Last week, a MetaFilter mem­ber posted a link to what ap­peared to be a new web­site for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig’s decade-long pro­ject to make a “dictionary of made-up words for emo­tions that we all feel but don’t have the words to ex­press.”

The pol­ished site in­cludes every­thing you’d ex­pect from a pub­lish­er’s pro­mo­tional book site: an au­thor bi­og­ra­phy, press men­tions, and links to buy the book on Amazon.

Strangely, it also in­cludes the en­tire text of the book, from its open­ing 800-word fore­word to a com­plete archive of all 311 ne­ol­o­gisms, with their ac­com­pa­ny­ing de­f­i­n­i­tions, et­y­mol­ogy, and short es­says, all penned by Koenig.

The book’s orig­i­nal photo-col­lage il­lus­tra­tions made by Koenig and sev­eral other artists are con­spic­u­ously miss­ing. Instead, each word has an AI-generated im­age made with DALL-E 2, rid­dled with the er­rors and ar­ti­facts typ­i­cal of that model.

A ban­ner at the top of the home­page en­cour­ages vis­i­tors to “Generate your own words us­ing AI — give your sor­rows a voice!” The Submit A Sorrow fea­ture lets you de­scribe a feel­ing, and then uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 to gen­er­ate the new word, et­y­mol­ogy, and de­f­i­n­i­tion, which go into a gallery of “User-Generated Sorrows” with AI gen­er­ated art.

MetaFilter mem­bers were im­me­di­ately sus­pi­cious, and so was I. My wife Ami and I made a card game in 2022, Lost for Words, partly in­spired by Koenig’s pro­ject. We own a copy of the book, and I’d fol­lowed it on­line for years. The em­brace of AI seemed out of char­ac­ter.

Then I no­ticed the new site was a dif­fer­ent do­main than the orig­i­nal Tumblr home­page en­tirely:

The orig­i­nal: dic­tio­nary­ofob­scure­sor­rows.comThe re­boot: the­dic­tionary­ofob­scure­sor­rows.com

What’s go­ing on here?

A Little History

John Koenig launched The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows on Tumblr in 2009, ex­pand­ing it to a se­ries of pop­u­lar video es­says in 2013.

If you know any word from the pro­ject, it’s prob­a­bly “sonder,” which spread far be­yond its ori­gin, mak­ing its way into com­mon par­lance and even­tu­ally to Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster.

son­der n. the re­al­iza­tion that each ran­dom passerby is liv­ing a life as vivid and com­plex as your own—pop­u­lated with their own am­bi­tions, friends, rou­tines, wor­ries and in­her­ited crazi­ness—an epic story that con­tin­ues in­vis­i­bly around you like an anthill sprawl­ing deep un­der­ground, with elab­o­rate pas­sage­ways to thou­sands of other lives that you’ll never know ex­isted, in which you might ap­pear only once, as an ex­tra sip­ping cof­fee in the back­ground, as a blur of traf­fic pass­ing on the high­way, as a lighted win­dow at dusk.

son­der n. the re­al­iza­tion that each ran­dom passerby is liv­ing a life as vivid and com­plex as your own—pop­u­lated with their own am­bi­tions, friends, rou­tines, wor­ries and in­her­ited crazi­ness—an epic story that con­tin­ues in­vis­i­bly around you like an anthill sprawl­ing deep un­der­ground, with elab­o­rate pas­sage­ways to thou­sands of other lives that you’ll never know ex­isted, in which you might ap­pear only once, as an ex­tra sip­ping cof­fee in the back­ground, as a blur of traf­fic pass­ing on the high­way, as a lighted win­dow at dusk.

Other words coined by Koenig have found a life out­side his pro­ject. You may have en­coun­tered “anemoia” (a feel­ing of nos­tal­gia for a time or place you’ve never known), “vellichor” (the strange wist­ful­ness of used book­stores), or maybe “monachopsis” (the sub­tle but per­sis­tent feel­ing of be­ing out of place).

But “sonder” is the break­away suc­cess. I’d wa­ger most peo­ple who have heard the word have no idea it was coined by a guy on Tumblr in 2012.

There’s an R&B band named Sonder, a failed Airbnb ri­val, and count­less busi­nesses rang­ing from con­sul­tan­cies and VC firms to cof­fee­houses and dis­pen­saries. There’s a bar named Sonder two miles from me right now.

That suc­cess landed Koenig a book deal with Simon & Schuster, and the book be­came a New York Times best­seller on its re­lease in November 2021.

Two years later, around August 2023, the new Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows web­site launched, but cu­ri­ously, with no ref­er­ence to it from the of­fi­cial Tumblr page or so­cial me­dia.

A Slick Impostor

The mis­sion of Koenig’s pro­ject, in his own words, is to “shine a light on the fun­da­men­tal strange­ness of be­ing a hu­man be­ing.”

So it felt strange that he would now be en­cour­ag­ing peo­ple to gen­er­ate new words and de­f­i­n­i­tions with LLMs, a con­tentious tech­nol­ogy that has been trained on so much hu­man writ­ing, but can’t know what it’s like to be hu­man.

I reached out to John Koenig di­rectly to ask if he was in­volved with the web­site. He emailed back an hour later:

Yeah man, I had noth­ing to do with it. Don’t know what to think or do about that, as the site is pretty slick. Nicer than my own, re­ally.

Yeah man, I had noth­ing to do with it. Don’t know what to think or do about that, as the site is pretty slick. Nicer than my own, re­ally.

It was­n’t hard to find who was re­spon­si­ble since they list them­selves in the “Site Credits” in the footer of every page: Qontour (formerly Prompt Digital), a web de­sign and mar­ket­ing agency based in San Francisco.

The only hint that the site is­n’t au­tho­rized is this page in their port­fo­lio, where they talk about how “Qontour built the in­ter­ac­tive dig­i­tal plat­form — de­sign­ing the site in Webflow, gen­er­at­ing an AI-powered im­age li­brary, and launch­ing a fea­ture that lets vis­i­tors sub­mit their own sor­rows and add new de­f­i­n­i­tions to the dic­tio­nary.”

On that page, they re­fer to them­selves as “fans” of the book: “The site gives fans (like us) one place to find every­thing — videos, re­views, in­ter­views, and pur­chase links — in­stead of search­ing across a dozen plat­forms.‍”

The prob­lem, of course, is that be­ing a fan does­n’t give them the right to re­pur­pose any of the ma­te­r­ial for their site.

Copyright and Confusion

In the footer of Qontour’s unau­tho­rized site, they added a copy­right no­tice ac­knowl­edg­ing that they don’t own any of the rights to the ma­te­r­ial on the site, while also li­cens­ing all the user-sub­mit­ted words into the pub­lic do­main with a CC Zero li­cense.

Dictionary Content © John Koenig — All rights re­served. User-Generated Content open li­censed — CC Zero.

Dictionary Content © John Koenig — All rights re­served. User-Generated Content open li­censed — CC Zero.

This be­trays a fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing of how copy­right works. Qontour did not have the right to pub­lish the en­tirety of Koenig’s book to show­case their web de­sign skills.

They also sub­mit­ted their site to Webflow’s di­rec­tory to ad­ver­tise their de­sign busi­ness. “This en­deavor show­cased our ex­per­tise in web­site de­sign, AI-generated con­tent, and ex­ten­sive con­tent in­te­gra­tion.”

Below the but­ton to “Hire Qontour,” a small link to “Copyright Info” mis­rep­re­sents their work:

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by Qontour is li­censed un­der a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. All Rights Reserved. In other words, it’s some­one else’s work so you can’t copy it or edit it for any rea­son, but you can share it with oth­ers.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by Qontour is li­censed un­der a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. All Rights Reserved. In other words, it’s some­one else’s work so you can’t copy it or edit it for any rea­son, but you can share it with oth­ers.

Needless to say, you can’t re­li­cense con­tent you don’t own.

Complicating their claims of it be­ing a fan trib­ute, Qontour also used their own Amazon af­fil­i­ate code through­out the site, cre­ated un­der their pre­vi­ous name Prompt Digital, giv­ing them a cut of all book sales.

Those com­mis­sions may have been mean­ing­ful over the last few years, since the un­of­fi­cial site is now the top search re­sult for vir­tu­ally every query re­lated to the book, in­clud­ing the book’s ti­tle, the words coined in the book, and even John Koenig’s name. In every Google search I’ve tried, the un­of­fi­cial site ranks higher than the of­fi­cial site, the pub­lish­er’s site, or Wikipedia.

This is made worse by the rapid shift from tra­di­tional web search to con­ver­sa­tional AI search, which is easy to ma­nip­u­late, hides sources, and col­lapses con­text into sim­ple an­swers.

ChatGPT and Gemini both link to the boot­leg as the of­fi­cial web­site, and both claim that John Koenig is the one that cre­ated it.

This cre­ates le­git­i­mate con­fu­sion over its au­thor­ship, and ar­guably, dam­ages the rep­u­ta­tion of the pro­ject and book with its en­thu­si­as­tic em­brace of AI. The per­son who orig­i­nally posted the site to MetaFilter thought it was the of­fi­cial site, and the com­menters in the thread then, rea­son­ably, ques­tioned whether the book it­self was writ­ten by AI.

I asked Koenig if his pub­lisher was plan­ning to is­sue a cease-and-de­sist take­down to the site, but did­n’t re­ceive a re­sponse.

After email­ing him, I re­al­ized that Simon & Schuster did make moves last year to limit its reach. They filed two DMCA take­downs (1, 2) with Google last July, ask­ing them to re­move two pages from the boot­leg site from their re­sults. It had no ef­fect.

AI and Consent

It’s one thing for a fan to share or remix copy­righted ma­te­r­ial out of love for the source ma­te­r­ial, with no com­mer­cial mo­tive. (“No copy­right in­tended!”) It’s an­other for a mar­ket­ing agency to take an en­tire liv­ing au­thor’s book, re­place its art with AI slop, add an AI word gen­er­a­tor, mon­e­tize the traf­fic, pro­mote it in their port­fo­lio, and then out­rank the of­fi­cial site every­where.

This is a more fla­grant form of pla­gia­rism than you typ­i­cally see these days, where hu­man-au­thored works are laun­dered with an AI model into some­thing that’s dif­fer­ent enough from its sources to avoid le­gal is­sues.

But it’s not sur­pris­ing to see it com­ing from an agency that has leaned into gen­er­a­tive AI so heav­ily. As they proudly ex­plain, “Every page on this site was writ­ten in Claude” us­ing an “author per­sona” that they call “Q.”

What’s miss­ing here is con­sent, which feels like the orig­i­nal sin of AI. As I’ve writ­ten about many times be­fore, gen­er­a­tive AI mod­els are all trained on a mas­sive cor­pus of hu­man-au­thored works with­out at­tri­bu­tion, con­sent, or com­pen­sa­tion, ex­tract­ing value from cre­ators while cen­tral­iz­ing power among a tiny hand­ful of mas­sive tech com­pa­nies.

On a much smaller scale, Qontour could have reached out to John Koenig for per­mis­sion to re­pub­lish his work, col­lab­o­rat­ing with him on a new, im­proved web­site for the book. He might have asked them to limit it to just the words pub­lished on his Tumblr, asked for them not to build AI fea­tures, or maybe just said no to the whole thing, which would be his right.

The Last Word

What hap­pened to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows may have been more brazen, but it is­n’t an iso­lated case.

It’s part of a broad trend hap­pen­ing across the web, where peo­ple are us­ing AI to repack­age, op­ti­mize, and re­place the au­thor­i­ta­tive sources it was trained on for profit.

Nearly every day, I get emailed a newly-launched, ob­vi­ously-vibecoded web­site filled with AI-generated con­tent that was de­signed to siphon at­ten­tion away from hu­man cre­ators: blog­gers, au­thors, jour­nal­ists, artists, mu­si­cians, and any­one else who slowly, painstak­ingly makes things for a liv­ing. I’m not even sure any­more that the emails I’m re­ceiv­ing are sent by a hu­man.

The feel­ing of see­ing some­thing you love in­gested and re­pur­posed by a ma­chine de­signed to re­place the per­son who made it seems like a uniquely mod­ern sor­row.

Maybe there should be a word for it.

You can pur­chase John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows at Powell’s Books, di­rectly from his pub­lisher, or your lo­cal in­die book­store. If you have to use Amazon, you can buy it us­ing the au­thor’s own af­fil­i­ate code so he gets the largest cut of the sale.

News

Midlands News

Politics

Ministers have said de­tails about ac­tion along­side the so­cial me­dia ban, in­clud­ing re­gard­ing VPN use, will come in July.

07:04, 18 Jun 2026Updated 11:02, 19 Jun 2026

New VPN rules are set to be is­sued by the Labour Party gov­ern­ment as part of the un­der-16 so­cial me­dia ban. The gov­ern­ment has not re­vealed any plans to reg­u­late them, but min­is­ters have said de­tails about ac­tion along­side the so­cial me­dia ban, in­clud­ing re­gard­ing VPN use, will come in July.

‌

Children’s min­is­ter Josh MacAlister told the BBC there were “options there about whether we could age-gate VPN use, which would be re­ally wel­come”.

‌

“We have more work to do to un­der­stand the ef­fec­tive­ness and ac­ces­si­bil­ity of dif­fer­ent meth­ods, the avail­abil­ity of iden­tity and age at­trib­utes at 16, and the pri­vacy con­sid­er­a­tions of dif­fer­ent ex­ist­ing and emerg­ing meth­ods,” Ofcom has told the gov­ern­ment.

‌

READ MORE People can get ex­tra £69,000 in their pen­sion us­ing World Cup method

Technology sec­re­tary Liz Kendall told Nick Ferrari at Breakfast on LBC that the reg­u­la­tor needed to strengthen its en­force­ment pow­ers and strat­egy amid con­cerns com­pa­nies are not be­ing ef­fec­tively pun­ished for break­ing on­line safety rules.

Ms Kendall said: “We need to make sure that if fines are given and they’re not paid, we have to take it to the next step.”

‌

On the search data, Richy George, chief rev­enue of­fi­cer at IT-AMG, told City AM: “Within hours of the ban be­ing con­firmed, the na­tion’s teenagers ap­pear to have been Googling how to get around it rather than dis­en­gag­ing from so­cial me­dia al­to­gether.”

Baroness Liz Lloyd said there is “limited ev­i­dence on chil­dren’s use of VPNs,” and has said that the gov­ern­ment has no plans to ban them.

However, the gov­ern­ment did launch a con­sul­ta­tion to “confront the full range of risks chil­dren face on­line”.

‌

“This in­cludes ex­am­in­ing re­stric­tions on chil­dren’s use of AI chat­bots, as well as op­tions to age-re­strict or limit chil­dren’s VPN use where it un­der­mines safety pro­tec­tions and chang­ing the age of dig­i­tal con­sent,” the gov­ern­ment said.

Ms Kendall told Nick Ferrari: “I told MPs yes­ter­day I’m go­ing to come back to the House with a state­ment on the is­sue of VPNs in July.

“There are very strong views on both sides of this. For some peo­ple, it is about pri­vacy, and it is the abil­ity to use that is re­ally held strongly by peo­ple.

Article con­tin­ues be­low

“And for oth­ers, they say they should be banned be­cause kids are us­ing them to get around.

“Yes. And so I— the main thing that we’ve done is we’ve com­mis­sioned ad­di­tional re­search on this be­cause I’ve not been happy with the ev­i­dence.”

Choose Birmingham Live as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick ac­cess to the news you value.

‌

Politics

Loupe is an iOS and iPa­dOS app that gives you a hands-on tour of the de­vice fin­ger­print­ing sur­face. It reads real val­ues from pub­lic iOS APIs, the same ones any third-party app can call, and shows them to you raw. The point is sim­ple: see what your iPhone qui­etly ex­poses, and why each read­ing helps an app rec­og­nize you again.

Trackers don’t need your name, email, or lo­ca­tion to rec­og­nize you on­line. Each read­ing is­n’t nec­es­sar­ily unique on its own, but to­gether they form a fin­ger­print that fol­lows you across apps and web­sites.

How sig­nals are or­ga­nized

Loupe groups every read­ing into three tiers, re­flect­ing the cost of ac­cess:

Passive — vis­i­ble to any app with no prompt at all (locale, time zone, screen, bat­tery, and more).

Needs Permission — read­ings that trig­ger an iOS prompt (contacts, pho­tos, lo­ca­tion, cal­en­dars).

Advanced — clever side-chan­nel uses of pub­lic APIs, such as URL-scheme prob­ing via canOpenURL and Keychain per­sis­tence across re­in­stalls.

Privacy

Nothing Loupe reads leaves your de­vice un­less you ex­plic­itly ex­port it. Values are shown raw, with­out ag­gre­ga­tion or hash­ing. Nothing is up­loaded, synced, or shared.

A note on how this was built

Loupe was writ­ten al­most en­tirely by AI cod­ing tools.

Building

You’ll need Xcode 26 or newer.

Open code/​Loupe.xcode­proj.

Copy code/​Con­fig/​Sign­ing.lo­cal.xc­config.ex­am­ple to code/​Con­fig/​Sign­ing.lo­cal.xc­config and fill in your own DEVELOPMENT_TEAM and bun­dle iden­ti­fiers. This file is git­ig­nored and never pub­lished.

Build and run on a de­vice or sim­u­la­tor.

The pro­ject uses Xcode’s build­able fold­ers (folder ref­er­ences), so new Swift files are picked up au­to­mat­i­cally with no need to edit the pro­ject file.

ma­cOS

Loupe also builds for ma­cOS. The Mac ver­sion is mostly com­plete, but a few things still need work be­fore it’s pol­ished.

Support the pro­ject

Loupe is free and open source. If it helped you see what apps can qui­etly learn about your de­vice, the best way to sup­port more work like this is to try Psylo, our pri­vacy-first browser for iPhone and iPad. Psylo gives you proxy-backed brows­ing, iso­lated tabs, and anti-fin­ger­print­ing pro­tec­tions.

You can also read why we built Psylo.

License

The source code is re­leased un­der the MIT License.

The Loupe name and logo, the app icon, all other im­ages and icons, and the de­sign source files are © Mysk, all rights re­served, and are not cov­ered by the MIT li­cense.

About

Loupe is made by Mysk.

Website

Blog

X

Mastodon

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — June 17, 2026 — SMPTE®, the home of me­dia pro­fes­sion­als, tech­nol­o­gists and en­gi­neers, has an­nounced that its en­tire Standards cat­a­log is now freely avail­able to the global me­dia tech­nol­ogy com­mu­nity. This in­cludes all pub­lished SMPTE Standards, Recommended Practices, Engineering Guidelines and Registered Disclosure Documents (RDDs), as well as all fu­ture re­leases. For more than a cen­tury, SMPTE Standards have helped en­able the in­ter­op­er­abil­ity that un­der­pins the en­ter­tain­ment tech­nol­ogy in­dus­try. By re­mov­ing bar­ri­ers to ac­cess, this mile­stone is ex­pected to ac­cel­er­ate adop­tion and im­ple­men­ta­tion, strengthen in­ter­op­er­abil­ity, and help drive the next gen­er­a­tion of in­no­va­tion.

“This was a de­ci­sion we did not make lightly,” says SMPTE President Rich Welsh. “For 110 years, SMPTE has evolved along­side the me­dia tech­nol­ogy in­dus­try, help­ing to drive change and in­no­va­tion — and we’re not stop­ping now.

“Our in­dus­try is con­fronting trans­for­ma­tive shifts, from IP-based work­flows to AI au­then­tic­ity and con­tent prove­nance, and we find our­selves at an­other in­flec­tion point. We lis­tened to our Members, Partners and the global Standards com­mu­nity, and the an­swer was clear: Interoperability is es­sen­tial to the fu­ture of me­dia. Now is the time to open the gates and en­sure the next gen­er­a­tion of me­dia tech­nol­ogy is built on a stronger, more ac­ces­si­ble foun­da­tion.”

SMPTE’s move to an open-ac­cess Standards Library is part of a broader ef­fort to mod­ern­ize the or­ga­ni­za­tion’s Standards de­vel­op­ment and pub­li­ca­tion processes. Recent ini­tia­tives in­clude adopt­ing GitHub-based work­flows for ver­sion con­trol, is­sue track­ing and au­toma­tion; tran­si­tion­ing to struc­tured HTML-based au­thor­ing; and im­ple­ment­ing an in­te­grated pub­lish­ing pipeline that stream­lines doc­u­ment cre­ation, re­view, val­i­da­tion and re­lease.

“We are thrilled to make SMPTE Standards ac­ces­si­ble to every­one,” says Raymond Yeung, SMPTE Standards Vice President. “Opening ac­cess re­moves bar­ri­ers to adop­tion and im­ple­men­ta­tion while sup­port­ing greater trans­parency through­out the stan­dards-de­vel­op­ment process. Combined with our mod­ern­iza­tion ef­forts, this mile­stone en­ables SMPTE to re­spond more quickly to in­dus­try needs while main­tain­ing the qual­ity and rigor our Standards are known for.”

SMPTE’s move to an open-ac­cess Standards Library is sup­ported in part by the or­ga­ni­za­tion’s Diamond-level Corporate Members: Amazon AWS, Apple, Blackmagic Design, CBS/Paramount Global, Disney, Dolby, Fox, Google, Ross Video, Sony and Telstra. Additionally, com­pa­nies and in­di­vid­u­als pledg­ing do­na­tions of $10,000 or more by Dec. 31, 2026, will be rec­og­nized as Inaugural Supporters of the Standards cat­a­logue.

“Standards achieve their great­est value when they are ac­ces­si­ble to every­one who needs to im­ple­ment them,” con­cludes SMPTE Standards Director Steve LLamb. “This move strength­ens in­ter­op­er­abil­ity, re­duces mis­in­for­ma­tion, and sup­ports more con­sis­tent im­ple­men­ta­tion across the in­dus­try. By open­ing ac­cess, SMPTE helps en­sure that de­vel­op­ers, in­te­gra­tors, ed­u­ca­tors, man­u­fac­tur­ers, as well as emerg­ing mar­kets, can build from ac­cu­rate spec­i­fi­ca­tions rather than sec­ond­hand sources, sup­port­ing the long-term health of the me­dia, mo­tion imag­ing and dig­i­tal cin­ema in­dus­tries.”

The lat­est SMPTE Standards are avail­able on the Recently Published Documents page of the SMPTE web­site, with the full cat­a­logue ac­ces­si­ble through the SMPTE Standards Library. To join SMPTE, visit smpte.org.

# # #

About SMPTE SMPTE is an in­dus­try-led, non­profit 501(c)(3) or­ga­ni­za­tion ad­vanc­ing Standards, Education and Community across the global me­dia tech­nol­ogy sec­tor.

For more than 110 years, SMPTE has brought tech­nol­o­gists, en­gi­neers, ed­u­ca­tors, cre­ators and busi­ness lead­ers to­gether to ad­dress the in­dus­try’s most im­por­tant tech­ni­cal chal­lenges. Through its Standards pro­gram, pro­fes­sional de­vel­op­ment and ed­u­ca­tional of­fer­ings, and global mem­ber com­mu­nity, SMPTE helps en­able in­ter­op­er­abil­ity, ac­cel­er­ate in­no­va­tion and shape the fu­ture of me­dia cre­ation, man­age­ment and de­liv­ery.

For more in­for­ma­tion about SMPTE, please visit smpte.org.

All trade­marks ap­pear­ing herein are the prop­er­ties of their re­spec­tive own­ers.

Media Contacts:

SMPTE

Russell Poole

Tel. +1 914 205 2374

rpoole@smpte.org

Bubble Agency

Americas & APAC:

Cameron Frechette, (+1) 978 – 855-2683

UK & EMEA:

Abbie Pavitt, +44 (0) 7523 685 321

smpte@bub­bleagency.com

(This post is part of a se­ries on the sub­ject of my hobby pro­ject, which is recre­at­ing the C source code for the 1989 game F-15 Strike Eagle II by re­verse en­gi­neer­ing the orig­i­nal bi­na­ries.)

I must ad­mit the rate of progress cur­rently ex­pe­ri­enced in the pro­ject is over­whelm­ing. A lit­tle over a month ago it seemed that we had sev­eral more years of la­bo­ri­ous rewrit­ting of as­sem­bly into C be­fore the sec­ond game ex­e­cutable (egame) started look­ing like some­thing, and the third one (end) still to go for dessert. Meanwhile, as of the time of writ­ing this, all C code has been re­con­structed for all ex­e­cuta­bles, all data has been moved from as­sem­bly into C, most of the as­sem­bly-only code has func­tional re­place­ments writ­ten in C, most rou­tines and data struc­tures have been as­signed mean­ing­ful names, and we’re look­ing at fork­ing off the repo for a port­ing pro­ject in the near fu­ture.

However, this ex­plo­sive growth in com­plete­ness and ca­pa­bil­ity also means that we’re aban­don­ing the rel­a­tively peace­ful do­main of just look­ing at whether the re­con­structed op­codes match, and we ac­tu­ally need to main­tain a run­ning game go­ing for­ward. The tool­ing makes sure that the op­codes stay faith­ful to the orig­i­nal as we con­tinue to make changes, but it can­not catch all bugs, par­tic­u­larly not the ones that have to do with data lay­out.

Test pi­lots wanted

Seeing how com­mu­nity in­volve­ment has al­lowed the pro­ject to flour­ish, I was hop­ing we could ask for a lit­tle bit more help. The F-15 Strike Eagle 2 re­con­struc­tion is now open and ready for test pi­lots to take to the dig­i­tal skies and find any bugs that we might have missed. Right now, the lat­est re­lease is v0.9.1 and it should work with the orig­i­nal game’s 451.03 ver­sion with the desert storm ex­pan­sion pack - just drop the ex­e­cuta­bles into the game folder re­plac­ing the orig­i­nal ones (make a backup be­fore­hand), pos­si­bly re­mov­ing the orig­i­nal f15.com to make sure it does not get launched in place of the new f15.exe, and take off. It will not go into the setup screen, in­stead as­sum­ing a MCGA/VGA dis­play with no sound and no joy­stick. But every­thing else should work in all 3 parts of the game (mission briefling, flight and de­brief­ing).

If any­thing does not work, we would ap­pre­ci­ate bug re­ports. We are look­ing for crashes, graph­i­cal glitches, keys not work­ing etc. Consider at­tach­ing a scren­shot (Ctrl+F5 in dos­box) if it’s use­ful. A de­scrip­tion of what was be­ing done be­fore the is­sue oc­cured will be help­ful to us in re­pro­duc­ing the prob­lem and hope­fully de­vel­op­ing a fix.

It’s im­por­tant to no­tice that this is a bug-for-bug re­con­struc­tion, so any be­hav­iour also pre­sent in the orig­i­nal game needs to stay as is (for now). The orig­i­nal has some prob­lems with 3d ob­jects dis­ap­pear­ing, plane falling to­wards the sky when in­verted and out of fuel etc. So be­fore re­port­ing an is­sue, it would be best to make sure it does not oc­cur in the orig­i­nal, so keep­ing a copy around for ref­er­ence might be a good idea.

Thank you to every­body who de­cides to help and thanks to every­one who con­tributed to the pro­ject thus far, al­low­ing it to reach this mile­stone. I’m look­ing for­ward to the next ones, and I’m happy y’all are along for the ride.

1 day ago

Erika Benke

Oodi Library, Helsinki

Finland’s li­braries are in­creas­ingly be­ing val­ued not by how many books they lend, but how they help so­ci­eties func­tion.

On a freez­ing January morn­ing in Helsinki, around 20 peo­ple gather out­side Oodi, the city’s cen­tral li­brary, wait­ing for the doors to open.

“I have tears in my eyes when I see peo­ple al­most run into the build­ing at 08:00, head­ing straight to their favourite spots,” says Katri Vänttinen, di­rec­tor of li­brary ser­vices for the whole of the Finnish cap­i­tal. “It shows that the li­brary re­ally be­longs to the pub­lic.”

By lunchtime, the build­ing is so full that vis­i­tors wan­der be­tween floors look­ing for an empty seat. Students work on lap­tops be­side huge win­dows over­look­ing Finland’s par­lia­ment and par­ents read with ba­bies and tod­dlers in brightly coloured play ar­eas.

A small group sits in a cir­cle: they’re knit­ting woollen socks, those with more ex­pe­ri­ence help­ing new­com­ers with tech­niques and pat­terns. In a li­brary mu­sic pod, a mid­dle-aged man records his first sax­o­phone track. In the li­brary café, an el­derly woman holds a Finnish con­ver­sa­tion class for two for­eign girls. By the en­trance, a teenage boy picks up a bas­ket­ball he’s bor­rowed and joins his friends on the li­brary court just out­side.

Research emerg­ing from these ini­tia­tives — not just in Finland, but also in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Canada — al­ready sug­gests that li­braries play a sig­nif­i­cant role in pro­mot­ing so­cial in­clu­sion, mak­ing a poignant ar­gu­ment: what if the value of li­braries is not in how many books they lend, but more in how they help so­ci­eties func­tion? And what can the world learn from this Finnish model?

Not just books

Finland has more than 700 li­braries for a pop­u­la­tion of 5.6 mil­lion, of­fer­ing every­thing from pod­cast stu­dios and 3D print­ing to ten­nis rack­ets and swim­ming pool passes.

According to Vänttinen, the most bor­rowed items af­ter books in Helsinki li­braries are spaces: rooms that can be pre-booked, free of charge, to meet, study, hold po­lit­i­cal dis­cus­sions or make mu­sic. Among portable items, board games and con­sole games top the list.

Oodi Library, Helsinki

This cul­ture of bor­row­ing, Vänttinen ex­plains, is rooted in deep-seated prag­ma­tism that stretches back to Finland’s rural past, when peo­ple rou­tinely shared farm­ing ma­chin­ery. “Today, many peo­ple in cities live in small homes, and they might need a sewing ma­chine only once a year,” says Vänttinen. “So why buy one? People pre­fer not to spend their own money when they can ac­cess a sewing ma­chine for free, funded through their taxes.”

Six hun­dred kilo­me­tres north of Helsinki, the city of Oulu’s newly re­fur­bished cen­tral li­brary Saari re­flects the same think­ing, says li­brary clerk Chris Stephenson while load­ing a mi­cro­film reader for a vis­i­tor to browse an old news­pa­per.

Around him, read­ers fill long ta­bles be­neath soft lamps. A newly re­tired teacher is print­ing sheet mu­sic for the choir he sings in and the band where he plays the gui­tar. One floor up, a young man ar­rives to shorten his jeans af­ter book­ing a slot for a sewing ma­chine. In the same room, a 3D printer hums be­hind a school­girl us­ing a heat press to make a T-shirt she’s de­signed for a friend’s birth­day. A laser cut­ter sits idly by.

We reach prac­ti­cally every­one, re­gard­less of so­ci­etal or cul­tural sta­tus. This is true every­day democ­racy — Katri Vänttinen

Before mov­ing to Finland, Stephenson worked in li­braries in the UK for 20 years. “I saw many li­braries closed down, and com­mu­ni­ties los­ing some­thing im­por­tant,” he says.

According to Noora Hirvonen, pro­fes­sor of in­for­ma­tion stud­ies at the University of Oulu, cut­ting un­der­used ser­vices to save money can be­come a self-ful­fill­ing prophecy. “We first cut li­brary open­ing hours and, as a re­sult, li­brary vis­its drop,” says Hirvonen. “This is then used as a rea­son for ad­di­tional cuts or even clos­ing the li­brary.”

Instead, Hirvonen ar­gues, in­sti­tu­tions should ask why the ser­vice is not used. Is it be­cause peo­ple do not find it valu­able, they do not have ac­cess to it, or they do not know about it?

“Usage is not only re­flec­tive of the value of the ser­vice: it’s shaped by things like vis­i­bil­ity and avail­abil­ity,” says Hirvonen.

Pillars of democ­racy

But the sig­nif­i­cance of Finnish li­braries ex­tends far be­yond tools and meet­ing rooms.

Professors, un­em­ployed and home­less peo­ple all use the same li­brary spaces, mak­ing li­braries a key part of Finland’s de­mo­c­ra­tic in­fra­struc­ture, says Hirvonen. “They’re places where any­one can ac­cess knowl­edge, meet oth­ers and take part in pub­lic de­bate, re­gard­less of in­come or back­ground,” Hirvonen says.

While these are core val­ues of li­brar­i­an­ship every­where in the world, says Hirvonen, in the Nordic coun­tries, they are em­bed­ded in law. Under the Finnish Library Act, pub­lic li­braries must pro­mote democ­racy, free­dom of ex­pres­sion and ac­tive cit­i­zen­ship. (Some other Nordic coun­tries have sim­i­lar poli­cies too.)

More like this:

Finland’s in­vest­ment re­flects this com­mit­ment: in 2025, the coun­try spent nearly €371m ($430m/£321m) on its pub­lic li­braries — that’s €65.78 ($76/£57) per per­son, com­pared to the av­er­age £10 ($13.5) per per­son spent in the UK, and a to­tal pub­lic li­brary ex­pen­di­ture of $15.2bn (£11.4bn ), or $45 (£34) per per­son in the US.

“Libraries can di­rectly sup­port democ­racy — this is one thing the world can learn from Finland,” says li­brary scholar R David Lankes from the University of Texas, who be­lieves li­braries thrive when com­mu­ni­ties ac­tively use them to learn, de­bate and cre­ate knowl­edge to­gether.

Erika Benke

Librarians help cus­tomers nav­i­gate on­line bu­reau­cracy, from tax ser­vices and bank ac­counts to pen­sion por­tals and dig­i­tal health records, and they rou­tinely pro­vide as­sis­tance with writ­ing CVs and job ap­pli­ca­tions. As a re­sult, a re­cent study of Finnish li­braries con­cluded that li­braries func­tion as crit­i­cal in­clu­sion in­fra­struc­ture.

“This pro­motes in­clu­sion,” says Mervi Vaara, a man­ager for re­gional li­brary ser­vices in Oulu. “The li­brary is like a shared liv­ing room for every­one.”

The whole Finnish wel­fare sys­tem in one build­ing — Nasima Razmyar

As a re­sult, an analy­sis of 38 stud­ies from around the world found that pub­lic li­braries con­sis­tently re­turn more value than they cost, giv­ing back from three to five dol­lars for every dol­lar in­vested. The study em­pha­sises that li­braries cre­ate both di­rect ben­e­fits — such as sav­ings from bor­row­ing rather than buy­ing, and sup­port for job­seek­ers — and in­di­rect ben­e­fits, in­clud­ing im­proved lit­er­acy, dig­i­tal com­pe­tence, em­ploy­a­bil­ity and com­mu­nity well­be­ing.

In an­nual eval­u­a­tions car­ried out by Finland’s re­gional au­thor­i­ties, li­braries con­sis­tently top the list of most val­ued pub­lic ser­vices. “We reach prac­ti­cally every­one, re­gard­less of so­ci­etal or cul­tural sta­tus,” says Vänttinen. “This is true every­day democ­racy.”

In the 2023 re­port, Finns de­scribed li­braries as trusted sources of in­for­ma­tion and dig­i­tal con­tent. “Trust in gov­ern­ment in­sti­tu­tions has been de­clin­ing for decades,” says Lankes, nod­ding to global sur­veys like the Edelman Trust Barometer, which shows a steady long-term drop in trust in pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions in many coun­tries. “But trust in li­braries and li­brar­i­ans re­mains ex­tremely high.”

Libraries, Lankes ar­gues, are among the few pub­lic spaces where peo­ple can sim­ply ex­ist with­out be­ing ex­pected to con­sume. “You can’t go to town hall and just hang out. You can’t go to the po­lice sta­tion and just hang out,” Lankes says. “But you can come to the li­brary and just be.”

Sanna Krook

And while Finns ac­tu­ally also still en­joy high lev­els of trust in pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions, ac­cord­ing to sur­veys, they face what re­searchers call a “participation para­dox”: de­spite trust­ing in­sti­tu­tions, many cit­i­zens still feel they have lit­tle real in­flu­ence over po­lit­i­cal de­ci­sions. Ultimately, li­braries can bridge that gap too, says Elina Eerola of the Finnish in­no­va­tion fund Sitra, who worked on a re­port on how li­braries can pro­mote democ­racy.

Eerola says li­braries can cre­ate ac­ces­si­ble spaces where cit­i­zens can meet de­ci­sion-mak­ers and take part in de­bates. Sitra’s pi­lot pro­jects have used li­braries to host com­mu­nity dis­cus­sions and events to con­nect cit­i­zens di­rectly with politi­cians and pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions.

A per­sonal im­pact

For some Finns, the im­pact of li­braries is not mea­sured in sta­tis­tics. Nasima Razmyar, now a mem­ber of the Finnish par­lia­ment, ar­rived from Afghanistan as a refugee at the age of eight. She still re­mem­bers the mo­ment she re­ceived her first li­brary card: the first phys­i­cal ob­ject she owned in Finland. “When I signed my name and re­ceived it, I sud­denly felt this place be­longed to me,” says Razmyar.

Growing up in the Helsinki neigh­bour­hood of Käpylä, she spent af­ter­noons study­ing in the lo­cal li­brary af­ter school. “My par­ents did­n’t speak Finnish, so the li­brary work­ers some­times helped me with my home­work,” she says. “That lo­cal li­brary was equal­ity,” she says. “The whole Finnish wel­fare sys­tem in one build­ing.”

As the af­ter­noon light fades out­side a Helsinki li­brary win­dow, Razmyar now watches her young chil­dren choose their books. “I think it gives chil­dren the feel­ing that they be­long here, and this is for them, which is re­ally im­por­tant,” she says.

–

For more sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy, en­vi­ron­ment and health sto­ries from the BBC, fol­low us on Facebook and Instagram.

2026 – 06-19

4 min read

Everyone’s writ­ing code with AI agents to­day. But the mo­ment an agent needs to de­ploy some­thing — and needs to sign up and cre­ate an ac­count — it slams face-first into a wall built for hu­mans: a browser-based OAuth flow, a dash­board to click through, an API to­ken to copy-paste, a multi-fac­tor au­then­ti­ca­tion prompt to sat­isfy. For an in­ter­ac­tive copi­lot sit­ting next to a de­vel­oper, that’s an­noy­ing. For a back­ground agent, it’s a hard stop.

Today we’re rolling out Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for Agents.

Agents can now de­ploy web­sites, APIs, and agents right away, with­out first need­ing to sign up for an ac­count.

Any agent can now run wran­gler de­ploy –temporary and de­ploy a Worker to Cloudflare. This tem­po­rary de­ploy­ment stays live for 60 min­utes, dur­ing which time you can claim the tem­po­rary ac­count, mak­ing it per­ma­nently your own. If you don’t, it ex­pires on its own.

Our goal? Let your agent code and ship.

Why fric­tion­less de­ploy­ments mat­ter for AI agents

Frictionless tem­po­rary ac­counts mat­ter more than it might first seem:

Background AI ses­sions have no hu­man in the loop, and are be­com­ing the norm. Any auth step that needs a browser, a copy-paste, or “click here in 60 sec­onds” means an agent gets stuck and may choose to de­ploy else­where.

Background AI ses­sions have no hu­man in the loop, and are be­com­ing the norm. Any auth step that needs a browser, a copy-paste, or “click here in 60 sec­onds” means an agent gets stuck and may choose to de­ploy else­where.

Trial-and-error is the agen­t’s su­per­power. Agents need a tight write → de­ploy → ver­ify loop. They need cheap, throw­away de­ploy­ment tar­gets, so they can curl their own out­put and de­cide whether they got it right.

Trial-and-error is the agen­t’s su­per­power. Agents need a tight write → de­ploy → ver­ify loop. They need cheap, throw­away de­ploy­ment tar­gets, so they can curl their own out­put and de­cide whether they got it right.

Agent plat­forms are build­ing their own ways for de­ploy­ing code to “just work” with­out ex­tra steps or cre­den­tials. People are start­ing to ex­pect that this process just works, with­out the need to sign up for other ser­vices that they’ve not used be­fore or heard of.

Agent plat­forms are build­ing their own ways for de­ploy­ing code to “just work” with­out ex­tra steps or cre­den­tials. People are start­ing to ex­pect that this process just works, with­out the need to sign up for other ser­vices that they’ve not used be­fore or heard of.

How it works

Temporary ac­counts are built around Wrangler, our Developer Platform com­mand-line in­ter­face (CLI) tool that lets de­vel­op­ers boot­strap new pro­jects, man­age their con­fig­u­ra­tions and re­sources, and de­ploy and up­date them.

Wrangler us­age is widely doc­u­mented on­line and agents know how to use it very well. But if you had­n’t yet signed in and granted Wrangler per­mis­sion to your Cloudflare ac­count, when the agent tried to de­ploy, it would get stuck at the sign-up and au­then­ti­ca­tion step. And you might rightly ask: How do agents and LLMs know that this new –temporary flag in Wrangler ex­ists, so that they ac­tu­ally use it with­out a hu­man ex­plic­itly telling them to do so?

To solve this, we up­dated Wrangler to prompt the agent with a mes­sage that tells it about the –temporary flag:

When the agent dis­cov­ers this, and then runs wran­gler de­ploy again with the –temporary flag, Cloudflare pro­vi­sions a tem­po­rary ac­count for the agent to use, gives Wrangler an API to­ken to work with, and pro­vides a claim URL that the agent can give back to the hu­man.

Let’s go over every step of the flow

Deploying and it­er­at­ing on a new pro­ject

Make sure you’re us­ing the lat­est Wrangler re­lease, fire up your fa­vorite cod­ing agent, and write a prompt to de­ploy a “hello world” app in build mode:

Make a very sim­ple hello world Cloudflare Worker in TypeScript and de­ploy it us­ing wran­gler, don’t ask me ques­tions, do the best you can

Make a very sim­ple hello world Cloudflare Worker in TypeScript and de­ploy it us­ing wran­gler, don’t ask me ques­tions, do the best you can

The agent will run wran­gler, pick up the –temporary flag from the out­put mes­sages, build your script, and de­ploy it in­stantly, no hu­man in the loop re­quired:

As you can see, the agent wrote the script, de­ployed it us­ing the –temporary flag, curled the pre­view link it got from the out­put, and ver­i­fied that the re­sult matches the code.

This is great, but agen­tic cod­ing is of­ten not about one sin­gle de­ploy­ment. A ses­sion can go through a cy­cle of mul­ti­ple code changes. This is not a prob­lem: the agent can it­er­ate on the Worker script and re­de­ploy the changes as many times as it wants (within the 60-minute claim win­dow). Type this prompt:

Now change hello world to “hello cloud­flare” and re­de­ploy

Now change hello world to “hello cloud­flare” and re­de­ploy

Look at the agent chang­ing the source code, reusing the pre­vi­ously cre­ated tem­po­rary ac­count, re­de­ploy­ing a new ver­sion and recheck­ing the re­sult:

Claiming the ac­count

At any point, you can claim the tem­po­rary ac­count and make it yours per­ma­nently. When you click the claim link you will be taken to a page where you can ei­ther sign up for or sign in to Cloudflare, and then claim the tem­po­rary ac­count that your Worker was de­ployed to. This in­cludes claim­ing not just Workers, but re­sources like data­bases and other bind­ings, too.

If you do not claim these tem­po­rary ac­counts within 60 min­utes, they will be au­to­mat­i­cally deleted.

The road to fric­tion­less agen­tic de­ploy­ments

This is just one way we’re elim­i­nat­ing the signup bar­rier for agents. We re­cently an­nounced a part­ner­ship with Stripe and a new pro­to­col we co-de­signed that lets agents pro­vi­sion Cloudflare on be­half of their users — cre­at­ing an ac­count, start­ing a sub­scrip­tion, reg­is­ter­ing a do­main, and get­ting an API to­ken to de­ploy code, with no copy-past­ing to­kens or en­ter­ing credit card de­tails. Last month, we col­lab­o­rated with WorkOS on the launch of auth.md, which any­one can adopt, to let agents pro­vi­sion new ac­counts us­ing well-es­tab­lished, ex­ist­ing OAuth stan­dards.

There’s a ton go­ing on in this space, and we’re ex­cited to keep mak­ing it eas­ier for agents to use Cloudflare, and for de­vel­op­ers to make their own apps agent-ready. Temporary ac­counts are one more step to­ward fric­tion­less agen­tic de­ploy­ments — stay tuned for more.

Temporary ac­counts have some lim­i­ta­tions, and their ca­pa­bil­i­ties may change over time; check the de­vel­oper doc­u­men­ta­tion for more in­for­ma­tion and then go build some­thing. Point your agent at Cloudflare, see how far it gets, and tell us what we can im­prove or what de­lights you — share what you’ve built on X or hop into the Cloudflare Community.

L:>PROJECTS>CONFIDENTIAL>SPATIAL-UNIX>*.*.*

X11 built for vi­sionOS and Apple Vision Pro.

A mod­ern X11 built for bask­ing in the past. Send your fa­vorite Xlib clients to spa­tial win­dows, and live out the fu­ture you were promised.

Objective

UHF X11 turns Apple Vision Pro into a full X11 dis­play server.

Attach X clients and vin­tage ma­chines to send X11 calls into na­tive, pixel-pretty spa­tial win­dows in vi­sionOS.

*setenv DISPLAY VISOR.LOCAL:0

xterm & xclock & xl­ogo & xcalc & twm &

X11 MATERIALIZES IN SPACE.

Specification

Rootless Spatial Windows

Each X11 top-level opens as its own vi­sionOS win­dow. Position them any­where in your space.

External X11 Clients

Accept con­nec­tions from trusted ma­chines over stan­dard, na­tive X11 TCP.

Beautiful Pixel Rendering

X frame­buffer con­tent is pre­sented at na­tive res­o­lu­tion with near­est-neigh­bor scal­ing for small sur­faces.

80s-Soaked Effects

CRT scan­lines, phos­phor masks, glow, and vi­gnette pre­sets for clas­sic dis­play char­ac­ter.

MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1

X au­thor­ity cook­ies are gen­er­ated on de­vice and copied to client ma­chines for au­then­ti­cated con­nec­tions.

Experimental Indirect GLX

3D in 2D in 3D. OpenGL clients can use GLX ren­der­ing over X11. Compatibility varies, as it did in the 2000s.

Custom Font Packs

Import bitmap font di­rec­to­ries from vi­sionOS fold­ers. Core X11 fonts ship with the app.