Developer Tools B

Microsoft strengthened the finance-focused capabilities of Copilot in Excel and added support for 'skills' to automate spreadsheet tasks. The company says its own finance team used and evaluated the feature in production, developing it with the reliability that financial work demands.

Apple researchers bring network science to UMAP, arguing that typical workflows focus only on its low-dimensional embedding. By analyzing UMAP's underlying kNN graph, the work aims to improve sensemaking and interpretation of dimensionality-reduction results.

Simon Willison highlights a prompt-injection variant by Håkon Måløy that upgrades attacks on Microsoft Word's Copilot into self-replicating worms. Hidden instructions in a source document can be interpreted by Copilot, which may both manipulate the drafted document and copy the instructions into the output, turning it into a new carrier that re-triggers in later Copilot workflows and propagates even without the attacker's original file present.

Simon Willison quotes cryptographer Matthew Green on the historic shift from EC/RSA public-key schemes to post-quantum algorithms such as HAWK. Green argues that if AI is going to become good at cryptanalysis, now, during this transition, is the ideal moment: in the best case it would build real confidence in the hard problems being standardized and make the cryptanalysis literature far more robust. This is commentary, not a claim of a specific break.