Obscura: The first VPN that can’t log your activity
The Curious Power of Punctuation
A Critic at Large The Curious Power of Punctuation Commas, dashes, semicolons, and spaces have shaped how we read for centuries. What happens when machines start crafting the sentences? By Louis Menand September 21, 2026 Jane Austen favored dashes. Her editors may have applied the commas we now think of as unmistakably Austenian.Illustration by Abraham […]
SAML: A Fractal of Bad Design
Born out of academia and raised in corporate IT departments, the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) authentication protocol continues to be a staple in these organizations. However, it’s time for it to retire. With the rise of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in the late aughts, IT departments needed a way for users to authenticate to many […]
Enjoy Every Sandwich
this captivating subtitle I wrote really makes you want to read it, doesn’t it?!? Warren Zevon appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman in October of 2002. I drew my remembrance of the appearance below. (Apologies to Dave, who has been rendered here in a way that kind of makes him look like Richard […]
Unreal Agent
If you’re interested in frontier cost-efficiency for your AI agents, we’d love to work together! Get in touch: [email protected]. While deploying agents in the wild, we wanted them to respond to users quickly and be cost-effective to run. We’ve noticed that agents spend a lot of time and tokens managing tool calls, which motivated us […]
My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps
My weird hobby lately is just wandering around Street View and zooming in on random stuff. Houses, wires, trees, whatever. lol. Today I found a 350Z in Tokyo. It’s just sitting there on the side of this narrow street, and when I flipped to the oldest photos of that spot, there it was too. Same […]
‘We hacked the FBI:’ Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees
A high profile hacking group claims it has breached multiple FBI-related services and stolen data “on all FBI employees and applicants.” A representative of the group, called ShinyHunters, told 404 Media the data includes FBI agents’ names, home addresses, phone number, and information on their spouse. The data breach could be massively significant and may […]
Launch HN: Coverage Cat (YC S22) – Umbrella insurance via your personal agent
How it works Coverage Cat is a licensed insurance brokerage that helps you compare home, umbrella, auto, and renters coverage side by side — with straight pricing, no sold leads, and a real broker on the other end. Ask a question or start a comparison. Coverage Cat pairs AI-guided intake with a licensed brokerage team, […]
Claude Opus 5.5 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis
Claude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) is amongst the leading models in intelligence, but somewhat expensive when comparing to other models of similar price. The model supports text and image input, outputs text, and has a 1M tokens context window. Claude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) scores 58 on […]
WordPress: Unauthenticated path traversal leading to conditional RCE
An unauthenticated attacker can make get_page_template() page-template resolution include a chosen readable local .php file outside the active theme directories. If relevant pre-conditions for both the server environment and the active theme are met, this can lead to RCE. The pre-conditions are: The active child or parent theme contains a top-level directory whose name starts […]