Tech News

Chrome rejected JPEG XL in 2023, and three years later, perceptual compression metrics still don’t vindicate its supporters. A technical analysis compares JPEG XL against AVIF and WebP in real-world web scenarios, beyond the symbolism of the open format.

A 64-number cipher that resisted 373 years of decryption attempts fell to Claude Fable 5.1 in under an hour. The key was never a secret alphabet: it was the very book where Thomas Urquhart hid it.

Misleading Google Ads passed Google’s human review twice, even though Gemini flags them as fraud instantly. The case exposes the gap between the AI Google promotes and the AI it actually uses to moderate its own advertising platform.

Website Wizard is a JOSM plugin that automates finding a business’s official website and adds the website tag to it in OpenStreetMap. The whole process takes under 15 minutes and requires no prior experience in mapping or programming. It’s a simple entry point for adding open, verifiable data to the world’s largest collaborative map.

Indie developer Joel Auterson explained why he decided to keep coding without generative AI, even as industry pressure pushes in the opposite direction. His reflection, inspired by his friend Shad’s camera app Uncamera, lays out three possible paths for any software creator in 2026.

An indie developer spent CA$220 over two weeks on Google Ads and discovered a bot farm had generated 60% of his billed installs. Here’s how he identified the pattern, filed an invalid traffic claim, and changed his campaign’s conversion event.

A Bluesky post about keeping old cables went viral among developers, prompting Jim Nielsen to print it out and tape it to his own cable box. The anecdote sums up why hardware kept ‘just in case’ is still the oldest backup policy in the trade.

Shopify announced it’s abandoning React Native, the framework it adopted in 2020, to rebuild its mobile apps in native Swift and Kotlin. The company says AI agents cut the cost of maintaining two platforms separately, the original reason behind its bet on React Native six years ago.

An essay published by the engineer who writes as Graybeard argues that software doesn’t drive people crazy because it’s technically hard, but because of the hidden cost of software: the gap between what a change appears to cost and what it actually costs to sustain. Here we break it down with code examples and a practical guide for teams.