This weak we’re looking at supply chains. We look at how AI is both a blessing and a curse for open source, how there’s a new sandworm attacking the npm ecosystem, how de-Americanisation of cloud is not easy and we also learn about an exciting new Agile certification. Sarcasm may be involved. Semantic Ablation But let’s start with something that puts a name to that feeling you get when you read an AI-generated wall of text and at the end of it, you feel like there has been relatively little meaning in what you’ve just read.

This week we’re looking at the impact of drugs on viruses, drugs on AI models, drug-addled bot behaviour and how the mainstream is catching up with AI Agent concerns. Oh, and some badly-drawn horses. Drugs The first bit of news comes from over the pond, where it looks like the Trumpian regime is looking to piss away vaccine advances. Flu vaccines are saving millions of lives, and an improvement in efficacy would be a good thing.

This week, we’re having a bit of a wild west theme to the GenAI related links. There’s continuing hype around OpenClaw - though it looks more like a hangover than a party. We’ve also got some interesting use cases for GenAI that are directly not related to coding and we’ll end up with a cryptic warning from a siren. The Good I’d like to start off with a couple of links relating what is feasible with GenAI:

This was the week when the autonomous AI bots went a bit crazy and decided to burn tokens on social media. Moltbook is so hot it leaves behind molten agents. Well, no, stop there Gerald, people will start thinking you are using an LLM to do your writing. Of course, there’s a decent sprinkling of security issues where once again the usual suspects prove that security vendors are bad at securing software.

It’s been a busy week, hasn’t it. Fascism is on the rise and AI too. But it’s not all bad news… (touches earpiece) I’m receiving new information. Aaaanyway. This week we’re looking at mad and bad. We’re looking at how magic strings and parameter injection can be bad, how mad AI coding is and how bad people make me mad. Telnet? In 2026? First of all, we’re reminded that running old services can be rather dangerous.

This week’s installment of my LinkBlog covers old tech that is new, operational tech that is secure, observability that is not expensive and a series of vulnerabilities for us to snigger at, then take a breath and take seriously. Mainframes are not dead I have often said that learning COBOL is on my bucket list and that my advice for young people in the software engineering sector is that learning how to program mainframes would be quite profitable as the current cohort of greybeards retire, and nobody understands anymore how the thing that holds banks and insurances and government together actually works.