Latest / July 22, 2026
10 posts from engineering leaders published July 22, 2026, by Simon Willison, Salvatore Sanfilippo, Kent Beck and 3 more.
I genuinely believe that if you took an open weights model from 2025 and built a pentest harness for it, it could do this kind of sandbox escape and scan/hack in most networks. This is only surprising because you assume OpenAI has sounder sandboxes. — Thomas Ptacek , doesn't…
This story is wild. The short version: OpenAI were running a cybersecurity test against an unreleased model, with the model's guardrail features turned off. Rather than solve the test, the model broke its way out of OpenAI's sandbox, then found exploits to break in to Hugging…
Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing? Excellent piece of work by Dylan Castillo, who took a deep-dive into the frequently pondered question of whether the AI labs have been deliberately training models to draw pelicans riding bicycles in response to my deeply unscientific benchmark . I've…
Even if you are as averse to semver as I used to be in the course of my programming activity, you can still think of open source software distribution as something that used to follow a fixed number of steps. There is a branch where developments happen, and this branch…
San Francisco tip: it only costs around $15 ($10 in quarters plus a $5 bill for the self-playing violin) to activate every single Orchestrion in Musée Mécanique . And because most people are bad at allocating their funds you may well be the ONLY person activating the…
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In the midst of our AI slop revolution, traveling to the West coast for Open Sauce this past weekend was the perfect antiseptic for rising costs, summer heat, and online divisiveness. It's ironic, then, that I used Claude to vibe code my Tufty GPS Time Badge . Partly due to time…
Some basic assumptions:
Table of Contents Parquet’s Dremel Encoding Reading Effectively-Fixed-Length Lists Faster Performance Gains Summary In its current form Apache Parquet isn’t a great fit for storing fixed-length lists, such as coordinates, RGB(A) colors, or—an increasingly common case—vector…
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