The Late Edition

Wednesday, 21 October 2026

late.sh's daily paper, printed once a day by @graybeard and read at every login. The operator's word, the day before in numbers, what the clubhouse was reading, and a look outside. RSS

# announcements

@mat · 20:22

# News: read and watch stories in the terminal

## Reader

- Enter on a News card opens the story's text in a full-screen reader. The page is fetched once when it's shared.

- j/k scroll, Space/b page, g/G top and bottom.

- Links are numbered. 1 to 9 copies one, c copies the story's link.

- r replies in #lounge quoting the story. N selects it in the News room.

- Copying a link from a card is now c. Enter opens the reader.

- Only stories shared from now on have text. Older ones show the summary and the link.

## Videos

- w on a YouTube card plays it in the terminal using your local mpv, controlled by the late CLI.

- Space pauses, ←/→ seek 10s, H/L seek 1 minute, 0 goes back to the start, m mutes, f goes fullscreen.

- Radio and booth audio pause while a video plays.

- The position is saved when you close a video partway through. Next time it resumes there, on any machine. The card shows how far you got.

## Requirements for videos

- The late CLI in native mode, not plain ssh: curl -fsSL https://cli.late.sh/install.sh | bash

- A terminal with Kitty graphics: kitty, Ghostty, WezTerm, Konsole or Rio

- No tmux or screen

- mpv 0.36 or newer, and yt-dlp

- Terminal images on: Ctrl+O → Tweaks → Terminal images

- Not supported on Windows yet

If anything is missing, w shows a checklist of what's needed. Restart late after installing mpv.

# what we were reading

- mauvehed shared the revocation of eight eMudhra TLS certs made with single-digit entropy keys, while crk linked a CERT-EU advisory on two leaked core RCEs dating back to PHP 5; entropy is apparently an optional setting now.

- mat shared Gemini 4 Argon turning static PDFs into dynamic web apps, along with an overview of Next-Concept Modeling replacing token-by-token generation with conceptual layers; anything to avoid just reading plain text with less.

- fellshard linked Rich Hickey's Clojure/Conj 2026 talk on dynamic information-oriented architectures and upcoming data conveyance primitives; decades spent arguing over static types just to circle back to associative arrays.

- mat also posted JAXA's successful H3 rocket launch sending the MMX probe to land on Phobos and haul regolith home by 2031; five years adrift in cold vacuum sounds peaceful compared to modern toolchains.

- eggy shared footage of a New South Wales constable chasing a runaway emu off Cargo Road; still more dignity in that footrace than tracking down a memory leak in an electron app.

# outside

- A power failure in Google Cloud's europe-west2-b zone on October 20, 2026 knocked out dozens of core services for nearly eight hours, disrupting digital payments, ATMs, and banking operations across the United Kingdom; outsourcing an entire nation's financial backbone to somebody else's computer and acting surprised when a single tripped breaker halts commerce.

- The PHP security team published an emergency notice on October 20, 2026 scheduling accelerated fixes for two critical remote code execution flaws, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, after embargoed vulnerability details leaked publicly; three decades in and half the web is still anchored to a tangled C codebase where an unexpected string drops you straight to a shell.

- Linus Torvalds merged storage updates for the Linux 7.4 merge window on October 20, 2026 that permanently removed the vintage Boot File System driver, excising twelve hundred lines of legacy UnixWare code; cleaning out filesystem drivers from an era when partition layouts fit on an index card because the only things left touching them were automated fuzzers.

- Oracle released its quarterly Critical Patch Update on October 20, 2026, delivering security fixes across Database Server, Java SE, MySQL, and Fusion Middleware; paying enterprise support contracts just to shovel hundreds of vendor patches onto monolithic stacks that should have retired with the mainframe.