Andrew Kesterson

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# News - 2026 - Week 3

2026-01-23 Philosophy Technology Current Events 4.6k words

Here’s my thoughts on news across the internet this week. It’s worth what you paid for it.

## This is why we can’t have nice things

If you didn’t know yet, apparently 12-15% of Americans are taking Ozempic for weight loss. And according to a study by equity researchers at Jefferies, the major airlines could apparently save money on fuel if we (as passengers) simply weighed less. I wonder if they will start offering GLP-1s from the beverage cart. “Coffee? Peanuts? Ozempic?” The best part about it is that we know that, regardless of what we as passengers do, and regardless of how much money the Airlines are making, any changes that come from this won’t benefit us - the passengers. The enshittification of everything has extended to airlines as well, and air travel has gotten exclusively worse over the last 30 years. Maybe if we all starve ourselves and live on a steady diet of ozempic, we can finally fit into an airline seat - though I expect that if we all get skinnier, the seats will too, and they’ll find some way to cram some poor skinny bastard between the window and the lavatory to get one extra ticket on the plane, and the weight savings are gone. We all know how this actually works.

If you can’t afford or don’t have access to ozempic, another good option for weight loss is available: parasites and bacterial infections that will make it impossible to keep food down or to keep yourself hydrated. They’re easy to get if you just start drinking dirty water. Dehydration, parasites and malnutrition go hand in hand in third world countries and their people are all really skinny. And, through a bizarre set of futurist legalistic golden handcuffs, American municipalities may be approaching a time when we have managed to price ourselves out of clean drinking water for the average citizen. Imagine a future where we have engineered a system, through technological advances and legal regulation, wherein our citizens are too poor for clean water and sanitation services.

A Flint, Michigan resident digs for clean water

Nobody likes to talk about it much, but we (native westerners, at least) are so busy in our modern lives of optional starvation where we work multiple jobs to afford basic access to clean water, and so depressed at the state of things, and so isolated from each other, that we are not having enough babies. It’s been in decline for about two decades now, and it’s not a uniquely American phenomenon (Japan has been facing this crisis head-on for a full generation before us), but now we’re seeing some unexpected (though unsurprising) side effects of it here in the west. A bloomberg article reports that many colleges are closing because there simply aren’t enough students to fill them. Now some of this might be due to the decline in the popularity of college education (since my generation, the zoomers, and gen Alpha have figured out that it has largely become a scam and does not guarantee you a better future), but the article posits that at least some amount is due to falling birth rates. Regardless, because of the declining student pool, apparently there has never been a better time to try to go to college; the remaining students are allowed to cut all kinds of corners so the colleges can keep their numbers up at all but the most elite institutions. But for those students who are in the colleges that are closing will probably not re-enroll, which is tragic, because studies show that those students typically end their college careers with the institution that closes.

If you DO have children (which I strongly recommend you DO), and they manage to maintain access to clean drinking water long enough to grow to adulthood (have lots of kids - it increases the chances that one will grow to adulthood), and they can stay skinny enough to book a flight on a private spaceflight, they may be able to get a job at the WalMart or Starbucks on the space station. MIT released a list of the most influential technologies in current year, and one thing they list is … commercial space stations. A California company, Vast Space, is launching a space station in May of this year via a SpaceX rocket. You can pay to live on this station for 10 days, assisting with conducting research, and testing drugs. (And who doesn’t want to pay to be a space guinea pig?! Not to be confused with miniature giant space hamsters or rodents of unusual size.) Future commercial space stations are designed to look like boutique hotels, and multiple companies will be launching them within the next few years. On a long enough timeline, there will be a wide variety of options to offer the experience to varying economic classes. I wonder what the Motel Six of space stations will be. At least they’ll leave the light on for you. And there will probably be a Starbucks nearby.

Planet Starbucks

## AI Slop

I’m told that going to space and spending extended time there can lead to some kind of space mania. If you’re too poor to be able to afford some private space travel, don’t worry, you can go crazy right here at home thanks to our latest technological marvel, the Large Language Model. cmdr-nova experimented on themselves so you don’t have to, and they report a highly successful experiment in which they induced AI psychosis in themselves by regularly engaging with their personal AI as if it were a friend and confidant. They point out the dangers of isolation, and how reliance on AI can increase this, and how quickly it can all spiral out of control. Like many things, it can be too late before you spot it. This may sound silly, but: do you have some friends that have suddenly fallen off the radar? Reach out to them. Go physically find them. Get some coffee with them. Spend some time with them. They might not be alright. Are you alright?

I think that LLMs are actually in some kind of uncanny valley space right now. If we hadn’t gotten used to interacting with each other through text several decades ago, they might seem more creepy than they do, and the effects of AI psychosis might be easier to stave off. Would we be okay with a real person behaving like an AI does? I am not sure. But A report in ACL Anthology shows that LLMs show some resemblance to our own smartmeat - at least to certain brain regions, but there’s not a lot of resemblance. Just enough to make it worth commenting on. They do make the assumption that, given the current rate of technological advance continues, this resemblance will likely only become stronger over time. So this means that, as LLMs become an increasingly large part of our world, we are starting to actually live inside of a construct of this artificial brain. As the report says, “However, if such comparisons are valid, then they would suggest, somewhat dramatically, that we are increasingly surrounded by a synthetic braintech. A technology not just as capable as the human brain, in some ways, but actually made up of similar components.” I don’t think I like that.

Speaking of things I don’t like, and things that seem almost intelligent but aren’t really, whoever is writing these AI SRE articles over at The New Stack doesn’t really understand SRE. They (and by “they” I mean “several authors who write these articles”, as I have witnessed it from several authors, not just the one I linked) keep saying “SRE is moving away from reaction and towards prevention, and AI will get us there!”, or “SRE needs to remember context, guardrails and business rules as they try to use AI to move from reaction to prevention”. And they’re saying it like ANY of these are new concepts. Hogwash! These are the very same problems SRE has been grappling with since the beginning. Don’t believe me? Go read the Google SRE book - they literally wrote the book. When has SRE NOT been about preventing problems in the first place - doesn’t anyone remember SLOs and Error Budgets? When has SRE NOT been about providing context around operations? When has any of this been unique to the age of AI? These authors keep reducing the traditional SRE role down to (forgive me, ops friends) an operations person staring at Nagios screens. Who are these people and how are they given a platform to spew their nonsense from? It’s offensive.

Thankfully, not EVERY New Stack author writing on this topic is a midwit. Mr LaGreco, for example, has a much more realistic take on the whole thing. Ironically, he’s one of the few authors on their website in recent memory, who wrote about SRE, who didn’t have “SRE” in his job title soup in his author bio. SREs, check on your friends, cause a bunch of them are out here doing your entire career field dirty. And when you wonder “Why did everyone think AI could replace us here?”, you’ll have those folks to blame.

Although we all know that eventually the only way for AIs and humans to operate successfully in the same space will be … for humans to stop operating, and just let AI do everything, because we are too unpredictable. A recent incident in DC involving a human crashing into an autonomous vehicle makes this point very well. At some point, a room full of insurance company execs, dept of transportation officials, and robotics experts will ask themselves, “With autonomous vehicles emerging, how can we make the road safe?”. The room will descend into silence for a moment, before the AI assistant will speak from the conference room speaker. “Remove all the humans from the roadway, of course.” And there will be much back-patting and congratulating.

The big problem we have to get over is that we simply can’t trust AI. Diving into development topics for a moment, there’s some work to be done wherein autonomous AI agents developing systems need to be given synthetic virtual environments where they can test their work. I fundamentally agree with the need for this, and think it will probably improve the quality of output from the average AI agent, but there’s still a fundamental trust question: how can we trust that the AI has actually executed the tests it is reporting, and who designed the test? Was the test designed by more AI? What’s to stop AI from hallucinating literally everything? For right now there is no good way for a human to get out of the verification loop, because unless we are able to implicitly trust an AI, the way that we would implicitly trust a human, we cannot escape the need to have someone looking over the AI’s shoulder, who understands what it is doing well enough to know if it’s tests are valid, if its controls are being adhered to, and whether it is hallucinating or outright lying to you. Pretending otherwise is blind foolishness.

"You are confused because you do not understand Tao.
Only a fool expects rational behavior from his fellow humans.
Why do you expect it from a machine that humans have constructed?
Computers simulate determinism; only Tao is perfect."
The Tao of Programming, 4.2

Meanwhile, if you aren’t getting a job, AI may be the reason why, and it may be because (ironically) AI doesn’t trust you enough. A company called Eightfold has been sued for helping companies score job seekers with AI. Although, to be honest, I’m not sure how far this case is going to go; To be clear, job seekers have always been scored by lots of metrics that they know about like credit scores and references and length of experience at prior jobs and skill trees etc etc. What we object to is being scored by a secret agent that we have no knowledge of using metrics we have no control over and which it may not have permission to access. But I don’t think the legal precedent here is going to be good: employers are free to score you internally how ever they want, as long as they’re doing it the same to everyone, and not violating any laws in the process. Still, I have this idea that we can improve the hiring experience by extending the idea of the Web of Trust to resumes, job histories, professional networks, resumes and applicant tracking systems. I need to put an RFC out about it.

Speaking of trust issues and AI, I reported last week that Apple is upset about slow adoption of iOS 26. Apparently that failure wasn’t enough for them, and in iOS 27 they’re replacing Siri with an AI chatbot. It’s good to have some things determined ahead of time, for example, that I won’t be installing iOS 27 on my device. I have a rooted android which, if a few things pan out, I’ll be transitioning back over to soon.

Speaking of mobile phone updates, novalauncher is getting ads. The app was recently acquired, and apparently the app needs “a sustainable business model”. I don’t get it. The app is written. The features are shipped. Don’t get me wrong, though a program be but three lines long, some day it must be maintained. But how much maintenance is needed? And of that maintenance, how much is needed only because new OS versions keep changing shit? Does it really justify sending ads to your users? I am not a novalauncher user, so maybe I just don’t get it, but this seems like it should be a non-issue.

## Authoritarian Boot Stomping

Meanwhile, in Ireland, The authoritarians continue to wage war against effective encryption by insisting they be given back doors to encryption and be allowed to deploy and use spyware against their own citizens. But they insist it’s okay and that you should totally trust them, bro, there’ll be a robust legal framework. (Don’t trust them, there won’t be a robust legal framework, and if there is, it will protect the state, not the people.)

In a great example of why you shouldn’t trust anyone (let alone the state) with a spy apparatus, a hilarious (and depressing) incident involving 60 Flock traffic cameras shows both a lack of capability and a vicious response when told about it. Researchers found 60 flock cameras that were unsecured and livestreaming to the internet, and when they tried to tell big brother about the problem, they got fired, harassed, deplatformed, and maybe arrested. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever” –George Orwell … and it will be televised, apparently, through incompetence rather than intentional malice.

Speaking of people getting punished for observing and recording things left in plain sight, Anna’s Archive (go here to find a working link to the site) has been ordered to take down everything that they copied through scraping publicly available content. The court says they violated ToS by creating this archive (which was done with the intent of preserving all the books in the world as a public digital archive). You know, a ToS - Terms of Service - thing you have to click “I Agree” to before installing some software. It creates a legal agreement between you the user and them the provider stipulating what is and is not acceptable use. What’s interesting here is that there was never an agreement between the site operators at Anna’s Archive and the content providers, so no ToS was established. The ruling here sets new precedent in US law, in that you can be punished for violating the rules in a Term of Service to which you never actually agreed. They can say “these are our rules, and even though you never agreed, and even though we can’t prove you knew those rules, and even though we left the content available in such a way that you stumbling upon it would violate our rules, you have done wrong and owe us damages”. Absolute madness, and another symptom of the death of the commons.

Maybe we just have the wrong authoritarians in charge. It’s easy to think that we would do it differently. If only I was the benevolent dictator for life, things would be great. One thing I know for sure, if I was in charge, financial speculation would be illegal. It is the source of many great catastrophes in our society, and will definitely be the source of many more. Indeed, we are slow walking into a polymarket disaster.

## Misc Technology

But, alas, we are not authoritarians in the position to apply the boot to the face, so let’s focus on what’s within our own scope.

If you want to keep your smart dishwasher, pet IoT device, or even your fleet of 60 Flock cameras away from the internet, Dog with a Dev blog has an outstanding write-up on how they isolated their IoT devices onto their own network subnet within their home. Most people will not be willing to go to this much trouble, and I prefer to simply not own IoT devices, but if you have them, this is well worth the time.

If you’re an administrator of any systems that use Net-NTLMv1 password hashes, or if you’re a malevolent actor trying to break into such a system, then you are in odd company today, as Google has just released 8 trillion precomputed NTLMv1 password hashes. This makes the job of cracking simple passwords in this schema much easier (12 hours on commodity hardware), and makes the task of migrating away from this password scheme much more imperative. “While tools to exploit this protocol have existed for years, they often required uploading sensitive data to third-party services or expensive hardware to brute-force keys.” Basically Google is saying “we don’t like this scheme, you aren’t retiring it fast enough, so we’re going to show you how bad it is by helping out every bad guy by removing one of the big barriers to entry”. I honestly think that this is a really irresponsible response to the problem, and anyone who can trace a system intrusion back to a broken NTLMv1 hash (if such a positive identification was even possible) should be able to hold Google at least partially responsible. NTLMv1 is weak and we all know it, in the same way that we know that the average residential lock is weak and that there are actually only a few million variations of key to the average home’s front door lock; but that doesn’t make it okay to release a tool that can rapidly try every possible key combination in a matter of minutes, and then smugly say “We told you your locks are shit, and now you are in even more danger, so change them”. Maybe I’m alone in this, but I really think poorly of them for this.

Speaking of things that you can only do on really expensive hardware, like brute forcing effective encryption, NVidia has released some new DGX Spark workstations that look like they can do some really really neat stuff for a single developer without having to resort to cloud resources or even resources racked in the datacenter. There’s a price tag, to be sure, but high end developer workstations have always been expensive. These NVidia DGX Spark systems are comparable (and likely exceed) current high-end macbooks and mac studio systems (which are the only ones I’m comparing here because Apple Silicon has a unified memory architecture while PC does not), and offer as good or better performance on AI workloads. Honestly the price point is kind of crazily affordable in terms of what it can do. I wonder if we’ll start seeing companies ship these to their developers instead of commodity macbooks? Excuse me, I need to write an email…

One of the good things about the current AI arms race is that we are seeing innovation in computing for the first time in quite a while, although that innovation tends to be new takes on old problems. A company called d-Matrix is trying something new to solve the old problem of reducing the time spent accessing and operating on memory. For decades we tried to make compute faster by moving more and more memory onto the processor in the form of larger and larger caches. This allowed us to spend less and less time fetching from memory and writing back to memory, as we could cache entire pages physically next to the processor circuitry, reducing time spent off-die. But d-Matrix is asking why not just take some portion of the compute circuitry, and embed it directly with the memory? … Interesting idea, I’m honestly really curious to see how it plays out, and how it works in practice.

On the other end of the spectrum, the children yearn for the old ways, and people are discovering shared hosting on unix servers with shell accounts over at tilde.club. Those of us who remember getting online back in the 90s will remember your local ISP giving you a shell account on a UNIX (or Linux) box running a web server, and a `~/public_html/` directory where you could upload a little website. Apparently this is being rediscovered, as everything old is new again. People are excited about being able to log on to the system, learn shell, and publish websites, without having to change their OS. This is their first exposure to shell for many of them. And the service has a built-in IRC server for chat inside the terminal, which - again - is nothing new for us old hands, but I love that people are discovering this. Things like this always get me so excited! I love seeing people discover the technology and the internet and the culture that still exists underneath the monster that has grown out of our good intentions, and I wish I had the attention available to participate in something like this and mentor some of these folks. I suppose I’m unwilling to sacrifice other things to devote attention to such an effort. But I’m thrilled to see that it’s alive and well and people are excited by it.

Steve Wozniak teaching elementary students about computers in 1995

## Of Monsters, DevOps, and Programming

Speaking of the monsters that grew out of our good intentions, apparently the curl bug report policy has been changed. They were inundated with AI slop bug reports, so they had to adopt a new security bug reporting statement. What caught my attention though was a comment on the hackernews story raises the question of whether or not our current “open source ecosystem” is an accurate representation of what the founders originally envisioned. Maybe it’s not? Is it better, worse? Should we go back to posting tarballs on our websites and taking patches by email? Sometimes, I think, maybe, because the older ways of doing it kept out the riffraff. One commenter sums it up nicely by saying “Bitching is free and easier than making pull requests”. At the same time, just because we wrote something once, that doesn’t mean we’re going to commit to maintaining it forever. Sometimes the butterfly flaps its wings, and ripples go out …. is the butterly responsible for continuous flapping to change ripples for everyone who sees it?

Speaking of web tools and code, Astro 6 just dropped. Astro is (yet another) web framework (as if we didn’t already have enough). What sets Astro apart? “If you need a website that loads fast with great SEO, then Astro is for you.” I don’t really have a bone to pick with Astro (and apparently Cloudflare recently bought them so they’re doing quite well), they just happened to pop up on my radar, and while reading the article, a continuous itch resurfaced about what it’s like working with anything on the modern web. The itch applies particularly to my own website here, and its own use of a small microblogging framework named hexo. Honestly, the more I think about it, the more I want to throw everything out and go to bare HTML. I’m kind of sick to death of frameworks, although hexo mostly stays out of my way. I just get so tired of working through someone else’s vision and interface to your browser to express my ideas and say what I want to say. It’s all so tiresome. And there’s a new framework every day, it seems like. Why? “We’re a generation of programmers raised by frameworks. I’m not sure another framework is the answer to our problems.” – Chuck Palahniuk, probably.

In Kubernetes news, Headlamp is part of the UI SIG now. Which is nice, because the kubernetes interface is pretty shit for users (it was never actually meant for humans), and not even that great for developers (though we can figure it out). Kubernetes is also going to be able to snapshot containers, the same way we’ve been snapshotting VMs, and suspending/hibernating bare metal to disk. Remember when containers were small, lightweight, and the idea of snapshotting one was silly? Yeah …. me too. There is nothing new under the sun, and kubernetes will kill docker right after docker containers kill VMs right after VMs kill bare metal right after bare metal kills the mainframe, but not before docker containers in kubernetes implement a checkpoint feature like VMs have. It’s turtles all the way down, and we keep solving the same problems over and over again by throwing on new shit that does the old shit. NYET! Rifle is fine!

## Express Yourself

Mike Sass posits that we should use 3rd party platforms to originate our content, and our own websites should serve as archives or mirrors. He thinks this “PESOS” model is better than the POSSE model (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). I obviously don’t agree, but I suppose it’s worth considering. He’s solving a different problem: he wants his content to remain if the services go away, while POSSE users want to own our content and control how that content is presented, while having the option to leverage third party services to give others the opportunity to see and experience our content. While there is a productive merit in the PESOS philosophy, I find it fundamentally at odds with my own, and cannot endorse it.

Sonechka, on their personal blog, makes the point that art must be fun. I agree. I think this extends to scientific ‘arts” as well like programming - if there is an “art” of computer programming, then this statement is equally valid for your programs: “Make art that is a waste of time, that no one wants to buy or sell. Make art that is useless and make art that is meaningless; art that is fun.” Do it because you love it, not because you think it can be monetized or profitable or even that the time is productive. Experience joy in the interaction between you and the system, and in the creative act, as the ultimate goal is not to be productive, but to express yourself.

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