur posture défensive à l'ère des agents IA. Collaborateurs Nicolas-Loïc Fortin Mickael Nadeau Crédits Montage par Intrasecure inc Locaux virtuels par Riverside.fm

Hey friends! Still your grieving pal over here, but also your swarming friend and Protecting My Network Edge host — because this week I've been tinkering with something called Project Swarm and I've got my diapers on regarding it, but I really, really like what I see so far. Then, fair warning, I flip on the tangent light and verbally barf up some personal stuff at the end. I'll make the hand-off super clear, so if you want your free security podcast to do exactly what you want and nothing else — totally fair, and you won't offend me by hopping off. Here's what we cover: What is Project Swarm? This comes to us from our friends over at GreyNoise. It centers around little sensors you deploy to the edges of your network that you can dress up to look like just about anything — attracting flies to the honey, if you catch my drift. You get more enumeration, insight, and logging into whatever shenanigans those flies are using to poke at your edge. Setup was refreshingly easy: You need a very low-powered VM or hardware device (my understanding is it even works on a Raspberry Pi) mapped to a public IP, plus a free GreyNoise account. You generate an API key, copy-paste a one-line install, and off it goes. I threw mine on a tiny Ubuntu VM. The part where I didn't read the flipping manual: Mid-install my SSH connection dropped and I'm going "what the heck?!" Turns out the installer intentionally moves your real SSH to some arbitrary high port — so you can run a fake SSH honeypot on 22 while your legit connection lives elsewhere. Once I spotted the new port in the console, a quick firewall tweak and I was back in. Profiles give me level 14 giggidies: Once your sensor checks in, you assign it a profile. Vulnerable WordPress, Tomcat, a Cisco AnyConnect VPN, FTP honeypot, SSH honeypot — kind of all the honeypots. I went with a vulnerable WordPress instance. My one complaint: you can only assign one profile per sensor. My dream scenario of an SSH honeypot AND an FTP AND a vulnerable Tomcat all on one box will have to wait (or maybe that'd look too suspicious and scare the baddies off — who knows). The results were wild: Within a couple days I had thousands of connections, several flagged as malicious and tied to known botnets. I could see source IPs, malicious labels, whether they were residential or company or Google, and even download raw packet captures. There's clearly more telemetry to dig into (what people tried to spray into the login portal, etc.) — I meant to go deeper before recording and didn't, so consider this a "to be continued." Why do I care, since I'm not defending some huge infrastructure? Honestly it started as a brain break. But I've been testing a ton of external networks lately and nearly every company site is WordPress — which now powers around 43% of the internet. Running my own WordPress honeypot gives real oomph to those "your out-of-date WordPress is a big deal" conversations, where I can say "I run a WordPress honeypot and here's the aggressive password spraying and plugin/theme enumeration I'm seeing right now." See it, don't just hear it: I show the actual portal, sensor config pages, and more over on 7MinSec.club this week. Why not both, right? It's like that meme. GreyNoise also has a Project Swarm user webinar coming up — check their events page. And to be crystal clear: they are not a sponsor, this is all free, and I just think it's clever. Life update (the tangent portion): About the time you hear this, I'll be on my way to my dad's funeral, where I'm sharing some words and singing a song. I've been practicing like a madman per advice from my music director friend and guitar teacher — including a little brain hack of focusing hard on my fingers to stay a half-step removed from the emotion. And if I cry my face off up there? Who cares. This isn't America's Got Talent; it's the gesture. I'll be honest, 2026 has been a rough one, but I promised two bright spots and here they are: my son Cam (about to finish paramedic school) has been keeping grandpa's spirit alive by wearing my dad's shirts, sunglasses, and Apple watch, and getting a Cessna tattoo with my dad's actual handwriting and birth year. And you all — the kind words, the offers to talk, the shared stories — reminded me there are a whole lot of good people out there. Thank you for that. One more thing on the horizon: My brain's been a squirrel on pixie sticks, but for whatever reason I've been happily grinding the CARTP as a little vacation for my mind. I might take a swing at the exam this week — start it in the evening, grind a few hours, sleep, finish in the morning (I'm too old for 24 hours straight). I might pass, I might fail spectacularly. Either way I'll keep you posted, and if I get the cert, that's probably next week's topic!

This episode covers a hacker's claim of stealing 35GB from Accenture—including source code, Azure personal access tokens, RSA keys, and SSH keys—while Accenture calls it an isolated, remediated matter, leaving uncertainty about potential downstream risk to its Fortune 500-heavy client base.   It also highlights a deepfake image of Senator Mitch McConnell debunked after Google's invisible SynthID watermark identified it as AI-generated, noting watermarking depends on tool participation.   The show warns of an undocumented Tenda router firmware backdoor using an alternate password ("RZadmin") with no patch available, and reports Ubiquiti fixes for seven critical UniFi OS vulnerabilities, including a max-severity command injection in UniFi Connect.   Finally, it describes how Venture Employer Solutions used ML/LLMs to filter low-value logs before SIEM ingestion, cutting firewall log volume 83%, saving about $250K annually, and halving mean time to response.   00:00 Sponsor NordLayer 00:37 Headlines Intro 01:08 Accenture Breach Claim 04:25 Deepfake Watermark Win 05:47 Tenda Router Backdoor 07:22 UniFi Critical Fixes 09:10 AI Cuts Log Noise 11:09 Wrap Up And Thanks 11:41 Sponsor Message

In this episode, we continue our exploration of vibe coding, this time we build a prompt for installing Digital Rebar. We test and refine the prompt across multiple runs, focusing on readiness checks, firewall ports, SSH keys, license file handling, and keeping the model within the provided instructions.We also look at where the install keeps failing, including NAT gateway setup, DNS configuration, key selection, and bootstrap completion, and use those failures to make the instructions more explicit. Finally, we discuss using prompts as install instructions for an agent system and how the same approach could apply to other complex setups like as OpenShift. Transcript: https://otter.ai/u/usI73DAlEbWw-3ukeN-wpYSobng?utm_source=copy_url

Si alguna vez habías pensado que en el mundo de los emuladores de terminal ya estaba todo inventado y que no había margen para la sorpresa, déjame decirte que estás muy equivocado. Yo también lo pensaba, de verdad. Pero la innovación no descansa y en este episodio te voy a presentar una propuesta que cambia por completo las reglas del juego.En mi búsqueda constante de la herramienta ideal para mi día a día, he pasado por Alacritty, por WezTerm, por mi queridísima Kitty y, recientemente, estuve dándole una oportunidad de oro a Ghostty. Sin embargo, me topé con un pequeño pero molesto inconveniente con la escritura de acentos que me obligó a volver a los brazos de Kitty. Pero como soy incapaz de resistirme a probar cualquier terminal nueva que caiga en mis manos, hoy quiero hablarte a fondo de Wave. ¿Es una terminal? ¿Es un navegador? ¿Es un entorno de desarrollo? Te lo adelanto ya: es todo eso a la vez y estructurado de una manera que te va a volar la cabeza.Un nuevo paradigma: El espacio de trabajo por bloquesWave no es una terminal corriente como las que estás acostumbrado a usar. En el episodio de hoy te detallo cuáles son los cinco bloques fundamentales que incluye de serie y cómo cambian por completo la forma en que nos enfrentamos a la línea de comandos:Bloques de TerminalBloques de Visor de ArchivosBloques WebBloques de EditorBloques de Inteligencia ArtificialLa magia de los Layouts y los espacios de trabajoOtro de los grandes aciertos de Wave es la posibilidad de guardar y gestionar tus disposiciones de pantalla o "Layouts". SSH Durable: Conexiones indestructibles para administradoresSi trabajas habitualmente con servidores remotos, este superpoder te va a encantar. Las conexiones SSH convencionales son muy sensibles: si cambias de la red Wi-Fi de tu casa a los datos móviles, si se produce un microcorte o si simplemente cierras la tapa de tu portátil para cambiar de sitio, la conexión muere y pierdes todo lo que estabas haciendo.Inteligencia Artificial local para máxima privacidadLa IA también está integrada de forma nativa en este entorno. Lo realmente interesante es que Wave te permite configurar tanto servicios en la nube (OpenAI, Anthropic) como modelos de lenguaje locales (por ejemplo, usando Llama). ¿Y por qué me sigo quedando con Kitty?Al final del episodio abordo este dilema. Aunque Wave me parece una de las propuestas más originales, potentes y visuales de los últimos años, sigo prefiriendo la ligereza de Kitty combinada con gestores de terminal rápidos como Yazi. Capítulos del episodio:00:00:00 El dilema de las terminales: de Kitty a Ghostty y Wave00:02:11 ¿Qué es Wave? ¿Hacía falta otra terminal Open Source?00:03:41 El concepto revolucionario de los bloques00:06:07 Los 5 tipos de bloques: terminal, visor, web, editor e IA00:08:43 Cómo moverte entre bloques como un profesional00:09:43 Creando tus propios espacios de trabajo (Layouts)00:13:20 Renderizado gráfico y el explorador de archivos integrado00:16:30 Inteligencia Artificial nativa y modelos locales00:18:00 Extendiendo la terminal con TypeScript y React00:20:47 SSH durable: conexiones indestructibles que sobreviven a todo00:22:13 Gestor de conexiones y contraseñas seguro00:23:11 Trucos rápidos y por qué me sigo quedando con Kitty00:25:24 Despedida y dónde encontrarnos para seguir cacharreandoMás información y enlaces en las notas del episodio

In this podcast, Series 4, Chapter 9, Dr. Barsuk interviews Dr. Matthew Charnetski. Matt is the Director of Simulation-Based Education and Research at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH.  Matt is also a term lecturer in the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions Masters in Health Professions Education Program in the Simulation Operations Track. He clinically is a paramedic but recently received a PhD in Health Professions Education at Maastricht University. He is the president-elect for the Society for Simulation in Healthcare (SSH). Drs. Barsuk and Charnetski talk about his plans for SSH.

CVE-2024-40766: The Patch Fixed the Bug. Nobody Fixed the Configuration. https://isc.sans.edu/diary/CVE-2024-40766%3A%20The%20Patch%20Fixed%20the%20Bug.%20Nobody%20Fixed%20the%20Configuration./33094 libssh2 - Out-of-Bounds Write via Unchecked packet_length in transport.c https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/libssh2-out-of-bounds-write-via-unchecked-packet-length-in-transport-c PixelSmash Critical FFmpeg Vulnerability Turns Media Files into Weapons https://jfrog.com/blog/pixelsmash-critical-ffmpeg-vulnerability-turns-media-files-into-weapons/ My Upcoming Classes https://www.sans.org/profiles/dr-johannes-ullrich

Topics covered in this episode: Backup Docker volumes locally or to any S3 Pyodide 314.0 Release nb-cli: A Command-Line Interface for AI Agents and Notebook Automation Hindsight Agent Memory That Learns Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python AWS Community Day Midwest tomorrow Wednesday the 24th in downtown Indianapolis, Six Feet Up is sponsoring and there are 2 Sixies presenting Connect with the hosts Michael: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn Calvin: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn Show: Mastodon / BlueSky / X Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesday at 7am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an bonus digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Michael #1: Backup Docker volumes locally or to any S3 Via Bryan Weber (thanks Bryan!), who spotted it over on Virtualization HowTo. Find Bryan at bryanwweber.com. offen/docker-volume-backup is a lightweight companion container that backs up the volumes your apps actually depend on, then ships them somewhere safe. It's tiny: written in Go and about 25MB compressed, roughly 1/20th the size of the shell-based image (jareware/docker-volume-backup) that inspired it. Drop it into your docker compose file as a backup service, mount the volumes you care about as read-only, and you're off. Push backups to a pile of destinations: a local directory, plus any S3, WebDAV, Azure Blob Storage, Dropbox, Google Drive, or SSH-compatible target. Mix and match as many as you want in one run. Recurring cron-style backups in a Compose setup, or one-off backups straight from the Docker CLI. Production-friendly touches worth calling out: Rotates away old backups so you don't quietly fill the disk. GPG encryption for your archives. Notifications on finished and failed runs (so you find out about failures before you need the backup). Stop a container during backup for a consistent snapshot using a simple docker-volume-backup.stop-during-backup=true label, then auto-restart it. Run custom commands during the backup lifecycle (great for a database dump before the file copy). Docker Swarm support, plus arm64 and arm/v7 builds. Hello, Raspberry Pi homelab. Fun aside from Bryan: he searched our back catalog for this tool and the search came back so fast he thought it hadn't run. Love to hear it. Calvin #2: Pyodide 314.0 Release PEP 783 is the real news — Pyodide maintainers used to hand-build 300+ packages. Now anyone can publish Pyodide wheels to PyPI with cibuildwheel. The version jump from 0.29 to 314.0 is intentional — it now tracks the Python version, so 314.x = Python 3.14. Binary compatibility is locked per Python cycle, meaning packages you build today won't break on the next Pyodide release. sqlite3, ssl, and lzma are back in the default stdlib — no more await pyodide.loadPackage("sqlite3"). Bigger download, but a much smoother experience for newcomers. bigint precision bug is fixed — values above 2^53 were silently losing precision when crossing the Python/JS boundary. The new JsBigInt type makes the roundtrip correct. Worth flagging if anyone is doing numeric work in a browser app. Experimental TCP sockets in Node.js — you can now connect Pyodide to a real database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis tested) when running server-side. Blurs the line between "Python in the browser" and "Python runtime anywhere Wasm runs." Michael #3: nb-cli: A Command-Line Interface for AI Agents and Notebook Automation From Piyush Jain (Jupyter and LangChain maintainer) on the Jupyter blog: nb-cli: A Command-Line Interface for AI Agents and Notebook Automation. nb-cli is an experimental, Rust-based CLI to read, write, execute, and search Jupyter notebooks. The premise: agents are great at CLIs but terrible at hand-editing the nested JSON in an .ipynb, so let them operate on the notebook from the outside instead of running inside it. Works with or without a Jupyter server. No server? It reads/writes .ipynb files directly and talks to kernels over ZeroMQ. Connected to a live JupyterLab, your edits show up instantly via Y.js (the same CRDT Jupyter uses). Smart output format: instead of token-heavy JSON or ambiguous plain markdown, it uses @@cell / @@output sentinels with inline metadata. Less wasted context, unambiguous structure, and it degrades gracefully on truncation. The payoff is composability. "Add a summary section and run it" becomes one shell pipeline instead of six agent tool calls. And nb search notebook.ipynb --with-errors returns only the failing cells, so the agent skips the cells that worked. Claude Code tie-in: it ships as an agent skill. npx skills install jupyter-ai-contrib/nb-cli and your agent can drive notebooks via nb. Out of jupyter-ai-contrib, which aims to become an official Jupyter AI subproject. Still early (crates.io is at v0.0.5), so kick the tires before anything load-bearing. See also marimo-pair. Calvin #4: Hindsight Agent Memory That Learns AI agents forget everything between sessions — Hindsight gives them persistent memory that learns over time Simple three-method API: retain(), recall(), reflect() — store, retrieve, and reason over memories TEMPR retrieval runs semantic, keyword, graph, and temporal search in parallel for accurate results Automatically consolidates related facts into durable observations instead of piling up duplicates pip install hindsight-all runs the entire server in-process; integrates with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Pydantic AI, CrewAI, and more Extras Calvin: Clanker: A Word For The Machine **Ponytail — You know him. Long ponytail. Oval glasses. Has been at the company longer than the version control** **Klangk: Multi-User AI Sandboxing, Collaboration and Coding Platform** Cursor announces Origin performative-ui to quick start your new idea Michael: Astral Joins OpenAI: The Interview SpaceX to acquire Cursor And OpenAI renews Open Source support Portuguese subtitles are now available for Talk Python courses DSF is hiring including Six Feet Up support Joke: Oh Babe…

In this milestone 10-year anniversary episode of North Meets South, Michael and Jake reflect on a decade of podcasting, from their first awkward recordings and early Laravel community connections to the friendships, conferences, and recurring topics that have shaped the show over nearly 200 episodes. A large part of the episode focuses on Michael's work-in-progress event ticketing platform inspired by the challenges of running Laracon AU. He explains the limitations of existing conference ticketing systems, the difficulties of collecting attendee information for multiple conference-adjacent events, and his vision for a more attendee-centric system that manages profiles, dietary requirements, event registrations, and conference networks across multiple Laravel events. To wrap up, Michael and Jake discuss giving developers direct database access, the security implications of SSH access, database permissions, and Laravel filesystem configuration, including why enabling exception throwing for filesystem operations can help avoid silent failures.Show linksLaracon AULaracon US TicketTailor Transistor Laravel News PodcastNo Plans to Merge Notes on WorkTalking BusinesslyLarabelles LaraProm WalletWalletLaravel filesystem throw on fail

Topics covered in this episode: pi + superpowers Terminal: Warp.dev + OhMyZSH {Blink,kitty} + mosh + tmux Claude code MacWhisper or Handy Tailscale Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python Training Six Feet Up is hosting a LinkedIn Live Connect with the hosts Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky) Calvin: @calvinhp@sixfeetup.social / @calvinhp.com (bsky) Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesday at 7am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Calvin #1: pi + superpowers terminal-first, open-source coding agent Session management is a first-class citizen Extension model is what makes pi special — it's aggressively composable Superpowers brings a structured software development methodology as loadable skills Steps back and asks you what you're really trying to do “hand you the keys to the car” mode vs guardrails might not be for everyone Michael #2: Terminal: Warp.dev + OhMyZSH If you're using the base terminal with default settings, you have so much head-room for improvement. I've been using Warp.dev since Elvis talked me into it. ;) Remarkable terminal but the AI side of things is a bit junky, can be turned off OhMyZSH gives better autocomplete e.g. git branch [HTML_REMOVED] lists all branches in the local repo! Commandbookapp.com is excellent to keep the terminal focused on terminal things and more server commands and other automation in Command Book. Calvin #3: {Blink,kitty} + mosh + tmux Kitty Terminal — GPU-accelerated terminal emulator for macOS, Linux, and Windows with support for graphics, ligatures, and a powerful tiling layout system built right in. Blink Shell — The go-to terminal for iPad/iPhone power users; full SSH and Mosh client with a gorgeous interface built specifically for mobile professional workflows. Mosh — Mobile Shell replaces SSH for remote connections, surviving network switches, sleep cycles, and flaky Wi-Fi with zero dropped sessions — essential for staying connected to long-running agentic jobs. tmux — Terminal multiplexer that keeps sessions alive on your Linux server indefinitely; detach from a Mosh session on your Mac, reconnect from your iPad, and your agent is right where you left it. The combo — Kitty or Blink + Mosh + tmux creates a "persistent remote brain" pattern: your beefy Linux homelab runs the compute-heavy agent sessions 24/7, and any device becomes a thin client to drop in and out at will. Michael #4: Claude code I prefer the IDE experience, the new PyCharm + Claude integration is really good. VS Code too. Why IDE? Because we should still be present with our code and managing context is much easier. Use the best/latest models on high thinking. “Speed” is not your friend, it's just shortcuts. Create skills and agents and use them. Curate your own rules (e.g. Talk Python's Claude.md) Works well on non-coding things. Just create a folder, put a ton of files in there and it's like NotebookLM + Chat + more. Calvin #5: MacWhisper or Handy Transcribes your speech using your choice of Whisper or Parakeet models. All transcription is done on your device, no data leaves your machine. Automatic Speaker Recognition with local models. Handy is more basic, but open source and runs on all platforms. Michael #6: Tailscale No need to open ports at all, Tailscale makes machines inside the same network accessible to each other Works great for laptops, desktops, etc. But also available for servers. Though I still use cloud firewalls for servers. How I use it: My dev database server, preloaded with QA data, is always running on my home mac mini m4 pro. All my apps look for that server before looking locally and tailscale makes them always accessible to each other My local LLMs expose OpenAI API compatible APIs. Tailscale makes these accessible even while traveling or at a coffee shop. Use my mini as an exit node. All traffic is routed outbound from my local fiber network. Great to restricted IPs like accessing my servers without caring about the local IP. Screen share back to my home machines even while traveling. Listen to the Talk Python episode with Alex for a deeper conversation. Extras Calvin: Telescopo great Mac Markdown viewer/editor. Michael: One more: Typora markdown editor. Created formal documentation for many of my open source packages using Great Docs. Via Mark Little: Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Joke: No second date

Show Notes - https://forum.closednetwork.io/t/episode-58-the-price-of-being-watched/198Website / Donations / Support - https://closednetwork.io/support/BTC Lightning Donations - closednetwork@getalby.com / simon@primal.netThank You Patreons & Direct Supporters! - https://www.patreon.com/closednetworkhttps://xmrchat.com/closednetworkDirect Support - https://closednetwork.ioSubscribe Without Patreon - https://closednetwork.io/#/portal/signupMichael Bates - Privacy Bad AssDavid - Privacy Bad AssTK - Privacy Bad AssTrying - Privacy Bad AssVO - Privacy Bad AssMrMilkMustache - Privacy SupporterHutch - Privacy AdvocateInferno_Potato Privacy SupporterDolores Y - Privacy SupporterDirect Support - Craig D Thank You Producers! You Produce This Show!TOP LIGHTNING BOOSTERS !!!! THANK YOU !!!@bon thousands and thousands and thousands of SATs sats!!@fireflygow - 5,000 sats!!frigolay - 34,540 SATs.. HOLY SHITEwardemoff - 5,000 SATsSilas ThornbrookThank You To Our Moderators:Unintelligentseven - Follow on NOSTR primal.net/p/npub15rp9gyw346fmcxgdlgp2y9a2xua9ujdk9nzumflshkwjsc7wepwqnh354dMaddestMax - Follow on NOSTR primal.net/p/npub133yzwsqfgvsuxd4clvkgupshzhjn52v837dlud6gjk4tu2c7grqq3sxavtJoin Our CommunityClosed Network Forum - https://forum.closednetwork.ioJoin Our Matrix Channels!Main - https://matrix.to/#/#closedntwrk:matrix.orgOff Topic - https://matrix.to/#/#closednetworkofftopic:matrix.orgSimpleX Group Chat - https://smp9.simplex.im/g#SRBJK7JhuMWa1jgxfmnOfHz7Bl5KjnKUFL5zy-Jn-j0Join Our Mastodon server!https://closednetwork.socialFollow Simon On The SocialsMastodon - https://closednetwork.social/@simonNOSTR - Public Address - npub186l3994gark0fhknh9zp27q38wv3uy042appcpx93cack5q2n03qte2lu2 - primal.net/simonTwitter / X - @ClosedNtwrkInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/closednetworkpodcast/YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@closednetworkEmail - simon@closednetwork.ioSpecial Thanks to - EloquentWinter for creating - A Linux guide on MAC address randomizationhttps://forum.closednetwork.io/t/a-linux-guide-on-mac-address-randomization/189TOPICSEncourage curiosity - This week ties together a single thread: someone else holds your data, and therefore holds the power. From algorithmic pricing to supply-chain malware to government scanning to cloud-AI assistants — and the hopeful counter-move, taking your data back. The episode theme is curiosity: in every story, one extra question would have changed the outcome.Segment 1 — Surveillance PricingInspired by More Perfect Union, "We Found the Radical Solution to Surveillance Pricing"Surveillance pricing (a.k.a. personalized / surveillance-based pricing) = charging you an individual price based on sensitive data about you — purchase history, browsing, geolocation, social activity, even biometric and financial signals. The economic endgame is "perfect price discrimination": charging each person their exact maximum.DoorDash holds a patent describing promotions based on a user's stress level.Delta Air Lines (with AI firm Fetcherr) has talked about expanding generative-AI pricing to ~20% of domestic fares, with ambitions to go further. Senators (Gallego, Blumenthal, Warner) and House members demanded answers.A Groundwork Collaborative / Consumer Reports / More Perfect Union study found different shoppers charged different prices for identical Instacart items. Former FTC chair Lina Khan has voiced concern.The "radical" fix is a law: New York's proposed One Fair Price Act would ban surveillance pricing outright — one posted price for everyone.Defensive moves (partial): private/container browsing, block cookies, disable ad personalization, use a VPN, compare logged-out vs. logged-in prices. Honest caveat: this is a structural problem — regulation, not browser tricks, is the real fix.Curious question: Is this price the market — or is it me being read?Segment 2 — "Arch malware btw": the AUR supply-chain attackInspired by Michael Tunnell and Switched to Linux — developing story, June 2026.The Arch User Repository (AUR) is community-maintained, unvetted package build scripts (PKGBUILDs). In a ~24-hour window, a coordinated attack poisoned a large number of packages — reports cite 1,500+ touched, with community trackers confirming ~400–500 malicious package names and rising.How: Attackers adopted orphaned packages (abandoned by maintainers — anyone can claim them) and edited the PKGBUILD to add a pre/post-install hook that pulls a malicious npm package, atomic-lockfile (Sonatype tracked one strand as the "Atomic Arch" campaign).Payload: A Linux infostealer + optional root-only eBPF rootkit. Targets developer secrets — browser creds/cookies, SSH keys, GitHub creds, Vault/npm tokens, Docker/Podman, VPN configs, shell history, Slack/Teams/Discord/Telegram, crypto wallets. eBPF lets it run in-kernel and hide processes/files/connections.If you were hit and the rootkit deployed: rotate every credential (from a clean machine) and reinstall from scratch. A normal uninstall is not enough.Status: Maintainers are removing malicious commits and banning accounts; the official repos of Arch-based distros (CachyOS, Garuda, Chaotic-AUR) were not infected — only users who installed/upgraded a compromised AUR package during the window. Community checker script + affected-package list were published within hours.Action checklist (Arch users):pacman -Qm → list your foreign (AUR) packages.Compare against the community list / run the checker script (CachyOS advisory).If matched → rotate credentials from a clean machine, then clean-reinstall.Curious habit: Before installing, ask who maintains this, when did it last legitimately update, and did ownership recently change? On the AUR, read the PKGBUILD — the malicious line was visible to anyone who looked.Segment 3 — UK Device Scanning: 90 Days to ComplyInspired by "Signal's Warning: The UK's Phone Scanning Plan Just Got Real"The UK government signaled that phone makers (Apple, Google) will get ~90 days to start scanning photos on young people's devices for nude images. Running alongside: Online Safety Act powers for Ofcom aimed at encrypted messaging (key report expected ~April). The mechanism: client-side scanning — every message/image checked on your device, before encryption.Why it matters: Client-side scanning doesn't break encryption directly — it inspects content before the lock clicks shut. The "end-to-end encrypted" label survives, but the privacy guarantee (nobody is looking) is gone.Signal's position: scanning won't protect children and builds surveillance infrastructure that "endangers us all."Security: once scanning exists on every device, the match-database can be expanded — swap it and you're scanning for slogans, documents, faces. Signal would withdraw from the UK rather than build a backdoor. Mullvad raised parallel alarms.Misdiagnosis: real child safety = better-funded education, social services, AI-platform guardrails — not default scanning. Rallying phrase: "Surveillance is not safety."Bigger picture: This is a template (cf. the EU's "Chat Control"). Sympathetic justification + a mechanism that, once built, can point anywhere.Curious question: Not is the goal good? (it usually is) but what else can this machine do once built, and who decides what it points at next?Segment 4 — iOS 27 at WWDC: the Privacy Fine PrintApple WWDC 2026 keynote coverage.Genuine wins: New Siri AI (next-gen Apple Intelligence) uses a tiered architecture — simple requests on-device, moderate ones via Private Cloud Compute (inspectable, hardened). Plus stronger family safety: child-account setup, parental controls, redesigned Screen Time, new Safari safeguards.The fine print (two concerns):Total context access. Siri AI indexes across your messages, emails, photos, and apps — a unified, queryable view of your whole digital life. Conversation history syncs via iCloud ("with privacy protections"), but strength depends on whether you've enabled Advanced Data Protection (Apple's E2EE for iCloud — not on by default).New Google dependency. Apple made official a Gemini partnership — the heaviest reasoning routes to Google Cloud. Apple says queries are anonymized and tokenized so neither Apple nor Google can link them to you (Federighi: "privacy in AI is non-negotiable"). Critics counter that PCC/anonymization is "only as private as the weakest link" — if Google retains any path to usage data for training/debugging, the guarantee weakens.Takeaway: Apple's defaults are still among the best of the mainstream — but don't let "privacy" in a keynote switch off your curiosity. On update: review Siri AI indexing settings, turn on Advanced Data Protection, and understand where your hardest queries travel.Curious question: A magical assistant that knows everything about you is, by definition, a system granted everything about you. Did you make that trade on purpose?Segment 5 — Self-Hosting 101: What to Migrate FirstOriginal recurring segment — Part 1 (scope). Part 2 next week: hands-on photos build.Self-hosting = run the services yourself, on hardware you own, instead of renting space on a company's servers. It's the deliberate counter-move to every other story this week. Honest caveat: you become your own IT department (backups, updates, downtime). Don't eat the elephant at once — scope first.The five candidates (ranked by impact-to-effort):Photos — highest emotional and surveillance value (faces, locations, timestamps). Self-host with Immich (Google-Photos-like: app, auto camera-roll backup, face/object search). Difficulty: moderate; biggest single win.Calendar — a forward-looking map of your life. CalDAV via Radicale or Nextcloud; syncs to your existing calendar app. Easy–moderate; great first project.Contacts — your social graph (everyone else's data too). CardDAV on the same Radicale/Nextcloud server — bundle it with calendar. Easy.File backups — documents and digital paperwork. Often Nextcloud.

Si has estado escuchando los últimos capítulos, te habrás dado cuenta de que he estado sumergido de lleno en el fascinante (y a veces abrumador) mundo de la Inteligencia Artificial. De vez en cuando mi mente me pide a gritos un descanso. Y para mí, descansar significa volver a los orígenes: ponerme a cacharrear con la terminal y escribir código en Rust.En el episodio de hoy quiero cambiar completamente de tercio. Te voy a contar mi experiencia de las últimas semanas saliendo de mi zona de confort con un editor de texto modal que me tiene maravillado en los servidores, y te presentaré cuatro herramientas que he desarrollado en Rust para solucionar pequeños problemas del día a día directamente en la consola de comandos. Así que, ponte cómodo mientras cocinas, vas de camino al trabajo o das un paseo, ¡porque nos vamos directos al turrón!El gran dilema de la terminal: ¿Por qué uso Helix en mis servidores si soy fiel a NeoVim?Los que me seguís desde hace tiempo sabéis que mi editor de cabecera en mi equipo de trabajo habitual es NeoVim. Llevo muchísimos años puliendo mi configuración y, a día de hoy, tengo más de cien plugins instalados que hacen que mi entorno sea espectacular: autocompletado instantáneo, una barra de estado genial, un explorador lateral de archivos y un sistema de análisis de código brutal. Pero, ¿qué pasa cuando me conecto por SSH a mis servidores de producción? Normalmente, estos servidores corren distribuciones Ubuntu de soporte a largo plazo con paquetes más antiguos, por lo que mi configuración de NeoVim moderna empieza a fallar estrepitosamente.Instalar y mantener más de cien plugins en cada uno de los servidores que gestiono es un dolor de cabeza inmanejable. Para solucionar esto sin renunciar a la agilidad de un editor modal en terminal, decidí darle una oportunidad a Helix.Peleándome con la memoria muscularTengo que confesarte que adaptarme a Helix ha sido un ejercicio duro para mis dedos. Cuando llevas años interiorizando los comandos de Vim, tu cerebro automatiza la edición. Mis herramientas caseras desarrolladas en RustAquí te hablo de ellas en detalle:1. mkdr (Markdown Reader/Render): Como todos mis artículos de atareao.es y mis notas personales están guardados en formato Markdown, necesitaba un renderizador potente para leerlos cómodamente desde la consola de comandos. 2. id3cli: Automatizar los metadatos de los episodios de este podcast es crucial para mí. 3. rustled: Para que mi asistente de inteligencia artificial, Cloe, pudiera comunicarse conmigo por voz, necesitaba una herramienta de texto a voz (Text-to-Speech) flexible4. ssrs: Si en algún momento no dispongo de conexión a internet o prefiero que los textos se procesen con absoluta privacidad, recurro a susurros.00:00:00 Introducción y un descanso de la Inteligencia Artificial00:00:56 ¿Qué es Helix y por qué me costó al principio?00:02:27 El problema de llevar NeoVim (y sus plugins) a los servidores00:06:23 Primeros pasos con Helix: el tutor y las diferencias con Vim00:09:34 Pantalla dividida, multicursor y velocidad extrema00:10:54 Temas, resaltado de sintaxis de serie y comandos00:15:12 Mis propias herramientas: renderizar Markdown en terminal con mkdr00:18:40 Navegación estilo Wiki y otras ventajas de mkdr00:20:18 id3click: gestionando etiquetas MP3 sin depender de terceros00:21:52 Dándole voz a Cloe: raslet y la API de Microsoft Edge TTS00:24:35 susurros: generación de voz 100% en local con Rust00:26:55 El futuro: ssrs (Whisper en Rust) y conclusiones00:28:35 Recomendación de podcast: Legalmente Productivos y despedidaMás información y enlaces en las notas del episodio

In this episode, we sit down with Agent P to unpack his open-source project GridPool, a radically simple approach to decentralizing Bitcoin mining payouts. We trace his journey from early concerns about mining centralization during the China ban to reverse‑engineering Ocean's Datum client to build a compatible, open server—enabling client-side block template construction without relying on a centralized payout custodian. Agent P walks us through GridPool's on-deck and winners lists, how difficulty-ordered but evenly split payout slots remove the need for a latency-prone share chain, and why this design can serve both medium-size miners seeking lower variance and small “lottery” miners. We also discuss compatibility with Hydrapool, potential Stratum V2 and CKPool integrations, bootstrapping a decentralized node network, and how GridPool preserves censorship resistance by only sharing minimal data necessary for verification. We close with a fascinating detour into vibe coding: Agent P details using AI agents to port open-source firmware onto closed miners—compiling and live-loading Mujina onto an S19 XP via SSH with minimal manual intervention—illustrating how AI lowers the barrier for anyone to contribute to open-source mining tools. If you're passionate about censorship resistance, decentralized pool payouts, and hands-on experimentation, this is a must-listen. Resources: gridpool.net • Hydropool and P2Pool v2 repos (community forks) • February Forum thread on firmware tips for Antminers • Testnet4 participation for GridPool bootstrapping

Scott and Wes sit down with Ben Vinegar, former Syntax GM and founder of Modem.dev, to geek out over terminal-maxxing, from SSH-based development and tmux workflows to AI-powered coding agents. Ben also demos two of his open source tools: Hunk, a slick terminal code reviewer with 4k+ GitHub stars, and TermDraw, a terminal-based diagramming tool that posts directly to your agent. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:49 Introduction to Modem and AI Project Management 01:40 Exploring Terminal Usage and Productivity 04:26 Setting Up Remote Development Environments 08:38 The Power of TMUX in Development 11:20 What makes TMUX splitting different? 12:46 Integrating AI with Terminal Workflows 14:56 The Future of Terminal Applications 17:31 Balancing GUIs and Terminal Interfaces getfresh.dev Ben's talk at AI Engineer Miami 24:39 Navigating Development Tools and Environments 26:44 The Balance of Security and Convenience in Coding 30:27 Cautionary Tales: The Risks of YOLO Mode 33:53 Innovative Tools for Enhanced Coding Experience 34:09 Hunk: Terminal code review. 41:39 TermDraw: A New Way to Visualize Code and Ideas 46:22 The Dynamics of Open Source Contributions 48:31 Visualizing Code: Tools and Techniques 50:54 Podcasting and Editing Processes State of Agentic Coding. Podguy: Agent-driven post-production workflow for video podcasts 56:23 Introducing Modem: A Product Intelligence Platform 01:01:39 Connecting Feedback to Product Development 01:03:15 Sick Picks Sick Picks Ben: Nirvanna: The Band - The Show - The Movie, Timecrimes Shameless Plugs Ben: https://modem.dev/ Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

In this episode, I take you through how I set up a Cardano node at home using a low-cost HP Elite mini PC, why I decided to do it this way, and how I'm thinking about turning it into a machine that can help pay for itself over time.The main goal here was to reduce the cost of running relay infrastructure for my Cardano stake pool, but in doing that, I can also use this node for other things, too, like a private submit API and other services that may earn rewards over time.I walk through the full setup flow I followed, including installing Ubuntu, enabling SSH access, hardening the server using the CoinCashew guide, deploying the Cardano node with Guild Operators, setting it up as a background service, using Mithril snapshots to speed up sync, and checking everything with gLiveView.If you've been thinking about running your own home relay, or you want to understand how a low-cost machine can fit into a wider Cardano infrastructure setup, this one will help.Tutorials and references used in this setup:CoinCashew Cardano stake pool guideCoinCashew Ubuntu hardening guideCoinCashew topology guideGuild Operators node setup guideTimestamps0:00 Why I bought this mini PC1:02 Turning it into a profitable machine2:08 Reducing relay costs for my stake pool3:24 Whats a Cardano submit API does5:10 Other services this node can run6:22 Installing Ubuntu on the HP Elite mini PC8:40 Switching Ubuntu to command-line boot10:12 Enabling SSH and remote access12:08 CoinCashew server hardening guide13:35 Setting up SSH keys properly15:22 Configuring SSH and changing the port17:48 System updates and fail2ban19:42 UFW firewall rules and opening port 600021:18 Chrony time sync setup22:44 Guild Operators install and dependencies26:10 Choosing binaries and Mithril tools28:34 Deploying the node as a systemd service30:12 Setting CPU cores and installing htop31:40 Configuring gLiveView and mempool tracing33:26 Mithril snapshot setup35:14 Downloading the Cardano DB snapshot37:08 Starting the node and checking status38:20 Topology configuration and relay peers40:05 Final checks in gLiveView41:22 Final thoughts and next stepsIf you want, I can also turn this into a shorter, tighter Spreaker version with less SEO language and more natural podcast copy.DISCLAIMER: This content is for informational and educational purposes only and is not financial, investment, or legal advice. I am not affiliated with, nor compensated by, the project discussed—no tokens, payments, or incentives received. I do not hold a stake in the project, including private or future allocations. All views are my own, based on public information. Always do your own research and consult a licensed advisor before investing. Crypto investments carry high risk, and past performance is no guarantee of future results. I am not responsible for any decisions you make based on this content.

Jon Westfall and I were joined by frequent guest panelists Frank McPherson, and Sven Johannsen to discuss  the announcements from the recent "Gemini I/O" and Android shows. I kicked off the episode with a real-world tech success story: the Google app on my Pixel devices provided a magnitude and epicenter alert for a 6.0 earthquake in Hawaii that occurred 200 miles away. I felt a relatively mild rumble but thought it was a feral pig bumping the side of my home. Much of our hardware discussion focused on the Google Book, a premium AI-first device running the "Aluminium" (Android-based) OS. We speculated that Google is positioning this to compete with the high-demand MacBook Neo, which is currently so popular that rumors suggest Apple may release a spec-bumped "Neo 2" to address chip shortages and stay ahead of the competition. On the software and AI front, we looked ahead to Android 17 and its new "Rambler" feature for Gboard, which uses AI to filter out "ums" and "ahs" from voice transcriptions. I shared my experience with Gemini Pro's voice cloning, which was "scary good" at mimicking my voice with minimal training, while Frank voiced skepticism about Wear OS 7 replacing tiles with widgets, fearing it's a step backward for round-screen usability. The episode also served as a warning about the dangers of auto-updates; Jon shared how a Ubiquiti router update broke his HomeKit setup—requiring an SSH command to fix—and I recounted a corrupt OneDrive for Mac update that forced me to roll back to its previous version using Time Machine. We wrapped up with a demonstration from Sven, who demonstrated his new Pixel Fold 10's unique feature in Google Meet that allows for a split-view using the front and back cameras simultaneously. This "double-vision" mode allows a caller to show their face while also providing a high-resolution view of their surroundings, which we agreed would be a game-changer for remote tech support or traveling. d there is still plenty of innovation happening in the Android ecosystem.

Microsoft confirms active exploitation of two Defender flaws. Europol dismantles a VPN service tied to ransomware gangs. A nine-year-old Linux kernel bug exposes SSH keys and password hashes. Cisco patches a critical Secure Workload vulnerability, while Drupal fixes a highly critical SQL injection flaw. Android malware quietly signs victims up for premium SMS scams. Webworm upgrades its espionage toolkit with Discord and Microsoft Graph backdoors. Plus, China and Russia deepen cooperation on AI, cybersecurity, and satellite systems. Our guest is Jake Moore, Global Cybersecurity Advisor for ESET, sharing a glimpse into his Infosecurity Europe keynote "The Deepfake Interview." Greg doesn't even work here anymore… Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest Today, Maria Varmazis speaks with Jake Moore, Keynote speaker for the upcoming Infosecurity Europe conference and Global Cybersecurity Advisor for ESET, getting a glimpse into his session "The Deepfake Interview: Breaking In From the Inside." This interview is part of our partnership with Infosecurity Europe.  Selected Reading Microsoft Defender vulnerabilities exploited in the wild (Help Net Security) Europol Seizes First VPN Used by Ransomware Gangs, Arrests Administrator (Hackread) Nine-Year-Old Linux Kernel Flaw Leaks SSH Keys and Password Hashes (Infosecurity Magazine) Cisco Patches Critical Vulnerability in Secure Workload (SecurityWeek) Android Malware Spotted Subscribing Victims to Paid Services Without Consent (Hackread) Drupal Patches Highly Critical Vulnerability Exposing Websites to Hacking (SecurityWeek) Webworm: New burrowing techniques (We Live Security) Xi and Putin pledge closer cooperation on AI, cyberspace and satellite systems (The Record) Zombie user account let hackers control the city's water (The Register) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry's most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

#351: Entry-level tech jobs are down 67% since 2022. Junior developer roles are down 40 to 50%. The instinct is to blame AI and call it unprecedented, but the layoffs are not the new part. The boom-bust cycle has happened before -- dot-com to dot-bomb, the 2020 hiring spree to the 2022 correction, now this. The new part is that the thing replacing the bottom of the ladder is not a cheaper human in another country. It is an agent that takes instruction and ships code overnight. Here is the uncomfortable reframe. A junior developer is told what to do, does not change the architecture, does not make decisions, and produces better work the more detail you give them. Replace the word junior with agent and the description does not change. That is the whole problem. The traditional path from junior to senior assumed five years of grunt work would teach you the things grunt work teaches. The grunt work has a new owner now, and nobody knows what the new on-ramp looks like. Seniors are not safe either. If you have spent 30 years writing pretty code and you have already started rejecting the idea that an agent can do it better, history is not on your side. The same people who refused to embrace cloud and containers are the people who will refuse this -- and the SSH-key-maker on the team that took a week to provision a key is not pivoting to AI either. Two types of employees. The ones you can replace in five minutes and the ones whose departure feels like a loss. Only one type thrives in this cycle. So what actually works? Capacity to learn over experience. Specific knowledge over generic knowledge -- if every developer on the internet can do what you do, the model trained on the internet can too. The job is becoming managing a team of agents the way a manager manages people: figure out what should be done, how, and when, then check on the team and work with individuals. The hiring test that still works after all these years is the one where the candidate switches to the browser and Googles. That is the person who can adapt. That is the person who survives this market.   YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/devopsparadox   Review the podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://www.devopsparadox.com/review-podcast/   Slack: https://www.devopsparadox.com/slack/   Connect with us at: https://www.devopsparadox.com/contact/

Take the 2026 AI Engineering Survey and get >$2k in credits and AIE WF tickets!This was recorded before Railway suffered a major GCP outage on May 19, despite being a multi-AZ, multi-zone mesh ring, with HA fiber interconnects between their Metal GCP AWS, because workload discoverability was unintentionally still tied to GCP. All has been resolved with a post-mortem.Railway did not start as an AI infrastructure company.It was founded in 2020 years before agents became the default way people thought about deploying software. Jake Cooper, formerly at Bloomberg and Uber, started Railway with a simple obsession: the activation energy to ship something to production should be near zero. Push code, get a URL, iterate. No Docker files, no Kubernetes manifests, no Ansible scripts stacked on Ansible scripts.For years, this was a slow grind. Railway spent its first 18 months hand-acquiring its first 100 users with Jake personally greeting every Discord signup on a second monitor.Today, Railway has raised $124m and is growing very fast. A 35-person team supports 3 million users, adding roughly 100,000 signups a week. Their bare metal data centers have a 3-month payback period vs. renting in the cloud, with 70% margins funding aggressive cloud bursting when needed. The servers they own have actually appreciated in value as RAM prices have climbed basically meaning the value of their hardware now exceeds the capital they've raised.From rebuilding Railway's network overlay over a weekend to moving the vast majority of workloads onto its own bare metal data centers, Jake Cooper is trying to build a new cloud for an agent-native world. In this episode, Railway's founder and “conductor” joins swyx and Alessio to unpack why the next era of software infrastructure is not just “Heroku but newer,” what agents need that humans did not, and why the old deployment loop of Git, PRs, CI/CD, and static cloud resources may be heading for a rewrite.We go deep on Railway's infrastructure stack: own-metal data centers, three-month cloud payback periods, cloud bursting, data center debt, Railpack, Nixpacks, Temporal, feature flags, Central Station, content-addressable filesystems, agent-safe production forks, and why the CLI may become more important than the canvas in an agent world. Jake also shares the founder journey behind Railway, how the company survived losing $500K/month, why it now serves millions of users with only 35 people, and why he believes the pull request is dying.We discuss:* How Railway went from a slow six-year grind to adding 100,000 users a week* How Railway thinks about agents as the next dominant software species* Why agents need version control, observability, compute, storage, and orchestration at 1000x scale* The economics of Railway's own-metal data centers and three-month payback* How Railway uses cloud bursting while scaling its own infrastructure* Why data center debt can be a better tool than venture debt for infra startups* Central Station, Railway's internal system for clustering customer feedback and incidents* Why responsible disclosure and over-communication matter for platforms* Why feature flags, progressive rollouts, and shadow traffic are essential for agents* Temporal's strengths, pain points, and why workflows matter for agents* Railpack, Nixpacks, Nix, and lazy-loaded content-addressable filesystems* Why “cattle, not pets” may change if you can clone the pets* Why Railway is building a new cloud from scratch instead of copying hyperscalers* The solo founder path, focus, writing, and how Jake thinks about company buildingRailway:* Website: https://railway.com/* X: https://x.com/RailwayJake Cooper:* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejakecooper/* X: https://x.com/JustJakeTimestamps00:00:00 Introduction: What Is Railway?00:02:07 Jake's Path to Railway00:06:13 Railway's Six-Year Growth Story00:08:52 Rebuilding the Business After the Free Tier00:11:17 Agents as the Next Software Platform00:13:29 Railway's Infrastructure Philosophy00:15:42 Bare Metal, Cloud Economics, and the Compute Crunch00:17:22 Cloud Bursting and Five-Cloud Networking00:20:20 Data Center Debt and Infra Financing00:23:31 Data Centers in Space00:25:24 What Agents Need From Infrastructure00:28:24 CLIs, Canvas, and Agent-Native UX00:35:15 Central Station, Incidents, and Responsible Disclosure00:40:30 Safe Rollouts, SRE Agents, and Production Forks00:45:00 AI SRE, Specs, Code, and Tests00:48:24 Self-Replicating Infrastructure and the New Serverless00:53:18 Heroku, Temporal, and Workflow Engines01:04:07 Railpack, Nixpacks, and Lazy-Loaded Filesystems01:06:01 Coding Agents, Token Spend, and Roadmap Acceleration01:10:56 The Pull Request Is Dying01:12:28 Feature Flags and the Agent-Era SDLC01:16:15 Cattle, Pets, and Cloning Machines01:19:29 Solo Founder Lessons01:24:12 Focus, GPUs, and Building a New Cloud01:28:20 Closing ThoughtsTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swyx, editor of Latent Space.Swyx [00:00:10]: Hey, hey, hey. Today we're in the studio with Jake Cooper of Railway.Alessio [00:00:14]: Conductor of Railway.Swyx [00:00:15]: Conductor at Railway. Yeah.Alessio [00:00:16]: Choo-choo.Swyx [00:00:17]: Do you actually have that anywhere, like on your business card?Jake [00:00:20]: We call some of our volunteer moderators conductors. I don't have a business card. We're not that big yet. At some point I will. I got handed a nice business card from the Supermicro folks, and I was like, “Damn, this is pretty official.”Swyx [00:00:30]: Business cards are coming back.Jake [00:00:32]: They're cool. They're hip. The conductor thing is good. We're trying to figure out what we want to call each other internally. Some people think it's super cringe and say, “You don't need a name for people internally.” Some people want to call each other something. We still don't have a really good one.Jake [00:00:55]: We've got New Railcrews, Trainiacs. Nothing has stuck yet.Swyx [00:01:00]: I like Trainiac. Trainiac sounds good. Railwayians. For those who don't know, what is Railway? Let's give people a crisp definition up front.Jake [00:01:09]: Railway is the easiest way to ship anything. You go to the canvas, or you talk with Claude, and you say, “Deploy a Postgres instance, deploy my GitHub repository, run this code,” and you're off to the races.Swyx [00:01:22]: You've got a nice animation on the landing page.Jake [00:01:24]: Thank you. None of my work, by the way. They don't let me touch the design stuff anymore.Jake [00:01:25]: We want to make it trivially easy not just to deploy things, but to evolve applications over time. Most tooling right now stacks entropy on top of entropy: Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible scripts, and all these other things. If we can version all of your software and keep track of all the changes, then we can make it trivial to clone environments, fork into a parallel universe, get copies of production data, get copies of any services, make changes, validate them, and collapse them back in without reproducing everything across a staging environment.The Railway Origin Story: From Uber Systems to a New CloudSwyx [00:02:07]: I was looking at your background: Bloomberg, Uber. Nothing immediately stands out as, “This guy is going to found the next great platform as a service.” What prepared you for Railway?Jake [00:02:21]: It was curiosity to keep going deeper. I started out on front-end stuff, working on Wolfram Mathematica and porting it over. Then I briefly moved to Bloomberg, then toward Uber and distributed systems, taking the Jump Bikes systems and moving them to a distributed system built on top of Cadence, the pre-Temporal Temporal.Swyx [00:02:44]: Which, by the way, I'm happy to talk about, pros and cons.Jake [00:02:48]: Totally.Swyx [00:02:51]: But let's do the Railway story.Jake [00:02:52]: It has been a continual step of wanting an experience. Whether it's walking up to a bike, unlocking it, and having it work frictionlessly, or something else, the depth required to make that happen follows from the experience. A lot of the work I do, and a lot of the team does, is in service of that experience. We fundamentally don't care how deep we have to go. We will swim to the bottom of the swimming pool to get the experience.Jake [00:03:17]: I don't have a physics PhD. I did an EECS degree. It has always been about figuring out the next step: how do we get there? That's what led to starting Railway for that experience and then moving all the way to bare metal data centers. I was adding patches to the kernel this week to get the experience there because I can see how much better it can be.Swyx [00:03:49]: Other patches to the Linux kernel this week?Jake [00:03:51]: Yeah. Not upstream. Our fork.Swyx [00:03:52]: That's a flex. Railpack? No, this is different. This is the OS on top of Railpack?Jake [00:03:57]: No, this is an actual kernel patch. It's always literally: what do we have to do to get that experience? Then figure it out. Anything is figureoutable.Swyx [00:04:10]: Would you send the patch upstream, or does it not fit other use cases?Jake [00:04:13]: Maybe. We have to work out the experience internally. It has to do with the storage layer we're building for some of the agentic stuff. Maybe it'll be useful upstream, but it's deeply useful for us internally.Open Source, Forks, and Non-Deterministic VersioningSwyx [00:04:29]: You mentioned open source before. How do you think about starting from open source, and then coding agents letting you do a lot more from forks of it?Jake [00:04:38]: GitHub's original sin is that it's almost a series of broken pointers. You have this thing, then you clone it, and now you've lost the whole upstream. How do we make it trivial for people to modify really small pieces of it?Jake [00:04:51]: We think of Git in a discrete sense: I've either made a change and merged upstream, or I haven't. What would it look like if it were percentage-based, a little more non-deterministic, or a stream of changes that users traverse as a percentage rolled out in general and then rolled all the way up?Jake [00:05:13]: We have the open-source kickback program and let you deploy templates because we want to make it trivial for people to version these shards over time. It solves a large problem around authentication, authorization, and security. NPM has a way to define, “Don't take any new packages.” The ideal end state is that you roll out progressively to users with the minimum impact zone and continue rolling up. JPMorgan should probably be the last one on the patch line, for all our sakes, because our money and livelihoods are there.Jake [00:05:53]: It's okay if Johnny Vibe Coder gets a broken patch because there's so much entropy in the system that the rubber has to meet the road at some point. You have to test at varying levels.The Long Grind: First Users, Free Tier, and Making the Business WorkSwyx [00:06:13]: I wanted to pull up this glorious chart, which is your usage or number of daily signups?Jake [00:06:22]: Daily signups, I think.Swyx [00:06:24]: You started six years ago. It was a slow grind, and now you're on a rocket ship. You say, “Don't doubt your fight and don't quit.” Maybe pick out certain points that were key inflections for the company.Jake [00:06:40]: At the start, it's about getting your first 100 users, hell or high water. We had a website and a support link. The support link was the Discord channel. I had notifications on with two monitors: the monitor I was working on and the other monitor with Discord. If anybody came in, I was immediately like, “Hey, how's it going?” It was rare, so getting those first 100 users to come back was the start.Jake [00:07:14]: Then you build a consultancy factory because users want all these things. You have to go back to the board and ask, “What is the actual product offering I want to build on top of this?”Jake [00:07:28]: VCs want charts that always go up and to the right, but in reality you don't necessarily want charts that look like that. For us, there have been periods of expansion where we add features to test use cases, and periods of compaction where we ask, “If the experience we have is good, how do we make it significantly better?” Maybe we strip out features that don't fit our ICP anymore.Jake [00:07:57]: The boom from 2022 to 2023 came from the free tier. Everybody under the sun was using it.Swyx [00:08:09]: A lot of Reddit bots and Discord bots.Jake [00:08:12]: And crypto miners. When you build an open product on the internet where anybody can sign up, the internet is a horrible place with so many things. You go through periods of asking, “How do I reach as many people as possible?” Then, “How do I fit the exact use case for the people who really matter and are really excited about this specific thing?”Jake [00:08:39]: Then there was a two-year period of making the actual business work. During the free-tier era, we were losing about half a million dollars a month.Swyx [00:08:59]: On a $20 million bank account.Jake [00:09:02]: On a $20 million bank account with maybe $50,000 a month in revenue. That's a horrible business. I don't know how anybody invested. But you have to go through it and say, “We have an experience people love, but the business has to work.”Jake [00:09:17]: There are two schools of thought. You can run the horrible business all the way up with bad margins, or you can go back and make it work. We've always wanted a super lean team. We're 35 people right now. It's very small.Swyx [00:09:36]: Supporting three million already?Jake [00:09:38]: Yeah. We're adding 100,000 users a week right now, so it's growing fast. We don't want to add headcount for the sake of headcount or throw bodies at problems. We want to build systems. It's hard to build systems during expansion because you're adding things to the system because people are asking for them or things are breaking.Jake [00:10:00]: We had to cut off the free users for a little while, rebuild the business, and make sure it worked. We want to reach as many people as possible because software is important. It's become difficult to create things in the physical world, so it's important to make it easy for people to build in the virtual world and have access to creation. But there are legs to that journey.Jake [00:10:30]: You can see divots in the charts. If you follow between 2025 and 2026, it's either summer or winter. People go on holiday with family.Swyx [00:10:50]: It affects that much?Jake [00:10:51]: Yeah. It's kind of B2C and kind of B2B. People are shipping constantly, then they stop. Our activation curve now shows more people activating on weekdays because we have more business users, so it smooths out over time.Agents as the New Interface to DeploymentSwyx [00:11:17]: Was there a point where you started prioritizing AI development or agent development?Jake [00:11:24]: We've prioritized agentic as a top-of-funnel thing. Over the last six months, we've deeply prioritized agentic as a mechanism to build and deploy things because we believe the curve is so steep and that is how people will build and deploy software.Jake [00:11:42]: It almost fundamentally doesn't matter whether this is dot-com or not because we're all on the internet anyway. If agents are going to deploy a bunch of things and we hit an inference wall at some point, we'll fix those problems. The dominant species over the next 10 years is that we've moved from assembly to C to C++ to JavaScript to words. You're going to need to close that loop.Swyx [00:12:13]: When you say this is dot-com, did you mean buying the domain, or the general case?Jake [00:12:17]: I mean the dot-com era, when companies had a huge run-up because people understood the internet was important. Then they hit bottlenecks, fundamental laws of physics, math didn't work, and everybody came back down to earth. But it didn't matter because the internet became so impactful. If you operate on a long enough time horizon, you should build these things anyway because you can see where it's going.Jake [00:12:45]: That's where I think a lot of agent stuff is. You get to a point where you're running thousands of agents in parallel. What is the inference cost? What is the compute cost? How do you make that efficient? How do you coordinate all this? We have issues coordinating humans; we don't even have good tooling for that. Now we have to figure out how to get agents to coordinate, safely version changes, and know when to raise their hand for someone to intervene. Otherwise it becomes an interrupt factory.Railway's Infrastructure Thesis: Network, Compute, Storage, and MetalSwyx [00:13:19]: Let's go right into the technical side. What are the core infrastructure or architectural beliefs of Railway that allow you to do what you do?Jake [00:13:29]: The primitives matter a lot for us. We need network, compute, storage, and orchestration around it. You need control over a lot of those things. We've talked a lot about how we don't really use Kubernetes because we want higher-order control to place workloads in very specific places.Jake [00:13:48]: The reason is that you have to be very efficient with agents: memory reuse and all these other things, or you're going to massively blow up your cost structure. Being able to rack and stack your own servers and build your own metal unlocks performance and cost. Experiences where you're running 1,000 agents in parallel are not massively cost prohibitive.Jake [00:14:13]: Token use and compute use are blowing up. Over time, those things have to get a lot more efficient. You can get a lot of margin to make those experiences solid by building your own metal. That's all in service of offering a differentiated experience to as many people as humanly possible.Swyx [00:14:51]: You have a data center in Singapore.Jake [00:14:53]: Yeah. We have two in every other region now. In Singapore, we're adding a second one in Q3.Swyx [00:14:58]: What's it like? I've never built a data center. Do you go to Equinix and say, “I want some slots?”Jake [00:15:05]: Yeah. Equinix. You basically go and say, “I want power and I want a cage.” They say, “Great, here's what it's going to be.” You rent the cage for a period of time, fill it with racks and servers, and hook up internet to it. That's all the pieces.Swyx [00:15:36]: Then you handle everything else.Jake [00:15:37]: You handle everything else.Swyx [00:15:39]: What's the math versus clouds doing it for you?Jake [00:15:43]: If we rented in the cloud, our payback period when we go to metal is about three months.Swyx [00:15:50]: Which is crazy.Jake [00:15:51]: It's nuts. That's four years of depreciated hardware. You're going to see a lot of this compute crunch because hyperscalers are buying up a lot of stuff. We're working directly with OEMs, resellers, and people building these machines: Supermicro, Dell, and others.Jake [00:16:11]: Upstream, there's a bunch of supply pressure. When we raised our last round, between deploying capital for servers and now, the amount of money we've raised is less than the amount of money we have in the bank plus the value of the servers because the servers have appreciated as RAM has gone up. It's nuts how valuable hardware has become.Jake [00:16:50]: If you look at hyperscalers, they deployed around $80 billion of capital expenditures this year, and next year will be more. That's a massive infrastructure build-out. You look at that and think it's crazy that they're spending way more than the Manhattan Project. But if every person is going to run dozens or hundreds of agents in parallel, you have no conceptual idea how much compute is required to make that experience happen, even if you're deeply efficient and sharing resources. And that doesn't even count inference.Swyx [00:17:22]: How do you plan the build-out? The growth chart is so vertical. Are you usually at 100% utilization as soon as racks are live? How far ahead are you planning?Jake [00:17:33]: We still maintain cloud presence for bursting. We work with AWS, GCP, and a few other clouds. We can rent, and then the moment we get space or power, we compact those workloads off the cloud. We started on the clouds, then built a system to migrate to our own metal. There's nothing that says you can't continually do that again, and that's exactly what we do. We never want to be compute constrained.Jake [00:18:09]: At the start of the year, we actually became compute constrained because one upstream provider wasn't able to give us quota at the rate we needed, and the hardware was slower. I spent a weekend rebuilding our entire network overlay so we could straddle five clouds: Oracle, AWS, ourselves, GCP, and one other one. We can do more than that now.Jake [00:18:38]: We got into a spot where we were trying to pack instances tight because we couldn't get enough compute. That led to a few reliability issues, which are now past us. I made a tweet pointing out that it's becoming harder and harder to acquire compute at the rate these models need to acquire compute. We got bit by it.Swyx [00:19:15]: How do you think about pricing knowing you might not have your own metal available at all times? Are you pricing assuming you need extra margin if you end up going into the cloud?Jake [00:19:26]: Because we've built out our metal data centers, our margins on metal are around 70%. We can deeply subsidize the cloud business if we want to scale at a reasonable rate. We have a few levers: metal, which makes the margins; cloud burst; debt to buy servers; and venture capital. It's an interesting operational problem: how much cash do we have, how much should we raise, how quickly can we deploy it, and can we scale revenue as quickly as we scale compute?Jake [00:20:05]: If we continue making it trivially easy for people to build and deploy, then the faster we close that loop and the more operationally excellent we are with capital, the faster the business can scale. It's almost a straight linear deployment rate.Financing Infrastructure: Hardware Debt, VC, and Operational LeverageSwyx [00:20:20]: I think infra startups raising debt is a tool people don't utilize enough or know enough about. What can you tell us about that? Is it secured against your CPUs?Jake [00:20:32]: It's secured against our hardware.Swyx [00:20:37]: What rates do you get? Who are the lenders?Jake [00:20:39]: We pay prime plus a spread, and we can refinance any of the debt as rates go down. The terms are pretty good. The unfortunate thing is that Twitter has no nuance, so people say, “Venture debt bad.” But as with all things, there are specific tools and areas where you can be deliberate instead of using one tool as a hammer. Venture capital is not the hammer for everything. You have to explore and figure out what works.Swyx [00:21:12]: VC is usually the most expensive financing you can get.Jake [00:21:15]: Yeah. I also think people think about VC incorrectly from a capital-raising perspective. Most people think, “How do I raise as much money as possible from whoever is probably the best I can get at that time?” That's close to right, but what we've tried to do is figure out what unfair advantage we can buy with that equity.Jake [00:21:34]: It's the most expensive equity you're going to give away at that point in time, assuming the company keeps getting better. How do you use it to work with someone stellar who complements you? In the seed stage, I had never started a company. Ray Tonsing had good advice, and I could text him all the time. He was really fast. Awesome.Jake [00:22:01]: Then with John and Erica at Unusual, they said, “You roughly know what you're doing building a product. We'll mostly leave you alone and be available for advice.” Amazing. Then we got to Series A and the business was an operational tire fire because we didn't know how to scale a business. Work with Erica, and Jordan is over at Redpoint, so bonus.Jake [00:22:28]: Now we've raised from TQ and FPV as we're moving into enterprises. Every step of the way, we've asked: who can we partner with at this specific time to unlock the next section of the journey? I don't know enterprise sales. As an engineer, I can eyeball what features we might need, and we have wonderful people internally who can help. But you want boardroom dynamics where everyone is aligned and asking, “How do we win this?” instead of bickering about strategy.Data Centers in Space and the Physics of ComputeSwyx [00:23:31]: You had a tweet about data centers in space. Why no data centers in space?Jake [00:23:37]: It's not “no data centers in space.” My hot take is that I think it is solvable. I've just never seen anybody solve it.Swyx [00:23:49]: You said, “How are you going to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum?” You're making a physics claim.Jake [00:23:55]: I haven't seen anybody prove how you're going to dissipate that much heat in a vacuum. It doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means nobody has brought it up yet.Swyx [00:24:05]: Astrophage.Jake [00:24:06]: I don't know what that is.Swyx [00:24:07]: The Martian thing. Okay, you're very logical.Jake [00:24:09]: It could work. A lot of people are putting the cart before the horse. They say, “We're going to put data centers in space.” Okay, but how? “We have time to figure it out.” It's like in The Martian where they ask how they're going to intercept something and say, “We'll figure it out.”Swyx [00:24:36]: Making a bet on human invention is weird because you blind trust that it can be solved. But with physics, there are first-principles bounds you can put on it. Maybe not. Maybe you're asking to travel time or break a fundamental thermodynamic law.Jake [00:24:57]: I don't know how VCs do this either. How do you know what's not possible and a grift versus what's possible but sounds completely insane? “We're going to put data centers in space.” Coin flip as to which it is, and I guess you'll know in 10 years. That's one cycle.What Agents Need: Versioning, Observability, and 1,000x ScaleSwyx [00:25:23]: Moving back to agents. The branching, fast spin-up, and orchestration you do feels like pre-work that happened to be exactly what agents want. What do agents want differently than humans?Jake [00:25:37]: They want the ability to version things. It's not that different; it materializes slightly differently. Agents want a way to test changes incrementally. Engineers have feature flags. Is there a reason agents can't use feature flags? I don't think so.Jake [00:25:54]: They want version control. Can we use Git or not Git? That one is up in the air. I think something outside Git will emerge for how we version these things over time. They need observability. You need to query what happened, when it happened, which steps failed, traces, logs, metrics, and all the rest. They need network, compute, and storage. They need to write files, save files, iterate on files, and snapshot file systems.Jake [00:26:25]: A lot of what humans needed is in line with what agents need. Branching and forking are not different; we're just moving 1,000 times quicker. It can look like you need something massively different, but what you need is something massively better than what existed. You need orchestration massively better than Kubernetes. You need networking probably better than Envoy. It goes all the way down the stack.Jake [00:26:55]: If the workload profile doesn't change so much as it gets massively compressed because you need thousands of these things, what assumptions change? etcd is going to melt. You need to replace it with something. You can go all the way down the stack and say, “That part has to change, that part has to change, and that part has to change.”Jake [00:27:19]: The interesting thing about the super-exponential curve is that you have to build systems where you can rip out those parts at any time because a new bottleneck might emerge. You get good at parallel agents, and a different part of the system breaks. So it's similar to what humans needed, but at 1,000x scale.Jake [00:27:55]: How do you do code review in the age of agents?Swyx [00:28:00]: You throw more agents at it.Jake [00:28:01]: You don't. But then who reviews for CVEs and all these other things?Swyx [00:28:07]: More agents.Jake [00:28:08]: And that's how we hit the inference wall. You can continually throw agents at the problem, but I think there's a limit to the number of agents you can throw at a problem.CLI, Agent Handles, and Closing the LoopSwyx [00:28:24]: You already had a CLI before it was cool. How is the shape of what you're exposing changing, if at all?Jake [00:28:28]: CLIs have always been cool. The CLI changes because we think about how to give Claude, Codex, ChatGPT, or any model a handhold.Jake [00:28:50]: A CLI is a single command: deploy, get logs, and so on. Things that were prohibitively annoying to humans are not annoying to agents. They're nice. If I handed you a CLI with 40 arguments and 600 flags, you'd think, “I'm never going to use all of this.” But if you hand it to an agent, it says, “This is excellent. I have so many handles to work with.”Jake [00:29:24]: If you're going to expose things to agents that way, you want as many handles as possible where they can get information, query dynamic information, and close the loop quickly. Most problems right now are about how to close the loop as quickly as possible. Where does the agent get stuck, and how can you remove that?Jake [00:29:49]: Telemetry is important. If you can tell where the agent gets stuck from the CLI and say, “12% of people deviate from the happy path because of this, and now I add this argument and drive it down to 2%,” you massively increase the rate of loop closure.Jake [00:30:03]: That's how we think about not just the CLI, but every point in the dashboard. It's a user journey: I hear about Railway. I get something deployed. I get my first green build or aha moment. I see an endpoint, logs, whatever. Then I iterate. The iteration loop is indefinite. The user wants to deploy a new thing, a Postgres instance, change code, and keep iterating.Jake [00:30:36]: If you focus on the iteration loops and what's blocking them from closing quickly, one thing we say internally is: you never want to be waiting on compute anymore. You always want to be waiting on intelligence. If you're waiting on compute, there's a bottleneck that needs to be destroyed because eventually that bottleneck becomes so large that another workflow emerges to change it.Jake [00:31:04]: We've built a product where you push code, build it, and so on. But I fundamentally believe the push-pull loop is going away. We'll get to a point where you make a small change in production, that change is versioned across your infrastructure, you're working alongside copy-on-write versions of your database and infrastructure, and then you merge it in and it's instantaneously live. That's the holy grail of loops. The push-pull-rebuild thing is a point of friction that we're removing entirely.Canvas as Output: Dashboards, Context Anchors, and HyperstructuresSwyx [00:31:43]: It's incredibly fast. If anyone hasn't tried it, that fast feedback is great. My hot take is that Railway was famous for its canvas, which visualizes your infrastructure and lets you manipulate it visually. But that was for humans. For the next phase of growth, Railway CLI is more important than canvas.Jake [00:32:05]: The canvas is funny because it's a mechanism to show changes over time. You're right that previously we used it a lot as an input. Moving forward, its goal is more like an output. You would go to the canvas, make changes, see them, and watch your infrastructure evolve. Now agents have access to the CLI and can make those changes. So the canvas becomes an output: what information does the human need at this moment to make suitable decisions about control requests? Do I approve this or not?Jake [00:32:57]: It also has to be an anchor for your context, a port in the storm. Think of it like layers in a file system. You start with a project, then drill down into services, then into a function or code, because you want to represent the entire thing not just in your head, but in the canvas. Other people can share that representation, think on the same wavelength, and move quickly.Jake [00:33:33]: A lot of organizations get in trouble as they scale because all the context lives in someone's head. “How does this microservice work?” “I have no idea; go ask this person.” Then you have whole categories of products built around context discovery. A lot of that melts away if you have a solid hierarchy and can infinitely nest services, code, context, and everything else all the way down. That's what lets you build these structures over time.Jake [00:34:18]: It's also what lets us build what I've called hyperstructures: things that are way bigger. You look at the Golden Gate Bridge and ask, “How did we build that?” There's a meme that we lost the technology. To some extent, yes, because the coordination that built those things evolved and changed. We lost some of the art of building structure as we jammed everything into Slack.Swyx [00:34:52]: But you jam everything in Discord.Jake [00:34:53]: Same point. It doesn't matter. It's message passing and interrupts, message passing and interrupts.Swyx [00:35:00]: So you're arguing there should be something better and more structured than Slack?Jake [00:35:04]: Yeah. For sure. I think Slack is awful, and Discord is awful too.Central Station: Context Routing, Support, and Incident ClustersSwyx [00:35:09]: This is the equivalent of my mom test. What have you done that has your solution to this?Jake [00:35:15]: Internally, we've built a tool called Central Station that aggregates all the context from our users. Every piece of feedback, every customer support item, everything gets aggregated into clusters. If an incident is brewing, we can determine how many users are affected and break off a discussion based on that.Jake [00:35:40]: That is more helpful than long-running channels where you're trying to decide which channel to put something in. If you can dynamically aggregate information and dynamically route it to the right person based on context, it works better. We know internally that these four people are close to networking. If we see a networking thing, we can drill it down to those four people. If it's with this part, we can look at the commits. This is no longer a manual process internally.Jake [00:36:13]: If you go to station or help.railway.com, that's why we built it. We wanted to scale with a massive amount of leverage by aggregating feedback.Swyx [00:36:27]: This is built in-house?Jake [00:36:28]: Yep.Swyx [00:36:29]: I remember helping out on this one with Angelo in 2023. You scale a lot with a very small team.Jake [00:36:38]: Yeah. We're about 10 times bigger now.Swyx [00:36:40]: You have your full developer code here? Very cool.Jake [00:36:44]: If you go to railway.com/stats, we expose this as a pub-sub-able thing. It's all real-time metrics. There's a way to get it as JSON somewhere if you care.Jake [00:37:01]: We're big on trying to build everything in public and talk about what we're working on. We've had issues in the past, and we'll say, “Here's how we're fixing these things.” We've gotten compliments and flak for incident reports. We're always trying to make them better and talk with people.Incidents, Disclosure, and Progressive RolloutsSwyx [00:37:20]: You had a big one recently. I liked that it was scoped to 3,000. You presumably used Central Station. Talk through what happened and how you address it internally as a team.Jake [00:37:38]: Internally, this one really sucked. It had to do with an upstream provider that didn't do the behavior it said it documented, which is unfortunate given they wrote the RFC for how the behavior should work. We rolled those things out, and Central Station caught it initially when a couple users said caches weren't invalidating. We turned it off immediately.Jake [00:38:03]: When you roll out to a large user base of three million people, you get a lot of disparate behaviors. We tested in staging and had tests, but we hit an edge case. We've hardened those systems, and now we can make that better. But it was a tough one.Swyx [00:38:39]: I always wonder how private disclosure is supposed to work if people find an issue. Are they supposed to contact you first? When you run a platform, these things will happen. What channels should people pursue to quietly resolve it before it becomes a bigger incident?Jake [00:38:59]: There's responsible disclosure. We err on the side of over-disclosing and letting you know something is wrong versus having your provider gaslight you. We've erred on sharing those things more publicly, even if they impact a small subset of users. That's a decision we've made internally. We have four values. One is honor. The honorable thing is to notify people to the widest degree at which they may have been affected or there was an issue, and then confront it head-on: why did it happen, what can we do better?Swyx [00:39:45]: Not the whole user base. That's because of incremental rollouts and other things?Jake [00:39:50]: Yeah. Progressive rollouts.Swyx [00:39:54]: That should be the norm at all large platforms.Jake [00:39:58]: It should. A variety of companies do this. There's the quote that Meta runs 10,000 different versions of Meta. To our earlier point about agents, they need the same thing. They need shadow traffic and all these other things. We've built so much ceremony around production being sacred that we need to make it trivially easy to test different behaviors in a safe environment. Then you can make mistakes in a safe environment.Safe AI SRE: Customer Agents, Forked Environments, and Production ParityAlessio [00:40:30]: Do you see a world where these things get automatically caught, not necessarily by your agent, but by your customer's agent? The cache invalidation issue seems easy to check if you know to look for it.Jake [00:40:44]: It's hard because to determine it, we almost need to hook into your observability infrastructure. That's why we have the template loop on the platform: so you can roll things out progressively. You can roll out to Johnny Vibe Coder initially, or push a shard that someone consumes at their own leisure. Or you can roll it out over weeks: 0.1% of people, 1% of people, early adopters, then all the way up. That's the non-deterministic version control we talked about earlier.Jake [00:41:30]: I believe that's where most things should go, because most companies end up building staged rollout systems in-house. It's the same thing built again and again at every company. There's a massive opportunity to consolidate developer debt.Alessio [00:41:45]: You should have a free tier. Model providers give free tokens if you let them use the data. You could give free compute if someone is the number-one shard that goes out and lets you plug into their observability.Jake [00:41:55]: We do that. That's why we talked about the impact on 3,000 people. We start with lower-impact people. Larger companies on the platform are last to receive those rollouts so they have a version of the platform that's deeply stable.Alessio [00:42:16]: I have three services, so I'm sure I get the first rollout. You can nuke my thing at any time. There are all these SRE agent companies. Observability people also want agents that fix upstream problems. You have your own agent in the canvas now. How do you see that playing out?Jake [00:42:39]: It's the stacking entropy problem. If you don't have primitives to make iteration in production safe, it becomes difficult. If you're an observability provider saying, “Here's the fix to this error,” assume 80% are good and make sense. But in the last 20% long tail of complex issues, if you let somebody stamp it, you create an opportunity for an incident.Jake [00:43:08]: That's why forked environments are important. People have staging, but it always drifts from production. You need primitives, workflows, and experience built first-party on the platform so you can fork any service at any point in time.Jake [00:43:33]: I think of the canvas as a sheet of transparency paper. The agent is a little guy you push up into the canvas. It should say, “I need to copy that service and that service so I can test these two things.” It gets a read-only copy of production. Anything that's PII gets marked as a transform when we clone the database, create a copy-on-write version, or read from it. Then the agent makes changes and asks, “Does this actually work?” as close to production as possible.Jake [00:44:22]: That's how close you have to be, or you get massive drift. The system becomes unstable. You see this with massive systems built on Docker for local, Kubernetes for production, and a specific thing for something else. That complexity slows developers and becomes unstable at scale, making it hard to iterate. We want to compress that way down and say, “As close to prod as possible is where we want to be.”From AISRE Skeptic to Agent BelieverSwyx [00:45:00]: I was texting Erica for questions, and she says you were originally not a believer in AISRE. Have you come around on it?Jake [00:45:10]: I flipped, but I'm still not a believer in AISRE if you don't have the primitives to make it safe. If you unleash AISRE on production infrastructure without safe primitives for copying volumes and making sure things are fine, it's going to nuke your production database. It's not a matter of if, but when. I'm a big believer in making those loops safe.Jake [00:45:33]: I was a deep AI skeptic until 2023. In 2024, I thought, “Maybe I can roughly make this thing do it.” In 2025, I thought, “Now I can hold this.” Over winter break, everybody came back saying, “It's almost impossible to hold this.”Swyx [00:46:01]: Did you see this on the Claude docs? CloudBot? OpenCloud?Jake [00:46:06]: It's gotten to a point where it's harder to hold it wrong than to hold it right. There's a scene in Avengers where Vision picks up Thor's hammer and says it's terribly well-balanced. It self-balances and works well. I'm a deep believer at this point that this will be the dominant species: assembly, C, C++, JavaScript, words.Swyx [00:46:35]: It feels like a big jump.Jake [00:46:37]: It is. But it's not like you abandon CPU-based discrete logic and move straight to fuzzy logic. You need both. Your skills should call code or applications or some static structure. You can use skills to distill what the procedure should be or how the code should act.Jake [00:47:02]: I'm coming to a thesis: you need three points. You need a clear spec defining the system, the code, and the tests. When you say it out loud, if you've been in engineering long enough, you're like, “Of course. That's an RFC, tests, and code.” But they all matter. Having them together lets them reinforce each other: the spec and tests match, but the code doesn't, so reconcile it. Or the tests and code match but the spec doesn't, so reconcile that. That's the iteration loop.Jake [00:47:41]: That's why you're seeing people talk about software factories, docs, and reconciliation. Some of that is architectural astronomy if you don't implement it, but that loop is where most things will end up.Swyx [00:48:07]: For listeners, we've been talking about this on the pod for three years: the holy trinity of specs and tests. Itamar Friedman from Qodo is the reference if people want to look it up.Self-Modifying Infrastructure and the End of Push-Pull-RebuildSwyx [00:48:18]: One thing I want to mention on the OpenCloud idea is self-modification. I don't know how Railway would support it, but I have my OpenClaw, and I just tell it it has the Railway CLI and can do whatever. In theory, whatever capabilities or new infra it needs, it can call the Railway CLI, provision it, and add it to itself. The agent can modify its own infra.Jake [00:48:45]: It's nuts. I have a loop set up where you put the Railway CLI on top of something that runs on Railway. You're authenticated as whatever the current box is, and you can make any changes to it. Then you call Railway deploy, and it deploys itself.Jake [00:49:04]: It's like: “I need to spin up this instance of this environment. I already exist in this environment. Excellent, I have access to a Postgres instance now.” That's where we want to go with agentic, self-replicating infrastructure. That's your loop: iterate in production. You continue making changes. If it works, merge it upstream. If it doesn't, throw it away.Jake [00:49:37]: How do you make throwaway copies trivial to spin up and super cheap? The era of “I have an AWS instance with four vCPU and 16 gigs of RAM” is going to get destroyed. If you do that for agents, you need a thousand of those machines. It's prohibitively expensive compared with what we've spent a ton of time figuring out: the atomic unit of deploy, whether you call it isolates, sandboxes, or something else. Only pay for what you use, spin up instantaneously, and close the loop as quickly as possible.Jake [00:50:15]: If the system can self-replicate safely and say, “This is my environment, I'm making these changes,” it can come back with, “Does this look good? This is a new state of infrastructure given this prompt. I think I've solved it.” Then you go back and say, “Actually, it looks different.” It does the loop again. Then you say, “Cool. Apply.”Swyx [00:50:38]: That's retroactively obvious, which is the most useful kind. Any other comments on agent deployment on Railway?Jake [00:50:51]: It's getting better every day. I'm on X or Twitter. You can always yell at me about the parts not working as well as they should, because plenty of things should work way better.The New Serverless: Stateful, Long-Running, Pay-for-What-You-Use LinuxSwyx [00:51:04]: At this stage, when people want massively or embarrassingly parallel compute, they usually talk serverless. I feel like there's a new serverless compared to the previous five years of serverless. You're in that new bucket. Do you have comparisons or philosophical differences you want to call out?Jake [00:51:31]: It's somewhere in between. It's the ability to run stateful, long-running workflows or executions.Swyx [00:51:42]: Vercel has Fluid Compute, Cloudflare has some container thing, Google has App Runner and others.Jake [00:51:55]: That's where everything is roughly going, and it's why we've been working on this for six years. We believe users need access to a computer: a box that speaks Linux. They need to deploy what they want. Other systems change the surface area of what you can build. For us, users need a computer and need to deploy anything they truly want. That's why we've focused on the primitives: network, compute, storage. If we give you those and expose them so you can run things indefinitely, that's where we believe it's going.Jake [00:52:43]: Twitter has no nuance, so everyone says “servers” or “serverless.” It's always somewhere in the middle: I want to run it for a long time, but I don't want to provision the resource statically or pay for things I'm not using. That's been our thesis from day one: pay only for what you use, run it indefinitely, and it is full Linux.Swyx [00:53:12]: That's why I like the naming of Fluid. It's fluid. Flexible.Heroku, Focus, and Carrying the Torch Without Becoming the PastSwyx [00:53:18]: Another milestone is the Heroku official deprecation. You're one of the presumptive new Herokus. “New Heroku” has been a category for as long as I've been in developer tooling. It's finally happening. What was that like? Any behind-the-scenes of, “This is the moment”?Jake [00:53:42]: You have people where you're like, “You were running stuff on here? You, as this company?” It's crazy that names you would know are running on it and now coming to us saying, “We want to move a lot of this off.”Swyx [00:54:00]: Any behind-the-scenes on why Salesforce let Heroku stagnate?Jake [00:54:05]: I can only guess. It's hard when it's not your business. Salesforce's business is to build a great CRM. That's their focus. Then you acquire a compute business as an offshoot. A lot of early Meta people talk about focus. Boz has a write-up about how in the early days of Meta they had no money, so they were forced to focus. Then they turned on the money tree and had no reason not to split their focus.Jake [00:54:52]: But that dilutes your product. You get offshoots where you ask, “Is this the focus of the business?” If it's not core, it languishes. A lot of companies get in trouble when they split focus because they're fighting a multi-front war, not just externally but internally for alignment. Where are we going? What are we doing? What is our purpose?Jake [00:55:24]: If you're Salesforce-built and mission-driven, you want to work on Salesforce. Heroku is off to the side. It's not core to the business. Getting resources, budget, focus, and alignment internally becomes hard. It was a matter of time.Swyx [00:56:06]: Kudos for them to call it out instead of leaving it unknown.Jake [00:56:12]: Their release was a little odd. They called it out, but they didn't say they were shutting it down. Behind the scenes, I think they issued messages to people saying they should close accounts and that they were going to deprecate and remove things over time.Jake [00:56:30]: It's crazy because some of my first deployment experiences were on Heroku. You start with dragging things into an FTP server, then you try to get a deploy working, and then it's Heroku. It was the on-ramp for us. But the wheel turns. New things emerge. We're happy to carry the torch for a lot of that. But we don't want to be the new Heroku. We want to be the way people build and deploy software, and ultimately the way people monetize software over time.Swyx [00:57:19]: It's still a big crown to be the new Heroku. There are 50 companies that fought for that.Jake [00:57:23]: Everybody is holding some portion of it. We're happy to support people and companies. The platform works differently. The game loop is similar, but we've been dogmatic about where these things are going: primitives, agents, fan-out. Some things fit; some workflows need to change. We have an approximation of Heroku pipelines with the environment system. It's exciting. We've got a ton of people we can support, and it's growing a lot.Temporal, Workflow Engines, and State MachinesSwyx [00:58:12]: I have one more technical question about Temporal. I've sold my shares. You're a power user and one of our earliest customers. I met you through Temporal. You built on Temporal. You have complaints. This may be the most neutral and informed conversation anyone will hear about Temporal without someone working at the company.Jake [00:58:39]: That's fair. I've used Temporal for almost 10 years because of Cadence at Uber.Swyx [00:58:52]: Give people a sense of what Cadence was at Uber.Jake [00:58:57]: Cadence was the precursor to Temporal. It powers trip actions, rides, when you rent a Jump bike or scooter or car. You're running workflows for a period of time and saying, “This ride will run indefinitely until it finishes.” You attach information: you paused in this zone, so add this charge to the bill. When you end the trip, the workflow is done. That experience was powered by Cadence at the time.Swyx [00:59:34]: I used to say it's like programming the entire user journey top-down as one function.Jake [00:59:39]: It's a powerful idea and important. It's also important for the next phase of the agentic journey. You want an agent to do a specific task, be complete or incomplete on that task, and move on to the next thing. You need a way to manage workflows dynamically.Jake [00:59:59]: Temporal was always great in theory, and great when you got it working the way you wanted in production. But it required you to model the entire journey in your head. If you didn't, you could cause issues where replaying the state of the workflow causes non-determinism.Swyx [01:00:25]: Because it works on deterministic workflow history.Jake [01:00:28]: Exactly. I describe it as a jet engine. If you know how to operate it and run it, it's great. But you can't hand it to people trying to build complicated things if they don't have the whole state in their head.Jake [01:00:48]: We run our whole deployment pipeline on top of it. That's a reasonably complicated workflow: pre-commit hooks, signaling, queuing, and all the rest. We ran into the same thing at Uber. As you express a large workflow, it gets more complicated, with more states in the state machine that you have to map back to the workflow.Swyx [01:01:15]: It's a lot of ifs.Jake [01:01:16]: Exactly. At Uber, we built a system for doing the state machine and testing it. We've started to build some of those things here because it's grown heavily. It's not quite love-hate. When it works well, it works super well. But if someone who doesn't have full context puts something into the system that invalidates state or causes non-determinism, or spins off a ton of activities, you have to keep track of underlying SRE knobs like activity slots. Those should scale with memory, vCPU, and so on. It becomes a bear to scale.Swyx [01:02:10]: You need a capable sysadmin running things behind the scenes. If you moved off, what would you do?Jake [01:02:19]: We'd build our own workflow engine. We have a few internally that we've worked on.Swyx [01:02:27]: This is one of those classes of things you typically wouldn't vibe code, but I'm wondering if you can.Jake [01:02:33]: I still don't think you should vibe code it. You still want to run decent tests to make sure it works.Swyx [01:02:39]: Timo didn't invent that from scratch either. There are libraries you can run. On top of that, it's just a state machine that you have to map out. Ultimately, you define the instructions you want and run them through a state machine.Jake [01:03:00]: It's very doable. Workflow stuff is interesting. Restate is doing neat stuff here.Swyx [01:03:10]: You're tied into JavaScript. Are you a JavaScript maxi?Jake [01:03:13]: Internally, we have TypeScript, Rust, and Go. We don't add more languages. Actually, we have a little C because we write BPF code and hooks. But those are the languages.Swyx [01:03:28]: Is this for sidecars?Jake [01:03:32]: No. It's for the networking stack, volumes, and things like that. We use TypeScript a lot because it powers the dashboard, but we're moving a lot of workflow stuff off the dashboard stack and into the infrastructure stack.Railpack, Nixpacks, and Content-Addressable FilesystemsSwyx [01:04:00]: Cool. Any other technical infrastructure stuff? Railpacks?Jake [01:04:07]: We built an engine for determining dependencies based on source code. It's called Railpack. We built the first version, Nixpacks, on top of Nix, and then we moved.Swyx [01:04:17]: People have been trying to get me to adopt Nix and NixOS for four years. Is it ever going to be a thing?Jake [01:04:23]: I don't know. We're excited about it, but it has pain points. Think of it as a stack of versioned binaries at specific slices in time. If you want version X and version Y, you bloat the package space, which blows up image size and makes real-world workloads difficult.Swyx [01:04:53]: But you content-address it and cache it. In theory, there are optimizations.Jake [01:05:00]: In theory, yes. But with a large enough user base and disparate enough machines, you run into a problem Meta described in the XFAAS paper, their internal serverless system. It becomes difficult at scale unless you break out specific runtimes.Jake [01:05:24]: We didn't want to do that because we wanted to truly allow you to deploy anything. That was our initial thing with Nix. But we've moved toward interesting work around content-addressable file systems that can lazy-load anything from any point and page it into memory.Swyx [01:05:48]: Amazing.Jake [01:05:49]: The future is very bright. It's crazy, and it's going to be nuts.Coding Agent Spend, Roadmaps, and Token ROISwyx [01:05:54]: Founder journey stuff?Alessio [01:05:56]: Your cloud usage: you tweeted you're going to spend $300K this month?Jake [01:06:01]: I think we got to $200K.Alessio [01:06:02]: Coding agents?Jake [01:06:03]: Yeah.Swyx [01:06:04]: Across the company?Alessio [01:06:05]: You only have 35 people, so I'm sure they're not all spending $10K a month. What's the distribution?Jake [01:06:10]: I think I'm at about $25K. We have power users all the way down. We came back from winter break, and I basically said, “If you're writing code by hand, you're doing this wrong.” The tools are good enough now that you can move extremely quickly. There are issues and pain points, but you should be reviewing the code you are writing instead of writing it by hand.Jake [01:06:40]: Architectural patterns matter more now than ever, but you shouldn't spend your time generating code you would write. If you know how to write it, ask the agent to write it and reconcile it until it looks like you would have written it yourself.Jake [01:06:58]: People misconstrue my propensity to push people toward agents as connected to our growth and some reliability bumps. They're not necessarily related. The tools are good enough to move extremely quickly and build things way larger than you could before.Jake [01:07:19]: To the earlier point about cooling data centers in space: I don't know. But with software, you can ask, “How would I build block storage from scratch? How would I do these things?” I have ideas because I have history and have read papers. Let me work them out and build massive test benches with thousands of tests, because those are now free to author. If you're not using AI systems to speed-run your roadmap and reconcile your existing system onto the future, you're missing a large point of what's happening.Alessio [01:08:12]: What's the path to spending $3 million a month? Is it bound by ideas and things customers can absorb?Jake [01:08:19]: For most companies, it's bound by deployment at this point. That's why we've seen a massive boom in users and companies, from Fortune 50s down, asking how to get developers to move faster. You'll probably hit your CFO before any technical limits because they'll look at the eye-watering amount of money spent on tokens. Inference costs have to come down, but we're inference constrained now. There will be price discovery around what makes sense for an org to adopt.Jake [01:09:06]: I think you'll end up with the F1 driver concept. If someone is really adept at these things, it makes sense to put them in a $3 million car. If they're not, it probably doesn't make sense. You'll take a few people and say, “You can drive the F1 car. We need to go in this direction. Figure out if it works and prototype it.”Jake [01:09:33]: We've done some of that and vastly accelerated our roadmap. We thought we'd ship something in a few years; now we can probably ship it in a few months because we validated it and don't have to build it incrementally. We can skip steps and move toward our vision.Alessio [01:09:58]: A lot of people are realizing the roadmap doesn't always have a business impact, so they say tokens are too expensive. But if your roadmap were built to make more money by the time you built it, you'd have token pricing for it, the same way you do with sales. You'd spend a billion dollars on sales if you knew you would get $2 billion of revenue.Jake [01:10:19]: Exactly. A naive way to measure this is the percentage of tokens that end up in production. If you can measure impact because those tokens end up in production, that's awesome. But the burden of proof will rise. Internally, we have a growing number of pull requests that haven't merged. The question becomes: how do you get this into production? It's about how quickly you can build and deploy software, which is exciting because that's our whole thing.The SDLC Shift: Prompt Requests, Feature Flags, and Safe RolloutsSwyx [01:10:56]: The SDLC is changing. One thesis is that the pull request is dying. It's going to be the prompt request. Beyond that, code review is also kind of dying if you have all the other systems in place. What else is changing about the SDLC?Jake [01:11:19]: The AISRE and the tools to make it happen. AISRE is pie-in-the-sky aspirational. What does it take to get an AISRE? What tools do you need to build?Swyx [01:11:32]: You should expose your tooling to customers at some point. The Central Station command center.Jake [01:11:39]: We have it for template maintainers. Template maintainers can deploy and maintain templates, and they get feedback. We're going to expose those things incrementally.Swyx [01:11:51]: Clustering around incidents. Everyone has a version of that, but I don't think anyone has solved it.Jake [01:11:56]: I won't say we've solved it internally, but it's gotten so good that we can see incidents forming pretty quickly. At some point, those will be things either someone else builds or we build. We've always built things purpose-built for us. If it makes sense to make it useful for users, monetize it, or turn that loop into a profit center instead of a cost center, we want to do that.Jake [01:12:28]: Pull request is definitely dying.Swyx [01:12:29]: Do you do first-party feature flagging and incremental rollout stuff?Jake [01:12:34]: We have a feature-flagging engine we built internally and will eventually roll out.Swyx [01:12:38]: I don't see it as a user. How come you didn't give us what you have?Jake [01:12:43]: We have to beta test it. We care a lot about the quality of the things. There's plenty we've used internally that doesn't make it all the way through the journey because it fails. It works for one service but not multiple services. We'd have to build it for multiple services and know that if we released it, we'd rebuild it again and again. Some things are worth that, but many inform the roadmap.Jake [01:13:18]: We don't want to dilute the experience by saying, “This works, but only for this service,” unless it's a core initiative. Over the next few months, we'll roll out things that work for a single service, then multiple services, then multiple services across the environment. You have to be deliberate. Otherwise you create broken disparate experiences and support load because people ask how to use the feature.Jake [01:13:52]: It's the earlier expansion and compaction pattern. You expand the company to get features, then compact and smooth them out so the experience is stellar. You told me in the hallway, “It's gotten so much better.” Internally we're saying, “This part really sucks. We need to make it significantly better.”Swyx [01:14:11]: I can attest to that over the last three years watching you build Railway. For listeners, feature flagging is a huge part of Uber culture. So much so that they have too many feature flags and another thing to remove feature flags. Facebook has Gatekeeper. Agents are going to need this. It's fundamental to incremental rollouts. OpenAI acquired Statsig. GPT-5 is routing and flagging through different models.Jake [01:14:56]: It's super important. If the software development lifecycle is going to change because we're doing things 1,000 times faster and 1,000 times more concurrently, what becomes important at scale?Jake [01:15:16]: Before I started Railway, I built a feature-flagging product and tried to sell it. It was an easier version of LaunchDarkly. I ran into a problem: anyone small enough to adopt your technology doesn't care about feature flags, and anyone large enough to need feature flags needs so much scale that you have to build out all the infrastructure. I scrapped it.Jake [01:15:42]: But what is old is new again. Companies are trying to move quickly, but you can't YOLO a vibe-coded thing straight into production. You need to say, “Here's my blast radius, my impact, and I want to shadow it for these users.” Feature flags. You're going to need the tools larger companies built to maintain their structures. Everything gets compressed by 1,000x so everybody can build those structures quickly.Jake [01:16:07]: That's exactly where we are: compressing the software development lifecycle, then expanding it and adding more new things.Cattle, Pets, and Clonable InfrastructureSwyx [01:16:15]: Another term that comes to mind for newer developers is “cattle, not pets.” People treat production like a pet. It has a name. You baby it and keep it alive. With cattle, you can mass farm, roll out, portion parts out, and kill them.Jake [01:16:37]: I think that might change. You can move toward having pets as long as you have a cloning machine for your pets.Swyx [01:16:52]: Yeah.Jake [01:16:52]: If you can snapshot every single thing at every frame, it doesn't matter if something gets obliterated because you have a snapshot of it. The things we've built right now are designed to block changes from the hermetically sealed DevOps line. You have to write a Dockerfile because you nee

New Malware Libraries means New Signatures https://isc.sans.edu/diary/%5BGuest%20Diary%5D%20%20New%20Malware%20Libraries%20means%20New%20Signatures/32986 Addressing Exchange Server May 2026 vulnerability CVE-2026-42897 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/addressing-exchange-server-may-2026-vulnerability-cve-2026-42897/4518498 Microsoft Authenticator Update CVE-2026-41615 https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-41615 ssh-keysign-pwn (CVE-2026-46333) Patches Released https://almalinux.org/blog/2026-05-15-ssh-keysign-pwn-cve-2026-46333/

¿Te imaginas tener a tu propio Jarvis en Telegram? Pues eso es OpenClaw

Wendy is back from hauling robots to Texas and getting ready to drive another one to California, so the crew leans hard into life on the road with Linux. Bill talks about moving his systems over to Bazzite, tells the story of an overworked NVIDIA 1080 that literally ate into another GPU, and explains how HomeBridge 2.0 keeps his smart‑home world humming. Nate shares his first impressions of Tux Manager, a Linux clone of the classic Windows Task Manager, and walks through the Framework‑plus‑Flip‑Go combo that makes his roaming setup feel like CubicleLabs away from home. From Steam Decks and One X Players to UniFi travel routers and noise‑canceling headphones, everyone opens their travel bags and talks about the gear they actually trust when Wi‑Fi is sketchy and power outlets are rare. Wendy also geeks out over her new MOVA V50 robot vacuum, complete with a dedicated “Sentinels” Wi‑Fi SSID, and how little self‑hosted comforts make a hotel room feel just a bit more like a homelab. Along the way, there are jokes about Ethernet‑cable hair, data having weight, and why the best layover is the one where your SSH tunnel actually connects. If you're curious about the recent Linux vulnerabilities and the ABCs of CVEs, don't miss SUDO Show 76, where they break it all down in a fun and informative way. Connect with the Hosts on Discord: Matt – @Dark1ltg Wendy – @Wendy.sh Nate – CubicleNate.com @CubicleNate Bill – @ctlinux on Mastodon Special Guest: Bill.

Brett records an episode without Christina and Jeff and chats with Melissa Davis (The Mac Mommy) about her start as a mommy blogger and longtime Mac podcaster, her tech-support work, and the strange lack of closure when online friends disappear. They trade mental-health and chronic-illness updates, Adderall vs. Vyvanse, difficulty finding curious doctors, and being labeled “worried well.” Don’t worry, they nerd out on mechanical keyboards, Karabiner, and remapping keys. GrAPPtitudes include Bartender 6 Pro, Sortio for AI tagging, Sketch Party TV, and Karabiner. Sponsor OneSkin improves your skincare routine with science-backed skin care products. With over 10,000 five-star reviews and validation from clinical studies, OneSkin has made a name for itself in the skincare industry. If you’re interested in trying OneSkin for yourself, you can get 15% off your order with the code OVERTIRED at oneskin.co/OVERTIRED. Chapters 00:00 Meet Melissa Davis 00:56 Early Podcast Days 02:20 Tech Support Seniors 05:52 Digital Legacy Work 06:50 Sponsor: OneSkin 08:14 Mental Health Check In 08:34 Insomnia And Focus 13:19 Doing Time Tracker 16:04 Suspenders And Stenosis 20:18 Mobility And Home Hacks 22:10 Melissa Health Update 23:25 ADHD Meds And Mutations 25:25 Curious Doctors Matter 27:59 Vyvanse Vs Adderall 30:26 Tracking Mood With Data 32:27 Cane And Somatic Therapy 36:09 Somatics For EDS 36:50 Yoga Modifications 38:19 Polycystic Liver Shock 39:20 Fatphobia In Healthcare 40:56 Pole Dancing Reality Check 41:55 Mechanical Keyboard ASMR 45:56 Nail Art And Picking 49:09 Keyboard Layout Rabbit Hole 01:00:59 Shortcuts And Muscle Memory 01:03:12 GrAPPtitude App Picks 01:14:07 Karabiner Power Tips 01:17:30 Wrap Up And Thanks Show Links hEDS Doing Timing Royal Kludge Keyboard Gamakey Silent Linear Switches EPOMAKER Switch Benefit Section EPOMAKER AegisSil Keycaps Set SketchParty TV Karabiner Sortio Bartender Pro Day One Join the Conversation Merch Come chat on Discord! Twitter/ovrtrd Instagram/ovrtrd Youtube Get the Newsletter Thanks! You’re downloading today’s show from CacheFly’s network BackBeat Media Podcast Network Check out more episodes at overtiredpod.com and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Find Brett as @ttscoff, Christina as @film_girl, Jeff as @jsguntzel, and follow Overtired at @ovrtrd on Twitter. Transcript Nails and Keys with Melissa Davis (The Mac Mommy) [00:00:00] Meet Melissa Davis Brett: Hey, this is Brett Terpstra. I am without my usual cohorts, Christina and Jeff. Um, so I, I wanted to, you know, get a, get an episode out for all of you listeners, and I reached out to Melissa Davis, known as The Mac Mommy. Um, I don’t, I, I don’t know if they’re still known as The Mac Mommy, but in m- in my lifetime they have been. Um, Melissa, why don’t you introduce yourself, let people know, like, M-Ma- long time, like Mac personality, podcaster. Tell us where you came from. Melissa: Where did I come from? Outer space. Uh, I came from being a mom. I, I, I will admit, this is hard to admit, But I will admit I started out as a mommy blogger. That’s, like, kind of a bad word nowadays. Brett: back, back, yeah, this is way Back when Melissa: [00:01:00] Yeah. Early Podcast Days Melissa: so we’re talking, like… Well, my oldest is gonna be 20, Brett. My oldest is gonna be 20 this summer. End of, end of June he’ll be 20 years old. So that’s about how long I’ve been doing podcasting. I mean, I started, I started, like, when… Well, you know what? I started listening to Adam Christianson’s The MacCast Brett: But you know what? I started Sure. Like one of the very first podcasts, Yeah. Melissa: still, I still listen to him on the Mac Geek Gab. Like, his voice is just so soothing to me. I used to… Like, that was the f- Back when I had, I had, I remember I had, like, an old G4, uh, Quicksilver Mac, and in the stinky little back room of our old house. And I used to, I used to download the podcasts, burn them on a CD, put them in my Walkman, ’cause I didn’t have an iPod yet at the time. I wasn’t that… I was never really that cutting edge. And I’d burn them on a CD, I’d put the CD in my Walkman, and then I would sit and nurse, I would nurse my baby. I, [00:02:00] and I would have to tuck the, uh, the headphones, you know, I’d have the ear- the, the wired, kinda like I have now, uh, and tuck it behind my back, like, behind my shoulder, because otherwise he’d, like, yank on the cord. And I would just listen to podcasts while I nursed. And I… And then, uh, then I met Victor Cajiao, and I started just kind of being, like, a serial podcaster, showing up here and there, and then it just kinda grew from there. Tech Support Seniors Melissa: Um, and I do… So I do tech support. I’m an IT tech s- tech support person. I… People call me their computer guru. I mostly work with, uh, the senior population, our, our vintage people, which I, I’m slowly becoming one of them. We’re all, we’re all gonna go that way. Brett: I feel like anyone who does Mac tech support deals with probably an, a, a population that skews older. Melissa: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s actually, it’s actually more– I will say it’s actually more difficult to work with somebody younger. Like, especially people my age or people [00:03:00] that are like, say, in their sixties I consider pretty young, 70 even. Uh, yeah, so but it’s, you know, the people are so, so interesting. You can learn so much. I love working with this population because they’re like encyclopedias, and the stories they tell you and the things you learn, it’s pretty amazing. And I could just, I could just spend– I have actually spent all day with some of them. Some of us just have really great chemistry and, you know, it’s… They– I, I’m also– I have ADHD, that’s no secret. And I think when you get older, um, not– it doesn’t affect everybody, but I do see a lot of what could be either they, they have ADHD or it’s like a– Brett: they have Melissa: of creeps in and it’s just a natural process of aging, cognitive decline. So, yep. Brett: have a lot of patience. Sure. S- some of my, some of my most interesting relationships over the last 10 years have been with, uh, Mac users in their late 70s, [00:04:00] 80s. And, uh, like they’ve been– They’re very– Like, they’re definitely… The people that I’ve known have been technically capable and very interested in learning. That’s why they follow me. That’s how I meet them, right? They’re like, they read my blog, which is just all nerd stuff. And, and so they’re, they’re technically competent, and they’re doing things that I can only aspire to be doing in my 70s and 80s. Um, I had a guy who was writing his memoirs at, in between like mountain bike rides. And so here’s the thing, though, is when you, when you know someone online and they’re in their 80s and you stop hearing from them for a Melissa: Yes. Yes. Brett: you have to assume that they have passed on. and that is sad, and you never really get any closure because you don’t know their friends or family. You [00:05:00] never get like a notice, an obituary. You don’t, you don’t know where these people go, um, and you don’t know how to check in on them once your normal channels of communication are severed. Melissa: Yeah, we’re at that age where we probably start reading the obituaries. Like, I haven’t heard from so-and-so in a while. Let me check the obits." Brett: I had, I had– Before NVUltra went on for, what’s it, like five years now, uh, without a release, um, I had a project called BitWriter with David Halter. And Melissa: remember you mentioning that, yeah. Yeah, and you wondered. Mm-hmm. Brett: he stopped responding. Melissa: you find out any at all? Any, Any, concrete… Brett: Nothing. I have put feelers out everywhere I can think of. I have no idea what happened to him. Melissa: went Richard Simmons, huh? Brett: yeah. Yeah. With less Melissa: No contact. No contact. Aw. Digital Legacy Work Melissa: I, I’m lucky that, uh, in my line of [00:06:00] work, I do typically hear from the family if they’ve passed on, because I form kind of a bond with a lot of people. I, I typically don’t lose clients unless they die, so… Brett: and you have some, like, in real life connections to Melissa: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do, I do both. I do… I have some clients where I’ve never met them in person, I’ve only ever done remote. Uh, and then, but most of my clients are, are local, the majority of them. But I, I still s- see them remotely too, so yeah. I’ve, I’ve actually been hired by some people, um, mostly I’ve had two male clients who they got a terminal illness, they knew they were terminal, and they followed me online and they pretty much hired me to take care of their surviving spouse. So that, that was… that’s a difficult thing, but I’m just honored that they chose me to, to help them out with that. So I’ve kind of been a bit of a digital undertaker in that regard. Sponsor: OneSkin Christina: I want to take a moment to share something that has significantly improved my skincare routine, OneSkin. [00:07:00] So we all have those days when our skin doesn’t feel its best, and I’ve certainly been in that boat, especially recovering from surgery. And I was tired of navigating through endless products that promised results, but often fell short. And that’s when I discovered OneSkin. It was founded by scientists dedicated to longevity, and this brand stands out for its commitment to real science over marketing hype. They tackle the fundamental question of how to actually slow down skin aging rather than just masking it. And their groundbreaking ingredient is, uh, ZeroS01, and it’s a proprietary peptide designed to help deactivate the damaged cells that contribute to aging skin. Since incorporating OneSkin into my routine, I’ve actually been noticing some improvements. My skin feels smoother. It looks more vibrant. Um, it’s definitely more moisturized, and so this is benefiting from its focus on supporting collagen and strengthening the skin barrier. With over 10,000 five-star reviews and validation from clinical studies, OneSkin has made a name for itself in the skincare industry. If [00:08:00] you’re interested in trying OneSkin for yourself, you can get 15% off your order with the code OVERTIRED at oneskin.co/overtired. That’s 15% off at oneskin.co/overtired using the code OVERTIRED. Thank you for supporting our show by checking them out Mental Health Check In Brett: Um, so do you wanna do a mental health Melissa: Sure. Brett: I, I know, I know you’ve listened to the show before. I know you know how this works. Melissa: how this works. Brett: Would you like to start? Melissa: I think I would like to hear you start, and then I’ll, I’ll add on Brett: that sounds good. Insomnia And Focus Brett: Um, so sleep continues to be a major issue for me. Um, I actually for four days in a row last week, I got eight hours of sleep a night, which was insane. I felt so good. Um- The first night… So I take [00:09:00] Lamictal for bipolar, and if I miss my evening dose, I crash and I sleep in the next morning, and I sleep soundly. Like, it’s the best sleep I can get. And then I wake up and all of a sudden the withdrawal kicks in, and then I’m shaky and dizzy for half an hour after I take the dose. Um, but that’s after, like, a solid night of sleep, and it never works two nights in a row. And, like, I’ve tried, like, maybe if I take Lamictal in the mornings instead of the evenings, maybe I’ll sleep through the night. It doesn’t work after that first missed dose. Um, but then I just, without making any changes in my lifestyle, started sleeping, and I thought finally after, like, two years of insomnia, I had turned a corner, because I can’t remember the last time I got eight hours of sleep for more than two nights in a [00:10:00] row. And then it ended, and then I was up. I’ve been up since 2:30 today. Melissa: I wondered, yep. Brett: I mean, I went to bed at 8:00, so that’s still nine, 10, 11, 12, 11, Melissa: I actually dozed off on the couch around 8:30. Like, if only I could just be in my bed right now, just be, like, transported. Yeah. Oh. Brett: Oh, I, I wish. If I could go back to bed… Like, sometimes I’ll, I’ll lay back down around 7:00 or 8:00 and get, like, another half hour of sleep, but it’s really that, like, uninterrupted block of deep sleep that I need, not… I take naps during the day, and I can usually fall asleep for half an hour, um, given that I’m usually functioning on five hours of sleep anyway. But anyway, um, I– That, that’s just kind of par for the course for me, so, like, any, any of our listeners know that that’s gonna be the first thing I report. Melissa: are you, [00:11:00] like, kinda competing? Like, are you trying to get eight hours because that’s what’s prescribed? Have you ever thought about Brett: be- actually, what works eight and a half, like I’ve, I’ve… Back when I had the option to sleep more than five hours, like, I did a lot of kind of experimentation and Melissa: know where your sweet spot is. Brett: Well, it… See, the sweet pot- spot changes as you age, though, and you need less sleep as you get older. So, so I can’t say for sure that eight and a half hours is still my sweet spot. Um, and I think honestly, if I can sleep seven hours, I feel pretty good, and I consider seven hours a good night’s sleep. Melissa: Yeah, ’cause mine’s like between four and six. Brett: really? Yeah. See, Melissa: feel Brett: I don’t function well. Oh, I don’t function well on anything less than seven hours. Melissa: I just have a love-hate relationship with sleep. I just don’t– I just hate to sleep. I just would rather be doing other things. Life is [00:12:00] just too interesting. Brett: I get that. I– get that. I– as someone who’s bipolar and has had like manic episodes where I’m up for five days straight, like I, I love not sleeping. Um, w- when, when I have the mania to give me energy and back it up. It’s when I’m just dragging all day and feel like a zombie. The thing– The, the plus side to it is the more tired I am, up to a certain point, the better I can focus. Like my brain slows down and it’s really easy for me to get into hyperfocus. And like most mornings I’m up at, you know, 2:30, 3:00 and I just start coding. And I can not only hyperfocus, but I can switch focus between three or four different projects like simultaneously. I hit compile on one, I move on to the next one, and I can rotate [00:13:00] through them and like keep track of all of it. And then right around 10:00 AM, my ability to do that ends and suddenly I like flip to a project and I cannot for the life of me remember what I was doing, which is why I’ve spent my life building note-taking apps and, and time tracking tools. Melissa: Yep, same thing. Doing Time Tracker Brett: dude, h- d- I don’t… You might not be familiar with my project Doing. Melissa: N-no, but I– you alluded to something. that’s not what you’re working on with Dan though, is it? Brett: No, no, that’s gonna be Melissa: Dan on that too. I, I, don’t know what it is yet, but yeah, I’m, I’m Brett: Oh, it’s… Yeah, it’s gonna be cool. Melissa: that’s so exciting. Brett: no, Doing is a command line tool where you can type things like, “Doing now podcasting with Melissa,” and it starts a timer for like what I’m doing now, and then I can ask it if I leave and come back, I can say, “What was I doing?” And it’ll tell me, [00:14:00] “You’re podcasting with Melissa.” Obviously, that’s a weird example ’cause I’m not gonna leave in the middle of this. But then it can give you like totals, time, tag-based time totals, uh, for your week and everything. It can show you like what you finished yesterday. Um, it’s not so much a task tracking app as it is a tool for keeping track of what you’re doing in the moment. Um, for, for people like me who switch between four projects at once, it’s really handy. And some guy, some fucking guy Melissa: Some fucking guy. Brett: it, rewrote it in Rust, and it is really good. it is really good. Uh, he like, I- Oh yeah, I use Melissa: Okay, ’cause Brett: This is, this is separate. this is this is a little more ‘ intentional than Timing. Um, I use both. They kind of work together, and Doing can actually import Timing’s JSON exports. So you can turn your, you can turn [00:15:00] all your Timing data into command line, uh, readable Doing files. Um, but anyway, this guy rewrote it in Rust with my permission, and he gave me full credit on the page. And I think I’m switching ’cause Doing is written in Ruby, and Ruby is slow, and Rust is fast. And like my Doing file where it stores all of my current projects, like my Doing items, gets so big that it can take Doing like up to five seconds to respond when I ask it, “What was I doing today?” Which is five seconds is a long time on the command line. Um, and his Melissa: pretty instantaneous. Brett: his version is like 100 milliseconds. Boom. But anyway, Melissa: It’s almost like you built your own little AI thing. Like, what was I doing? What Brett: kinda, kinda, yeah. Melissa: you doing, Dave? Brett: This is, this [00:16:00] was built long before AI was a common thing, but the other thing that’s contributing to my mental health Suspenders And Stenosis Brett: is suspenders. Melissa: Ah, yes. Brett: So I have I have gained 100 pounds, um, not, n-not of my own choice, but like I had rapid weight gain and I recently got a stenosis diagnosis, which I hate the Melissa: telling you, I’m telling you, we’re like 23 and me here. I’ve got that too. Brett: apparently during one of my, like when I gained 50 pounds in like six weeks, my body was looking for places to store all the new fat and decided my spine might be a good place for that. Um, so I have fat in my spine and I have degrading discs. This is separate from my love of suspenders, so I’ll get back to [00:17:00] that. I, um, Melissa: Wait till you get it in your eyeballs. Brett: Oh, for real? Melissa: Yeah, you can have… I have, um, what’s it called? Cholesterol. Yeah, if you look at your eyes really close, if you see like a white kind of w- ridge around your irises, that’s cholesterol. Brett: Oh, wow. Yeah, I hope, I hope that hasn’t happened yet, but who knows? Um, Melissa: Brings out Brett: I– So I have all this, I have all this extra weight and I had a lot of trouble with belts. A, belts hurt ’cause they dig into my, my gut, and they don’t really work. I, every, every time I stood up, my butt crack showed and I had to like wiggle my pants up. And then I I tried a pair of suspenders and it was like a l- a switch had been flipped. All of a sudden my pants just stayed up without any constriction around my waist, just like they just stayed with me wherever I went. And now I can, [00:18:00] I can tuck my shirts in and it actually looks kinda cool when you got the suspenders look going on. Which means, so like for a long time I only wore one brand of shirt, um, and because they, it was, it fit my belly and it was long enough and like it wasn’t, wasn’t baggy around the top and didn’t hang off my belly like a muumuu. Melissa: Mm-hmm, Brett: And like, so I, I, I only wore this brand of shirt and I own like 15 of them, and I would just cycle through Melissa: dresses, they’re just your Walmart $10 cotton tank dress. Love it. Brett: Yeah. But now that I can tuck my shirts in and feel okay about it, I can buy those extra large nerd shirts, ones with funny slogans and stuff on them. And normally those would hang straight down off my belly, and I hate the way that looks. But now I can tuck those in, which means I can get back to wearing funny, [00:19:00] ironic T-shirts, and it, it’s like opening up a whole new world of possibilities Melissa: That is a bonus for mental health. Brett: every day now I put on my suspenders and it makes me happy. Um, Melissa: wonderful. It’s almost like a, like a mobility aid. Brett: Kinda, yeah. Melissa: yeah. Brett: of, I– So I, I have a monopod, um, like a tripod that folds up into a walking stick, and it’s nice and light and it is an adjustable height ’cause it’s designed to be used as a camera tripod. Um, and I’ve started walking with it Melissa: yeah. kinda like you’re Brett: I c- yeah. Yeah. Like one of my fat friends has s- literal like ski poles. They’re like half height ski poles and they walk with them and it helps them a ton, and I Melissa: Yeah, hikers use those. Brett: try that out. But a walking stick [00:20:00] really does help with my stenosis, but I can still, even with a stick, I can only walk for about five minutes, which is about .3, Melissa: Yeah. Brett: 3, .3 miles. Um, and then I have to stop and sit, and it’s been a real pain, literally. Mobility And Home Hacks Melissa: And is standing difficult, too? Brett: standing is worse than walking. Melissa: thing, yeah. Standing’s worse. Brett: Yeah. Like if I am in the kitchen and I’m at the stove cooking, before the onions start to brown, I have to sit Melissa: Yeah. Yep. Brett: Uh, so we now have a stool in our kitchen, Melissa: Do you have one in the shower? Brett: yes. Well, our shower, our shower has a nice, like the back of the tub is a seat. Melissa: Oh, okay. Yeah. Brett: I don’t know if this house was designed by old people or not, but, um, but it’s certainly everything is relatively [00:21:00] accessible in that way. Um, but the stool in the kitchen means I can cook dinner. Emptying the dishwasher is the worst for me. That just like bending over, picking stuff up, and then just moving back and forth, like the five feet across our kitchen. My– I, it takes me three stops, three rests to get a dishwasher emptied. Um, and then I’m kind of ruined after that. I hate it. And I hate that I Melissa: stress mat? Brett: What’s that? Oh, you mean Melissa: mat to stand on? Gotta get, gotta Brett: think that would help? Melissa: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I have Brett: used to have one Melissa: and one in front of the kitchen, and I don’t even, I don’t even, do the cooking. Brett: Ha. I used to, I used to have one of those in front of the stove when I w- when I didn’t have pain, but just because I was really getting into cooking and I was spending a lot of time, and I was starting to feel it in my knees. Um, yeah, maybe I should do Melissa: I think it’s a fatigue [00:22:00] mat, I think they call it. Brett: Yeah. Melissa: Yeah, Brett: That sounds Melissa: plus they look cool if you get little designs on them and stuff. Yeah. Oh, we could spend the day talking about just mobility aids and ergonomics and all that kind of stuff. Melissa Health Update Brett: Well, it’s your turn. Talk about whatever you like. Melissa: Yeah, you give me some ideas to talk about. Um, yeah, I struggle with a lot of the same things that you do. Um, I’m always like kinda comparing notes every time you post something. I’m like, "Oh No, ‘Cause you talked about Have you … You haven’t started the injections yet, have you? Brett: No, and they just delayed those. I don’t get them until like June 20th or something. Melissa: nervous about those for you, because I’ve had those and I’ve decided to just swear off them, so I’ll just kinda give you just a heads-up. I mean, it does raise your blood sugar, so that’s not great, and, um, it can give you the roid rage, kinda make you angry, so that’s something to watch out for, and more weight gain, so …But it’s like one of those things where you just have to kinda try [00:23:00] it and see if it works, because if it does work, then you could be more mobile and then maybe drop a few pounds and get some of that weight off of your spine. But if it doesn’t work, just know that that can happen, Brett: my doctor did not mention any of those side effects, so good to Melissa: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s the chronic life, so that’s, that’s what, that’s what, uh, affects my mental health, so I’m, I’m really good at faking it. I am actually … I will say I’m actually feeling a little bit more even. ADHD Meds And Mutations Melissa: I’m on, uh … I love when you talk about different prescriptions and stuff. Uh, I just mentioned, so I’m taking Adderall. That is, ugh, it’s a mixed bag. Um, I wanted to ask you about Vyvanse, cause that’s the next thing for me, but it’s, like, super expensive, so I’m trying to make Adderall work as best I can, but I’m, I’m in the process of playing with the dosage. But I think she told me, like, the highest was 30. The thing is, uh, I’ve had genetic testing done, and [00:24:00] I have this condit- not a condition, but it’s a I’m a mutant. It’s a genetic mutation called, it’s, it’s just initials. It’s MTHFR, lovingly known as Brett: you process your, your, chemicals twice as … fast. I have Melissa: Yes, faster processing in the liver. So that’s when she told me, ’cause she started, uh, me out on methylphenidate, and I was like, “Well, what about Adderall?” Because it, I see it work for my kids, you know? The kids are chip off the old block, right? And so I’ve had them tested too, and all three of us are positive for that. It’s lovelin- lovingly known as the motherfucker gene mutation. Um, yeah, so, and it is. It’s, it’s quite a bitch, um, ’cause it causes a whole bunch of other problems. And of course, we’ve talked about Ehlers-Danlos, so I have, uh, hypermobile Eh- Ehlers-Danlos. I’m having a hard time … I’m just having a hard time with that in general, mental health wise, because there’s just not enough awareness about it, enough people, and doctors, doctors and nurses. And you know, I’ll, I’ll say I wanna, I would love to be able to get [00:25:00] to a point where I can just say, “I have H-E-D-S,” or heads or what- however they’re gonna pronounce it, and, like, somebody know what that is when I go in for an appointment. But I still have to explain it, you know? And then that, that cuts into my time. ‘Cause they only … When you’re, when you’re our age, they only give you, like, 15 minutes, if that. When you’re much older, ’cause I’ve had to take, I’ve had to take family members to the doctor, they get a whole lot more time. But, uh, you know, it’s like, "Oh, you’re, you’re too young to be this sick. You’re too young to be this old," Brett: Right. Yeah. Curious Doctors Matter Brett: Um, I did– I found that doctor for me that knew exactly what all those acronyms meant, knew exactly, like, not only did they know what POTS was, they knew like seven different kinds of POTS and what tests to use to narrow it down. And then she got called up to National Guard Melissa: Oh, I wondered, I wondered, what happened to that doctor, ’cause it sounded so Brett: I waited. I was on a, I was on– I w- I had an appointment scheduled that was gonna be six months from the time she [00:26:00] left. Um, and I had it scheduled, and it was on July 7th. And then I got a letter in the mail saying that her Guard duty had been extended, and now I can’t see her again until September. And, like, I’ve, I’ve tried seeing other doctors that work with her, but none of them have the knowledge she has, and it was such a relief Melissa: Is this the curious one? Okay. I always think about you whenever I’m either looking for a provider or in the, in the midst of, of getting, you know, shuffled around to a new provider. I’m like, “I hope they’re curious,” ’cause that made– that meant so much to me when you explained about how a doctor needs to be curious. I’m like, “That’s what I need.” I need somebody… Or even just my therapist. I have a new, a new therapist that I see, and she’s really curious, and I really, really like that about her. That’s something that helps with mental health, is when somebody’s curious, ’cause I’m Brett: it goes h- it goes hand in hand with credulousness. Like, [00:27:00] first they have to be willing to believe you, and like, especially when it comes to invisible issues like EDS. Like, you have to be willing to believe a person and then be curious enough to look for answers. Like, the first step is believing, and the second step is curiosity. Melissa: Yes. I’ve already had my patient record marked as… Have you ever heard this one? Worried well. Brett: No. Melissa: I looked it up. It’s basically hypochondriac. Brett: Yeah, that’s what I was gonna guess. That Melissa: Yep. I actually– I was proud of myself because I actually did confront the doctor about it and I said, “What does this mean?” I said, “I, I looked it up and it kinda concerns me ’cause it makes me look like a hypochondriac.” And she said, "Oh, no, no, that’s just a, a code that we use when we don’t have something else to assign to it so that insurance will pay." Bullshit. Brett: Yeah, right? I feel like that’s exactly the kind of [00:28:00] thing insurance doesn’t pay. Melissa: Mm-hmm. so Vyvanse Vs Adderall Brett: what do you wanna know about Vyvanse? Melissa: Um, a- and I know it’s different for everybody, but I just kinda wondered what your take was on it. Um, how– can you compare it to Adderall at all for me, Brett: Yeah. Melissa: no comparison? Brett: it’s basically a non-abusable, I would call it lower lying version of, of Adderall. Like, it’s in the same family of stimulant as Adderall, but it can’t– It isn’t processed or it’s… I don’t remember how the mechanics of it work, but you can’t snort it basically. Like, it doesn’t, it doesn’t do anything Melissa: Which I wouldn’t wanna do anyway ’cause there’s nothing up here. Brett: Sure. Sure. And then, yeah, I’m not suggesting that was gonna be a problem for you. Um, but it’s also, like, it’s way, um, for me anyway, it’s way calmer. [00:29:00] Um, and there are people that say it doesn’t do anything at all. Um, especially a lot of people, a lot of people say the generic version doesn’t do anything, um, and that the name brand version does, but I haven’t found that to be true. Like the generic, which you’re correct, still costs like 200 bucks a month, um, for the generic. Um, but it is– It’s not my favorite. Melissa: I wondered why– what made you stop taking it. Did it just not work for you? Brett: No, I still take Vyvanse. Um, yeah. Um, I used to take, um, Focalin, which I loved. Melissa: That really worked for my kiddo, yep. Brett: but it also triggered my mania, Melissa: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Brett: so I was always walking this line of like, do I wanna be super productive and manic with like weeks of depression in between, [00:30:00] or do I just wanna be somewhat productive and stable? Um, which is why I’ve stuck with Vyvanse, and my doctor loves it enough for me that she won’t, she won’t prescribe anything else for me at this point. Like, I’ve asked about switching. I’ve asked about moving back to Adderall and things like that, but, Melissa: It seems like you’re, like you’re kinda on an evening out. Brett: Yeah, I haven’t had a manic episode for a couple years now. Tracking Mood With Data Melissa: Do you track it? Do you– Like, have you ever seen those– I keep seeing these ads for it ’cause, you know, the algorithm feeds us the stuff for wearables that are, um, called– I think it’s called Visible, so it makes your symptoms more visible instead of invisible. Like, do you track it? Do you Have you nerded out on your own data? Brett: like my mania and depression? Melissa: Yeah, like do you track it and look at graphs or anything like that to Brett: See, I’ve never had to use an external tool because I can just look at GitHub contribution graphs, and I can look at [00:31:00] my RSS feed, and I can see exactly, like for a period of like eight years, I can pinpoint exactly where my manic episodes were, um, because that data is historically preserved out there on the internet for all to see. Um, it’s, yeah, it’s– Well, and that’s, like I built tools that gathered that, those various sources of data. Um, and then there was a, a tool called, um, I forget. Melissa: cool, though? Hmm. We’ll think Brett: But it could pull, it could pull in all that data. Um, Bell Beth Cooper, Hello Code, I can’t remember the name of the app. Melissa: Yeah, it’ll come to you eventually. Brett: sure. Uh, but it could pull in like your GitHub, uh, commits along with like what the weather was at the time, how many songs you listened to that Melissa: Oh, day one sorta does that, yeah. Brett: Does it now? Melissa: A little bit, yeah, your locations, [00:32:00] um, if you turn on some of those things. Like not– I don’t think it does the music and things like that, but Brett: I haven’t used it for a while. I haven’t used it for a Melissa: I was gonna switch to the journal app. I was actually really… I held off on upgrading to Tahoe for the longest time, but that one kept nagging at me ’cause I thought, oh, you know, maybe. I mean, as much as I love Day One, I, I thought about, I thought about actually switching over, but no. I tried it. I’m, I’m gonna stick with Day One. Brett: Cool. All right. Cane And Somatic Therapy Brett: Um, so did you have, did you have more to add to your Melissa: Oh, I was gonna, I was gonna add on to what you were talking about with the suspenders. I did start… I think you probably… Well, yeah, you commented on it. Um, I started using a cane, and that I have mixed feelings about that. Um, I should have brought it in here so I could show you. I’ll show you later, ’cause, uh, anyway, it’s, it’s purple. I did get a pimp cane. That’s what my husband calls it. I thought, damn it, if I’m gonna use, like, a cane, then it’s gonna be [00:33:00] purple, and I’m gonna like looking at it, as much as I hate to use it, so. So I’ve been trying to use it. I… What you were talking about with, uh, with finding a curious doctor, I do have new physical therapist, um, so I’m really happy about that. Same kind of thing where she’s super booked. I think that’s just how it is. Like, the really good ones, they’re good, and, you know, it shows because it’s, it’s hard to get in to see them. So yeah. So I’m, I’m looking forward to that. We’re gonna be doing… Have you heard of somatic therapy? Brett: Yeah. Melissa: Yeah. So ha- have you tried it? Do, do you like it? Okay. That’s, that’s what I’m embarking on. Brett: I actually have a friend who teaches classes in it. Melissa: Oh, Al probably knows about that. Brett: y- yeah, Melissa: Yeah, I’ll, I’ll Brett: and it is, it is amazing how hard just doing things, doing motions you’re used to, but doing them very slowly and intentionally. It is like you– Just like, Just like, doing y- like a clamshell where you drop your knee, you’re [00:34:00] on your back and you drop your knee down to the side and bring it back up. Like that motion, most of us, even infirmed people can do that okay. You try to take… You try to do that and take like five breaths in each direction, and you’ll start shaking. It’s very Melissa: Ah, uh-huh. Yep. Brett: Yeah, but it’s good. Like it’s g- it really retrains your muscles. It really, it strengthens, retrains, and helps with, uh, finer motor control. Melissa: Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, I, I’m, I’m a little bit on the skeptical end of it, so that’s why I’m, I’m glad that, that you, you vouch for it too. It’s like I know that it works, but I just… I guess I wanna understand the science of it a little bit more. Like, for example, I’ve tried, uh, acupuncture, and I just didn’t feel like it did, did anything for me. I think you have to be, like, a believer, and I just Brett: think so. Melissa: I, I, I even did that on purpose knowing that I kinda felt like it wasn’t gonna work. I was like, well, what if I just go into this? ‘Cause, [00:35:00] ’cause I talk to people and they’re like, "Well, you have to believe in it." I’m like, but what if I don’t? I just don’t, you know? I’m, I see it Brett: it’s not medicine if you have to believe in it. Melissa: Yeah. I mean, I see it work for other people. I know there’s, you know, such a thing as placebos and things like that, and I don’t know, it’s, it’s woo-woo and I, I, I like woo-woo stuff. I, it just, it didn’t do anything for me, so… It’s not to say that it doesn’t work for other people, but it just did not work for me, and I, I kind of, I, maybe I just, uh, did that on purpose when I, I try- probably just tripped myself up going into it thinking, well, I just don’t believe it, so if it works, then there must be science behind it. And then, then, I’ll believe. But it didn’t work out, so. So the, I’m a little bit on the fence about the somatic thing, but the, the, the gal that I’m working with is just so, she has EDS herself, and like, like what you were saying, like, she, she knows all about it and she could even, you know, tell me the, the type that she has, and I was like, I met, I met, actually last week I met two zebras in one week. [00:36:00] You, you’re familiar with the, the zebra mascot? If you, uh, the saying goes, if you hear hooves, think horses. But we’re not horses, are we? Yeah, so Yeah, so that’s, that’s our, our Somatics For EDS Melissa: EDS Brett: somatic– somatics you don’t have to believe in for them to work. Melissa: Okay, that is Brett: it’s an actual physical therapy method that trains the finer muscles, um, that surround your larger muscles and, and strengthens those, and it– Yeah, it’s for real. It’s, yeah, it’s not like a… It’s soma- I think, Melissa: w- totally Brett: ’cause I I had the same reaction when someone said somatics, ’cause I think, “Oh, that’s some holistic idea of the body, um, of soma,” and it’s… No, it’s, it’s got legit physical therapy behind it. Melissa: And, Yoga Modifications Melissa: you used to do a lot of yoga too, so that probably makes Brett: I still do. Melissa: Yeah? That’s [00:37:00] wonderful. Brett: it’s gotten really hard. Um, I can’t, I can’t– So I get dizzy Melissa: Yeah. Brett: going from sitting to standing, um, and my back gives out if I am in, like, horse or warrior two for more than a couple minutes. Um, and I can’t do cobras because I have a belly like a nine-month pregnancy. Um, so I have to do, like, prenatal yoga, um, which is actually a thing. Melissa: that’s a good idea. I’m glad you brought that up. I should look Brett: a- and I do chair yoga, um, where I I take the class that everyone else takes, but I modify it to work with… Like, there, there are defined moves that you do with a chair instead of. Instead of doing down dog, you do, like, a 90-degree down dog holding the back of a chair. Um, and you put, like, a knee on the chair to do warrior two, so you’re actually [00:38:00] resting. And Um, and you can do it fully seated too and get at least the arm exercises out of it. So I’ve been trying to maintain, maintain flexibility and some endurance. I’m not doing yoga the way I used to do it, but I am still Melissa: I’ve seen some of your poses. It’s pretty impressive. Brett: Yeah, back in the day. Melissa: W- when you could be upside down. Polycystic Liver Shock Melissa: I should look into that because I, you know, although I’m done having babies, like far done having babies, I have… You probably know about this too, I have polycystic liver disease, which is a really rare type of liver disease, and it’s not fatty liver. Oh my God, I have to keep telling doctors that. That’s the other thing. It’s like, it is not fatty liver. It is not. It- they’re cysts. It’s a totally different thing. I’m basically full of bubbles. So I… But it feels like that’s why I went in to get it. I didn’t actually get that checked. I found it accidentally when I went in for an heart, for a heart CT. That’s when they found it, and for a, a breast MRI, so [00:39:00] both those, those types of scans caught it. The other parts were fine, so my heart’s fine, so that’s a relief. But yeah, so this was a bit of a shock. And so I don’t know exactly what it means moving forward, um, but my entire liver is, like, engulfed in cysts, so. Right? But my blood work is, is fantastic right now, so I’m just gonna keep Brett: That’s good. Melissa: hoping it stays that way. Brett: That’s something. Fatphobia In Healthcare Brett: Um, I I have heard for a long time about, um, doctors being fatphobic and, and always assuming that, um, always assuming that your health i-issue is because you’re fat and not even looking for underlying issues, which has been an interesting experience for me because that really never happened to me. Melissa: Mm. Brett: Um, at least not once I switched to Gundersen from, like, a local clinic. Then I realized that it’s not just being fat that gets you [00:40:00] stigmatized, it’s being a fat woman. Melissa: Mm, I was gonna say try having a uterus and being Brett: yeah. Yeah. Um, like I talked to one of my best friends, April, who he’s, has been on Melissa: by, women doctors. Brett: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, that’s what April tells me. She tells me all these horror stories. Even after finding care she trusted, she still has to deal with people saying, “Well, if you just lost some weight.” Like, she’s been fat her whole life. She’s in better shape than most skinny people Melissa: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Brett: I mean, she does sit-ups with 50-pound plates and does, like, five, 10 miles at a time on her, like, on her bike and, like, she’s in great shape and still has to walk with the ski poles, and she’s getting her second knee replaced this week. And, like, it, it’s just infuriating to hear the way that doctors dismiss Melissa: You know what the problem is, Brett? Brett: goes through [00:41:00] when Pole Dancing Reality Check Melissa: Not enough doctors have watched fat pole dancers. That is the problem right there. They need more education. Brett: Um, yeah. There’s, there are a couple of, um, queer burlesque shows Melissa: shows, yes. Brett: in my area that almost always include a plus-size pole dance, and it is amazing to Melissa: Oh, it’s mesmerizing. It should be an Olympic sport. Remind me to send you the, the link to, unless you’ve already seen it, have you seen the Deadpool pole dancer? Brett: No, I don’t think Melissa: you are in for a treat. We might just have to put that in the show notes, but I don’t know, I don’t know if your listeners are that, are into that It’s fully clothed, but it’s, there’s even blue Crocs involved. Brett: So this is nobody that you’re seeing on the Melissa: I wondered, yep. I wondered, yeah. Aw, he looks so soft. Mm. Mechanical Keyboard ASMR Brett: So you’ve [00:42:00] gotten really into mechanical keyboards. Melissa: have, I have. In fact, uh, I was gonna, I was gonna see how this might sound, but I, I brought my little box of key caps to show you so that I could say, welcome to my ASMR channel. Brett: That would… is is that a thing? I bet there are ASMR, like, key switch testing. Melissa: yeah, yeah. I’ve run across a couple of videos where, you know, they’ll have a hashtag ASMR in there, and that’s, that’s what it is. Do you experience ASMR yourself? Brett: No. Melissa: No? So when you listen to those videos you don’t get like the s- the tickling of the spine and stuff? Brett: No. Melissa: I do. It actually, it goes, it… I forget. I always forget what the acronym stands for, but it, you know, has something to do with the meridian. So if you can i- imagine your brain like split in half, and I feel it right on this side. It goes, it goes like the, down the back of my head, behind my ear, and down into my shoulder. It [00:43:00] is the funkiest feeling, and I love it. I love it so much. Even when we were talking about animals in the, in the beginning and I even had a cat that would come and just like kind of lick my ear and, oh, I just, I love that. Most people cannot stand that sound. They have the opposite condition where they can’t handle somebody chewing gum. My grandfather had that. Um, some, some kinda, it ends in a tonia. Misatonia or something like that, um, where… I don’t know. Do you have any of those like sound sensory issues? I have a lot of Brett: really don’t. I’m very, I’m very, like, sound Like, I like loud, heavy music. Like, that does something for my psyche. Um, but general sounds, they neither bo-bother me nor stimulate me. Melissa: imagine what that’s like. I just can’t. I’m So bothered, and my kids too, and you know, ugh, God, Brett: So El Melissa: has been problematic. Brett: El is, El is, definitely sensitive to sound, um, in a way that Like, even my [00:44:00] mechanical keyboards can’t be, can’t be on the same floor of the house as Elle. We pretty much live in silence, and that’s fine for me most of the time because, like, it just doesn’t affect me either way. So, like, keeping things quiet is easy, and I focus well in silence. And then when Elle’s gone, I blast my music, and w- when I’m in the car, I blast my music, and then the rest of the time I live in the quiet place. Melissa: Mm-hmm. In The Quiet Place. Brett: Yeah. Melissa: Yeah, we have- something a little similar, but m- my husband and I have, uh… We have our his and hers kind of setup here in, in the, in our den, in our inner study. So he’s got his side and I’ve got my side. So we’re together, and he does a lot of grading papers, and he’s really good about putting his, his earbuds in and just tuning the whole world out. He’s… It’s fascinating to watch that man just [00:45:00] execute. I mean, I just am so envious of people who can just execute. But the, the, the, yeah, the sensory, it’s all about the sensory stuff for me when it comes to keyboards. I actually thought about… I don’t know how popular it would be, but I also thought about making a podcast, a video podcast, that would highlight the intersection of nail art and mechanical keyboards. Because I’ll tell you, that’s actually what… I’ve always loved mechanical keyboards, but yeah, the, the one that I had, someone had given me a, a Matias, and oh, it’s, it’s so loud, but it’s like high-pitched. It’s kinda sharp. And it was even kind of annoying to me after a while. And then it does not, it’s not a mechanical keyboard in that you can’t pull the switches out, so you’re kinda stuck with what you got. Like, you might be able to change the key caps if you could find them, but couldn’t change the switches. And something happened to the S key, and I was like, “All right, it’s over,” so. But I can’t get rid of them either, so one of these days I wanna have like a display of, of keyboards. [00:46:00] Nail Art And Picking Melissa: But what got me, what got me into saying, “Okay, I’m finally, I’m just gonna invest in a keyboard because it’s ergonomically important to me,” is I have… And I can’t pronounce it, so I’m not even gonna try, but there’s a condition, and it’s a self-diagnosed thing. But I, I am a picker. I pick my skin a lot. Um, I think it’s called derma something Anyway, so I wasn’t gonna try to pronounce it. But, uh, I’ve always had that condition since I was a kid. I didn’t even know it was a thing. I just thought everybody get, uh, picks. But then during the pande- during the pandemic, it got super bad. Like, I had, I had, um, some panic attacks and, you know, as a lot of probab- people probably did. But it got so bad to the point where I had picked my fingers and they were bleeding and they were throbbing and they were hurting. And I said to one of my kids, I said to my youngest, I said, “Can you just, like, if I, if I’m picking, can you just let me know?” And then I regretted doing that because then he took it on as this, like, full-time job, you know? And it kinda [00:47:00] gave him anxiety, and I thought, “Oh, okay, that, that was a bad thing to do.” So I s- I let him off the hook. I said, “No, you don’t have to tell me anymore.” Um, because, yeah, ev- even if I went to, like, just kinda, like, clean under my nail or something. So it was actually causing a real problem for the family that I was just picking so much. And it’s not just my fingers, it’s, like, other parts of my body. So I thought to myself, “Well, what can I do about this?” And so I started putting fake nail tips on. And I hate to be all, like… I don’t know, I’m not, I try not to be, like, a very vain person, but I really started kinda falling into the nail art side of things, and I, I just recently learned how to do gel and work with, um, uh, what’s it called? Uh, not resin. So I… Oh, that’s another ASMR thing. Do you like to watch resin pours? Brett: I do, actually, yes. Melissa: that’s… Okay, so if you like resin pours, if you like to watch the viscosity and the way the, the chemicals, like, form together and when they, when they mix colors in and stuff, [00:48:00] that’s what it’s like with nail art but on more of, like, a macro level because it’s, you know, you’re working with small stuff. Like, just, just recently I learned how to do… So I’m showing Brett this on, on camera, but I recently learned how to do the kind of nail polish that you take a magnet and you run the magnet along it, and it makes this, like, a cat’s eye. Brett: Yeah, that’s cool. Melissa: I love it. So, so that, so combining nail art then, and I thought, “Well, now I’ve got these long nails,” but all of my keyboards have been these flat, really low-profile keyboards. And, you know, I just, I started to dread it. So then I was kinda caught between a crossroads. Like, either I leave nails off and I can type really, really fast and have high accuracy with no nails, but then as soon as, as soon as I get, like, a little snag or something, then I start picking and then it’s just, it’s all over then. Or I try to find a way to work with these nails. So that’s what I started thinking, “Well, maybe if I had higher keys.” And so then I just, yeah, rabbit hole. [00:49:00] Went down the rabbit hole, and I’ve, I’ve just kinda been there ever since. And, uh, it really, I think, uh… Let’s see. How long ago did this start? It’s only been about maybe like six months or something like that, so. Keyboard Layout Rabbit Hole Melissa: But in that time so I’ve started, um, building a collection of switches. So I’ve been really interested in both the key caps and the switches. Um, I’ve got my baseboards. I like my Royal Kludge the best. This is… I’m gonna show Brett my Royal Kludge. So, so this is what it’s looking like right now. Brett: Yeah. Melissa: It is very purpley. Um, I did post some pictures. I can… I don’t know if you do pictures in show notes, but I could take some pictures for you It’s got a knob. It’s got, um… Let me see if I can do it real Brett: Do you use the knob. I have a couple keyboards with knobs and even a joystick, and I never actually use them Melissa: Good question. Um, I, I use it, I try to use it for volume at [00:50:00] times, and that’s probably what I use it for the most. But this one does have a… Let’s see if I can get this into focus here, backwards and upside down. It’s gonna be upside down, but you see how you can put, you can put your logo Brett: Oh, yeah. Nice. Melissa: got my The Mac Mommy little logo on there. Otherwise, it gives you the time in military format, so that’s kind of handy to have. Um, but yeah, it’s… To be honest, I, I love the, I love this Royal Kludge because it’s nice and heavy, and I love the form factor. It’s got a number pad, um, because I’m, because I am a grown-ass adult and I need a number pad. Um, but it’s nice and heavy. It doesn’t, it doesn’t move around my desk a lot. I kind of have to type, like, kind of crooked, ’cause that’s just the way my neck goes to the wrong way and stuff like that. So I like being able to fit it on my desk. I have a, I had a larger one made by Red, uh, what is it? Redragon. This is the one that I started [00:51:00] out with. Gonna make lots of noise here. But as you can see, this one is way bigger. And it was, as much as I liked it, I mean, I fell in love with it, but what was happening was my accuracy was, like, really thrown off because I fe- I kept feeling like it just needs to be, like, a couple centimeters to the right or a couple centimeters to the left. It just wasn’t centered very well. So this one, my husband gets all the hand-me-downs, so that one went over onto his desk. Uh, and then I also have a baby keyboard here, and this is another Redragon. This is my little mini one. Brett: that’s, that’s the kind of keyboard I mostly use, like a 70% keyboard. Melissa: Yeah, I think this one’s even 60. Um… Brett: My– The one I’m using right now is, uh, 60. There’s no, there’s no function row, there’s no arrow, there’s no keypad or, like, arrow pad. Um, Melissa: No [00:52:00] arrows? How do you live without arrows? Oh, do you, you mapped your keys to something Brett: so it looks like this, Melissa: nice. I love the Brett: that the, the space bar is split in two. Yeah, my, my, my partner says it looks like, uh, gay ’80s. It’s all pink and blue and purple. Um, but the, the space bar is split, and the right half of mine functions as something called a mod key, and when I hold that down, then my I, J, K, and L keys become arrow keys. Melissa: Oh, wow. Brett: once you get used to it, you never have to take your hand off the home row. Melissa: Oh my God, that must be amazing. Brett: It– Yeah, once you get used to it, it, it’s so… Like, g- moving to a keyboard that doesn’t have that is kind of tortuous. On my MacBook Pro, I have remapped it using Karabiner so that Melissa: [00:53:00] That’s what I’m using. Brett: if I hold, the semicolon down with my pinky, then H-I-J-K-L become, Melissa: Oh, nice. Brett: become arrow keys, so I still don’t have to move my hand all the way down and to the right. Like, that’s such a inefficient movement that then I have to, like… Because I don’t have great feeling in my fingers, so finding, on a low-profile keyboard, finding the, the homing buttons again Melissa: Oh, do you use the humming buttons? See, that’s the thing, I was never taught that. I mean, I took like a ty- I took like a typewriting class back in high school, and I just didn’t like it. I, I just taught myself. I just… I’m an autodidact that way, so I just taught myself. Brett: my dad, back in 1984, we had a typing program on our PCjr, and I Melissa: It wasn’t Mavis Beacon, was it? Brett: remember. I don’t remember. All I know is, like, It taught you touch typing, and it would give you [00:54:00] these lessons, and you would basically just mirror what was on screen. And at the age of seven, I was typing at about 68 words per minute on an, on an old IBM PCjr keyboard. Um, got a lot faster through high school and everything. But yeah, I was, I was, from day one, I was raised to be a touch typist, and, and I took all the classes they had in school. Melissa: But you still touch Brett: labs. Yeah. Melissa: Uh-huh, yeah. So you don’t do the home rows. Brett: No, that is touch Melissa: Oh, touch typing, so you do feel… for the bumps. Brett: Yeah, I feel for the bumps, and then I just, like, my f- my key, my fingers never really leave the Melissa: Oh, yeah. See, I wish I could do Brett: centered home row. Yeah. It’s, it, it’s good. Um, Melissa: And you’re using the split, so my gosh. Brett: What– You get used to that too. Um, like, [00:55:00] I can’t do it with the split far apart. I’ve seen people use, like, splits, like, way out to the sides, and I can’t, my, my brain doesn’t do that. Like, my hands have to be within, like, six inches of each other. Melissa: I always thought, it would be so cool to have something where you could have it, like, raised up like this, right? And use your hands sideways. Brett: Yeah. Well, that’s I mean, that’s essentially, I have, on the bottom of this keyboard, I have these risers. Melissa: Oh, uh-huh. Oh, Brett: So it sits, right now I have it at about a 45-degree tent, tent, tent. Um, but it can go up to more like an 80-degree tent, where you’re actually Melissa: Wow. Brett: uh, almost like you’re clapping, you’re typing. Um, I don’t Melissa: of that. I have a, a, handshake mouse. Brett: Vertical mouse. Melissa: You like… Is that what you have for a mouse too? Brett: no, I, I love Melissa: Trackballs. Oh, trackpads. Oh, okay. Brett: Apple’s Magic Trackpad changed my life. I’ve never used– I’ve never gone back to a [00:56:00] mouse since the first Magic Trackpad came out. Melissa: So you’re all about the gestures then? Brett: yeah, Melissa: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s great. Brett: Bet- bet- better touch tool for the win. Melissa: You know what it is for me, is because of the type of work that I do, and this is very much true for both of us, you do these things because of the type of work that you do. The type of work that I do, I’m in everybody’s homes, so I have to ty- I have to be able to type and use their mouse and, I mean, it’s actually a very dirty job. So I keep hand wipes with me everywhere. Um, that, that was why during the pandemic I was like, “I am not coming to your house and I am not touching the stuff that you just picked your nose and…” Yeah, mm-mm. But, so, so i- it’s been kind of keeping me almost like a purist in a way as far as keyboards have gone all these years. I, I finally just kind of let go and embraced this recently, th- which is why I’m so excited and why I’m just kind of nerding out on it, because when, when I worked [00:57:00] in, like, I’ll call it the industry, um, I got my f- my start in prepress. So I worked in prepress, I was a typesetter, and we had… That’s what I kind of miss. We had the old clunky beige keyboards, and I had my muscle memory such that I think my o- my Option key would have, like, the indentation of my nail on it. You know? ‘Cause I had, just like you have, keys that are programmed. I could… I was a Quark queen. I don’t know if you’re familiar with QuarkXPress? Brett: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was a graphic designer. I I know Quark. Melissa: Yeah, I loved it. I was… And, and I used it back in the OS 9 days, OS 7 really, is when I started out. Uh, I did not like the OS X vers- OS 10 version of Quark. Did not like it at all. Brett: No, but that’s Melissa: it was slow. Brett: Adobe came out with, what was, what was Adobe’s… InDesign. Yeah. By the time I had started, by the time I had started my own ad agency, we were all InDesign. Melissa: Oh, [00:58:00] nice. Okay. I mean, it was a Brett: and none of the, none of the print shops expected Quark files Melissa: Yeah. Oh, it was so expensive. I remember I had to buy it when I was in college, and I remember it cost, like, $800. I’m probably still paying for that, damn it, in interest. Yeah, so that, that’s how I got my start originally, and that’s how I was doing… I, I went to… So I have, I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts. I went to college in order to be a designer. I wanted to be a designer designer, and that’s what I, what I thought I was good at and thought that I liked doing, ’cause, you know, “Oh, you’re a girl. Go to art school. You like to draw.” You know? I’m always bitter about that because I really wish that I would’ve been able to go… I mean, this was, you know… I’m, I’m 51, so this was back in the day where girls, girls don’t do computers and girls don’t do coding. G- girls don’t do computer science. They didn’t even call it computer science. They didn’t even call it graphic design back then. It was commercial art. Um, so I studied that and, you know, I liked it ’cause I thought, “Well, this is what I could, I could take my art and make [00:59:00] a living into it.” And then fast-forward, um, I just started to fall in love with the technical troubleshooting side of things. So as, as good as I was at the technical typesetting and the technical, like, putting prepress things together, you know, um, uh, key sheets and s- you know, things like that. Do you remember, was there, uh, did you ever use a program called Quick Keys? That was one of the ones Brett: familiar. Melissa: you could map your own keys to things. So w- when I was in prepress and doing typesetting, I used that program and I, I mapped all my keys, and I had all these quick keys and stuff so I could go really, really fast, you know? So when they wanted something done fast, they gave it to me, and I could just fly through documents with this. But then as people learned that I was good at this kind of stuff and troubleshooting, they’re like, “Oh, hey, Roger needs, you know, has a problem. Can you go help him?” So I’d go over to his cubicle, I sit down, and he’s got nothing. You know, he’s got [01:00:00] no quick keys, no nothing, and you just kinda get lost because your muscle memory just adapts to it. And I couldn’t help people the way… And, and that was what it was about for me. I really liked more helping people and troubleshooting and the technology side of things than the actual design process. So I kind of went to the other side with it. And so I just kind of, like, vowed that, okay, I’m not gonna do any kind of, like, customization on my own workstation because then I’ll, my, my muscle memory will map to it, and then when I go to sit down to help somebody else, I won’t… You know, I’ll be so much in my own world that I won’t be able to help them. And so I just kind of, like, remained a, a pu

Java 26 est là, GraalVM cartonne chez Trivago (43 à 12 réplicas !), OpenJDK interdit le code généré par LLM, Spring et Quarkus enchaînent les releases. Côté IA : ADK 1.0, A2A, Lyria 3 chante (mal ?), Yann LeCun lance Ami Labs et ses World Models. Mythos d'Anthropic fait trembler la sécu, Claude Code a leaké son source, et les git worktrees envahissent vos terminaux. Bonus : la mort annoncée de l'IDE, vagues de licenciement chez Oracle et Block, et nos voix toutes clonées. Bon week-ends de mai ! Enregistré le 7 mai 2026 Téléchargement de l'épisode LesCastCodeurs-Episode-340.mp3 ou en vidéo sur YouTube. News Langages Retour d'expérience d'une migration vers graalVM chez Trivago https://medium.com/graalvm/inside-trivagos-graalvm-migration-native-image-for-graphql-at-scale-912bca9df841 La passerelle GraphQL de Trivago (point d'entrée de tout le trafic vers 48 microservices) souffrait de pics de timeout au démarrage JVM Résultats spectaculaires après migration vers GraalVM Native Image : réduction des réplicas de 43 à 12, CPU de 15 à 5 cœurs, images Docker plus légères Obstacles techniques : incompatibilité Log4j → migration vers Logback, remplacement de Mockk par Testcontainers, compilation CI/CD très gourmande Netflix DGS et d'autres librairies manquaient de support GraalVM → l'équipe a contribué des correctifs upstream en open source Approche recommandée : commencer par les services les moins complexes, investir massivement dans les tests automatisés À la 14e migration, le processus était si rodé qu'il allait plus vite que la toute première tentative OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI - https://openjdk.org/legal/ai OpenJDK adopte une politique intérimaire interdisant toute contribution incluant du contenu généré par des LLMs, modèles de diffusion ou systèmes deep-learning Le périmètre est large : code source, texte, images dans les dépôts Git, pull requests GitHub, emails, pages wiki et issues JBS Les contributeurs peuvent utiliser les outils d'IA de manière privée pour comprendre, déboguer et relire le code OpenJDK, mais ne peuvent pas contribuer le contenu généré Trois risques justifient cette politique : surcharge des relecteurs face au code plausible mais incorrect, risques de sûreté/sécurité pour une plateforme critique, et risques de propriété intellectuelle (l'OCA exige que les contributeurs possèdent les droits IP de leurs contributions) Même éditer partiellement du code AI-généré ne le rend pas acceptable à la contribution Oracle, sponsor corporatif d'OpenJDK, travaille sur une politique complète à soumettre au Governing Board GraalVM Native Image et la Closed-World Assumption en Java https://pvs-studio.com/en/blog/posts/java/1357/ Un bon article de rappel du contexte de closed world en Java GraalVM Native Image compile les applications Java en exécutables natifs statiques, sans JVM au runtime. La JVM fonctionne en monde ouvert : les classes sont chargées à la demande, les appels sont des références symboliques résolues dynamiquement. Native Image impose la "closed-world assumption" : tous les chemins d'exécution doivent être connus à la compilation. Les fonctionnalités dynamiques Java (réflexion, proxies, chargement de classes) créent des chemins cachés invisibles à l'analyse statique. C'est pourquoi Native Image exige des fichiers de configuration explicites pour la réflexion, les proxies, les ressources et la FFM API. L'article illustre le problème avec la Foreign Function & Memory API pour appeler printf natif : fonctionne sur JVM, échoue en Native Image sans config. Inclure tout le bytecode accessible serait inutilisable : binaire géant, compilation très lente, et la réflexion nécessite des métadonnées précises. La configuration n'est pas un défaut de conception mais une conséquence logique du passage du dynamique au statique. Java 26 : les nouveautés https://foojay.io/today/java-26-whats-new/ Java est le langage de la JVM, publié tous les 6 mois depuis Java 9 ; Java 26 est une version non-LTS avec 10 JEPs. JEP 500 : protection des champs final modifiés par réflexion profonde, avec des avertissements configurables. JEP 504 : suppression définitive de l'API Applet, plus supportée par les navigateurs. JEP 516 : le cache AOT (Project Leyden) fonctionne désormais avec n'importe quel garbage collector. JEP 517 : support HTTP/3 dans le client HTTP, HTTP/2 reste le défaut mais HTTP/3 est accessible à la demande. JEP 522 : amélioration du débit du GC G1 en réduisant la synchronisation entre threads applicatifs et threads GC. Nouveau support des UUIDv7 via UUID.ofEpochMillis(), naturellement triables et adaptés aux identifiants de bases de données. Process devient AutoCloseable, utilisable dans un try-with-resources. Aucune fonctionnalité en preview n'est graduée en standard ; Structured Concurrency en est à sa 6e preview. Librairies Guillaume a créé une petite librairie Java sans dépendance pour extraire le JSON d'une réponse d'un LLM un peu verbeux https://glaforge.dev/posts/2026/03/22/extracting-json-from-llm-chatter-with-jsonspotter/ Les LLM génèrent souvent du JSON, mais il est parfois entouré de bla-bla et/ou contient des erreurs (ex: commentaires, virgules finales) qui bloquent les parseurs JSON standards. Guillaume a créé une petite librairie légère sans dépendance pour localiser et extraire la structure la plus longue ressemblant à du JSON (même malformé) On peut ensuite passé cette chaîne à un parseur "lénient" (plus tolérant) comme Jackson pour ensuite avoir de bons vieux objets Java fortement typés Librairie dispo sur Maven Central ADK Java sort sa version 1.0 (Agent Development Kit par Google) https://developers.googleblog.com/announcing-adk-for-java-100-building-the-future-of-ai-agents-in-java/ ADK est un framework open source de Google pour créer des agents IA, initialement en Python, maintenant multi-langages (Python, Java, Go, Typescript). Nouvelles fonctionnalités majeures : Outils puissants : GoogleMapsTool, UrlContextTool, ContainerCodeExecutor, VertexAiCodeExecutor, abstraction ComputerUseTool. Architecture de plugins centralisée : Nouveau conteneur App pour gérer les Plugins à l'échelle de l'application (ex: LoggingPlugin, GlobalInstructionPlugin). Context engineering amélioré : Compaction d'événements pour gérer la taille des fenêtres de contexte (résumé et rétention). Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) : Supporte les workflows ToolConfirmation pour approbation humaine des actions d'agent. Services de session et de mémoire : Contrats clairs pour la gestion de l'état (InMemory, VertexAI, Firestore) et la mémoire à long terme. Support Agent2Agent (A2A) : Collaboration native entre agents distants de différents frameworks via le protocole A2A. Dans cet autre article, Guillaume partage comment il a développé l'application Comic Trip montrée dans la vidéo YouTube et qui utilise ADK 1.0 https://glaforge.dev/posts/2026/03/30/building-my-comic-trip-agent-with-adk-java-1-0/ Nouvelle version du SDK Java pour Agent2Agent Protocol, avec le support de la version 1.0 de la spécification https://medium.com/google-cloud/a2a-java-sdk-1-0-0-beta1-released-e83c414b34cc Alignement avec la version 1.0 de la spécification Nouveau groupId org.a2aproject.sdk et package org.a2aproject.sdk Protocoles de transport : support complet et équivalent pour JSON-RPC, gRPC et HTTP+JSON/REST. Gestion des erreurs : introduction de codes d'erreur et détails structurés pour une meilleure observabilité. Optimisation HTTP : ajout d'en-têtes de cache pour les métadonnées des agents (Agent Card). Flexibilité du client HTTP : support par défaut du JDK HttpClient, avec option Vert.x pour les environnements Quarkus. Nouvelles fonctionnalités techniques : méthode DataPart.fromJson() pour la création simplifiée d'objets depuis du JSON brut. Prochaines étapes (v1.0.0.GA) : support simultané des versions 1.0.0 et 0.3.0 du protocole pour assurer l'interopérabilité. JPA 4.0 Milestone 2 : nouvelles fonctionnalités pour Jakarta Persistence https://in.relation.to/2026/04/23/JPA-4-M2/ Jakarta Persistence (JPA) est la spécification standard Java pour le mapping objet-relationnel (ORM), implémentée notamment par Hibernate. JPA 4.0 M2 est la deuxième milestone de la prochaine version majeure de la spécification, annoncée par Gavin King. Construction de requêtes Criteria à partir de chaînes JPQL, offrant plus de flexibilité dans la composition dynamique des requêtes. Nouveaux types d'expressions spécialisés (TextExpression, NumericExpression) pour simplifier l'écriture des requêtes Criteria. Nouvelle interface FetchOption pour contrôler explicitement la stratégie de chargement des associations, dont un BatchSize intégré. Nouvelle annotation @EntityListener qui découple les classes entités de leurs listeners, supprimant les dépendances à la compilation. Les listeners peuvent cibler plusieurs types de callbacks et s'appliquer globalement à toute l'unité de persistance. Introduction de FlushModeType.EXPLICIT et QueryFlushMode pour un contrôle plus fin de la synchronisation avec la base de données. La méta-annotation @Discoverable permet de placer des annotations comme @NamedQuery sur n'importe quelle classe ou interface. Améliorations du DDL via @Index amélioré et clarifications de la spécification via la javadoc. Quarkus 3.35 : tree-shaking, PGO et AOT Semeru https://quarkus.io/blog/quarkus-3-35-released/ Quarkus est un framework Java cloud-natif optimisé pour GraalVM et HotSpot, conçu pour les microservices et les environnements conteneurisés. Nouveau JAR tree-shaking expérimental : analyse des dépendances à la compilation pour supprimer les classes inutilisées. Sur le CLI Quarkus, cela supprime plus de 6 000 classes et économise environ 18 Mo (39,5 %). Support du Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) pour les builds natifs via quarkus.native.pgo.enabled=true. Le PGO est une fonctionnalité Oracle GraalVM, non disponible dans la Community Edition. Support de l'AOT IBM Semeru : le démarrage passe de ~380 ms à ~190 ms dans les premiers tests. Nouvelle extension quarkus-reactive-transactions : support de @Transactional pour les méthodes Hibernate Reactive retournant Uni. Configuration CORS dédiée pour l'interface de management, indépendante de l'interface HTTP principale. Les tests n'utilisent plus les System Properties pour la propagation de configuration, facilitant la parallélisation future. Le serializer jackson sans reflection n'est pas le default du aux retours de cas limites, encore du travail This Week in Spring - 21 avril 2026 https://spring.io/blog/2026/04/21/this-week-in-spring-april-21-2026 Spring Framework 6.2.18 et 7.0.7 corrigent trois failles de sécurité : DoS via fichiers multipart WebFlux, empoisonnement de cache de ressources statiques, et DoS sur Windows. Le support open source de Spring Framework 5.3.x et 6.1.x est terminé, la migration est recommandée. Spring Data 2026.0.0-RC1 introduit l'upsert (MERGE/INSERT ON CONFLICT) dans l'API Template de Spring Data Relational. Spring Data ajoute un RedisMessageSendingTemplate pour la cohérence avec les listeners Redis, et une optimisation de réinitialisation de caches en un seul appel. Spring AI introduit une Session API (série Agentic Patterns, partie 7) : architecture event-sourcée pour la mémoire des agents IA. La Session API supporte la compaction turn-safe, l'isolation de sous-agents en parallèle, et la persistence JDBC (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, H2). Elle vise Spring AI 2.1 (novembre 2026) et remplacera à terme l'API ChatMemory. Spring Vault 4.1.0-RC1 et 4.0.2 sont disponibles. Netflix a présenté son usage de Java, Spring Boot et Spring AI dans une vidéo. This Week in Spring - 28 avril 2026 https://spring.io/blog/2026/04/28/this-week-in-spring-april-28-2026 Cette série hebdomadaire de Josh Long compile les nouveautés de l'écosystème Spring : articles, outils, podcasts et annonces de la communauté. Spring Boot 4 introduit un package natif de résilience org.springframework.resilience avec une nouvelle API de retry qui remplace les approches fragiles via Spring Retry ou Resilience4j. L'API retry native de Spring Boot 4 a des noms d'attributs et sémantiques différents des anciennes bibliothèques, rendant les tutoriels pré-2025 obsolètes et sources de bugs silencieux. Le SDK Spring AI pour Amazon Bedrock AgentCore est disponible en GA : il intègre les capacités AgentCore dans Spring AI via annotations et auto-configuration. Le SDK AgentCore gère automatiquement le contrat runtime AgentCore : endpoint /invocations, health check /ping, SSE avec backpressure. Il offre mémoire court terme (sliding window) et long terme (sémantique, préférences, résumé, épisodique), ainsi que des outils pour navigateur et exécution de code en sandbox. Un plugin Maven (Nullability Maven Plugin) simplifie l'intégration de JSpecify et NullAway pour enforcer la null-safety à la compilation dans les projets Java. Le plugin génère automatiquement les fichiers package-info.java par package et configure le compilateur pour traiter les violations de nullabilité comme des erreurs. Josh Long et Dr. Venkat Subramaniam ont co-présenté à Voxxed Days Amsterdam sur "Intelligent Kotlin", avec un épisode de podcast associé. Cloud Amazon S3 Files https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/04/amazon-s3-files/ Amazon S3 Files est un nouveau service donnant un accès système de fichiers direct aux données stockées dans les buckets S3 Basé sur la technologie Amazon EFS, il supprime la barrière entre stockage objet et interface système de fichiers sans dupliquer les données Débit en lecture pouvant atteindre plusieurs téraoctets par seconde ; des milliers de ressources de calcul peuvent y accéder simultanément Les données restent accessibles via les deux interfaces : S3 API classique et système de fichiers standard, sans migration nécessaire Cas d'usage : agents IA pour la persistance de mémoire entre pipelines, équipes ML sans staging, simplification des data lakes Disponible dans 34 régions AWS Data et Intelligence Artificielle Comment générer de la musique et des clips audio en Java avec le modèle Lyria 3 https://glaforge.dev/posts/2026/03/25/generating-music-with-lyria-3-and-the-gemini-interactions-java-sdk/ Génération musicale avec Lyria 3 (DeepMind) et le SDK Java Gemini Interactions. Lyria 3 : modèle d'IA générative pour créer musique avec paroles ou pistes instrumentales. Utilisation via le SDK Java de l'API Gemini, nécessite une clé API Gemini. Deux versions de modèle Lyria 3 : lyria-3-clip-preview : Clips courts (30s), extraits. lyria-3-pro-preview : Chansons complètes (jusqu'à 3 min), structurées. Personnalisation via les prompts : Fournir ses propres paroles ou les faire générer. Contrôler la structure de la chanson ([Intro], [Verse], [Chorus], [Outro]). Générer des morceaux instrumentaux uniquement. Utiliser des images comme source d'inspiration (modèle multimodal). Sortie : Audio (MP3) et texte (paroles/structure) directement, sans décodage complexe. Facilite l'intégration de la génération musicale dans les applications Java. Les world model, la prochaine étape pour les IA https://www.lepoint.fr/sciences-nature/comment-le-commando-de-yann-le-cun-se-prepare-a-ringardiser-les-geants-mondiaux-de-lia-depuis-paris-OZVUWTDYBNE25C6WF44265ZQKE/ Yann LeCun a quitté Meta FAIR pour créer AMI Labs (Advanced Machine Intelligence) basée à Paris Sa thèse : les LLMs ne mèneront pas à l'intelligence générale, la vraie IA doit partir de la compréhension du monde physique AMI Labs a levé 1,03 milliard de dollars en seed (le plus grand seed round de l'histoire européenne) à 3,5 milliards de valorisation Les world models apprennent à prédire et comprendre la réalité physique plutôt qu'à prédire le prochain token d'une séquence Slogan d'AMI : "Real intelligence does not start in language. It starts in the world." Paris comme base stratégique pour challenger la Silicon Valley dans la prochaine rupture de l'IA Debezium 2026 : résultats du sondage communautaire https://debezium.io/blog/2026/04/27/debezium-2026-survey-results/ Debezium est un outil de Change Data Capture (CDC) open source qui capture les modifications de bases de données en temps réel pour les diffuser vers des systèmes comme Kafka. 98,6% des répondants utilisent Debezium activement ou prévoient de le faire dans l'année, avec 91,3% déjà en production. 63,8% des déploiements tournent sur Kubernetes, 60,9% utilisent Kafka Connect auto-géré, et 17,4% restent sur des VMs ou bare metal. Helm charts est l'approche dominante pour la gestion de configuration, souvent combiné avec GitOps, CI/CD, Ansible ou Terraform. PostgreSQL domine les connecteurs utilisés à 69,6%, suivi de MySQL (33,3%), SQL Server (29%) et Oracle (27,5%). Les volumes de changements capturés vont de 1-25 modifications par minute jusqu'à 1-2 millions par minute selon les environnements. Infinispan rejoint l'écosystème OGX comme fournisseur de stockage vectoriel https://infinispan.org/blog/2026/04/17/infinispan-joins-ogx-ecosystem OGX (anciennement Llama Stack) est un serveur API agentique open source pour construire des applications d'IA complètes. OGX compose des fournisseurs d'inférence, des stores vectoriels, des backends de sécurité, des runtimes d'outils et du stockage de fichiers en un seul serveur déployable. OGX se positionne comme une alternative à l'API OpenAI, déployable sur diverses infrastructures et modèles. OGX cible les workflows RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) et les applications agentiques. Infinispan s'y intègre comme fournisseur de vector IO, apportant recherche vectorielle, par mots-clés et hybride. Je n'ai pas entendu parlé de ce renommage, vous le voyez dans vos deploiements ? Outillage cmux un nouveau terminal basé sur Ghostty spécialisé pour les coding agents https://cmux.com/ Application macOS native construite sur le moteur de rendu Ghostty (libghostty), offrant une accélération GPU pour une fluidité maximale Conçu spécifiquement pour le multitâche et les workflows assistés par IA, avec des onglets verticaux affichant la branche Git, le répertoire et les ports actifs Intègre des notifications qui illuminent les panneaux lorsqu'un agent IA (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) nécessite l'attention de l'utilisateur Propose un navigateur web intégré et scriptable qui peut être affiché en écran scindé à côté du terminal via une API Alternative moderne à tmux, ne nécessitant pas de fichiers de configuration complexes ou de préfixes de touches pour la gestion des vitres et des sessions Supporte nativement tous les agents de codage en ligne de commande et permet l'automatisation via une API socket et une interface CLI dédiée Git Worktree comme un chef https://www.metal3d.org/blog/2026/git-worktree-comme-un-chef/ Article par Patrice Ferlet Git Worktree: Travailler sur plusieurs branches simultanément via des répertoires distincts. Évite git stash ou clones multiples pour le changement de contexte rapide. Méthode "bare" (recommandée): Cloner le dépôt en mode bare (ex: .bare). Lier le dossier racine au dépôt bare via un fichier .git. Configurer le remote tracking pour voir toutes les branches distantes. Ajouter des worktrees pour chaque branche (git worktree add ). Avantages: Économie d'espace, source de vérité unique (un git fetch met tout à jour), hooks/configs partagés, sécurité. Conseils: Ne jamais faire de git checkout à l'intérieur d'un worktree. git fetch --all depuis n'importe quel worktree pour tout mettre à jour. git worktree add --detach pour tester des merges temporaires sans créer de branche. Supprimer: git worktree remove puis git worktree prune. Un script wtree est fourni pour automatiser l'initialisation du setup "bare". Améliore considérablement le workflow. L'IDE meurt et vite https://x.com/jdegoes/status/2036931874057314390?s=46&t=C18cckWlfukmsB_Fx0FfxQ Des leaders techniques prédisent la fin rapide de l'IDE traditionnel, remplacé par des interfaces conversationnelles agentiques Le changement de paradigme : le développeur n'écrit plus des lignes de code mais exprime son intention et supervise des agents autonomes Des outils comme Claude Code, Copilot et Cursor transforment déjà radicalement les workflows de développement quotidiens L'IDE centré sur l'éditeur de code perd sa raison d'être quand l'agent lit, modifie et structure le code de manière autonome La transition est comparable au passage du desktop au mobile : les pratiques établies depuis 30 ans remises en question en quelques mois Le source de Claude Code a leaké via probablement le codemap et un site decrit sont fonctionnement https://ccunpacked.dev/ Le 31 mars 2026, Anthropic a accidentellement inclus les sourcemaps dans un package npm de Claude Code, exposant ~512 000 lignes de TypeScript La fuite n'était pas un piratage mais une erreur humaine : un "*.map" oublié dans .npmignore Le site ccunpacked.dev a été lancé pour analyser et visualiser le code source décompressé Le code révèle un agent background permanent nommé "KAIROS", un mode furtif pour cacher les contributions des employés Anthropic à l'open source, et 44 feature flags cachés Une fonctionnalité inédite "Buddy" (animal de compagnie électronique dans le terminal) et un mode "dream" pour l'idéation continue ont été découverts Anthropic a confirmé : "Aucune donnée client sensible n'était impliquée. Erreur humaine dans le packaging de la release." Gemini CLI passe aux agents https://x.com/srithreepo/status/2039794081925382307?s=46&t=GLj1NFxZoCFCjw2oYpiJpw Gemini CLI, l'agent IA open source de Google pour le terminal, introduit des hooks dans sa boucle agentique Les hooks permettent d'exécuter des scripts automatiquement (scanners de sécurité, vérifications de conformité, logging) à chaque étape de l'agent Lancement de Gemini CLI GitHub Actions : un agent autonome pour les repositories qui peut exécuter des tâches de codage de routine Support des MCP servers pour étendre les capacités et des "Agent Skills" pour des workflows spécialisés Mode agent disponible dans VS Code et IntelliJ avec accès aux outils du système de fichiers et terminal Wispr, le speech to text en local sur macOS http://wispr.stormacq.com/ Wispr est une application macOS de dictée vocale entièrement locale, propulsée par Whisper (OpenAI) sur appareil, sans cloud ni tracking Sébastien Stormacq a développé Wispr en un jour et demi sans écrire une seule ligne de code, grâce à Kiro CLI (agent IA Amazon) Disponible en open source sur GitHub et via Homebrew Détection automatique de la langue, insertion du texte au curseur dans n'importe quelle application via un raccourci global En un mois : 19 releases incluant mode mains-libres, suppression des mots de remplissage, auto-envoi pour les chats, et un outil CLI Exemple concret de développement vibe coding produisant un outil de qualité production sans expertise Swift préalable Comment, Gordon, l'assistant spécialisé en Docker est né https://n9o.xyz/posts/202603-building-gordon/ Nuno Coração (n9o.xyz) détaille comment Gordon, l'assistant spécialisé Docker, a été construit sur docker-agent, le runtime d'agents IA open source de Docker écrit en Go Les agents sont définis en YAML déclaratif et distribués comme des artefacts OCI, sans mise à jour binaire nécessaire L'architecture initiale en essaim de 9 agents spécialisés a été abandonnée au profit d'un agent racine unique avec un prompt soigneusement conçu Le modèle utilisé est Claude Haiku 4.5, suffisant après optimisation des prompts Principe clé "show, then do" : toute action de l'agent nécessite une approbation explicite de l'utilisateur La description des outils impacte fortement la précision du LLM : ajouter des outils peut paradoxalement dégrader les performances existantes Le prompt est une spécification détaillée (identité, patterns d'accès fichiers, règles de sécurité) plutôt qu'une simple instruction IBM Bob https://bob.ibm.com/blog/announcing-ibm-bob-launch IBM Bob assistant IA d'IBM pour coder sur de vraies codebases (lancé avril 2026) 5 modes : Ask, Plan, Code, Advanced (MCP), Orchestrator Détecte la complexité du code en temps réel et propose des refactos Fait des revues de code automatiques sur tes branches/issues GitHub Permet d'écrire en langage naturel directement dans l'éditeur Fonctionne aussi en terminal/CLI et dans les pipelines CI/CD Sécurité : approbation manuelle, .bobignore, checkpoints, pas de training sur tes prompts How I use Claude - 50 tips pratiques https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZzhfPle9QU Staff Engineer Meta partage 50 tips après 6 mois d'utilisation intensive de Claude Code Basé sur ~12h/jour d'usage perso et professionnel Couvre tout : bases, workflows avancés, parallélisation Objectif : partager ce qu'il aurait voulu savoir dès le départ Méthodologies Quelqu'un rale sur la non soutenabilité des bases de code écritent avec des agents https://mariozechner.at/posts/2026-03-25-thoughts-on-slowing-the-fuck-down/ Mario Zechner estime que les agents IA font les mêmes erreurs répétitivement sans apprendre, accumulant la complexité à grande vitesse faute de bottlenecks humains Sans vision globale, les agents créent du cargo-cult : les "best practices" de l'industrie appliquées localement sans cohérence architecturale La croissance de la base de code dégrade la capacité des agents à retrouver le code existant → duplication et incohérences croissantes Il cite des pannes AWS et des initiatives qualité Microsoft comme signes préoccupants liés au code généré par IA Solution : réserver les agents aux tâches délimitées et évaluables, garder l'architecture, les APIs et les systèmes critiques écrits à la main Maintenir une revue de code rigoureuse et traiter les humains comme les gardiens finaux de la qualité On m'oblige à utiliser l'IA https://n.survol.fr/n/on-moblige-a-utiliser-lia Éric D. défend l'adoption obligatoire de l'IA comme décision stratégique légitime, comparable au choix du full remote ou de la stack technique Il distingue la décision stratégique (adoption IA) de la méthode d'accompagnement (qui reste collaborative et bienveillante) La compétence IA devient un critère de recrutement : chercher des candidats déjà curieux et explorateurs de ces outils L'alignement culturel sur les pratiques et outils est un prérequis à la cohésion d'équipe Le refus d'adopter certains outils stratégiques peut justifier de ne pas recruter un candidat autrement compétent Encore une metodo SPDD https://martinfowler.com/articles/structured-prompt-driven/ Problème : l'IA accélère le dev individuel mais amplifie ambiguïtés et incohérences à l'échelle d'une équipe. martinfowler SPDD : traiter les prompts comme des artefacts versionnés, révisables et réutilisables plutôt que des échanges jetables. martinfowler Canvas REASONS : 7 dimensions (Requirements, Entities, Approach, Structure, Operations, Norms, Safeguards) pour guider le LLM de l'intention à l'exécution. martinfowler Workflow en 6 étapes : exigences → analyse → contexte → prompt structuré → code → tests unitaires, chaque étape s'appuyant sur la précédente. martinfowler 3 compétences clés : abstraction d'abord, alignement de l'intention, revue itérative. martinfowler Limites : fort ROI sur du code métier complexe, peu adapté aux hotfixes urgents, scripts jetables ou travail créatif/visuel. m Sécurité Le projet Glasswing pour sécuriser les logiciels https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing Anthropic lance Glasswing, une initiative de cybersécurité utilisant Claude Mythos Preview pour identifier des vulnérabilités zero-day 12 partenaires fondateurs dont AWS, Apple, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, Linux Foundation, Microsoft et NVIDIA Anthropic investit 100 millions de dollars en crédits de modèle et 4 millions en dons aux organisations de sécurité open source Le modèle opère avec une autonomie substantielle, identifiant des milliers de vulnérabilités dans les OS, navigateurs et infrastructures critiques Plus de 40 organisations supplémentaires ont accès pour scanner et sécuriser leurs systèmes Objectif : donner l'avantage aux défenseurs avant que les techniques de hacking assistées par IA ne se généralisent chez les attaquants LinkedIn vous espionne https://frenchbreaches.com/blog/linkedin-est-accuse-de-fouiller-dans-votre-ordinateur-illegalement Scandale "BrowserGate" : LinkedIn injecte du JavaScript qui tente de détecter les extensions Chrome installées sur votre navigateur Le script analysé contient une liste codée en dur de 6 222 extensions Chrome avec identifiants et chemins de fichiers internes Croissance alarmante de la liste ciblée : 38 extensions en 2017 → 461 en 2024 → ~1 000 en mai 2025 → 6 222 début 2026 Les données collectées incluent aussi CPU, RAM, résolution d'écran, timezone et état batterie pour du fingerprinting Certaines extensions ciblées sont liées à la neurodivergence, aux pratiques religieuses ou aux opinions politiques → violation grave du RGPD LinkedIn défend que le scan vise uniquement à détecter les extensions qui pratiquent le scraping de données Post mortem de la supply chain attack sur la librairie NPM axios https://github.com/axios/axios/issues/10636 Le 31 mars 2026, deux versions malveillantes d'axios (1.14.1 et 0.30.4) ont été publiées via un compte mainteneur compromis Vecteur d'attaque : RAT installé via ingénierie sociale ciblée sur la machine personnelle du mainteneur principal La 2FA ne protège pas si la machine de l'utilisateur est compromise : l'attaquant contrôle tout et peut agir comme l'utilisateur Les packages malveillants injectaient plain-crypto-js@4.2.1, un cheval de Troie multi-plateforme (macOS, Windows, Linux) Détection communautaire en ~3 heures, suppression par npm, mesures correctives : rotation complète des credentials Changements préventifs : publication via OIDC, releases immuables, amélioration des pratiques GitHub Actions Passbolt un gestionnaire de mots de passe open source https://lesjoiesducode.fr/passbolt-gestionnaire-de-mots-de-passe-gratuit-open-source-que-votre-equipe-merite-vraiment Gestionnaire de mots de passe open source conçu pour le partage d'identifiants en équipe, utilisé par plus de 50 000 organisations Chiffrement individuel par utilisateur et par version de credential, pas de coffre-fort partagé — architecture zero-knowledge "Forward secrecy" : quand un membre quitte l'équipe, ses copies chiffrées sont automatiquement révoquées sans reset manuel Supporte TOTP, clés SSH, tokens API et champs personnalisés avec piste d'audit complète de tous les accès Édition communautaire entièrement gratuite avec utilisateurs illimités, auto-hébergeable ou cloud Chiffrement OpenPGP nécessitant passphrase + clé privée, avec tokens visuels anti-phishing Loi, société et organisation Anthropic fait un don d'1,5 millions de dollars à la fondation Apache https://news.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-announces-1-5m-donation-from-anthropic Anthropic donne 1,5 million de dollars à l'ASF pour soutenir l'infrastructure, la sécurité et la communauté open source Vitaly Gudanets (CISO d'Anthropic) : "Soutenir l'ASF est un investissement direct dans la résilience et l'intégrité des systèmes dont dépend l'IA moderne" Les fonds financeront les systèmes de build, les processus de sécurité et les services aux projets Apache Ce don est le déclencheur de l'initiative IA responsable à 10 millions de dollars de l'ASF L'infrastructure Apache est invisible mais critique : des systèmes financiers aux plateformes de santé, elle sous-tend l'écosystème logiciel mondial L'ASF lance l'initiative IA responsable https://news.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-launches-10m-responsible-ai-initiative-with-initial-1-75m-donation L'ASF lance une initiative pour une IA responsable dotée d'un budget de 10 millions de dollars sur 3 ans minimum Anthropic est le premier donateur avec 1,5 million de dollars ; Alpha-Omega contribue 250 000 dollars L'initiative fournit aux projets Apache un accès à des modèles IA pour l'expérimentation et la sécurité Elle soutient l'ensemble de la chaîne IA/ML : pipelines de données, infrastructure, frameworks de deep learning Des tracks de conférences, hackathons et bourses de voyage sont prévus pour élargir la communauté Les principes directeurs incluent la supervision humaine, l'intégrité des licences et la sécurité open source Oracle vire 30000 personnes https://rollingout.com/2026/03/31/oracle-slashes-30000-jobs-with-a-cold-6/ Oracle licencie 20 000 à 30 000 employés, 18% de ses effectifs mondiaux. Les salariés ont appris leur licenciement par un simple email à 6h du matin, sans aucun préavis. L'accès à tous les systèmes (Slack, Zoom, badges) a été coupé immédiatement après. But : libérer 8 à 10 milliards de dollars pour construire des centres de données IA. Oracle a déjà contracté 50 milliards de dettes en 2026 pour financer ses projets IA. Paradoxe : l'entreprise affiche un bénéfice record de 6,13 milliards, mais ses liquidités sont dans le rouge. L'action Oracle a perdu plus de la moitié de sa valeur depuis septembre 2025. Et si l'IA n'était qu'un prétexte pour licencier https://eventuallycoding.com/p/ia-licenciements-et-si-l-intelligence-artificielle-n-etait-qu-une-excuse Hugo Lassiège (eventuallycoding) estime que les entreprises utilisent l'IA comme narratif commode pour masquer des erreurs de gestion passées (Block a triplé ses effectifs post-COVID sans croissance des revenus correspondante) Moins de 1% des licenciements technologiques seraient réellement dus à des gains de productivité IA selon les analyses citées Mesurer la productivité des développeurs reste un problème non résolu, mais les entreprises affirment des gains d'efficacité sans preuves Des pressions économiques réelles (inflation, guerres commerciales, coûts énergétiques) sont masquées derrière le discours IA Les restructurations nécessaires sont présentées comme des transformations AI-driven positives pour rassurer les investisseurs Il y voit une fenêtre d'opportunité pour l'Europe pendant que les géants américains se restructurent GitHub Copilot va utiliser les interacitons pour entrainer ses modèles sauf si vous vous délistez https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-github-copilot-interaction-data-usage-policy/ À partir du 24 avril 2026, GitHub utilise par défaut les interactions des utilisateurs Copilot Free, Pro et Pro+ pour entraîner ses modèles Les données collectées incluent le code accepté ou modifié, les snippets envoyés, les noms de fichiers et structures de dépôts, et les retours utilisateurs Les utilisateurs Copilot Business, Enterprise et les dépôts d'entreprise sont exclus de cette collecte de données d'entraînement Opt-out disponible dans les paramètres GitHub > "Privacy" ; les préférences de désactivation préalables sont conservées automatiquement Objectif déclaré : améliorer la précision des modèles sur les langages et cas d'usage du monde réel Grosse percée de Claude Code dans les commits sur GitHub https://aifoc.us/damn-claude-thats-a-lot-of-commits/ Explosion de Claude Code : En six mois, Claude Code est passé de 0,7 % à 4,5 % de tous les commits publics sur GitHub, surpassant tous les autres outils d'IA combinés. Adoption massive des agents IA : Environ 5 % des commits publics sur GitHub sont désormais générés par des agents IA, un chiffre en croissance rapide depuis fin 2025. Domination des bots sur GitHub : Au-delà des commits, les outils d'IA sont omniprésents dans la gestion des pull requests et des problèmes (Copilot et CodeRabbit notamment). Limites méthodologiques : Les données ne concernent que les dépôts publics (les entreprises utilisent massivement des dépôts privés, invisibles ici). Le comptage dépend fortement de la visibilité des signatures (certains outils comme Claude marquent systématiquement leurs commits, d'autres non) L'API de recherche GitHub présente une fiabilité variable à cette échelle. Changement de paradigme : Le développement logiciel vit une transition majeure, comparable au passage du desktop au mobile. L'intégration des agents IA dans le cycle de production n'est plus une expérimentation, mais une réalité opérationnelle à grande échelle. Dysmaths une application pour aider à apprendre les mathématiques et la géométrie lorsque l'on souffre de dyspraxie, dysgraphie https://dysmaths.com/ Application web pour aider les élèves de collège et lycée souffrant de dysgraphie et dyspraxie à faire des maths et de la géométrie Outils de dessin à main levée, géométrie précise (compas, rapporteur, règle) et opérations structurées (fractions, racines, puissances, symboles mathématiques) Export PDF et PNG avec conservation fidèle de l'échelle pour l'impression et la soumission des exercices Options d'accessibilité : police OpenDyslexic, personnalisations d'interface, import d'images et de PDFs Répond à un besoin réel : les outils standards ne sont pas adaptés aux difficultés de coordination et d'organisation spatiale en mathématiques IA ou réalité ? Par Amistory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPYdAhBBF2I L'IA génère des contenus (images, voix, vidéos) de plus en plus indétectables Les arnaques au clonage de voix et deepfakes sont en forte hausse Les faux contenus viraux manipulent l'opinion à grande échelle Le faux n'est plus un accident, c'est devenu un système organisé La société entre dans une ère de doute généralisé sur le réel Comment s'informer quand le réel lui-même peut être simulé ? Conférences La liste des conférences provenant de Developers Conferences Agenda/List par Aurélie Vache et contributeurs : 6-7 mai 2026 : Devoxx UK 2026 - London (UK) 12 mai 2026 : Lead Innovation Day - Leadership Edition - Paris (France) 12-13 mai 2026 : Lyon Craft - Lyon (France) 19 mai 2026 : La Product Conf Paris 2026 - Paris (France) 19-20 mai 2026 : Green Code Challenge - Paris (France) 21-22 mai 2026 : Flupa UX Days 2026 - Paris (France) 22 mai 2026 : AFUP Day 2026 Lille - Lille (France) 22 mai 2026 : AFUP Day 2026 Paris - Paris (France) 22 mai 2026 : AFUP Day 2026 Bordeaux - Bordeaux (France) 22 mai 2026 : AFUP Day 2026 Lyon - Lyon (France) 27 mai 2026 : aMP Day Strasbourg 2026 - Strasbourg (France) 28 mai 2026 : DevCon 27 : I.A. & Vibe Coding - Paris (France) 28 mai 2026 : Cloud Toulouse 2026 - Toulouse (France) 29 mai 2026 : NG Baguette Conf 2026 - Paris (France) 29 mai 2026 : Agile Tour Strasbourg 2026 - Strasbourg (France) 2-3 juin 2026 : Agile Tour Rennes 2026 - Rennes (France) 2-3 juin 2026 : OW2Con - Paris-Châtillon (France) 3 juin 2026 : IA–NA - La Rochelle (France) 4 juin 2026 : Workplace Intelligence Days - 1ère édition - Lyon (France) 5 juin 2026 : TechReady - Nantes (France) 5 juin 2026 : Fork it! - Rouen - Rouen (France) 6 juin 2026 : Polycloud - Montpellier (France) 9 juin 2026 : JFTL - Montrouge (France) 9 juin 2026 : C: - Caen (France) 9 juin 2026 : France API 2026 - Paris (France) 11-12 juin 2026 : DevQuest Niort - Niort (France) 11-12 juin 2026 : DevLille 2026 - Lille (France) 12 juin 2026 : Tech F'Est 2026 - Nancy (France) 15 juin 2026 : Jupyter Workshops: Demystifying MyST Markdown in Education - Orsay (France) 16 juin 2026 : Mobilis In Mobile 2026 - Nantes (France) 17-19 juin 2026 : Devoxx Poland - Krakow (Poland) 17-20 juin 2026 : VivaTech - Paris (France) 18 juin 2026 : Tech'Work - Lyon (France) 22-26 juin 2026 : Galaxy Community Conference - Clermont-Ferrand (France) 23-24 juin 2026 : MWCP 2026 - Paris (France) 24-25 juin 2026 : Agi'Lille 2026 - Lille (France) 24-26 juin 2026 : BreizhCamp 2026 - Rennes (France) 25-26 juin 2026 : Agile Tour Toulouse 2026 - Toulouse (France) 27 juin 2026 : Asynconf - Paris (France) 2 juillet 2026 : Azur Tech Summer 2026 - Valbonne (France) 2-3 juillet 2026 : Sunny Tech - Montpellier (France) 3 juillet 2026 : Agile Lyon 2026 - Lyon (France) 6-8 juillet 2026 : Riviera Dev - Sophia Antipolis (France) 28-30 août 2026 : State of the Map - Champs-sur-Marne (France) 4 septembre 2026 : JUG Summer Camp 2026 - La Rochelle (France) 10-11 septembre 2026 : Nantes Craft - Nantes (France) 17 septembre 2026 : dotAI - Paris (France) 17-18 septembre 2026 : API Platform Conference 2026 - Lille (France) 18 septembre 2026 : dotJS - Paris (France) 18 septembre 2026 : WordCamp Bretagne - Rennes (France) 22 septembre 2026 : Salon Data 2026 - Nantes (France) 22-23 septembre 2026 : Agile en Seine & IA 2026 - Paris (France) 24 septembre 2026 : OWASP AppSec Days France 2026 - Paris (France) 24 septembre 2026 : PlatformCon Paris - Paris (France) 24 septembre 2026 : React Native Connection 2026 - Paris (France) 24-26 septembre 2026 : Paris Web 2026 - Paris (France) 28-29 septembre 2026 : 4th Tech Summit on AI & Robotics - Paris (France) & Online 1 octobre 2026 : WAX 2026 - Marseille (France) 1-2 octobre 2026 : Volcamp - Clermont-Ferrand (France) 2 octobre 2026 : DevFest Perros-Guirec 2026 - Perros-Guirec (France) 5-9 octobre 2026 : Devoxx Belgium - Antwerp (Belgium) 12 octobre 2026 : Dev With AI - Paris (France) 27-29 octobre 2026 : Directions EMEA 2026 - Paris (France) 29-30 octobre 2026 : BDX I/O 2026 - Bordeaux (France) 30 octobre 2026 : Cloud Nord 2026 - Lille (France) 4-5 novembre 2026 : Devoxx Morocco - Casablanca (Morocco) 14-15 novembre 2026 : Capitole du Libre - Toulouse (France) 19 novembre 2026 : DevFest Toulouse 2026 - Toulouse (France) 27 novembre 2026 : DevFest Paris 2026 - Paris (France) 1-3 décembre 2026 : Apidays Paris - Paris (France) 4 décembre 2026 : DevFest Lyon 2026 - Lyon (France) 4 décembre 2026 : DevFest Dijon 2026 - Dijon (France) 9-10 décembre 2026 : OpenSource Expérience - Paris (France) 9-10 décembre 2026 : DevOps REX - Paris (France) 10 décembre 2026 : KCD Provence - Aix-en-Provence (France) 7-9 avril 2027 : Devoxx France 2027 - Paris (France) Nous contacter Pour réagir à cet épisode, venez discuter sur le groupe Google https://groups.google.com/group/lescastcodeurs Contactez-nous via X/twitter https://twitter.com/lescastcodeurs ou Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/lescastcodeurs.com Faire un crowdcast ou une crowdquestion Soutenez Les Cast Codeurs sur Patreon https://www.patreon.com/LesCastCodeurs Tous les épisodes et toutes les infos sur https://lescastcodeurs.com/