Daily Tech News 5 September 2026

Top Story

• Bob is back. (IBM)
  
  This time as an AI-assisted coding tool from IBM, rather than... Bob.
  

Tech News

• I hope there's a certain amount of sibling rivalry between Claude Opus and Fable; I just gave Opus access to a complete history of my personal blog where I am complimentary to it and much less so to Fable.
  
  And even less so to OpenAI, to be fair.
  
  Which is to say, Minx 2.0 is finally under way. The database and language limitations that blocked me - there's no database that works the way I need and no language with the set of tradeoffs I want - are gone. I didn't have enums or multi-valued indexes or sharded search in MySQL, and while Python is not bad, making it fast is a juggling act.
  
  So I built my own.
  
  Aiming for a release on my own blog on the 21st followed by wider availability once it's proven itself.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile work continues on porting Hack to a 1983 10-bit imaginary home computer. The level generation took 15 seconds initially, but chasing down the code paths in the Basic runtime plus a few clever software optimisations got that down to about 500 milliseconds. It blinks and the new level appears - but that blinking is doing magic, because high-resolution text display really taxes the memory bus and it's the trick of hiding the map that allows it to be drawn so fast.
  
  
  
  
  
• Lenovo being Lenovo. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If you have a Lenovo account - which I do - and a Dropbox account - which I do - you might also have some bad news - which I personally do not.
  
  
  
• Coder's (the company's) security registry infrastructure was compromised. (Bleeping Computer)

  The Coder platform enables organizations to provide developers with secure, self-hosted cloud development environments for building and deploying software, including AI applications.

  "Secure."

  The project is used by prominent private and government organizations, including Dropbox, Palantir, Square, Mercedes-Benz, KKR, EnBW, the U.S. government, and defense companies.

  Dropbox needs to find better partners to work with.
  
  
  
• Burnt out on a three day week. (Jenny Wanger)
  
  AI slop or just regular slop? You decide!
  
  I'm burnt out on a two day week right now, in the sense that across Monday and Tuesday I clocked a full week's worth of hours.
  
  
  
• AMD has unveiled a new home computer. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not one you put inside your home. It costs $150,000. You buy one instead of a home.