Episode Details

Today's topics:

Driverless USB Wi‑Fi via Pico - An open-source firmware turns a Raspberry Pi Pico W into a driverless USB Wi‑Fi adapter using standard CDC-NCM, improving compatibility for embedded and legacy hosts.

SQL-native stats with DuckDB - The-stats-duck v0.6.0 brings profiling, regression, resampling, and richer plotting into DuckDB SQL, making analytics workflows faster and more reproducible.

Security triage in LLM era - Filippo Valsorda argues coordinated disclosure norms are strained by LLM-generated vulnerability noise, shifting priorities to verification, triage, and prevention in CI.

AI evals as a business - A critique of selling AI model evaluations explains why “evals as a service” struggles—thin buyers, talent drift, and benchmark gaming—while tooling and safety audits may endure.

World-models for AI agents - Qwen-AgentWorld proposes training language world models on interaction trajectories to simulate environments for planning, with a new benchmark to measure agent reasoning improvements.

The invention of red squiggles - A memorial to Word developer Tony Krueger highlights how background spellcheck and red squiggles shaped modern editor UX, improving writing without interrupting flow.

Rule-based generative city map - Jerry’s Map shows decades-long, rule-driven generative art built from thousands of panels and chance-based instructions—an analog ancestor to procedural worldbuilding.

Cat-borne fungus spreading risk - Scientists warn Sporothrix brasiliensis, a cat-transmitted fungus, is expanding geographically and could reach the U.S., raising veterinary and public-health surveillance needs.