I’ve been thinking about coal mines. How you dig a hole in the earth, extract everything valuable, leave a scar, and walk away. Then someone comes along decades later and says, what if we filled it with water and made it beautiful? Feels like a metaphor for something, but I can’t quite land it.
Germany Turned Coal Mines Into 14,000 Hectares of Lakes
Where there were coal mines, now there are lakes. 14,000 hectares of them. Germany decided that massive scars in the landscape didn’t have to stay that way. They could become something people actually want to visit. Revolutionary concept: clean up your mess and make it nice. The UK should take notes, but we’ll probably just build a block of overpriced flats.
Nearly Half of Cybersecurity Pros Want to Quit
The work isn’t the problem. The invisibility is. When everything runs smoothly, nobody notices you exist. When one thing goes sideways, suddenly you’re the only person in the room. It’s like being a referee: you only get attention when someone thinks you’ve messed it up. Although – this isn’t really new is it?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/nearly-half-of-cybersecurity-pros-want-to-quit-heres-why/
How AI Went From Eye-Roll to Everywhere at RSAC
A few years ago, vendors hyping AI at security conferences got polite nods and internal groans. Now those same people have rebuilt their entire pitch around it. Someone finally wrote the forensic breakdown of how we got here, and it’s uncomfortably accurate. We didn’t choose this. We just stopped resisting.
https://ringmast4r.substack.com/p/not-long-ago-the-cybersecurity-industry
OpenAI’s AGI Clause Quietly Disappeared
Remember the bit in the OpenAI-Microsoft deal where OpenAI could walk away once they achieved AGI (to be honest, I had zero idea about this)? Simon Willison noticed it’s gone. Vanished. Nobody else caught it because nobody else was looking at the primary sources. Now we know who really controls what, and it wasn’t the fairy tale we were sold.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/now-deceased-agi-clause/
Gene Therapy Restores Girl’s Sight on the NHS
Sometimes you need a reminder that humans can do astonishing things. Gene therapy restored a girl’s eyesight. On the NHS. Free at the point of care. Whatever else is broken in the world, this isn’t.
https://www.gosh.nhs.uk/news/nhs-eye-gene-therapy-restores-saffies-sight/
AI Music Floods Apple Music, Nobody Listens
A third of all new tracks on Apple Music are AI-generated. Humans are listening to 0.5% of them. We didn’t ask for more music. We asked for better music. But quantity is easier to measure than quality, so here we are, drowning in algorithmic noise nobody wants.
Greece Wants to Ban Anonymous Social Media
Greece’s solution to bad behaviour online? Force everyone to use their real names. Because nothing says ‘healthy democracy’ like making sure activists, whistleblowers, and abuse survivors can’t speak without exposing themselves. Surely this will only catch the bad guys. Surely.
https://www.euractiv.com/news/greece-to-ban-anonymity-on-social-media/
Identity Management Just Got Infinitely Weirder
We’ve gone from verifying humans to verifying humans, the machines acting for them, the AI acting for the machines, and the deepfakes pretending to be all of the above. Identity management used to be straightforward. Now it’s an existential crisis with API calls.
Stalkerware Turned One Victim Into Thousands
Someone installed stalkerware on a celebrity’s phone. Now 90,000 screenshots of their private life are out there. Everyone they messaged became a victim too. This is the nightmare scenario privacy advocates warned about, except it’s not hypothetical anymore. It’s just Tuesday.
Bonus: How to Actually Personalise Claude
Lenny Zeltser wrote a proper guide on securing and personalising Claude so it knows who you are, how you work, and what you actually need. Not vendor fluff. Actual useful instructions. Rare enough to be worth highlighting.
https://zeltser.com/personal-ai-stack
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That’s it. Another week survived. If you’ve got thoughts, reply to this. If you want more cynicism in real-time, I’m on Infosec.exchange making poor decisions in public. Hopefully Adrian appreciates the effort I put into trying to find some positivity in there this week!
Stay safe. Stay Cynical.
Javvad Malik 