Carbon Dating
Daring Fireball
• Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
[Sponsor] WorkOS Pipes: Ship Third-Party Integrations Without Rebuilding OAuth
Connecting user accounts to third-party APIs always comes with the same plumbing: OAuth flows, token storage, refresh logic, and provider-specific quirks.
WorkOS Pipes removes that overhead. Users connect services like GitHub, Slack, Google, Salesforce, and other supported providers through a drop-in widget. Your backend requests a valid access token from the Pipes API when needed, while Pipes handles credential storage and token refresh.
Simplify integrations with WorkOS Pipes.
Link: workos.com/docs/pipes?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…
Structured Context Engineering for File-Native Agentic Systems
Structured Context Engineering for File-Native Agentic Systems
New paper by Damon McMillan exploring challenging LLM context tasks involving large SQL schemas (up to 10,000 tables) across different models and file formats:
Using SQL generation as a proxy for programmatic ag...
08.02.2026
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye from Berkeley Haas School of Business report initial findings in the HBR from their April to December 2025 study of 200 employees at a "U.S.-based technology company".
This captures an effec...
Hong Kong court jails Jimmy Lai for 20 years
A court in Hong Kong has sentenced the tycoon and pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison. Mr Lai, who is a British citizen, was found guilty of foreign collusion and publishing seditious material, but his family says it was a political trial. The British go...
Japan's prime minister wins landslide election victory
Japan's prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has led her party to a decisive election victory. Her Liberal Democratic Party won more than two thirds of the seats in the lower house of parliament. It gives Ms Takaichi wide scope to push through her conservative agenda. She's prom...
Kākāpō mug by Karen James
Friend and neighbour Karen James made me a Kākāpō mug. It has a charismatic Kākāpō, four Kākāpō chicks (in celebration of the 2026 breeding season) and even has some rimu fruit!
I love it so much.
Tags: kakapo, art
The Guardian: here’s how Substack makes money...
The Guardian: here’s how Substack makes money hosting Nazi newsletters. These newsletters weren’t even hard to find or subtle: swastikas and in-app recommendations from one antisemitic newsletter to a bunch of others.
The Global Story: Is ISIS having a resurgence in Syria?
The US military has begun to transfer up to 7000 Islamic State (IS) group detainees held in prisons in Syria to Iraq, which officials say is to prevent prisoners breaking out and regrouping. The transfer comes weeks after the US led large-scale strikes on IS group targets in...
Winter Olympics disrupted by protests and 'sabotage'
The Winter Olympics in Italy are disrupted by violent protests and the authorities launch an investigation after severed cables cause mass delays on the railway network. Also: The veteran French politician, Jack Lang, resigns as head of the Arab World Institute in Paris over...
Quoting Thomas Ptacek
People on the orange site are laughing at this, assuming it's just an ad and that there's nothing to it. Vulnerability researchers I talk to do not think this is a joke. As an erstwhile vuln researcher myself: do not bet against LLMs on this.
Axios: Anthropic's Claude Opus ...
Vouch
Vouch
Mitchell Hashimoto's new system to help address the deluge of worthless AI-generated PRs faced by open source projects now that the friction involved in contributing has dropped so low.
He says:
The idea is simple: Unvouched users can't contribute to your projects. Ve...
Claude: Speed up responses with fast mode
Claude: Speed up responses with fast mode
New "research preview" from Anthropic today: you can now access a faster version of their frontier model Claude Opus 4.6 by typing /fast in Claude Code... but at a cost that's 6x the normal price.
Opus is usually $5/million input and...
Quoting David Crawshaw
I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing. The fear itself I understand, I have fear more broadly about what the end-game is for intelligence on tap in our society. But in the limited domain of writing computer programs these tools have brought so much exploration and joy to my work.
— David Crawshaw, Eight more months of agents
Tags: coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms
How StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code
Last week I hinted at a demo I had seen from a team implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks at the code the coding agents are producing. That team was part of StrongDM, and they've just shared the first public des...
07.02.2026
Video with racist clip pulled from Trump social media
President Trump says he only watched part of a video including a racist animation of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, before it was posted on his own social media. The clip was at the end of a 62-second video he shared containing claims about voter fraud in the 2020 presid...
Quoting Tom Dale
I don't know why this week became the tipping point, but nearly every software engineer I've talked to is experiencing some degree of mental health crisis.
[...] Many people assuming I meant job loss anxiety but that's just one presentation. I'm seeing near-manic episodes triggered by watching software shift from scarce to abundant. Compulsive behaviors around agent usage. Dissociative awe at the temporal compression of change. It's not fear necessarily just the cognitive overload from living in an inflection point.
— Tom Dale
Tags: ai-ethics, careers, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms
Running Pydantic's Monty Rust sandboxed Python subset in WebAssembly
There's a jargon-filled headline for you! Everyone's building sandboxes for running untrusted code right now, and Pydantic's latest attempt, Monty, provides a custom Python-like language (a subset of Python) in Rust and makes it available as both a Rust library and a Python ...