Weekly Tech Cocktail - Issue #13

China's open models on top, mathematicians outcounterexampled, and the $25 exploit worth $500k. And more hot tech in an overheated summer (well, quite cool today).

Phew. Keeping up got hard lately, but this time, the issue ships on its Tuesday. Yeepee. So what’s up this week?

Open-weights models took the lead this week and kept it. The Kimi K3 Moment argues the leaderboard flip is the smaller half of the news, Ben Werdmuller reads it as locked-down American AI losing, and Ben Thompson takes the long view in Who's Afraid of Chinese Models?. The bill reaches subscribers too: Max Woolf documents the random weekly quota resets hitting everyone's coding agents.

A language model produced a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture, an open problem since 1939. Kevin Buzzard's Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled is the piece to read; for the working-mathematician counterpoint, Terry Tao details what coding agents actually let him do.

After twenty years, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote his last Bikeshed column. The bikeshed is dead, long live the bikeshed.

#tech

• Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database - a national property registry erased, backups included. Your disaster recovery plan is fiction until someone tests it for you.

• What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard - a software developer builds, manufactures and sells a device, with real numbers at every step.

• Microsoft's Secure Boot has been broken for most of its existence - Ars investigates a trust chain that spent a decade broken while everyone shipped against it.

• Learning a few things about running SQLite - Julia Evans on SQLite in operation: litestream, locks, backups, the parts the tutorials skip.

#apis

• UPI: Anatomy of a Transaction - one Indian instant payment followed layer by layer, seven actors between the PIN and the result.

• Opaque, Interoperable Passkey Records (and a Go API) - Filippo Valsorda proposes a portable format for passkeys, with a working Go implementation.

• A Farewell to ARPs: IPv4 Service on IPv6-Only Networks - serving IPv4 where there is no IPv4 left, from RIPE.

#genai

• Exploit brokers pay $500k for WordPress RCEs. I found one with GPT5.6 and $25 - the economics of vulnerability discovery just moved. Security vendor blog, research looks genuine.

• Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now - the tool that compiles its own runtime. Willison unpacks the stack.

• Reverse-engineering is cheap now - coding agents flip the ROI of reverse-engineering the gadgets in your home.

• How to stop Claude from saying "load-bearing" - why LLM verbal tics take hold and how to steer them away, a practical TIL.

#tools

• The Git history command deserves more attention - the git log options that change daily work, in one short read.

• Transcribe.cpp - local speech-to-text in C++, open source, with a proper technical writeup.

• Gleam is now on Tangled - an established language moves its git hosting to ATProto. Watch the decentralisation of OSS infrastructure.

• Nativ: run frontier open models locally on your Mac - open models on Apple Silicon, MIT licensed, built on MLX. No account, no cloud.

fun

• Airport Simulator - an absurdly complete airport in your browser tab. Goodbye, afternoon.

• An NTP server that traveled back in time caused a massive Australian mobile outage - one GPS card sends NTP into the past and Telstra's network follows it there.

I'm Romain, a software craftsman and musician. Every week I dig through the noise and send back the few links worth reading.