A Fixer Pleads Guilty in the Super Micro Chip Smuggling Case
A single-sentence report about a guilty plea in the Super Micro chip-smuggling case is worth auditing for what it states and what it leaves blank.
Deep Dives
Where a story earns an experiment — research, hands-on setup, and a verdict, not just a summary. One a week, when there's something to dig into.
A Reassurance Button With No Tracking, Rebuilt on My Homelab
A tiny page offers a button and a voice with no tracking and no data collected, so I rebuilt it on my homelab and found the voice is the whole product.
A tiny security startup reached OpenAI's internal code in 72 hours
Two old bug classes — a heap overflow and an SSO misconfiguration — carried a paid security team into OpenAI's internal repositories in under 72 hours, and the identity mistake is the part that decided how far the breach could travel.
The Model's Version Was Better and Taught Me Less
I turned autocomplete off for an evening, wrote a small config parser by hand, then compared it with the model's version, and the ordering mattered more than the tool.
Why Explicit Types Reduce Cognitive Load in Code
A test of whether removing type declarations helps or hurts the reader.
The Last Lighthouse Keepers: How Automation Retired an Entire Profession
Electric lamps, rotating beacons, and remote monitoring removed keepers from the towers one by one over a century, turning a respected maritime job into a symbol of what automation erases.
The Voynich Manuscript: The Book That Has Defeated Every Decoder
A 15th-century book written in an unknown script and filled with botanical and astronomical illustrations has resisted linguists, cryptographers, and machine translation for well over a century.
The Antikythera Mechanism: The Ancient Computer Lost for Two Millennia
A bronze geared computer recovered from an ancient Greek shipwreck predicted eclipses and tracked the calendar, showing how far ahead ancient science ran and how easily that knowledge was lost.