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There is justified anger about governments relying on Palantir software. There are also calls to write replacement software, perhaps imbued with European values.
And I’d love for that to happen pronto, but first we need to understand a few things. It is not just the software.
Image by Mariia Shalabaieva on Unsplash
“Palantir is often called a data broker, a data miner, or a giant database of personal information. In reality, it’s none of these—but even former employees struggle to explain it” - Wired

I’ve pushed AI doomers on how exactly the AI kills us, and I’ve never heard a good answer. I think Skynet style scenarios where humanity is largely opposed to an out of control AI are science fiction domination fantasies, along with Gray goo bottom-up scenarios. Both of these assume a major continuity break with current reality, too bizarre to be true. But unfortunately, you don’t need this for humanity to end as an open-ended evolutionary process. I think the danger is that AI continues to optimize the current societal loss function of domestication.

This is going to be a rant about modern web design practices. But before I get to that, let me begin with a familiar principle from the world of cryptography. Among software developers, and especially among those who work on security-sensitive systems, there is ...

The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics David Oks provides the clearest explanation I've seen yet of why consumer products that use memory are likely to get significantly more expensive over the next few years. The short version is that memory manu...

On Thursday, three of the lead Raspberry Pi engineers hosted an AMA on the r/engineering subreddit.

Raspberry Pi 6

One of the most interesting tidbits was on the Pi 6.

Looking back at previous launches:

• 2012: Raspberry Pi
• 2015: Raspberry Pi 2 (+3 years)
• 2016: Raspberry Pi 3 (+1 year)
• 2019: Raspberry Pi 4 (+3 years)
• 2023: Raspberry Pi 5 (+4 years)

Following that cycle, one would expect a Pi 6 3-4 years after the Pi 5, which would put it in 2026 or 2027.

Research: pydantic-monty investigation

It's been a few months since I last poked at Monty, the sandboxed subset of Python implemented in Rust. I had Claude Code look at the most recent release.

Importantly the max_duration_secs, max_memory, max_allocations, and max_recursion_depth settings all appear to work as advertised.

Tags: python, sandboxing, pydantic

Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are demanding answers from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after KrebsOnSecurity reported this week that a CISA contractor intentionally published AWS GovCloud keys and a vast trove of other agency secrets on a public GitHub account. The inquiry comes as CISA is still struggling to contain the breach and invalidate the leaked credentials.

This article tells part of the general story of Dungeons & Dragons on the tabletop and on computers, which includes the more specific one of the Infinity Engine games. My power fantasy when playing a role-playing game is to confront a villain, explain point by point why his master plan is flawed, and then get […]

Working up from basic logic gates to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the way they do.

A survey of unused-dependency detectors

FTC to Require Cox Media Group, Two Other Firms to Pay Nearly $1 Million to Settle Charges They Deceived Customers About “Active Listening” AI-Powered Marketing Service Back in 2024 Cox Media Group were caught trying to sell advertisers packages based on "active listening", ...

A chance Discord message, two missing pieces, and one hour before the window closed: From info leak to RCE on Google Cloud. Three months later, it happened again.

Canadian authorities on Wednesday arrested a 23-year-old Ottawa man on suspicion of building and operating Kimwolf, a fast spreading Internet-of-Things botnet that enslaved millions of devices for use in a series of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the past six months. KrebsOnSecurity publicly named the suspect in February 2026 after the accused launched a volley of DDoS, doxing and swatting campaigns against this author and a security researcher. He now faces criminal hacking charges in both Canada and the United States.

In the hours following the news that art-template fell victim to a supply chain attack via NPM, developers and systems administrators scrambled ensure all of their projects were unaffected from a supply chain attack where attackers have controlled the reposit...

We just announced the first release of Datasette Agent, a new extensible AI assistant for Datasette. I've been working on my LLM Python library for just over three years now, and Datasette Agent represents the moment that LLM and Datasette finally come together. I'm really e...

Release: datasette-agent-sprites 0.1a0

A Datasette Agent plugin for running commands in a Fly Sprites sandbox.

Tags: sandboxing, datasette, fly, datasette-agent

Release: datasette-agent-charts 0.1a2

• "View SQL query" buttons below rendered charts.

Tags: datasette, datasette-agent

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a3

• "View SQL query" buttons for both visible tables and collapsed SQL result tool calls.
• Don't display empty reasoning chunks
• Improved handling of truncated responses - table still displays to the user even if the SQL results were truncated when showing the agent.

See Datasette Agent, an extensible AI assistant for Datasette.

Tags: datasette, datasette-agent

Release: datasette-agent-charts 0.1a1

• More color! Bar and waffle charts without a color column are shaded by magnitude with a sequential color scheme; color columns holding text values use the observable10 categorical scheme. #2
• Now checks execute-sql permission before running the query to find the column names.
• Charts now display interactive tooltips.
• Fixed a bug where waffleY charts were not described to the agent.

Tags: datasette, datasette-agent

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-45250 for the project FreeBSD, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a kernel stack overflow when validating permissions of the setcred(2) ...