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I've started playing around with YouTube's "create video thumbnail", which hopefully will give me back a bit of time in my day (it used to be a manual job in Photoshop) and be a bit more interesting. And on that note, the imagery it&

Declaring victory without a definition simply muddies the waters

After a year of work, hundreds of commits, 5 generations of pull requests, dozens of tests, rewriting part of Anubis in Rust, the first compiler bug of my career, and at least three times making my tower run out of ram I think I have finally done it. The next versio...

The recent agent sandbox escapes at OpenAI and Anthropic look less like a technical failure and more like a philosophical one - treating security controls as though they only need to work most of the time.

The purpose of DNS is to spread scams

Terence Eden shares some daunting statistics in support of his take that "the Domain Name System's purpose seems to be a vector for criminals to run scams on people at a terrifyingly high rate".

On this Interisle report (via Andrew Campling), Terence says:

It says 85 million new registrations of gTLDs were made in 2025. Of those 8.5 million were added to blocklists by May 2025. It reckons that a 10% abuse rate is the likely floor for these numbers and it's probably closer to 20%. One in five newly registered domains with a gTLD are scams. That's a bloody crisis.

I had no idea. Apparently ICANN have been discussing this problem for years.

Tags: dns, scams, terence-eden

I imagine everyone here has received an unsolicited message telling them that their tax is overdue and that they urgently need to visit Genuine-Tax-Payment-Website.fart or that a parcel is delayed at customs and you can pay a small sum for its release at Almost-The-Right-Acronym.ak You know it is a scam. Most people just mark as spam and move on with their day. But a significant number of people …

If you continue to add floors and rooms to a building forever, it will collapse. Software faces no such constraint. The code can always get worse. There can always be a new layer of indirection or a reduction in performance.

— Zach Kehs, There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get

Tags: technical-debt

This August, I accomplished what I wanted for many years: I deleted the last cgo dependency in Debian Code Search! This was made possible by Go’s recently introduced SIMD support, because now we can implement the TurboPFor integer compression format as efficiently — more eff...

I’ve had a running joke with my wife Dorte for almost as long as we’ve been a couple. I reasoned back in the day that, since she was going to be a doctor — a more reliable source of income than writing about computer games — she should be expected to buy me the Porsche […]

Introducing GPT-6 Astra for developers

Blink and you'll miss it, but there's a familiar creature at 1m59s:

Across the board, Astra has more attention to detail, better understanding of the user's prompt, and can build more sophisticated outputs. In particular, it excels at building 3D models. I've seen it make incredible renderings of gardens, shipyards, animals, cityscapes, even Dyson spheres.

Astra really does believe in putting a red neckerchief on a pelican riding a bicycle.

Via Hacker News comment

Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, gpt-6-astra

The previous post discussed the motivation for and application of the rank-trace theorem. This post will give a proof. Suppose A is a real symmetric matrix. The rank-trace inequality says where tr is the trace operator, the sum of the elements along the diagonal of the matrix. Terse proof Here’s the proof in a nutshell: diagonalize A […]

The post Proof of the rank-trace theorem first appeared on John D. Cook.

TIL: Using Blender with coding agents on macOS

I've been having fun with Blender in ChatGPT Codex on my Mac recently. Getting it to work with coding agents is really easy: install the full Mac application from blender.org and run a prompt like this:

Use the already install /Applications/Blender to render a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle

In this case I followed that up with these two prompts:

OK add a background and a lot of flair

Then:

OK make it a whole lot better

And got this image, generated using Blender's Python API:

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, blender, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, coding-agents, gpt-6-astra

A few weeks ago I felt like it would be fun to see if I can make one of those cheap Chinese CarPlay dongles run something other than the stock firmware. The idea was that rather than just forwarding CarPlay, why not do something more interesting with them? They all work qu...

SpaceX’s turbine blade factory, Fervo’s deal with Google, Delhi’s cheap metro, why recycling is overrated, and more.

This is a gorgeous set of short stories - and a good deal more accessible than some of the heavyweight prose Liu has previously been involved with. Some of the stories contain sentences which are complex jewels to be savoured. What I particularly like is the way he moves between almost-prosaic Earth-bound stories to the the most extraordinary flights of fancy. One story might be set in a…

I’ve been on an optical media kick lately, having a grand old time burning discs and whatnot. One bit of advice that consistently comes up: don’t let your burned discs get exposed to sunlight; the dye layer is UV after all, and since the sun is a deadly laser it can damage your precious bits.

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

Today's links Google skates: Another federal judge loses a game of peek-a-boo. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Memory-hacking ads; "Dzur"; NZ Ministry of DRM; Canadians v looking at the internet; Advice for self-publishers; Advice for writers; Why ...

You're changing the value for future windows.

The post What happens if you change a window class’s <CODE>GCL_<WBR>CB­WND­EXTRA</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

I got access to GPT-6 Astra this afternoon, so naturally I used it to generate SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles - at low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning levels (Astra doesn't support reasoning=none). Then I rendered those pelicans in a comparison grid with GPT-5.6 Sol...