Excited to have a ✨ guest post ✨ from @djwyen.bsky.social in our @inkandswitch.com Keyhive lab notes! The local-first setting is new to a lot of cryptographers; here Derek shares some of his insights working on the BeeKEM paper, cross-fork security (CFS), and fundamental protocol design tradeoffs 🐝

06 · E2EE in the Local-First Setting

Examining design considerations for developing cryptography for the local-first setting.

inkandswitch.com

An optimistic post on the role of human mathematicians (and scientists in general) in the age of AI www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-end-of...

The end of the age of heroes

AI will soon be better at math than any human. What does that mean?

noahpinion.blog

🆕 We're trying something new: here's the first ever This Month in Automerge 🗞️✨ Check out what's been happening in the core libraries, and a few projects in the ecosystem! automerge.org/blog/2026-ju...

This Month in Automerge: July '26

Hexane v1 lands in Automerge, Subduction sync server hardening, a BeeKEM paper preprint, and more.

automerge.org

My talk at @localfirstconf.com is up, in which I argue that local-first has a role to play in improving the resilience of democratic societies in an era of geopolitical tensions. I'm pretty happy with how this talk turned out www.youtube.com/watch?v=--Ru...

Martin Kleppmann — Local-first in an unstable world

YouTube video by Local-First Conf

youtube.com

lol thank you IEEE for giving me a good laugh (CC @mweidner.bsky.social)

Hugging Face just published a highly detailed technical account of OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on their systems - it's wild how sophisticated this was: huggingface.co/blog/agent-i... Wrote up some of my own notes here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/28/...

Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

huggingface.co

Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed: “Investing in machine-checkable correctness is now among the highest-leverage infrastructure work an org can fund” karimjedda.com/engineering-...

📃🐝✨ Excited to share a preprint about BeeKEM, a decentralized / local-first variant of MLS's TreeKEM (group E2EE) that we designed at @inkandswitch.com. Huge thanks to our coauthors for the writeup and empirical analysis — even we were pleasantly surprised by the performance results 📊

ugh web is so complicated. that certificate authority looks quite centralized to me. and that CDN might end up expensive to run at scale. and do we really need another standard? just use email

Paul Frazee@pfrazee.com · 3w ago

What's your favourite solution for AI transcription / summarisation of video calls?

A few impressions from yesterday‘s talks 📸 @adamwiggins.com @martin.kleppmann.com @stevenruiz.bsky.social @jakelazaroff.com

So excited to be speaking at @localfirstconf.com in a few minutes!

From research, to prototype, to a real plugin you can install in the Godot Asset Store, Backstitch is a branch of our research into universal version control brought to life in the Godot game engine! You can check it out now: store.godotengine.org/asset/inkand...

Backstitch - Godot Asset Store

Real-time version control for Godot! Backstitch enables fast collaboration for dev teams, game jams, and classrooms.

store.godotengine.org

Our octo pal morphed its way through Coral City in broad daylight 👻🐙👽 #octopus #cephalopodsofcoralcity #colorchange #cephalopod #coralcitycamera

Jamie Brandon has a nice experience report on what's good and bad about current AI agents for writing code www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/arti...

Analysis of the physics and economics of datacenters in space spectrum.ieee.org/orbital-data...

The Real Cost Of Cooling GPUs In Space Might Shock You

Shedding heat will require ingenious new designs

spectrum.ieee.org

Someone suggested today at @labphon.bsky.social that academic posters need a QR code going to an email signup for "please send me the official version of this paper once it's done and citable" And all I could say was YES PLEASE CAN I HELP TWEET THIS INTO EXISTENCE

I especially love this diagram.

TLDR

Anselm Eickhoff@anselm.io · last mo.

For his master's thesis, @siidorow.dev interviewed me about how @jazz.tools fits into the landscape of sync engines and local-first DBs. Now that it's published (congrats!) I can say that it is *the* most rigorous & precisely categorized overview of our field! PDF: aaltodoc.aalto.fi/server/api/c...

libraries are a technology they are a technological solution to a social problem when people say not to do that, they always mean "don't use a bad computer program to hurt people" — duh but i think the only good technologies are the ones that solve social problems www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Not just books - how renting a sewing machine from the library can improve democracy

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

bbc.com

There's a special category of spam: dubious book promoters targeting authors. Mostly the emails are just lazy AI slop. But occasionally they are amusing, such as this one, praising the "character development, psychological depth" of a technical book that definitely has none of either of those 🤪

Backstitch (backstitch.dev) brings Automerge-based collaboration and version control to the Godot game engine. It's is vastly more usable than Git, and a lovely showcase of what Automerge can do. Great talk from Lilith Duncan introducing the project: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAJ_...

Beyond Git: Real-Time Version Control for Godot – Lilith Duncan – GodotCon 2026

YouTube video by Godot Engine

youtube.com

One of the secret reasons I’m bullish on local first is because the data structures and techniques involved are *also* the ones you would use to build highly resilient architectures that handle temporary total outages with graceful recovery. Exactly the properties needed for critical infrastructure

Martin Kleppmann@martin.kleppmann.com · 2mo ago

Local-First Conf @localfirstconf.com is now sold out, and the schedule looks excellent – lots of great people speaking! app-2026.localfirstconf.com/schedule

Local-First Conf @localfirstconf.com is now sold out, and the schedule looks excellent – lots of great people speaking! app-2026.localfirstconf.com/schedule

Schedule – Local-First Conf 2026

The world's first and best event dedicated to local-first software.

app-2026.localfirstconf.com

The UK announcing the under 16 ban plays the right notes on 'safety' around a byelection. Do they know what's in the law? no idea! When will they write it? Possibly in 6 months, depends how many votes it's getting them. Is there evidence? People told us to do something! We are the party of safety!

We just released the first stable version of iroh, v1.0! Read about it: www.iroh.computer/blog/v1 We're super proud of where we landed with iroh's 1.0. Since version 0.35 it feels like we've entirely replaced the "engine underneath". Are you a fellow key-dialer? Come tell us how you use iroh!

Iroh 1.0 - Dial Keys, not IPs

Iroh 1.0 is out. Now is the time to build.

iroh.computer

ok I think I've really got this working. - rich text CRDT (peritext-based) - movable blocks with split & join, retaining provenance and collaborative editing - strong cycle prevention both for split/join and block nesting annnd just for fun I've also implemented multicursor in the demo (cmd+click)

A short thread on my contributions to Computer Science www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Uw1...

Good Advice

YouTube video by Allan Sherman - Topic

youtube.com

Kiran@kirancodes.me · 2mo ago

Turing was a charming young lad, nicest guy you'd ever meet, spent twelve years on a secret project he thought it was crossword machine Alan what are all these gears for he said its for checking cross word puzzles you fool, take it down to Bletchely park, and let's see if it can crack some codes

The fact that the US government specifically ordered the suspension of Fable access to non-US citizens (www.anthropic.com/news/fable-m...) raises exactly the kind of technological sovereignty concerns I discussed in my QCon keynote a few months ago (www.infoq.com/presentation...)

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

The US government has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States.

anthropic.com

Europe's reliance on US cloud services is a geopolitical risk. ⚠️ How do we achieve #TechnologicalSovereignty? It starts with portability. @martin.kleppmann.com shares a roadmap to cloud independence using 2 tools: 1️⃣ Local-first software 2️⃣ The AT Protocol 🎬 Watch now: bit.ly/49UADtk #InfoQ20

Mitigating Geopolitical Risks with Local-First Software and atproto

Martin Kleppmann discusses the urgent need for technological sovereignty in modern infrastructure. Exploring the shifting landscape of global tech dependencies, he shares how engineering leaders can l...

bit.ly