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Platform Decay

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Platform Decay Book Cover Platform Decay
Martha Wells
The Murderbot Diaries
Tor Books
May 5, 2026
256
★★★☆☆

So I just finished reading the latest Murderbot book and I had caused me to realize I have questions, but we’ll get to those in a moment. This book is fairly standard Murderbot fair — Murderbot is doing something they think is dumb because their humans asked nicely. Very Bolo Tank if you will. The book is ok, for what I would call a “travel book”, but it does feel like the overall plot isn’t being progressed much in these recent books. Like I get it. Corporates bad, weird hippy dumb circle planet and university with mercenaries good — but shouldn’t there perhaps be something bigger happening here?

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Is this the standard of behavior we get from Debian now?

So… a really really long time ago I wrote a small set of PNG utilities called pngtools. They’re not particularly complicated or anything, but a few distros decided to package them, including Debian (and therefore Ubuntu), Gentoo, Mint, and so forth. I’ve talked previously here about resurrecting the old subversion commit history and attempting to modernize the code.

And then something weird happened. A couple of weeks ago a github issue was filed against pngtools. The entire bug report is a single sentence pointing to the Debian bug tracker where people are being… weird. I think perhaps I accidentally overlapped with two things — a slightly entitled user, and people who appear to “karma farm” by pushing bug reports from Debian upstream with the minimum possible level of detail. Certainly when I look at the github history for these users they do not have a good hit rate for reporting bugs which actually result in a fix upstream. I am unclear on why they would be doing this thing if their goal isn’t either to acquire a fix or to earn some sweet sweet made up internet points.

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Early assessment of Fable, Anthropic’s new “slightly safer” LLM model

This is obviously not a scientifically valid assessment, but it is my general early impressions. This started as a really really long slack message, but it became pretty clear that slack wasn’t the right place for something like this — so here it is as a blog post instead.

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System Collapse

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Once again a relatively short but enjoyable Murderbot book. I think its endearing that Murderbot continues to develop as a character, even if some of the tropes are feeling a little worn around the edges. Yes they get injured, yes they do some combat, yes they're sarcastic. On the other hand I think this story line is both unique compared to the previous ones, and builds reasonably upon the previous book. Honestly though, this and the previous book probably should have been one volume.

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Lunar Outfitters

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This book is the story of the makers of the Apollo Program space suits, International Latex Corporation (ILC). The book is written from the perspective of a former employee, so presumably it's not entirely unbiased, but it's still an interesting read. At a time where more traditional aerospace companies were either focused on converting rubber pressure suits intended for high flying military aircraft, or things which resembled the love child of a space craft and a garbage can, ILC was actively working on what we now recognize as a space suit -- something protective and pressurized that still allowed as much joint mobility as possible. ILC had their stumbles, especially when forced to pair with more traditional aerospace companies who looked down on ILC's background as a garment manufacturer. However, it seems pretty clear in hindsight that they were by far the best prepared in terms of making something actually usable. Ultimately ILC also suffered pretty severely from reduced government funding as the US Federal Government reduced investment in the space program at the end of the Apollo era -- it turns out there aren't heaps of buyers for space suits. This book is both detailed but at the same…

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War bodies

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I am conflicted about this book. I bought it impulsively in a book shop because the review sounded really good, and I hadn't read any Neal Asher before, but within the first 50 pages has decided the premise was silly and the writing two dimensional even for a science fiction book. I persisted, largely because of sunk cost fallacy. Its rare for me to give up on a book, but this was one of them. In the end it was off to the charity box for it.

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Claude Code is scary good at APK reverse engineering

A couple of weekends ago, Cat and I had a Bluetti home battery installed. Bluetti seems to be taking the open source community fairly seriously, and there was already a Home Assistant integration available on github, which is impressive. Before installation it was hard to tell if my EP760 inverter with "PBOX" IoT dongly thing was well supported or not, so we just kind of YOLO'ed it. Sadly, the existing open source Bluetti projects I looked at had pretty poor support for this model. However, I've spent a fair bit of time in the last year reading and watching tutorials on YouTube about Android reverse engineering, so I knew at least that JADX existed and how to run it to extract source code. I've also been playing around a lot with Claude Code, and it had done a fairly good job at analyzing malicious APKs from the courses I'd done, so I thought perhaps I could do something interesting here. Its super common for APKs to be obfuscated with commercial tools, but notably Claude is also pretty good at unwinding that obfuscation in a way in which its probably no longer a particularly effective technique for stopping analysis of otherwise…

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Coding agents and deep learning

Andy sent me this post about how Carl Kolon uses and thinks about coding agents. The post is pretty interesting, and when I went to reply to Andy I realized that at seven paragraphs perhaps the reply is better suited to here than a signal message. Also, because that is more friendly than replying to messages with links to your blog to drive traffic and the adoration of your readers? This is of course a forward looking statement for me, I do indeed hope one day to have a reader here but baby steps. Similarly to Carl I certainly started using LLMs as "smarter search", cutting and pasting queries into claude.ai, and waiting patiently for an answer. I think this should make Google very worried, especially as its so good at finding answers. The improved performance over a "raw Google" is largely because of persistence -- the LLM doesn't perform  single search, it will keep searching until it finds the answer. The decreasing levels of supervision Carl talks about is what I am talking about when I talk about prompts and planning, which has been my favourite LLM topic for the last few weeks. Increasingly I am writing a plan for…

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