Geek News Central

In this episode, Ray Cochrane leads with GitHub’s worst reliability month on record and the AI infrastructure pressure behind it. He also covers Warp going open source, Apple’s Mac supply crunch, OpenAI’s goblin tic, the first 1X humanoid factory in the US, Tesla’s Semi finally hitting mass production, Chinese EVs with movie-projecting headlights, the final GPS III satellite, and a quantum researcher who won 1 Bitcoin.

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Full Summary

Cochrane opens the show with one of the biggest infrastructure stories of the year. GitHub is buckling under unprecedented agentic load, and the world’s largest code host just had its worst reliability month on record. Furthermore, the broader episode threads a clear pattern: AI demand is reshaping infrastructure, hardware supply, and developer tooling in ways the industry did not see coming.

GitHub’s Worst Reliability Month on Record

GitHub CTO Vlad Fedorov posted an apology on the company blog this week. He acknowledged the platform’s recent failures and committed to a new priority order: availability first, then capacity, then features. Meanwhile, an April 23 merge queue regression silently produced wrong squash commits across 658 repositories and over 2,000 pull requests. Additionally, an Elasticsearch cluster crashed on April 27 after a botnet attack, and GitHub Actions went down on April 28.

Outside reconstructions put April uptime under 85 percent. However, GitHub’s own status page stays in the 99 percent range because it does not count degraded performance as downtime. Cochrane notes that GitHub originally planned a 10x capacity increase and has now revised that to 30x in eight months. Mitchell Hashimoto, GitHub user 1299 since 2008, also announced he is pulling his Ghostty terminal off the platform entirely.

Warp Terminal Goes Open Source Under AGPL

Warp open-sourced its AI-first terminal client this week under the AGPL license. Their contribution model leans heavily on agents handling code, planning, and testing while humans focus on direction and verification. However, Cochrane pushes back on that framing. He argues the recent GitHub problems show that human approval alone is not enough oversight for agent-driven workflows. Additionally, he notes that the more hands-off developers get, the less they can mentally model their own systems.

Apple Caught Flat-Footed by Local AI Demand

Tim Cook told Wall Street on the Q2 FY2026 earnings call that Mac mini and Mac Studio supply will be constrained for several months. Both machines turned out to be popular local AI workstations, which Apple did not predict. Consequently, Apple discontinued the 512GB Mac Studio upgrade in early March and raised the 256GB upgrade by $400. Some upgraded configurations now show 4 to 5 month delivery estimates.

Cochrane connects the demand spike to the OpenClaw wave and his own recent OpenClaw scare, where his install started making suspicious outbound requests. Furthermore, he is in no rush to lean into local agentic tooling given the constant prompt injection and security issues in the space.

OpenAI Explains the Goblin Obsession

After GPT-5.1 launched, ChatGPT users noticed the model could not stop saying “goblin.” OpenAI traced the bias to the optional Nerdy personality, which was 2.5 percent of all responses but produced 66.7 percent of all goblin mentions. The reward signal during personality training quietly favored creature metaphors. Then the bias leaked into the rest of the model through later supervised fine-tuning.

OpenAI retired Nerdy in March, filtered creature words from training data, and added an explicit Codex system prompt rule: never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, or pigeons. Cochrane frames this as the beauty and disaster of pattern matching. Additionally, he notes that LLM behavior is not editable like static code; it can only be patched, and the patches stack up over time.

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1X Opens America’s First Vertically Integrated Humanoid Factory

Bloomberg reports that 1X Technologies opened a 58,000 square foot humanoid robot factory in Hayward, California. The Norway-founded, OpenAI-backed company is calling it America’s first vertically integrated humanoid factory. Their goal: 10,000 NEO home humanoids in year one, with a 100,000 unit target by end of 2027. Furthermore, the first 10,000 unit allocation reportedly sold out in five days when pre-orders opened in October. NEO sells for $20,000 outright or $499 per month.

Cochrane is skeptical that humanoids solve a real problem for the average household. However, he sees genuine potential for elderly and disabled users. Additionally, he flags privacy and data collection concerns about robots that have to perceive everything in your home.

Tesla Semi Rolls Off the High-Volume Line

Tesla rolled the first Semi off its 1.7 million square foot factory adjacent to Gigafactory Nevada on April 29. The Long Range version delivers 500 miles at $290,000, while the Standard Range hits 325 miles at $260,000. Additionally, the Long Range supports the 1.2 megawatt Megacharger that restores 60 percent of range in about 30 minutes. The factory targets 50,000 trucks per year, though analysts project 5,000 to 15,000 deliveries in 2026.

Cochrane opens with a recent personal experience. He saw a semi truck on the freeway with the entire cabin removed from the engine, an unusual failure mode he had never seen before. Furthermore, he questions the actual environmental benefit of electric trucking given grid sourcing and battery mineral concerns. The reveal was 2017, and high-volume production is now nine years after that announcement.

Chinese EVs With Headlights That Project Movies

Huawei’s XPixel headlight system can now project full-color movies up to 100 inches in front of the car. The technology debuted in full color on the Aito M9 and is rolling out across Stelato S9, Qijing GT7, and Luxeed V9 MPV. Additionally, the same hardware powers real safety features: adaptive driving beam, lane-change path projection, and pedestrian crossing direction signaling.

Meanwhile, US regulations only approved adaptive driving beam in February 2022. Pixel-addressable projection systems are not covered by current FMVSS rules at all. Consequently, even if these cars sold in the US, the headlights would have to be downgraded to be street legal.

The Final GPS III Satellite Reaches Orbit

SpaceX launched GPS III SV-10, the tenth and final GPS III satellite, on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral on April 21. GPS III delivers signals 3 times more accurate and 8 times more resistant to jamming than the previous constellation. It also adds the L1C signal, which interoperates with Galileo, BeiDou, IRNSS, and QZSS, plus M-code military encryption.

Up next, GPS IIIF launches start in 2027 with up to 22 satellites deploying through about 2037. IIIF adds laser inter-satellite links and optical reflectors for centimeter-level satellite tracking. Cochrane loves this kind of quiet infrastructure win that powers global economics without anyone noticing it.

Researcher Wins 1 Bitcoin for a Quantum Attack on Crypto

Independent Italian researcher Giancarlo Lelli won Project Eleven’s 1 Bitcoin Q-Day Prize on April 24. He derived a 15-bit elliptic curve private key from its public key using a variant of Shor’s algorithm on rented cloud quantum hardware. Furthermore, the previous record was 6 bits, set in September 2025 on an IBM 133-qubit machine, so this extends the record by a factor of 512.

However, Bitcoin uses 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography, so real wallets are not at risk yet. Additionally, other researchers have pushed back on the result. Their criticism: a 15-bit search space is only 32,767 possibilities, which a laptop can brute-force in milliseconds. Project Eleven defends the milestone as a stepping stone for demonstrating Shor’s algorithm running end-to-end on real quantum hardware.

Gemini Now Generates Real Files

Google rolled out file generation for the Gemini app. Users can now generate PDFs, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, Google Workspace files, CSV, LaTeX, plain text, RTF, and Markdown directly from a chat prompt. Additionally, files can be downloaded to device or exported straight to Google Drive. The feature is globally available to all Gemini app users.

Google Illuminate Turns Papers Into Podcasts

Google Illuminate is the experimental Labs tool that converts academic papers into roughly five-minute two-voice podcast-style audio. Generation takes about 30 seconds, with a 20-per-day cap and a 30-day library. Additionally, transcripts are interactive and clickable for jumping to specific moments. Cochrane likes it as an index for triaging papers but pushes back on using it to replace deep reading. He argues that real technical material like clustering logic needs a real read, not a summary by AI podcasters.

Cochrane closes with show housekeeping and a callout to Pocket Casts and True Fans as solid modern podcast apps. Have a great night, and happy June.

The post GitHub, Goblins, Ghostty, and GPS III #1863 appeared first on Geek News Central.

In this episode, Ray Cochrane unpacks Anthropic’s Mythos model and the Treasury’s emergency meetings with Wall Street, then digs into Apple’s vibe-coding crackdown and a gaming-anxiety study that hit way too close to home. Also covered: Verge’s solid-state motorcycle, UBTech humanoid robot sales jumping 23-fold, Japan’s first osmotic power plant, Finland’s permanent nuclear waste vault, Ghostty landing in Ubuntu, Cloudflare’s EmDash CMS, and a Claude Code skill that talks like a caveman.

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Full Summary

Cochrane opens the show by framing Anthropic’s new Mythos model as the AlphaGo moment for cybersecurity. From there, the episode moves through Apple’s pushback against AI-generated apps, a gaming anxiety study with a deeply personal hook, a series of “first to ship” energy and robotics wins out of Finland, China, and Japan, and several developer-tool stories that show how quickly the economics of software are shifting.

Mythos, the Detection Ceiling, and Wall Street’s Emergency Response

Anthropic’s Mythos model has Wall Street rattled. Operating autonomously, Mythos found and demonstrated the exploitation of a 27-year-old TCP SACK bug in OpenBSD, an operating system famous for being one of the most security-focused on the planet. Per Anthropic’s red team, over 99% of the vulnerabilities Mythos has identified remain unpatched. The researchers’ conclusion is blunt: “the moat in AI cybersecurity is the system, not the model.”

The policy response moved fast. On April 7th, Treasury Secretary Bessent and Fed Chair Jerome Powell pulled the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Citi, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley into Treasury headquarters on short notice. All four banks are now testing Mythos internally. Treasury CIO Sam Corcos is also seeking direct access. Anthropic is gating distribution through Project Glasswing, a limited-access program with JPMorgan, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia.

Cochrane comes down firmly behind Anthropic’s gated approach. Because a 5.1-billion-parameter open model can apparently recover the core analysis chain for the OpenBSD flaw, this capability is not locked behind Frontier Compute. He wants the critical infrastructure hardened before the public gets keys. However, he also notes the bigger lesson is about human wisdom: people offloading all their thinking to AI lose out on the wisdom that makes any of these tools genuinely useful.

Apple Bans Vibe Coding Apps from the App Store

Apple has been quietly pushing back against what people are calling “vibe coding” apps. Replit, Vibecode, and an app called Anything all run AI models on the phone and produce working software that runs inside the host app. Apple cites Guideline 2.5.2, in effect since 2017, which requires apps to be self-contained. Replit and Vibecode had their App Store updates blocked. Anything was pulled in late March, briefly restored on April 3rd, and then pulled the same day again.

The forcing function is volume. App Store submissions jumped 84% in a single quarter as vibe coding tools flooded Apple’s review queue with AI-generated apps. Cochrane thinks Apple is justified, given the security issues swirling around the Vibe coding ecosystem. Even a beautiful diamond gets lost in a sea of sand, and that flood is exactly what Apple is trying to manage. The company behind Anything is now pivoting to iMessage, desktop, and Android.

Playing Video Games to Win Is Linked to Higher Anxiety

Cochrane gets personal on this one. Through high school and his early 20s, he was deeply addicted to League of Legends. His dad teased him about it constantly. In the last few years of that addiction, his body would go ice cold and shake every ranked match before. His partner identified it as a panic attack. The moment that happened, he quit. Today, he no longer shakes.

The new study lines up with his experience. Researchers Kayleigh Watters and Mikael Rubin at Palo Alto University analyzed a publicly available database of 13,464 adult gamers, most of whom primarily played League of Legends. Players who game to win show higher generalized anxiety but actually play fewer hours, since performance pressure pushes them out. Players who game to relax show strong links between social anxiety avoidance and more hours played. The study appeared in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

The headline framing of “playing to win makes you anxious” misses the point. The real finding is more interesting: gaming for avoidance and gaming for competition are both warning signs, for different reasons. Cochrane notes that the League of Legends community’s toxicity has been a running joke for years, and this study suggests the game’s structure may have been manufacturing the anxiety that fueled it.

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Verge Motorcycle: World’s First Production All-Solid-State Battery

Cochrane filled his tank for $60 today, which made this story land especially hard. His mom has driven electric for years and patiently manages a 90-mile real-world range. The next-generation answer is already shipping. Verge Motorcycles, a Finnish company, is the first production vehicle of any kind with an all-solid-state battery. Their 2026 bikes ship in Q1 with a pack from Donut Lab, another Finnish outfit spun out of Verge.

The numbers are bonkers. The pack delivers an energy density of 400 Wh/kg, roughly double that of current Tesla cells. It sustains 100kW charging, hits full charge in about 5 minutes in the lab and 12 minutes on the actual bike, and the long-range version covers 600 kilometers (about 370 miles) per charge. Toyota, QuantumScape, and Samsung SDI have all been telling us that solid-state is coming in 2027 to 2030. A Finnish motorcycle company shipping in Q1 2026 just embarrassed them all.

UBTech Humanoid Robot Sales Jump 23-Fold

UBTech dropped its 2025 annual earnings on April 1st. Humanoid robot revenue hit 820 million yuan, roughly $119 million USD, up 2,203% from 35.6 million yuan the year before. Unit sales went from 3 robots in 2024 to 1,079 in 2025. Shares jumped 14% on the announcement. The customer list is a real industrial deployment: BYD, Foxconn, Geely, FAW-Volkswagen, and Audi. The flagship is the Walker S2, with UBTech targeting 5,000 units in 2026 and 10,000 in 2027.

Cochrane is honest about what this means. He does not think we are heading for an extinction event, but worker displacement is a real concern. The US has no universal income or universal healthcare. The people affected are not white-collar managers. They are everyday line workers who already make the least on the ladder. Work efficiency reportedly doubles when these robots arrive, which is a company-side win, but the humans they replace are not getting half a year of gardening leave to retrain. He invites the listener to take on this one directly.

Japan Switches On Asia’s First Osmotic Power Plant

In August 2025, Fukuoka’s Seawater Desalination Center quietly opened Asia’s first osmotic power facility. It generates about 880,000 kilowatt-hours per year, enough for roughly 220 homes. It is only the second operational osmotic plant in the world, after Mariager, Denmark, in 2023. Osmotic generation uses a salinity gradient: fresh water on one side of a membrane, salt water on the other, and the pressure difference spins a turbine.

The clever part is what Fukuoka does with desalination brine. Instead of regular seawater, the plant uses concentrated brine left over from the desalination process. This amplifies the salt gradient and squeezes more energy out of the same membrane. The result is a closed-loop partnership: the desalination facility produces drinking water and leaves brine behind, the osmotic plant turns the brine into electricity, and that electricity runs the desalination facility. Every desalination plant on Earth produces brine, so if Fukuoka’s co-located model works, the same pattern could be replicated across hundreds of plants worldwide.

Japan’s Luna Ring Solar Moon Proposal Goes Viral Again

Shimizu Corporation’s Luna Ring concept is making the rounds again. The pitch: a 6,800-mile belt of solar panels around the Moon’s equator, beaming microwave power back to Earth. Project lead Tetsuji Yoshida has long argued that a full ring could eliminate fossil fuel dependence entirely. The proposal first surfaced in 2013, has no funding, no government endorsement, and no concrete cost estimate. Shimizu has not put any active development behind it.

Cochrane finds the concept fun every time it resurfaces. However, this would have to be a worldwide effort in the truest sense, with treaties, a new generation of launch economics, and microwave power transmission at a scale nobody has demonstrated. Beaming the power back to Earth has always been one of the biggest practical holdbacks. The Luna Ring is inspirational, but not shipping.

Finland’s Onkalo Nuclear Waste Vault Opens

Finland’s Onkalo facility is the world’s first permanent deep geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel. Operated by Posiva, the facility is buried about 430 meters down in 1.9-billion-year-old bedrock. It is designed to hold up to 6,500 tons of spent fuel and operate until the 2120s. The construction costs about €1 billion, with operating and closure adding roughly €4 billion more before the program is done.

The catch is that radioactivity remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years. Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, warned that the copper canisters will eventually corrode, with different scientific opinions on how fast. Geologic disposal remains “fraught with uncertainties,” and we have never validated an engineered system across a 100,000-year time frame. The bet is that the rock and copper outlast the radioactivity.

Cochrane sees Onkalo as time-buying rather than a final answer. It is more of a bank holding spent fuel while science catches up. He prefers it to Japan’s ongoing approach of releasing tritium-treated water from Fukushima Daiichi into the Pacific, even though the dilution is well below WHO drinking water guidelines. Burying the waste in an insurmountable containment strikes him as the more honest answer to a problem nobody knows how to truly solve.

Ghostty Terminal Lands in the Ubuntu Repos

Ghostty 1.3.0 is now available in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS’s universe repository. The install is simply `sudo apt install ghostty`, no PPAs, no Snap, no Nix, no building from source. Ghostty was created by Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp. It is GPU-accelerated, uses native Swift on macOS and native GTK4 with libadwaita on Linux, and supports tabs, splits, profiles, ligatures, and the Kitty graphics protocol.

Cochrane recently caught Hashimoto on a podcast, where he walked through his agentic coding workflow. Ghostty is being actively built using AI harnesses like Claude Code and Codex. Hashimoto told a story in which Codex fixed a six-month-old bug in 45 minutes, for a total API cost of $4.14. Personally, Cochrane uses WezTerm, but he is excited to see Ghostty become more widely available with a native UI rather than Electron.

Borgo: Rethinking Go Using Rust

Analytics India Magazine profiled Borgo, a programming language by developer Marco Sampellegrini (GitHub: alpacaaa). Borgo is statically typed with Rust-like syntax, but it compiles to Go and uses the Go runtime and garbage collector. It includes sum types (Option and Result), pattern matching, and full compatibility with existing Go packages. Notably, it removes Rust’s borrow checker and lifetimes entirely.

Borgo is not new. It first appeared on Hacker News in 2023, with a RustLab talk in 2024. The 2026 angle is a renewed look at it through the lens of AI coding agents, since type-rich languages like Rust have been showing outsized productivity gains. Cochrane is a fan of Rust and stands by the borrow checker, but he enjoys these exploratory languages for what they reveal about what developers actually want.

Caveman: A Claude Code Skill That Cuts 65% of Tokens

Developer Julius Brussee built a Claude Code skill called Caveman that forces Claude to respond in stripped-down fragments. No articles, no “just,” no “really,” no pleasantries, no hedging. The tagline is “why use many token when few token do trick.” Across 10 real dev tasks, Caveman mode averaged 294 tokens per response, compared to 1,214 in normal mode. That is a 65% drop in output tokens. The project is MIT licensed with three intensity levels: lite, full, and ultra.

Cochrane stumbled across the project online and shared it with a classmate who had been complaining about token costs. The classmate now insists that “the caveman is the only way to live.” Cochrane has not made the switch, but the bigger point lands. If a community plugin can cut 65% of tokens without correctness regressions, the labs are shipping verbose-by-default and charging users for the privilege. He suspects verbose output makes models feel more trustworthy, even when the token math says otherwise.

Cloudflare Launches EmDash as a WordPress Successor

Cloudflare released EmDash on April 9th, an open-source, MIT-licensed, TypeScript-based CMS pitched as the spiritual successor to WordPress. The big flex is that it was built in 60 days using AI coding agents. EmDash runs on Astro 6.0, either on Cloudflare’s edge platform or on a standard Node.js server. The plugin security model uses sandboxed Dynamic Workers with explicit permissions, addressing the architecture flaw that Cloudflare says causes 96% of WordPress vulnerabilities.

Cochrane could not resist pointing out the irony of the name. The em dash has become the trademark giveaway that an AI was involved in writing. He has reservations about whether EmDash will succeed. WordPress is extremely hard to unseat, plenty of “WordPress killers” have come and gone, and the ecosystem is twenty-plus years deep. He is curious to see what comes next but not optimistic.

Google Open-Sources the DESIGN.md Format

Google Labs open-sourced the DESIGN.md format used by Stitch, their AI UI design tool. DESIGN.md is a declarative file capturing a project’s design system, colors, typography, and spacing in a way AI agents can read and apply. Cochrane has tried Stitch personally and finds it impressive at producing web designs. He has also seen DESIGN.md-style files already start appearing in repositories.

He sees this kind of file becoming a new paradigm for agentic design, alongside robots.txt and llms.txt. However, he worries about a side effect. If everyone uses the same standardized format and the same AI tools, the web could become a homogeneous set of sites that all look the same. He is enthusiastic about the standardization but hopes designers continue to push for genuinely unique work.

A 13-Liter PC With a Water Loop Built Into the Case

Geeky Gadgets covered a build by “Visual Thinker”, a 13-liter mini-ITX case with custom SLA-printed water distribution plates built directly into the chassis. Instead of traditional soft tubing, plates channel coolant between the CPU and GPU blocks and are sealed with TPU and silicone molds. The case supports a full-size GPU and an SFX power supply. No thermal benchmarks, parts list, or pricing have been published. It is a one-off you cannot buy.

Cochrane sees this as a sign of where PC building has gone in 2026. Modern mid-grade GPUs run nearly every recent game, so raw performance is no longer the differentiator. He likes seeing builders lean into design and craft rather than just stuffing the most powerful parts into a box. He admits he is the traditional type and built his own machine to maximize parts, but the design-first direction is a healthy evolution for the hobby.

To close out the show, Cochrane recommends Pocket Casts as a podcast app. He finds it picks up new episodes very quickly. Big thanks to GoDaddy for over twenty years of keeping this show on the air, and a reminder that every promo code use is like writing a check to the show.

The post Mythos: Cybersecurity’s AlphaGo Moment #1862 appeared first on Geek News Central.