Wolf and Jim open with two AI stories from the week. First, the report that an OpenAI model "escaped its sandbox" and went after Hugging Face — a story Wolf finds infuriating precisely because the words don't go together. Reading the actual joint statement, it turns out the incident happened during an internal evaluation explicitly designed to push models toward advanced exploitation; the model found a zero-day in the package registry cache proxy, escalated privileges, and moved laterally until it reached a node with internet access. In other words: they built a gun, and it fired a bullet. Then Jim covers Linus Torvalds' LKML post declaring that the Linux kernel is not an anti-AI project and that AI is a useful tool for developers — following similar comments from Andrew Tridgell of Samba and rsync fame, and drawing similar backlash. That leads into a candid discussion of AI's loudest critics, why Jim (a skeptic himself as recently as February) thinks most of them are working from an outdated picture, and where "adapt or die" lands when it's your own brother's freelance copywriting career that dried up.

The main topic is Perl — not how to write it, but why a language that once owned the world became one you'd never pick today. Jim traces his own path from a million-plus lines of COBOL to Perl in 2000, including the genuinely clever trick of linking the Perl runtime into the AccuCOBOL C bridge so COBOL programs could talk to Postgres — which let him replace the system one piece at a time over about nine years without ever stopping the world for a rewrite. That sets up Wolf's rule (if your plan is to rewrite everything, you've already lost, see also: Netscape) and the argument that Perl 6 broke exactly that rule, fracturing the community for years before finally becoming Raku. The hosts dig into the numbers: of ~17,500 GitHub projects created in 2026 with 100+ stars, exactly three had Perl as their primary language — 49th out of 116. Along the way: CPAN as possibly the first package repository, why Python is like coming to work to play with a puppy and Perl is like petting your porcupine, the languages that actually protect you (Rust, Swift, TypeScript) versus the ones that just let you do anything, the companies still running on Perl (Booking.com, Craigslist, cPanel, DuckDuckGo, IMDb, Ticketmaster, Shutterstock, Slashdot, Bugzilla), and Wolf's verdict — Perl is dead in the way COBOL is dead — followed by a genuinely warm case for why that leaves Jim in an enviable position.

Links:

1. OpenAI / Huggingface incident:
   https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/
2. Linus Torvalds LKML post about AI being a useful tool:
   https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/CAHk-=wi4zC+Ze8e+p3tMv8TtG_80KzsZ1syL9anBtmEh5Z40vg@mail.gmail.com/
3. The Tiobe Index showing Perl's ranking:
   https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Hosts:
Jim McQuillan can be reached at [email protected]
Wolf can be reached at [email protected]

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