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These are my notes and expanded thoughts from this month’s Space News segment on ABC Radio Hobart and ABC Northern Tasmania. Every month I join Lucie Cutting on Sunday mornings to chat about what’s happening above and beyond.

Here’s what we discussed, plus some of my notes, and expanded thoughts from this edition of the programme:

Water on the moon?

China just made space history, and it’s not the headline you’d expect. Back in June 2024, their Chang’e-6 mission became the first spacecraft ever to return samples from the lunar far side. The mission was very cool (a technical term), requiring a relay satellite just to communicate, since radio signals can’t pass through a moon’s worth of solid rock.

Software engineers underestimate the scale of Excel usage. With agents now able to work directly in spreadsheets, we're looking at transforming how billions of dollars in business processes are managed.

I just hit send on the October edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access a copy here. In the newsletter this month:

• Coding agents and "vibe engineering"
• Claude Code for web
• NVIDIA DGX Spark
• Claude Skills
• OpenAI DevDay and GitHub Universe
• Python 3.14
• October in Chinese Al model releases
• Miscellaneous extras
• Tools I'm using at the moment

Here's a copy of the September newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!

Tags: newsletter

Claude Code Can Debug Low-level Cryptography Go cryptography author Filippo Valsorda reports on some very positive results applying Claude Code to the challenge of implementing novel cryptography algorithms. After Claude was able to resolve a "fairly complex low-level bug" i...

Today's links There's one thing EVERY government can do to shrink Big Tech: The path to a post-American internet. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: D2020; Sony rootkit; Public Enemy vs the internet; NYC plute Hallowe'en. Upcoming appearances: Where t...

I plan to introduce hard Rust dependencies and Rust code into APT, no earlier than May 2026. This extends at first to the Rust compiler and standard library, and the Sequoia ecosystem.

In particular, our code to parse .deb, .ar, .tar, and the HTTP signature verification code would strongly benefit from memory safe languages and a stronger approach to unit testing.

If you maintain a port without a working Rust toolchain, please ensure it has one within the next 6 months, or sunset the port.

— Julian Andres Klode, debian-devel mailing list

Tags: open-source, debian, rust, linux

It's like BDD, but the user is a hallucination

This blog post explores how Tigris Object Storage's bucket forking feature enables isolated dataset experimentation similar to forking code repositories. It demonstrates creating parallel data timelines for filtering, captioning, and resizing game screenshots without duplicating storage, allowing safe experimentation on large datasets.

This blog post explains how to effectively file abuse reports against cloud providers to stop malicious traffic. Key points: Two IP Types: Residential (ineffective to report) vs. Commercial (targeted reports) Why Cloud Prov...

Marimo is Joining CoreWeave I don't usually cover startup acquisitions here, but this one feels relevant to several of my interests. Marimo (previously) provide an open source (Apache 2 licensed) notebook tool for Python, with first-class support for an additional WebAssembl...

My piece this morning about the Marimo acquisition is an example of a variant of a TIL - I didn't know much about CoreWeave, the acquiring company, so I poked around to answer my own questions and then wrote up what I learned as a short post. Curiosity-driven blogging if you like.

Tags: til, blogging

Today's links The internet was made for privacy: And unmade by regulators. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Materialist conspiratorialism; TSA ball-fondlers; Anonymous to dox 1,000 Klansmen; Amazon hates private property; The Great Firewall of Camer...

The Arduino Uno Q is a weird hybrid SBC Jeff Geerling October 31, 2025

The Arduino Uno Q is... a weird board. It's the first product born out of Qualcomm's buyout of Arduino.

It's like if you married an Intel CPU, and a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller—oh wait, Radxa's X4 did that.

Arduino even tried it before with their old Yún board, which had Linux running on a MIPS CPU, married to an ATmega microcontroller.

The Uno Q isn't quite a Raspberry Pi, but it looks like one when you squint at it. And it's not quite an Uno, but it does a pretty good job masquerading as that, too.

Marimo is Joining CoreWeave I don't usually cover startup acquisitions here, but this one feels relevant to several of my interests. Marimo (previously) provide an open source (Apache 2 licensed) notebook tool for Python, with first-class support for an additional WebAssembl...

I have been using a MacBook Pro M4 as my portable computer for the last half a year and wanted to share a few short impressions. As always, I am not a professional laptop reviewer, so in this article you won’t find benchmarks, just subjective thoughts! Back in 2021, I wrote ...

Are speed dating and network effects contradictory?

I’ve always thought of myself as a practitioner. In the startups I was part of, the only “strategy” were my marketing tactics on how to make the VP of Sales the richest person in the company. After I retired, I created Customer Development and co-created the Lean Startup as a simple methodology which codified founders […]

To really understand a concept, you have to "invent" it yourself in some capacity. Understanding doesn't come from passive content consumption. It is always self-built. It is an active, high-agency, self-directed process of creating and debugging your own mental models.

— François Chollet

Tags: francois-chollet, teaching

Introducing SWE-1.5: Our Fast Agent Model Here's the second fast coding model released by a coding agent IDE in the same day - the first was Composer-1 by Cursor. This time it's Windsurf releasing SWE-1.5: Today we’re releasing SWE-1.5, the latest in our family of models op...