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Rosettes and Other Hidden Traces of Hamburg's Tram
Almost 50 years after Hamburg's last tram ran in 1978, Mert Bulan goes looking for what the once-huge network left behind, from rosettes on house walls that held overhead wires to rails under the asphalt, and asks why Germany's second-largest city ended up without trams.
9 min · 1,989 words
Recycling ANSI art: Tracing the origins of Fire Escape's logon screens
Josh Renaud traces where the ANSI logon screens on Fire Escape's St. Louis BBS came from, matching them to earlier 'public domain' art by Violet Stymacks and other late-1980s artists, and looks at how the BBS scene thought about ripping, remixing and permission.
15 min · 3,417 words
Unveiling The Grid: PCBs made in America, twice as fast as Shenzhen
CircuitHub unveils The Grid, the factory-scale robot in Massachusetts it has run for five years: levitating movers carry each board between paste, placement, reflow and inspection machines, scheduled by learned models and agents, so high-mix PCB assembly needs no changeovers. An example motor-controller order arrives in 4 days for $630 versus 9 days from Shenzhen.
3 min · 639 words
Formalizing the Enormous Theorem
Axiom releases the first complete computer-checked Lean proof of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups, the roughly 15,000-page 'enormous theorem'. Over 24 days, its engineers and mathematicians directed swarms of AI agents that produced about 43.1 million lines of Lean, surfacing 34 notable deviations from the published record and a new group theory result.
18 min · 4,183 words
Tailscale SSH: Investigation and remediation update
Tailscale says it is investigating security vulnerabilities in Tailscale SSH, mostly privilege-escalation issues where an already-authorised user could exceed their local user's permissions. Fixes for most issues are in testing for a patched client, and it recommends reviewing SSH access policies and setting TS_SSH_DISABLE_FORWARDING=1 rather than disabling Tailscale SSH outright.
2 min · 452 words
Choose Your Backend: Three TLS Bugs in GoAhead
FoxIO researcher Sébastien Féry details three independent bugs in the TLS integrations of GoAhead, an embedded web server in hundreds of millions of IoT, firewall and industrial devices: revoked client certificates accepted on OpenSSL builds (CVSS 9.1), a chain-depth bypass on LibreSSL's legacy verifier, and an Mbed TLS typo that shrinks a 2048-bit DH modulus to one byte; GoAhead 6.1.1 fixes them.
14 min · 3,243 words
Viral Polls Are Not Representative Polls
Political scientist Kevin Reuning scrapes 90 days of poll posts from a prolific Bluesky polling account, extracts each result with an LLM, and shows that the polls that get reposted most are the ones that look better for Democrats than the race average, so people who follow polls through their feeds see a skewed picture.
5 min · 1,131 words
Keyless Entry: Hacking SwitchBot Smart Locks
Neodyme's security team reverse-engineered the SwitchBot Lock Pro and found several vulnerabilities, the worst a misuse of AES-CTR in its Bluetooth protocol that lets anyone nearby silently unlock the door in a software-only attack. The write-up walks through the firmware analysis, the attacks, disclosure, and the fixed firmware and app versions.
10 min · 2,293 words
Our Response To The eMudhra Key Disclosure Incident
Roland Shoemaker of the Go Security team explains why Go shipped its first-ever URGENT-track security release after weak keys on eight eMudhra intermediate certificates made it possible to forge TLS certificates, with a timeline of the roughly seven-and-a-half-hour response and how to check whether your Go binaries are affected.
6 min · 1,294 words
Working with academic communities to build scientific understanding
OpenAI announces AI-produced results in harmonic analysis (local smoothing and Kakeya in all dimensions), complexity theory (a claimed refutation of the Exponential Time Hypothesis) and quantum field theory (existence of QCD), and describes external expert-led collaborations to verify and explain them.
8 min · 1,739 words
Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11
enlyth investigates which is the oldest unmodified GUI application that still runs natively on 64-bit Windows 11, given that 16-bit programs are no longer supported, and shows Windows 1.01's REVERSI.EXE running via otvdm as a bonus.
2 min · 525 words
Stalwart v1.0: The Fastest Mail Server on the Planet
Stalwart's maintainer announces v1.0 of the Rust mail and collaboration server five years after its first commit, focused on performance work (SIMD/SWAR parser rewrites, profiling-driven optimisation, benchmarks) and finalising the on-disk data format.
14 min · 3,170 words
Anthropic files S-1 with the SEC for proposed initial public offering
Anthropic, PBC has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the SEC for a proposed IPO of its Class A common stock, which it intends to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol "ANT"; share count and price range are not yet set.
1 min · 249 words
The Pharo team announces Pharo 14, focused on modernizing development tools (Mission Control, Pulse, new Method and Settings browsers), rebuilding refactoring and command infrastructure, and VM work including RISC-V JIT support, with a move to a fall release schedule.
3 min · 754 words
“AI Skills” are worthless in 2026
Charles Miller argues that today's hard-won tricks for working with AI tools are like old C optimisation folklore: quickly made obsolete as the tools improve. Instead of rushing to master prompts and agent workflows now for fear of being left behind, he is content to keep pace with the pack.
2 min · 373 words
Alfie John recalls growing up before the mainstream internet, trading pirated games on floppies, discovering BBSes and the demoscene's cracktros, and finding Denthor of ASPHYXIA's VGA demo trainer tutorials in Turbo Pascal, which made him decide he wanted to make demos and become a programmer.
4 min · 1,017 words
writing about pratt parsing so I remember it
A hands-on walkthrough of Pratt parsing for C expressions: why it rarely shows up in standard compiler courses, how binding power handles precedence and associativity, and how prefix, infix and postfix subroutines keep the parser core small, with pointers to Crafting Interpreters.
5 min · 1,260 words
OpenAI and Anthropic cut their LLM prices by up to 80% within a few months. Why?
Max Woolf walks through a timeline of OpenAI and Anthropic model launches since June 2026, showing input, output and cache prices falling by up to 80%, and weighs possible reasons including competition from open-weight models, compute capacity and upcoming IPOs, concluding that cheaper LLMs are good for users.
11 min · 2,568 words
Venkatesh Rao, reading Joyce Appleby's history of capitalism, argues that today's AI panic mirrors early mercantilist zero-sum thinking: fears of surplus intelligence and useless minds resemble old fears about trade and idle labor, while a 'cognitive capitalist' view sees intelligence creating new demand and new freedom for minds.
15 min · 3,546 words
Gheist: Attempted Scaled Abuse of Stolen GitHub Tokens Stumbles
Wiz Research details Gheist, a campaign since September 2026 that uses stolen GitHub tokens to commit a sync-check workflow dumping repository secrets into logs, with 13,500+ planted branches across 850+ accounts, and explains how the attack works, how to detect and harden against it, and its indicators of compromise.
5 min · 1,248 words