Articles I read in 2026

Week 5, 2026

No more boring drawings! - ~~How~~Why to draw something

Carefully composed drawings can show our relation to the world. It is interesting because we have made a conscious choice of what is important to us. And chances are that this is also interesting for others.
Thief of $90M in seized U.S.-controlled crypto alleged to be government crypto contractor's son
The future of software engineering is SRE
- Everybody wants to write a greenfield demo. Nobody wants to run a service.
  - The first 90% to get a working demo is easy. It's the other 190% that matters.
- People don't buy software, they hire a service. - result
The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world
- Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts.
- Civil resistance involving a threshold of 3.5% of the population actively participating has never failed to bring about change.
- Erica Chenoweth's research analyzed hundreds of campaigns over the last century to compare the success rates of nonviolent versus violent protests.
  - Chenoweth has backed off her previous conclusions in recent years, observing that nonviolent protest strategies have dramatically declined in effectiveness as governments have adjusted their tactics of repression and messaging. See eg The Harvard Professor Who Quantified Democracy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46759139
Bugs Apple Loves
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46727587

AI slop security reports submitted to curl
The Influentists - The trend of 'hype first and context later' is characterized by individuals called 'The Influentists' who leverage large audiences to propagate unproven or misleading claims.
- Doesn't the existence of consumer products like ChatGPT indicate that LLMs aren't able to do human-level work? If OpenAI really had a digital workforce with the capabilities of ~100k programmers/scientists/writers/lawyers/doctors etc, wouldn't the most profitable move be to utilize those "workers" directly, rather that renting out their skills piecemeal? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624115
[Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT](https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-advertising-and-e
- This sounds exactly like what Google used to say about search results. Just a few ads, clearly separated from organic results, never detracting from the core mission of providing the most effective access to all the world’s information. (And certainly not driven by a secret profile of you based on pervasive surveillance of your internet activity.) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46650756
- People are reacting negatively to the ads, but there's a bigger point. This is bearish as heck for AGI. If OpenAI were recursively improving their general-computer-using agent, who was going to be superhuman at every job, they wouldn't need to be messing around with things like this. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46653567

Cross-Site Request Forgery is dead! - Same-Site Cookies. SameSite=Strict, SameSite=Lax
CSRF Protection without Tokens or Hidden Form Fields - The so called "modern" method to protect against CSRF attacks is based on the Sec-Fetch-Site header, which all modern desktop and mobile browsers include in the requests they send to servers.
Meta made scam ads harder to find instead of removing them

Meta's AI tools are going rogue and churning out some very strange ads
Maybe the default settings are too high
- Slowing down the pace of consumption, whether reading or eating, significantly enhances enjoyment and comprehension.
- Default consumption speeds, possibly influenced by modern living's abundance, often reduce the rewards of activities.
- Clichés like 'less is more' and 'stop and smell the roses' are profound insights that lose their meaning when consumed too rapidly.
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