Newsletter

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 → ...

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 → ...