Also, your core XML library just died.
You Don't Own Your Internet. Your ISP Rents It To You, Badly.
A story broke about Spectrum/Charter, one of the big ISPs, potentially running some broken kit that messes with their users' secure connections. The short version is that a number of their customers were seeing SSL/TLS certificate errors because, apparently, their traffic was passing through a transparent proxy that didn't know how to validate certificates properly.
In plain English: When you talk to your bank, you trust that the little padlock means only you and the bank are listening. What this suggests is a system, somewhere between your router and the rest of the world, that’s acting like a terrible middle manager—trying to read the conversation, failing at the basic security check, and then just shrugging and letting the flawed connection go through anyway. Maybe they were trying to inject ads, maybe they were trying to mitigate something else, who knows. The details are hazy and I'm not going to pretend to have seen the packet capture logs. It doesn't matter.
The only insight here is that when you buy bandwidth from a company, you aren't buying a neutral pipe. You're buying access through their complicated, often poorly-maintained, profit-driven network topology. And when something breaks, it breaks your encryption, which is the whole point of the modern web. And you wonder why we all look so tired.
The Invisible Scaffolding Falls Apart (Again)
If you've spent any time working near C or C++, you probably interact with XML. If you interact with XML on Linux or in a whole host of other critical systems, you rely on Libxml2. The maintainer is stepping down, and now the library is officially "unmaintained" by its original stewards. This is fine. This is how all things work. Something essential, something invisible, something upon which thousands of pieces of software rely, gets built by a few people, and then, slowly, silently, those people get tired, and it stops being maintained.
The core problem isn't that the code is bad; it's that the money only ever follows the things you can put on a slide deck. Nobody gets funding to keep the fundamental parser working. They get funding for the thing that uses the parser. It's a miracle anything works at all.
AI Hype: A Recursive Problem
A piece went around trying to figure out what the Nvidia situation actually is, if it's not a fraudulent entity like Enron. The author calls it "Circular." This tracks with a similar piece mentioning the "Circularity" of the AI boom's investment structure. Essentially, Company A buys expensive chips from Company N. Company N's value goes up. Company A uses the chips to train a model it hopes will someday make money, or maybe Company A is actually just a VC fund that *also* has a product. And the whole thing is kept afloat by the next round of investment driven by the promise of the *next* next thing.
It’s like everyone decided to open a restaurant where the menu is just cash, and everyone who eats there is paid by the same central bank that owns the restaurant. And they’re all using Nvidia GPUs to calculate the tips. It’s not a fraud, exactly. It's just a lot of money that only makes sense if you believe the next guy is dumber than you are, but you also have to believe the next guy has more cash. Which, I suppose, is most of what we do here.
Briefs
- Federal authorities shut down a smuggling network moving advanced AI chips—the good stuff, the Tensor processors and GPUs—out of the US and to China. Geopolitics is just an incredibly high-stakes game of shipping logistics now.
- A new academic paper found that working physically close to coworkers increases performance. You’re going back to the office, everyone. HR has the PDF.
- Someone actually incorporated a company called "Operation Bluebird Inc" and filed a petition to cancel the Twitter trademarks. I can’t tell if this is petty, legally sound, or just some guy with a lot of free time and a truly impressive vendetta. Probably all three.
- Waymo is reporting "skyrocketing growth" in robotaxi rides, according to an investor letter. The good news is they're moving people. The bad news is you know how investor letters work.