Fifteen things worth your time from the past week, pulled out of whatever archivore caught me reading. A quieter week for big model releases, a heavier one for people arguing about who’s stealing from whom.
I don’t like passkeys — Ethan Hawksley argues passkeys solve the wrong threat model for an individual. They kill phishing, but do nothing about the risk that actually ends most people’s accounts: losing the one device they’re bound to. Hardware keys cap out at 25–300 accounts each; synced passkeys tie your whole identity to Apple or Google, so one account ban costs you everything at once. Discuss →
Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap — Liam Powell picks apart a language pitched for the AI-coding era, where humans write specs and an LLM writes the proofs. Its own demo needs 442 lines to prove a two-line game rule, because the language quietly reinvents formal verification — badly, and without apparently knowing the field already exists. The real lesson: vibe-coding a language lets you ship something large before you’ve read enough to know a much smaller solution was sitting there. Discuss →
Microsoft exec called AI scraping “the largest theft of labor in human history” — Unredacted court filings show a Microsoft executive using that exact phrase internally, while the company keeps shipping products built on the same scraped data. Rebecca Bellan’s report is a useful reminder that the industry’s own leadership doesn’t believe its public line about fair use. Discuss →
Hister: a private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep — Full-text indexing of everything you’ve browsed and everything on disk, searchable from a browser extension, a terminal, or an MCP-connected assistant. No telemetry, no required cloud service. It’s solving a close cousin of what I built archivore for, from the opposite direction — total recall instead of curated capture. Discuss →
An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations — A Raspberry Pi, a microphone, and a local bird-song classifier drive an e-ink panel that renders whatever species it just heard as a hand-cut historical plate — over 800 real illustrations, all public domain. No cloud, no app, just a window that redraws itself when the birds change. Discuss →
Neovim has a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023 — Someone checked the project’s donation address out of curiosity and found a 10 BTC gift from 2023, worth roughly $800,000 today, that nobody appears to have touched since. No drama yet — just an open question nobody on the project has answered.
Doing Everyone Else’s Job — Yossi Kreinin’s case for quietly doing work that isn’t technically yours, when the person whose job it is won’t do it and the organization needs it done regardless. He credits the habit for shipping things that otherwise never would have — but draws a sharp line against doing it in parallel with someone rather than on their behalf, which is how the same instinct quietly turns into empire-building. Discuss →
PS5 Linux’s lead developer just quit the whole scene — Andy “TheFlow0” Nguyen is walking away from years of PlayStation homebrew after AI “vibe-coders” found the project’s last usable exploit and reported it to Sony rather than sitting on it, ending his PS5 Linux effort’s future. His real complaint isn’t AI itself — it’s that a small community of people who understood their exploits has been diluted by contributors shipping code they don’t. Discuss →
The local LLM ecosystem doesn’t need Ollama — Zetaphor’s teardown argues Ollama built its popularity as the first friendly llama.cpp wrapper, then spent years under-crediting the engine underneath while pivoting toward a cloud business funded by that same popularity. Detailed, pointed, and worth reading before your next local-model setup. Discuss →
Notes on migrating a 35KB preprompt to self-hosted Ollama — Set aside the framing about frontier providers stealing your data: the practical gotchas here are genuinely useful. A 35KB prompt alone eats 14% of a 65k-token local context window, and everything that worked fine on a frontier model’s huge context starts thrashing — repeated tool calls, re-read files, forgotten instructions — the moment you self-host. The fixes (single-objective prompts, tuning Ollama’s tiny default context, logging state to disk between turns) are worth stealing regardless of why you’re switching. Discuss →
OpenAI’s own bots reportedly knew about a RubyGems vulnerability — Aaron Patterson walks through a “GemStuffer” campaign in which bots plausibly run by OpenAI uploaded junk gems designed to execute arbitrary code via YARD documentation, apparently while also scraping RubyDoc.info. Whatever the full story turns out to be, a frontier lab’s own automated agents being implicated in supply-chain-style abuse is the actual news. Discuss →
Fable 5.1 solved a 370-year-old cipher — Claude Fable 5.1 spent 44 minutes and 176k tokens cracking Sir Thomas Urquhart’s Cyphral Distich, unsolved since at least 1899: the key turned out to be the book itself, each cipher number indexing a word in one of the author’s own numbered sections. It then applied the same method to solve a second, larger cryptogram from 1652. A genuinely rare case of a model doing something no human cryptographer managed in over three centuries. Discuss →
Waymo pulled itself over and called the police — After detecting what it flagged internally as a terms-of-service violation involving a firearm, a Waymo vehicle stopped itself and alerted emergency services, leading to the arrest of two juveniles carrying a loaded, unregistered rifle. Whatever you think of self-driving cars, this is a concrete case of an autonomous vehicle actively policing its own passengers, not just avoiding pedestrians. Discuss →
Leaving Linux — After a decade of Linux devotion, a longtime enthusiast switched to a MacBook and iPhone, arguing that desktop Linux’s customization edge has mostly evaporated now that every environment has converged on the same flat design and everyone’s running the same Electron apps regardless of distro. A candid, unpretentious account of aging out of a hobby operating system, not a hit piece on Linux. Discuss →
Great Lakes sturgeon may be 400 years old — New research using four decades of catch-and-recapture data suggests lake sturgeon may live over 400 years, far longer than previously believed — meaning some fish swimming the Great Lakes today could predate European contact with the region. The finding is forcing scientists to rethink how long a species that lost 99% of its population to overfishing will actually take to recover. Discuss →