Monday, 12 October 2026
Nobel Prize to Robert Hall and Michael Woodford, AI coding tools behind 81% of production outages, and post-quantum migration timeline tightens
Engineering
royfish.dev
Fingerprints Are the New Cookies
The author says browser fingerprinting now replaces third-party cookies for advertisers. Google decisions caused this shift, and the author says it harms personal privacy. Fingerprints use hardware and software traits, such as GPU, screen, fonts, and audio. These traits identify a device, even after cookies are cleared or a VPN is used. The author says only protections built into the browser engine work reliably.
LeadDev
AI Code Causes Real World Production Outages
Undo surveyed 300 senior engineering leaders at large companies in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK). 81% of leaders said artificial intelligence (AI) coding tools caused a production incident or outage in six months. More than 90% reported serious defects that reached production. 93% said an AI hallucination led to a wrong root cause diagnosis. 79% said release cycles are no faster than before AI. Engineers spend 16.9 hours a week to debug code, and 9.8 hours to write code.
Filippo Valsorda
(Post-Quantum) Cryptographic Right Answers
Filippo Valsorda updates the Cryptographic Right Answers series, a set of security guides for developers. The author says the post-quantum timeline changed in early 2026. Experts agree that the migration must finish by 2029. Asymmetric cryptography must move to post-quantum algorithms first. Symmetric cryptography stays sound, because Grover's algorithm does not seriously weaken it. The article gives advice for each primitive and tells developers to use established libraries.
GitHub / QGIS
QGIS Bans AI-Assisted Contributions
QGIS merged QEP428, a proposal that bans AI-assisted contributions. The ban replaces the earlier AI policy, which did not work in practice. Maintainers cite the review burden from AI-generated submissions. The author calls the ban a starting point. Exceptions can be considered later, case by case. Some reviewers ask whether the ban covers issue text, documentation, and review tools.
ClickHouse Blog
Postgres Isn't Slow. Your Storage Is.
Sai Srirampur, at POSETTE 2026, showed that storage often limits PostgreSQL performance at scale. In a benchmark, local NVMe reached 16,030 transactions per second, against 1,734 on AWS EBS. Local NVMe data disappears with its machine, so the talk proposes cluster-level replication and independent backups.
Humanities
Aeon
Is Everything Conscious?
Sam Kimpton-Nye argues that the principle of sufficient reason can support panpsychism. The principle says that every fact has an intelligible explanation. Panpsychism says that consciousness is a basic feature of matter. Physical descriptions do not explain subjective experience. Mørch argues that fundamental physical properties may be mental. The author doubts full intelligibility is possible, but panpsychism is worth considering.
JSTOR Daily
Why English Colonists Called Indigenous Dogs Wolves
Historian Strother E. Roberts says two large canines reported near Plymouth Colony in 1621 were Indigenous dogs. English writers called them wolves. Their view denied that Indigenous peoples could domesticate animals, which helped settlers describe Indigenous peoples as uncivilized and justify their dispossession.