davewiner's subscription list, hackerNewsStars category. List created by feedlandDatabase v0.8.16.
Krebs on Security
• BrianKrebs
Patch Tuesday, April 2026 Edition
Microsoft today pushed software updates to fix a staggering 167 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and related software, including a SharePoint Server zero-day and a publicly disclosed weakness in Windows Defender dubbed "BlueHammer." Separately, Google Chrome fixed its fourth zero-day of 2026, and an emergency update for Adobe Reader nixes an actively exploited flaw that can lead to remote code execution.
Trusted access for the next era of cyber defense
Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now
Experimental History
• Adam Mastroianni
Nothing ever dies. It merely becomes embarrassing.
OR: the Halo theory of science
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
• Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic: In praise of (some) compartmentalization (14 Apr 2026)
Troy Hunt
• Troy Hunt
Weekly Update 499
I'm starting to become pretty fond of Bruce. Actually, I've had a bit of an epiphany: an AI assistant like Bruce isn't just about auto-responding to tickets in an entirely autonomous manner; it's also pretty awesome at responding with just a little
Big Plans is out now
Big Plans is out now on iOS and Android. We built it at Secret Lab for Bank of us, the Tasmanian customer-owned bank, as a story-based game for kids aged 5 to 8 about money. Specifically, the value of money, needs versus wants, and the basics of planning and making choices.
We loved making it. The brief was unusually thoughtful for a kids’ app: no ads, no in-app purchases, no online interaction, no marketing pitches at children. Just a small game that helps a five-year-old start thinking about how money works. There’s a parent guide that goes with it for families who want to keep the conversation going off-screen.
Entropic Thoughts
• kqr
Object Oriented Programming in Ada
Ada is incredibly well designed. One way this shows is that it takes the big, monolithic features of other languages and breaks them down into their constituent parts, so we can choose which portions of those features we want. The example I often reach for to explain this is object-oriented programming.
I never truly understood object-oriented programming until I learned Ada, which breaks down object-oriented programming into separate features, like
- encapsulation,
- reuse,
- inheritance,
- abstract interfaces,
- type extension, and
- dynamic dispatch.
Quoting Steve Yegge
The TL;DR is that Google engineering appears to have the same AI adoption footprint as John Deere, the tractor company. Most of the industry has the same internal adoption curve: 20% agentic power users, 20% outright refusers, 60% still using Cursor or equivalent chat tool. It turns out Google has this curve too. [...]
There has been an industry-wide hiring freeze for 18+ months, during which time nobody has been moving jobs. So there are no clued-in people coming in from the outside to tell Google how far behind they are, how utterly mediocre they have become as an eng org.
Tags: steve-yegge, google, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms
Exploring the new `servo` crate
Quoting Bryan Cantrill
The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone's) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters.
As such, LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp abstractions in part because we don't want to waste our (human!) time on the consequences of clunky ones.
— Bryan Cantrill, The peril of laziness lost
Tags: bryan-cantrill, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai
Gemma 4 audio with MLX
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
• Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic: Austerity creates fascism (13 Apr 2026)
Martin Alderson
• Martin Alderson
A little tool to visualise MoE expert routing
I built a small tool to visualise how Mixture of Experts models route tokens through different experts. It's genuinely fascinating to watch.
That’s a Skill Issue
SQLite 3.53.0
-
ALTER TABLEcan now add and removeNOT NULLandCHECKconstraints - I've previously used my own sqlite-utils transform() method for this. - New json_array_insert() function and its
jsonbequivalent. - Significant improvements to CLI mode, including result formatting.
The result formatting improvements come from a new library, the Query Results Formatter. I had Claude Code (on my phone) compile that to WebAssembly and build this playground interface for trying that out.
Via Lobste.rs
SQLite Query Result Formatter Demo
Tool: SQLite Query Result Formatter Demo
See my notes on SQLite 3.53.0. This playground provides a UI for trying out the various rendering options for SQL result tables from the new Query Result Formatter library, compiled to WebAssembly.
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
• Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic: Don't Be Evil (11 Apr 2026)
Kākāpō parrots
Lenny posted another snippet from our 1 hour 40 minute podcast recording and it's about kākāpō parrots!
Tags: kakapo