Most of the software we use is sold off the peg. One cut, made for everyone, which is to say made for no one in particular. You take it home and do the adjusting yourself — learn where the menus hide, accept the order it wants things done in, fill out
A few weeks ago I read that Anthropic's new model, Mythos, had found a 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD. OpenBSD is the BSD that has spent three decades being the one you cannot break into. Its tagline — only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of
There is a shape forming around the question of how to work with AI. It hasn't fully arrived yet, but the gap between what's possible today and what most people are using is closing faster than I expected — measured in months, not years. The outlines are
When I was seventeen, I tried to build a perpetual motion machine. It was for a competition. The idea — quietly ridiculous, in retrospect — was that an arrangement of magnets, placed just right, could use their own attract-and-repel forces to keep turning each other. I had read enough physics to know
An email arrived last week with the opening line "Dear Mr Zainal,". The one before it had said "Dear Mr Abidin,". Neither is correct. Both are understandable. And both are part of the slow, well-meaning process by which Asian names get quietly flattened into a shape
Full disclosure: I am not a lawyer. But I recently loaded the entire Federal Constitution of Malaysia into a RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) system and asked it a question that had been nagging me for a while — what happens when a state law contradicts a federal law? And in particular, what