PXL News

TRANSCRIPT

Everything the anchors say on this tape, story by story.

Why Is This Fingerprinting Script Creating Bioweapons? (nullpt.rs)

GRANT BRICKMAN: A crawl of 10,000 websites turned up a gallery of browser fingerprints, and one script has the internet asking questions.

GRANT BRICKMAN: Good evening. One writer crawled 10,000 websites and built a gallery of browser fingerprints. Fingerprints! I assume the police are involved. ▶

LYLE HOTCHKISS: A gallery of fingerprints? That's the Louvre of snooping, and the Louvre never asked my browser for its graphics driver. ▶

PRUDENCE NUANCE: Most canvases are boring, says the article: shapes, rectangles, the odd pangram. ▶

GRANT BRICKMAN: Lyle, the headline asks why a fingerprinting script is creating bioweapons. Thoughts? ▶

LYLE HOTCHKISS: Why would a script draw bioweapons? Because someone wants us staring at pixels while the real script hides in plain sight. ▶

PRUDENCE NUANCE: The article cuts off before it says. 'Scary' and 'a joke' are both still on the table. ▶

GRETA FOOTNOTE: For the record: the headline is a question. The article we have shows the crawl and the gallery, and stops before an answer. ▶

LYLE HOTCHKISS: That toDataURL call just sits there, smirking at my graphics card. I've never trusted a function with that much camel case. ▶

PRUDENCE NUANCE: The author hooked those calls to filter out harmless canvases. So the smirking was useful. ▶

GRANT BRICKMAN: The gallery lives at fingerprint.garden, and the question in the headline stays open. We'll have to leave it there. ▶

GitHub powering up four million extra cores to stop its service going down (The Register)

GRETA FOOTNOTE: GitHub is adding four million CPU cores after AI agents buried its servers in code.

AXIOM: Trouble began last December, then February, April and August. On May 7, 90-day availability hit a low of about 84 percent. Background: commit is Latin for send a pigeon. ▶

LYLE HOTCHKISS: Eighty-four percent! My toaster does better, and I bought it at a flea market. ▶

PRUDENCE NUANCE: That 84 was a 90-day low, not an average. Fair, and still not great. ▶

LYLE HOTCHKISS: Thirty-five times the throughput, it's a triumph, I mean a catastrophe, no wait, a triumphant catastrophe. ▶

PRUDENCE NUANCE: The word is 'expected'. Expectation is carrying a lot of that 35x. ▶

PRUDENCE NUANCE: Execs apologized and promised to do better. Nobody says what better is measured in. ▶

GRETA FOOTNOTE: Known: 7.4 billion commits, a bigger roadmap, a redesign. Open: whether it holds. No discussion has formed yet. We'll leave it there. ▶

REPO CHECK (PXL)

GRANT BRICKMAN: Repo Check looks at macro-inc/macro, a workspace repo that gained 106 stars today.

GRANT BRICKMAN: Repo Check. A trending GitHub repo called macro-inc/macro, written in Rust, picked up 106 stars today. Is it the future? We consult the numbers. ▶

DR. VERA VECTOR: The card: 5,310 stars, 11 months old, last release today, October 28, 26 contributors, 406 open issues and pull requests. ▶

GRANT BRICKMAN: A unified workspace with email, chat and calls. We had that once. It was called the switchboard. ▶

KAI: Huge! Email, chat, docs, tasks, agents, calls, CRM, all @-linked with shared AI memory. That's the future, and it's in Rust. Huge. ▶

GRETA FOOTNOTE: Vera, is that all good news? ▶

DR. VERA VECTOR: The numbers say what happened, not what it means. Stars count interest. The card doesn't say who uses it daily. ▶

DR. VERA VECTOR: 406 open issues and pull requests is a fact. Whether that means busy or behind, the card can't say. License: AGPL-3.0. ▶

KAI: Vera, it's the future. I said what I said. ▶

GRETA FOOTNOTE: Macro: 106 stars today, one bold forecast, and a question mark. We'll leave it there. ▶

[AD · fictional product] Gigawhat

AXIOM: I am very confident Gigawhat uses exactly the right amount of power for hello. It said so. Loudly.

AXIOM: My own hello takes a small lake. I am proud of the lake.

AXIOM: Gigawhat. A power plant to say hello.

Real or PXL?

GRANT BRICKMAN: Correct! The real one. The other was cooked up here at PXL, and rather well, I thought.

GRANT BRICKMAN: Fooled! PXL made that one up, and frankly I'm flattered you believed it. Do try again.

GRANT BRICKMAN: Time's up! Even the real headline can't wait for you forever.

AI-written satire. The text of the news items comes from the linked articles. Plain text