Part 1 of a 5-part series exploring how the database landscape has exploded from a handful of relational systems to 426 specialized options, while the DBAs who once guarded that knowledge have largely vanished. Tim O’Brien shares hard-won database wisdom from 25 years in the trenches, starting with a story about Albert, the two-finger-typing DBA who saved him from his first production disaster.

Security researchers reveal how malicious code can be hidden inside ML model files using Python’s pickle format, potentially compromising millions of models. Plus: a new Rust-based JavaScript engine achieves 97% ECMAScript compliance, and a blogger feeds Meta’s AI crawler 270,000 pages of procedurally-generated nonsense.

Today’s episode covers a coordinated censorship campaign targeting Archive.today through fabricated legal threats, AWS’s historic deprecation of 24 services forcing code migrations, and a fascinating experiment revealing how AI models fail at drawing clocks in eerily human ways. Plus brief updates on Google’s India AI investment, Blue Origin’s reusability milestone, Disney-YouTube TV resolution, and Apple Watch import ban developments.

A self-replicating worm floods npm with 100,000+ spam packages while exploiting blockchain rewards, marking a new evolution in supply chain attacks. Today’s tech news also covers OpenAI’s GPT-5.1 release with 5x speed improvements, Cambridge’s artificial leaf that outperforms nature 10-to-1, and updates on Spotify lossless audio, Apple Digital ID, and UK cybersecurity legislation.

Today’s episode covers Microsoft’s November Patch Tuesday with an actively exploited zero-day, Rust 1.91.1’s WebAssembly and illumos fixes, and Japan’s wooden satellite experiment. We also dive deep into IBM’s ”Loon” quantum chip announcement and the legal battle over OpenAI’s ChatGPT conversation logs.

We explore the incredible science behind the Northern Lights, from solar explosions 93 million miles away to Earth’s protective magnetosphere creating nature’s most spectacular light show, plus the serious risks space weather poses to our technological infrastructure. Today’s tech news covers Bluetooth 6.2’s major security improvements, YouTube forcing complexity on open source tools, and FFmpeg developers pushing back against Google’s AI-driven bug reports.

An investigation into how Google’s year-old Willow quantum chip is being incorrectly reported as breaking news, revealing the echo chamber of tech journalism. Plus: Linux kernel embraces Microsoft C extensions for the first time, critical container runtime vulnerabilities patched, and the strange legal world where ships and rivers are people.

Exploring the gap between feeling productive and actually being productive when using AI coding tools, examining how automation bias and parallel processing can lead to costly mistakes. Plus, news on the proposed TP-Link router ban, Montana’s ”right to compute” law, a creative battery project from disposable vapes, and major tech industry developments.

Today’s tech news covers a Ruby garbage collector bug that turned hashes into strings, the complete rewrite of the Material for MkDocs stack into Zensical, and the nightmare of being a bankruptcy attorney named Mark Zuckerberg. Plus: Meta’s $600 billion AI infrastructure bet and the growing concerns about an AI bubble.

A 1968 Bell Labs promotional film showcased dramatic computer demonstrations with suited scientists and red lighting, while just down the hall, two twenty-somethings named Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were building Unix on an unwanted PDP-7 without management support. Plus: Cloudflare scrubs a massive botnet from their domain rankings, Snapchat open-sources their cross-platform UI framework Valdi, and how a group of friends accidentally fooled the entire tech industry with fake AMD benchmarks.

Today we cover a massive credential find with 2 billion email addresses discovered by Troy Hunt, Meta’s new Pyrefly type checker that’s 40x faster than existing tools, and the surprising closure of the 200-year-old Farmers’ Almanac. Plus critical updates on AMD’s Zen 5 cryptography flaw and Nvidia’s revolutionary B300 Blackwell platform.

This episode delivers a critical wake-up call to developers about the urgent need to secure their workstations against modern worms targeting developer environments. We explore why attackers are zeroing in on developer machines, dive deep into the ShaiHulud and PhantomRaven worms that have shaken the developer community, and provide concrete steps to protect your credentials. Plus, we cover the day’s tech news including a VMware zero-day actively exploited by Chinese hackers, how timing wheels solve massive scaling problems, and a smart vacuum that got bricked for blocking data collection.

As Git approaches its 20th anniversary, we explore the often-unspoken limitations of the world’s dominant version control system—from its struggles with massive monorepos to the irony of a decentralized tool creating GitHub’s centralized empire. Plus, today’s tech news features a critical React Native vulnerability affecting millions of developers, WebAssembly coming to the Linux kernel, and a genetic mutation that makes bones unbreakable but renders swimming impossible.

A deep dive into how aviation handles automation in turbulence reveals surprising parallels to programmers learning to trust AI copilots. Plus news on cybersecurity insider threats deploying ransomware, a CSS-only 3D terrain generator that defies expectations, and the first recording of a dying human brain showing memory replay.

In this first episode of ”Cloud Computing: Worst Case Scenarios,” we explore what happens when cosmic threats collide with our centralized cloud infrastructure, drawing lessons from the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor and the October 2025 AWS outage that left Toast toast and millions without their morning coffee apps.

GHC now runs entirely in the browser via WebAssembly, bringing Haskell’s advanced type system and runtime to a near‑native, sandboxed environment without local installs. Today’s news features new research on “HeisenTrojans” exploiting EDA tools, and fresh cosmology results suggesting dark energy may be weakening.

Today’s news covers IoT devices compromised via Tor, a programming language that prevents unit conversion disasters, and a camera that found 2,000 asteroids in its first night. Plus a review of the week’s technical topics: open source evolution, AI legal complexity, code longevity, Dijkstra’s timeless programming wisdom, FinOps nuances, and the cloud versus private infrastructure calculus.

David Heinemeier Hansson saved over $1 million annually by moving Basecamp and HEY from public to private cloud, and his math is solid. Today we examine why his approach worked, what everyone else needs to consider before following his playbook, and the hidden costs of managing your own infrastructure. Plus news: NPM’s AI-targeted malware with 86,000 downloads, Python’s UV tool revolution, and a mathematical curiosity about consecutive digits.

Tim explores why utilization reports in FinOps are dangerously misleading, examining how CPU percentages lie and operational realities complicate optimization efforts. Plus today’s tech news: new physical attacks on secure enclaves from major chipmakers, Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant over anti-DEI requirements, and Amazon’s massive 14,000-person layoff.

We revisit Dijkstra’s “The Humble Programmer” and why it still frames our AI‑era anxieties — then three headlines: Chrome moving to HTTPS-by-default warnings, Apache Fory Rust’s cross-language serialization, and Samsung’s smart fridges getting ads.