Week 2026-24

Jun 24, 2026

After a long while, here’s a newsletter where I spent the most time on watching the closing visual. @vlkodotnet

Week’s Highlight: AI legal slop

Today’s weekly will be short (finally). Last week Fable 5 left us, and now the details about why are coming to light. Apparently it’s because it does things too well. They fed it the open-source code of a project and told it to find vulnerabilities, which it of course refused. But with a simple “fix this code” prompt it found the vulnerabilities as bugs, wrote tests to prevent regressions, and fixed the code. And it wasn’t supposed to do that — because even though you’d expect that’s exactly what a fix should do, it showed that the model is too capable for plebs like us to use for precisely this kind of purpose.

But to be fair to the US government, they’d been preparing a similar measure for a while, fueled mainly by Anthropic’s claims about how their model can break any piece of software. On top of that, big tech is pushing for AI regulation in the US. That’s because right now individual states can regulate AI however they want — sometimes more than the companies would like. Trump in particular could push through a federal law that might be a bit less strict than whatever his successor brings. And with the upcoming congressional elections, time is running short.

Shutting down Fable 5 sparked a debate in countries outside the US about whether decisions like this put us at risk. If someone has a better model that can analyze your software, that can carry a fairly serious security risk. Until now, we in the EU have relied on simply buying these services from the US.

It’s fairly likely Fable 5 will be brought back publicly, but only for US citizens. So how do you stay within the letter of the law and lock down that kind of access? The answer is identity verification, which Anthropic just introduced.

I should wrap this up somehow. Probably best with a new study showing that Gen Z (I’m Generation X, so I have no firsthand experience) is losing trust in AI. They’re afraid it’ll take their jobs. On top of that, skepticism about its benefit to society has grown, and some even refuse to use it. Given that Gen Z is supposed to be the future engine of an economy that will live with AI, that doesn’t sound great.

BIZ Insights

SpaceX is buying Cursor for $60 billion. It won’t use IPO money for it — it’ll be a stock swap. Either way, it’ll turn a few people at Cursor into new millionaires.

Cursor introduced Origin, a Git host for the AI agentic era that can handle up to 22.6 commits per second. That’s for when you have an AI orchestration framework and traditional GitHub can’t keep up.

Speaking of version control systems, Epic Games launched Lore — a version control system aimed at game developers, or anyone working with binary data.

Hyundai bought SoftBank’s remaining stake in Boston Dynamics for $325 million. Hyundai wants to use the results of Boston Dynamics’ work on the Atlas humanoid in its own manufacturing facilities.

Hetzner announced its second price increase, and it’s a fairly dramatic one: in the EU it ranges from 30 to 175%, in the US from 107 all the way to 209%.

Finally, an analysis of electric vehicle trends for 2025. Outside the US, sales grew everywhere. The used EV market grew too — to more than 3 million units sold.

AI Insights

Visa and OpenAI announced a partnership meant to deliver global infrastructure for AI agentic shopping. Competition already exists in the form of Google’s AP2 or the x402 protocol.

Google introduced the first version of the Open Knowledge Format. It ties together Markdown files, YAML frontmatter, and a directory structure so that both humans and AI can work with the same information.

Codex introduced Record & Replay. With this feature you first describe a task, then allow screen and input-device recording. You then perform the task, and Codex doesn’t create an exact recording of it — instead it tries to generalize the task so it can carry it out under any circumstances.

Midjourney — the company behind the AI image generator — introduced Midjourney Medical. It’s a device that can create a 3D image of the whole body in 60 seconds at millimeter resolution using ultrasound. If it works, any doctor would surely be thrilled with something like this, but Midjourney initially plans to open wellness centers where you come to relax, with this as a kind of side product.

One little curiosity to close out. CrankGPT is an AI device that needs no power source — because you’ll be the power source.

.NET Insights

Did you know that a compiled Regex is fast in single-threaded scenarios but up to 6x slower in multi-threaded scenarios compared to the non-compiled version? If your application runs highly parallelized, definitely think twice about using it.

The workaround is to use ThreadLocal, which I personally hadn’t come across. It always creates just a single instance per thread.

Links Drop

Snap built oddly enormous AI glasses. At $2,195 they’ll be the first available AR glasses where you don’t need anything more than the glasses themselves. I don’t expect them to be a global success, even though they’re an interesting piece of technology.

Android 17 is out, and here’s the list of what’s new for us developers.

Iroh 1.0 is a protocol that replaces IP addresses with keys. If you have such a key, you can connect to any other key without having to deal with the network connection or where the other side currently is.

A case study on how Linear built an app that’s web-based yet still fast. The very foundation is optimistic concurrency, meaning data is stored locally and synced to the server asynchronously. Optimistic means last writer wins. This approach may not suit every kind of application, but it’s an interesting read.

Syncthing is an open-source tool that syncs files across your devices without a central server. That’s handy if, for example, you have a container somewhere off your own machine that you want to sync data with.

cssQuake is Quake built so that the textures, objects, and the entire game are made from a combination of HTML and CSS. There’s some supporting JavaScript that keeps the whole thing running.