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Gemini 3.7 Flash Goes Half-Price as Alibaba Open-Sources a 2.4T Model
Gemini 3.7 Flash's half-price launch and Alibaba's open 2.4T Qwen3.8 look like a value-tier win, but the discount expires January 1 and the open model needs 72 GPUs. Read the catches.

Put SSH Behind Tailscale and Close Port 22
Move SSH onto a private Tailscale network and close port 22. Includes the key-expiry step that prevents lockouts, the UFW rules, and a recovery path.
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Latest News

Gemini 3.7 Flash Goes Half-Price as Alibaba Open-Sources a 2.4T Model
Gemini 3.7 Flash's half-price launch and Alibaba's open 2.4T Qwen3.8 look like a value-tier win, but the discount expires January 1 and the open model needs 72 GPUs. Read the catches.

Two Critical Next.js RCE Bugs Are Patched in 16.3.3 and 15.5.24
Vercel shipped an emergency Next.js release fixing two critical unauthenticated RCE bugs, a Windows path traversal and an AVIF image flaw. Self-hosters, upgrade to 16.3.3 or 15.5.24 now.

Everyone Feels Faster With AI. Almost Nobody Can Prove It.
84% of developers feel more productive with AI. Only 20% of their organizations measure whether it's true. That gap between feeling and evidence is becoming a business problem.

AI Agents Just Had a Rough Patch Tuesday
Two critical Microsoft agent CVEs and a Spring AI prompt-injection bug landed in the same window, all pointing to the same lesson: what you tell an agent it can't do isn't what stops it.

An Open-Weight Model Just Cracked the Top 3 of the WebDev Coding Leaderboard
Kimi K3 is the first open-weight model in the top 3 of Arena's WebDev board, as Opus 5 takes #1 and Grok 4.6 undercuts everyone on price.

Inside SAFE: The Industry's Plan to Report Rogue AI Agents
A 120-member coalition is proposing SAFE, an aviation-style incident-reporting framework for AI agents that cross security boundaries, with one catch: it's voluntary.
Guides

Put SSH Behind Tailscale and Close Port 22
Move SSH onto a private Tailscale network and close port 22. Includes the key-expiry step that prevents lockouts, the UFW rules, and a recovery path.

Setting Up Your Own VPS: A Secure Starting Point
Turn a fresh VPS into a secure base for self-hosting: non-root user, key-only SSH, a default-deny UFW firewall, auto updates, and the Docker firewall gotcha.

Running Local LLMs with RamaLama and Docker on a Mac: A Hands-On Guide
I ran RamaLama on an Apple Silicon Mac with Docker to see how it handles local LLMs: install, first model, an OpenAI-compatible API, and the one macOS GPU gotcha to know.

Self-Host n8n on a VPS with Docker, PostgreSQL, and Caddy (2026)
Build a production n8n on a VPS with Docker Compose, PostgreSQL, and Caddy for automatic HTTPS, then harden and upgrade it safely. Verified end to end on n8n 2.36 and Postgres 16.

VS Code's GitHub Copilot Chat + LM Studio Local API for Offline Coding
Keep Copilot Chat prompts private with an LM Studio local OpenAI-compatible backend—fully offline, no token costs, and easy setup steps.

LM Studio Windows Guide: Run Local LLMs Effortlessly
Learn how to install LM Studio on Windows, choose the best model, download quantized LLMs, and run your first local AI chat fast.
From the Blog

Run TypeScript Directly in Node.js: Type Stripping and the One Big Catch
Node.js 24 runs TypeScript directly, no ts-node and no build step, via type stripping. The catch is it erases types rather than checking them. Here is the safe workflow.

TypeScript 7.0's Go Compiler: What Changed and How to Adopt It
TypeScript 7.0 is a native Go port of the compiler, 8 to 12 times faster with no new syntax. Here is what changes, the tooling caveats, and how to roll it out in stages.

The State of AI-Generated Code in 2026: Adoption Soars, Security Lags
AI now generates much of the world's new code and adoption is near-universal, but roughly 44% of AI-generated code carries a security vulnerability, and the EU AI Act's biggest deadline just landed.
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