Weekly Tech Cocktail - Issue #11
Who is allowed to touch the models, the bill for the hype, and a scroll read after 2,000 years. And much more ...
This week, OpenAI previewed GPT-5.6 Sol and started releasing access on the White House's schedule, user by user. Anthropic reserved Mythos for "trusted" US orgs. The question is no longer what the models can do, but who is allowed to touch them. METR's independent evaluation is the coldest read on offer.
Ford rehired 350 veteran engineers after its AI tooling failed to preserve expertise or train juniors. Kent Beck reminded us that YAGNI was never about the cost of typing code, now zero, but the cost of speculative structure, which the model still will not pay for you.
The Vesuvius Challenge read an entire carbonized Herculaneum scroll for the first time, with imaging and ML. Two thousand years in a furnace, now readable. The rest is below, including how Elden Ring fakes its enemy AI with no ML at all.
#tech
A Practical Guide to SSH Tunnels - local and remote port forwarding, finally with diagrams that make it stick.
What happens when you run a CUDA kernel? - the whole journey from launch to silicon, one layer at a time.
In praise of memcached - an unkillable cache, and a quiet case against chasing the new thing.
You Don't Know Jack About Formal Verification - formal methods from a practitioner, minus the folklore.
#apis
window.showDirectoryPicker opens up a whole new world - the File System Access API, used in anger.
Stop Getting Good at Protocols. Get Good at Agent Experience - design for the agents that will consume your service, not for the protocol of the month.
You might not need a service worker - the browser APIs that often make it redundant.
#genai
DeepSeek open-sources its inference optimizations (DSpark) - 60 to 85% faster generation, real systems work, not an announcement.
HackerRank open-sourced its ATS, then scored one resume 90, then 74, then 88 - the instability of AI hiring, demonstrated on itself.
What happened after 2,000 people tried to hack my AI assistant - prompt injection and jailbreaks, from the field.
Working With AI: A concrete example - where it helps and where it derails, on real code, from the author of htmx.
#tools
Evan's Jujutsu Tutorial - a hands-on intro to jj, the VCS that sits on top of Git.
RubyLLM - one Ruby interface for every major LLM provider, open source.
TikZ Editor - draw your LaTeX figures with a mouse instead of coordinates.
#fun
The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring - how a AAA fakes its enemy "AI" with simple tricks and no ML in sight.
I'm Romain, a software craftsman and musician. Every week I dig through the noise and send back the few links worth reading.