Articles
Long-form writing on tech, culture, and the edges of the internet.
VSCode's SSH remote editing runs its own code on the host
VSCode's SSH remote editing runs a Bash stager that installs its own Node and agent on the remote host, with a channel back that can read, write and run code.
A red badge you never earned
Apple's iOS Settings now shows unskippable promos for its paid services, and the red badge that once signalled real work clears only when you pay or wait.
Claude optimizes what it measures
How Anthropic made claude.ai about 3x faster in two weeks by turning every metric an internal Claude model could measure into a CI benchmark it could climb.
Respond before you confirm
ShinyHunters claims it holds data on all FBI employees and applicants. The response that counts protects the named people, not just the systems.
The benchmark score is the number to trust least
Claude Opus 5.5 scores 58 on the Intelligence Index, but the cost, verbosity and latency numbers behind it matter more.
Your telemetry toggle was a file access control
Claude Code 2.1.277 gates AGENTS.md loading behind the remote tengu_agents_md_mod flag, so turning telemetry off silently skips the local file.
An unsolved cipher was never a secure one
GPT-6 Astra autonomously broke MVUEH, a German Army Enigma message unsolved since 2005, writing its own Bombe and chasing Bundesarchiv records.
Every Prompt Is A Retrieval Request
A researcher asked Meta's Muse agent to export the files it could see and got 6.8 GB back, including its runtime, SSH keys, and memory store.
Mini-AGI trains a model with no frozen base
mini-AGI trains as it reads, through the same path it answers on, so the weights keep moving and there is no single frozen version of the model to sign.
Your watermark is a spymark
Watermarks that embed a hidden per-user identifier become spymarks: what the payload size tells you, and why metadata stripping does not remove them.
MCP is an attack surface, not a feature
An engineer argues the Model Context Protocol is obsolete now that capable agents can call HTTP APIs and CLIs directly, and most MCP servers can go.
Rewriting weights live on 8GB of VRAM
mini-AGI trains a byte-level MoE model from scratch on an 8GB GPU, keeping weights on disk and paging experts in, learning as it reads.