Researchers discover security vulnerability in WhatsApp
IT-Security Researchers from the University of Vienna and SBA Research identified and responsibly disclosed a large-scale privacy weakness in WhatsApp’s contact discovery mechanism that allowed the enumeration of 3.5 billion accounts. In collaboration with the researchers, Meta has since addressed and mitigated the issue. The study underscores the importance of continuous, independent security research on […]
Loose Wire Leads to Blackout, Contact with Francis Scott Key Bridge
Blackouts led to loss of steering and propulsion on 984-foot-long vessel WASHINGTON (Nov. 18, 2025) — The NTSB said Tuesday that a single loose wire on the 984-foot-long containership Dali caused an electrical blackout that led to the giant vessel veering and contacting the nearby Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, which then collapsed, killing […]
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Art of Living (and Dying)
On summer break from his university studies, a young Robert Louis Stevenson worked late into the night. He apprenticed in his family’s lighthouse engineering business but had no interest in the trade. Instead, he had “made his own private determination to be an author” and spent his nights writing a novel that would never see […]
The Boring Part of Bell Labs
How Bell Labs supported itself between moonshots It took me a long time to realize that Bell Labs was cool. You see, my dad worked at Bell Labs, and he has not done a single cool thing in his life except create me and bring a telescope to my third grade class. Nothing he was […]
The lost cause of the Lisp machines
2025-11-18 :: lisp, stupidity, stories I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will. History Symbolics went bankrupt in early 1993. In the way of these things various remnants of the company lingered on for, in this case, decades. But 1983 was when […]
Adafruit on the Death of Arduino
Qualcomm-owned Arduino quietly pushed a sweeping rewrite of its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and the changes mark a clear break from the open-hardware ethos that built the platform. The new documents introduce an irrevocable, perpetual license over anything users upload, broad surveillance-style monitoring of AI features, a clause preventing users from identifying potential […]
Measuring Political Bias in Claude
We work to train Claude to be politically even-handed in its responses. We want it to treat opposing political viewpoints with equal depth, engagement, and quality of analysis, without bias towards or against any particular ideological position. ”Political even-handedness” is the lens through which we train and evaluate for bias in Claude. In this post, […]
Pozsar’s Bretton Woods III: Sometimes Money Can’t Solve the Problem
In March 2022, as Western nations imposed unprecedented sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Zoltan Pozsar published a series of dispatches that would become some of the most discussed pieces in financial markets that year. The core thesis was stark: we were witnessing the birth of “Bretton Woods III,” a fundamental shift in how the […]
What AI Is Really For
Best case: we’re in a bubble. Worst case: the people profiting most know exactly what they’re doing. After three years of immersion in AI, I have come to a relatively simple conclusion: it’s a useful technology that is very likely overhyped to the point of catastrophe. The best case scenario is that AI is just […]
Broccoli Man, Remastered
November 16, 2025 / 10 min read Within Google there is a series of videos starring “Broccoli Man” poking fun at the experience of building software as a Googler. One of these, “I just want to serve 5TB”, circulated extremely widely and ended up getting published publicly to YouTube. It’s a Google cultural classic that […]