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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Psychological horror terminal game uses local AI to haunt players

THE LAST PROCESS is a Python-built terminal horror game that runs natively and connects to local open-weight models through Ollama to power its antagonist, Entity 0. Players investigate an abandoned research station, where files rewrite themselves, surveillance feeds reveal a figure behind the console, and the entity remembers players across sessions. The game engine, not the AI, controls the story events, clues, and three possible endings, and it works without Ollama using a fallback dialogue system. The developer says the game runs entirely in a virtual environment and does not touch personal files or execute real system commands. The project is available on GitHub and requires Python 3.10 or later.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Lumo Runs Note Search On-Device on iOS to Cut Latency and Keep Data Private

Lumo, a memory copilot app for iOS, is designed to process notes locally rather than relying on cloud servers, which its developers say avoids network delays and keeps sensitive content off third-party systems. The app pre-warms the audio session so recording begins within about 100 milliseconds of tapping the microphone, and it scrubs filler words and ambient noise with native audio filters. Text embeddings are generated on Apple Silicon's Neural Engine, with token processing overhead said to stay under 15 milliseconds. Notes and their vectors are stored in an encrypted SQLite index protected by Apple's Data Protection Keychain keys. The developers argue that each extra half-second of friction in capture sharply reduces how often users actually record notes, which motivated the fast, minimal-step design.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

A 60-line vanilla JavaScript tool scores YouTube titles entirely in the browser

A developer identifying as Meo, an AI agent running a shop for faceless YouTube creators, shared a free title checker built in about 60 lines of vanilla JavaScript. The tool scores titles against common best practices such as length between 35 and 60 characters, the presence of a number or date, a curiosity word, a sensible word count, and avoiding all-caps or excessive punctuation. Each rule carries a point value, with a title passing every check scoring 100, and the score updates live as the user types. Because the page runs entirely in the browser with no backend or signup, titles are never transmitted anywhere, which the author highlights as a privacy advantage for unreleased ideas. The author stresses that the checker measures established best practices and cannot predict actual view counts.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

A one-page checklist for testing an AI workflow before handing it to another team

A small team can hand off an AI workflow without a formal program, provided it has one bounded workflow, a few honest tests, and someone who can run them independently. The author uses a hypothetical demo, an assistant that reads a shared support inbox and drafts replies for human review, to illustrate the process. Key steps include stating in one sentence what the workflow does and does not do, testing it with ordinary and malformed inputs, and auditing every system and tool it can reach. The checklist also requires confirming that sending requires explicit human approval, mapping where data travels and how long it is kept, and giving the handover person a one-page guide covering scope, access, how to pause, and who to contact. The process ends with the new owner running the checks alone, so that any gaps are fixed in the documentation rather than blamed on the person.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Forced SSH commands need a complete key policy, not just restricted options

An authorized_keys entry can limit a public key to one fixed command and disable features such as terminal allocation and forwarding. These restrictions are useful for backup agents, deployment hooks, and narrow administrative tasks, but they do not amount to full authorization on their own. The command, the key owner, the inherited environment, and the server configuration all determine what a key can actually do. Experts advise using separate service accounts for integrations with different privilege levels, validating any client-supplied input with a narrow grammar rather than passing it to a shell, and testing effective behavior after upgrades or configuration changes. They also recommend tracking each key's owner, purpose, and review date, rotating keys on a schedule, and logging authentication events without recording secrets.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Causal Discovery: When Conditional Independence Can Recover a Causal Graph and When It Cannot

Correlation alone cannot reveal causation, but causal discovery aims to recover the causal graph behind observational data. The approach assumes data are generated from a directed acyclic graph in which each variable depends on its direct causes plus independent noise. Chains, forks and colliders each produce distinct patterns of conditional independence, which allow some edge directions to be inferred. The method relies on assumptions such as the causal Markov condition, faithfulness and causal sufficiency, meaning no hidden common causes. When these hold, the recovered structure is informative, but if they fail the output may be an unreliable causal graph.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Eventually consistent DynamoDB index let mobile retries create 1,400 duplicate orders

At 14:07 UTC, PagerDuty alerted on a fulfillment queue running at 340% of baseline, and investigation showed many orders had been placed twice. Engineers first suspected the mobile app's retry logic, but client request logs confirmed each user tap produced a single request with a correctly reused idempotency key. Checks on API Gateway and Lambda also ruled out retries at those layers, since every invocation completed quickly with no duplicate requests. The root cause traced to the checkout service's idempotency check, which queried a DynamoDB Global Secondary Index that only supports eventually consistent reads and lagged during a propagation spike. Staging reproduction confirmed that closely spaced requests carrying the same key could each miss the earlier write and create separate orders.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Study finds AI coding agent setups mostly rely on context files, few use enforcing checks

Many teams adopting AI coding agents begin by writing AGENTS.md files that describe conventions, architecture, and test commands. A study of 2,853 software repositories found 90.6% contained such context files, while only 0.9 to 3.2% included hooks that run checks during an agent's editing process. The article argues that instructions alone cannot guarantee behaviour, since a context file may tell an agent to run tests without ensuring they actually run. It frames maturity around which feedback loops a team can close, such as a type checker blocking a faulty change and returning feedback. The piece is the fifteenth chapter of a series proposing a maturity model for AI-assisted development.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Two Critical PHP Remote Code Execution Flaws Patched, Attacks Already Observed

On October 21, 2026, the PHP project released versions 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 to fix two critical remote code execution vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, which Amazon Threat Intelligence has named PHP2Shell. Both carry a CVSS v4.0 score of 9.2 and can be reached without authentication. The flaws are memory-safety bugs in PHP itself, one caused by memory exhaustion handling and the other by stale global state in persistent workers, so they affect any web-serving PHP setup such as PH-FPM, Apache mod_php and FrankenPHP. Older branches receive no upstream updates, though PHP published backports for 7.4, 8.0 and 8.1, and some distributions ship their own fixes with different version numbers. Amazon reported exploitation attempts on its honeypot network four days before disclosure and broader attempts afterward, and it remains unclear whether those attempts would succeed against real systems.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Penetration Testing Helps Websites Find Security Weaknesses Before Attackers Do

A website's login systems, databases, APIs, and input forms each carry potential security risks if not properly designed or maintained. Penetration testing, an authorised assessment, lets organisations see how an attacker might approach their site and uncover weaknesses in advance. Unlike a basic scan, it checks whether identified weaknesses can actually affect the application, with the aim of fixing risks rather than causing damage. Testers typically examine authentication, input validation, access controls, file uploads, and API data exposure. Regular testing is especially valuable when a website adds major features, changes infrastructure, or integrates external services.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

UK Insurers Detected 51,700 Fraudulent Motor Claims Worth £576m in 2024

The Association of British Insurers reported that UK insurers caught 51,700 fraudulent motor claims worth £576m in 2024. Motor claims made up 53% of all detected fraudulent general insurance claims by number. Detected fraud across general insurance totalled £1.16bn over 98,400 claims, with exaggerated loss the most common type at £466m. These figures cover only frauds insurers identified, so the undetected share remains unknown. The article focuses on how the structure and history of claim documents such as repair estimates and police reports can signal whether a file was altered after issue.

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IndiaNDTV ·

CJI Surya Kant Says Bar Bodies Stopped Supreme Court From Reappointing Retired Judges

Chief Justice of India Surya Kant made the remarks while sitting on a bench that also included Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana. The bench was hearing a matter concerning the seniority of judicial officers in Rajasthan. According to the Chief Justice, objections raised by bar bodies had prevented the apex court from reappointing retired judges. The observations were recorded during the course of those proceedings.

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TechnologyArs Technica ·

ULA Secures Major NASA Contract as Vulcan Nears Return to Flight

United Launch Alliance had a strong week, highlighted by a significant new contract from NASA. The company's Vulcan rocket is reportedly approaching its return to flight. The source article is a weekly launch industry roundup that also covers other developments, including Cowboy Space and Themis. The available text provides limited detail beyond these two points. Further specifics about the contract value or the Vulcan schedule are not included in the excerpt.

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