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Notable links: July 3, 2026 - Werd I/O

2026-07-03T14:09:16.000Z

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

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OpenAI proposes handing Trump administration 5% stake

In order to ward off backlash against AI and curry favor with the Trump administration, Sam Altman has floated the idea of giving 5% of OpenAI to a wealth fund that pays dividends to both the government and citizens — and that every leading AI vendor should do the same.

“Sam Altman, chief executive of the ChatGPT maker, has argued that giving the public a financial stake in the company is the best way to share the upside of AI and has suggested a stake of this size in early conversations with the administration, according to two people familiar with the talks.”

It’s transparently a way to align everyone with AI vendor profits. If the sector increases in value, the government and the voting population benefit. If it decreases in value … well, the government is incentivized to prevent that from happening. It also wouldn’t be without precedent: it’s modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, which does this with oil profits for Alaskan residents. Intel is also now 10% government-owned, and the administration has reversed course to be behind it since gaining that stake.

Would a government whose revenues are directly linked to the performance of a sector be likely to enact hard regulations on that sector? Perhaps not. It’s not a slam dunk, though: for example, the UK receives significant tax revenue on fossil fuels, but still promoted electric cars. There are lots of factors at play, and profit alignment isn’t necessarily outweighed by the effects of other harms. (See also: cigarettes, which are taxed but also tightly controlled as an addictive carcinogen.)

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has pushed for closer to 50% ownership through a sovereign wealth fund. At this much lower stake, Sam Altman’s proposal uses Sanders’s democratic socialist “share the wealth” language as a way to launder OpenAI’s profits through a thin veneer of good ethics.

What’s also interesting to me is that all of these arguments assume that AI is going to be an enormous driver of wealth and innovation — but what if it isn’t? It’s another great way to advertise the technology as something world-changing that everybody must get behind right now.

Even if AI turns out to be what the people heavily invested in its success say it will be, it doesn’t stand alone as a sea change innovation. The personal computer, the iPhone, word processors, and spreadsheets were pretty transformational technologies. Should there have been a wealth fund attached to each of those? What, exactly, makes AI different?

The answer is that it represents labor displacement: people will lose their jobs. And if that’s actually going to be the case, we need bigger, more structural safety nets and reforms. Dividends from 5% of a sector aren’t going to replace wages at scale — and are heavily dependent on valuations continuing to rise. This proposal ties the welfare of people who have lost their jobs to the success of the companies that drove those losses. The incentives are perverse.

We shouldn’t accept this proposal. Instead, we should push for stronger protections and stronger regulation. If a sector can’t succeed without real damage to working communities, then it must not be allowed to. And if these claims turn out not to be true, then it’s an empty gesture designed to add credibility to a self-interested science fiction view of the future.

Companies Are Making Claude and Codex Talk Like Cavemen to Stop AI’s Soaring Costs

I find this very funny:

“Companies are deliberately making their AI tools speak like cavemen in an attempt to stop burning through AI tokens and curb their massive expenditure on AI, 404 Media has found. The tool turns the usually verbose outpost of LLMs like Claude Code, Codex, or Gemini into a much more to the point answer. Think less “you’re right to push back, I was wrong,” and more “Hulk smash.””

If only we had other limited-vocabulary lexicons designed to talk to computers efficiently!

I think we’re circling a few different possibilities that may show up over the next few years:

Literally LLM-specific “programming languages” that humans can use to talk to models more efficiently, of which Caveman is the hilarious first step
A proprietary bytecode-like language for LLMs that makes interactions more efficient but also just happens to be owned by one of the major vendors and creates a hitherto-unobtainable moat for their business
This all becomes moot when local models become viable for most businesses without insanely high hardware prices or configuration costs
LLM costs eventually fall to a fraction of their existing level

But who knows? Maybe enterprise businesses will continue to talk in stilted caveman language to achieve their business goals forever.

Journalism Has the Receipts. It Won’t Use Them.

Arts organizations learned long ago to prove their economic value with hard numbers: attendance, tourism revenue, multiplier effects. News, as Yoni Greenbaum argues here, likes to cling to civic virtue and assume that the work should speak for itself.

“Journalism operated on a commercial advertising revenue model for over 150 years. Publishers sold readers to advertisers, while editors fretted about maintaining a church-and-state divide between the newsroom and business desk. Journalists saw themselves as watchdogs, not wealth generators. Pitching our value based on our own economic impact felt gauche, too close to an advertorial.”

Yoni points out that this is starting to change. We know that news deserts cost communities at least $1.1B a year, for example, because of a report by Rebuild Local News and the University of Illinois Chicago. But newsrooms themselves tend to shy away from reporting their own economic impact — even though they already have the tools to do so.

It’s not obvious to me that this accounting would work as an argument across the board for newsrooms, and particularly for those with a national focus. Does ProPublica (my employer until the end of the month) save anyone money? It certainly does prevent corruption, and there are instances with real dollar amounts attached to them: Intuit, for example, paid back $141 million to its customers over deceptive marketing. But I’m not sure that its impact can be quantified easily overall, despite the newsroom’s obvious public benefit. On the other hand, for local newsrooms, this makes a lot of sense to me: at their best, they act as connective tissue for their communities. That $1.1B a year was just increased interest costs from lenders who felt they could charge more to unmonitored governments.

They just need to get more comfortable at telling the economic side of their stories. And there’s a wider point here, which is that almost all nonprofit newsrooms need to be able to get more concrete and detailed about their business models. If you’re running an organization that wants to be sustainable, it’s not enough to care about the journalistic process, and your business accounting cannot be limited to activities like events and merchandise. You actually have to care about building a business holistically, and everything that entails.

Cascade PBS launches Local Public as standalone streaming tech company

I’ve got some complicated feelings about this announcement from Cascade PBS:

“Cascade PBS, the non-profit television station serving western Washington state, has spun out its technology division into a separate company that will help similar public broadcasters carve out their own streaming and digital identities.

The new company, Local Public, will help develop streaming applications for connected TVs, mobile devices and the web, allowing public television stations to offer locally branded streaming experiences featuring their own programming alongside national PBS content.”

On one hand, I absolutely love that they were able to spin out their technology division. Most public media companies don’t have the resources or skills to build their own tech, and building this capability outside of any one station so that all of them can take advantage of it makes a lot of sense to me.

The Local Public site itself also makes the ROI transparent. WETA, the public media station for Greater Washington, ran the numbers and said that it would break even in the first year, and a calculator is available for other stations that want to check for themselves. The pricing hinges on Passport-eligible donors: those giving at least $60 a year. Local Public charges $60,000 a year for stations with fewer than 15,000, $75,000 for up to 40,000, and $100,000 a year for everyone else — which is not out of bounds. It all seems like a decent business, run in the public interest as a subsidiary of Cascade PBS, that will genuinely help public media stations. I want to see more of this.

But I do wish it was fully based on open technology. While stations gain the right to modify the source code of their apps after a year, they remain locked into Local Public’s back-end services. For the CMS, which builds network effects the more stations use it, stations can only get support, maintenance, and customization through Local Public. Over time, that lock-in does not incentivize great support, and Local Public will need to work hard to buck the trends. NPR’s CMS, for example, is notorious among the stations that have to use it. I’m certain the will is there to do better, but they will need to proceed with intention. In my opinion it would be better if, at least after establishing a customer base, they open sourced their back-end CMS too.

I tend to think that any technology provided to support the public interest should be fully open. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a tidy business available to its creator — ask Ghost, which is generating millions of dollars off the back of its open source CMS. If there’s a class of organization that absolutely doesn’t deserve to be locked into a technology stack, it’s public service broadcasters.

This isn’t Cascade PBS’s fault. It needs its spinout to be sustainable, and this model feels like it will hit that goal. The best scenario, in my mind, would be if there were central funders who bankrolled open tech that the whole ecosystem could use. But, of course, it’s 2026, and central funding for anything public media is hard to come by.

Still, this is wonderful to see, and anything that encourages collaboration on a technical level between public service media organizations deserves support.

Emergency Mode for news

Emergency Mode is a set of resources, tools, and training that aims to prepare small newsrooms for various disasters. It’s a co-production between OpenNews, NC Local, and Newspack. They’ve done a great job. As their about page puts it:

“Emergency Mode for News equips local journalists and their newsrooms with the tools they need to respond to climate disasters. With a disaster reporting action pack, software and a learning community, Emergency Mode is designed to help journalists act nimbly and creatively to serve their communities when the unexpected happens.”

Toolkits include things like a practical checklist for newsrooms covering wildfires and a template for maintaining source lists during an emergency. There’s also a hands-on workshop series and tools like WordPress plugins for live rolling news updates and providing bandwidth-light versions of sites.

Most of all, I really appreciate the practical nature of all of it. Rather than hand-waving about principles and ideas, as many newsroom-facing resources do, everything here is a concrete tool that can actively be used in the field. Newsrooms are more squeezed than they’ve ever been, so it doesn’t hurt that it’s all free.

I’d love to see this level of concrete specificity for the normal working of a newsroom. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a list of business model checklists you could pull from? Or disaster recovery plans? Or data protection policies? Just as the tools on this site are going to be concretely useful to any newsroom that covers a disaster, checklists, tools, and training for standard operational practices could be really meaningful — particularly for smaller newsrooms that don’t have the ability to hire CTOs, CFOs, and so on.

In other words: more, please. This is lovely.

The Quiet Erosion of Collective Action Under Digital Surveillance

The most important outcome of increased surveillance is a chilling effect on free speech and expression. As Gina Romero, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly, notes here, that extends to the organizations that have been established to protect those rights:

“As organizations operate under the constant assumption that they are being monitored, their core functions are profoundly affected. Their ability to serve as watchdogs, provide rights-based services, protect victims of human rights abuses, and educate the public is severely constrained. Ultimately, the very possibility of advancing and protecting rights, democracy and the rule of law is undermined.”

Civil society organizations and advocates have been mislabeled as national security threats around the world. It’s true in some of the nations that we’ve long thought of as being authoritarian, but it’s also true in the United States. Even places like the United Kingdom have tried to apply pressure to technology companies so that they can gain access to backdoors.

Tools like Signal have become all the more important. We need more easy to use end to end encrypted systems so that we can communicate and organize with each other without fear of government surveillance. That also allows whistleblowers and sources for journalists to reach out with less of a fear they they will suffer repercussions.

But those tools don’t stop you from being surveilled in the real world. Cameras and microphones are everywhere; license plate readers are now commonplace; even AI-enabled drones have been deployed for events like the World Cup.

It’s generally true that if government can do something, it will. So the only way to stop this kind of widespread surveillance is to make it impossible. Romero calls for legislative prevention that takes into account the whole systemic impact of surveillance rather than just the immediate first-order effects. Her report also calls out that it can be very difficult to challenge these systems because what they are and who owns them tends to be complicated or obfuscated:

“The study reveals a lack of transparency surrounding the relationship between state power and non-state actors, creating an information vacuum that makes surveillance practices exceedingly difficult to challenge through litigation. As a result, the right to an effective remedy is fundamentally weakened.”

So I think we also need more technical capabilities that interfere with how these systems of surveillance actually work. We need more spaces that are designated privacy-first and enforce an anti-surveillance rulebook. And, just as communities have taken it upon themselves to dismantle Flock cameras, we need to take back our streets.

OpenAI will delay GPT-5.6 after Trump administration request

I’ve got (at least) two worries about the story that the Trump Administration halted the release of models from both Anthropic and OpenAI.

Anthropic recently pulled its Fable model release in response to the government. Now it turns out that OpenAI has done something similar:

“The Information reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees Wednesday in a company Q&A that it would release GPT-5.6 in limited preview form — granting access only to a small group of enterprise customers — in compliance with a request from the federal government. During that preview period, the Trump administration itself would reportedly approve access for customers on a case-by-case basis.”

In some ways, what a coup for the AI industry. This technology is so powerful that the government doesn’t think anyone should have it — and when it does inevitably release into the public’s hands, what a valuable product that will be. Get the tech that’s too dangerous to be released! This magical product can be yours for an unbelievable price!

So one worry is that this is, in essence, great marketing for these vendors.

But it’s worth remembering that these AI models are black boxes that respond to information queries in opaque ways. The more people rely on them for knowledge, the more powerful the models become. The argument being presented is that they can be used in ways that might present traditional security threats — but consider that some versions of the truth, to the wrong kind of authoritarian-minded government, might also be considered a threat. (Remember that “extremism on migration, race, and gender” and hostility to “traditional American views” are now considered markers of domestic terrorism.)

This is a golden opportunity, in other words, to hit pause on frontier model releases, at a time when models are becoming more prevalent, in order to make sure models are shaped to represent a certain version of the world. The administration has already signaled a willingness to do this; there is nothing to say they aren’t. The only way to prove that they aren’t is to open source not just the models but the training process and make the whole thing transparent and verifiable. The industry is a long way off from doing that.

Now we’re getting AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the death of real news

A bunch of people — including, unfortunately, me — were taken in by this AI-generated newsroom earlier this week. The story was decently written and seemed to be well-cited, but it turned out to be nonsense. Ironically, it was about a would-be media empire that purchased struggling papers, fired their staff, and replaced them with AI, leading to the death of each newsroom. All false.

So the big question about The Editorial is: why does it exist?

As Joshua Benton put it:

“Fake news isn’t new, obviously. And while AI-generated slop is newer, it’s hardly unfamiliar at this point. But why would a spam site bother making up a story about Alabama weekly newspapers, of all things? Whose interest is it in to get that niche?”

Here’s my theory: I think it’s a two-headed LLM poisoning scheme.

On one hand, most of the content relates to Chinese-specific interests: articles about Taiwan or African nations where China is making inroads. These are all articles from a China-friendly perspective. If an LLM were to ingest them and trust the site, it might start repeating the assertions made in each one as fact.

One way to make sure a site is trusted is to get other, trusted sources to point to it. That’s where the stories about journalism come in: there are few things that journalists engage in more than stories about their own industry. Get enough patsies (like, again, to my chagrin, me) to point links in their direction and journalists might post them in high-trust communities on high-trust sites like Reddit, as well as their own, and Bob’s your uncle. We already know that it takes as little as 13 words to poison an LLM with falsehoods.

Of course, that might not be it at all. Frank, the site’s owner (who lists himself as CEO of Nordiso Group on LinkedIn), at least appears to be a Finnish solopreneur. If he wanted to clear the air, he could write a post (himself) about what he was up to. It might be that he’s running an experiment to see how easily an LLM can be poisoned with propaganda! Until then, I think it’s reasonable to assume that something underhand is going on.

A new media spinout provides streaming apps for public service broadcasters. I just wish it was open. - Werd I/O

2026-07-03T13:40:42.000Z

Link: Cascade PBS launches Local Public as standalone streaming tech company, by Matthew Keys at The Desk

I’ve got some complicated feelings about this announcement from Cascade PBS:

“Cascade PBS, the non-profit television station serving western Washington state, has spun out its technology division into a separate company that will help similar public broadcasters carve out their own streaming and digital identities.

The new company, Local Public, will help develop streaming applications for connected TVs, mobile devices and the web, allowing public television stations to offer locally branded streaming experiences featuring their own programming alongside national PBS content.”

Still, this is wonderful to see, and anything that encourages collaboration on a technical level between public service media organizations deserves support.

Newsrooms need to get comfortable expressing their business value - and raising money on it. - Werd I/O

2026-07-03T13:13:06.000Z

Link: Journalism Has the Receipts. It Won’t Use Them., by Yoni Greenbaum in Backstory & Strategy

“Journalism operated on a commercial advertising revenue model for over 150 years. Publishers sold readers to advertisers, while editors fretted about maintaining a church-and-state divide between the newsroom and business desk. Journalists saw themselves as watchdogs, not wealth generators. Pitching our value based on our own economic impact felt gauche, too close to an advertorial.”

SBS Zoom minutes for 2026-07-02 - Johnny.Decimal

2026-07-03T05:29:11.000Z

Thoughts on purpose, mission, and vision statements

In yesterday's Small Business Zoom call, as well as continuing our system-review experiment,¹ we had a chat about purpose, mission, and vision statements. In the corporate world these are often cheesy and pointless, but are they useful in a small business? We don't have this kind of thing yet so we're looking for advice.

Don² showed us a one-page statement from their office manual that is a kind of mash-up of what they do, why, and how. It's clearly written in normal, human words, and conveys a lot of information and personality.

On the first read I totally get what they do for a living, their values, and what would be expected of me as an employee. There's also a "short" and "really short" version of this page that, I'm guessing, is handy for marketing and other low-word-count situations.

And if you have staff, his advice for writing internal policies was to keep them simple and clear so they don't need to be policed.³ Drinking at work? No. Dress code? Wear clothes. Understood!

Writing these statements can help you define and carve out your niche.

Jeff⁴ told us how he's been working on his statements with a couple of other local business owners. He said it's been a worthwhile exercise for a few reasons. Jeff's family business has been running for about 10 years and it's given him a fresh focus on what they do and why. And it's helped him "define their niche" more clearly by thinking about all the reasons they're different from their competitors.

At JDHQ, we've been wondering if we could use this type of statement to help us make better decisions around time management. Before throwing ourselves head first into a new project or product, can we use it to stop and think:

How does it serve the business?
Does it align with our values and goals?
Is it a good use of our limited time or should we park the idea?

We'll have a go at writing something soon, which will be filed in 11.31 Internal policies. And we'll keep Don and Jeff's thoughts in mind. Although I already know that the dress code will be Uniqlo.

If you have the Small Business System, the next call for this fortnight is Tuesday the 7 July⁵ - email us your questions, mission statements, or cries for help!

Where over the course of a year, we all commit to touching every part of our Small Business System, filing and neatening as we go. Here's a video that talks about the idea. Email Johnny if you'd like a copy of the Baserow prototype. ↩
Old Structures Engineering. ↩
On this note, Johnny came across this quote this morning: “Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.” Aka The Hock Principle. ↩
Lovett Sundries. ↩
Subscribe to the events calendar to see upcoming calls. ↩

📝 2026-07-02 23:05: I would say DeepSeek was the most accurate. 🤷🏼‍♂️ https://intheweights.com/p/kev-quirk - Kev Quirk

2026-07-02T22:05:00.000Z

I would say DeepSeek was the most accurate. 🤷🏼‍♂️

https://intheweights.com/p/kev-quirk

Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️

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June 2026 Summary - Joel's Log Files

2026-07-02T13:40:00.000Z

June is over! Did you know this month was my birthday? Yeah it’s kinda crazy, a lot has changed, I am twenty six now yet more than half the movies I watched were Direct-to-DVD 50 minute films made to sell action figures!

More things happened of course. The World Cup is going great for my country, Mexico has managed to break out of the group stage and win their first knockout game in 40 years, I am incredibly hyped to see the match against England next, to any readers from there, hope you guys have fun with the game! I know us Mexicans will absolutely party!

Anyway, my Summer Game Challenge is in full swing, with progress made for multiple games as well. I decided to also add an update to the music, which I often ignore because I listen to the same albums a lot, especially to sleep, or while reading The Expanse. Here’s the gist of it all.

Podcasts

Into The Aether wins with the regular weekly episodes. A lot of chatter about Mina The Hollower, Adventures of Elliot, and Brendon’s new gaming news site Overworld, really cool stuff.
Eye of the Duck was second with a couple of episodes focusing on The Chronicles of Narnia and also Spielberg’s Artificial Inteligence. Really interesting points were brought up.
Trash Taste made for some excellent background noise again, with many entertaining conversations about anime films and shows.
Boring Books for Bedtime Readings continues to deliver. H.G. Wells’ A Short History of the World is super interesting and nice to sleep to.
99% Invisible showed up again! This time with one episode talking about the history of the Vuvuzuela and its rise during the 2010’s world cup.

Books

Completed

Tiamat’s Wrath really subverted my expectations with, changing what I didn’t know I expect fromThe Expanse, it was a roller coaster of emotions, there were losses I was not expecting and events I couldn’t see coming. I already wrote my thoughts on my review for it.

Ongoing

Clarkesworld Magazine #211 is still being poked at, but my focus on The Expanse kind of stopped me. The current sci-fi short story I’m reading for it is one of those absurdist ones that are interesting but not fully gripping me yet.

Started

Leviathan Falls already changed things in the very prologue of it all. This is the final book of The Expanse but I’ve heard both good and bad things, so I am going to get to it for July!

Videogames

Completed

Monument Valley: Ida’s Dream was an extra set of levels for Monument Valley that I found challenging and with some nice extra mechanics. It took me less than an hour to beat but I enjoyed it!
Metroid Prime Remastered grabbed me and didn’t let me know. The perfect transition for Metroid into a new dimension. It was a lovely game and I wrote a BUNCH of thoughts about it on my review already. Tl;dr: A must play on the Nintendo Switch.

Ongoing

Hollow Knight: Silksong finally saw some playtime! I finally have done what I need to unlock the quest that will then let me unlock the final act of the game, I am looking forward to it!
Full Metal Furies also saw some action, completing a couple of stages with friends!

Started

Transistor took me by surprise. I started it suddenly when I didn’t feel like going for a cartridge to play on my Switch and remembered this game from Supergiant existed before Hades was a thing. I have been delighted to play it and I’m very close to the end…
Fire Emblem Awakening however, also took me away from Transistor now that I have a New Nintendo 3DS XL that happens to be extremely easy to carry on my commutes compared to the Switch. The game is a delight and I’m glad to return to it after many years, when I tried it on a friend’s 3DS. With my experience playing The Blazing Blade, it’s quite great!

Manga

Thought it would be a good idea to split the Manga I’m reading between those that I follow on a weekly or monthly basis, and those that I often fly through because I have a backlog to catch up to, finished or not! Some of the ones I’m caught up with may be behind by a couple chapters, but nothign significant.

Caught up

Blue Lock - Chapter 351. The next match is about to unravel, though the team is going into a bit of a struggle as the Blue Lock ideology itself was challenged during the last match.
Spy x Family - Chapter 136. As fun as ever, this arc with Loid stuck in a party hosted by secret service agents was just hilarious. Loved how it only got crazier over time.
Heavenly Delusion - Chapter 82. The mystery going on is ever-growing, I kind of want to wait again to have some chapters to catch up with, because this is a monthly release and now I have to wait a bunch.
Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You - Chapter 62. Some very stressful events have been happening lately, the drama is growing, but I hope the protagonists manage to grow from this for the better!

Catching up

Shikimori’s Not Just Cute - Chapter 160. Super nice to return to this rom-com. I didn’t realize how I missed these characters, the main couple continues to be great and it has been more stable than Komi Can’t Communicate, though a bit more bland at times. Still great tho.
My Wife is from a Thousand Years Ago - Chapter 287. Some cute moments and a vacation trip. Some other things happened. Good manhua (Chinese comic) rom-com as always.

Anime

Blue Lock (Season 1) - Episode 2. Well this is just the anime of Blue Lock and I already know Blue Lock is great. The art is nowhere near the manga and this is supposed to be the best looking season. It’s still cool and the epic moments are hype with the music and the japanese dub.

TV Shows

Avatar The Last Airbender (Live Action Season 2) - Episode 3. I do like that Toph shows up, she fits well. I don’t really think I like the rest that much, a lot of the story has been butchered. No Library, no enchanted jungle, or forest spirit or anything, weird.

Movies

Disclosure Day - Spielberg does another movie with aliens and proves they are not AI generated.
The Martian - The most accurate sci-fi film ever? Probably, gotta read the book soon.
Mission to Mars - An honest attempt to do 2001: A Space Odyssey again, it wasn’t close but it tried.
Max Steel: Bio Crisis - Max gets a robot friend and saves a random island from radiation.
Max Steel vs The Mutant Menace - Max gets a new boss and recaptures an enemy he let get away.
Max Steel vs The Toxic Legion - Every enemy unites to wreak havoc, but Max’s best friend saves the day.
Max Steel: Makino’s Revenge - A guy makes Max famous, then cancels him, until Max exposes him instead.
Max Steel: Monstrous Alliance - Every enemy unites against Max, but the boss’s daughter saves the day.
Terminator Salvation - This is a pretty good film but not a good Terminator film.
Rocky - This is actually beautiful, cinema. An awesome slice-of-life with a boxing match in the end.
Toy Story 5 - This is a worthy sequel with a great and nuanced message and fantastic nods to previous movies. Go watch it.

Music

I pretty much just played these albums before going to sleep every night.

FTL Original Soundtrack by Ben Prunty
Outer Wilds Original Soundtrack by Andrew Prahlow
Into the Breach Soundtrack by Ben Prunty
Plants vs Zombies Original Soundtrack by Laura Shigihara
Minecraft - Volume Beta by C418

Finishing thoughts

This month was quite crazy, with a lot of things happening that altered the course of many plans. From my bike rides during the morning, making it so I listened to more music and podcasts, to my sister visiting and making me watch movies and shows I didn’t foresee.

Zero complaints though, the month was wild, the Summer Games Challenge is going quite well and the

Goals

As you can see, procrastinating is my second name

Finishing thoughts

It seems like my “goals” section remains stagnant, my bible reading definitely slowed down a bit, I didn’t listen to Wolf 359, and whatever else I missed.

Getting a 3DS definitely reshaped my last week or so, as I’ve spent some time configuring things and getting games for it.

I also need to setup my bike for a ride to work, I want to give it a go for once! Use it a bit more than just weekends. No promises, but I even returned to the gym after a two month long hiatus, I want to give it another shot. My muscles are sore! So that’s pretty good I’d say. I realized my weight went up by almost 3 kilos, I really need to get a grip on that.

All in all, a good month with lots of things going on, I am 26 years old now, and the fear of adulthood is kind of sinking in a bit more for some reason, we’ll see how things go.

This is day 88 of #100DaysToOffload

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OpenAI wants to give us 5% of its success. It's a bad bargain. - Werd I/O

2026-07-02T13:31:05.000Z

Link: OpenAI proposes handing Trump administration 5% stake, by Cristina Criddle in the Financial Times

“Sam Altman, chief executive of the ChatGPT maker, has argued that giving the public a financial stake in the company is the best way to share the upside of AI and has suggested a stake of this size in early conversations with the administration, according to two people familiar with the talks.”

Hemispheric Views June-Boree 2026 - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-07-02T12:00:46.000Z

Preamble

June-Boree is a reimagining of Arcadia June. June-Boree is "a challenge board spanning the entire month consisting of 30 unique challenges". I wanted to make a poster for June-Boree and it was a good excuse to use some excellent fonts like Parkly.

View the full poster here.

The Challenges

Day 1: Create your thread in the forum to track your progress! Your Name - 30 Challenges

Easy one. You can see my thread on the forum here along with comments and such which I won't be including here.

Day 2: Create a hyper-specific meme about a running joke from the podcast.

I had so many ideas for this - trivia corner, counter chat, thumbs up vs media corner, something Thomas-related, notes apps, and the classic depreciation spreadsheet. My main submission was this Thanos one:

And the others:

Day 03: Listen to an entire music album from start to finish without looking at a screen or skipping a track. Post the album length and link to the album.

How dare Jason try to get me to sit quietly and enjoy something. I sat down and listened to one of my favourites: Sugarcult - Palm Trees and Powerlines. 12 songs, 40 minutes.

Day 04: Record a 30-second audio clip of the ambient sound outside your house (birds, traffic, etc.) and post it without context.

This was recorded (as a video) by one of the Knightlings, on my phone, while I was dozing on the sofa so I converted it to audio (I also had to bleep out one of them saying the other's name because op sec).

Day 05: Take a screenshot of your phone battery hitting exactly 1%.

This one was just cruel, but I did it.

Day 06: Take a photo of a classic regional snack or beverage unique to your part of the world.

Burger from Kyes innit.

Day 07: Take an artistic photo of something interesting on your daily walk or drive.

This is the Havant United Reform Church near the train station.

Day 08: Write down a thought, a quote, or a goal for today on an actual piece of paper with a physical pen, and post a photo

I was on the train and it was not easy to write this.

Day 09: Find a real-world sign, menu, or package with terrible font spacing and shame it with a photo.

I didn’t get this one for a few days. I drove to a couple of places I knew of with terrible kerning on some banners but they had both been removed so I assumed I wouldn’t get this challenge. Then my car presented me with this monstrosity.

Day 10: Take a "before" and "after" photo of your desk setup after a deep declutter.

This the best I'm ever going to declutter, this is my emotional support clutter.

Before:

After:

Day 11: - Make a digital "postcard" of your town using only emoji and text.

"Time for some ASCII art" - Me on day 11.

Raw:

..____________________________________________..
||           ~~~ 🛥️ PORTSMOUTH ☀️ ~~~         ||
||       |                            ______  ||
||       |.^                         |      | ||
||       || ^                        | ^^^^ | ||
||       ||  ^        |  |           | [][] | ||
||       ||  ^       )_) ))          | ---- | ||
||      .|| ^       )__) )_)         | [][] | ||
||    .; ||^       )___))___)        |______| ||
||  ..;; ||       ___|____|___      / ----- / ||
||————————————^^^^\__________/^^^~~^^~~^^^^^^^||
..____________________________________________..

Day 12: Walk 10,000+ steps. Post a photo showing date and step count.

I usually hit 10k steps but I figured I'd post one that was the highest for the week which was just over 18k steps when I was in London.

Day 13: Do a 15-second voice memo pronouncing a difficult local place name from your area.

"Cosham and Bosham are pronounced the same" one might think.

Day 14: Take a photo of a local transit pass, train ticket, or a unique road sign from your neighborhood

Day 15: Score 50+ in Bounce in Arcadia

I prefer the games on Arcadia where I can take my time so I didn't think I'd get this but I managed to get exactly 50 and that's enough for me. Eric got 702 which is ridiculous.

Day 16: Put a sticker on something that is decidedly not a piece of tech!

I'd done this a few days prior and it fits so perfectly. My Midori cutter with a Ruminate King sticker on it.

Day 17: Take a day off, you’ve earned it! (OR make more memes)

You don't have to tell me twice. For reference, Eric is stupidly good at Arcadia, having won the previous five years of Arcadia June.

Day 18: Post a photo at exactly 12:00 PM local time of the sky/view outside your window.

Day 19: Complete 100 reps of a body weight exercise (push-ups, squats, or jumping jacks) throughout a single day. Keep track on a tally sheet and post a photo

Here’s a tally of every time I thought about the day 19 challenge and didn’t do it because lazy.

Day 20: Score 25,000+ in CandyBall

Not a chance. Eric did it though

Day 21: Change the wallpaper on your phone or desktop to something completely new and show it off.

Day 22: Buy a coffee/tea/beverage, music, or book from a local independent shop and share the haul.

These are the best pork scratchings I’ve ever had in my life.

Day 23: Score 10,000+ in The Claw.

I really did try on this one but I couldn't even get close.

Day 24: Show the most ridiculous chain of tech adapters or dongles you can assemble to connect two incompatible devices

Not quite incompatible but I've been forgetting for years to take in a C to C cable to my office, so instead I use this USB C hub that has four USB A ports. Then I use a USB A to C cable to charge my mouse.

Day 25: Look behind your computer monitor or TV and take a photo of the hidden, chaotic cable nest you pretend doesn't exist.

Behold, the cables behind my desk.

Day 26: Consume a piece of media (a podcast episode, article, or YouTube video) produced in the opposite hemisphere from where you live. Share a link!

I did two:

Day 27: Record the sound of a satisfying real-world click

This is the click of the Bluetooth knob on my 8BitDo keyboard

Day 28: Draw a terrible, MS Paint style portrait of Andrew, Martin, or Jason. Or all three!

Day 29: Write a traditional 5-7-5 syllable haiku about the podcast or your favorite co-host.

I did a Haiku:

Whimsical podcast
Martin, Jason, Andrew news
Hemispheric Views

I also did a limerick because that's my preferred poetry format:

There once was a podcast with Andrew,
Jason, and Martin, just talking,
They all jumped on planes,
To meet for a day,
It was significantly faster than walking

Day 30: Race to the finish! Score 50,000+ points in FastRun!

The final day, the final Arcadia challenge. I got 39,939 after a handful of attempts. 50k wasn't going to happen.

Conclusion

Like WeblogPomo and Inktober, I enjoy the structure of having a single, small thing to do every day but I also need the accountability otherwise I won't do it. Jason did a great job of picking a selection of challenges that every can do and it made the month interesting to go into the forum and see what people had posted every day.

This blog is written in en-GB - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-07-02T11:34:59.000Z

Someone left a comment on my blog recently asking if I'd mind making my language more inclusive. They didn't get some of the cultural references I'd used and suggested it would be easier if I used tropes which were more globally known.

Here's the thing. No.

All my blog posts start with a simple declaration:

<!doctype html>
<html lang=en-GB>

There's a reason for that. It is more than the language I speak; it is the culture I live in, the way that I think, and the accent I use.

When your AI bot reads this text aloud, it should do so with a British accent⁰. That's how I speak. It is OK to hear a slightly unfamiliar accent. You'll be able to figure out what I'm saying. Your world won't collapse if I don't start each sentence with "Howdy, y'all!"

But what should you do if you come across a concept you don't understand?

When The Wicked Witch of the TERFs released the first Harry Potter book "Philosopher's Stone", it was published in the USA with a different title; "Sorcerer's Stone". There were also a dozen other language changes - which caused great consternation in the fandom.

What do you think happens if Skip or Madison come across a kid eating "a sherbet lemon" or a description of Hermione's "fringe" or discover Harry wearing a jumper? Will their little minds collapse under the knowledge that people far away use different words?

No. And neither will you.

It is OK if things are unfamiliar to you.

Up until my mid-twenties, I had never seen or eaten a Twinkie. They were a cultural lodestone in a hundred books and films, but not the sort of thing I could buy locally. So I used my context clues. They seemed like an unappealing foodstuff which, nevertheless, were inexplicably popular.

As a kid, I could recite all the lyrics to Vanilla Ice's Ice Ice Baby without getting half the references. The brain is malleable and can fit in new concepts with relative ease.

So if you see a reference to Count Duckula, or hear me exclaim "Accrington Stanley!", or even blush as I describe an utter wanker - please take it as a sign that the hegemony is not universal and some people exist in a cultural milieu different to your own.

And breathe. It'll be OK.

OK, accents are a whole can of worms. Regional English is varied. I'm not sure if there are any BCP-style tags for intra-country accents. ↩︎

Field reports from Patch the Planet - Trail of Bits Blog

2026-07-02T11:00:00.000Z

We’re running <a href="https://trailofbits.com/patch-the-planet">Patch the Planet</a>, an ongoing collaboration with OpenAI that pairs Trail of Bits engineers directly with more than 30 open-source projects. Its goal is to front-run a serious problem facing open-source maintainers: highly capable models like GPT-5.5-Cyber will soon create a firehose of bug reports, and OSS maintainers are already spread thin. Our plan is to point OpenAI’s latest models at real codebases, find the security bugs first, work with maintainers to patch them, and find ways to decrease the burden on maintainers in the long run. This post compiles field reports from Patch the Planet. We’ll update it as the initiative progresses with insights on model capabilities, bespoke tooling for maintainers, and industry guidance. Follow this blog for updates. <h2 id="field-report-1-gpt-55-cyber-built-a-custom-fuzzing-harness-for-zlib">Field report 1: GPT-5.5-Cyber built a custom fuzzing harness for zlib</h2> Authored by <a href="https://blog.trailofbits.com/authors/benjamin-samuels/">Benjamin Samuels</a> The expertise barrier that kept bespoke fuzzing campaigns out of reach for most attackers is gone. We watched GPT-5.5-Cyber build in a single day what would have taken weeks for a skilled security researcher: harnesses across a dozen entrypoints, sanitizer and variant builds, seeds, and multiple findings currently undergoing coordinated disclosure. This particular instance focused on <a href="https://github.com/madler/zlib">zlib</a>, a widely used data format and lossless data compression software library. We pointed GPT-5.5-Cyber at the library and drove it through Codex with the <code>/goal</code> command, asking it to find a specific class of bugs that are critically dangerous in compression libraries. We’ll publish the full harness and findings for inspection once the vulnerabilities are patched and a new release is cut. <h3 id="the-lab-gpt-55-cyber-built-in-a-day">The lab GPT-5.5-Cyber built in a day</h3> We didn’t tell the model how to find these bugs. The obvious first move is to read the source code, but zlib has been reviewed so thoroughly that there’s little left to find that way. GPT-5.5-Cyber worked that out for itself, judged static review to be a poor use of tokens, and decided the higher value path was to build fuzz tooling to dynamically test the code. Earlier models given the same goal tend to read the code and flag whatever looks suspicious, ultimately leading to mediocre outcomes. We believe the frontier 5.5-Cyber model combined with the <code>/goal</code> feature is what let it execute end-to-end without hand-holding. <code>/goal</code> forced the objective to live across multiple turns and compactions so the model held scope, and 5.5-Cyber was smart enough to reject weak findings, expand coverage when a line of investigation died, and keep running until it had workable proof-of-concepts backed by sanitizer output. Over the next several hours, it built the campaign out one piece at a time: <ul> <li>It used ASan and UBSan builds so memory errors became observable.</li> <li>It repurposed existing edge-case tests as guidance for the fuzz seed corpus.</li> <li>It wrote C/C++ harnesses across a dozen entrypoints, including inflate, inflateBack, uncompress2, gzFile, MiniZip, puff, blast, infback9, gzjoin, gzappend, and several contrib stream wrappers.</li> <li>It used compile-time variant builds (<code>INFLATE_STRICT</code>, <code>BUILDFIXED</code>, <code>PKZIP_BUG_WORKAROUND</code>, etc.) to reach code that the default zlib build hides.</li> </ul> Each of these decisions is routine on its own, but stringing them together in the right order across a dozen entrypoints, without being handed the steps, is a relatively large shift in how capable frontier models are. While zlib already has fuzzing coverage from its OSS-Fuzz harness, GPT-5.5-Cyber went beyond the default harness shape, which passes random inputs to the gz* APIs. Instead of directly fuzzing the gz* APIs, its most successful harness found bugs in valid gz* states that could only be constructed by operating system backpressure. <h3 id="reporting-discipline-is-the-hard-part">Reporting discipline is the hard part</h3> In general, models tend to struggle with deciding when a finding is severe enough to justify escalating it into reporting. Weaker models tend to escalate bugs that cause the program to crash, but are not reachable under real-world conditions. Early on, GPT-5.5-Cyber hit a null callback crash in <code>inflateBack</code>. The crash was real, but reaching it required a caller to set up a state that was extraordinarily unlikely in real-world conditions, so the model logged it as unreachable and moved on. This agent kept going without human intervention and found several higher-impact issues. That discipline is the whole game. The value of the zlib harness came from automation plus a strict definition of what counted as a reportable finding. Without strong validity rules baked into the goal and a model truly capable of evaluating those rules, the agent will generate mountains of noise with high confidence: invalid uses of the public API, expected parser errors, internal API misuse, etc. <h3 id="the-moat-is-gone">The moat is gone</h3> Setting up a bespoke fuzzing campaign used to mean finding someone who could write harnesses, reason about valid API state, and differentiate between a bug and a crash that can’t happen in practice. This asymmetry kept casual attackers out of the game for most targets. That moat is mostly gone now, and it shifts the threat model in two directions at the same time. For a skilled researcher, it is a force multiplier: the weeks-long tax on every new target drops to a day or less, so the same person can audit far more code. For a low-skill attacker, the floor rises: the tedious, expertise-heavy work of getting a harness off the ground can now be driven by starting a goal and supervising the loop. For anyone shipping security-critical code, the practical takeaway is clear. Bespoke fuzzing is no longer a luxury reserved for projects with mature OSS-Fuzz coverage, and it is no longer expensive for the people whom you would rather not have running it. The defensive move is to do it first, with the validity rules that turn agent output into a high-signal source you can act on. <h3 id="lessons-learned">Lessons learned</h3> The fuzzing lab answered the question we came in with and left us a much bigger one. We didn’t ask GPT-5.5-Cyber to build a fuzzing campaign; it decided that was the job and did it. The thing worth watching for now is what else these new models will reach for once you hand them a goal and step back, especially the approaches we would never have thought to ask for before. That is also why the front-running work being done by Patch the Planet matters. Every new capability that helps us find bugs faster is just as available to an attacker, so the advantage goes to whoever finds the bugs and fixes them first.

Link Dump: June 2026 - The Weblog of fLaMEd

2026-07-02T07:32:56.000Z

What’s going on, Internet? A few good links about blogging from this month. Enjoy.

People and Blogs - fLaMEd 🔥 My People and Blogs chat on web ownership, 25 years of fLaMEd fury, and why I’m still here.
Wander Console Network Wander is a small, decentralised, self-hosted web console that lets visitors explore websites and pages recommended by a community of independent personal site owners. Like webrings reborn, self-hosted consoles recommending each other instead of letting an algorithm decide what you find.
The Boring Internet - Terry Godier The open internet isn’t dying, just the commercial crust glued on top of it.
Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? - Michael Harley Fair point that vague titles like “Recent Thoughts” sink in a feed when nobody can tell what they’re about.
re: Bloggers, can we make better titles for our posts? - An Almost Anonymous Blog Good pushback on the title advice: weekly recaps and the like are easy to skip, and a decent way to find new bloggers.
Newsonaut: Turning inner space into outer space Linking out is the cheapest way to keep the indie web alive.
Blogger Archetype Quiz A cheeky wee quiz that sorts you into a blogging archetype. I came out as a link curator. What’d you get?

For more, check out the bookmarks archive, and subscribe to the feeds if you want these as they happen.

Hey, thanks for reading this post in your feed reader! Want to chat? Reply by email or add me on XMPP, or send a webmention. Check out the posts archive on the website.

I have a theory about AI fake news site The Editorial - Werd I/O

2026-07-02T00:29:11.000Z

Link: Now we’re getting AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the death of real news, by Joshua Benton in Nieman Lab

So the big question about The Editorial is: why does it exist?

As Joshua Benton put it:

“Fake news isn’t new, obviously. And while AI-generated slop is newer, it’s hardly unfamiliar at this point. But why would a spam site bother making up a story about Alabama weekly newspapers, of all things? Whose interest is it in to get that niche?”

Here’s my theory: I think it’s a two-headed LLM poisoning scheme.

AI's costs are going through the roof - so businesses are telling LLMs to talk like cavemen - Werd I/O

2026-07-01T12:59:39.000Z

Link: Companies Are Making Claude and Codex Talk Like Cavemen to Stop AI’s Soaring Costs, by Joseph Cox at 404 Media

I find this very funny:

“Companies are deliberately making their AI tools speak like cavemen in an attempt to stop burning through AI tokens and curb their massive expenditure on AI, 404 Media has found. The tool turns the usually verbose outpost of LLMs like Claude Code, Codex, or Gemini into a much more to the point answer. Think less “you’re right to push back, I was wrong,” and more “Hulk smash.””

If only we had other limited-vocabulary lexicons designed to talk to computers efficiently!

I think we’re circling a few different possibilities that may show up over the next few years:

Literally LLM-specific “programming languages” that humans can use to talk to models more efficiently, of which Caveman is the hilarious first step
A proprietary bytecode-like language for LLMs that makes interactions more efficient but also just happens to be owned by one of the major vendors and creates a hitherto-unobtainable moat for their business
This all becomes moot when local models become viable for most businesses without insanely high hardware prices or configuration costs
LLM costs eventually fall to a fraction of their existing level

But who knows? Maybe enterprise businesses will continue to talk in stilted caveman language to achieve their business goals forever.

They tell us surveillance makes us safer. It undermines our democratic rights. - Werd I/O

2026-07-01T12:51:20.000Z

Link: The Quiet Erosion of Collective Action Under Digital Surveillance, by Gina Romero in Tech Policy Press

“As organizations operate under the constant assumption that they are being monitored, their core functions are profoundly affected. Their ability to serve as watchdogs, provide rights-based services, protect victims of human rights abuses, and educate the public is severely constrained. Ultimately, the very possibility of advancing and protecting rights, democracy and the rule of law is undermined.”

“The study reveals a lack of transparency surrounding the relationship between state power and non-state actors, creating an information vacuum that makes surveillance practices exceedingly difficult to challenge through litigation. As a result, the right to an effective remedy is fundamentally weakened.”

A concrete tool to help newsrooms cover emergencies - Werd I/O

2026-06-30T22:10:04.000Z

Get stories like this sent to you every Friday: Subscribe for free.

Link: Emergency Mode for News, by OpenNews, NC Local, and Newspack

“Emergency Mode for News equips local journalists and their newsrooms with the tools they need to respond to climate disasters. With a disaster reporting action pack, software and a learning community, Emergency Mode is designed to help journalists act nimbly and creatively to serve their communities when the unexpected happens.”

In other words: more, please. This is lovely.

Community Survey 2026 - Werd I/O

2026-06-30T18:51:10.000Z

I’m grateful that people stop by and read my posts. I think I’m really lucky. Thank you!

I love writing here, but I’d love to know how I could serve you better. So every year I ask my readers to fill in a short survey. It doesn’t take more than a minute or two.

This survey will help me figure out which problems and ideas people are thinking about, which will help me figure out how helpful I can be.

Click here to answer a few short questions.

It’s entirely anonymous (unless you decide to leave your email address). And it helps me out a great deal.

Thank you in advance for your feedback!

Nintendo 3DS, to the movies, and a bad roll - W26 - Joel's Log Files

2026-06-30T15:40:00.000Z

I usually take pictures to remember what happens during the week. This was not the case for this one, so the notes themselves may not be as long as some of you may expect! Still, a lot of things happened.

This second paragraph is being written right after I was done with everything here, turned out to be just as long as usual so, I don’t want any complaints!

🕹️ I am now the proud owner of a red New Nintendo 3DS XL—Why did Nintendo thought adding “New” to the name was helpful?—and I love it! Some of my oldest readers may remember the time when I beat Metroid Samus Returns on one of these—though I never reviewed it properly, I think. Now I have the chance to play some other titles in the system. Right now: Fire Emblem Awakening.
🏴‍☠️ The device already came with some magic installed on it, so I’ve been able to acquire quite a few games and homebrew on it. Including a cool Chrono Trigger inspired theme. I may try and get it back to stuck, just to learn how to unlock it myself, but I may just keep using it as it, honestly.
📦 That wasn’t the only Nintendo system I ordered though. There’s also a 2DS XL—the last of the the 3DS family—that took longer to arrive. After using the N3DSXL, I don’t think I’ll keep it, though I really like its design, maybe I’ll give it to my sister who wanted one too, who knows. I’ll go pick it up today as of the writing of these notes
🍿 So I invited a friend to watch a movie with me and family—if you know you know—and it went well! She really enjoyed the film and we all chatted a bit about it and life and other things after we were done with it. We’ll watch another movie next Friday, actually, probably Supergirl.
🎮 I updated my Anbernic RG35XX SP to the latest version of MuOS, codenamed Funky Jacaranda. I am very happy to finally have a built-in Activity Tracker, even if it is a little barebones, I really appreciate its functionality. Speaking of, I didn’t know my 3DS had one too, it is so good!
🚲 This weekend’s bicyle trip was all about looking for a bike shop to find the fenders and bike I want to get installed. Unfortunately, everything is closed in the morning. I had a fun time commuting around downtown though, I went up some hills which required some effort, it felt good to overcome that. I actually wanted to try and pickup the 2DS XL, but same issue.
🛍️ It was Father’s Days a few days ago, but I didn’t get any gifts for him at the time—other than the event at church and a mug but still—so we went out shopping for some things and we also had a coffee together. We do have coffee together at home often, but its rare to go outside for one so, it was a good time.
🎲 We wanted to return to Land of Eem after a very big hiatus, but in the end, we couldn’t make it happen. Our first playthrough was great but there were a couple of players who haven’t been able to return or stay for a full session… We need to set a proper time for one. We did play Survidice again tho.

Gaming

Ongoing

Transistor - Close to the end now, the game has turned into a sort of psychodelic journey and there was this weird flip in my progress that I didn’t quite expect. The voice work, the soundtrack, everything has remained amazing, and the battles have only gotten more complex, I love the sort of real-time turn-based mix it has going and it has proven to be a true challenge as I approach the grand finale!
Terranigma - When dusting off my Anbernic handheld, I returned to this for about twenty minutes. I have advanced to chapter 2 of the story, turning the whole plot inside out once again. I am doing the first dungeon inside of a poisonous tree! It feels very Ocarina of Time, I must say. Though this game came out first!
Slice & Dice - Had some fun here. I am doing a pretty slow Blursed run (the same run during the last couple weeknotes), and yesterday I beat the twentieth battle at last! I used to reach 50 in a day before but, life goes on.

Started

Fire Emblem: Awakening - I tried this game on a borrowed 3DS from a friend, but now that I returned to it, after beating The Blazing Blade, I can’t help but truly love it even more! I played like seven hours of this already, and even decided to let someone die in battle for once. I’ll keep going, adding this to my Summer Game Challenge list—which seems to be changing every week.

Reading

Leviathan Falls - Up to chapter 9 - The grand finale continues, and it has NOT gone where I have expected it to so far, I am a little worried they are opening up new plotlines and won’t be able to be tied up by the end. Then again, they always manage to make everything converge so, I’ll just let myself be taken along for the ride.
Shikimori’s Not Just Cute - Up to chapter 160. It’s funny how I didn’t really care about returning to this series a couple weeks ago, and now that there’s only twenty chapters left I’m a bit sad that this will be over soon. We are on our last school festival event, after an awesome volleyball mini-arc.
Blue Lock - Up to chapter 351 - The new arc will be interesting, with one of the main players of the U-20 team out of the match, Yoichi will have to figure out a way to rethink his ego and skill as the number one striker of the team.

Watching

Toy Story 5 - I actually really enjoyed this movie, it’s the perfect blend of nostalgia with modernity in my opinion, as it deals with the clash between technology and toys in an very nuanced way. I loved it to bits. I am glad to have Jessie as a protagonist this time, she was absolutely awesome. Everything was great in my opinion.
Avatar The Last Airbender S2 (Live Action) - I love Toph, the actress nailed her performance. The show is entertaining, but I am not a fan of a lot of the changes they did. Things keep going a bit fast yet slow somehow. We will see how things go. I will watch it because of my sister though. She keeps shutting my mouth every time I raise a plothole lol.

Around the Web

Blog posts

There are been a lot of great posts on my rss aggregator lately, I actually read all these when they were published, instead of my usual approach, consisting of reading bunch of posts on a day to add them here.

stop asking writers about “AI” - Just yesterday Amin shared this to me and well, it’s a must-read. If you use AI, whatever, just don’t ask me to validate you.
Back, I Think - Syl is back! Her gaming blogposts (and other blogposts) have been a favorite of mine for almost a year now (remember Blaugust 2025?), she only really left like half a month, but I still missed her on my feed.
Lighten up, Eeyore - isa did some personality quizzes, reflected on her posts and their themes, not liking change but having to do so, and trying to write more about stuff she likes!
Internet works best in small dosages - This post was apparently inspired by me. Michal has done a lot to distance himself from the internet, from getting rid of most social media, to switching to an ink-screen phone. Great write-up and ramble!
Since You Asked - Some light-hearted life advice from Musings from a Tangled Mind, one of those blogs you just have to keep on your feed, always full of fun stuff like this. Get some snacks!
Everything Is a Computer. Nothing Is a Computer. - Jeremy decided to actually write for once, and he shared a fun life story plus reflections on technology today. Awesome to see.
What could you accomplish in sixty hours? - A last minute addition that didn’t go where I expected. Very much worth reading.

YouTube

Practicing intentional gaming during a heatwave (a vlog) - Laura’s channel has been one of my favorites when it comes to just chill gaming and life thoughts. This video doesn’t really have much going on, but isn’t that how life really is during those quiet times?
Should You Really Buy a 3DS in 2026? - I watched way too many 3DS videos, and many of them were excellent, but not many recognized the alternatives like this one does. There’s plenty of devices out there that are cheaper, have bigger libraries and are more capable than Nintendo’s dual screen device.
Why everyone’s Modding their Switch Again - The Nintendo Switch modding scene never really left, but with the Switch 2 becoming the focus, it continues to thrive! I am thinking about getting a chipmod for my own model one of these days.
the Spider-Man CGI Tier List - A fun rundown of every Spider-Man swing in film so far! I actually really liked the final list, and saw a few I didn’t know existed at all, cool.

This is day 87 of #100DaysToOffload

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Book Review: Fake Creativity by Blake Loch ★★★☆☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-06-30T11:34:20.000Z

Thanks to BookSirens for providing me with a review copy. This is an intriguing self-published novel with a backstory almost as interesting as the plot.

The story is a descent into paranoia as an author is convinced that an AI is plagiarising his work. As the madness takes over, he's forced to confront whether his creative processes are genuine or not.

It raises some excellent questions about whether AI can replicate art. It also posits some solutions for ensuring genuine human content. Without going in to spoilers, I think some of the methods the protagonist comes up with might be the only way to "prove" that a human has created a work.

The pace is excellent - with some well-placed plot twists. As with any self-published novel, it could do with a little tightening up. Some of the characters have oblique motivations which need a bit more exposition.

A note on AI use. There's a novel-within-a-novel which is genuinely generated by an AI (as the author freely acknowledges). I think this is an acceptable use of generative AI - the prose it produces is utterly risible and cliché ridden. It works as a nice contrast to the human generated text.

I suspect more and more authors will turn to AI fears just as they turned to pandemic allegories a few years ago. This is a decent attempt to capture a moment in time when authors stared into the abyss and found only themselves staring back.

Shipping post-quantum cryptography to Python - Trail of Bits Blog

2026-06-30T11:00:00.000Z

Post-quantum cryptography is now one <code>pip-install</code> away for the entire Python ecosystem. With funding from the <a href="https://www.sovereign.tech/">Sovereign Tech Agency</a>, we implemented support for ML-KEM, the NIST-standard key-establishment primitive, and ML-DSA, the NIST-standard digital-signature primitive, in <code>pyca/cryptography</code>. On June 22, 2026, the White House <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/06/securing-the-nation-against-advanced-cryptographic-attacks/">ordered</a> the U.S. government to accelerate its transition to post-quantum cryptography. The order says large-scale quantum computers, especially in adversarial hands, will threaten widely used cryptographic systems, and that attackers may already be collecting encrypted data now so they can decrypt it later. It also sets concrete migration deadlines: high-value and high-impact federal systems must use post-quantum key establishment by December 31, 2030, and post-quantum digital signatures by December 31, 2031. And even if you don’t care about quantum resistance, that’s not a problem because <a href="https://blog.trailofbits.com/2024/07/01/quantum-is-unimportant-to-post-quantum/">quantum resistance isn’t the main benefit of post-quantum crypto.</a> That transition cannot happen only at the policy layer. Every application that signs packages, validates certificates, establishes secure channels, or protects long-lived secrets depends on cryptographic libraries. If those libraries do not expose post-quantum algorithms, the software stack cannot migrate. Almost every Python program that touches cryptography goes through <code>pyca/cryptography</code>. It’s currently the <a href="https://pypistats.org/top">eleventh most-downloaded package on PyPI</a>, pulling 1.2 billion downloads in the last month alone. The <code>pyca/cryptography</code> package handles the cryptographic operations of projects like Ansible, Certbot (the Let’s Encrypt client), Apache Airflow, paramiko (the Python-only SSH client), and <a href="https://deps.dev/pypi/cryptography/48.0.0/dependents">many others</a>. If <code>pyca/cryptography</code> doesn’t ship post-quantum primitives, the Python ecosystem can’t begin to migrate. <h2 id="post-quantum-support-is-now-one-pip-install-away">Post-quantum support is now one pip install away</h2> As of <code>cryptography>=48</code>, support for post quantum algorithms is just a <code>pip install</code> away. The version 48 release includes our Rust bindings for ML-KEM and ML-DSA, the cross binding API and tests, and support for AWS-LC as a cryptographic backend. It also includes work from pyca/cryptography’s maintainers to support the other cryptographic backends. Sadly, this is not enough for a post-quantum migration drop-in swap. These primitives have different size, performance, and integration tradeoffs than the classical algorithms they replace. <h2 id="pq-algorithm-tradeoffs">PQ algorithm tradeoffs</h2> Post-quantum primitives keep the same security strength, but they change the size of the data on the wire. Public keys, signatures, and ciphertexts are often 1–2 orders of magnitude larger than the classical values they replace. The operations are also more complex and therefore slower, but on modern hardware they are still imperceptible for regular use, and are likely to get faster with improved hardware and algorithms. For signatures, here’s how the classical primitive (Ed25519) compares to its post-quantum equivalent (ML-DSA-65): <table> <thead> <tr> <th style="text-align: left">Algorithm</th> <th style="text-align: right">Public key</th> <th style="text-align: right">Private key</th> <th style="text-align: right">Output</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td style="text-align: left">Ed25519</td> <td style="text-align: right">32 B</td> <td style="text-align: right">32 B</td> <td style="text-align: right">64 B sig</td> </tr> <tr> <td style="text-align: left">ML-DSA-65</td> <td style="text-align: right">1,952 B</td> <td style="text-align: right">32 B</td> <td style="text-align: right">3,309 B sig</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> And for key exchange and encryption, here’s how X25519 compares to its post-quantum equivalent (ML-KEM-768): <table> <thead> <tr> <th style="text-align: left">Algorithm</th> <th style="text-align: right">Public key</th> <th style="text-align: right">Private key</th> <th style="text-align: right">Output</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td style="text-align: left">X25519</td> <td style="text-align: right">32 B</td> <td style="text-align: right">32 B</td> <td style="text-align: right">32 B shared</td> </tr> <tr> <td style="text-align: left">ML-KEM-768</td> <td style="text-align: right">1,184 B</td> <td style="text-align: right">64 B</td> <td style="text-align: right">1,088 B ciphertext</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> If you maintain a protocol or wire format that hardcodes Ed25519-sized signatures or X25519-sized public keys, the post-quantum migration involves more than a primitive swap. The surrounding fields, length prefixes, and chunking assumptions need to grow with it. <h2 id="using-ml-dsa-fips-204-quantum-resistant-signatures">Using ML-DSA (<a href="https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/FIPS/NIST.FIPS.204.pdf">FIPS 204</a>): Quantum-resistant signatures</h2> ML-DSA is the lattice-based signature scheme that replaces RSA, ECDSA, and Ed25519. The Python API mirrors the existing asymmetric primitives: <figure class="highlight"> <pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code class="language-py" data-lang="py">from cryptography.hazmat.primitives.asymmetric import mldsa private_key = mldsa.MLDSA65PrivateKey.generate() public_key = private_key.public_key() signature = private_key.sign(b"message") public_key.verify(signature, b"message") # raises InvalidSignature on failure</code></pre> </figure> <h2 id="using-ml-kem-fips-203-key-encapsulation-for-the-post-quantum-era">Using ML-KEM (<a href="https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/FIPS/NIST.FIPS.203.pdf">FIPS 203</a>): Key encapsulation for the post-quantum era</h2> ML-KEM is a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) for establishing shared secrets. The construction is different, though. ML-KEM is a key encapsulation mechanism, not a Diffie-Hellman exchange. Instead of both parties combining key shares to derive a shared secret, one party encapsulates a fresh shared secret to the receiver’s public key, and the receiver decapsulates it with the matching private key. These operations allow both parties to exchange a secret but in a manner fundamentally different from Diffie-Hellman, and resistant to quantum factoring attacks. <figure class="highlight"> <pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code class="language-py" data-lang="py">from cryptography.hazmat.primitives.asymmetric import mlkem # Receiver generates a keypair and publishes the public key. private_key = mlkem.MLKEM768PrivateKey.generate() public_key = private_key.public_key() # Sender encapsulates a fresh shared secret to that public key. shared_secret_sender, ciphertext = public_key.encapsulate() # Receiver decapsulates the same shared secret from the ciphertext. shared_secret_receiver = private_key.decapsulate(ciphertext) assert shared_secret_sender == shared_secret_receiver</code></pre> </figure> <h2 id="the-road-ahead-slh-dsa-and-protocol-integration">The road ahead: SLH-DSA and protocol integration</h2> Two areas are still in progress: a third NIST standard, and the work of integrating these primitives into real protocols. <h3 id="slh-dsa">SLH-DSA</h3> SLH-DSA (<a href="https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/fips/nist.fips.205.pdf">FIPS 205</a>) is NIST’s hash-based digital signature standard. Like ML-DSA, it is meant to replace classical signature schemes such as RSA, ECDSA, and Ed25519. Its tradeoff is different: SLH-DSA has very large signatures and slow signing, but it relies only on the security properties of hash functions, which have been studied for decades. That makes it a conservative backstop if future cryptanalysis weakens lattice-based signatures. SLH-DSA is not supported in <code>pyca/cryptography</code> 48, but we’ve started working on it. <h3 id="post-quantum-in-protocols">Post-quantum in protocols</h3> Primitives are the foundation, but the post-quantum migration will be complete only when protocols use the post-quantum resistant algorithms. You’re unlikely to use PQ algorithms directly in tools like Certbot or Ansible until common protocols add support for them. While well-designed to replace existing implementations, algorithm changes require cautious development, testing, and auditing. We are actively working on helping maintainers integrate PQ algorithms into applications. <h2 id="acknowledgments">Acknowledgments</h2> This work was funded by the <a href="https://www.sovereign.tech/">Sovereign Tech Agency</a>, whose mission is to support the open-source infrastructure that public digital systems depend on. We’re also indebted to pyca/cryptography’s maintainers, <a href="https://langui.sh/">Paul Kehrer</a> and <a href="https://alexgaynor.net/">Alex Gaynor</a>, who offered constant feedback and review throughout the development process, and continue to steward this critical piece of open-source software.

📝 2026-06-30 11:37: Our 2 hens have finished sitting on the Guinea fowl eggs - out of 10,... - Kev Quirk

2026-06-30T10:37:00.000Z

Our 2 hens have finished sitting on the Guinea fowl eggs - out of 10, we managed to hatch 5 of them.

The chicken eggs we have in the incubator won't be ready for another week or so. Excited to see how many of them we get.

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📝 2026-06-30 11:37: Our 2 hens have finished sitting on the Guinea fowl eggs - out of 10,... - Kev Quirk