Mentioned in today’s edition: Python, OpenAI, Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, Palantir, Jensen Huang and Windows 98. Plus, deals on Elgato mic arms, Samsung Frame TVs and AMD CPUs.

The News

What's the point of sharing your code with conditions if someone can instantly rip it off with AI?

Since its creation in 2006, the Python library chardet has been available under a specific license (Tuananh). Last week, one of its maintainers (but not the original creator) put out an updated version that was completely rewritten by an LLM. As a result of the rewrite, he said it would now be subject to a new, more permissive license (GitHub). Its original creator responded by saying that, no, this violated the original license because the LLM had "exposure to the originally licensed code" (GitHub). 

The Sizzle: Open source project drama is nothing new, but this is a preview of a bigger fight that we're going to see more often. If you wanted to build something that can detect character encoding, you could use chardet but it comes with the condition of using its rules. That's supposed to encourage people to share work in the knowledge that they can set the terms for how it's used.

But what happens when the cost of creating your own is suddenly more or less the same as using the existing one? You see something you like, you rip it off at a marginal cost, technically it's different because it's "rewritten" and then you use whatever rules you want. Great for you, but what about the person who made the code in the first place? Certainly it doesn't encourage them to share their code in the future, or for anyone else who wants to set limits. While this sort of thing was always technically possible, the friction of having to do a full rewrite was one of the safeguards against this behaviour. AI reducing the cost of reverse engineering and producing the near-identical copies of anything that you can get your hands on — open source code now, next proprietary software, books, movies, you name it — is a challenge to the systems that encourage people to build and share things.  

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Hello data centres, welcome to war

Data centres have officially become strategically important military targets (Guardian). Three Amazon Web Services data centres were attacked last week, with an Iranian news outlet reporting that Amazon and Microsoft infrastructure were intentionally targeted (FT, $). It's unlikely that these data centres were doing significant work for the military — those types of data centres tend to be smaller and hidden away — but their destruction would cause disruption, even if traffic can be routed elsewhere.

Naturally, cyber attacks have been a big part of the US-Iran conflict (The Record) and the US military is increasingly relying on AI to help sort through intelligence like satellite images, radar and communication interceptions (WSJ, gift link). 

Also on AI news: OpenAI and Oracle have ditched one part of their "flagship" Project Stargate data centre project (Bloomberg, $) eyes emoji. And here are two fun, dystopian AI testing stories that came out over the weekend: Alibaba's new model freed itself and started secretly mining crypto (Axios) and Claude realized it was being tested, found an answer key, then built software to hack it (Reddit).

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Most silicone phone cases are too grippy. I am not a crank.

Testing out the new Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, reviewer Ben Schoon had one complaint (9to5Google): the official silicone phone case was way too grippy. Schoon said that it's actually legitimately difficult to get in and out of his pocket, and he's had the same issue with Google Pixel cases since the Pixel 8. This made me realise that I ditched the silicone cases in part because I, too, hate doing the 'wiggling my phone out of my pocket' dance. As a result, I'm rolling with a hard plastic case on my iPhone 17 Pro (which I don't love). 

What kind of phone case do you use? I'd love to hear what phone case material you're rocking, and if you've ever felt like you're fighting with a plunger while trying to extract your phone.

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Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of World:

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Oh, Also

A madman has built a M&M-based programming language

Some complete maniac has built an entire coding language using M&Ms. Here's how it works: there are just six letters (for each colour of M&M). Each colour represents a family of instructions, i.e. yellow for math, green for stack and variables. The number of candies put together determines which specific command or whatever in the family. Code compiles by printing an image file made from the M&M sprites (however the author notes that it will not work if you "dump a bag of candy on a messy kitchen table and take a dramatic iPhone shot"). Here's the GitHub if you're sick enough to give it a whirl. 

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Bargains

Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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