activescott's Notes

Anthropic say that Cowork can only access files you grant it access to—it looks to me like they’re mounting those files into a containerized environment, which should mean we can trust Cowork not to be able to access anything outside of that sandbox.

Update: It’s more than just a filesystem sandbox—I had Claude Code reverse engineer the Claude app and it found out that Claude uses VZVirtualMachine—the Apple Virtualization Framework—and downloads and boots a custom Linux root filesystem.

I recently learned that the summarization applied by the WebFetch function in Claude Code and now in Cowork is partly intended as a prompt injection protection layer via this tweet from Claude Code creator Boris Cherny:

Summarization is one thing we do to reduce prompt injection risk. Are you running into specific issues with it?

Subscribe [On agents using CLI tools in place of REST APIs] To save on context window, yes, but moreso to improve accuracy and success rate when multiple tool calls are involved, particularly when calls must be correctly chained e.g. for pagination, rate-limit backoff, and recognizing authentication failures.

Other major factor: which models can wield the skill? Using the CLI lowers the bar so cheap, fast models (gpt-5-nano, haiku-4.5) can reliably succeed. Using the raw APl is something only the costly "strong" models (gpt-5.2, opus-4.5) can manage, and it squeezes a ton of thinking/reasoning out of them, which means multiple turns/iterations, which means accumulating a ton of context, which means burning loads of expensive tokens. For one-off API requests and ad hoc usage driven by a developer, this is reasonable and even helpful, but for an autonomous agent doing repetitive work, it's a disaster.

This program generates images from text prompts (and optionally from other images) using the FLUX.2-klein-4B model from Black Forest Labs. It can be used as a library as well, and is implemented entirely in C, with zero external dependencies beyond the C standard library. MPS and BLAS acceleration are optional but recommended.

In the video, at least one agent appears to fire nonlethal rounds at the crowd, hitting one woman in the leg before aiming and striking Rummler’s face.

The video shows Rummler dropping to the ground after being shot, holding his face as the crowd retreats. The same agent then drags him by the hood of their jacket; they appear to be choking, grasping at the jacket binding their neck as blood pours from their left eye.

Another video shows Rummler inside the building, lying on the ground bleeding while agents fire what appear to be pepper balls at the back of the head and neck of a man trying to record the incident with his cellphone.

“The other officers were mocking him, saying, ‘You’re going to lose your eye,’” she said, recalling what her nephew told her.

The number of billionaires reached more than 3,000 last year, and collectively they saw their fortunes increase by 16%, or $2.5 trillion, the report said.

Added to this, billionaires’ wealth has surged by 81% since 2020, the charity said, describing the past as “a good decade for billionaires.”

And while the rich have become richer, poverty reduction has slowed, with levels “broadly where they were in 2019,” according to a news release from the charity.

Oxfam also said the super-rich often use their wealth to secure political power as well as media ownership, noting billionaire Elon Musk’s involvement in the U.S. administration at the start of 2025, Jeff Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post and billionaire Vincent Bollore’s acquisition of French news site CNews.

Rich nations are “cutting aid further and faster than before,” Oxfam’s report stated. These cuts, including the closure of USAID, could lead to an additional 14 million deaths by 2030, the charity said.

“Just being a leader in a highly corrupted regime for over a decade makes it logical that she is a priority target for investigation,” said David Smilde, a Tulane University professor who has studied Venezuela for three decades. “She surely knows this, and it gives the U.S. government leverage over her. She may fear that if she does not do as the Trump administration demands, she could end up with an indictment like Maduro.”

Rodríguez has been on the radar of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for years and in 2022 was even labeled a “priority target,” a designation DEA reserves for suspects believed to have a “significant impact” on the drug trade

she steadily worked while foreign minister and later vice president to court American investment during the first Trump administration, hiring lobbyists close to Trump and even ordering the state oil company to make a $500,000 donation to his inaugural committee.

The announcement stunned Netanyahu, who was not consulted. The Israeli media quickly started reporting on the idea that Qatar and Turkey — key mediators on the Gaza deal who both have fractious relationships with Israel — would be wielding influence.

Google has appealed a US district judge's landmark antitrust ruling that found the company illegally held a monopoly in online search.

The company is requesting a pause on implementing a series of fixes - viewed by some observers as too lenient - aimed at limiting its monopoly power.

He refused to grant government lawyers their request for a Google breakup that would include a spin-off of Chrome, the world's most popular browser. Instead, he pushed less rigorous remedies, including a requirement that Google share certain data with "qualified competitors" as deemed by the court. That data was due to include portions of its search index, Google's massive inventory of web content that functions like a map of the internet. The judge also called for Google to allow certain competitors to display the tech giant's search results as their own in a bid to give upstarts the time and resources they need to innovate.

This week, Google parent Alphabet became the fourth company ever to reach a market capitalisation of $4tn.

The White House has announced the first members of its Gaza "Board of Peace", and the list of names will do little to dispel the criticism from some quarters that the US president's plan resembles, at its heart, a colonial solution imposed over the heads of the Palestinians.

The UN estimates around 80% of buildings in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged and families who have survived the war are now struggling with the winter weather, and a lack of food and shelter.

Showing meaningful progress towards rebuilding will also be a Herculean task, involving not only the removal of an estimated 60 million tonnes of rubble, but first finding and disposing of the dead bodies and unexploded bombs contained within it.

Hamas has said it will only disarm as part of a wider deal establishing a Palestinian state. Israel, whose ground troops still control more than half of the Gaza Strip, has said it will only withdraw if Hamas disarms. How that catch-22 can be resolved is perhaps the biggest test of all.

I am guessing that the OP eventually figured it out, but since no-one posted the correct answer here, and I just figured it out the hard way, I thought I would share what I learned. Like the OP, I could not get the disconnect slide to go back down until I realized that there is a latch clip on the left hand side that needs to be pulled out clear of the sliding part. In addition, the red tab at the top needs to be pulled up to its highest point (in case you pressed it down at all while getting the mechanism to reconnect). Once these two barriers were addressed, my sliding connector snapped back into place with ease.

In the Seattle region, average apartment rents have climbed about 5% since 2022, according to ALN Apartment data. In the Austin area, rents moved in the opposite direction. They fell about 6% in 2023 and another 4% in 2024 and 2025.

Austin is not cheap. But in recent years, it became a national outlier. While rents kept rising in many big cities, Austin’s fell.

To understand Austin’s experience, it helps to start with the pandemic, when Austin saw one of the sharpest rent spikes in the country. Remote work tempted thousands of newcomers to move there. Rents jumped 20% to 25% year over year

new apartments with pools and gyms. That kind of housing often draws criticism, because rents are higher than in new buildings than in old buildings. But housing researchers say it still matters. Building newer, more expensive apartments frees up space in older, cheaper apartments, which decreases the pressure for rents to rise in older buildings.

“Seattle has tended to be an everything bagel kind of place, so they may want to pass pro-housing reforms, but also it wants to have tenant protections and inclusionary zoning and things on top of that that may limit the effectiveness of the supply oriented policies,” Schuetz said.

“Texas is a good example of just a plain bagel," she continued, "You want to increase supply, you're gonna pass a lot that increases supply without any frills on top.”

One example: Austin has eliminated the requirement that developers include parking spaces at their apartment buildings.

Another example: Austin has an affordable housing fee that builders pay, as Seattle does, but in Austin the fee is an option that allows the builder to build taller buildings, whereas in Seattle the fee is required whether the builder takes advantage of the extra height allowance or not.

“I can’t fully explain, but we’ve actually seen eviction filing rates go up in the city as rent prices have gone down,” McGlinchey said. And Texas law limits how much cities can protect tenants.

There are broader concerns, too. More people mean more pressure on roads, water systems, and more construction on environmentally sensitive areas. “Austin has strong environmental protections,” McGlinchey said, but “people worry at the same time, are we sort of eroding what people love about this city while just sort of building, building, building to address this demand that we've had for housing?”

McGlinchey does not expect Austin’s rent drops to last.

When developers build apartments in pedestrian-heavy areas, many cities require restaurants or retail on the ground floor. The idea is to encourage people to walk, rather than drive, to shop and dine.

But developers often lose money on those storefronts, and those costs get passed on to renters through higher housing prices.

So Gov. Bob Ferguson has requested a bill making it illegal for cities to require storefront spaces in new apartment buildings. Instead, developers could add more apartments, or amenities for tenants like gyms and rec rooms.

His proposed budget would redirect $569 million from the state’s quarterly auctions of pollution permits away from the environmental spending those funds have been dedicated to since the auctions began in 2023. That half-billion-plus dollars would be used to shield state refunds of sales taxes for lower-income taxpayers from the budget axe.

To date, the auction funds — paid by major polluters for the right to keep damaging the global climate with emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide — have gone mostly to expand clean energy use and to help 16 communities in Washington identified as being overburdened by air pollution.

The Climate Commitment Act, which created the state’s cap on carbon emissions and system of carbon auctions, specifies that the sales-tax refunds are an approved use of auction proceeds, though no auction proceeds have been used for tax rebates to date.

Rooftop solar has helped some tribal citizens lower their monthly energy bills from $160 to $10, as well as avoid blackouts.

Fossil-fuel combustion is the primary cause of the planet's rapidly heating climate.

“On the one hand, the thing that makes Wikipedia truly magical is that it’s open to anyone who shares our vision and our values,” opined Iskander, who is stepping down on January 20 and had quipped onstage about giving a speech on her way out the door. The incident is an example of the tension that can emerge “when a thing can belong to everyone and no one all at the same time”. It shouldn’t paint a whole community

As Wikipedia neared its quarter century, I wanted to investigate whether the website can survive myriad challenges from regulators, AI, the far right and Elon Musk.

The internet has made it feel like each of our tribes inhabits different, irreconcilable realities. And yet somehow, on Wikipedia, people manage to reach a consensus every day. How did that happen?

If you Google something, the top result has long been a Wikipedia entry. Now, as people increasingly use AI tools like ChatGPT, the results they see are in no small part based on Wikipedia; today’s large language models have been trained on Wikipedia’s millions of articles. This has led to a decline in eyeballs on Wikipedia, Iskander tells me. Some longtime Wikipedians privately also worry about declining editor numbers. For now, though, Wikipedia remains in the top 10 most viewed websites, while eschewing the business model of the other top platforms: Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Amazon. This crowdsourced, non-profit website has become the largest compendium of human knowledge ever created. That doesn’t mean it will survive the most challenging moment in its history.

The Heritage Foundation, which produced the Project 2025 plan for Trump’s second term, even mooted identifying and targeting Wikipedia editors it disagrees with using facial recognition.

Wikipedia was blocked in Turkey for almost three years, and remains blocked in China.

A global trend towards regulating online content risks making Wikimedia Foundation’s work untenable. Laws such as the EU’s Digital Services Act and the Online Safety Act in the UK fail to differentiate the website from for-profit platforms, Wikipedians claim. Where governments compel platforms to take more responsibility for content posted by users, they could force Wikipedia to go dark in their countries.

Wales posted to the article’s talk page criticising the lede and overall presentation of the article for stating, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel was committing genocide. It was a “violation” of the website’s neutral point of view, he wrote, which “requires immediate correction”. Al Jazeera mistakenly reported (and later corrected) that Wales himself had locked editing on the page. The report seemed to misunderstand how Wikipedia really works. Whatever his personal feelings about Israel and Palestine, even Wales, the website’s founder, couldn’t force the wording to be changed: revisions could only be made through painstaking discussion by Wikipedia’s editors. An administrator had instead restricted the page to longtime “extended confirmed” editors on October 28 2025. The article remains restricted, with debate ongoing among users over issues with its content.

Wales said its problems were a sign he needed to use his role more to emphasise Wikipedia’s neutrality. “I think that’s particularly true at a time where we’re being called ‘Wokipedia’,” he said. “And I’m really keen that we double down on neutrality in these times, because it’s part of what is so valuable and so trusted about Wikipedia, which is to say it doesn’t matter what your political views are, you can turn to Wikipedia and get a pretty straight thing.”

Drawing him back to the question about the “Gaza genocide” article, I asked what exactly he saw his role as being when he got involved. “I just raised the question,” he replied. “I’m like, ‘This is not OK,’ right?” Recently Wales has been leading a “neutral point of view” working group with Wikimedia Foundation’s research team and Wikipedia community representatives to improve understanding and support for NPOV across a wide range of cases. It’s a conversation he thinks Wikipedians need to have: “If people feel like we’ve decided that we want to take sides on issues, it’s going to be a big problem in the long run,” Wales said, adding, “Nothing magically changes overnight, but I think we’ll get there. I’m always optimistic.”

Israel has moved the blocks which are supposed to mark its post-ceasefire line of control deeper into Gaza in several places, sowing confusion among Palestinians.

Under the terms of the US-brokered deal with Hamas, Israel agreed to withdraw troops beyond a line marked in yellow on Israeli military maps, which it has illustrated on the ground with concrete yellow blocks. Defence Minister Israel Katz warned in October that anyone crossing the Yellow Line would be "met with fire".

the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) placed blocks and later returned to move them deeper inside Gaza. In total, 16 positions were moved.

As well as the blocks that have been moved, BBC Verify mapped 205 other markers. More than half of those have been placed significantly deeper inside the Strip than the line marked on maps. An IDF spokesperson said it rejected "all claims that the Yellow Line has been moved or its crossing by IDF troops".

In some cases, the movements of blocks were followed by demolitions of nearby buildings by the IDF.

Israeli forces have killed at least 10 Palestinians and wounded several in attacks across Gaza. It comes after the United States announced the launch of the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire agreement. At least 451 Palestinians have been reported killed since the ceasefire took effect in October last year. US President Donald Trump has announced he will chair what’s being called a “Board of Peace” to govern Gaza. At least 71,441 people have been killed and 171,329 wounded by Israeli forces across Gaza since October 2023. A total of 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the October 7, 2023, attacks, and about 200 were taken captive.

It starts from the moment you fire up your coding agent. As soon as it sees that you're building something, it doesn't just jump into trying to write code. Instead, it steps back and asks you what you're really trying to do.

Once it's teased a spec out of the conversation, it shows it to you in chunks short enough to actually read and digest.

After you've signed off on the design, your agent puts together an implementation plan that's clear enough for an enthusiastic junior engineer with poor taste, no judgement, no project context, and an aversion to testing to follow. It emphasizes true red/green TDD, YAGNI (You Aren't Gonna Need It), and DRY.