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Jeff Atwood uses the scrolling wealth-inequality graph at dreamagainusa.org to argue that extreme wealth concentration in America is almost impossible to grasp until you experience its scale, and asks whether reaching the so-called top is worth the suffering built into the system for everyone else.
4 min · 809 words
Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers
Felix Rieseberg, an engineering manager at Anthropic, explains why he has stopped giving coding interviews and argues that with AI, engineers without years of tenure or social capital can outpace more experienced peers; he offers practical advice on ownership, taste, empathy and principled thinking for junior engineers.
5 min · 1,233 words
The next circle of security hell
Gentoo developer Michał Górny revisits his 2021 'modern packager's security nightmare' and argues things have got worse: vulnerabilities arrive at unprecedented rates, rushed fixes and API breaks pile up on downstream packagers, and the community risks a breaking point where everyone bundles and fends for themselves.
3 min · 705 words
Thomas Neumann argues that Goodhart's law is breaking database benchmarks such as ClickBench, where systems increasingly optimise for the known queries, and proposes keeping benchmark queries secret or generating fresh workloads each round, as SQLStorm does, so results stay meaningful.
3 min · 753 words
Jan Schaumann argues that cyber defense teams are effectively under a DDoS: AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery, broken embargoes and marketing-driven disclosure have outpaced vulnerability and patch management, and defenders cannot simply AI their way out, so the industry needs to rethink disclosure and triage before teams burn out.
10 min · 2,277 words
With critical CVEs surging as LLMs get better at finding vulnerabilities, Gavin Anderegg argues that most content sites never needed a CMS or a server-rendered Node stack: clients rarely edit them, nobody patches them, and statically generated HTML is faster, nearly free to host and has a far smaller attack surface.
5 min · 1,136 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
DOJ says presidents should be able to sell secrets on eBay
Lauren Harper's The Classifieds newsletter from Freedom of the Press Foundation covers the DOJ's argument that presidential records are personal property, selective White House declassification efforts, the push to make private prisons subject to FOIA, and other government secrecy news.
4 min · 940 words
Elon Musk Just Gave Europe a Reason to Replace American Technology
Writing from London, Steve Blank argues that the reported throttling of Starshield to Ukraine, apparently ordered by Elon Musk, has convinced European policymakers that U.S. technology carries a kill-switch risk, and that AI now makes building sovereign alternatives to American software feasible, at a long-term cost to U.S. companies.
3 min · 624 words
Brennen Puth argues that text-heavy websites should print cleanly, walking through what went wrong when he printed his own blog and the print stylesheet changes he made to hide navigation and other screen-only elements.
3 min · 602 words
OpenAI and Anthropic Wanted to Replace Engineers. Instead, They Shot Their Own Customers.
Techbro Nerd argues that by selling AI coding agents, OpenAI and Anthropic let anyone clone established software, using Adobe versus the vibe-coded ArtCraft as the example, which erodes the enterprise software customers the labs depend on and drives the price of their own product toward zero.
6 min · 1,409 words
Stella Wilson argues France's rising sovereign bond yields and fiscal deadlock can be explained by her SSRN paper with Johan Båge, "Pinning the Wage to Scarcity and Technology", which separates returns from real growth from returns on scarcity, and makes the case for land value taxation.
2 min · 415 words
Freelance security consultant Lucas Luitjes digs into the public php2shell proof of concept and argues mass exploitation is far harder than vendors claimed: it needs four requests to the same PHP worker and the exact build, which means days of DoS-like brute forcing against real sites behind load balancers and WAFs. Patch fast, but the '15 minutes or die' hype was overblown.
3 min · 608 words
We are all living inside of an obscure sci-fi film from 1970
Thanks for that, Jim compares today's rush to hand military and political decisions to error-prone AI models with the plot of the 1970 film Colossus: The Forbin Project, in which a US president cedes national defence to an AI that seizes control.
3 min · 577 words
Canadians Are Running Out Of Time To Oppose The Dangerous C-22 Surveillance Bill
EFF's Joe Mullin warns that Canada's Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, has passed the House of Commons and now sits before the Senate, and urges Canadians to oppose its expansion of surveillance powers and cross-border data sharing with US police.
2 min · 395 words
No Need for Retirement When Utopia Is Around the Corner
Jim Nielsen compares Daniel Ellsberg's account of RAND's missile-gap years, where staff felt a quasi-religious mission and doubted they'd live to collect retirement, with today's rhetoric from AI labs like Anthropic.
2 min · 425 words
I can't believe PowerShell is actually good
Corbin Davenport of The Spacebar admits he underestimated PowerShell after Bash scripting frustrations, showing how its native data types, easy web API parsing, and .NET objects made a real scripting job, migrating old Tumblr posts with their metadata, far easier.
10 min · 2,286 words
Cloudflare is rewriting everything in Rust
Sylvain Kerkour traces Cloudflare's shift from C and Lua NGINX modules to Rust after CloudBleed, covering Pingora, FL2 and the NGINX termination rewrite, a critique of its open-source posture, and how avoiding .unwrap() could have prevented the November 18, 2025 outage.
5 min · 1,102 words
There isn't an easy exploit for this PHP vulnerability
Elias Taylor argues that the much-hyped PHP vulnerability behind this week's emergency security releases is a real bug but hard to exploit in practice, nowhere near Log4Shell or Heartbleed, and explains why the panic outruns the risk in the LLM era.
4 min · 808 words
Ofcom Concedes Defeat in the 4chan Case
Lawyer Preston Byrne, counsel for 4chan, argues that Ofcom's testimony to a Commons committee, accepting it may never recover fines blocked by foreign courts, amounts to conceding defeat in its Online Safety Act enforcement against 4chan. He cites the US court's dicta in 4chan v. Ofcom, predicts Ofcom will seek new blocking powers, and calls for the GRANITE Act.
4 min · 871 words