Alvaro Lopez Ortega / 2026-07-10 Briefing

Created Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:58:08 +0000 Modified Sat, 11 Jul 2026 13:03:58 +0000
4177 Words

China dropped its urban jobs target for the first time since the 1990s in its five-year plan, citing AI-driven economic shifts. In tech, Scarf moved away from Haskell after seven years, blaming long compilation times as a bottleneck. A performance regression in Open MPI on Slingshot interconnects was traced to libcxi errors causing a fallback to TCP/IP, reducing bandwidth from 25 GB/s to 2.3 GB/s.

📰 News

Package Management as Org Chart

The article applies Conway’s Law to dependency management, showing how strategies like monorepos, Bazel, and Maven’s nearest-wins mediation mirror an organization’s communication and conflict resolution patterns. Each tooling choice reveals and enforces underlying power dynamics, such as monorepos requiring a dedicated migration workforce or Maven resolving disagreements by proximity to the top. Ultimately, the selection of package management reflects how a company coordinates and settles disputes.

Debugging performance regressions

A performance regression in Open MPI on Slingshot interconnects reduced peak bandwidth from 25 GB/s to 2.3 GB/s. Debugging revealed that libcxi errors caused libfabric to propagate failures, forcing Open MPI to fall back to TCP/IP. The investigation highlighted Guix’s transparency in diagnosing such issues.

Running 1000 tests in 1s (2022)

Preact’s 1003-test suite runs in about one second by opting into only the necessary test isolations, avoiding the heavy default overhead of modern runners. Older runners like Mocha and Jasmine achieve similar speeds by not applying that isolation. This demonstrates that most code does not require the extensive isolation modern tools impose.

What Every Python Developer Should Know About the CPython ABI

The CPython ABI enables Python to call into native code (C, C++, Rust, Fortran) and allows that code to interact with the interpreter. Understanding this ABI is essential for distributing packages, debugging wheel installation issues, and interpreting wheel filename compatibility tags. The article covers the evolution of the Python C API and ABI, including changes for the free-threaded interpreter and a new ABI planned for Python 3.15.

Scarf leaves Haskell

After seven years of production use, Scarf has moved away from Haskell due to long compilation times becoming a critical bottleneck, especially as AI-driven code generation and parallel agent workflows made cold builds the dominant cost in development. The company cited growing costs from compilation time and ecosystem friction as key factors in the decision.

Hannah Montana Linux v26.0

Hannah Montana Linux v26.0 has been announced, though the article contains no substantive information and only displays a loading message. No details about features, changes, or release notes are provided.

Practical Algorithms for Incremental Software Development Environments

No article content was provided to summarize.

Two Ways To Design

The article states that the site requires JavaScript and uses features not available in older browsers. It also mentions a measured improvement in server performance and an “awesome incremental search,” but provides no further details.

What are you doing this weekend?

The article invites readers to share their weekend plans and ask for help or feedback. It also reminds readers that it is perfectly fine to do nothing at all.

Let’s build a simple interpreter for APL

The author is building an APL interpreter in Python, tokenizing source code from right to left to match APL’s execution order. They define a Token class for symbols like numbers, operators, and parentheses, and a Tokenizer class to split code into tokens. This work adapts Ruslan Spivak’s Pascal interpreter series to APL’s distinct syntax.

China drops urban jobs target in five-year plan, first since 1990s, amid AI displacement volatility

China has omitted a numerical target for urban job creation in its five-year plan for the first time since the 1990s, citing uncertainty from AI-driven economic changes. The plan instead pledges to maintain new urban jobs at a “considerable scale” from 2026-2030, with flexible annual targets set each year.

College app Fizz accuses Jerry Lu of leaking secrets to rival Sidechat after 2022 investor meeting

In a new legal filing, college social app Fizz accuses venture capitalist Jerry Lu of Maveron of obtaining its confidential information under the guise of a potential investment in 2022 and sharing it with rival Sidechat. Fizz, which sued Sidechat in 2023 for unfair competition, claims it learned of Lu’s involvement through discovery and that he continued to funnel details about Fizz’s fundraising and strategy to the competitor.

Phia, a shopping app co-founded by Phoebe Gates, acts as a browser extension that finds discount codes for users. However, the startup has allegedly used deceptive tactics like “cookie stuffing” to falsely claim credit for sales it did not generate, raising concerns about its affiliate commission practices.

QuantumDiamonds raises €91M (€76M from EU Chips Act) for quantum sensor chip defect detection

QuantumDiamonds, a Munich-based spin-out from the Technical University of Munich, has raised €91 million to scale its diamond-based quantum sensor technology for detecting hidden defects in advanced microchips. The funding includes €76 million under the European Chips Act.

Xreal launches $299 A01 Plus AR glasses, 62g, 1080p 120Hz 50° FOV

Xreal has launched the $299 A01 Plus AR glasses, weighing 62 grams and featuring 1080p micro OLED panels with a 120Hz refresh rate and 50-degree field of view. The glasses are a lighter, stripped-down version of the $449 1S, offering bright screens and comfortable design but with a flimsier frame and fewer features like no electrochromic lens or three degrees of freedom.

Malaysia PM Anwar Ibrahim to debut AI avatar in days to help public navigate govt services

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim plans to debut an AI avatar named PMX AI within days, created by Zetrix AI Bhd., to assist the public with government services. The avatar is a nod to his role as the country’s 10th prime minister.

Circle approved to start national digital-currency trust bank for institutional custody

Circle Internet Group received OCC approval to establish Circle National Trust, a national digital-currency trust bank, enabling institutional custody services under a single federal charter. Following the announcement, Circle’s shares surged as much as 16%.

Destructive Windows backdoor stuffs multiple wipers and ransomware code into a single package

Microsoft has identified a new Windows backdoor called GigaWiper that packages at least three malware families, including wipers and ransomware, into a single modular tool.

SpaceX has applied to the FCC for approval to launch 100,000 third-generation Starlink satellites, promising a 100-fold bandwidth increase and multi-gigabit symmetrical broadband, though deployment would require Starship. Meanwhile, environmental groups are urging the FCC to halt orbital datacenter licenses, warning that such a surge of launches could litter the exosphere with a million satellites and calling for a full environmental review.

EU puts ‘addictive’ design of Facebook, Instagram under the DSA microscope

The European Union is investigating Meta over potentially addictive design features on Facebook and Instagram, including infinite scroll and autoplay. Brussels claims the company failed to properly assess or mitigate the risks these features pose.

Fashion mart Miinto unzips breach details, warns shoppers to watch for phisherfolk

Miinto, a Copenhagen-based fashion marketplace, apologized after a perpetrator accessed its order management system, exposing customer data. The company warned shoppers to be vigilant against phishing attacks following the breach.

Datacenter MacGyver saved the biggest football match of the year

Police considered canceling a major football grudge match due to a power issue, but a tech-support engineer—dubbed a “Datacenter MacGyver”—solved the problem, electrifying fans and saving the game.

Red Hat offers RHEL support ‘forever’ for those who need to lock in to legacy tech

Red Hat is now offering indefinite support for legacy versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), allowing customers to lock in to older tech stacks. However, the move carries a warning of vendor lock-in, symbolized by the “golden screwdriver.”

Microsoft warns customers AI will mean busier Patch Tuesdays

Microsoft warns customers that AI integration will lead to more frequent and busier Patch Tuesdays. The company suggests that these additional patches create more reasons for customers to adopt its auto-patching tools.

Mayor Mamdani Announces Landmark “Click-to-Cancel” Consumer Protection Rules

New York City has introduced two new consumer protections: a “Click to Cancel” rule requiring subscriptions to be as easy to cancel as to sign up for, and a rule banning hidden junk fees by mandating all-in pricing. The Click to Cancel rule alone is expected to save New Yorkers up to $162.5 million per year.

45% of Enthusiasts ‘Seriously Considering’ Leaving Sony for PC

A Push Square poll of over 6,500 readers found that 45% of PlayStation enthusiasts are seriously considering switching to PC gaming, with 41% citing Sony’s decision to stop manufacturing physical games as the main reason. Only 23% indicated they would stick with PlayStation, while 15% have already transitioned and 10% play on both platforms. The article notes Sony has lost fan trust, though it has not yet made its case for the next generation.

GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produces proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture [pdf]

A new AI model, GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra, has reportedly produced a proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture, a long-standing problem in graph theory. The proof, presented in a PDF, claims to confirm that every bridgeless graph has a collection of cycles covering each edge exactly twice. This marks a significant milestone in automated mathematical reasoning.

New York City to become first in US to ban deceptive subscription practices

New York City will become the first US city to ban deceptive subscription practices, effective October 1, fining companies up to $525 per user for failing to offer simple cancellation. It also proposed a rule requiring sellers to advertise the total price upfront, including all mandatory fees, targeting “junk fees” in housing and other services.

War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history

The War Atlas is an interactive cartography tool that maps every named war in human history, covering over 5,000 years. Users can filter by era from the Bronze Age to the modern day and adjust the timeline speed. The platform also offers tour, search, and citation features for exploration.

Anyone else get a vague GitHub shakedown notice?

Greg Troxel received a GitHub email threatening to bill him for a “Code Quality” public preview, despite never signing up for a paid plan or providing billing information. He suspects the notice may be linked to his past involvement with QGIS and is seeking clarification from the community.

Snails’ teeth beats spider silk as nature’s strongest material (2015)

Limpets’ teeth, composed of goethite nanofibers in a protein matrix, are the strongest natural material, roughly five times stronger than spider silk. They can endure pressure comparable to converting carbon into diamond, though human-made materials like graphene remain stronger.

Steam generated an estimated $11.1 billion in revenue during the first half of 2026, a 14.5% year-over-year increase and its most profitable half-year ever. Growth was fueled by a surge in Chinese players, higher prices, viral co-op hits, and stronger back-catalogue sales, with older games accounting for 79% of total revenue.

QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

QuadRF is a phased-array radio built around a Raspberry Pi 5 and FPGA that can detect WiFi signals through walls and track drones in flight, operating in the 4.9-6 GHz range. Available as an open-source kit starting at $499 on Crowd Supply, the device was successfully tested, visualizing nearby WiFi networks and tracking a DJI drone.

A Love Letter to Flashcards

The author initially dismissed flashcards as rote memorization but changed their view after taking a learning course that introduced spaced repetition and Anki. They now use Anki to combat their poor memory, especially for cumulative subjects like math, emphasizing that flashcards are only helpful after understanding material and serve to maintain deep learning rather than replace it.

Computation as a universal and fundamental concept

Tim Roughgarden’s lecture series explores fundamental limits of computation, beginning with Alan Turing’s proof that some problems like the halting problem are unsolvable, then examining how algorithmic shortcuts solve many problems quickly, and culminating in the P versus NP question—the central unsolved problem linking thousands of seemingly different problems.

I De-Googled Myself

A user describes de-Googling over two years, citing frustration with Google One’s AI subscription and inability to downgrade as the final straw. They migrated ~238 GB of photos from Google Photos to Apple Photos and multiple backup services like Backblaze and BorgBase. The only remaining paid Google service is YouTube, used to avoid ads.

The Annotated JEPA

JEPA is a self-supervised learning approach that trains models by predicting representations of masked regions in latent space rather than reconstructing pixels, forcing the encoder to learn semantic features. The article provides a pedagogical walkthrough of I-JEPA for images, then discusses extensions to video with V-JEPA and the distributional regularizer approach in LeJEPA.

Man nearly sucked out of ‘detached’ window on Ryanair flight

A man was nearly sucked out of a Ryanair flight when a window detached mid-air en route to Germany, but other passengers pulled him back inside. He was hospitalized with friction burns but was otherwise in good condition. The flight returned to Thessaloniki, and Ryanair reported the window detached during the flight, possibly due to debris from an engine.

ActivityPub over ATProto (2023)

The article proposes running ActivityPub on top of AT Protocol’s Personal Data Server (PDS), arguing that ATProto’s pluggable identity and signed data repositories offer user control and credible exit, unlike email-style federation. It highlights that ATProto is a generic infrastructure not limited to Bluesky, and ActivityPub’s actor document provides indirection to make such integration feasible. The author presents this as a design provocation, not a finished prototype.

Offline tool to stabilize TV volume using IR control and spike detection

AdBuster 2.0 PRO is a portable Windows application that uses real-time audio analysis with offline ML/AI and proprietary CEPA Logic to automatically lower TV volume during loud commercials and restore it smoothly afterward. It operates fully locally with no internet, accounts, or data collection, and offers optional IR blaster support for hardware volume control.

Proton AG Services is currently experiencing some issues

Login access across Proton services was restored on July 10, 2026, after an incident that disrupted multiple services including Mail, Calendar, Drive, Pass, VPN, SimpleLogin, Wallet, and Lumo. Engineering teams are monitoring the recovery and investigating the root cause to prevent future occurrences.

Successful Companies Go Blind

Successful companies can develop “competence blindness,” akin to Mexican cavefish that retain eye genes but lose functional eyes: rapid growth and insular hiring suppress careful engineering, making it a vestigial trait. Employees from outside find their suggestions rejected, and internal initiatives often stifle the very competence they aim to foster. This allows such firms to survive for decades with strong financials but deteriorating technical foundations, as long as market barriers remain high.

Punk, or why I don’t stream anymore

The author argues that streaming and online culture have become performative spectacles devoid of genuine participation, where identity is replaced by marketing copy and AI mediation. They mourn the loss of authentic hacker culture, noting that the internet’s uniformity and corporate co-optation make isolation impossible and meaningful engagement futile. The piece concludes with a grim view of technological and societal absorption, where individuals are transmuted into compatible material for the machine.

Runloom – Go-style coroutines for Python free-threaded

Runloom is a Go-style coroutine library for Python that enables blocking code to run on a million fibers across all CPU cores via hand-rolled assembly context switching and a work-stealing scheduler, achieving spawn rates higher than Go (2.29 M/s vs 2.10 M/s). It requires free-threaded CPython 3.13t and offers a bridge for async code and monkey-patching for existing blocking libraries, though it currently has higher memory per fiber (8.8 KB vs Go’s 2.7 KB).

Europe’s Largest Unions Demand Right to Cancel Work on Days Above 30C

Europe’s largest unions are demanding a legal right for workers to cancel shifts when temperatures exceed 30°C, citing health and safety concerns. The proposal aims to protect workers from heat-related illnesses as climate change drives more frequent heatwaves.

Ryanair Passenger Sucked Toward Broken Window After Midair Engine Failure

A Ryanair Boeing 737-800 suffered an engine failure after takeoff from Thessaloniki, sending debris through a passenger window and partially sucking out an injured passenger. The pilots safely returned to Thessaloniki, where the injured passenger received medical attention. A replacement aircraft later flew the remaining passengers to Memmingen with a four-hour delay.

Late Bronze Age Collapse

The Late Bronze Age Collapse (c. 1220–1170 BC) was a series of site destructions across the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East that caused the severe decline or collapse of major states, making it a more severe event than the fall of the Western Roman Empire, though not a total collapse. Understanding is primarily based on archaeological evidence like destruction layers, but dating and interpretation remain challenging, and not all sites were uniformly destroyed. The article provides an overview of the collapse, its uncertain causes, and its long-term impacts.

Unified Memory, Explained: Why Mini PCs Can Run 70B Models a Big GPU Can’t

Unified-memory mini PCs, such as those with AMD’s Strix Halo, can run 70-billion-parameter models that exceed the VRAM of high-end GPUs like the RTX 5090, but generate text much slower due to lower memory bandwidth (~120–270 GB/s vs. over 1,000 GB/s). Capacity determines whether a model loads; bandwidth determines speed, creating a trade-off where mini PCs offer cheap, large capacity for local LLMs while discrete GPUs provide far faster inference but limited capacity.

Good Tools Are Invisible

The article argues that good tools should be invisible, seamlessly enabling work, rather than being treated as “fun” puzzles that distract from productivity. It criticizes the tendency to celebrate a tool’s shortcomings as games and notes that tool choice often becomes a tribal identity that prevents honest evaluation of flaws.

Java 27: What’s New?

Java 27 introduces nine JEPs, including making G1 the default garbage collector in all environments, adding post-quantum hybrid key exchange algorithms for TLS 1.3 to defend against quantum attacks, and enabling compact object headers by default to reduce memory and improve performance.

China lands reusable rocket for first time, state media says

China successfully landed its first reusable rocket, the Long March 10B, on a floating platform after a vertical booster return from Hainan. The rocket uses landing hooks to catch a net, unlike SpaceX’s Falcon 9. This breakthrough signals China’s growing ability to compete with US dominance in reusable rocket technology.

In Emacs, Everything Looks Like a Service

Emacs functions as a platform for building clients that access OS and network services, treating them as services. The article illustrates this by creating a weather client for wttr.in using Elisp, emphasizing that Emacs can orchestrate diverse functionalities. This capability supports the idea that within Emacs, everything resembles a service.

Browser Fingerprinting – How websites track you across internet –without cookies

Browser fingerprinting silently collects unique browser and device details—such as OS, screen resolution, fonts, and GPU data—to create a persistent digital identifier that works even in incognito mode and cannot be cleared like cookies. Techniques like canvas, WebGL, font enumeration, and audio fingerprinting combine dozens of signals into a unique hash. While primarily used for advertising and user profiling, it also serves legitimate purposes such as fraud detection and bot prevention.

Cloudflare will default-block multi-purpose crawlers that scrape for both search indexing and AI training on new and free-tier sites, forcing publishers to choose between allowing AI training or losing search visibility. Google offers opt-out tools like Google Extended, but publishers remain wary of potential search penalties, though some, like USA Today, are considering leaving Google Search amid declining traffic.

Build your own vulnerability harness

Project Glasswing’s findings show that effective enterprise security scanning requires a model-agnostic orchestration harness rather than reliance on single models or agents. By treating models as interchangeable components and cross-testing them across a pipeline, the system traces vulnerabilities across repositories and filters false positives. The core value lies in the persistent orchestration layer, not in any particular frontier model.

Focus

A former early Facebook engineer describes the brutal but highly focused startup culture, where Mark Zuckerberg refused to support external causes to maintain product focus. As the company grew, such small, reasonable digressions accumulated, creating drag and diluting the core mission. The author clarifies this charitable example illustrates hidden costs, not a critique of Meta’s actual impact.

Parental device use and the adolescent-caregiver attachment bond

Adolescents who perceive their caregivers as distracted by devices (technoference) report higher levels of insecure attachment, both anxious and avoidant. This finding comes from a validation study of the Device Attachment Interference Scale (DAIS) involving 600 U.S. adolescents aged 12–17. The research underscores caregiver attentional availability during device use as a key relational factor linked to attachment security.

What will define Elon Musk’s legacy? DOGE cuts to USAID Ebola programs

Elon Musk dismantled USAID through his Department of Government Efficiency, cutting Ebola detection programs that experts say worsened an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Despite evidence of resulting deaths, Musk denies responsibility and attacks critics, while experts estimate millions could die from the cuts.