This video is a thorough walkthrough of the XZ Utils backdoor by Jia Tan. It is long but introduces the history of open source, how open source software is built and maintained and how the flaws were exploited for this attack. Very well done. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoag03mSuXQ

Meta Director of AI Safety Allows AI Agent to Accidentally Delete Her Inbox - 404 Media

I’ve heard a lot about OpenClaw over the past few weeks. I’ve been surprised at the amount of access some people are willing to give it. There are a number of security flaws that I would not be comfortable having on my machine.

This story about Summer Yue, the director of alignment at Meta Superintelligence Labs, shows how unreliable OpenClaw can be even for people who know what they’re doing.

Letters to a Young Creator

The Steve Jobs Archive released a short book called "Letters to a Young Creator" today. It can be read online, on Apple Books or downloaded as an EPUB.

John Gruber shared this section from Laurene Powell Job's introduction to the series on Daring Fireball. I liked it too.

Among the books that mattered to Steve was Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.I’m struck by this line from its pages: “Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.”

This is a time to live your questions. The beauty of answers, when they do come, is that they allow us to ask new and better questions. Life is learning how much we have yet to learn. In this volume, we have asked distinguished creators of diverse fields to share some of their answers to questions you asked at the beginning of your fellowship year. You’ll find candid stories of struggle and success, mistakes, and milestones. The wisdom they share in their reflections was forged by asking the kinds of questions you’re asking now.

 

Unicode Characters in Visual Studio

I came across a problem with Unicode characters in a dataset I was parsing in Visual Studio Code. A quick Google brought up this post from 2012, Finding Those Pesky Unicode Characters in Visual Studio.

The fix was to search using the regular expression [^\x00-\x7f] and remove the Unicode characters.

The original solution came from Aaron Jensen back in 2011.

This video is worth watching. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC7YGG0FzZ0

ai;dr

I don't know if Tony (Sid) Sundharam coined the phrase ai;dr (ai; didn't read) but his blog post is the first place I have seen it. I agree with the sentiment he expressed here.

For me, writing is the most direct window into how someone thinks, perceives, and groks the world. Once you outsource that to an LLM, I'm not sure what we're even doing here. Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write?

Current, A New RSS Reader

I was scrolling through the posts on Kottke.org when I came across a post about Current, a new RSS reader. I love trying RSS readers. I use NewsBlur on the web and NetNewsWire on my Mac. I also have Feedly and Inoreader accounts.

Current is different from these services in that it discards the number of unread posts from the UI. Terry Godier, the developer of Current, said in the announcement blog post "There is no count because counting was the problem."

I like that I pay $9.99 for the software and I don't have to worry about another subscription. It may not replace NewNewsWire but I like to support people trying new ideas, especially if it's a one-time fee.

TechCrunch have a good article of the features available in Current.

“Today, as we move toward and beyond 2025, we are entering a possible era of AI-generated content. You may ask yourself, why bother? It matters. Your word matters, your knowledge matters, and we must continue to push back against the entropy and bit rot of the internet.” - Scott Hanselman (Afterword from "Writing for Developers: Blogs that get read")

Scott Hanselman remains one of my favourite people to follow in tech.

Getting Started

I came across Cassidy Williams Blogvent series in December. I’ve made a few attempts into blogging over the years but it never stuck. I missed the opportunity in December. Lent seemed like as good an opportunity as any although the idea of publishing a post everyday is daunting.

I’ve considered using Micro.blog for a while and it is a good candidate for this project. I use Ghost for my main website. The fact that Micro.blog allows for short articles to be posted without titles makes the thought of publishing less intimidating.