196 / How we lost the internet

Hi ✌🏻

Toot of the Week

I select all images with traffic lights, therefore I am — @colingourlay@bne.social

Software

• You Can Choose Tools That Make You Happy (borretti.me)

  Fernando Borretti comments on how we try to rationalize our choice of obscure tools, when using them making us happy is reason enough.

• Type-level Bounded Recursion in Rust (catgirl.ai)

  Ash documents it's type crimes to build a stack depth counter.

AI

• Toolmen (aworkinglibrary.com)

  Mandy Brown disects AI as a political instrument to enforce inequality:

  If those in power cannot prove that a great many people are already inferior then they will bring that inferiority about by forcing them to use a tool that diminishes their intellectual and creative capacity.

• GitHub MCP Exploited: Accessing private repositories via MCP (simonwillison.net)

  Simon Willison explains how the GitHub MCP fulfills the lethal trifecta for prompt injection, and how the attack works.

Cutting Room Floor

• Researchers Say New Contact Lenses Let You See in the Dark (futurism.com)

  Victor Tangermann describes a new study developing contact lenses that detect infrared light.

• [video] How we lost the internet (youtube.com)

  Cory Doctorow gives an incredible Keynote at PyCon US about enshittification, wage-theft and surveillance capitalism. If you prefer to read, LWN has a shortened text version, but I recommend watching the talk.

• We Know A Good Life When We See It (seekingsignal.substack.com)

  Matt Duffy explains how we as a society forgot virtue, and how we can create a better moral culture.