Saturday, 7 November 2026
AI is now accelerating its own research; Firecracker VM escape reaches host root; Soviet collapse and China's survival compared
Today's Lead
EngineeringPlanned Obsolescence
AI is dramatically accelerating AI research
Ajeya Cotra argues that artificial intelligence (AI) is already speeding up AI research. Anthropic's internal measurements show its capability progress ran about twice as fast from October 2025 to October 2026. An investigation by Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR) found that AI automation likely causes most of this speedup. Cotra warns that this fast feedback loop could create dangerous systems. She also says that AI companies lack the security needed to protect their model weights.
Engineering
Cloudflare Blog
The post-quantum future of web privacy
Cloudflare describes Privacy Pass, a system that lets websites limit client requests without user accounts. Privacy Pass relies on classical cryptography, so a quantum computer could forge its tokens. The authors present Moderation Of unLinkable Endorsements (MOLE), a new design that also hides the token issuer. Post-quantum values are much larger than classical values, so systems must be rebuilt. The authors combine a zero-knowledge proof method with multivariate signatures to make efficient post-quantum blind signatures. They say the designs are near practical use, pending security proofs and further analysis of the signature schemes.
pwn.ai
Firecracker VM Escape: PwnEscape Part 2
The article describes a guest-to-host escape in Firecracker, a lightweight virtual machine monitor. An attacker inside a guest changes a saved register frame of a virtual central processing unit (vCPU) thread. The changed thread then runs attacker-chosen code as root on the host.
Mitchell Hashimoto
Libghostty 1.0
Mitchell Hashimoto released libghostty-vt 1.0, a stable, portable C library for terminal emulation. The library and its application binary interface (ABI) now have strict compatibility promises. JetBrains now uses a libghostty-powered terminal in its integrated development environments (IDEs), which have over 12.5 million active users. Neovim approved a change that replaces libvterm with libghostty-vt, and its maintainers wait for a release. The library creates no threads and runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and WebAssembly. Hashimoto says a complete terminal can be built in about 1,500 lines of C.
Asahi Linux
Progress Report: Linux 7.3
The Asahi Linux project published its progress report for Linux 7.3. Two large drivers, for audio and video decoding, reached the Linux mailing list this cycle. The project also posted Thunderbolt support to the mailing list. The project will change its code license to GNU General Public License version 2 or later.
Humanities
Astral Codex Ten
Your Book Review: Orality and Literacy
Scott Alexander reviews Walter Ong's book Orality and Literacy. Ong argues that written text is a separate technology from speech, and that it changed how people remember and reason. Alexander says social media pulls modern culture back toward orality, and he urges readers to defend text as the main tool for deep thought.