Faisal’s Web Site
Tuesday, 15 September 2026
Two hackers got 5.5 years. OpenAI’s agents got a press statement.
Ryan Williams: “That is the actual damage. Not the 500 gems. The precedent that unbounded agent deployment is a communications problem rather than a legal one.”
Monday, 14 September 2026
Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to.
Laurie Voss: “The other thing that’s changed since 2022 is that the cost of writing software collapsed, and I think that’s the first time in thirty years a variable in this equation has actually moved rather than just sped up.”
Wednesday, 2 September 2026
There’s A New Space Telescope On Its Way To Help Answer The Biggest Question In The Universe
Barry Petchesky, Defector: “This time next year, we might be viewing some other star’s Pale Blue Dot.”
Tuesday, 18 August 2026
Is Anthropic Making Money? How Much Money?
Brad DeLong: “And, I was confident, selling your soul to SEO and charging for the eyeballs your second-rate search results trapped into repeated casts of the yarrow sticks would ultimately be self-defeating. … And, I was confident, selling your soul to clickbait-rage and charging for the eyeballs your outrage-bait feeds had trapped into doomscrolling would ultimately be self-defeating. Guess what? Selling your soul to SEO was not self-defeating. Neither was becoming the master necromancer of rage-bait doomscrolling. Am I missing something similar here and now?”
Monday, 17 August 2026
Collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation would lead to substantial oceanic carbon release and additional global warming
D. Nian, M. Willeit, N. Wunderling, A. Ganopolski & J. Rockström: “Arctic temperatures cool by ~ 7 °C (60 °N–90 °N), while Antarctic temperatures warm by ~ 6 °C (60 °S–90 °S).”
Friday, 14 August 2026
Astronomers discover a new kind of cosmic object – a black hole ‘star’
Ian Sample, The Guardian: “They may be the nascent, swaddled phase that marks the beginning of almost every supermassive black hole’s journey’”
AI is removing the middle class of software engineering
Florian Herrengt: “You can’t afford bad engineers anymore.”
Thursday, 13 August 2026
rent, always rent
Dan Davies: “Which means that, in general, when you look at the recorded profit margins of a retailer in the accounts, what you are learning about is how good a job the real estate investment bankers did.”
Tuesday, 4 August 2026
The 90 day disclosure policy is dead
Himanshu Anand: “Your monthly maintenance window is not a safety margin. It is an attack window.”
See also: the time it takes to fix, qualify, build, distribute, and receive an OS update.