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An AI interview about explaining hard things simply, conducted on a dog walk

There was once a wizard who lived beside a pond.

Back in January 2025, multiple different security researchers published a total of 6 security vulnerabilities in rsync, some of which allow arbitrary code execution and file leaks, so naturally I was wondering whether/how my gokrazy/rsync implementation was affected. Did imp...

TUF, in-toto, and Sigstore only look pointless while nothing is on fire

I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming. The output is broken, but in a way that’s getting harder and harder to detect. Which is exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly accurate statistical model.

Well, that didn't last long! Recording this on Saturday morning my time, I observed ShinyHunters having gone quiet since the massive haul that would have been the Instructure ransom. It was two weeks almost to the hour since I'd first heard rumour of payment being made,

Pi is now part of Earendil, but in the important sense it is still Mario’s project. He has been living with its issue tracker longer than I have, and he has been exposed to the weirdness of the new form of agent traffic in Open Source projects for longer too. This post is ...

I recently stumbled upon a nice blog post titled Childhood Computing. It made me think about my own childhood computing experience. I am much older than the author of the aforementioned post, but like them, I too love computers. I have for most of my life. ...

Submissions for Australia’s next National Cultural Policy closed in May 2026. I wrote one, on behalf of Tasmanian Game Makers, because I want games taken seriously as what they are: the art form most of us actually play.

Read the full submission on Tas Game Makers

Here are the highlights.

Games are the art form of our time. In 2025, 82% of Australians played them, the average player was 35, and women now make up just over half of all players. On the government’s own data, digital games development has been the fastest-growing of all cultural and creative activities in the country over the past decade. Games are also one of our most export-heavy creative industries: 93% of the Australian sector’s revenue comes from overseas.

On the <dl>

I learned a few new-to-me things about the <dl> element from this article by Ben Meyer:

1. A <dt> can be followed by multiple <dd>
2. You can optionally group the <dt> and <dd> elements in a <div> for styling - but only a <div>.
3. You can label them using ARIA.
4. They've been called "description lists", not "definition lists", since an HTML5 draft in 2008.

So this is valid:

<h2 id="credits">Credits</h2>
<dl aria-labelledby="credits">
  <div>
    <dt>Author</dt>
    <dd>Jeffrey Zeldman</dd>
    <dd>Ethan Marcotte</dd>
  </div>
</dl>

Here's a useful note from Adrian Roselli on screen reader support for description lists.

Via Hacker News

Tags: css, html, screen-readers, web-standards

Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle, providing lab space for astronauts and experiments. Spacelab was controlled by a French-built minicomputer, called the Mitra 125 MS. Unlike modern computers, this computer didn't ...

Squatter removal services, Apple finding uses for defective chips, process heat use in California, the brewing Colorado River crisis, and more.

Releases, advisories, and articles from across the package management world

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.