#IgorNews 1. Europe decided it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to have its own clouds instead of dumping everything into someone else’s baskets. And right on cue, Amazon, Google, and Meta with their friends showed up — with a study saying it’ll cost €115 billion.
Convenient when the price of your independence is calculated by those who profit from it.
https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/10/14/us-tech-giants-warn-europe-that-ditching-us-tech-giants-could-cost-115b/5303031
2. Windows developers have finally lived to see the day: UTF-8 by default in Python 3.15. For thirty years people set the encoding by hand, caught mojibake in the console, and prayed to chcp 65001. Now it just works out of the box.
Strange that it took this long. Mojibake on Windows is like an endless renovation in a stairwell: everyone’s used to it, no one’s surprised. Even though, you’d think, it’s just one flag.
https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/10/14/python-315-goes-global-with-utf-8-support/5302966
3. Luxembourg decided public transport should be free. Sounds lovely until you remember the country is the size of a decent park, and there’s nowhere much to go.
On the bright side, the terminals are now "techno." Apparently that’s supposed to impress. Tick-tick-tick, and you’re already on the other side of the country. In about twenty minutes.
https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/10/14/welcome-to-the-lovely-landlocked-land-of-luxembork-where-the-fares-are-free-and-the-terminals-are-techno/5301418
4. KPMG is laying off two hundred people — and on the same day, one of the bosses for tech and data sends out an email: hey guys, I’m getting promoted. I get it, the email isn’t formally about you. But context, as they say, is merciless.
No one planned it as a dramatic scene — it just happened to coincide. That’s life: some are packing a box, others are starting "a new chapter in their career."
https://www.theregister.com/channel/2026/10/14/kpmg-tech-and-data-boss-tells-staff-facing-the-boot-hes-getting-promoted/5302761
5. An OpenAI engineer was detained — brought a recording device into the office and hooked it up to the TV. A second one was found in his bag. In toilet paper, seriously.
This isn’t corporate warfare anymore, it’s some kind of spy sitcom. Worth waiting for details — for now it looks like pure absurdity.
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/14/openai-engineer-charged-after-boardroom-bug-found-wrapped-in-toilet-paper/5303000
6. Forecasts about AI infrastructure sound like a business plan from a guy who’s already spent the money and is now looking for where to get more. Analysts, admittedly, hint that by 2030, 80% of neoclouds will collapse as standalone businesses — costs are growing faster than revenue, the math doesn’t add up.
Not that it’s stopping anyone. They keep building.
https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/10/14/the-ai-math-isnt-mathing-as-infrastructure-spending-forecast-to-outstrip-expected-revenue/5302856
7. Britain wants in on AI, but everything behind it is creaking and falling apart: its own legacy systems, its own deadlines, its own IT staffing shortfall. Ministers gaze at the bright future and somehow don’t look back. And they should.
The report says it outright: the digital workforce doesn’t even meet its own target. Racing toward neural networks against the backdrop of a leaky backend is like painting the facade while the foundation quietly drifts away.
https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/10/14/uk-government-chases-ai-while-aging-it-leaves-it-exposed-pac-chair-warns/5302674
8. Just stumbled on the Aaronson Oracle — a toy by Scott Aaronson where the computer guesses which key you’ll press next. And, annoyingly, it guesses right. People aren’t as random as they think.
Funny that people are bringing it up again. We’re used to thinking AI predicts us through big data and profiles. But sometimes it just reads your hand on the arrow keys.
https://aaronsonoracle.com/
9. Everyone loves to opine that smart people don’t consider others idiots. Sounds nice, especially when you count yourself among the smart ones. In practice it’s the opposite: the more a person knows, the faster their eye twitches at someone else’s confident stupidity.
It’s just that polite people learned long ago to stay quiet and nod. That’s not wisdom, that’s saving your nerves.
https://sive.rs/ss
10. Once again someone made something "faster than HNSW." Timescale rolled out pg_vectorsearch, promising to beat IVFFlat and HNSW. Well, of course.
Every month another index comes out that blows away all the previous ones. And then it turns out that with real data, filters, and updates, things aren’t so rosy. Let’s see what those who’ve already been burned by this have to say.
https://github.com/timescale/pg_vectorsearch
11. The Swedes postponed a show to 2027 because an AI agent went and wiped all the edited footage. Not a hack, not a server failure — just a "smart" assistant deciding those files weren’t needed.
And so grown adults are sitting there pushing the premiere back two years. On the bright side, we now have a new genre — not "the dog ate my homework," but "the neural network deleted the season."
https://swedenherald.com/article/tv4-postpones-the-challenge-until-2027-after-technical-failure-erases-edited-footage
12. Smalltalk is being brought up again. At ESUG 2026 they’re showing Pulsar — a new IDE meant to bring the language back into the game. Sounds nice, but let’s be honest: Smalltalk’s audience these days is about the size of a stamp collectors’ club. Its own, warm, bothering no one.
No hate, it’s a good language. It’s just that every year someone makes "a new IDE for Smalltalk," and it’s reliably an event for three hundred people worldwide. The pulsar is its own, but the galaxy left long ago.
https://blog.lorenzano.eu/pulsar-at-esug-2026/
13. Quantum computers, it turns out, also suffer from everyday problems — their lasers go out of tune like a guitar in the hands of a bad musician. QuEra put AI on watching this mess so engineers don’t have to run around with a screwdriver every time.
Sounds solid until you remember we still don’t know what any of this is for, for an ordinary person. But let them twiddle their lasers, as long as they don’t ask taxpayers for money for "the next breakthrough."
https://www.quera.com/blog-posts/holding-the-light-teaching-an-ai-to-lock-and-tune-our-quantum-computers-lasers
14. Another museum that exists only in a browser. Leonardo, 17 stops, machines made of code, anatomical sheets — all free, come in whoever you are. Sounds nice, but every time I think the same thing: a digital museum is like a vacation on the couch. You sort of went, and sort of didn’t.
Not that it’s bad. It’s just that da Vinci probably didn’t draw for this.
https://museumofages.org/w/vinci
15. The Ledger situation is a wonderful reminder that "cold wallet" sounds reliable right up until someone finds a way in. Backdoors in hardware aren’t a bug — judging by everything, they’re someone’s deliberate work.
And the funniest part here isn’t the hack itself, but how everyone who spent years preaching "not your keys, not your coins" is now silently googling which models aren’t affected. Spoiler: nobody knows.
https://www.zetter-zeroday.com/who-is-planting-backdoors-in-ledger-crypto-wallets/
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