Stratechery Today

2026.43: A New Era

Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery! This week marks a new era for Stratechery, which is now presented by Stripe . I’m excited about what this partnership can unlock, starting with in-person on-video episodes of Sharp Tech. Check out the YouTube video above (or watch it on Stratechery ); and, for subscribers, look forward to a bonus episode showing up in your subscriber feed every Sunday morning (add your feed on sharptech.fm ). Here were a few of our favorite topics this week: Presented by It’s kind of weird to be the Internet’s number one fan of ads. What makes it even weirder is that I have been the Internet’s number one fan of ads without actually having ads on Stratechery . That second part is changing: I’m super excited to announce that Stripe is going to be the presenting sponsor of Stratechery. And, at the end of the day, for me it couldn’t be any other company. One of my hangups in terms of advertising is that I take my ethics super seriously, and ultimately, if a company is helping pay the bills, it’s hard to be truly objective about them. What I realized, however, is that it’s hard for me to be objective about Stripe anyway.  I wanted to be a professional blogger long before I started Stratechery; however, I thought I had missed my chance, particularly as it became clear that advertising was not a long term business model for a one-person site. However, when Stripe launched with support for recurring billing, I realized there was a better model: subscriptions. 13 years later, and I’m still a happy customer. Or, to put it another way, I’m already conflicted because I love Stripe.  I’m not the only one: more than 5 million businesses use Stripe, accounting for 1.7% of global GDP. Moreover, a lot of those businesses are Internet native and accretive to the world’s economy, which is to say that Stripe is literally making the world a better place. That’s an easy company to get behind, especially since they have been behind Stratechery from the very beginning. — Ben Thompson The Best iPad; The Worst Phone. John Gruber wrote a great review of the iPhone Duo, which we broke down on Dithering . In short, it’s an iPad that fits in your pocket, and it’s awesome at that; just don’t expect a good phone. Plus, on Monday we discussed Apple’s surprising partnership with Meta for edge AI, a topic I also covered in Tuesday’s Update . — Ben Thompson The SS Sarandos in a Storm. The past week has seen a flood of bad news for Netflix: layoffs, executive departures, another disappointing round of earnings, and another hit to a share price that has taken a 40% hit over the past 12 months. Wednesday’s Update provides a comprehensive state of the union , and we doubled back on the topic for a fun conversation on this week’s Sharp Tech , where we divided the company’s problems into areas that can be fixed (the content) and what may be much trickier (growing the business in a world where Meta and YouTube are primary engagement competition). — Andrew Sharp You Can See Everything, But Can’t Trust Anyone. Allow me to be the 1,000th person on the internet to recommend Nathan Fielder’s new Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything . After declaring on Sharp Tech last week that I wasn’t interested in seeing it, I did in fact check it out, and wound up loving it. I wrote about my experience on Sharp Text , with 5 spoiler-free notes for anyone still on the fence, and 5 more reactions for anyone who’s seen it. Compulsively watchable (and worth seeing in a theater), I think it may have also been the most effective document of our modern media environment I’ve ever seen. — AS Do You Trust Apple? — Apple has a lot of trust in terms of delivering integrated products and preserving privacy; the real trust question is if you think Siri AI will justify investing more in their ecosystem. Muse Spark Open, Meta + Apple, Thin and Thick — Meta has a new open source model, and to everyone’s surprise, they are are partnering with Apple to make sure you can run it locally. Netflix Earnings, Business or Franchise, Disney’s Deal — Netflix has a solid business, which is exactly the problem: the company increasingly seems like a business and not a franchise, at least in terms of growth. An Interview with Craig Moffett About SpaceX and Bubbles — An interview with Craig Moffett about SpaceX, from launch to broadband to mobile, plus how he is applying the lessons of the dot-com bubble to today. You Can See Everything (And It’s a Great Time) — Nathan Fielder’s movie lives up to the hype and captures the modern world better than any art in recent memory. Apple + Meta AI The Duo Review The Birth & Rise of India’s IT Outsourcing Industry New Export Controls in Multiple Sectors; Q3 GDP and the Fifth Plenum; Europe Presses Forward; OpenAI and Nvidia Chips Aday Mara and the OKC Woodchipper, An Emergency Celtics Panic Watch, Silver Appreciation(???) and Laker Dreams Netflix Angst, The End of the Internet, Q&A on Meta’s VR Glasses, Anthropic Alignment, You Can See Everything

Business Marketing Media

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At Today

Premium: The Hater's Guide To Blackstone

For whatever reason, Blackstone founder and CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman has a thirty-chapter-long series called “ My Personal History ” that is, well, exactly what it sounds like — a financial hagiography that frames him as a noble, sensible man with strong values, like when he sent a letter to “distinguished skull and bones alumni” Averell Harriman, whose father Edward Harriman had crashed the stock market in 1901 in his dogged attempt to monopolize the post-bubble railroad industry. Averell himself had co-founded a bank with Fritz Thyssen, who banked the nazis . Anyway, seven chapters in, Schwarzman makes a bold claim while telling the story of his first job on Wall Street in 1969, where he saw the oncoming collapse of a nearby student fridge rental and life insurance business (no, really): Good question, Steve!  While we’re on the subject, why is it that you invested $275 billion of Blackstone’s roughly $1.4 trillion in assets under management into data center and digital infrastructure investments? While people might get excited about their products, I have it on good authority that the $2.3 billion debt financing deal you did for CoreWeave (back when, per The Information , it only had $16 million in revenue) closed despite everybody having serious misgivings about the financial health, ongoing returns and actual viability of the business. Based on everything I’ve learned about Blackstone, it appears that the only people you do business with are “salespeople trying to persuade you of something that is not real”!  Let’s go down the list: Blackstone is the world’s largest commercial landlord, the world’s largest private equity firm, and the largest investor in data center infrastructure. It has invested in and/or loaned money at least once to OpenAI , Anthropic , CoreWeave, Google TPUs , Firmus , a private equity vehicle to sell Anthropic’s software , Lambda , and innumerable amounts of random AI startups and AI infrastructure companies at a scale that is hard to quantify for reasons I covered in both the Hater’s Guides to Private Equity and Private Credit , which mostly stem from the word “private.” Nevertheless, even from the outside, Blackstone’s exposure to AI — and the greater software industry — is distressingly large, and thanks to that privacy , it’s very, very hard to tell where the money is coming from, both in the case of where Blackstone gets its funds and what specific vehicle it’s deploying them from.   Put another way, you can find Blackstone’s fingerprints on almost every big AI deal, yet more often than not have no way of saying what specific fund sunk in the cash.  Blackstone, as the Ur-Private Equitor, is not one company but a labyrinth of different investment funds, each funded by a combination of corporate pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, horrifyingly, public pension funds, which Bloomberg Intelligence estimates accounts for 32% or so of Blackstone’s overall funding. Today, I’m going to dig into how credit, insurance and big bets on AI have changed one of the most evil companies in the world. Blackstone-owned medical device rental company Apria Healthcare paid, per the Private Equity Stakeholder Project , its owners $210 million in dividends in the same month that it paid a $40.5 million settlement related to its fraudulent billing practices, otherwise known as defrauding the sick and elderly. Great job guys! In 2019, per Housing Is A Human Right , the UN’s special envoy on the Right To Housing and the chair-rapporteur of the UN’s Working Group on human rights sent Schwarzman a seven-page-long letter stating that Blackstone was "significantly contributing” to the financialization of housing, which was “having a grave impact on the enjoyment of the right to adequate housing for millions of people in the world,” with Blackstone-owned Invitation Homes’ jacking up leases, charging tenants for repairs, forcing people out of their homes , and its overall financialization of housing directly discriminating against African Americans, to name only a few of the horrors caused by this company. I go into more detail about this in the piece. In 2018, Blackstone bought Atlanta-based Packers Sanitation Services . Five years later in 2023, PSSI was forced to pay a mere $1.5 million to the Department of Labor for, to quote TIME , “...[employing] more than 100 children—some as young as 13—were employed in hazardous jobs cleaning equipment like skull splitters, brisket saws, and bone cutters in meatpacking plants in eight states over the course of three years.” In March and July 2021, Blackstone would take its payments platform PaySafe and benefits platform Alight public via two separate SPACs with billionaire Bill Foley, with the stocks peaking at $185 and $260 a share respectively. Their stocks are worth $5.51 and $9.16 as of writing this sentence, with effectively anyone who invested during the IPO utterly screwed.

Business AI Finance

Unsung Today

“Scaring the daylights out of unsuspecting users”

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.) In 2018, users of the still relatively-new Amazon Echo devices would occasionally hear their Alexa… laughing. It felt completely unprompted, and creepy as hell. There are so many memes and exaggerations that it is hard to find the genuine recording of the synthesized laughter, but I think this video from WTNH News8 captures what it genuinely sounded like: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/scaring-the-daylights-out-of-unsuspecting-users/yt1-play.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/scaring-the-daylights-out-of-unsuspecting-users/yt1-play.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> There’s not much to the mystery, so I’ll jump to Amazon’s explanations to the story, as excerpted in this Ars Technica article : In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase “Alexa, laugh.” We are changing that phrase to be “Alexa, can you laugh?” which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance “Alexa, laugh.” We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to “Sure, I can laugh” followed by laughter. Combine this with potentially overeager wake words… It’s not uncommon for Echo devices to hear sounds and mistake them for a user’s wake word. Amazon’s smart speakers can be programmed to respond to a few words: “Alexa” is the most common, but other options like “Echo” and “Amazon” are available as well. These bouts of laughter could be a byproduct of Echo devices mistakenly hearing their wake words. …and it all starts to make sense. “Echo, laugh” is three grunt-esque syllables and I can imagine other words or even noises interpreted as these. But one of the commenters under the article had a good observation: I’m confused what circumstances could possibly lead to this behavior. Why does Alexa even have a “laugh creepily” response? Perhaps this was nothing more than a programmer trying to add something “cute” to software, and that idea backfiring horribly. It feels similar to all those random and awfully cheap Google easter eggs when you search for specific phrases that randomly change the font to Comic Sans, or rotate the screen, or do other basic things, just because that’s “fun.” (You know me, I will never miss an opportunity to hate on these.) Anyway, it seems like the problem went away after the described patch was implemented. The original WTNH News8 video continues with “One Twitter user even reported an Amazon Echo that began listing the names of local funeral homes and cemeteries without prompting,” and the idea of someone pranking the news team on Twitter was the thing that made me laugh.

Programming

Unsung Today

“As user-friendly as a cactus”

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.) There aren’t very many YouTube videos that talk about user interfaces of specific programs. I shared one long ago covering the Apple Music app , and this review by Tantacrul (a.k.a. Martin Keary) of music notation software Finale is so much better and more fun, and I wish there were more like it: = 2x) and (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/as-user-friendly-as-a-cactus/yt1-play.2096w.avif" type="image/avif"> = 3x) or (width >= 700px)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/as-user-friendly-as-a-cactus/yt1-play.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> It’s not just a cutting critique of the user interface of a badly-aged app. It’s also a great introduction to the whole space, and a thought-provoking case study that goes beyond just UI, but also into business context and market changes. (Finale was released in 1988 and discontinued in 2024.) While I would love to see productions like this for other niches (Blender! CAD! screenwriting software! design tools…?), this video already feels like a must watch to anyone working on complex software – even if it’s far away from music. It is a cautionary tale, and it covers the issues of an aging codebase, complexity, evolving system conventions, user habits, deferred maintenance, plugin ecosystems, innovator’s dilemma, and so on. It will make you think. From the beginning of the video: I want to look at how Finale got started, what was happening behind the scenes and how it got swept away due to larger external forces that its creators could not have predicted. And ultimately, how, when the writing was on the wall – when it was clear that big improvements were needed – it found itself stuck, unable to change. This is a case study in how creative software dies. The video itself is also more creative than you might expect. As a matter of fact, toward the end, it can get a little… unhinged. You’ll know when that happens. And that seems like a perfect transition into Halloween Week on Unsung! Let’s spend an entire week talking about scary and weird stories. It’s going to be fun!

Design Programming Business

Unsung Today

Apple’s iPod recreation

Just a week ago , I bemoaned the lack of any good iPod click wheel explainers, and today the news broke about Apple Music hiding a functioning iPod on their 404 page . I am usually not a fan of easter eggs – most of them are poorly made – but this might be the best iPod recreation I’ve seen, and it’s an interesting thing to study: = 3x)" srcset="https://unsung.aresluna.org/_media/apples-ipod-recreation/1-framed.1600w.avif" type="image/avif"> Most importantly, it works well on mobile, too – well, some of the page chrome and ads feel a bit the way, but it’s not a big deal (and you can hide them using the Hide Distracting Items feature in Safari) – so you can pretend you’re holding an iPod in your hand. Worth spending a bit of time with it, especially if you have never used an iPod in your life: Kudos to whomever put this together. This is how you do easter eggs. (I tagged this as emulation , even though this is a grounds-up recreation in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.) I think it generally covers all the modes etc. (with small exceptions) the typography looks accurate, it has the little “haptic” beeps, it has proper acceleration and the scrollbar, it has a little music library with various playlists, I have only noticed a few small bugs.

Programming Frontend JavaScript CSS HTML

Jeff Geerling Today

Ubiquiti's $99 Vape Detector is actually pretty good

Since learning about the effects of high CO2 concentration on attention and cognitive performance—especially at levels much higher than 2000ppm—I've started monitoring CO2 and other air quality indicators in my house, at my studio, and even on the road. I have a few other air quality monitors I'll be covering in the future, but today I wanted to focus on one I only heard about in the comments on a recent video tearing down a cheap no-name 'Air Quality Detector' from Amazon .

Electronics Hardware Science

Kev Quirk Today

2026-10-23 11:56: I've never really tracked my #100DaysToOffload effort very well, so I decided to create a...

I've never really tracked my #100DaysToOffload effort very well, so I decided to create a page to help me track it. Turns out I've completed the challenge 7 times! https://kevquirk.com/100 Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment .

AI UI

Stratechery Today

Sharp Tech on Video: Netflix Angst, the End of the Internet, and Meta’s VR Glasses

Sharp Tech is, for the first time, available on video. You have two ways to consume it: YouTube, and here on Stratechery

Business Media

Marc Brooker Yesterday

Animations for System Builders: Metastability and Lost Writes

Pretty pictures help us learn, maybe? One of the things I love using LLMs for is helping me understand systems better. In the Strands Decider post I wrote about how I often ask ask me questions to check I understand this . The other technique I’m enjoying right now, and am delighted to see folks around me using too, is building animations. Animations can help us build an intuition for how and why systems work, or how and why they fail. Here’s one example: did you know that a Raft cluster can lose writes if even one of the cluster members has a storage layer that lies about ? When I built Stability Sim , I wanted to help engineers understand metastable failures better. That worked pretty well on an abstract level (e.g. retries and queues make metastability really easy to trigger ), but I still hear doubts that these behaviors happen in real systems. After all, those real systems are production-proven, and wouldn’t we have shaken out the behaviors by now if they existed? Let’s start with Postgres. In this example, captured from traces on real Postgres 16 running in a real MicroVM. Before a load spike, the database is easily able to handle its 20 queries-per-second load, thanks to the whole working set sitting in the page cache. But after the load spike, we’ve filled up a lot of the memory running queries (each takes 12MB), which now run slower because they’re served off the disk rather than the page cache. I like this example, because it shows that even simple, non-distributed systems have these behaviors. What about ? Again, we have load spike triggering the metastable state. Writes, in this case. The overloaded peers look like they’re unavailable, which triggers a storm of application-level resends. I like this example, because is widely-used quality software. Operational experience doesn’t seem to effectively shake out these kinds of issues. When I wrote Garbage Collection and Metastability , a widely-known systems academic told me that it was a fantasy . I’ve seen it happen in the wild in ways I couldn’t share, and I can forgive people for not believing this can happen based on the hand waving in the blog. So it’s nice to have a real world example, picking on again. At the start, we’re ticking along nicely at 500 reads/second, before spiking load to 1000 reads/s. The read spike increases the time spent in GC, increasing average tenure, and making less CPU available for the read workload. This is a self-reinforcing loop, and the system doesn’t recover without intercession. I believe the same thing could happen on a runtime without GC, due to increasing work in the allocator, but haven’t been able to reproduce that yet. The animations here are all generated with Kiro and KiroCrew , mostly with Opus 5.5. The actual results came from a real test environment, which captures the traces that back the animations.

DevOps PostgreSQL Performance

Sean Goedecke Yesterday

Software is slow because of bad design, not slow languages

Many people are saying that AI will make software faster by rewriting it in faster languages, but this isn’t generally true. Most programs cannot be meaningfully sped up by rewriting them in C or Rust. How can this be true? Some languages are orders-of-magnitude faster than others: for instance, C can be fifty times faster than Python. Won’t rewriting my Python program in C thus make it fifty times faster? No, it won’t. Software performance is usually dominated by I/O, not the speed of the language. Where language speed matters, most slow languages already have popular libraries that allow them to unlock C-like speed. In general, performance is a matter of design , not of language choice. Consider a simple CRUD website with a database. For any given request, 50% of the request time 1 might be spent querying the database: to fetch the current user, the record being asked for, any relevant user memberships or settings, and so on. Rewriting that website in C can only speed up that other 50%, which puts a hard ceiling on the improvements you can make 2 . At best, you’ll make requests twice as fast (probably closer to 1.5x in practice). That’s not bad, but it’s nowhere near an order-of-magnitude speedup. In other words, most real programs are “I/O-bound”: they spend most of their time waiting for data to be input or output somewhere, as opposed to “CPU-bound” programs that spend most of their time actively doing things. I/O-bound programs don’t just have to rely on a database. Often programs have to wait on some third-party API, or on writing or reading data to disk. You could speed the code in up by 100x and you probably wouldn’t even notice, because spends all of its time waiting on the network. What about work that is obviously not I/O-bound? For instance, wikis have to turn stored markdown into renderable HTML 3 . Wouldn’t rewriting that in a faster language cause a massive speedup? It would! That’s why applications that do that use libraries like cmark-gfm that call out to fast languages for markdown rendering. In general, most slow languages can write very fast programs by invoking this kind of library. Python is famously a slow language, but it’s a competitive choice for CPU-bound workloads like machine learning and mathematics, because it has a healthy set of libraries that let it offload these workloads to fast C code. If a Python program spends 80% of its time doing matrix multiplications on a GPU, you are very unlikely to be able to speed it up by rewriting it in C, because those matrix multiplications are already happening in tightly-optimized C or assembly code. Of course, some programs do in fact do a lot of CPU-bound work in slow languages. If a program has not had much engineering attention, there will probably be a lot of low-hanging fruit . But these programs are often unimportant: if they were important, someone would have gone in and optimized them already, before AI made it (relatively) easy. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to find a useful program to rewrite. Actual Computer recently rewrote tiktoken in assembly, providing a significant 4 speedup. However, you’re not going to revolutionize some field of computing like this. Even fast tokenization is only useful on the margins, because time spent in tokenization is a fraction of the time spent in inference. Despite all this, I think most software is far slower than it could be. I’m optimistic about the potential (with or without AI) to significantly speed up commonly-used software. But I think most of these speedups will come from redesigning the program, not rewriting it in a faster language. In a 2018 post , Bryan Cantrill described trying to rewrite a C program into Rust. It was difficult because the carefully-optimized design of the C program did not play well with the Rust borrow checker. Giving up, he simply wrote the program in Rust in the naive way, expecting a 20% slowdown or worse. Instead, it was 30% faster . The reasons boil down to Rust’s internal preference for a B-tree over a binary search tree, which happens to be a more cache-efficient data structure. So even in a largely CPU-bound workload, in the hands of someone very skilled at writing fast C, performance is dominated by design, not by language speed. This matches my own experience in higher-level languages. When I think of the significant speedups I’ve managed, they’re almost exclusively redesigns of the software to do less work: All of these strategies are completely unrelated to how fast the language is. In fact, writing in a slow higher-level language can make it much easier to optimize the code, because you can see at a glance what the program is doing. If (for some reason) I had first rewritten the web server in assembly, I would have a much harder time noticing the N+1 query, or the fact that we could move an API call into a job, and so on. Right now everyone is asking their AI agents to rewrite programs in Rust or C or assembly. This is fun, but it’s not a serious attempt at optimization. The set of programs that can be meaningfully sped up by this kind of rewrite is very narrow. If you want to make everything faster with AI — and you should! — you ought instead to be asking your agent to profile programs, identify hotspots, and suggest ways to redesign what the program does. Occasionally you may run into a hotspot that is truly CPU-bound and cannot be refactored to do less work. In these rare cases, rewriting that section in a faster language will help. But simply rewriting from the start will be far less successful than most people imagine. There are many good reasons to rewrite software in a different language: portability, efficiency, maintainability, and so on. But in terms of raw speed , you’re better off focusing on the program’s design. This might seem ridiculously high (if you typically work with slow languages or CPU-bound workloads), or ridiculously low (if you don’t). In my experience it’s at least in the ballpark for interpreted languages. This is formally called Amdahl’s law . Why not just store the HTML? You can, but sometimes the content of the HTML differs per-user (and even if you store the HTML you have to convert it at least once). They claim 4-23x faster than tiktoken and it was indeed ~5x faster on my laptop — though arguably this speedup comes from a redesign to avoid the dependency on regex, not on any intrinsic slowness of Rust with Python bindings. Caching a slow operation (typically an external API call) Performing slow operations asynchronously, either in a background job or out of the request/response lifecycle Performing operations in parallel instead of sequentially (sometimes breaking up large operations in order to do this) Replacing a set of SQL queries with a single SQL query (fixing N+1 problems) Replacing a slow SQL query with a fast SQL query Skipping unnecessary slow operations (e.g. in a paginated view, only fetch ancillary data from entities that are on the current page) This might seem ridiculously high (if you typically work with slow languages or CPU-bound workloads), or ridiculously low (if you don’t). In my experience it’s at least in the ballpark for interpreted languages. ↩ This is formally called Amdahl’s law . ↩ Why not just store the HTML? You can, but sometimes the content of the HTML differs per-user (and even if you store the HTML you have to convert it at least once). ↩ They claim 4-23x faster than tiktoken and it was indeed ~5x faster on my laptop — though arguably this speedup comes from a redesign to avoid the dependency on regex, not on any intrinsic slowness of Rust with Python bindings. ↩

Programming C HTML Python

Manuel Moreale Yesterday

Thinking about privacy and webmentions

I was perusing the always lovely website of one mr. V.H. Belvadi and stumbled my way onto a post titled “Webmentions, copyright and privacy” and from there quickly landed on Kev’s post titled “Privacy and Webmentions” . I find the topic very interesting because it sits at the intersection of two things I care much about: web based technology and human interactions. And so I’m gonna spend a moment thinking in public about this. The first issue I personally see in this overall discussion is the way Webmentions are framed. Quoting from Kev’s post: To my mind, a public post on an open platform like Mastodon is precisely that: public. The Fediverse is decentralised by design. When you reply to someone, your message doesn't remain isolated on your home instance; it federates across countless independent servers That to me doesn’t really square well with what Webmentions were designed for. If you open the W3C Recommendation for Webmention , you’ll see that right at the top the Abstract reads: Webmention is a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it on your site. From the receiver's perspective, it's a way to request notifications when other sites mention it. So the focus is on sending and receiving notifications. It says nothing about federating content. Down below in the document, the example they provide for a potential flow is even more explicit . The focus here is on getting notified that someone mentioned your content, so that links can be automatically included to provide ways for people to bounce around different locations that are somewhat interconnected. This is the web after all, and the web is all about linking pages. So unless I’m completely misunderstanding this document, the whole discussion about federating content has not much to do with webmentions. But I might be completely wrong; I’m far from an expert here. Scrolling through the replies to Kev’s post, I also saw a few perplexing—at least to me—ideas. For example, Ralf wrote: As you wrote, your blog is just another Fediverse instance. If people don't want to appear somewhere in a worldwide federated network with their public posts, they shouldn't post publicly into a worldwide federated network. Why are we restricting this reasoning to only federated networks? Doesn’t this also apply to, quite literally, all the web? If I post something publicly on my blog I should not then expect to have some agency over how my content is treated? Can people simply host copies of it at will? That doesn’t sound right to me. You can quote it, sure. You can even link to it. But I don't think we're cool with the idea of people simply grabbing copies and hosting them elsewhere. Then we have this exchange , also screenshotted below. Funnily enough, this exchange has an extra reply if you follow that link above, compared to what’s included inside Kev’s post, which makes this whole discussion about embedding vs linking even more confusing. So, I get what Kev’s saying when he writes «If someone was to post to Mastodon and expect that post not to show up on other parts of the Fedi, they're naive. », but at the same time we all know that the Fediverse is confusing even for tech people. So brushing that complexity aside by simply labelling people as naive is convenient, but doesn’t change the point Evan was making: if I’m a normal user and I’m signing up for a service, I post something, and I then delete it, I’m expecting that content to be actually deleted. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. Then there’s a whole long discussion about the GDPR implications, which I’m not gonna get into because GDPR is a mess, it’s a constantly shifting law, and I’m not a lawyer. But it’s certainly interesting to think about that as well. One interesting part, though, was Kev’s description of the situation: Mastodon.social isn't harvesting data from Fosstodon.org, nor vice versa, nor this site. They're all connecting over protocols as they were designed for the open web. By this reasoning, I could set up my server to connect to any other server, submit GET requests over HTTP, which is a protocol designed for the open web, and get all that content? I don’t think that’s a reasonable assumption, and I’d also get into trouble for stealing all that content since I’m not a massive AI lab, and instead I’m just a random guy. The main problem I see here is that some technologies carry with them implicit expectations. And that’s obviously problematic because different people can have very different sets of values and norms they live by. So I might set up webmentions to automate me sending you a ping to let you know that, hey, I wrote a blog post about something you wrote, with the expectations that you’ll display that on your site as a link. But you, on the other side, might see the ping and be like “hey, this person has replied to me, so this is a comment that can live on my website, under my content”. Who’s in the wrong here? Me? You? Both? Neither? I personally don’t know. What I do know is that I’m gonna publish this post, and then send an email to both Kev and V.H. to let them know I linked to their posts. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Connect via email :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month

Web Development Security

iDiallo Yesterday

Productivity

I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work. — Office Space I was watching a video where a guy said he has 8 agents working in the background. He was stressed out and was trying to "get shit done." At one point he said "I have no time to myself." That was very confusing. Let's assume for a second that the AI agents were doing all the work for him. Maybe it was some tedious work that would have taken him so much time to do manually. Now, he doesn't have to do the work because someone else is doing it. Why is he still busy? The Future we were promised It seems like the goal of productivity is to reduce the amount of work needed to create a set of results. But the moment you create the same results in less time, you are incentivised to use the new gained time to produce even more results. You will rest when you grow up — My Mom. But now that we are grown up, our employer changed the tune just a bit: You will rest when you are dead.

AI

Unsung Yesterday

Mailbag: October 2026

First of all, I wanted to send a thank you to everyone who ever sent me an email or a message. I read all of them, but can’t always respond timely – and sometimes at all – but I enjoy receiving those, and learn a lot from them. I wanted to excerpt a few things I received in recent months, so that you can enjoy them, too! Gabriel Roth pointed an obvious flaw in the Ishmael editor’s Ghost Cut implementation that completely eluded me: You didn’t mention perhaps the worst thing about the Ghost Cut feature in Ishmael — sometimes I want to move text between apps! If I cut something in Ishmael and I want to paste it into BBEdit, I’m out of luck. The “solution” is to copy it first, but the idea of changing cut + paste to copy + cut + paste in certain cases but not others makes me shudder. Ben Zotto sent in a 2006 essay by Joel Spolsky that covers the just-mentioned February 29, 1900 bug on a different occasion. “So, it’s a bug in Lotus 123?” “Yeah, but probably an intentional one. Lotus had to fit in 640K. That’s not a lot of memory. If you ignore 1900, you can figure out if a given year is a leap year just by looking to see if the rightmost two bits are zero. That’s really fast and easy. The Lotus guys probably figured it didn’t matter to be wrong for those two months way in the past. Spoiler: Bill Gates makes an appearance. A while back, I ended a post saying “Who would ever benefit from it behaving this way?” A reader wrote with this fun anecdote: My work buddies coined an absurd acronym for those absurd UI misses: HCTPBWIW How Can This Possibly Be What I Want I received a letter from Pierre-Luc Gagné, explaining in some detail the mysterious Canadian keyboard with unique symbols I wrote about last month . The answer to the mystery: this keyboard was used by Canadian government, which for a while mandated both this specific layout, and these specific icons. The layout originated by the province of Québec trying to improve French keyboards, and was meant to find a balance between the original American-centric layout, and the needs of French language: [The previous layout] prioritized English by putting every accented letter except é under two keystrokes. Glyphs that are far less commonly used like « and < were their own keys, but è and à needed two keys to be written. Francophones write à all the time . This was basically a remnant of typewriters’ operations brought forward to computers. The [new layout] moved most accented letters to their own key. Only the circumflex (^) [requires] two keystrokes, but that accent is the least used. The effort started in the 1990s. Gagné reports that by 2006 it was deemed okay to use the layout, but forgo the special icons – that explains the disappearance of those unique symbols from Apple’s keyboards – and some time after that, the federal government withdrew the order forcing the layout, as well. (It is now only a “guidance.”) Shining more light at the mystery, Gagné writes: “The anglophone majority in Canada never adopted this keyboard, so it’s seldom talked about in English.” (If you are interested in researching this more, the keywords are CAN/CSA Z243.200-92, SGQRI 001, and ISO 9995-7.) From social : The argument that rounded corners reduces the clickable area of a button reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke that Kit Kat carving their name into each bar is robbing you of chocolate. Lastly, Kevin Smith wrote this à propos updates , but it is also a good anecdote to follow the more recent post about Linear’s zero-bug policy : I missed the deadline to submit mine, but here’s my folklore.org -type anecdote from my days at Apple: I personally wrote the novice-friendly Terminal warning about the sudo command in OS X. For the longest time, users were greeted with the 90s-vintage warning about properly using sudo: “ We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local Systems Administrator… ” As an AppleCare support drone, I guided customers through a sudo command at least once per week, and always needed to reassure them about what this geeky text even meant. Finally one day I filed a Radar (arguably something that was above my pay grade!) and provided a suggested revision to the sudo warning that was way less inside-baseball. To my utter shock, the Terminal team used my language word-for-word in an OS X update a few months later. I was never even notified that my change was used, it just appeared in Terminal! As far as I know, the sudo warning was removed entirely from Terminal at some point. But as a low-level employee who never even worked in Cupertino, it was an honor for a few of my own words to live inside the OS for a number of years. Thanks again!

Programming

Kev Quirk Yesterday

2026-10-22 14:13: So. Hooman. Are you ready for our meeting?

So. Hooman. Are you ready for our meeting? Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment .

Career Business Culture

Herman's blog Yesterday

If people would just

People use the word just a lot when talking about problems. If people would just drive slowly near schools. If people would just pay their taxes. If people would just follow the rules. It's a sentence that sounds reasonable as it's true that most problems would go away if people just behaved. The thing is, they don't...and they probably never will. This isn't a cynical take on humanity (I think most people are decent). It's about designing good systems. The vast majority of people who use Bear are there to write, and most drivers in my city stop at red lights. But "most" isn't "all", and when you're dealing with thousands (or millions) of people, a small percentage is still a lot of people. Let's say 1% of people are going to misbehave. That doesn't sounds like much, but if 10,000 people sign up for a service, that's 100 people trying to break things. You can't plan for the 99% and hope the 1% sorts itself out. The 1% is where all the work is. It's also not always the same 1%. Decent people have bad days. Someone who usually stops at a red light might run it accidentally when they're distracted and late for work. Some people genuinely don't know how to recycle properly (a pet peeve of mine as all my recycling feels pointless once I put it in the apartment block's recycling bins which contain un-recyclable trash). Expecting people to just isn't a solution, it's a wish. The useful question is "what happens if they don't just ?" I wrote about roundabouts a while back and mentioned implicit and explicit rules. A no-parking sign is an implicit rule. It relies on people choosing to obey it, with a vague threat of a potential fine. A tree planted on a sidewalk is an explicit rule. You can't park there, mate. A traffic light asks you to stop. A roundabout makes it physically difficult to not slow down. Bad systems punish everyone for what a few might do: bank KYC and airport security are two I've had to deal with in the past week that annoyed me. They treat every person like a suspect, and punish them accordingly. Good systems work like a tree on a sidewalk. They don't rely on goodwill, and the people who were going to behave anyway barely even notice them.

Design

Stratechery Yesterday

An Interview with Craig Moffett About SpaceX and Bubbles

An interview with Craig Moffett about SpaceX, from launch to broadband to mobile, plus how he is applying the lessons of the dot-com bubble to today.

Programming Business Finance

A Room of My Own 2 days ago

Haven’t I Written About This Before? (simplify, simplify, simplify)

Once again, I need to simplify. From my diet and exercise to how I spend my time, and especially all the little things I do every day that don’t really need doing. I’ve written about this before , many times. I even wrote an entire blog post as a note to self - to do fewer things . It’s always there at the back of my head: I’m doing this, but it doesn’t need to be done. I’m much better than I used to be, though, many years ago (I guess midlife has something to do with it; my time sure does feel more finite now). I have, truly, stripped away a lot. And yet… it feels like it’s not enough. I’ve vowed this so many times – less organising, more living. I reread an old blog post where I was questioning how much time I spend tweaking, tinkering and tidying things in my digital world. And here I am, again, still doing exactly the same thing. I enjoy it, which is part of the problem. But as I wrote back then, if the internet disappeared tomorrow, I’d have literally nothing to show for hours and hours of  my tinkering work. And that does bother me. A few evenings ago, I found myself doing it again. I’ve been feeling quite overwhelmed lately, mostly with work, but also with life in general. I haven’t been eating particularly well, I’ve felt like I’m gaining weight, and I know I need to get back to looking after myself properly. So what did I do? I started reorganising my ebook collection. I have thousands (literally) of ebooks collected over many years, going all the way back to when e-books first became freely available online through places like Project Gutenberg. I’ll never read most of them. At some point, I exported my collection from Calibre and stopped using Calibre, and the books ended up in about 1,800 folders, with more folders inside those folders. Each book might have several formats, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and so on. I decided I should sort all of this out. Extract the files, reorganise them, rename them consistently by author and title, and make everything nice and tidy. I spent several hours doing this while watching Nashville , which is my current favorite TV show. And I kept on doing this despit the fact that I’m fully aware that whenever I want a book, I simply search my Dropbox and send it to my Kindle. It takes hardly any time. I don’t need to reorganise thousands of files to make that happen. Yet there I was, spending hours on something that served absolutely no purpose. The thing is, I find this kind of work relaxing. It’s repetitive, it doesn’t require much thinking, and it gives me something to focus on when I’m feeling stressed or overwhelmed. I can lose myself in it for hours. 1 Maybe it’s like knitting or crocheting but with nothing to really show for it. But I also recognise that it’s busywork. And I know I tend to do more of it when I’m stressed. Meanwhile, there are things I genuinely want to do (that will require some effort) that I keep putting off. I had every intention of getting back to my novel, finishing the substantial draft I’ve already written, or perhaps starting another one. I’ve done neither. Instead, I tinker with things. I’ve also been thinking (again!) about how much time I spend recording and documenting things. Take my book journal in Day One , for example. I liked the idea of keeping a record of everything I read, writing a few thoughts about each book, extracting Kindle highlights and consolidating everything in Day One (this is in addition to Goodreads where I  logged every book I read since 2011). In practice, my Day One journal has become another obligation, another thing to do even when I don’t feel like doing it. So whenever I have a free hour to devote to one of my interests, I find myself updating this or that log instead of actually doing something. Like yoga, cooking something healthy, going for a nice long walk or working on my writing (even this blog!). But no, I sit down to work through the backlog of all my different logs and trackers. But now I’ve been keeping my Day One book journal for more than a year. Should I just stop? Adjust how I do it? Or what? And then there are my weekly notes. I started writing them as blog posts, but found that turning them into something worth publishing involved far too much curating and editing. So I removed them from the blog and continued keeping them privately. I’d made a commitment to do all 52 weeks this year. But now I’m questioning that too. Do I really need to document every week? I liked the idea of having a weekly record (this is in addition to the Day One journal I already keep anyway). The same goes for my monthly notes in Bear. I start a fresh note each month, consolidate my calendar (essentially duplicating information that’s already in my Google Calendar) and add my weekly notes as the month goes on. At the end of the month, the whole note goes from Bear into Day One. I do this religiously every month. I’m not sure what use I get from it, except that I have these monthly notes where I can put things like bookings and plans made in advance. I’m beginning to think I want to stop most of this documenting and tracking, at least for a while. So, as I was thinking about all of this and trying to simplify my life, something else occurred to me. At work, I use the Microsoft suite (as you do, because there’s not much choice!). So I use Microsoft To Do, which integrates with Outlook, Teams and OneNote. I can also flag an email, give it a date, and it appears in my task list. It’s simple, and it works. I don’t worry about whether all my notes are perfectly organised, whether everything links together, or whether I’ve filed something in exactly the right place. Or at all. Most of the time, I can find what I need simply by searching. And I delete ruthlessly. The difference is that at work, the purpose of my systems is to get actual things done. Projects need to move forward. Decisions need to be made. Tasks need to be completed. The system exists to support the work, not become the work. Yet in my personal life, I seem to spend far more time maintaining systems that don’t actually need maintaining. Systems that don’t even need to exist in the first place. There’s no real consequence if I don’t organise my ebooks, consolidate my reading highlights or tidy up my notes. So why am I doing it? What else can I be doing insted? My life is busy, and work takes up a lot of my energy. I don’t have unlimited time in the evenings or on weekends. And there are things that (at least in theory, right?) matter far more to me than having a perfectly organised digital life. I want to get stronger and more flexible. I want to walk more, do yoga and strength training, eat better and spend more time cooking for my kids. I want to finish my photo books , which I’ve been meaning to do for ages. I want to write. Not just blog posts, but creative writing. I want to return to my novel and actually make progress on it. And I want to enjoy reading without feeling that every book needs to be summarised, highlighted, documented and remembered. Actually, reading paper books is now such a treat because I don’t highlight anything for Readwise. In fact, I’ve been enjoying going to the library, borrowing books and just reading or skimming them, without saving anything or logging every book I’ve read (except in Goodreads , how can I ever stop that). I’ve spent years collecting things: books, articles, notes, highlights, photographs, information and ideas. And then I’ve spent even more time (I don’t even want to think how much) organising those collections. And how much of it have I actually used? Very little, I suspect. In the end, I mostly use what I’ve absorbed and what I can remember anyway. I want to get back to the same level of writing creativity I used to have, before I was able to collect endless snippets of other people’s wisdom. There is just too much of it now. It’s nothing like the commonplace books (before I knew they were called that) of my childhood, when one notebook would last me foryears and was such a pleasure to leaf through. Back then, everything I wrote about was truly my own. Craving Quiet: Stepping Away for a While Do Fewer Things, Do Them Well I Choose Living Over Documenting On the Compulsion to Record The Journal Project I Can’t Quit The Art of Organizing (Things That Don’t Need to Be Organized) The Cost of Organizing Ideas – But I Keep Doing It Anyway I have since re-downloaded Calibre and tidied all my e-books. It took several hours of work. Couldn’t help it. Craving Quiet: Stepping Away for a While Do Fewer Things, Do Them Well I Choose Living Over Documenting On the Compulsion to Record The Journal Project I Can’t Quit The Art of Organizing (Things That Don’t Need to Be Organized) The Cost of Organizing Ideas – But I Keep Doing It Anyway I have since re-downloaded Calibre and tidied all my e-books. It took several hours of work. Couldn’t help it.

Writing

daniel.haxx.se 2 days ago

“ignore the slop”

Lots of people who are against the use of AI for all its ethical and inherent issues tell me this. Just ignore it . Don’t let big AI control us. The “slop” they refer to is anything created that involved an AI, and in our case ( the curl project ) it is in particular vulnerability reports. “Ignoring the slop” cannot be done and it doesn’t help. Vulnerability reports created with the help of AIs point out actual problems, and sometimes vulnerabilities. Ignoring real vulnerabilities because they were found by AI does not make users safe and secure. It makes them vulnerable. We don’t want that . I personally don’t refer to this as AI slop because the reports are typically accurate and correct, even if much too wordy. I think “slop” implies that it is wrong, misleading or otherwise bad content. One can certainly object to the use of AI, but when we get real vulnerabilities reported and proven, we cannot in good faith pretend they don’t exist just because we think the tech involved in digging them up is questionable. That would be a disservice to, or even betrayal of, our users. We make curl secure for our users. An Open Source project typically gives no guarantees at all, so there are no legal requirements that force us to fix flaws. We are however a project with high goals of quality and stability and we would jeopardize our name and track record if we now would stop delivering on that. Also, a few of us involved in the project also sell curl related support and services, where at least part of that means providing secure curl releases, so we still have this contractual obligation to a set of customers. And they wouldn’t be customers in the fist place if the Open Source project didn’t already have the proven quality track record. So no, we really cannot ignore vulnerability reports. A sizeable portion of users seem to still believe we still suffer from a lot of made up and hallucinated reports by these AIs. We really don’t. Almost all the stupidity and lies we saw in the vulnerability reports made by AIs in the past have ceased. Since spring 2026 the slop reports are practically gone. Our current challenge is much harder: high volume, high quality . They always use too many words. Every report is now hundreds of lines and the explanations are convoluted and detailed (and often repeat themselves multiple times). In a good report, the human writes a first paragraph explaining the problem briefly and then they submit the full report. It’s annoying when the reporter surrender everything to the AI, including the communication part. The AIs are also still bad at figuring out exactly where the line is between a bug and a vulnerability, and if it is a vulnerability, what severity it is. This is not a surprise though, as this is also the case for human reporters. A good trend is that they often produce good reproducers or proofs of concept helping to trigger and prove the problem/vulnerability. That was a really complicated part of the reporters’ work back in the day, now it’s just a prompt or two. These days, like within the last few months, we have received hundreds of vulnerability reports submitted to curl and every single one had AI involved to some extent . It is generally easy to tell on the language and the length and details of the report.

Security Open Source Java

corsix.org 2 days ago

Using a lookup-table to correct an approximation

Programming Performance

Alex White's Blog 2 days ago

Go update your PHP version now!

If you're running a blog that is built on PHP (for example, Pure Blog), you need to update your PHP installation right now. Critical vulnerabilities have been discovered in PHP, putting any PHP application at risk. So SSH into your server, run and then run to ensure you are now running one of the patched versions ( 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 ). Don't delay, act today!

Security Php Backend