DDoS

A generally disgusting week if you too are tired of constant AI updates.

Twenty Eighth International Obfuscated C Code Contest - August 4, 2025

Starting off with something delightful, yet another IOCCC has come and gone. This is a really great hacking competition where you can actually see outside-the-box thinking in its purest form and you should definitely check this and prior years out. That of course encourages Hackers to talk about its entries, offering insightful commentary such as "pretty cool!" and "neat" and even sometimes "wow". This is how the (potentially) final frontier of distinctly human programming is treated, with grughead applause.

Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade no-crawl directives - August 5, 2025

An AI wants to access your data regardless of your consent. The AI company claims the crawler is not even theirs and Cloudflare is just trying to entrench itself as the "AI solution for your website", which it definitely is. We have talked about this before in the context of AI summarizing your article (many times without citing it) and you losing out revenue or visitors, this is simply an extra step in which the AI bypasses your defenses. Hackers try to think of a way to go with the way of the future while also creating a carve-out for their specific usecase, such as using their own AI "fetchers" that "should be allowed" in order to summarize a website's content. This subject will be doubtlessly discussed time and again so we're leaving it here for now.

Open models by OpenAI - August 6, 2025

OpenAI used to be rather open, hence the name. Then it became rather closed, and now it's opening (some of) its models for the world to use. Hackers rejoice at the thought and spend time discussing what they can't wait to do next with AI, such as put the AI on their phones. The discourse, much like the OICCC is to the extent of "that's so cool".

Claude Code IDE integration for Emacs - August 7, 2025

Your favorite OS gets an AI integration. Hackers believe this is actually a really good idea, making their exposure or lack thereof to Emacs and people that use Emacs obvious for all to see. Some Hackers think that the emacs community lashing out at this news is "hurtful" and "counter-intuitive", ignoring the fact that these are people that use Emacs in 2025.

GPT-5 - August 8, 2025

An AI is out. It may be good, or it may not be good. Hackers talk about how it may be good, or it may not be good. Some Hackers say "we won't know if it's good or not good yet, but here's what I believe". Other Hackers talk about the future, while others talk about the present.