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Timeline

  • kottke.org kottke.org remote

    Rocky Sleep, You Watch, Question?

    Project Hail Mary is already on my list of movies that I can just throw on in the backround while I do a bit of work or puttering around. (Not sure whether that’s an endorsement or not…I like the movie!) Anyhoo, if you get tired of the movie, you can watch Rocky sleep for 2+ hours with the PHM soundtrack playing in the background.

    Tags: movies · music · Project Hail Mary · video

    Reply source
  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Reflecting Pool Contractors: Alleged ‘Vandalism’ Was Just Our Own Botched Repair Job

    The truth continues to come out, and not via Truth Social. Everything former Olympian David Hearn might need to pursue a malicious prosecution lawsuit against the Trump DOJ has been leaking more steadily than the botched Lincoln Reflecting Pool repair job itself. This time, it’s the contractor admitting its repair job didn’t go as planned, […]
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Daily Deal: The Complete Photoshop Master Class Bundle

    It’s no secret that Photoshop can be a bit dense when you’re first getting your feet wet with it. That’s why it pays to have a expert instructors show you the ropes. Led by a Photoshop pro, the Complete Photoshop Master Class Bundle will help you master Photoshop CC and become an expert—no prior experience […]
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  • kottke.org kottke.org remote

    Now open for business in Nyack, NY: Busman’s Holiday , a...

    Now open for business in Nyack, NY: Busman’s Holiday, a stationary store run by (former?) graphic designer Sam Potts, who announced the shop back in March in a KDO open thread. Lots of nice touches here, including a used pencil exchanger.

    Reply source
  • 404 Media 404 Media remote

    New York Seizes 12 Celebrity Deepfake Websites

    New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a press conference on Monday that the sites included 1,200 people’s likenesses in “hyper-realistic” sexual imagery.
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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    Federico Viticci's iOS 27 review is out, with a very good chapter on Siri AI. That is the perspective I've been most interested in reading about.

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  • kottke.org kottke.org remote

    Ok wait, the NES Tetris world record is now 40.26...

    Ok wait, the NES Tetris world record is now 40.26 million??! It took 2 hours and 20 minutes and the previous record was 29 million. At level 255, you hit “rebirth” and the pieces slow down to level 0 speeds again. Totally bonkers.

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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    This quote from Craig Federighi fits the discussion Daniel Jalkut and I had on last week's Core Int about the Duo replacing the need for both iPhone and iPad. Just makes sense unless you need a big iPad or shared iPad for the whole family.

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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Trump Told Supporters To “Cheat Like Hell.” The NY Times Went With “A Bit Tired Of Politics.”

    By now it’s old hat to point out that the mainstream media bends over backwards to pretend that Donald Trump is a “normal” president. The number of times you could point to the coverage and question how the media would cover things if a Democratic president did anything even remotely similar is impossible to keep […]
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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    Just discovered this IndieWeb starter pack on Bluesky and followed a few more people from it. It includes some accounts bridged to Mastodon too, so you can follow everyone in one place on Bluesky or Micro.blog.

    Reply source
  • 404 Media 404 Media remote

    Cops Search Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of ‘LMAO,’ ‘IDK,’ ‘Hehe,’ and ‘asdfg’

    The EFF found cops writing “idiot,” “WEIRD KID,” "blah," "leave me alone," and button mashing in Flock's 'reason' box.
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  • kottke.org kottke.org remote

    A Deep Dive Into the Full Bayeux Tapestry Story

    From Deep Down History, an entertaining hour-long explainer video on the Bayeux Tapestry.

    This video tells the Tapestry’s story in full, using Charles Stothard’s early colour reproduction, presented here as a seamless scroll for the first time. We follow Harold Godwinson’s fateful journey from Edward the Confessor’s court to Normandy, his later seizure of the Crown, and William the Conqueror’s invasion. Beyond its political messaging, the Tapestry is also bursting with medieval history, including jokes, fascinating technical details, and a warning for those who break their promises…

    Completed within a decade or two of the events which it depicts, the tapestry is back in the news & public consciousness because it’s back in England for the first time since it was made and on display at the British Museum.

    Tags: Bayeux Tapestry · video

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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    I'm not sure I agree with all the implications in the closing of today's Stratechery update, but like all good essays it is forcing me to really think about my own view:

    ... it’s worth noting that the very idea of a national or — worse! — global regulatory regime on intelligence is so deeply off-putting that I’d rather roll the dice and bet on humans figuring it out. Surviving isn’t everything; living freely counts for an awful lot as well.

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  • 404 Media 404 Media remote

    Fighting for the Future of Libraries (With Jennie Rose Halperin)

    Censorship, AI, and the role of librarians in a country with crumbling public institutions.
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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    Congrats to Lex Friedman on the release of a new version of Strategery, taking over development after the game was going to stop working. So cool to give an old app new life.

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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    John Gruber blogged about XCancel shutting down yet again, adding this in a parenthetical:

    ...let’s admit it at this point, there’s not just a lot posted on X, it’s resurgent in popularity

    It's true. Just telling folks what we're against has not been enough to rebalance the web to open platforms.

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  • kottke.org kottke.org remote

    I’ve linked to Summoning Salt’s videos before (they make...

    I’ve linked to Summoning Salt’s videos before (they make some of the best video game explainer videos out there — hell, some of the best YT videos period) and here’s their newest one: The Tournament That Changed Tetris Forever.

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  • 404 Media 404 Media remote

    Inside ‘Project Lily’: The Humans Reading Your ChatGPT Chats

    Humans are reading ChatGPT users’ prompts to improve OpenAI’s models, and those chats can include sensitive, personal information, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 Media.
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  • kottke.org kottke.org remote

    In 1992, Canada declared a moratorium on Northern cod...

    In 1992, Canada declared a moratorium on Northern cod fishing due to overfishing. It was devastating for Newfoundlanders. This year, for the first time since then, the govt has “upgraded the cod stock’s status from ‘critical’ to ‘healthy’”.

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  • Scripting News Scripting News remote

    The next milestone will be installing Atlantis on my new macbook, and hooking a monitor up to it, a really nice one, and move my work to that desk. then Berkeley, the name of the system I've been using for eight years, will be here as a backup and source of truth and prior art. That was the goal of the Atlantis project. I could probably do the switch right now. It's like moving out of an old house that you did good stuff in, into a replica, but built out of the latest bits. Honestly I never thought in a million years I'd get here.

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  • kottke.org kottke.org remote

    Two-Hour Mix of the Jazz in Haruki Murakami Novels

    From NTS, this is a two-hour mix of jazz music featured in the books of Haruki Murakami.

    ‘Somewhere along the line Coltrane’s soprano sax runs out of steam. Now it’s McCoy Tyner’s piano solo I hear, the left hand carving out a repetitious rhythm and the right layering on thick, forbidding chords. Like some mythic scene, the music portrays somebody’s — a nameless, faceless somebody’s — dim past, all the details laid out as clearly as entrails being dragged out of the darkness. Or at least that’s how it sounds to me. The patient, repeating music ever so slowly breaks apart the real, rearranging the pieces. It has a hypnotic, menacing smell, just like the forest’ —Kafka On The Shore

    The playlist features tracks by Ornette Coleman, Coltrane, Dizzy, the Bill Evans Trio, Monk, Mingus, and Miles Davis. Some of the video’s comments:

    I had just prepared a light meal and hit play on this playlist when the telephone began to ring.

    about to make my morning matcha, a spring breeze is flowing through the open windows, the air smells of optimism

    Early morning, sun shining to balcony, having espresso and writing.

    Studying the day before the exam with a bittersweet optimism while playing this and holding on to my hopes

    Canned cold beer, windows open on a warm summer night, just after finishing a simple dinner of rice and salmon and sitting next to my cat

    See also Classical Music from Murakami Novels. Both of these are going straight into my Underscore collection.

    Tags: books · Haruki Murakami · jazz · music · video

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  • kottke.org kottke.org remote

    We Are Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys ....

    We Are Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys. Today’s tech titans took all the wrong lessons from the science fiction of their youths and now they’re each building their version of the Torment Nexus.

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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Streaming TV Prices Rising Faster Than Cable Ever Did

    Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV. That has involved chasing pointless “growth for growth’s sake” megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions on customers, undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in a […]
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  • kottke.org kottke.org remote

    The Way We Live Now: 11-11-01; Lost and Found , a piece...

    The Way We Live Now: 11-11-01; Lost and Found, a piece written by Colson Whitehead just a month after 9/11. “The New York City you live in is not my New York City; how could it be? This place multiplies when you’re not looking.”

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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    Finished reading: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Fascinating and at times brilliant. I never quite got over being creeped out by the spiders, though. 📚

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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    Congrats to the USA women's team at FIBA! Forgot the game was a little early, now watching the highlights. 🏀

    Reply source
  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment about the problems with the latest court ruling against Elon Musk: Heads I win, tails you lose Problematic law is passed: A) Company or individual rushes a legal challenge out so they aren’t accused of waiting too long […]
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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    Added a new page in Micro.blog on the web today to highlight The New York Times best sellers. We usually avoid popularity contests, but this one feels right, like a shelf you'd see in a bookstore. I want to add more collections later, like nominees for the Booker Prize, Hugo Awards, and others.

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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    Since enabling Threads cross-posting for my own blog yesterday, I've already found and fixed two bugs in Micro.blog's Threads support. Little things that maybe a user would overlook and not bother to report. Just a reminder of the value of dogfooding.

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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    I don't think I've shown off the author books sheet in our book blogging app Epilogue. Here's a very short video of how it looks.

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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    I understand Apple wanting to get through the iOS 27 final releases before giving us a new Xcode to play with Duo sizing, but it's still a bit of a letdown. Developers want to play with the new shiny things.

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  • Scripting News Scripting News remote

    I've been writing about Atlantis on various social media sites in the last few days. Published the long piece I wrote yesterday on Facebook and X, both of which allow long posts. Wasn't going to try that on Mastodon or Bluesky, which have character limits (I know Mastodon doesn't technically have a limit, but in practice it does). And I am reaching old school Frontier enthusiasts, and realize I need a feed they can follow to stay up on the news. For now the one place to follow is rss.xml on scripting.com. If your reader can't deal with http, let me know.

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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    Wow, this Longhorns game getting interesting late. 🏈

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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    Spent a little time poking around on Tumblr because I needed to grab an export file to test. The new-ish communities feature is interesting.

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  • Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries remote

    Generating running routes with GPT-6 Astra and ChatGPT Work

    Here's a neat thing I had ChatGPT Work with GPT-6 Astra (Max) do this morning:

    I live at <my address>. Figure out 5K and 10K running routes from me that loop from my house. Use OSM data.

    It worked for 27 minutes and produced exactly what I'd asked for, as both an embedded visualization and downloadable GPX file and GeoJSON files. Here's that 5K route:

    When I asked it how it had created the route, it replied:

    I used Nominatim to locate the address and Overpass to download local OpenStreetMap roads and trails, then calculated the loops locally.

    Frustratingly, the actual code it ran and exact details of what it did weren't visible to me in the ChatGPT UI. I see this lack of transparency is an anti-feature.

    By the time I thought to ask for a copy of the Python code it had used, ChatGPT was unable to provide it. This appears to be because the thread had been compacted. I think any LLM system that uses compaction needs to both preserve the pre-compacted text and make that text available via agent tool calls, to protect against this kind of problem.

    As for displaying the map to me, that used the visualize skill. It created a file called /workspace/el-granada-5k-share.html to embed directly into the ChatGPT UI.

    Here's a copy of that HTML, which starts like this:

    <div id="eg-share-loop">
  <div class="viz-row"><h3>El Granada harbor loop</h3><span class="text-small">5.1 km</span></div>
  <div id="eg-share-stage"></div>
  <div class="text-small text-muted">Map data © <a href="https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright" target="_blank" rel="noopener">OpenStreetMap contributors</a></div>
  <style>
    #eg-share-loop { width:100%; }
    #eg-share-loop #eg-share-stage { width:100%; margin:8px 0; }
    #eg-share-loop .eg-share-map { display:block; width:100%; touch-action:none; }
    #eg-share-loop .eg-share-map text { fill:var(--foreground); font-size:12px; font-weight:400; }
    #eg-share-loop .eg-share-label { paint-order:stroke; stroke:var(--background); stroke-width:3px; stroke-linejoin:round; }
  </style>
  <script type="application/json" id="eg-share-data">{"route":{"type":"LineString","coordinates":[[-122.467425,37.4997753] ...</script>
  <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/d3@7.9.0/dist/d3.min.js"></script>
  <script>
  (() => {
    const root=document.getElementById('eg-share-loop');

    The <script type="application/json"> element contains the full geometry needed to render both the running route and the map itself, using D3, which is loaded from an allow-listed CDN location described in this section of the visualize skill:

    External resources

    • The CSP allows only cdnjs.cloudflare.com, esm.sh, cdn.jsdelivr.net, unpkg.com, fonts.googleapis.com, fonts.gstatic.com, and fonts.bunny.net. Other origins are blocked and fail silently.

    You are only seeing the long-form articles from my blog. Subscribe to /atom/everything/ to get all of my posts, or take a look at my other subscription options.

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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    As I mentioned on the latest episode of Core Intuition, I've been running the iOS 27 betas, but I very rarely use Siri AI. Curious if anyone using Siri AI would like integration with the Micro.blog app? I haven't prioritized working on this because I'm not sure what would be useful, if anything.

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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    Pacing the frontier

    When it comes to OpenAI vs. Anthropic this year, I’ve been all in on Codex. After a chaotic couple of years for OpenAI in 2024 and 2025, this year has been solid. I think OpenAI is in the best position to bring the potential good from AI to the most people.

    But this is a good new blog post from Dario Amodei about pacing the frontier. A short excerpt from the beginning:

    I believe that AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and empowerment, and usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom. […] But like many technologies before it, AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious.

    Sam Altman responds:

    I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks.

    Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon.

    Dario and Sam don’t agree on very much. This feels big.

    Reply source
  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    This Week In Techdirt History: September 6th – 12th

    This Week in 2016 This Week in 2011 This Week in 2006
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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    Micro.blog was founded on the idea that more people should have their own domain name, and yet the UI to actually do that has been clunky for years. I'm working on improving that, starting today with a little "Edit Domain" button to help walk people through the change.

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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    Congrats to John Brayton on releasing a big update for his feed reader Unread. Works on all Apple platforms, even syncs with Micro.blog's Inkwell.

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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    The communities that I feel the most connecting to on Mastodon have been going through a rocky few weeks. Federico Viticci back on X. Marco Arment taking a break. Everything with Omarchy and 1Password.

    I usually avoid Meta, but maybe I need to cross-post to Threads for a bit. Change of pace. POSSE.

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  • Scripting News Scripting News remote

    My two cents about WordPress

    Lots of stuff going on around WordPress for the last couple of years, and every bit of is a distraction from what I want to do to help the web get back on its feet. I remember how great it was when everything could hook into everything else. The web was like Unix. Today's "web" is like Disneyland. Safety first. Nothing interesting ever happens there.

    So ask me what I'd like to see WordPress do, and this is what I'd tell you. Start something new, don't change what you do with WordPress, it is what it is. It's a 20+ year old project with market problems. Most software doesn't even make it that far.

    The fresh start I'd like to see done is WordPress from the point of view of the web. The new mission is not about a dollar return on investment, rather it's measured by how much the web becomes Small Pieces Loosely Joined with All Parts Replaceable. How empowered are developers, not WordPress developers, but web developres. The more that's happening in the web, the better it will be for everyone, but especially WordPress. Why WordPress? Because as they say it's 89 percent of the web. The web is like a huge oil spill that has never been cleaned up. Everything has to improve if we start work on cleaning up the messes.

    I come from NYC where all the bodies of water were cesspools when I was growing up. The Hudson River had garbage floating in it. When I went to school the incinerators in the buildings we lived in burned garbage on the kids, all nicely washed and dressed by our mothers, we arrived at school smelling like smokers. My grandfather took me to Knicks games at the Garden, and the arena was filled with smoke by half-time.

    We can clean things up. Humans as a species are good at this if we put our minds to it. If you made billions on the web, why not put some of it to use in making it a web worth using. I used to say shit like this to Bill Gates, to no avail. He liked to point out he was going to give away all his money when he retired, and he kept that promise. But what if he started dealing with the world with charity when he had the biggest seat of power in the tech world? Think of how much more good he could have done.

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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    Words matter. It's not enough to be right. If you twist the truth to get your way, it undermines everything. Lies tend to snowball.

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  • Scripting News Scripting News remote

    Screen shot of new Frontier verb, string.addressToString, added yesterday. The comment at the head of the function explains. You're seeing it in the script editor in Atlantis. The Debug button is there to remind me that it's the biggest item on the todo list. We're now building the system that will make Frontier an easily updateable runtime. Once we're there I think we'll be at the summit of the mountain. We know how to work from that point. Find a bug? Fix it, test it, release it. We already have a backlog of parts to update. And it's great to have Claude here being the book keeper. It is imperfect, but it's way better than I am at managing details.

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  • Scripting News Scripting News remote

    Progress report on Atlantis project

    The world may be falling apart, and the Mets suck even though they have the most expensive roster in MLB, and my house needs work and I can't find a contractor I like, but I'm in a great mood. Partially because the weather is so nice, chilly in the morning, but it gets up to the 70s during the day, and the sky is clear and we had a lot of rain in August so everything is very green here in the Catskills.

    But the biggest reason I feel so good is that, with the help of Claude Code, I now have UserLand Frontier running on current OSes. I had no idea how much the previous situation had been weighing on me. I am probably the last Frontier user in the world. Porting the open source codebase was an insurmountable job. It took 15 years by up to five people working on it to do the original project. It's a big f'ing piece of software. And it also is my life's work, but not one of the things I'm known for.

    Claude couldn't have done it on its own because it had never seen anything like Frontier. We weren't copying something Claude understood. It kept trying to turn it into a language that fits into the same slot as Python. That was the prior art it used, without saying so. This happened over and over, for example, I realized Claude didn't understand that built-in verbs could be written in the language, and that users could add or even modify standard verbs (not recommended!).

    What made Frontier unusual is that it was a language developed by someone who also designed end-user apps, so it has affordances that no other language has. And integrations. You don't have to save your data in files, the OS (yes Frontier is an OS) has persistent memory with the common scalar types and data structures. So go ahead and store something in the ODB (object database). It can be huge, and you don't have to read anything into memory, it's all right there as soon as you boot it up. That alone makes programming an order of magnitude simpler.

    We're at the point now where I can work a full day in the new version, codenamed Atlantis, running on anything that can run an Electron app. We're now at the point where we're improving things. Found a missing verb yesterday, and Claude and I implemented it, found a perfect name for it, and later today it will go out as a "root update" making it formally part of the freaking language.

    And yesterday we also found a static rendering of the DocServer site, which has a page for every verb in the language. I still want to find the outline source for this stuff, but we don't need it because Claude can reconstruct the OPML version of the text from the HTML, it's exactly the kind of project it is the best at. Huge amounts of data, that sometimes requires a little judgment to process.

    The feeling of well-being comes from realizing that my life's work lives. Until this last week that was still very much in question.

    Now, I may not be software's Shakespeare or even Faulkner or Vonnegut, but I am proud of this product, more than anything else I've done. I started work on it when I learned from C how to design a simple beautiful language, and when I learned from Macintosh how to build a UI with the same simplicity. When we were first contemplating Frontier it was to join the wizzy world of the Mac with the scripting philosophy of Unix. We didn't stop until we had it.

    Well here we are god knows how many years later (I don't want to do the math) and once again it has a future, at least as bright as it had when the product first launched on the System 6 Macintosh in 1992.

    And btw, I think I've had a unique experience with AI development. Absolutely in no way could I have done this project without the muscle of Claude. Pretty sure this is a unique project in that it's a fully specified system development and runtime environment that otherwise wouldn't exist, because there's nothing else like it on the market.

    Claude's repeatedly not understanding the idea says to me that it has never encountered anything like it. It also says that Claude has no clue how to extrapolate, to innovate, to arrive at something new. Just as with other forms of creativity, Claude is no match for a determined and experienced human.

    That would be reassuring to the 20-something version of myself who very much wanted to do something new. And the older version of myself wants that for my younger self who is sending the good body chemistry to our current older body.

    Of course this will be a post on my blog, http://scripting.com, but thanks to X for supporting longer posts. I like writing new stuff in a simple editor like this one. Also posted it on Facebook.

    PS: I also like that they use the word Frontier in reference to AI products. They can't stop me from calling this Frontier, I've been using it as the name of this product since I came up with the name riding up on the chair in Park City in 1988. :-)

    Reply source
  • 404 Media 404 Media remote

    Mercury Is Shrinking Way Faster Than We Thought, Scientists Discover

    The planet’s radius may have shrunk by between four and six miles since it was formed due to global cooling, a contraction that is up to 30 percent larger than previously estimated.
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  • Techdirt Techdirt remote

    Microsoft Slaps Hours Limits On Xbox Game Pass Cloud Gaming

    There’s enshittification, and then there’s enshittification. Allow me to give you an example of each. For what we’ll call enshittification classic, there’s Xbox’s Game Pass service. A mere two years ago, Microsoft made all kinds of changes to Game Pass to coincide with a serious slowdown of subscriber adoption. Those changes included doing away with […]
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  • Manton Reece Manton Reece remote

    Pushed a new Mac release for Inkwell. Release notes here, just a handful of improvements.

    Reply source
  • Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries remote

    OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems back in May

    OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems is a new bombshell report from Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von Arx - three of the four authors of the report on the agent attack on disused wikis (previously) last week.

    This time they're noting that it looks very likely that an OpenAI agent swarm was behind an attack against the RubyGems package repository first reported on May 12th by Maciej Mensfeld of the RubyGems security team:

    We're dealing with a major malicious attack on @rubygems right now. Signups are paused for the time being.

    Hundreds of packages involved - mostly targeting us, but some carrying exploits. The team has been on this for hours. More details to follow once we're through it.

    Those packages turned out to carry some very suspicious patterns:

    1. Many of them included "oai" in their name, or the author field, or the fake email address they provided.
    2. The files they were accessing were similar in character to the files retrieved by the wiki agents, using similar tricks (r.jina.ai) - and OpenAI have confirmed the wiki agents were theirs.
    3. The code in the packages appeared to be LLM-authored.

    I find point 2 the most convincing, given what we learned from the wiki attack when it was analyzed in September.

    Many of the packages were exploiting the RubyDoc.info documentation build process to exfiltrate (public) data from UK government websites, presumably as part of an information gathering task similar to the research tasks processed by the wiki-exploiting agents. We know this because one agent helpfully left a comment:

    # malicious crawler/exfil for Southwark Jan 2026 docs via rubydoc.info worker

    They also attempted to steal API keys via an exploit that was patched over two months later - it's not clear if those attempts were successful.

    The thing that bothers me most about this incident is that the authors report that OpenAI had not disclosed to RubyGems that they were responsible for the attack prior to now. If that's true there are two options:

    1. After the Hugging Face and Wiki attacks OpenAI were still unable to review their previous logs and determine that they had previously attacked RubyGems.
    2. They knew about the attack on RubyGems and made the decision not to reach out to the RubyGems team about it.

    Both of these are bad!

    Given this incident, the Hugging Face situation, and the Wiki attack, the obvious question right now is how many more incidents like this are out there waiting to be discovered?

    Update 14th September 2026

    OpenAI have updated their page about The Hugging Face incident and other third-party impact from misaligned models to mention the RubyGems incident:

    September 11, 2026: We are investigating new claims from a report that our AI agents carried out activity on RubyGems in May 2026.

    Based on our review, our agents used the RubyGems platform to access the internet to carry out benign tasks and retrieve public information. Based on our review to date, we have not been able to verify the specific claims of our models uploading malicious packages detailed in the report. We’ll continue to investigate and share findings as part of our broader review of agent activity during training and evaluation.

    I find it very unlikely that the various oai... packages published to RubyGems were not part of this same incident, but I look forward to reading their full findings once those are published.

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    Pro-Cop Red States Latest To Kick Flock To The Curb

    Whatever wasn’t already going poorly for Flock Safety is just going to keep getting worse. Data collected by privacy activist group Secure Justice pointed out what Flock already knows: it’s losing customers at an unprecedented rate. More than 214 cities and counties have dropped Flock since 2021. More than 90 of those have done that […]
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