Bose re­leased the Application Programming Interface (API) doc­u­men­ta­tion for its SoundTouch speak­ers to­day, putting a sil­ver lin­ing around the im­pend­ing end-of-life (EoL) of the ex­pen­sive home the­ater de­vices.

In October, Bose an­nounced that its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speak­ers and sound­bars would be­come dumb speak­ers on February 18. At the time, Bose said that the speak­ers would only work if a de­vice was con­nected via AUX, HDMI, or Bluetooth (which has higher la­tency than Wi-Fi).

After that date, the speak­ers would stop re­ceiv­ing se­cu­rity and soft­ware up­dates and lose cloud con­nec­tiv­ity and their com­pan­ion app, the Framingham, Massachusetts-based com­pany said. Without the app, users would no longer be able to in­te­grate the de­vice with mu­sic ser­vices, such as Spotify, have mul­ti­ple SoundTouch de­vices play the same au­dio si­mul­ta­ne­ously, or use or edit saved pre­sets.

The an­nounce­ment frus­trated some of Bose’s long-time cus­tomers, some of whom own mul­ti­ple SoundTouch de­vices that still func­tion prop­erly. Many ques­tioned com­pa­nies’ in­creas­ingly com­mon prac­tice of brick­ing ex­pen­sive prod­ucts to fo­cus on new de­vices or to min­i­mize costs, or be­cause they’ve gone through ac­qui­si­tions or bank­ruptcy. SoundTouch speak­ers re­leased in 2013 and 2015 with prices rang­ing from $399 to $1,500.

Today, Bose had bet­ter news. In an email to cus­tomers, Bose an­nounced that AirPlay and Spotify Connect will still work with SoundTouch speak­ers af­ter EoL, ex­pand­ing the wire­less ca­pa­bil­i­ties that peo­ple will still be able to ac­cess.

Additionally, SoundTouch de­vices that sup­port AirPlay 2 will be able to play the same au­dio si­mul­ta­ne­ously.

The SoundTouch app will also live on, al­beit stripped of some func­tion­al­ity.

“On May 6, 2026, the app will up­date to a ver­sion that sup­ports the func­tions that can op­er­ate lo­cally with­out the cloud. No ac­tion will be re­quired on your part. Opening the app will ap­ply the up­date au­to­mat­i­cally,” Bose said.

is a news writer cov­er­ing all things con­sumer tech. Stevie started out at Laptop Mag writ­ing news and re­views on hard­ware, gam­ing, and AI.

Posts from this au­thor will be added to your daily email di­gest and your home­page feed.

Posts from this au­thor will be added to your daily email di­gest and your home­page feed.

In a sur­pris­ingly user-friendly move, Bose has an­nounced it will be open-sourc­ing the API doc­u­men­ta­tion for its SoundTouch smart speak­ers, which were slated to lose of­fi­cial sup­port on February 18th, as re­ported by Ars Technica. Bose has also moved that date back to May 6th, 2026.

When cloud sup­port ends, an up­date to the SoundTouch app will add lo­cal con­trols to re­tain as much func­tion­al­ity as pos­si­ble with­out cloud ser­vices. Users will still be able to stream mu­sic to SoundTouch speak­ers with Bluetooth, AirPlay, and Spotify Connect (plus phys­i­cal AUX con­nec­tions). Remote con­trol fea­tures and group­ing speak­ers will also con­tinue to work, and users will still be able to set up and con­fig­ure their SoundTouch speak­ers.

Now that the smart speak­ers’ API is be­ing open-sourced, users can also cre­ate their own com­pat­i­ble SoundTouch tools to help fill in any gaps left by the lack of cloud ser­vices. While it’s still dis­ap­point­ing that the speak­ers are los­ing of­fi­cial sup­port, Bose’s ap­proach at least lets peo­ple con­tinue us­ing their speak­ers, rather than brick­ing oth­er­wise func­tional de­vices.

This move from Bose is par­tic­u­larly sur­pris­ing be­cause of how rare it is. Usually when prod­ucts lose sup­port for cloud ser­vices, they end up bricked, and oc­ca­sion­ally users step in them­selves to fix things. For in­stance, when Pebble orig­i­nally shut down in 2016, users kept their watches func­tional by cre­at­ing the Rebble Alliance, a com­mu­nity-run re­place­ment for the watch­es’ cloud ser­vices, firmware, and app store.

Follow top­ics and au­thors from this story to see more like this in your per­son­al­ized home­page feed and to re­ceive email up­dates.

I was read­ing Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1992 and found this nice il­lus­tra­tion:

Fast for­ward to 2025. Apple re­leases ma­cOS Tahoe. Main at­trac­tion? Adding un­pleas­ant, dis­tract­ing, il­leg­i­ble, messy, clut­tered, con­fus­ing, frus­trat­ing icons (their words, not mine!) to every menu item:

It’s bad. But why ex­actly is it bad? Let’s delve into it!

Disclaimer: screen­shots are a mix from ma­cOS 26.1 and 26.2, taken from stock Apple apps only that come pre-in­stalled with the sys­tem. No sys­tem set­tings were mod­i­fied.

The main func­tion of an icon is to help you find what you are look­ing for faster.

Perhaps counter-in­tu­itively, adding an icon to every­thing is ex­actly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be dif­fer­ent. But if every­thing has an icon, noth­ing stands out.

The same ap­plies to color: black-and-white icons look clean, but they don’t help you find things faster!

Microsoft used to know this:

Look how much faster you can find Save or Share in the right vari­ant:

It also looks cleaner. Less clut­tered.

A col­ored ver­sion would be even bet­ter (clearer sep­a­ra­tion of text from icon, faster to find):

I know you won’t like how it looks. I don’t like it ei­ther. These icons are hard to work with. You’ll have to ac­tu­ally de­sign for color to look nice. But the prin­ci­ple stands: it is way eas­ier to use.

If you want icons to work, they need to be con­sis­tent. I need to be able to learn what to look for.

For ex­am­ple, I see a “Cut” com­mand and next to it. Okay, I think. Next time I’m look­ing for “Cut,” I might save some time and start look­ing for in­stead.

How is Tahoe do­ing on that front? I pre­sent to you: Fifty Shades of “New”:

I even col­lected them all to­gether, so the ab­sur­dity of the sit­u­a­tion is more ob­vi­ous.

Granted, some of them are dif­fer­ent op­er­a­tions, so they have dif­fer­ent icons. I guess cre­at­ing a smart folder is dif­fer­ent from cre­at­ing a jour­nal en­try. But this?

There is no ex­cuse.

Yes. One of them is a check­mark. And they can’t even agree on the di­rec­tion of an ar­row!

Find (which is some­times called Search, and some­times Filter):

These are not some ob­scure, unique op­er­a­tions. These are OS ba­sics, these are foun­da­tional. Every app has them, and they are al­ways in the same place. They should­n’t look dif­fer­ent!

Icons are also used in tool­bars. Conceptually, op­er­a­tions in a tool­bar are iden­ti­cal to op­er­a­tions called through the menu, and thus should use the same icons. That’s the sim­plest case to im­ple­ment: in­side the same app, of­ten on the same screen. How hard can it be to stay con­sis­tent?

Photos: same and mis­match, but re­versed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maps and oth­ers of­ten use dif­fer­ent sym­bols for zoom:

Another car­di­nal sin is to use the same icon for dif­fer­ent ac­tions. Imagine: I have learned that means “New”:

Then I open an app and see. “Cool”, I think, “I al­ready know what it means”:

You’d think: okay, means quick look:

Sometimes, sure. Some other times, means “Show com­pleted”:

Same as with con­sis­tency, icon reuse does­n’t only hap­pen be­tween apps. Sometimes you see in a tool­bar:

Then go to the menu in the same app and see means some­thing else:

Sometimes iden­ti­cal icons meet in the same menu.

Sometimes next to each other.

Sometimes they put an en­tire bar­rage of iden­ti­cal icons in a row:

This does­n’t help any­one. No user will find a menu item faster or will un­der­stand the func­tion bet­ter if all icons are the same.

The worst case of icon reuse so far has been the Photos app:

It feels like the per­son tasked with choos­ing a unique icon for every menu item just ran out of ideas.

When look­ing at icons, we usu­ally al­low for slight dif­fer­ences in ex­e­cu­tion. That lets us, for ex­am­ple, un­der­stand that these tech­ni­cally dif­fer­ent road signs mean the same thing:

Same ap­plies for icons: if you draw an ar­row go­ing out of the box in one place and also an ar­row and the box but at a slightly dif­fer­ent an­gle, or with dif­fer­ent stroke width, or make one filled, we will un­der­stand them as mean­ing the same thing.

Like, is sup­posed to mean some­thing else from ? Come on!

Or two let­ters A that only slightly dif­fer in the font size:

A pen­cil is “Rename” but a slightly thicker pen­cil is “Highlight”?

Arrows that use dif­fer­ent di­ag­o­nals?

Three dots oc­cu­py­ing ⅔ of space vs three dots oc­cu­py­ing every­thing. Seriously?

The sheet of pa­per that changes mean­ing de­pend­ing on if its cor­ner is folded or if there are lines in­side?

But the fi­nal boss are ar­rows. They are all dif­fer­ent:

Supposedly, a user must be­come an ex­pert at notic­ing how squished the cir­cle is, if it starts top to right or bot­tom to right, and how far the ar­row’s end goes.

Do I care? Honestly, no. I could’ve given it a shot, maybe, if Apple ap­plied these con­sis­tently. But Apple con­sid­ers and to mean the same thing in one place, and ex­pects me to no­tice minute de­tails like this in an­other?

Sorry, I can’t trust you. Not af­ter every­thing I’ve seen.

Icons are sup­posed to be eas­ily rec­og­niz­able from a dis­tance. Every icon de­signer knows: small de­tails are no-go. You can have them some­times, maybe, for aes­thetic pur­poses, but you can’t rely on them.

And icons in Tahoe menus are tiny. Most of them fit in a 12×12 pixel square (actual res­o­lu­tion is 24×24 be­cause of Retina), and be­cause many of them are not square, one di­men­sion is usu­ally even less than 12.

It’s not a lot of space to work with! Even Windows 95 had 16×16 icons. If we take the typ­i­cal DPI of that era at 72 dots per inch, we get a phys­i­cal icon size of 0.22 inches (5.6 mm). On a mod­ern MacBook Pro with 254 DPI, Tahoe’s 24×24 icons are 0.09 inches (2.4 mm). Sure, 24 is big­ger than 16, but in re­al­ity, these icons’ area is 4 times as small!

So when I see this:

I strug­gle. I can tell they are dif­fer­ent. But I def­i­nitely strug­gle to tell what’s be­ing drawn.

Even zoomed in 20×, it’s still a mess:

Or here. These are three dif­fer­ent icons:

Am I sup­posed to tell plus sign from sparkle here?

Some of these lines are half the pixel thicker than the other lines, and that’s sup­posed to be the main point:

Is this sup­posed to be an ar­row?

It even got an even tinier viewfinder, which you can al­most see if you zoom in 20×:

Or here. There is a box, in­side that box is a cir­cle, and in­side it is a tiny let­ter i with a to­tal height of 2 pix­els:

And this is a win­dow! It even has traf­fic lights! How adorable:

Remember: these are retina pix­els, ¼ of a real pixel. Steve Jobs him­self claimed they were in­vis­i­ble.

It turns out there’s a magic num­ber right around 300 pix­els per inch, that when you hold some­thing around to 10 to 12 inches away from your eyes, is the limit of the hu­man retina to dif­fer­en­ti­ate the pix­els.

And yet, Tahoe icons rely on you be­ing able to see them.

When you have so lit­tle space to work with, every pixel mat­ters. You can make a good icon, but you have to choose your pix­els very care­fully.

For Tahoe icons, Apple de­cided to use vec­tor fonts in­stead of good old-fash­ioned bitmaps. It saves Apple re­sources—draw once, use every­where. Any size, any dis­play res­o­lu­tion, any font width.

But there’re down­sides: fonts are hard to po­si­tion ver­ti­cally, their size does­n’t map di­rectly to pix­els, stroke width does­n’t map 1-to-1 to pixel grid, etc. So, they work every­where, but they also look blurry and mediocre every­where:

They cer­tainly start to work bet­ter once you give them more pix­els.

or make graph­ics sim­pler. But the com­bi­na­tion of small de­tails and tiny icon size is deadly. So, un­til Apple re­leases MacBooks with 380+ DPI, un­for­tu­nately, we still have to care about the pixel grid.

Icons might serve an­other func­tion: to help users un­der­stand the mean­ing of the com­mand.

For ex­am­ple, once you know the con­text (move win­dow), these icons ex­plain what’s go­ing on faster than words:

But for this to work, the user must un­der­stand what’s drawn on the icon. It must be a fa­mil­iar ob­ject with a clear trans­la­tion to com­puter ac­tion (like Trash can → Delete), a widely used sym­bol, or an easy-to-un­der­stand di­a­gram. HIG:

A rookie mis­take would be to mis­rep­re­sent the ob­ject. For ex­am­ple, this is how se­lec­tion looks like:

But its icon looks like this:

Honestly, I’ve been writ­ing this es­say for a week, and I still have zero ideas why it looks like that. There’s an ob­ject that looks like this, but it’s a text block in Freeform/Preview:

Why did it be­come a metaphor for “Select all”? My best guess is it’s a mis­take.

Another place uses text se­lec­tion from iOS as a metaphor. On a Mac!

Some con­cepts have ob­vi­ous or well-es­tab­lished metaphors. In that case, it’s a mis­take not to use them. For ex­am­ple, book­marks: . Apple, for some rea­son, went with a book:

Sometimes you al­ready have an in­ter­face el­e­ment and can use it for an icon. However, try not to con­fuse your users. Dots in a rec­tan­gle look like pass­word in­put, not per­mis­sions:

Icon here says “Check” but the ac­tion is “Uncheck”.

Terrible mis­take: icon does­n’t help, it ac­tively con­fuses the user.

It’s also tempt­ing to con­struct a two-level icon: an ob­ject and some sort of in­di­ca­tor. Like, a check­box and a cross, mean­ing “Delete check­box”:

Or a user and a check­mark, like “Check the user”:

Unfortunately, con­structs like this rarely work. Users don’t build sen­tences from build­ing blocks you pro­vide; they have no de­sire to solve these puz­zles.

Finding metaphors is hard. Nouns are eas­ier than verbs, and menu items are mostly verbs. How does open look? Like an ar­row point­ing to the top right? Why?

I’m not say­ing there’s an ob­vi­ous metaphor for “Open” Apple missed. There is­n’t. But that’s the point: if you can’t find a good metaphor, us­ing no icon is bet­ter than us­ing a bad, con­fus­ing, or non­sen­si­cal icon.

There’s a game I like to play to test the qual­ity of the metaphor. Remove the la­bels and try to guess the mean­ing. Give it a try:

It’s delu­sional to think that there’s a good icon for every ac­tion if you think hard enough. There is­n’t. It’s a lost bat­tle from the start. No amount of money or “management de­ci­sions” is go­ing to change that. The prob­lems are 100% self-in­flicted.

All this be­ing said, I gotta give Apple credit where credit is due. When they are good at choos­ing metaphors, they are good:

A spe­cial case of a con­fus­ing metaphor is us­ing dif­fer­ent metaphors for ac­tions that are di­rect op­po­sites of one an­other. Like Undo/Redo, Open/Close, Left/Right.

It’s good when their icons use the same metaphor:

Because it saves you time and cog­ni­tive re­sources. Learn one, get an­other one for free.

Because of that, it’s a mis­take not to use com­mon metaphors for re­lated ac­tions:

Another mis­take is to cre­ate sym­me­try where there is none. “Back” and “See all”?

Some menus in Tahoe make both mis­takes. E.g. lack of sym­me­try be­tween Show/Hide and false sym­me­try be­tween com­pleted/​sub­tasks:

Import not mir­rored by Export but by Share:

Authors of HIG are ar­gu­ing against in­clud­ing text as a part of an icon. So some­thing like this:

would not fly in 1992.

I agree, but Tahoe has more se­ri­ous prob­lems: icons con­sist­ing only of text. Like this:

It’s un­clear where “metaphorical, ab­stract icon text that is not sup­posed to be read lit­er­ally” ends and ac­tual text starts. They use the same font, the same color, so how am I sup­posed to dif­fer­en­ti­ate? Icons just get in a way: A…Complete? AaFont? What does it mean?

A lot has al­ready been said about the ab­surdly large cor­ner ra­dius of win­dows on ma­cOS Tahoe. People are call­ing the way it looks com­i­cal, like a child’s toy, or down­right in­sane.

Setting all the aes­thetic is­sues aside — which are to some ex­tent a mat­ter of taste — it also comes at a cost in terms of us­abil­ity.

Since up­grad­ing to ma­cOS Tahoe, I’ve no­ticed that quite of­ten my at­tempts to re­size a win­dow are fail­ing.

This never hap­pened to me be­fore in al­most 40 years of us­ing com­put­ers. So why all of a sud­den?

It turns out that my ini­tial click in the win­dow cor­ner in­stinc­tively hap­pens in an area where the win­dow does­n’t re­spond to it. The win­dow ex­pects this click to hap­pen in an area of 19 × 19 pix­els, lo­cated near the win­dow cor­ner.

If the win­dow had no rounded cor­ners at all, 62% of that area would lie in­side the win­dow:

But due to the huge cor­ner ra­dius in Tahoe, most of it — about 75% — now lies out­side the win­dow:

Living on this planet for quite a few decades, I have learned that it rarely works to grab things if you don’t ac­tu­ally touch them:

So I in­stinc­tively try to grab the win­dow cor­ner in­side the win­dow, typ­i­cally some­where in that green area, near the blue dot:

And I as­sume that most peo­ple would also in­tu­itively ex­pect to be able to grab the cor­ner there. But no, that’s al­ready out­side the ac­cepted tar­get area:

So, for ex­am­ple, grab­bing it here does not work:

But guess what — grab­bing it here does:

So in the end, the most re­li­able way to re­size a win­dow in Tahoe is to grab it out­side the cor­ner — a ges­ture that feels un­nat­ural and un­in­tu­itive, and is there­fore in­evitably er­ror-prone.

If things go our way, YouTube’s no­to­ri­ous un­skip­pable ads might be a thing of the past come this February.

As Phụ Nữ re­ports, Vietnam re­cently an­nounced Decree No. 342, which de­tails a num­ber of pro­vi­sions to the na­tional Advertising Law, due to take ef­fect from February 15, 2026. The ad­just­ments are ex­pected to place stricter con­trol on Vietnam’s on­line ad­ver­tis­ing ac­tiv­i­ties to pro­tect con­sumers and curb il­le­gal ads.

Amongst the de­cree ar­ti­cles, some stand­out stip­u­la­tions in­clude a hard cap on the wait­ing time be­fore view­ers can skip video and an­i­mated ads to no more than 5 sec­onds. Static ads must be im­me­di­ately can­cellable.

Additionally, the de­cree re­quires plat­forms to im­ple­ment clear and straight­for­ward ways for users to close ads with just one in­ter­ac­tion. False or vague sym­bols de­signed to con­fuse view­ers are for­bid­den.

Online plat­forms must add vis­i­ble sym­bols and guide­lines to help users re­port ads that vi­o­late the law and al­low them to turn off, deny, or stop see­ing in­ap­pro­pri­ate ads.

Beside rules about the user ex­pe­ri­ence, the de­cree also seeks to tightly reg­u­late ads for 11 groups of goods and ser­vices that di­rectly im­pact the en­vi­ron­ment and hu­man health, in­clud­ing: cos­met­ics; food and bev­er­ages; milk and for­mula for chil­dren; in­sec­ti­ci­dal chem­i­cals and sub­stances; med­ical sup­plies; health­care ser­vices; plant pes­ti­cides and vet­eri­nary drugs; fer­til­iz­ers; plant seeds and saplings; phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals; and al­co­holic drinks.

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Better health be­gins on your plate—not in your med­i­cine cab­i­net.

The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans de­fines real food as whole, nu­tri­ent-dense, and nat­u­rally oc­cur­ring, plac­ing them back at the cen­ter of our di­ets. The State of Our Health50% of Americans have 75% of adults re­port hav­ing at least one 90% of U.S. health­care spend­ing goes to treat­ing —much of which is linked to diet and lifestyle We are end­ing the war on pro­tein. Every meal must pri­or­i­tize high-qual­ity, nu­tri­ent-dense pro­tein from both an­i­mal and plant sources, paired with healthy fats from whole foods such as eggs, seafood, meats, full-fat dairy, nuts, seeds, olives, and av­o­ca­dos.Pro­tein tar­get: ~0.54–0.73 grams per pound of body weight per dayVeg­eta­bles and fruits are es­sen­tial to real food nu­tri­tion. Eat a wide va­ri­ety of whole, col­or­ful, nu­tri­ent-dense veg­eta­bles and fruits in their orig­i­nal form, pri­or­i­tiz­ing fresh­ness and min­i­mal pro­cess­ing.Whole grains are en­cour­aged. Refined car­bo­hy­drates are not. Prioritize fiber-rich whole grains and sig­nif­i­cantly re­duce the con­sump­tion of highly processed, re­fined car­bo­hy­drates that dis­place real nour­ish­ment.What is the New Pyramid?The New Pyramid is a sim­ple guide de­signed to help Americans eat real, whole foods more con­sis­tently. It pri­or­i­tizes nu­tri­ent-dense foods and re­duces re­liance on highly processed prod­ucts, us­ing mod­ern nu­tri­tion sci­ence to sup­port every­day health.What does “Eat Real Food” mean?Eat­ing real food means choos­ing foods that are whole or min­i­mally processed and rec­og­niz­able as food. These foods are pre­pared with few in­gre­di­ents and with­out added sug­ars, in­dus­trial oils, ar­ti­fi­cial fla­vors, or preser­v­a­tives.Why does the New Pyramid em­pha­size pro­tein and veg­eta­bles?Pro­tein and veg­eta­bles form the foun­da­tion of real food meals. Together, they sup­port mus­cle health, meta­bolic func­tion, gut health, and sta­ble en­ergy while nat­u­rally crowd­ing out highly processed foods.Yes. Healthy fats are a nat­ural part of real foods such as meat, seafood, dairy, nuts, olives, and av­o­ca­dos. These fats sup­port brain health, hor­mone func­tion, and nu­tri­ent ab­sorp­tion when con­sumed in their nat­ural forms.How does the New Pyramid ad­dress added sug­ars?Added sug­ars are not part of eat­ing real foods and are not rec­om­mended. The New Pyramid en­cour­ages avoid­ing added sug­ars en­tirely, es­pe­cially for chil­dren, while al­low­ing nat­u­rally oc­cur­ring sug­ars found in whole fruits and plain dairy.Where do grains fit in the New Pyramid?Grains can be part of a real food diet when eaten in whole or tra­di­tion­ally pre­pared forms. Foods like oats, rice, and true sour­dough are pre­ferred. Refined and pack­aged grain prod­ucts should be lim­ited.Hy­dra­tion mat­ters. Choose wa­ter or unsweet­ened bev­er­ages to ac­com­pany meals and snacks.Is the New Pyramid a strict diet?No. The New Pyramid is a flex­i­ble frame­work meant to guide bet­ter choices, not dic­tate ex­act meals. It sup­ports cul­tural tra­di­tions, per­sonal pref­er­ences, and dif­fer­ent lifestyles while re­in­forc­ing one core goal: eat real foods most of the time.Ex­plore the re­search, rec­om­men­da­tions, and im­ple­men­ta­tion guid­ance that shape the Dietary Guidelines, in­clud­ing the sci­ence, the pol­icy guid­ance, and the every­day serv­ing frame­work.

I love writ­ing soft­ware, line by line. It could be said that my ca­reer was a con­tin­u­ous ef­fort to cre­ate soft­ware well writ­ten, min­i­mal, where the hu­man touch was the fun­da­men­tal fea­ture. I also hope for a so­ci­ety where the last are not for­got­ten. Moreover, I don’t want AI to eco­nom­i­cally suc­ceed, I don’t care if the cur­rent eco­nomic sys­tem is sub­verted (I could be very happy, hon­estly, if it goes in the di­rec­tion of a mas­sive re­dis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth). But, I would not re­spect my­self and my in­tel­li­gence if my idea of soft­ware and so­ci­ety would im­pair my vi­sion: facts are facts, and AI is go­ing to change pro­gram­ming for­ever.

In 2020 I left my job in or­der to write a novel about AI, uni­ver­sal ba­sic in­come, a so­ci­ety that adapted to the au­toma­tion of work fac­ing many chal­lenges. At the very end of 2024 I opened a YouTube chan­nel fo­cused on AI, its use in cod­ing tasks, its po­ten­tial so­cial and eco­nom­i­cal ef­fects. But while I rec­og­nized what was go­ing to hap­pen very early, I thought that we had more time be­fore pro­gram­ming would be com­pletely re­shaped, at least a few years. I no longer be­lieve this is the case. Recently, state of the art LLMs are able to com­plete large sub­tasks or medium size pro­jects alone, al­most unas­sisted, given a good set of hints about what the end re­sult should be. The de­gree of suc­cess you’ll get is re­lated to the kind of pro­gram­ming you do (the more iso­lated, and the more tex­tu­ally rep­re­sentable, the bet­ter: sys­tem pro­gram­ming is par­tic­u­larly apt), and to your abil­ity to cre­ate a men­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the prob­lem to com­mu­ni­cate to the LLM. But, in gen­eral, it is now clear that for most pro­jects, writ­ing the code your­self is no longer sen­si­ble, if not to have fun.

In the past week, just prompt­ing, and in­spect­ing the code to pro­vide guid­ance from time to time, in a few hours I did the fol­low­ing four tasks, in hours in­stead of weeks:

1. I mod­i­fied my linenoise li­brary to sup­port UTF-8, and cre­ated a frame­work for line edit­ing test­ing that uses an em­u­lated ter­mi­nal that is able to re­port what is get­ting dis­played in each char­ac­ter cell. Something that I al­ways wanted to do, but it was hard to jus­tify the work needed just to test a side pro­ject of mine. But if you can just de­scribe your idea, and it ma­te­ri­al­izes in the code, things are very dif­fer­ent.

2. I fixed tran­sient fail­ures in the Redis test. This is very an­noy­ing work, tim­ing re­lated is­sues, TCP dead­lock con­di­tions, and so forth. Claude Code it­er­ated for all the time needed to re­pro­duce it, in­spected the state of the processes to un­der­stand what was hap­pen­ing, and fixed the bugs.

3. Yesterday I wanted a pure C li­brary that would be able to do the in­fer­ence of BERT like em­bed­ding mod­els. Claude Code cre­ated it in 5 min­utes. Same out­put and same speed (15% slower) than PyTorch. 700 lines of code. A Python tool to con­vert the GTE-small model.

4. In the past weeks I op­er­ated changes to Redis Streams in­ter­nals. I had a de­sign doc­u­ment for the work I did. I tried to give it to Claude Code and it re­pro­duced my work in, like, 20 min­utes or less (mostly be­cause I’m slow at check­ing and au­tho­riz­ing to run the com­mands needed).

It is sim­ply im­pos­si­ble not to see the re­al­ity of what is hap­pen­ing. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. It is now a lot more in­ter­est­ing to un­der­stand what to do, and how to do it (and, about this sec­ond part, LLMs are great part­ners, too). It does not mat­ter if AI com­pa­nies will not be able to get their money back and the stock mar­ket will crash. All that is ir­rel­e­vant, in the long run. It does not mat­ter if this or the other CEO of some uni­corn is telling you some­thing that is off putting, or ab­surd. Programming changed for­ever, any­way.

How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was in­gested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, be­cause I see this as a con­tin­u­a­tion of what I tried to do all my life: de­moc­ra­tiz­ing code, sys­tems, knowl­edge. LLMs are go­ing to help us to write bet­ter soft­ware, faster, and will al­low small teams to have a chance to com­pete with big­ger com­pa­nies. The same thing open source soft­ware did in the 90s.

However, this tech­nol­ogy is far too im­por­tant to be in the hands of a few com­pa­nies. For now, you can do the pre-train­ing bet­ter or not, you can do re­in­force­ment learn­ing in a much more ef­fec­tive way than oth­ers, but the open mod­els, es­pe­cially the ones pro­duced in China, con­tinue to com­pete (even if they are be­hind) with fron­tier mod­els of closed labs. There is a suf­fi­cient de­moc­ra­ti­za­tion of AI, so far, even if im­per­fect. But: it is ab­solutely not ob­vi­ous that it will be like that for­ever. I’m scared about the cen­tral­iza­tion. At the same time, I be­lieve neural net­works, at scale, are sim­ply able to do in­cred­i­ble things, and that there is not enough “magic” in­side cur­rent fron­tier AI for the other labs and teams not to catch up (otherwise it would be very hard to ex­plain, for in­stance, why OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are so near in their re­sults, for years now).

As a pro­gram­mer, I want to write more open source than ever, now. I want to im­prove cer­tain repos­i­to­ries of mine aban­doned for time con­cerns. I want to ap­ply AI to my Redis work­flow. Improve the Vector Sets im­ple­men­ta­tion and then other data struc­tures, like I’m do­ing with Streams now.

But I’m wor­ried for the folks that will get fired. It is not clear what the dy­namic at play will be: will com­pa­nies try to have more peo­ple, and to build more? Or will they try to cut salary costs, hav­ing fewer pro­gram­mers that are bet­ter at prompt­ing? And, there are other sec­tors where hu­mans will be­come com­pletely re­place­able, I fear.

What is the so­cial so­lu­tion, then? Innovation can’t be taken back af­ter all. I be­lieve we should vote for gov­ern­ments that rec­og­nize what is hap­pen­ing, and are will­ing to sup­port those who will re­main job­less. And, the more peo­ple get fired, the more po­lit­i­cal pres­sure there will be to vote for those who will guar­an­tee a cer­tain de­gree of pro­tec­tion. But I also look for­ward to the good AI could bring: new progress in sci­ence, that could help lower the suf­fer­ing of the hu­man con­di­tion, which is not al­ways happy.

Anyway, back to pro­gram­ming. I have a sin­gle sug­ges­tion for you, my friend. Whatever you be­lieve about what the Right Thing should be, you can’t con­trol it by re­fus­ing what is hap­pen­ing right now. Skipping AI is not go­ing to help you or your ca­reer. Think about it. Test these new tools, with care, with weeks of work, not in a five min­utes test where you can just re­in­force your own be­liefs. Find a way to mul­ti­ply your­self, and if it does not work for you, try again every few months.

Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn cod­ing, and now ma­chines are do­ing it for you. But what was the fire in­side you, when you coded till night to see your pro­ject work­ing? It was build­ing. And now you can build more and bet­ter, if you find your way to use AI ef­fec­tively. The fun is still there, un­touched.

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The Low Orbit Security Radar is a weekly se­cu­rity newslet­ter from an of­fen­sive prac­ti­tion­er’s per­spec­tive. One idea, cu­rated news, and links worth your time.

When watch­ing the sit­u­a­tion in Venezuela un­fold, the phrase “It was dark, the lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a cer­tain ex­per­tise that we have” caught my at­ten­tion. I do not wish to com­ment on the geopo­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion other than to pro­vide some in­sights within my area of com­pe­tency, specif­i­cally, of­fen­sive se­cu­rity.

During a press con­fer­ence, General John D. Caine stated: “As they ap­proached Venezuelan shores the United States be­gan lay­er­ing dif­fer­ent ef­fects pro­vided by SPACECOM, CYBERCOM, and other mem­bers of the in­ter-agency to cre­ate a path­way”. Cyber op­er­a­tions pre­ced­ing tra­di­tional mil­i­tary ac­tions have be­come a com­mon pat­tern so I started dig­ging into the re­ported in­ter­net out­ages.

BGP is the first thing that comes to mind. It’s a pro­to­col used by routers to de­ter­mine what path data takes to get to it’s des­ti­na­tion, it does this by ex­chang­ing rout­ing in­for­ma­tion be­tween Autonomous Systems. It is also no­to­ri­ously in­se­cure and much of the data about BGP is col­lected in pub­lic datasets. Every ma­jor net­work has an Autonomous System Number or ASN. CANTV (AS8048) is Venezuela’s state-owned tele­com, so that’s the ob­vi­ous place to start.

Cloudflare Radar’s route leak data for AS8048 on January 2nd had some in­ter­est­ing anom­alies: 8 pre­fixes (blocks of IP ad­dresses) were be­ing routed through CANTV, with Sparkle (an Italian tran­sit provider) and GlobeNet (a Colombian car­rier) in the Autonomous System (AS) path. The AS path is es­sen­tially the list of net­works traf­fic passes through to reach its des­ti­na­tion. CANTV was in a path it is not typ­i­cally a part of.

There was also a no­tice­able spike in BGP an­nounce­ments in the days lead­ing up to the events and a dras­tic dip in the “Announced IP Address Space” ac­cord­ing to the same Cloudflare Radar data, al­though it’s un­clear what this in­di­cates.

Notably, Sparkle is one of the tran­sit providers in the AS path listed as “unsafe” on is­bg­p­safeyet.com, mean­ing they don’t im­ple­ment some BGP se­cu­rity fea­tures such as RPKI fil­ter­ing.

Cloudflare shows that a leak hap­pened, but not the ac­tual net­work pre­fixes. The net­work pre­fixes are use­ful to de­ter­mine what in­fra­struc­ture was po­ten­tially af­fected. Fortunately pub­lic datasets col­lect this BGP in­for­ma­tion. Pulling the data from ris.ripe.net/​docs/​mrt from around the time of the leak and us­ing a tool called bg­p­dump we can ex­tract the data into a read­able for­mat:

TIME: 01/02/26 15:41:16

TYPE: BGP4MP/MESSAGE/Update

FROM: 187.16.222.45 AS263237

TO: 187.16.216.23 AS12654

ORIGIN: IGP

ASPATH: 263237 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 269832 21980

NEXT_HOP: 187.16.222.45

COMMUNITY: 0:6939 65237:1020

ANNOUNCE

200.74.228.0/23

200.74.236.0/23

200.74.230.0/23

200.74.238.0/23

200.74.226.0/24

After some more pro­cess­ing with bg­p­dump we can get a much bet­ter view of the data, in­clud­ing the pre­fixes that were miss­ing from the Cloudflare radar.

BGP4MP|1767368421|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.230.0/23|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 6762 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 24482:65304 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368421|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.236.0/23|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 6762 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 24482:65304 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368421|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.228.0/23|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 6762 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 24482:65304 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368421|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.238.0/23|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 6762 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 24482:65304 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368421|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.226.0/24|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 6762 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 24482:65304 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368421|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.232.0/24|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 24482:65304 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368421|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.233.0/24|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 24482:65304 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368421|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.234.0/24|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24115:52320 24115:65012 24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368421|A|187.16.222.45|263237|200.74.234.0/24|263237 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.222.45|0|0|0:6939 65237:1020|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368421|A|187.16.222.45|263237|200.74.233.0/24|263237 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.222.45|0|0|0:6939 65237:1020|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368421|A|187.16.222.45|263237|200.74.232.0/24|263237 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.222.45|0|0|0:6939 65237:1020|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368446|A|187.16.222.45|263237|200.74.228.0/23|263237 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 6762 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.222.45|0|0|0:6939 65237:1020|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368446|A|187.16.222.45|263237|200.74.236.0/23|263237 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 6762 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.222.45|0|0|0:6939 65237:1020|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368446|A|187.16.222.45|263237|200.74.230.0/23|263237 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 6762 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.222.45|0|0|0:6939 65237:1020|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368446|A|187.16.222.45|263237|200.74.238.0/23|263237 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 6762 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.222.45|0|0|0:6939 65237:1020|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368446|A|187.16.222.45|263237|200.74.226.0/24|263237 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 6762 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.222.45|0|0|0:6939 65237:1020|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368450|A|187.16.222.45|263237|200.74.234.0/24|263237 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.222.45|0|0|0:6939 65237:1020|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368450|A|187.16.222.45|263237|200.74.233.0/24|263237 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.222.45|0|0|0:6939 65237:1020|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368450|A|187.16.222.45|263237|200.74.232.0/24|263237 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.222.45|0|0|0:6939 65237:1020|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368451|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.234.0/24|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 24482:65304 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368451|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.232.0/24|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 24482:65304 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368451|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.233.0/24|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 24482:65304 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368451|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.238.0/23|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 24482:65304 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368451|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.228.0/23|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 24482:65304 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368451|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.226.0/24|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 24482:65304 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368451|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.236.0/23|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 24482:65304 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

BGP4MP|1767368451|A|187.16.208.144|24482|200.74.230.0/23|24482 52320 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 8048 23520 1299 269832 21980|IGP|187.16.208.144|0|0|24482:2 24482:200 24482:13000 24482:13020 24482:13021 24482:65304 52320:41912 52320:61056 52320:64123|NAG||

More in­for­ma­tion about the for­mat can be seen in Working with Raw BGP Data but of note, the AS path has 8048 (CANTV) re­peated 10 times, is very odd as this would make the route less at­trac­tive since BGP prefers shorter paths. Also of note is all 8 pre­fixes fall within a 200.74.224.0/20 block.

200.74.226.0/24

200.74.228.0/23

200.74.230.0/23

200.74.232.0/24

200.74.233.0/24

200.74.234.0/24

200.74.236.0/23

200.74.238.0/23

A quick WHOIS lookup shows this range be­longs to Dayco Telecom, a host­ing and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions provider in Caracas.

A re­verse DNS lookup can be used to find the do­main name from an IP ad­dress. Interestingly, look­ing up some of these ranges turns up some pretty crit­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture in­clud­ing banks, in­ter­net providers, email servers, and more.

BGP anom­alies hap­pen fre­quently, but the tim­ing of some cur­rently un­ex­plained BGP ac­tiv­ity is very in­ter­est­ing.

When BGP traf­fic is be­ing sent from point A to point B, it can be rerouted through a point C. If you con­trol point C, even for a few hours, you can the­o­ret­i­cally col­lect vast amounts of in­tel­li­gence that would be very use­ful for gov­ern­ment en­ti­ties. The CANTV AS8048 be­ing prepended to the AS path 10 times means there the traf­fic would not pri­or­i­tize this route through AS8048, per­haps that was the goal? There are many unan­swered ques­tions.

Regardless of the ac­tual goal, there were un­doubt­edly some BGP shenani­gans hap­pen­ing dur­ing this time frame. There is a lot of data pub­licly avail­able that is worth a much deeper dive to un­der­stand ex­actly what hap­pened.

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