Weekly news | 2026-01-28

news

• HashiCorp releases agent skills
• Ireland wants to give its cops spyware, ability to crack encrypted messages
• We (curl) will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
• MS confirms it will give the FBI your Windows PC data encryption key if asked
• Second Win11 emergency out of band update to address disastrous Patch Tuesday
• Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology
• France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.
• Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only
• Fedora Asahi Remix is now working on Apple M3
• Google Books removed all search functions for any books with previews
• TikTok users can't upload anti-ICE videos. The company blames tech issues
• SoundCloud Data Breach Now on HaveIBeenPwned
• Skip is now free and open source
• TrustTunnel: AdGuard VPN protocol goes open-source
• BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

• AI:

  • Claude's new constitution
  • Prism
  • Which AI Lies Best? A game theory classic designed by John Nash
  • Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
  • Qwen3-TTS family is now open sourced: Voice design, clone, and generation
  • Qwen3-Max-Thinking
  • Kimi Released Kimi K2.5, Open-Source Visual SOTA-Agentic Model

• AWS:

  • Amazon Corretto January 2026 Quarterly Updates
  • Amazon MQ JMS specification for RabbitMQ brokers
  • AWS additional policy details to access denied error messages
  • AWS Security Agent now supports GitHub Enterprise Cloud
  • Bedrock AgentCore Browser now supports custom browser extensions
  • Bedrock Reserved Tier available now for Claude Opus 4.5 and Haiku 4.5
  • Clean Rooms join and partition hints in SQL
  • Connect adds conditional logic and real-time updates to Step-by-Step Guides
  • Connect automatically select random samples of agent contacts for evaluation
  • Deadline Cloud machine learning training using Foundry Nuke CopyCat
  • EC2 48xlarge and metal-48xl sizes for EBS optimized
  • EC2 Auto Scaling New Mechanisms for Group Deletion Protection
  • EC2 M4 Max Mac instances | GA
  • ECR cross-repository layer sharing
  • EMR Serverless KMS customer managed keys for encrypting local disks
  • EVS multiple VMware NSX Edge Gateways
  • EVS VCF and VMware ESX software version selection
  • Instance Scheduler enhanced scaling, reliability, and event-driven automation
  • Quick Sight dashboard customization in tables and pivot tables
  • Quick Suite expanded size, faster ingestion, and richer data type for SPICE datasets
  • RDS Blue/Green Deployments reduces downtime to under five seconds
  • RDS for Oracle bare metal instances to Standard Edition 2
  • RDS for Oracle now supports replicas in Oracle multi-tenant configuration
  • RDS for SQL Server enhances differential and transaction log restores support
  • Resource Control Policies support for Cognito and CloudWatch Logs
  • Route 53 Domains support for .ai, and other top-level domains
  • SageMaker HyperPod enhanced lifecycle scripts debugging
  • SageMaker Unified Studio cross-Region and IAM role-based subscriptions
  • Transfer Family Terraform module now supports web apps
  • WorkSpaces Microsoft Office, Visio and Project 2024 Apps
  • For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on AWS’s What’s New Feed page.

tooling

• Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
• Mastra 1.0, open-source JavaScript agent framework from the Gatsby devs
• ChartGPU – WebGPU-powered charting library (1M points at 60fps)
• Libbbf: Bound Book Format, A high-performance container for comics and manga
• Stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time (2024)
• Convert potentially dangerous PDFs to safe PDFs
• It looks like the status/need-triage label was removed
• Tao Te Ching – Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin
• A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch
• TUI for managing XDG default applications
• Web-based image editor modeled after Deluxe Paint
• Nvidia-smi hangs indefinitely after ~66 days
• The Holy Grail of Linux Binary Compatibility: Musl and Dlopen
• Clawdbot - open source personal AI assistant
• Clawdbot Renames to Moltbot
• Only 1 LLM can fly a drone
• Velox: A Port of Tauri to Swift by Miguel de Icaza
• SmartOS: a Type 1 hypervisor
• A static site generator written in POSIX shell
• Lix – universal version control system for binary files

blogs

• The challenges of soft delete
• Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi
• From stealth blackout to whitelisting: Inside the Iranian shutdown
• Why does SSH send 100 packets per keystroke?
• Some C habits I employ for the modern day
• Internet Archive's Storage
• I Like GitLab
• I added a Bluesky comment section to my blog
• The future of software engineering is SRE
• There is an AI code review bubble
• Tree-sitter vs. Language Servers
• A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

resources

• EmuDevz: A game about developing emulators
• Nested code fences in Markdown
• isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC
• European Alternatives
• Things I've learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager
• A list of fun destinations for telnet
• CSS Optical Illusions
• Introduction to PostgreSQL Indexes
• The hidden engineering of runways
• How I estimate work