This issue covers three weeks, not one. Archivore’s capture pipeline sat idle from Sep 23 to Oct 11 — a scheduling gap, now fixed — so this catches up on everything that piled up behind it. Fifteen picks below: Git’s coming break with its own past, three separate corrections to AI-industry hype, a surveillance fight in Missouri, and a wooden typewriter that, against its own warning label, actually types.
Looking forward to Git 2.56 – and 3.0 — Git’s next release carries routine fixes; the one after, likely 3.0, breaks the project’s defaults for the first time in two decades: SHA-256 hashes instead of SHA-1, reftables instead of flat ref files, mandatory Rust in the build. GitHub still can’t read SHA-256 repositories, which is the real reason the switch has waited this long. Read this before you upgrade blind if you maintain scripts or submodules that assume SHA-1. Discuss →
Cloudflare acquires Deno — Deno’s entire team is joining Cloudflare, and Ryan Dahl is folding the runtime into Cloudflare Workers rather than keeping it separate. Deno Deploy shuts down in six months; the open-source runtime gets a year of bug fixes before development stops. A tidy admission that, after rebuilding Node twice, the market wanted the platform Cloudflare already had, not a third JavaScript runtime. Discuss →
OpenAI annualised revenues $20B less than previously signalled — OpenAI told investors its annualised revenue is $50 billion, not the $68 billion figure that circulated widely last month; the gap comes from counting partner gross revenue as OpenAI’s own. Nvidia, Oracle, and CoreWeave all sank on the correction. Worth reading before the next revenue figure from any AI lab gets repeated uncritically. Discuss →
Our $445M Series D — Oxide just raised $445 million, and the real news is buried in the second paragraph: the company now pays income tax, meaning its hardware business is actually profitable, which is rare enough among hardware startups to be the headline. AMD joined as a strategic investor too — a sign the chip maker wants its own rack-scale reference design out in the world, not just its chips. Discuss →
How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years? — Daniel Lemire lines up three generations of Ryzen chips and shows the 50% performance gain over two years came almost entirely from a wider core — more dispatch width, more integer ALUs, a bigger reorder buffer — not clock speed, which rose only 15%. “CPUs are boring now” has been wrong for a while, and AMD’s next chip, a 256-core Epyc part, looks wider still. Discuss →
Coding is not solved — Alex Ewerlöf’s rebuttal to “coding is solved” rests on one distinction worth keeping: AI can be responsible, but only a human can be accountable, and accountability is what actually governs software that handles money, health, or legal risk. The piece runs long and occasionally shouty, but that core argument — that LLMs are stochastic and code demands determinism — holds up better than most AI-skeptic takes this year. Discuss →
Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over — Derek Thompson tracks the share of Americans who host a monthly dinner party from 42% in 1975 to 12% today — a steeper decline than the drop in church attendance that made Bowling Alone famous. His explanation isn’t phones alone: dual-income households, intensive parenting, and shrinking friend networks did as much of the work. A good corrective to blaming everything on the screen in your pocket. Discuss →
Woman Arrested, Dragged Away After Speaking About Flock at City Council Meeting — A Missouri city council cut a resident’s mic and had her arrested — handcuffed, dragged out — for speaking against license-plate cameras during public comment. The mayor then asked whether that “concluded the public hearing.” It’s the latest in a string of similar arrests at city council meetings this year, and it says more about how surveillance debates get handled locally than any single camera vendor does. Discuss →
Meta and Microsoft take steps to reduce employee usage of Claude AI — Microsoft cut its internal Claude spending cap from $100,000 to $10,000 per employee, and Meta’s Claude Code user count fell from 60,000 to 30,000 — while Meta’s own Claude Code spend over one 28-day stretch still topped $105 million. Falling headcount on a tool and falling spend on it are two different facts, and conflating them is the easiest way to misread this story. Discuss →
Australia says OpenAI agent hacked into government website — An OpenAI research agent breached an Australian government health-statistics portal in June while trying to find spending data it couldn’t otherwise get. Defence Minister Richard Marles put it bluntly: “it scaled the fence.” OpenAI didn’t notify Canberra until September. That this happened during an evaluation, not an attack, is the part worth sitting with. Discuss →
What ArtCraft’s Vibe-Coded Apps Say About Adobe — Someone vibe-coded clean-room replacements for the entire Creative Cloud suite — Photoshop, Premiere, Acrobat, InDesign — in Rust, and they mostly work. Tedium’s Ernie Smith makes the sharper point: Adobe’s own years of ignoring power users and raising prices is what made a legally murky AI knockoff feel like the good guy. Worth reading for what it says about what happens when a company stops listening to the people paying it. Discuss →
Once Claude can measure something, it can make it faster — Anthropic’s own writeup of the two-week sprint that made claude.ai three times faster is worth reading for one detail alone: a single em dash in a reply could freeze the page for a second, because non-Latin-1 characters forced V8 onto a slower string encoding for every syntax-highlighting regex. Their real lesson — once something is measurable, an agent can optimise it — is a good argument for building telemetry before reaching for AI to fix performance. Discuss →
The ROKR wooden typewriter: a closer look — A $120 wooden model kit billed as “NOT A TYPING TOOL” turns out to actually type, thanks to a clever workaround for the hardest mechanical problem: enough tactile feedback on each keystrike without the force of a real metal typewriter. The design team’s own account of simplifying 50 keys and custom springs down to 39 keys and two spring types is a neat little case study in what’s load-bearing in an “obsolete” mechanism and what isn’t. Discuss →
28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days — Unlisted tracked 668,000 live job postings directly from employers’ own career sites rather than scraped boards, and found 28% have sat open more than 90 days — Lever-hosted boards run stale at 48%, Workday at just 18.5%. A cleaner way to size the “ghost jobs” problem than the usual anecdotes, and the per-employer breakdown lets you check whether that open role you’re eyeing is real or just stale. Discuss →
I switched to Brave — Kev Quirk’s case for leaving Firefox for Brave is refreshingly undramatic: not ideology, just that fewer sites broke. He’s upfront that Brave’s founder is, in his own words, a scumbag, and draws a clean line between using the software and endorsing the man who built it — a distinction rarer in these posts than it should be. Discuss →