Hasty Briefs - Daily Tech News Brief

Farewell Economy 7, a Casualty of the Long Wave Switch-Off
3 hours ago
- Economy 7 was a 1980s UK electricity system using off-peak power for storage heaters.
- The system relied on a BBC Radio 4 Long Wave signal at 198 kHz for nationwide control.
- In 2025, the BBC is shutting down its Long Wave service, making Economy 7 meters obsolete.
- The signal was phase-modulated and allowed different energy use programs.
- Droitwich transmitter's shutdown is due to the unavailability of high-power vacuum tubes.
- Electricity companies are replacing old meters with smart meters, but progress is slow.
- Some users report modern non-smart Economy 7 meters track time via 50Hz cycles.
- Discussions include potential hacks to manipulate the system, like generating fake signals.
- Long Wave's reliability contrasts with modern internet-dependent systems.
- The shutdown raises concerns about the future of services like the Shipping Forecast.
Builder.ai did not "fake AI with 700 engineers"
3 hours ago
- Builder.ai was falsely accused of faking AI with 700 engineers in India.
- The company actually had a team of 15 engineers working on Natasha CodeGen, an AI tool for software development.
- Builder.ai's downfall was due to accounting fraud, not the alleged AI deception.
- The viral claim about 700 engineers originated from an unverified social media post.
- Former engineers at Builder.ai built a legitimate AI system, but the company lacked focus and rebuilt existing tools.
- The company's external developer network faced fraud issues with billing hours.
- Builder.ai's collapse was unrelated to its engineering team's work.
Caltrain official lived in secret apartment built illegally inside train station
3 hours ago
- Joseph Navarro, former Caltrain deputy director, illegally built and lived in an apartment inside Burlingame Caltrain station using $42,000 in public funds.
- Navarro was sentenced to four months in county jail, two years of probation, and ordered to pay restitution to Caltrain.
- The apartment lacked personal touches but had essentials like a flat-screen TV, clothes, and exercise equipment.
- Navarro conspired with station manager Seth Worden to avoid oversight by keeping invoices under $3,000.
- Worden, who built a similar $8,000 apartment in Millbrae station, was sentenced to 60 days in jail and one year probation.
- An anonymous tip in 2022 led to Navarro's termination and criminal charges.
- Caltrain emphasized the misuse of public funds violates law, policy, and public trust, promising accountability.
AI agent startups at Y Combinator’s Spring ’25 Demo Day
3 hours ago
- Y Combinator's spring 2025 batch featured 70 startups focused on agentic AI.
- The accelerator program invests $500,000 in each selected startup over three months.
- YC's first spring cohort ran from April to June 2025, emphasizing AI innovation.
- 10 standout AI agent startups were highlighted, spanning industries like healthcare, fintech, and robotics.
- Startups include Aegis (insurance appeals), Airweave (productivity tools), and Mbodi AI (robot training).
- Other notable startups: Approval AI (mortgage automation), Atlog (sales calls), and Willow (voice dictation).
- YC's alumni include major successes like Stripe, Airbnb, and DoorDash.
Show HN: Mcp-hacker-news – An MCP server for accessing Hacker News data via LLMs
5 days ago
- A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Hacker News built with TypeScript.
- Acts as a bridge between the official Hacker News API and AI-powered tools like Claude and Cursor.
- Enables fetching and interaction with live Hacker News data (posts, comments, users) via standardized MCP endpoints.
- Supports integration with Claude and Cursor by adding configuration to their respective config files.
- Requires Node.js v18.x.x or higher.
- Setup involves cloning the repository, installing dependencies, and building the project.
- Provides fixed resources for top, new, and best stories matching Hacker News API endpoints.
- Offers advanced tools for parameterized queries including fetching specific stories, comments, user profiles, and more.
- Recommends using pnpm for development setup but supports npm or yarn as alternatives.
Microwave blasters can down even jam-proof drones
11 hours ago
- US Army Captain Bray McCollum tested the Leonidas IFPC-HPM, a microwave weapon designed to down drone swarms.
- The Russo-Ukrainian war highlighted the need for effective counter-drone technology, as traditional jamming methods fail against newer drones.
- Epirus, a defense-tech startup, manufactures the Leonidas system, which disrupts drone electronics with microwave pulses, causing crashes.
- Other companies like Thales, Leidos, RTX, and Lockheed Martin are developing similar microwave-based counter-drone systems.
- Microwave weapons pose challenges for drone designers, as reflective shielding may not fully protect drones from microwave interference.
- Ukraine is keen to acquire microwave counter-drone technology, with at least two local firms working on prototypes.
- Future goals include developing microwave blasters capable of downing drones and cruise missiles from 10km away.
Intel Vulkan Linux Driver Lands Initial Support for VP9 Decoding
8 hours ago
- Intel's Vulkan Linux driver now supports VP9 video decoding via the VK_KHR_video_decode_vp9 extension.
- The support was merged into Mesa 25.2 for the Intel ANV driver.
- Hyunjun Ko of Igalia implemented the VP9 Vulkan-based video decoding for Intel's Linux driver.
- The implementation passes all Vulkan Conformance Test Suite (CTS) cases for VP9 decoding, except for two tests.
Shaping Light – Volumetric Lighting
4 days ago
- Post-processing enhances 3D scenes with atmospheric and lighting effects efficiently.
- Volumetric Lighting creates realistic beams of light, adding depth and atmosphere to scenes.
- Coordinate system transformations are crucial for converting between screen space and world space.
- Raymarching is used to simulate light propagation through a volume, creating dynamic lighting effects.
- Shadow mapping improves realism by accounting for light occlusion by objects in the scene.
- Performance optimizations include blue noise dithering to reduce artifacts and improve efficiency.
- Light scattering and phase functions enhance the realism of volumetric lighting.
- Applications include creating moody atmospheric scenes and enhancing space-themed visuals.
- Challenges include handling multiple light sources and omnidirectional shadow casting.
- Future directions may explore global illumination and ambient occlusion for more advanced lighting effects.
SIMD-friendly algorithms for substring searching
5 hours ago
- Popular programming languages provide methods or functions to locate a substring in a given string, such as strstr in C, find in C++'s std::string, and pos/index in Python.
- Substring search algorithms can be categorized into two major groups: those based on Deterministic Finite Automaton (e.g., Knuth-Morris-Pratt, Boyer Moore) and those based on simple comparison (e.g., Karp-Rabin algorithm).
- Standard algorithms assume that comparing characters is cheap, but modern CPUs do not meet this assumption, leading to the exploration of SIMD-based approaches for substring search.
- Two SIMD-friendly approaches are discussed: a modification of the Rabin-Karp algorithm and an SSE4 string search method, both aiming to improve performance by leveraging parallel processing.
- The Karp-Rabin algorithm uses hash comparisons to identify potential substring matches, with SIMD solutions replacing hash predicates with vector predicates for faster parallel processing.
- A SWAR (SIMD Within A Register) approach is described, utilizing bitwise operations to locate substring matches without dedicated SIMD instructions.
- AVX2 and SSE implementations are compared, showing AVX2's superior performance due to its wider registers and efficient instruction set.
- ARM Neon and AArch64 implementations are discussed, highlighting the challenges and optimizations specific to ARM architectures.
- SSE4.1 and AVX2's MPSADBW instruction is explored for substring search, though it faces limitations such as quadratic complexity in certain scenarios.
- SSE4.2's String and Text New Instructions (STNI) are introduced, but their performance is limited by high latency and lack of support in newer processors.
- Performance measurements across various architectures (Westmere, Bulldozer, Haswell, Skylake, KNL, ARMv7, ARMv8) show significant speed-ups for SIMD implementations over traditional methods like strstr.
- The article concludes with acknowledgments and a reference to the GitHub repository containing all implementations and test programs.
Operating Systems in Chips vs. Secure, Auditable OSes
20 hours ago
- Intel and AMD processors contain hidden subsystems like Intel ME and AMD PSP, operating below the OS with privileged access.
- These subsystems can bypass traditional security measures like antivirus and encryption, posing a stealth threat.
- Security vulnerabilities (e.g., Intel-SA-00086) have shown attackers can exploit ME undetected for years.
- Nation-state actors (e.g., NSA, Chinese APTs) use firmware-level attacks for persistent surveillance.
- Firmware attacks leave no logs and cannot be stopped by standard software updates.
- Purism disables or neutralizes ME/PSP where possible, prioritizing transparency and open development.
- Purism advocates for industry reform against secrecy in computing hardware.
- Purism offers secure devices like Librem Key, Liberty Phone, and Librem laptops.
OxCaml
18 hours ago
- Jane Street has developed OxCaml, a set of extensions to OCaml aimed at performance engineering.
- OxCaml's design goals include providing safe, convenient, and predictable control over performance-critical aspects of programming.
- Extensions focus on fearless concurrency, memory layout, allocation control, and quality-of-life improvements.
- OxCaml is open-source and experimental, with no stability guarantees but aims for easy use with modified OCaml tools.
- Jane Street releases libraries in two forms: one for upstream OCaml and one leveraging OxCaml's extensions.
Climate.gov will stop publishing new content on July 1
21 hours ago
- Climate.gov, a widely used federal website for climate information, will stop updating content on July 1, 2025.
- The site, operated by NOAA, had nearly one million monthly visitors and was a trusted source for climate data.
- All 10 staff members responsible for content creation and data visualization have been terminated.
- The layoffs are part of a broader purge of probationary employees across the government.
- Climate.gov provided timely information on weather patterns, droughts, and extreme weather events to help public planning.
- Former program manager Rebecca Lindsey believes the administration aims to suppress public discussion on climate change.
- The Trump administration has previously dismantled other climate-related programs, including the National Climate Assessment team.
- While the site remains accessible, its content will become outdated without updates.
Kernel Memory Safety: Mission Accomplished
21 hours ago
- The CrowdStrike outage in 2024 highlighted vulnerabilities in mature OSes due to memory-safety bugs.
- Asterinas is a Rust-based framekernel OS designed to achieve complete kernel memory safety with a minimal Trusted Computing Base (TCB).
- The framekernel architecture combines the performance of monolithic kernels with the security of microkernels, confining unsafe code to a small, auditable core.
- OSTD, the OS framework for Asterinas, provides safe abstractions for kernel development, enabling features like system call handling in safe Rust.
- Asterinas supports over 210 Linux system calls, multiple CPU architectures, file systems, sockets, and devices, all while maintaining competitive performance.
- The TCB in Asterinas is approximately 15,000 lines of code, significantly smaller than other Rust-based OSes, and is amenable to formal verification.
- Future plans for Asterinas include support for Linux namespaces, cgroups, a graphics subsystem, and ARM architecture, aiming for production readiness.
- Asterinas is open-source and welcomes contributors to help advance memory-safe OS development.
Carimbo: Minimal 2D game engine in modern C++20 with SDL, scriptable in Lua
16 hours ago
- Carimbo is a lightweight 2D game engine written in modern C++.
- Features Lua scripting and supports high-performance deployment on major platforms.
- Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and WebAssembly.
- Supports Steam achievements natively on macOS and Windows without external linkage.
- Licensed under the MIT license.
- Source code available at github.com/willtobyte/carimbo.
- Discover and play games made with Carimbo at carimbo.games.
Window-sized device taps the air for safe drinking water
7 hours ago
- 2.2 billion people globally lack access to safe drinking water, with 46 million affected in the U.S.
- MIT engineers developed a hydrogel-based atmospheric water harvester to capture water vapor from the air.
- The device operates passively, without external power, and works efficiently even in dry desert conditions like Death Valley.
- It produces up to 160 milliliters of clean drinking water per day in low-humidity environments.
- The hydrogel's design includes glycerol to prevent salt leakage, ensuring the water is safe to drink.
- The system's scalability allows for deployment in resource-limited regions, potentially supplying households with water.
- The technology outperforms other passive and some actively powered water harvesters in dry conditions.
Meta AI searches made public – but do all its users realise
7 hours ago
- Meta AI searches are being made public without users realizing, potentially exposing sensitive queries.
- Some users' prompts and results are posted on a public feed, traceable to their social media accounts.
- Examples include requests for scantily-clad characters, test answers, and personal gender-related questions.
- Meta states chats are private by default, but users can choose to share posts publicly.
- A warning appears before sharing, but it's unclear if users fully understand the implications.
- The public 'Discover' feed can link searches to users' other social accounts via usernames and profile pictures.
- Users can opt to make searches private in account settings.
- Rachel Tobac, a cybersecurity expert, highlights the mismatch between user expectations and reality as a security problem.
Japan struggles to fend off a world without enough matcha
7 hours ago
- Global demand for matcha put unprecedented strain on Japan’s tea industry last year.
- Kyoto tea companies Ippodo and Marukyu Koyamaen announced purchase limits on matcha for the first time.
- Many stores were completely sold out of certain matcha products.
- Subscription plans allow commenting on stories, but users must first create a display name in their profile.
$100 Hamburger
5 hours ago
- $100 hamburger is aviation slang for an excuse general aviation pilots use to fly.
- The term originally referred to the cost of renting or operating a light aircraft for a short round-trip to a nearby airport for a meal.
- Increasing fuel prices have raised the hourly operating costs, making the $100 hamburger more expensive.
- A similar concept in Perth, Western Australia, is the 'Rotto Bun Run', an annual charity event where pilots fly to Rottnest Island for bakery goods.
AI Isn't Magic, It's Maths
2 days ago
- AI is not magic but sophisticated math and pattern recognition.
- ChatGPT predicts responses based on patterns in vast text data, not understanding.
- Midjourney creates art by statistically refining noise to match prompts.
- AI assistants like Claude generate responses by predicting likely answers from training data.
- AI operates via mathematical operations, like neural networks and probability calculations.
- AI lacks true understanding, common sense, and can hallucinate or fabricate information.
- Bias in AI stems from training data reflecting human prejudices.
- Latest AI models like GPT-4o and Claude 3 show improved accuracy and capabilities.
- AI advancements come from better data, computing power, and algorithms.
- AI is a tool, not sentient, and its improvements are due to human engineering.
For All That Is Good About Humankind, Ban Smartphones
5 hours ago
- Smartphones are making people unhealthy, miserable, antisocial, and less free.
- Smartphone usage is a collective problem, not just a personal one, affecting social norms and expectations.
- Smartphones negatively impact mental and physical health, increasing loneliness, depression, and stress.
- They contribute to political polarization and erode trust in shared institutions.
- Smartphones blur the boundaries between work and personal life, leading to burnout.
- There is a growing movement towards 'dumb phones' as an alternative to smartphones.
- A ban on smartphones is proposed as a way to reclaim personal and social freedom.

Hasty Briefsbeta

Farewell Economy 7, a Casualty of the Long Wave Switch-Off

Builder.ai did not "fake AI with 700 engineers"

Caltrain official lived in secret apartment built illegally inside train station

AI agent startups at Y Combinator’s Spring ’25 Demo Day

Show HN: Mcp-hacker-news – An MCP server for accessing Hacker News data via LLMs

Microwave blasters can down even jam-proof drones

Intel Vulkan Linux Driver Lands Initial Support for VP9 Decoding

Shaping Light – Volumetric Lighting

SIMD-friendly algorithms for substring searching

Operating Systems in Chips vs. Secure, Auditable OSes

OxCaml

Climate.gov will stop publishing new content on July 1

Kernel Memory Safety: Mission Accomplished

Carimbo: Minimal 2D game engine in modern C++20 with SDL, scriptable in Lua

Window-sized device taps the air for safe drinking water

Meta AI searches made public – but do all its users realise

Japan struggles to fend off a world without enough matcha

$100 Hamburger

AI Isn't Magic, It's Maths

For All That Is Good About Humankind, Ban Smartphones