Simon Willison discusses the pitfalls of attempting to replace a legacy system with a new one when technical debt is overwhelming. He explains that while the old system continues to evolve, developers lack incentive to improve it, and the new team, initially fast, eventually struggles to understand and deliver the required functionality. The result is often two partially functional systems in production, with the new one abandoned and the old one still running, increasing risk and complexity.
The article warns of a targeted campaign against prominent Rust developers and crate owners, aiming to compromise their devices and accounts to publish malware. Attackers use seemingly legitimate video calls to trick targets into installing malicious software or executing commands, such as a fake audio codec or clipboard command. A recent supply‑chain attack on the array‑ref crate illustrates the threat, and the author suggests using dependency cooldowns as a defensive measure.
Release: pwasm 0.2a0
pwasm is one of my folly projects - an entirely vibe-coded pure Python WebAssembly engine that I built in January during my first bout of AI mania.
I hadn't touched it sin...
Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 has been released, marking the final release candidate for the upcoming 3.15 release scheduled for October. Hugo van Kemenade, the release manager, notes that only clear bug‑fix changes are allowed between this candidate and the final release, and urges third‑party maintainers to prepare wheels on PyPI and test their projects during this phase. The new RC is not yet available for GitHub Actions, but users can add it to their testing matrix using the allow‑prereleases and check‑latest flags to automatically test against the latest RC and then the stable release.
Simon Willison writes about a situation where letters were taken from him, prompting a discussion on dwarf behavior rather than dwarf AI. He notes that dwarf AI does not exist, and that dwarves sometimes misbehave. The piece is tagged with AI and game-design, referencing Tarn Adams, co‑creator of Dwarf Fortress.
Paint.NET has added a fully reverse‑engineered rewrite of Direct2D for use on WINE, implemented in PaintDotNet.Windows.Direct2D1.Managed.dll. The rewrite was created by Claude, a generative‑AI coding agent, and is described as largely "vibe coded" with limited review due to its size. The author notes that Claude required significant oversight to ensure proper resource management and to avoid design flaws.