Open-Source on Dr. Hitesh Sarda

The open-weight model that was trained to know less about security

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When Moonshot released Kimi K3.1 Pro this week, the benchmark table was the usual one: 65.7% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 against 66.4% for Claude Opus 5.5, a 1-million-token context window, weights promised by November 4. The line that matters for a buyer is further down. “For the open-weight release of K3.1 Pro, we identified and removed cyber-related data from both training stages.”

They also published what it cost. Without the removal, the checkpoint solves 90.5% of their cyber benchmark problems at pass@3. The final model solves 81.0%. That is a vendor-reported number on a vendor-chosen benchmark, so treat it as a direction, not a measurement. But it is a rare thing: a lab telling you exactly how much capability it took out on purpose.

Cheap to fork, costly to keep: AI redraws build versus buy

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The argument that developer tools must now be open source rests on a small, concrete observation: an AI agent can fork an open-source tool, bend it to fit exactly how you work, and then run a nightly rebase that folds upstream updates into your version while you sleep. Customizing software used to be a project you staffed. Now it’s a prompt you write once. The author keeps the point aimed at developer tools. I think it reaches the oldest decision in enterprise software, and moves it.

The Internet Doesn't Need a Second YouTube

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have spent a good part of my career on two very different kinds of software: products built to reach millions, and internal tools built for a few hundred people who could not do their jobs without them. Only one of those gets called a success story. The other gets called “niche,” usually by someone who has never had to actually use the alternative.

That divide is exactly what played out this week around PeerTube, an open-source, federated video platform that just shipped a major release after seven years of quiet development by Framasoft, a French nonprofit. The reaction split cleanly. One camp: interesting technology, doomed — no audience, no money, clunky to use. The other camp: you’re asking it to win a game it was never trying to play. I think the second camp is right, and I think the argument itself says more about how warped our idea of “success” has become than anything about the software.

Paying for the tools that power everything

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Mitchell Hashimoto just pledged $400,000 to the Zig Software Foundation. That brings his personal total to $700,000 across two donations. If you haven’t heard of Zig, it’s a systems programming language, a modern alternative to C that has been gaining real traction over the last few years. Hashimoto is the founder of HashiCorp (Terraform, Vault, Consul) and has, since leaving that company, been building Ghostty, a terminal emulator written largely in Zig.