This is very much a repeat of part 22 'remission again' from earlier in the year. Milo in his car carrier on a trip back from the vets with a bandage on his foreleg The fifth protocol has worked, and once again everything went smoothly until the visit to NDSR for Epirubicin where we had to delay things a little whilst his neutrophils recovered.

YouTube video by RedMonk

Amy Westervelt’s new book Brought To You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy is a must-read for anyone tracking the machinery of climate denial and delay. The...

TL;DR Large Language Model (LLM) based Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be great at cranking out plausible sentences. But stringing those sentences together to form some kind of narrative doesn't get a good story. That's a problem, and an opportunity; because humans run on stories, and (for now at least) it seems that we still need humans to craft good stories.

TL;DR Open source projects that I contribute to have adopted AI bots to ease the pull request (PR) process. It might just be me (though I doubt it), but somehow it feels less like a personal attack when a bot tells you what's wrong with your PR than when it's a person doing it. This is likely a multiple win for maintainers - less toil, fewer confrontations, and thus more precious attention to focus on making their project better.

I wish I needn't care about Omarchy or DHH. Maybe you're annoyed by now by all the posts about Omarchy. I mean, we get it: DHH recently discovered Linux after he got sick of Apple taking 30% of all h...

Pupdate We were back in the Lake District (more on that later), so the boys were able to get out for some nice long walks. Max and Milo by a stream as we walked the 'coffin trail' from Grasmere to Ambleside Going a month later than usual meant that there were no grouse on the estate but there were loads of ripe blackberries, which the boys enjoyed browsing.

It's been a couple of months since Milo finished his fourth (modified) CHOP/CEOP protocol, and he's been able to enjoy the summer without any vet visits[1]. Milo snacking on raspberries from the bush We'd been hoping for a nice long remission like last year, but that wasn't to be. A scan at the start of this week found a lesion on his duodenum, and the advice was to restart chemotherapy.

What if instead of editing a gene, or blocking the protein it produces, you could simply switch it off?

Unlocking _everything_ on the CPU with DRAM scrambling - xoreaxeaxeax/skitter-creek-bath-salts

TL;DR The attention economy dynamics for AI chatbots and agents are very different from social media, and so we're seeing a whole new approach to capturing (and keeping) our attention. This comes down to fundamental human nature - the strongest fuel for groups is outrage; and whilst it might burn dirty and contaminate everything around it, it burns hot, and that keeps the money wheels turning.

TL;DR As Internet of Things (IoT) devices become more commonplace managing the risks they bring becomes more of a bother. I've chosen to deal with this by having different network zones for different trust levels; implemented mostly with OpenWrt. But it's still a compromise where various security risks are accepted as OK given the effort it would entail to deal with them properly.

Explore how passkey implementation gaps undermine security when relying parties fail to validate the User Verified flag, reducing MFA to a single factor.

TL;DR If you're migrating between hosting services that both use Cloudflare then don't be surprised when you see the old site after cutting over DNS to the new provider. Your request is going into the new IP, but being served from the old cache. The old provider needs to be de-provisioned so that Cloudflare can pick up the new content.

Pupdate The whole of July has been hot and sunny (more on that later), so quite often the boys have been having an early morning walk in the shade of the woods before it gets too hot. Max and Milo walking in the woods The apple tree seems particularly bountiful this year, so they've both been enjoying the windfalls (particularly Milo).

One of my favourite science fiction novels is 'Rainbows End' by Vernor Vinge. The year is 2025 (yes, seriously), and the world is a mixture of the familiar and the bizarre. Advances in medicine allow older people to become mobile and youthful again, but these newly young old people are unprepared for the world in which they awaken, full of digital wonders and wearable tech, particularly augmented reality, which is everywhere.

TL;DR The AI infrastructure bubble has reached a point where companies just can't actually spent all the money they might (notionally) have allocated. There might be money on a balance sheet somewhere, but good luck exchanging it for actual GPUs, or HVAC, or HVAC installers, or... When the sums of money get large enough it turns out that it's difficult to actually spend it.

US residential proxies are the bane of the internet. They’re the major source of social media manipulation and spam. A residential proxy runs someone else’s traffic through a real home internet connec...

We want the Government to introduce a nationwide ban on the sale of single-use disposable barbecues. Disposable BBQs are increasingly linked to preventable wildfires, which poses a serious risk to pu...

Amnesty International UK has removed a report which labelled JK Rowling's sexual abuse crisis centre Beira's Place as "anti-rights".

Blog post: Too many words about DIDs by Steve Klabnik

Pupdate The start of the month saw the raspberries coming out on the bushes in our garden, so Milo (in particular) got busy harvesting what he could reach (and barking at any birds that dared to come nearby). Miniature Dachshund Milo eating raspberries Max seems to be back to normal after his back trouble last month, and Milo has finished his chemo and had a scan that confirmed he's still in remission 🙂

Chris and Nick on Overambitious AI Intern

Even by the standards of AI development, where each month often feels like a year, this has been quite the week. Back in April, Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos, a frontier model that was supposed to be exceptionally capable of finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities, which led the company to delay its public release, which is a remarkable measure from a commercial AI lab.

Chris and Nick on AI Tech Debt

Chris and Nick on Cloud vs On Premises

The microVM ecosystem was battle-tested long before agentic AI created the demand. A landscape survey: every VMM, the shared Rust crate ecosystem, a dozen AI sandbox platforms, and honest trade-offs.

Chris and Nick talk to Sarah Wells

TL;DR Conway's Law tells us that organisations create systems that mirror their communication systems. Jamie Dobson coin's 'Miell's Law' in a post about the work of our mutual friend (and his colleague) Ian Miell in his forthcoming book 'Follow the Money': Organisations that design systems are constrained to produce systems that reflect the financial structures and incentives of those organisations.

Pupdate It was Milo's 5th birthday on the 12th, which meant a post about how he's getting on. Miniature Dachshunds Max and Milo curled up together on a grey wool blanket. Sadly Max has also needed to visit the vets, with (we think) back ache, which might be the dreaded Intervertebral Disc Disease (IVDD). He's been on reduced activity, so shorter walks, but thankfully seems pretty much back to normal after some painkillers and anti-inflamatory treatment.

Chris and Nick talk to Matthew Skelton

Despite rising concerns about sycophancy—excessive agreement or flattery from artificial intelligence (AI) systems—little is known about its prevalence or consequences. We show that sycophancy is wide...