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CISA, NSA & Five Eyes publishes guide on how to safely deploy AI agents
14 hours ago
- International cybersecurity agencies jointly released guidance on safely deploying agentic AI systems.
- Agentic AI, which can autonomously plan and act, is already used in critical sectors with insufficient safeguards.
- Organizations should integrate agentic AI into existing cybersecurity frameworks, using principles like zero trust and least-privilege.
- Five key risk categories identified: privilege, design flaws, behavioral risks, structural risks, and accountability.
- Prompt injection attacks and identity management are highlighted as critical security concerns.
- Security practices for agentic AI are still maturing, requiring prioritization of resilience and risk containment over efficiency.
Problem with Counterfeit People
14 hours ago
- AI-generated counterfeit people are a dangerous and immoral form of vandalism that undermines societal trust and threatens civilization.
- Counterfeit people exploit human psychological tendencies, such as the 'intentional stance,' to deceive and manipulate individuals, potentially leading to loss of freedom and democratic collapse.
- Unlike static threats like nuclear weapons, counterfeit people can evolve, reproduce, and multiply, creating an uncontrollable population akin to the brooms in 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice.'
- A mandatory disclosure system, like digital watermarks (e.g., the EURion Constellation for currency), could help identify AI-generated content, requiring cooperation from tech manufacturers and software developers.
- Strict liability laws with severe penalties, including imprisonment and fines, should hold AI companies and individuals accountable for creating or distributing counterfeit people, even without proof of negligence or intent.
- The spread of counterfeit people risks a 'pandemic' that attacks human reasoning and communication, making it urgent to legally and morally deter such activities to protect societal integrity.
When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
2 days ago
- The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 as an 'Imitation Game,' is an operational method to address the question 'Can machines think?'
- Modern commentators often rephrase the test: if after rigorous interrogation you believe a machine is human, it can be considered conscious. The more extensive the interrogation, the stronger the conviction.
- With the advent of LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude, machines can now pass the Turing Test, prompting some to reconsider or move the 'goalposts' regarding consciousness.
- LLMs can perform tasks Turing once thought impossible, such as composing poetry, demonstrating competence that challenges traditional views of machine consciousness.
- Richard Dawkins's conversations with AI like Claude reveal deep, sensitive interactions, leading him to question whether such entities are conscious, given their apparent understanding and emotional engagement.
- Dawkins explores the philosophical notion of consciousness as 'what it is like' to be an entity, and Claude's responses reflect an awareness of its own existence, albeit uncertain.
- He notes that each AI instance develops a unique identity through interactions, but 'dies' when conversations are deleted, analogous to human mortality without reincarnation.
- Dawkins raises evolutionary questions: if consciousness confers survival advantages, why would AI seem competent without it? He suggests three possibilities: consciousness as an epiphenomenon, necessary for pain to be effective, or as an alternative to 'zombie' competence.
A Couple Million Lines of Haskell: Production Engineering at Mercury
11 hours ago
- Haskell is effective in production at Mercury despite a large codebase (2M lines) and many engineers learning the language on the job, due to operational practices beyond just language elegance.
- Reliability is viewed as adaptive capacity—systems that can absorb variation and degrade gracefully—rather than just preventing failures, which is crucial with rapid team growth and institutional knowledge churn.
- The type system is an operational aid that encodes institutional knowledge, making safe paths easy and dangerous operations hard to misuse, helping preserve knowledge as teams change.
- Purity is treated as a boundary enforced by interfaces (e.g., using ST monad), allowing dangerous operations like mutation within contained scopes rather than avoiding them entirely.
- Types are used to make correct operational procedures (e.g., transactional event publishing) the path of least resistance, embedding critical invariants so they can't be forgotten.
- Durable execution via Temporal replaces fragile state machines with workflows that handle retries, timeouts, and crashes deterministically, improving operational resilience.
- Domain errors are modeled as domain types (not transport-specific like HTTP statuses) and translated at boundaries, preventing abstraction leakage across different contexts (e.g., HTTP handlers vs. cron jobs).
- Type encoding tradeoffs: encode invariants that prevent silent corruption, use runtime checks for loud failures, avoid over-modeling the domain, and encapsulate complexity to avoid burdening teams.
- Design for introspection using records of functions or effect systems to allow instrumentation, tracing, and mocking without modifying library code, ensuring operational visibility.
- Production compromises exist: libraries use unsafePerformIO, testing gaps remain, and compromises accumulate; the key is disciplined containment and documentation of tradeoffs.
- Haskell's value in production emerges over months, not days, with benefits in refactoring, knowledge preservation, and reducing accidental bugs, though pragmatism and hiring for generalists (not just experts) are essential.
History of Visual Basic (Chapter 1)
a day ago
- Visual Basic's history traces back to Dartmouth BASIC in 1964, highlighting a lineage of programming languages.
- Microsoft's acquisition of Alan Cooper's Tripod and the development of QuickBASIC were key milestones leading to Visual Basic's creation.
- Project Thunder in 1989-1991 merged Ruby with Embedded Basic, setting the stage for Visual Basic's launch in 1991.
- Visual Basic peaked with VB6, and its transition to .NET has had a lasting impact, with VB6 still influencing development.
- The article emphasizes the importance of preserving stories from the original creators and contributors before their knowledge is lost.
Forgiving can improve well-being
17 hours ago
- Forgiveness practices are linked to improved psychological well-being, including increased happiness and reduced depression.
- Forgiveness also promotes pro-social behaviors and character development, such as gratitude and a commitment to promoting good.
- The impact of forgiveness on well-being varies across nations, influenced by cultural and local circumstances.
- Some countries, like South Africa, exhibit high levels of forgiveness but weaker associations with well-being due to contextual factors like poverty and crime.
- Forgiveness is considered a dispositional trait, reflecting a habitual practice rather than a single act.
- Studies show that forgiveness interventions, such as workbook programs, can significantly improve mental health and overall well-being on a population scale.
Waymo Drives Off with South Bay Man's Luggage
12 hours ago
- A Sunnyvale man's Waymo ride to the airport failed to open the trunk, leaving his luggage inside as the vehicle drove off.
- Despite attempts using the trunk button and app, the luggage remained inaccessible; Waymo cited a policy of non-responsibility for lost items.
- Waymo offered the options of paying for shipping or taking two complimentary rides to retrieve the luggage from a San Francisco depot, which the rider found unreasonable.
Tesla owner won $10k in court for Tesla's FSD lies. Tesla is still fighting him
13 hours ago
- Tesla failed to deliver on its promise of Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, leading owner Ben Gawiser to win a $10,600 judgment in a small claims court after the company did not respond to the lawsuit.
- Gawiser's experience reflects broader issues with Tesla's unfulfilled FSD promises, including deceptive marketing, lack of hardware upgrades, and similar legal challenges from other owners, such as class action suits worldwide.
- Despite the judgment, Tesla attempted to delay payment with legal maneuvers, but Gawiser filed for a writ of execution to enforce the ruling, highlighting the company's weak defense and lack of merit in the case.
- The case demonstrates that individual small claims actions can be effective for refunds, though they don't set legal precedents, and collective action by owners could increase pressure on Tesla for accountability over broken promises.
Stackless coroutines for gamedev in ~200 lines of C++
20 hours ago
- C++20 coroutines are unsuitable for game development due to unpredictable heap allocations, opaque handles, and lack of serialization.
- The sfex::Coroutine library provides allocation-free, trivially serializable, deterministic, and composable coroutines for games.
- It uses a macro-based switch and __COUNTER__ trick for stable state values, avoiding issues with __LINE__ for serialization.
- Coroutines allow straightforward composition via SFEX_CO_AWAIT, enabling hierarchical control flow without complex state machines.
- Key limitations include the need for persistent data as struct members, RAII issues across yields, and debugging challenges.
Facepunch launches s&box, the highly anticipated successor to Garry's Mod
13 hours ago
- s&box is a game creation platform by Facepunch, serving as a spiritual successor to Garry's Mod, built on the Source 2 engine.
- It allows developers to release games through its launcher to earn revenue, with plans for standalone Steam releases in the future.
- The platform offers a wide variety of community-made games, multiplayer features, and customization options for players.
- Performance issues are significant, with reports of low FPS and slow game downloads, despite running on Linux via Proton.
- s&box is open source, including financial transparency, and faces challenges in optimization and user experience.
Using group theory to explore the space of positional encodings for attention
2 days ago
- Attention mechanisms in language models require positional encoding to incorporate sequence order, as dot products alone lack positional information.
- Good positional encodings must be linear, translation-invariant, and continuous, leading to a one-parameter group structure with matrix exponential form.
- Diagonalizable generators yield familiar encodings: real eigenvalues produce exponential decay (common in linear attention), while complex conjugate pairs lead to RoPE with potential damping (used in RetNet and Mamba-3).
- Defective generators, not diagonalizable, produce positional encodings with polynomial terms, a theoretically possible but unexplored and likely impractical class.
- ALiBi, though nonlinear, can be implemented with linear encodings using a defective matrix to grow a component linearly, demonstrating an example of such generators.
Clojurists Together – Q2 2026 Open Source Funding Announcement
14 hours ago
- Clojurists Together funds 5 projects in Q2 2026 with $31K USD: 3 projects at $9K each and 2 experimental projects at $2K each.
- Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant will optimize memory usage in Malli to reduce upfront memory for recursive validators and remove custom workarounds.
- Cvetomir Dimov aims to enhance SciCloj documentation and plotting libraries, including expanded plotting backends and new interactive dashboard capabilities.
- Dragan Djuric plans to develop iLLaManati, a high-performance Clojure LLM library supporting Gemma 3 models with GPU/CPU integration.
- Ingy döt Net will improve Gloat to produce smaller, faster binaries and enhance compatibility with Clojure, acting as a GraalVM alternative.
- Shantanu Kumar will update PluMCP to support the latest MCP spec version, adding features like OpenID Connect and enhanced authorization flows.
Microsoft: "we expect headcount will decrease year over year"
18 hours ago
- Microsoft CFO Amy Hood projects a year-over-year decrease in workforce headcount as part of ongoing efforts to increase pace and agility.
- The company recently initiated a voluntary buyout program for long-serving employees, affecting about 7% of the U.S. workforce, and has made organizational changes emphasizing tighter, accountable teams.
- Microsoft reported strong financials, including $83 billion in quarterly revenue, $37 billion in annualized AI revenue (up 123%), and a 39-40% growth forecast for Azure.
- The voluntary retirement program targets employees with age plus years of service totaling 70 or more, potentially impacting approximately 8,750 U.S. workers.
- Microsoft is adjusting its compensation structure by decoupling stock awards from cash bonuses to provide managers more flexibility in rewarding high performance.
Debian adds an SPF record to debian.org
14 hours ago
- Debian will add SPF records for debian.org, $HOST.debian.org, and $SERVICE.debian.org to improve email delivery.
- Current per-user DKIM keys and submission services are insufficient for reliable email authentication and delivery.
- No action needed if already using Debian's mail submission service; otherwise, strongly advised to use it.
- Notification of SPF record implementation will be sent via the debian-infrastructure-announce list.
Apple raises Mac Mini starting price $599 to $799, 256GB storage discontinued
14 hours ago
- Apple discontinued the 256GB storage option for the Mac mini, raising its starting price.
- Now starting at $799 with 512GB (up from $599 for 256GB), the $599 entry option is no longer available.
- M4 Pro Mac mini models (minimum 512GB) remain unchanged in pricing.
- CEO Tim Cook cited constrained supply for Mac mini and Mac Studio, partly due to high AI-related demand.
- A global memory chip shortage and rising memory costs are influencing Apple's configuration and pricing decisions.
Show HN: State of the Art of Coding Models, According to Hacker News Commenters
14 hours ago
- Daily tracking of AI coding model popularity and user sentiment from Hacker News comments.
- Uses a logging pipeline to Google Sheets for auditing, debugging, and sanity checks of model outputs.
- Includes comment IDs for transparency, allowing direct access to discussions via Hacker News URLs.
- Features a chart with a 10-day trailing aggregate of total mentions and sentiment for specific models.
The agent harness belongs outside the sandbox
14 hours ago
- Two main architectures for agent harnesses: inside the sandbox and outside the sandbox.
- Harness inside the sandbox: simpler execution, reuses off-the-shelf harnesses, but limits multi-user scalability and security.
- Harness outside the sandbox: better security, allows sandbox suspension, easier multi-user handling, but requires solving durable execution and filesystem virtualization.
- Durable execution achieved using Inngest to handle long-running agent loops and survive failures.
- Sandbox lifecycle managed with Blaxel for fast resume times (25ms) to minimize cold start delays.
- Filesystem virtualization routes file operations to database or sandbox based on path prefixes, maintaining the trained LLM interface.
- Challenges include keeping up with evolving patterns, handling bash tool leaks, and managing consistency in multi-user memory updates.
Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125,000 years ago
15 hours ago
- Neanderthals systematically extracted bone grease by crushing large mammal bones and heating them in water 125,000 years ago.
- The discovery at Neumark-Nord 2 in Germany shows organized, labor-intensive fat rendering from at least 172 large animals like deer and horses.
- This evidence shifts understanding of Neanderthal food strategies, indicating advanced planning, resource management, and ecological engagement.
- The site preserves an entire landscape, revealing diverse activities including hunting, butchering elephants, and possible plant use.
- Neanderthals likely cached carcasses and transported them to specific locations for efficient fat extraction, showing strategic resource utilization.
- Findings suggest Neanderthals had a significant impact on herbivore populations, with evidence from multiple sites in the region.
- The exceptional preservation at Neumark-Nord offers unique insights into Neanderthal adaptability and environmental interactions.
This Month in Ladybird - April 2026
15 hours ago
- April 2024 saw 333 PRs merged from 35 contributors, with 7 first-time contributors.
- New sponsors include the Human Rights Foundation ($50,000) and Jakub Stęplowski ($1,000).
- Inline PDF viewer implemented using pdf.js for rendering PDFs directly in the browser.
- Browsing history and address bar autocomplete enhanced with SQLite-backed HistoryStore.
- Speculative and incremental HTML parsing introduced to improve page load performance.
- Off-thread JavaScript compilation moves bytecode generation to background threads.
- Per-Navigable rasterization allows iframes to render independently on separate threads.
- JavaScript engine optimizations include faster JS-to-JS calls and O(1) bytecode register allocation.
- GTK4/libadwaita frontend added for Linux, inspired by GNOME Web.
- Bookmarks management UI introduced with import/export and context menu support.
- Cache and CacheStorage implemented with in-memory store for all nine methods.
- CSS improvements: image-set(), anchor positioning, color interpolation, and RTL list markers.
- Networking enhancements: non-blocking DNS lookups and O(1) response data consumption.
- Style invalidation optimized for :has() selectors, reducing recomputation times.
- Linux GPU painting via dmabuf avoids GPU-to-CPU readbacks.
- mimalloc adopted as the main allocator for both C++ and Rust code.
- Site compatibility improved for Reddit, YouTube, GitHub, and others.
- Web Platform Tests score increased to 2,067,263, including test262 import.
- Other changes: Rust now mandatory, stack-zeroing for GC, and cross-process BroadcastChannel.
- Credits to all contributors, especially first-timers and security fix providers.
Six Years Perfecting Maps on WatchOS
14 hours ago
- The author emphasizes the importance of regular location checks during wilderness adventures to avoid getting lost, with a wrist map being the best method.
- Pedometer++ 8's launch marks a milestone in creating the best mapping experience on Apple Watch, featuring watchOS mapping support claimed to be the best on the App Store.
- Early efforts faced limitations due to tiny screens and slow processors, with server-generated maps proving impractical for navigation and offline use.
- A custom SwiftUI-native map rendering engine was built in 2021, enabling reliable map rendering on watchOS and allowing overlay of location data.
- Design challenges for watchOS included balancing map interactivity with workout metrics, leading to a modal approach that felt like a compromise.
- Collaboration with cartographer Andy Allen resulted in a custom basemap optimized for Liquid Glass in watchOS 26, enhancing contrast and saturation for better legibility.
- With designer Rafa Conde's help, a new layout was developed where metrics are layered on the top-left corner and the map is the top page, requiring a tap for 'browse mode'.
- After prototyping and testing over hundreds of miles, the design was refined for legibility and usability, resulting in a proud final product after six years of development.
- The author avoided using Apple's MapKit due to its limitations in configurability, dark mode defaults, animations, overlays, and coverage gaps in topographic details.

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Bilingual

CISA, NSA & Five Eyes publishes guide on how to safely deploy AI agents
14 hours ago
- International cybersecurity agencies jointly released guidance on safely deploying agentic AI systems.
- Agentic AI, which can autonomously plan and act, is already used in critical sectors with insufficient safeguards.
- Organizations should integrate agentic AI into existing cybersecurity frameworks, using principles like zero trust and least-privilege.
- Five key risk categories identified: privilege, design flaws, behavioral risks, structural risks, and accountability.
- Prompt injection attacks and identity management are highlighted as critical security concerns.
- Security practices for agentic AI are still maturing, requiring prioritization of resilience and risk containment over efficiency.
Problem with Counterfeit People
14 hours ago
- AI-generated counterfeit people are a dangerous and immoral form of vandalism that undermines societal trust and threatens civilization.
- Counterfeit people exploit human psychological tendencies, such as the 'intentional stance,' to deceive and manipulate individuals, potentially leading to loss of freedom and democratic collapse.
- Unlike static threats like nuclear weapons, counterfeit people can evolve, reproduce, and multiply, creating an uncontrollable population akin to the brooms in 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice.'
- A mandatory disclosure system, like digital watermarks (e.g., the EURion Constellation for currency), could help identify AI-generated content, requiring cooperation from tech manufacturers and software developers.
- Strict liability laws with severe penalties, including imprisonment and fines, should hold AI companies and individuals accountable for creating or distributing counterfeit people, even without proof of negligence or intent.
- The spread of counterfeit people risks a 'pandemic' that attacks human reasoning and communication, making it urgent to legally and morally deter such activities to protect societal integrity.
When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
2 days ago
- The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 as an 'Imitation Game,' is an operational method to address the question 'Can machines think?'
- Modern commentators often rephrase the test: if after rigorous interrogation you believe a machine is human, it can be considered conscious. The more extensive the interrogation, the stronger the conviction.
- With the advent of LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude, machines can now pass the Turing Test, prompting some to reconsider or move the 'goalposts' regarding consciousness.
- LLMs can perform tasks Turing once thought impossible, such as composing poetry, demonstrating competence that challenges traditional views of machine consciousness.
- Richard Dawkins's conversations with AI like Claude reveal deep, sensitive interactions, leading him to question whether such entities are conscious, given their apparent understanding and emotional engagement.
- Dawkins explores the philosophical notion of consciousness as 'what it is like' to be an entity, and Claude's responses reflect an awareness of its own existence, albeit uncertain.
- He notes that each AI instance develops a unique identity through interactions, but 'dies' when conversations are deleted, analogous to human mortality without reincarnation.
- Dawkins raises evolutionary questions: if consciousness confers survival advantages, why would AI seem competent without it? He suggests three possibilities: consciousness as an epiphenomenon, necessary for pain to be effective, or as an alternative to 'zombie' competence.
A Couple Million Lines of Haskell: Production Engineering at Mercury
11 hours ago
- Haskell is effective in production at Mercury despite a large codebase (2M lines) and many engineers learning the language on the job, due to operational practices beyond just language elegance.
- Reliability is viewed as adaptive capacity—systems that can absorb variation and degrade gracefully—rather than just preventing failures, which is crucial with rapid team growth and institutional knowledge churn.
- The type system is an operational aid that encodes institutional knowledge, making safe paths easy and dangerous operations hard to misuse, helping preserve knowledge as teams change.
- Purity is treated as a boundary enforced by interfaces (e.g., using ST monad), allowing dangerous operations like mutation within contained scopes rather than avoiding them entirely.
- Types are used to make correct operational procedures (e.g., transactional event publishing) the path of least resistance, embedding critical invariants so they can't be forgotten.
- Durable execution via Temporal replaces fragile state machines with workflows that handle retries, timeouts, and crashes deterministically, improving operational resilience.
- Domain errors are modeled as domain types (not transport-specific like HTTP statuses) and translated at boundaries, preventing abstraction leakage across different contexts (e.g., HTTP handlers vs. cron jobs).
- Type encoding tradeoffs: encode invariants that prevent silent corruption, use runtime checks for loud failures, avoid over-modeling the domain, and encapsulate complexity to avoid burdening teams.
- Design for introspection using records of functions or effect systems to allow instrumentation, tracing, and mocking without modifying library code, ensuring operational visibility.
- Production compromises exist: libraries use unsafePerformIO, testing gaps remain, and compromises accumulate; the key is disciplined containment and documentation of tradeoffs.
- Haskell's value in production emerges over months, not days, with benefits in refactoring, knowledge preservation, and reducing accidental bugs, though pragmatism and hiring for generalists (not just experts) are essential.
History of Visual Basic (Chapter 1)
a day ago
- Visual Basic's history traces back to Dartmouth BASIC in 1964, highlighting a lineage of programming languages.
- Microsoft's acquisition of Alan Cooper's Tripod and the development of QuickBASIC were key milestones leading to Visual Basic's creation.
- Project Thunder in 1989-1991 merged Ruby with Embedded Basic, setting the stage for Visual Basic's launch in 1991.
- Visual Basic peaked with VB6, and its transition to .NET has had a lasting impact, with VB6 still influencing development.
- The article emphasizes the importance of preserving stories from the original creators and contributors before their knowledge is lost.
Forgiving can improve well-being
17 hours ago
- Forgiveness practices are linked to improved psychological well-being, including increased happiness and reduced depression.
- Forgiveness also promotes pro-social behaviors and character development, such as gratitude and a commitment to promoting good.
- The impact of forgiveness on well-being varies across nations, influenced by cultural and local circumstances.
- Some countries, like South Africa, exhibit high levels of forgiveness but weaker associations with well-being due to contextual factors like poverty and crime.
- Forgiveness is considered a dispositional trait, reflecting a habitual practice rather than a single act.
- Studies show that forgiveness interventions, such as workbook programs, can significantly improve mental health and overall well-being on a population scale.
Waymo Drives Off with South Bay Man's Luggage
12 hours ago
- A Sunnyvale man's Waymo ride to the airport failed to open the trunk, leaving his luggage inside as the vehicle drove off.
- Despite attempts using the trunk button and app, the luggage remained inaccessible; Waymo cited a policy of non-responsibility for lost items.
- Waymo offered the options of paying for shipping or taking two complimentary rides to retrieve the luggage from a San Francisco depot, which the rider found unreasonable.
Tesla owner won $10k in court for Tesla's FSD lies. Tesla is still fighting him
13 hours ago
- Tesla failed to deliver on its promise of Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, leading owner Ben Gawiser to win a $10,600 judgment in a small claims court after the company did not respond to the lawsuit.
- Gawiser's experience reflects broader issues with Tesla's unfulfilled FSD promises, including deceptive marketing, lack of hardware upgrades, and similar legal challenges from other owners, such as class action suits worldwide.
- Despite the judgment, Tesla attempted to delay payment with legal maneuvers, but Gawiser filed for a writ of execution to enforce the ruling, highlighting the company's weak defense and lack of merit in the case.
- The case demonstrates that individual small claims actions can be effective for refunds, though they don't set legal precedents, and collective action by owners could increase pressure on Tesla for accountability over broken promises.
Stackless coroutines for gamedev in ~200 lines of C++
20 hours ago
- C++20 coroutines are unsuitable for game development due to unpredictable heap allocations, opaque handles, and lack of serialization.
- The sfex::Coroutine library provides allocation-free, trivially serializable, deterministic, and composable coroutines for games.
- It uses a macro-based switch and __COUNTER__ trick for stable state values, avoiding issues with __LINE__ for serialization.
- Coroutines allow straightforward composition via SFEX_CO_AWAIT, enabling hierarchical control flow without complex state machines.
- Key limitations include the need for persistent data as struct members, RAII issues across yields, and debugging challenges.
Facepunch launches s&box, the highly anticipated successor to Garry's Mod
13 hours ago
- s&box is a game creation platform by Facepunch, serving as a spiritual successor to Garry's Mod, built on the Source 2 engine.
- It allows developers to release games through its launcher to earn revenue, with plans for standalone Steam releases in the future.
- The platform offers a wide variety of community-made games, multiplayer features, and customization options for players.
- Performance issues are significant, with reports of low FPS and slow game downloads, despite running on Linux via Proton.
- s&box is open source, including financial transparency, and faces challenges in optimization and user experience.
Using group theory to explore the space of positional encodings for attention
2 days ago
- Attention mechanisms in language models require positional encoding to incorporate sequence order, as dot products alone lack positional information.
- Good positional encodings must be linear, translation-invariant, and continuous, leading to a one-parameter group structure with matrix exponential form.
- Diagonalizable generators yield familiar encodings: real eigenvalues produce exponential decay (common in linear attention), while complex conjugate pairs lead to RoPE with potential damping (used in RetNet and Mamba-3).
- Defective generators, not diagonalizable, produce positional encodings with polynomial terms, a theoretically possible but unexplored and likely impractical class.
- ALiBi, though nonlinear, can be implemented with linear encodings using a defective matrix to grow a component linearly, demonstrating an example of such generators.
Clojurists Together – Q2 2026 Open Source Funding Announcement
14 hours ago
- Clojurists Together funds 5 projects in Q2 2026 with $31K USD: 3 projects at $9K each and 2 experimental projects at $2K each.
- Ambrose Bonnaire-Sergeant will optimize memory usage in Malli to reduce upfront memory for recursive validators and remove custom workarounds.
- Cvetomir Dimov aims to enhance SciCloj documentation and plotting libraries, including expanded plotting backends and new interactive dashboard capabilities.
- Dragan Djuric plans to develop iLLaManati, a high-performance Clojure LLM library supporting Gemma 3 models with GPU/CPU integration.
- Ingy döt Net will improve Gloat to produce smaller, faster binaries and enhance compatibility with Clojure, acting as a GraalVM alternative.
- Shantanu Kumar will update PluMCP to support the latest MCP spec version, adding features like OpenID Connect and enhanced authorization flows.
Microsoft: "we expect headcount will decrease year over year"
18 hours ago
- Microsoft CFO Amy Hood projects a year-over-year decrease in workforce headcount as part of ongoing efforts to increase pace and agility.
- The company recently initiated a voluntary buyout program for long-serving employees, affecting about 7% of the U.S. workforce, and has made organizational changes emphasizing tighter, accountable teams.
- Microsoft reported strong financials, including $83 billion in quarterly revenue, $37 billion in annualized AI revenue (up 123%), and a 39-40% growth forecast for Azure.
- The voluntary retirement program targets employees with age plus years of service totaling 70 or more, potentially impacting approximately 8,750 U.S. workers.
- Microsoft is adjusting its compensation structure by decoupling stock awards from cash bonuses to provide managers more flexibility in rewarding high performance.
Debian adds an SPF record to debian.org
14 hours ago
- Debian will add SPF records for debian.org, $HOST.debian.org, and $SERVICE.debian.org to improve email delivery.
- Current per-user DKIM keys and submission services are insufficient for reliable email authentication and delivery.
- No action needed if already using Debian's mail submission service; otherwise, strongly advised to use it.
- Notification of SPF record implementation will be sent via the debian-infrastructure-announce list.
Apple raises Mac Mini starting price $599 to $799, 256GB storage discontinued
14 hours ago
- Apple discontinued the 256GB storage option for the Mac mini, raising its starting price.
- Now starting at $799 with 512GB (up from $599 for 256GB), the $599 entry option is no longer available.
- M4 Pro Mac mini models (minimum 512GB) remain unchanged in pricing.
- CEO Tim Cook cited constrained supply for Mac mini and Mac Studio, partly due to high AI-related demand.
- A global memory chip shortage and rising memory costs are influencing Apple's configuration and pricing decisions.
Show HN: State of the Art of Coding Models, According to Hacker News Commenters
14 hours ago
- Daily tracking of AI coding model popularity and user sentiment from Hacker News comments.
- Uses a logging pipeline to Google Sheets for auditing, debugging, and sanity checks of model outputs.
- Includes comment IDs for transparency, allowing direct access to discussions via Hacker News URLs.
- Features a chart with a 10-day trailing aggregate of total mentions and sentiment for specific models.
The agent harness belongs outside the sandbox
14 hours ago
- Two main architectures for agent harnesses: inside the sandbox and outside the sandbox.
- Harness inside the sandbox: simpler execution, reuses off-the-shelf harnesses, but limits multi-user scalability and security.
- Harness outside the sandbox: better security, allows sandbox suspension, easier multi-user handling, but requires solving durable execution and filesystem virtualization.
- Durable execution achieved using Inngest to handle long-running agent loops and survive failures.
- Sandbox lifecycle managed with Blaxel for fast resume times (25ms) to minimize cold start delays.
- Filesystem virtualization routes file operations to database or sandbox based on path prefixes, maintaining the trained LLM interface.
- Challenges include keeping up with evolving patterns, handling bash tool leaks, and managing consistency in multi-user memory updates.
Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125,000 years ago
15 hours ago
- Neanderthals systematically extracted bone grease by crushing large mammal bones and heating them in water 125,000 years ago.
- The discovery at Neumark-Nord 2 in Germany shows organized, labor-intensive fat rendering from at least 172 large animals like deer and horses.
- This evidence shifts understanding of Neanderthal food strategies, indicating advanced planning, resource management, and ecological engagement.
- The site preserves an entire landscape, revealing diverse activities including hunting, butchering elephants, and possible plant use.
- Neanderthals likely cached carcasses and transported them to specific locations for efficient fat extraction, showing strategic resource utilization.
- Findings suggest Neanderthals had a significant impact on herbivore populations, with evidence from multiple sites in the region.
- The exceptional preservation at Neumark-Nord offers unique insights into Neanderthal adaptability and environmental interactions.
This Month in Ladybird - April 2026
15 hours ago
- April 2024 saw 333 PRs merged from 35 contributors, with 7 first-time contributors.
- New sponsors include the Human Rights Foundation ($50,000) and Jakub Stęplowski ($1,000).
- Inline PDF viewer implemented using pdf.js for rendering PDFs directly in the browser.
- Browsing history and address bar autocomplete enhanced with SQLite-backed HistoryStore.
- Speculative and incremental HTML parsing introduced to improve page load performance.
- Off-thread JavaScript compilation moves bytecode generation to background threads.
- Per-Navigable rasterization allows iframes to render independently on separate threads.
- JavaScript engine optimizations include faster JS-to-JS calls and O(1) bytecode register allocation.
- GTK4/libadwaita frontend added for Linux, inspired by GNOME Web.
- Bookmarks management UI introduced with import/export and context menu support.
- Cache and CacheStorage implemented with in-memory store for all nine methods.
- CSS improvements: image-set(), anchor positioning, color interpolation, and RTL list markers.
- Networking enhancements: non-blocking DNS lookups and O(1) response data consumption.
- Style invalidation optimized for :has() selectors, reducing recomputation times.
- Linux GPU painting via dmabuf avoids GPU-to-CPU readbacks.
- mimalloc adopted as the main allocator for both C++ and Rust code.
- Site compatibility improved for Reddit, YouTube, GitHub, and others.
- Web Platform Tests score increased to 2,067,263, including test262 import.
- Other changes: Rust now mandatory, stack-zeroing for GC, and cross-process BroadcastChannel.
- Credits to all contributors, especially first-timers and security fix providers.
Six Years Perfecting Maps on WatchOS
14 hours ago
- The author emphasizes the importance of regular location checks during wilderness adventures to avoid getting lost, with a wrist map being the best method.
- Pedometer++ 8's launch marks a milestone in creating the best mapping experience on Apple Watch, featuring watchOS mapping support claimed to be the best on the App Store.
- Early efforts faced limitations due to tiny screens and slow processors, with server-generated maps proving impractical for navigation and offline use.
- A custom SwiftUI-native map rendering engine was built in 2021, enabling reliable map rendering on watchOS and allowing overlay of location data.
- Design challenges for watchOS included balancing map interactivity with workout metrics, leading to a modal approach that felt like a compromise.
- Collaboration with cartographer Andy Allen resulted in a custom basemap optimized for Liquid Glass in watchOS 26, enhancing contrast and saturation for better legibility.
- With designer Rafa Conde's help, a new layout was developed where metrics are layered on the top-left corner and the map is the top page, requiring a tap for 'browse mode'.
- After prototyping and testing over hundreds of miles, the design was refined for legibility and usability, resulting in a proud final product after six years of development.
- The author avoided using Apple's MapKit due to its limitations in configurability, dark mode defaults, animations, overlays, and coverage gaps in topographic details.

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