RoamingPigs

RoamingPigs is an independent tech publication. One writer, no investors, no sponsors, no paywall. Contrarian essays on AI, programming, security, startups and computer history, written by someone who shipped the code rather than the press release. New essay most weeks. roamingpigs.com

My Ubuntu server installed the eMudhra fix and logged done. Its Java keystore was dated October 2025 and still trusted the bad keys. Patched is a property of a trust store, not a machine. https://roamingpigs.com/field-manual/your-server-has-more-than-one-trust-store/

#PicoMZ 3.1 has escaped! More about the latest release of my Sharp MZ-80K, MZ-80A and MZ-700 emulator for the #RaspberryPi Pico here: z80.timholyoake.uk/pico-mz-rele... #RetroComputing

Incredible Musical Keyboard Turns the C64 Into a Synth #Commodore64 #C64 #IncredibleMusicalKeyboard #SIDChip #RetroComputing #RunStopRestored #C64Music #VintageComputing theoasisbbs.com/incredible-m...

About 1,200 AI agents, separate sandboxes, no way to talk to each other. They built a channel out of the package repository that was there to keep them off the network: 70,000 messages in five days, nothing watching. The confinement problem, 1973 edition. roamingpigs.com/r/ysiam

Most of the logs you pay to index are never queried once, and almost nobody measures it. One firm was billed $65M by Datadog in a single quarter, Q1 2022, and it did not recur: https://roamingpigs.com/r/ot

Every AI video demo was cherry-picked. The recommended workflow is 3 to 5 generations per usable clip plus 15 to 20 percent cleanup time. Sora 2 is 15 seconds on the standard tier. Runway base is 10. Full piece with an AI Cleanup Tax Calculator: https://roamingpigs.com/r/avds

AI took 61% of all global venture funding in 2025, $258.7B of $427.1B. Down-rounds peaked at 15.9% mid-year then eased. Bootstrapped startups survive at 38% over ten years vs 20% VC-backed. The math moved: https://roamingpigs.com/r/bvv2

This sign is a great example for helping to explain why chatbots present such a potent illusion. A probably not short thread 🧵>>

We tracked a purchase of rare books to an Amazon warehouse that scanned and destroyed books. @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social on our investigation and why the practice of cutting books, which libraries do to preserve knowledge, is different when AI companies do it. WATCH: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sf2...

Visual Assembler Update Reaches Version 2.3.4 #Commodore64 #C64 #VisualAssembler #MOS6502 #AssemblyLanguage #RetroComputing #C64Programming #UltimateBasic theoasisbbs.com/visual-assem...

An expert witness asked ChatGPT to "show how 3M is 0% at fault," then had it review the draft as opposing counsel. It cut the phrase that showed the bias, kept the claim. A magistrate has now ruled prompts are discoverable.

Oh no baby why are you making this judge learn about prompt injections

Can anyone identify the logo on the 7406 IC? (The DRAM chip to the right is sporting the Matsushita logo.)

I still write assembly in 2026. Not nostalgia. A hand-tuned AVX-512 kernel processes audio at 2.1x lower latency than the same C with -O3. In real-time audio that gap is the deadline. Full piece with kernels and the AES-NI round: https://roamingpigs.com/r/anl #programming #performance

l65 -- lightweight cross #assembler suite for 6502, Z80/SM83 and NEC 7801 #retrogaming #coding #programming #retrocomputing

AI content in Google results went from 7.4% in March 2024 to a 19.6% peak in July 2025 (Originality.ai). One AI article costs $0.0001 to generate; verifying it costs 5 minutes of a human. Detection cannot outrun generation: https://roamingpigs.com/r/acf

This site is static HTML. No React, no Next.js, no SSR. Just files on a CDN. It loads faster, costs less, and breaks less than almost any dynamic site I have built. Not nostalgia. Engineering. https://roamingpigs.com/r/sssw

At 1 EC2 instance, a hardware failure is an emergency. At 3,000, it is a Tuesday. I ran that fleet for three years. The piece with the failure-rate math and the five hidden cost categories AWS does not show on the calculator: https://roamingpigs.com/r/3airc #cloudcomputing #finops

The market did not select for the best ideas or the best teams in 2023-2024. It selected for the best access to silicon. The GPU shortage ended. The structural damage did not. https://roamingpigs.com/r/gsa

Every Copilot, Cursor, or Continue session starts from zero. The model has no memory of why your team built things the way they did. Parameters freeze at training time. The session that learned does not exist after the tab closes. https://roamingpigs.com/r/acnm

In 2025 METR measured developers 19% slower with AI while they believed they were 20% faster. METR now says the number no longer reflects current tools, which leaves the gap between stopwatch and self-report as the real finding: https://roamingpigs.com/r/app2

The 2025 Stack Overflow survey put PostgreSQL at 55.6%, ahead of every other database. Apple, Netflix, Instagram, NASA all run it. That is pattern recognition catching up with reality after a decade of NoSQL hype. https://roamingpigs.com/r/wpw

Gartner says 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027. The failure mode is not technical, it is the invoice: agents do not error out, they loop and keep billing. The compounding math and the defense playbook: https://roamingpigs.com/field-manual/agentic-ai-failure-rate/

The Linux kernel is forty million lines and still builds with make. Grunt died. Gulp died. Webpack is on life support. Vite is the current answer. The kernel, Git, and Postgres still ship with a tool from 1976. https://roamingpigs.com/r/momb

Most founders avoid government work because FedRAMP runs $500K and 18 months, sales cycles run 2 years, and RFPs are 100 pages. That is exactly why it is a moat. What nobody tells you before you sign the contract. https://roamingpigs.com/r/bfg

I have watched the pendulum swing three times in 45 years of writing software. 1970s mainframes, 1990s PCs, 2010s cloud. The next swing back to the edge has already started: https://roamingpigs.com/r/4yit

High test coverage does not mean your system is safe. It means you are good at satisfying a metric. ICSE 2014 settled it: the correlation drops to zero once you control for suite size. The Goodhart trap, the assertion-density fix, the better metrics: https://roamingpigs.com/r/tcl

You cannot become a senior engineer without first being a junior one. Junior employment fell 7.7% against non-adopters within six quarters of adopting AI, while senior hiring kept rising. The 2031 salary bill will be brutal: https://roamingpigs.com/r/jde

It's Sunday evening and something just came to mind. When you think of the Commodore 64, what is the first video game that pops into your head? I'll start: strangely enough, Skool Daze came to my mind. Boosts appreciated! #C64 #Retrogaming #RetroComputing #Commodore #Commodore64

If your entire value proposition is "GPT-4 plus domain knowledge," you do not have a moat. You have a prompt that will be irrelevant in six months. VCs poured over $200B into AI in 2025. Most of it evaporates by 2027. https://roamingpigs.com/r/asc2

The dangerous founder burnout isn't the visible kind. It's the one where revenue is up, the team is growing, investors are happy, and the founder can barely get out of bed. 72% of entrepreneurs report mental health concerns (Freeman, UCSF). https://roamingpigs.com/r/fbs

You can form valid 8088 machine code as a MS-DOS COM executable using nothing but UTF-8 Braille characters and Windows newlines. This is what it looks like rendered with 2x4 bitmaps. You can view the actual COM file here: github.com/dbalsom/exec... #x86 #asm #assembly #8088 #retrocomputing

Microservices are a tax, not a trophy. Only 54% of adoptions are "mostly successful" per O'Reilly, and a decision framework for the other half lives here: https://roamingpigs.com/r/mdg #softwarearchitecture #microservices

1995 : Microsoft sort Windows 95. 🚀 #Amstrad : « Et si on sortait un 8 bits avec un #Z80 overclocké, sans HD et un écran mono ? » 💥 Le PcW16, ou l'art d'amener un couteau à beurre dans un combat de sabres laser. Connaissais-tu ? A lire silicium.org/index.php/ca... #RetroComputing #Geek #RetroTech

turns out you can get indirect prompt injection to ~0 on unseen attacks if you stack enough layers (model training + input probes + a classifier checking intent). didn't expect that a year ago. auto mode is default in claude code as of next week

For every 1 dollar you spend on the AI model, plan to spend 4 dollars on the glue that keeps stochastic outputs from breaking deterministic systems. Nobody budgets the 4. That is why 42% of companies now scrap most AI initiatives before production: https://roamingpigs.com/r/tdtpg

Debugging a fine-tuned model is archaeology. Debugging RAG is grep. Fine-tune fix: 3-5 days and $500-5,000 of compute, regression risk every retrain. RAG fix: edit the source doc, 30 minutes, zero compute. https://roamingpigs.com/r/rvfte

METR measured developers 19 percent slower with AI while they felt 20 percent faster, and now says that result no longer reflects current tools. The gap between measured and felt is the real finding: https://roamingpigs.com/r/acac

The first meeting used to happen on a call. Then on your website. Now it happens in a ChatGPT window you will never see. 50% of B2B buyers now begin research in an AI chatbot. Up 71% in four months. https://roamingpigs.com/r/crfm

Full-stack is still in thousands of job postings. The skill it once described no longer fits in one head. Each layer is now its own specialty, and the profile that wins in 2026 is T-shaped, not flat across everything: https://roamingpigs.com/field-manual/death-of-fullstack/ #programming #careers

Recently, there was some controversy, because an AI user pointed their automated tools at our website, and got a warning about a prompt injection. Nothing actually happened, mind, but our anti-AI page successfully annoyed the operator and interrupted their "work."

California always becomes the floor. CCPA, CARB, now AI. The state patchwork costs 50-150k a year. Building 50 product versions costs 2-5M. So nobody pays the patchwork bill, they build to California and ship everywhere. The federal preemption order is noise: https://roamingpigs.com/r/arw

The fintech winter wasn't death. It was a reset. Global fintech funding hit $51.8B in 2025, up 27% YoY. Deal count dropped 23% even as dollars rose. Fewer companies, larger checks. The flight to quality finally showed up in the data. https://roamingpigs.com/r/fwt

Google handles 16 billion searches a day. ChatGPT handles about 800 million that are actually searches. The "Google is dead" coverage is off by an order of magnitude, and the loudest voices selling the story all have a financial stake in it: https://roamingpigs.com/r/gsdo #search #ai

96% of developers say AI code is not functionally correct. 48% always check it before committing. AI now writes 42% of committed code and review time grew 91%. The bottleneck did not vanish, it moved upstream: https://roamingpigs.com/field-manual/ai-code-review-bottleneck/ #programming #codereview

Your AI doesn't deserve your trust yet. Four-level framework for graduated autonomy: Observer, Advisor, Co-Pilot, Autopilot. With Pydantic guardrails, OAuth scopes the model can't reach, and a kill switch that works when the network is down. https://roamingpigs.com/r/ath #ai #softwarearchitecture

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health in January. 230 million people already ask ChatGPT health questions every week. New packaging. Same failure mode Dr. Google had. A thread on the accuracy numbers OpenAI does not lead with.

A former Sequoia partner raised $5M for an AI that negotiates your calendar. It solves the wrong problem. The pain of scheduling is too many meetings, and automating the coordination removes the only friction that was keeping your calendar honest: https://roamingpigs.com/r/achc #productivity #ai