Sunday link dump: Vibe cloning, so hot right now
Vibe
coded browser ports of Halo, The Simpsons: Hit And Run, GTA work
well by Lewis Parker. And the worst part is, at least where the
video game publishers will be concerned, some of these run
perfectly….It’s also extremely worrying that one of the four different
web browser ports of Halo: CE I played had working online servers…and my
ping was low.
AI-enabled
fraud cost Americans $148 billion in 2025 by JB Branch and Richard
Fiesta. The Consumer Federation of America estimates that Americans
lost $148 billion to online scams and crimes in 2025. That’s more than
$1,100 for every U.S. household and nearly a 26 percent increase from
the year prior.
(One of the biggest reasons behind this trend is
some deliberately fraud-friendly design and policy decisions at Google
and Meta.)
Bipartisan
bill barring U.S. purchase of Russian oil on the horizon: Pennsylvania
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick by Mira Bhakta. (Wasn’t this already illegal?
No, the 2022 ban contained an exception for the president to allow
energy that was already purchased before the legislation passed, or in
cases where the importation would be in the national interest.
)
Ukraine’s
drones knock out AI data center belonging to “Russia’s Google” by
Jeremy Hsu, Russia’s
Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight after Ukraine drone
strikes cripple multiple of ‘Russia’s Google’ data centers by Jowi
Morales. Russian bot traffic has dropped dramatically in the past few
days after Ukraine knocked out Yandex’s biggest data centers, with a
third attack happening last night. Cloudflare reports that bot traffic
from the Yandex network has dropped to just 0.4% of the maximum number
of HTTP requests recorded in the past two weeks.
Adobe
in Trouble After Someone Reverse Engineered Adobe Creative Suite and
Released It as Open Source by Joe Wilkins. Though plenty of
competitors have tried to ram their way into the market, few have been
able to make a dent against the dominant Creative Cloud. That may be
about to change — and not because of a tech giant like Apple, but thanks
to the efforts of a four-person team of vibecoders.
(Maybe we are on the AI-max timeline?)
The
AI Engineering Report 2026: The AI Acceleration Whiplash - Ten
Takeaways (or maybe not?) The relationship between AI adoption
and defect rate is not flattening as organizations mature their AI
programs; it’s steepening. More AI-generated code in the codebase
correlates with more bugs per developer, and that relationship is
strengthening as adoption deepens.
Mistral
says “Le Chonk” can challenge the best AI models by Joel Khalili.
The stark reminder that the US government could unilaterally revoke
access to frontier-grade AI has created an opening for Mistral, a
Europe-based lab with open-weight models.
A sustainable web career, for when all this blows over by David Bushell. (Accessibility and other fundamentals—stuff that the web will always need people who are good at)
Consumer Affairs Commission to Host Town Hall on Affordability (Saturday, October 24, in San Leandro, California)
Kill
Criteria and Exit Mechanics by Dennis Kennedy. To prevent
experiments from degenerating into zombie projects, leadership must
define clear, operational stopping triggers upfront that mandate hard
decisions.