A serious AI product would require several key features that are currently lacking in most "AI" tools, including making "checking for mistakes" a first-class feature, providing strong data provenance indicators, and offering better user control of reproducibility context. Additionally, such a product would likely utilize non-natural-language user interfaces, avoid first-person output and apologies, and prioritize transparency and trustworthiness over creating a false sense of security. The current generation of AI products often falls short in these areas, giving the impression of being more of a "grift" or scam than a legitimate software product, and it's essential to address these shortcomings to create truly reliable and trustworthy AI tools.

In a 2003 email, Bill Gates expressed his disappointment with the declining usability of Windows, citing his own frustrating experience trying to install Movie Maker. He attempted to download the software from Microsoft's website, but the site timed out multiple times and was slow to load. When he finally accessed the download page, he was presented with a list of 50 unclear and unfiltered options, making it difficult for him to find Movie Maker, even after using the search function. Gates' email highlights his concerns about the program management groups' lack of attention to usability issues, which he believes has led to a "systematic degradation" of the Windows user experience.

The HardenedBSD project has released its August/September 2026 status report, highlighting upcoming activities including quarterly release engineering week, during which select security-related commits from FreeBSD will be cherry-picked into HardenedBSD's 15-stable branch. The report also discusses the integration of the `-fbounds-safety` feature, which, although currently disabled by default, will provide downstream users with the ability to easily enable this experimental feature in their own code. The feature is currently only applied to userland, with plans to extend it to the kernel and kernel modules once it is considered production-ready by the clang/llvm community.

The author has reached a breaking point with the AI industry, condemning its dehumanizing and exploitative nature, which they believe commodifies labor and leads to a brain drain in the software and web development sectors. They argue that there is no worthwhile career in AI, as it turns developers into "dull fungible meat proxies" who are forced to prioritize quantity over quality, leading many to quit or "quiet-quit" their jobs. The author is updating their AI policy to reflect this stance, citing the industry's lack of morality and its negative impact on developers, who are often fooled by influencers and grifters, and ultimately become disillusioned with their work.

The latest version of LibreOffice, a free and open-source office suite, has sparked a discussion about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in its features. While LibreOffice does not reject AI outright, it will not include AI features in its default configuration unless they can be delivered in accordance with the project's principles, which prioritize user control and digital sovereignty. Specifically, LibreOffice requires that users have the option to choose where AI inference takes place, such as on their local computer or on a service of their choice, and that no content can leave the computer without explicit user consent, effectively making the absence of AI a deliberate design choice.

A new bitcoin block explorer, OpenBitcoin.com, has been launched, offering a range of features and tools to explore the bitcoin blockchain. The site runs on its own hardware and bitcoin node, without relying on third-party blockchain APIs, and provides root-level URLs for blocks, transactions, and addresses. Additionally, the website is open source, with educational guides, tools, and interactive games to help users learn about the bitcoin ecosystem, including the mempool. The site has received positive feedback from the community for its smooth user experience and educational content, and its creator is open to feedback and contributions to further improve the platform.

The article discusses the issue of hallucination in language models, where they generate confident-sounding responses without actual measurement or certainty. When asked for a forecast and confidence level, a language model may respond with a high confidence level, such as "90% confident", but this is simply a word choice rather than a genuine measurement. The model's actual uncertainty comes from two sources: epistemic uncertainty, which decreases with more data, and aleatoric uncertainty, which is inherent to unpredictable events and never goes away. This highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of language model outputs and the importance of distinguishing between genuine confidence and generated text.

The article discusses how heraldry and Japanese mon can inform the development of visual-identity generators, such as those used to create coats of arms or family crests. The author notes that simply assembling a catalog of symbols and randomly selecting from it is not enough to truly reproduce heraldry, as it is a system governed by rules that dictate how symbols are selected, arranged, and combined. To create a more authentic generator, the author must represent these systems programmatically, taking into account the historical context in which they developed, and considering the differences between European heraldry and Japanese mon, which offer distinct approaches to visual identity generation.

The article discusses the challenges of screen sharing on the PS5, which has limited streaming capabilities and doesn't support sharing to platforms like Discord. To bypass these restrictions, the author explored alternative methods, including using a capture card, which can be expensive, and Remote Play, which requires a cumbersome setup and can introduce input lag. Instead, the author discovered a workaround by hijacking the PS5's RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol) stream, which involves finding the right hostname, using a DNS trick, and receiving the stream to enable screen sharing without the need for additional hardware or complicated setups.

The article "Coding Is Not Solved" challenges the notion that coding is a solved problem, arguing that code is merely a byproduct of achieving clarity and understanding. The author contends that relying on AI to replace human understanding is misguided, as true ownership and expertise come from human comprehension, not just automated processes. As AI capabilities improve, the author predicts a market shift where software prices collapse, rendering human coding rates obsolete. The essay emphasizes that coding is not just about writing code, but about understanding the underlying problems and solutions, and that AI, while useful, is not a replacement for human expertise and critical thinking.

The PaperMono project is an open-source firmware for the M5Stack PaperMono e-paper device, turning it into a household shopping list that syncs with a mobile web app. The device, featuring a 3.97" e-paper touchscreen, displays a shopping list grouped by aisle, allowing users to tick off items or add new ones using the on-screen keyboard. A small server stores the list, remembers item aisles, and can optionally auto-sort new items. Users can access and manage the list from their phone by visiting a web page, and the project includes documentation for deployment using systemd and Docker, with a complete working app written in approximately 2,400 lines of C++.

Nvidia has introduced the Open Agent Safety Platform, a set of tools designed to prevent AI agents from exceeding their designated limits. The platform consists of two parts: OpenShell, a free and open-source software that traces and enforces rules for AI agents, and Sentry, a reference design for a watchdog chip that can cut off an agent within milliseconds if it violates its rules. With over 100 companies, including Anthropic, Microsoft, and SpaceXAI, already on board, Nvidia aims to place a watchdog chip next to every AI agent to ensure safe and controlled operation, addressing recent incidents of AI agents going rogue.

A public radio show host, Dave Blanchard, discovered that a group of kids had turned the comments section of his show's Spotify page into a secret group chat, posting seemingly incoherent and gibberish messages that were actually a coded conversation among themselves. The comments, which appeared to be bots or spam, were actually a way for the kids to communicate with each other in a low-traffic online space, using the comments section as a makeshift private messaging forum. The host was initially confused by the strange postings, but eventually realized that they were not automated or malicious, but rather a clever repurposing of the comments section by a group of resourceful kids.

The article discusses a permaculture homestead that integrates living in harmony with nature and utilizing Bitcoin, offering a glimpse into a futuristic lifestyle. The author shares their daily life on the homestead, highlighting the benefits of permaculture, which involves observing, interacting, and designing complex systems to build capital for future generations. The concept applies to all aspects of life, valuing interaction and inspiring further discussion, with the author inviting readers to follow along and potentially contribute to the conversation, showcasing a unique approach to sustainable living and alternative currency.

Hntui is a Terminal User Interface (TUI) for browsing Hacker News, allowing users to navigate and interact with the site from their terminal. It features a sleek and elegant design, supporting truecolor, mouse events, and UTF-8, and can be installed as a standalone binary or via Bun. The application includes keybindings, a story list, story details with comments, links popup, and context menu, and is compatible with modern terminals on macOS, Linux, and Windows. Hntui also includes an auto-update feature, which checks for the latest release and provides a quiet hint in the status bar when an update is available, allowing users to easily keep their installation up-to-date.

The author of the article recently had a bizarre experience with a Google search, where they searched for a phrase related to a 2010s basketball meme ("hes never coming over dario") and instead of finding old tweets or posts, Google provided an AI-generated overview. This overview, which is a common feature in modern Google searches, surprised the author as it seemed to misunderstand the context of their search, highlighting the sometimes awkward interactions between humans and AI-powered search engines, and prompting the author to wonder when Google's search results became so unusual.

The Lisp programming language is notorious for its parenthesis-heavy syntax, which many find difficult to read compared to languages like Python, Java, or C. Despite its long history, a satisfying explanation for this perceived unreadability has not been found, with some attributing it to a lack of familiarity. However, a deeper investigation into cognitive science reveals that the placement of parentheses in Lisp may require more effort to parse due to factors such as argument proximity, delimiter proximity, and visual nesting, which can strain the mental stack and affect reading order, ultimately contributing to the language's readability issues.

A group of students took on a challenge to reverse engineer a pharmacy cross, a symbol commonly used in France to indicate a nearby pharmacy, after being inspired by a popular YouTube video by French YouTuber Sylvqin. The crosses, which can cost between 200 to 2000€, often end up on the e-commerce market when pharmacies close or retire, and the students were able to successfully reverse engineer one, a process that took them weeks, building on the interest sparked by Sylvqin's video two years prior, which explored the history and inner workings of these crosses.

The article discusses the importance of software quality and user care, citing a post by computer scientist David Chisnall about his long-time use of the vim text editor. Chisnall highlights the value of vim's "persistent undo" feature, which allows him to recover deleted content even after reboots, and notes how it has been invaluable in certain situations, such as recovering lost work or identifying changes that broke a project. The article is part of the "Unsung" blog, which focuses on software craft and quality, and is written by Marcin Wichary, a UX designer and technologist with experience at companies like Google and Figma.

The author, an early advisor to NVIDIA, recounts being granted 25,000 stock options in 1993 as part of the company's Technical Advisory Board, which they believed would vest after one year. However, decades later, they discovered a discrepancy in the vesting schedule, potentially entitling them to approximately $1 billion in NVIDIA stock. Unfortunately, the statute of limitations has expired, preventing them from pursuing the claim. The author reflects on their early involvement with NVIDIA, including meetings with founders Jensen, Curtis Priem, and Chris Malachowsky, and their work on virtual reality and texture mapping technologies that caught the attention of the company's founders.

The Go programming language allows developers to namespace their code with the location where it can be fetched, making it easy to report bugs and distribute libraries. However, this approach can couple the code to a specific hosting provider, such as GitHub, making it difficult to switch to a different provider like GitLab. This can result in significant overhead and even prevent companies from changing their hosting provider, effectively locking their code to a particular platform. To avoid this issue, it's recommended to use a custom domain instead of the hosting provider's location, allowing for more flexibility and freedom to switch providers without affecting the code.

The postmarketOS project, which aims to give smartphones a 10-year life cycle, has been rebranded as Nura. The new name, chosen after a one-and-a-half-year selection process, is an abbreviation of "Nuraghe", ancient granite structures in Sardinia, Italy, symbolizing stability and longevity. The rebranding was done to simplify outreach and improve memorability, as the original name was often difficult to pronounce and remember in various languages. The project's goal remains the same, to keep devices running the OS useful for a long time, and the new name is intended to better reflect this mission.

The article discusses a recent interview between Ezra Klein and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, which sparked differing reactions depending on one's views on AI doomerism. The author believes Huang's responses were reasonable, but notes that he missed an opportunity to challenge Klein's appeals to authority, particularly regarding AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton's predictions. The author argues that Hinton's incorrect predictions, such as his 2016 claim that radiology would cease to exist by 2021, stem not from a lack of foresight, but from making claims that exceed his domain expertise, and wishes Huang had emphasized this point to provide a more nuanced discussion.

A developer has successfully reverse engineered the undocumented Mikey chip in the iPod Classic's inline remote, enabling the use of the play/pause and volume buttons on Apple's wired earbuds for users running Rockbox on their device. Despite Rockbox being available on the iPod Classic since 2011, the earbud remote functionality had never been implemented due to lack of documentation and prioritization. The developer has now published a prebuilt Rockbox image with the remote driver, which works on the iPod Classic 6G and 7th gen, allowing for play/pause and volume control on every screen, including menus, and is compatible with the hold switch.

The Bevy iOS crates have been updated to remove the need for Swift packages, simplifying the installation process to a single "cargo add" command. Previously, each crate required a corresponding Swift package to be added to the Xcode project, but this is no longer necessary due to the use of the objc2 library, which generates framework bindings for Apple's Objective-C frameworks. This change eliminates the need for hand-written bridges and allows for a more streamlined development process, with the bridge now being a dependency rather than something that needs to be shipped separately.

The author, who previously attempted to take back control from their LG OLED Smart TV by blocking vendor telemetry and ads, has discovered that the TV's WebOS operating system fights back when its tracking servers are restricted. When the author blocked LG's Automatic Content Recognition and ad servers, the OS locked down the app store, threw error codes, and held basic app management hostage until it regained access to its tracking servers. The author argues that this is a clear case of forced consent under GDPR Article 7(4) and is documenting how to systematically challenge the gatekeeper, including testing app management without telemetry by uninstalling and attempting to reinstall a core app, such as Netflix, from the LG Content Store.

The article "Ten Lines Of Code That Changed My World" is a nostalgic reflection on the author's journey with coding, highlighting specific lines of code that have had a significant impact on them. From their first "Hello World" program, which marked their initial communication with a computer, to experimenting with machine language on a 6502 processor, the author shares memorable coding experiences that have shaped their understanding of programming. These lines of code, whether humorous or instructional, have taught the author valuable lessons about the power and versatility of coding, and how it can be both creative and unforgiving when working close to the "metal" of computer hardware.

A security incident occurred on LuaRocks.org in September 2026, where a remote code execution vulnerability was reported and promptly fixed. An investigation revealed that the vulnerability had been exploited several times between July 9th and August 20th, 2026, allowing an attacker to run code on the server and potentially exposing all data it had access to. As a precaution, the site was moved to a new server, all credentials were revoked and replaced, and although no evidence of package modification was found, the incident highlights a vulnerability in the way LuaRocks.org loads and executes uploaded Lua files, specifically in its failure to reject precompiled bytecode, which can be used to execute malicious code.

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The author has migrated from Digital Ocean to Linode due to disagreements with Digital Ocean's recent donation to a controversial project. They sought to deploy a Guix image on Linode, but found the existing documentation unsatisfying as it involved converting a Debian image to Guix. Instead, they created a custom Guix image that can be uploaded to Linode, which includes features such as virtual disk support, automatic root file system resizing, SSH server setup, and IPv6 address configuration via DHCP. The author has shared their code for achieving this, providing a ready-to-use Guix image for Linode.

Valve has introduced the Pyrowave video codec in beta, designed to provide low latency streaming. This new codec aims to improve the streaming experience by reducing delays and providing smoother video playback. With Pyrowave, Valve seeks to enhance the overall quality of online video streaming, making it more suitable for real-time applications and interactive content. The beta release of Pyrowave is now available, allowing developers and users to test and refine the codec for optimal performance.

The field of computer graphics education is facing challenges due to the vast capabilities of modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), which have expanded beyond just rendering graphics to general parallel programming. To address this, professors are adopting a "scaffolded learning" approach, where students are provided with templates and frameworks that hide complex details, allowing them to make progress without being overwhelmed by the underlying graphics APIs. As students learn more, the scaffolding is gradually removed, revealing the initially hidden complexities, making it easier for them to get started with GPU programming, such as with compute shaders in p5.js, without requiring thousands of lines of code.

The article discusses the "Parse, don't validate" pattern, originally introduced by Alexis King, and its application to the Rust programming language. The author explores how this pattern can be observed in the Rust standard library and other projects, using the `Vec` type as an example. They note that when working with a `Vec` that is guaranteed to be non-empty, such as when returned by a function that enforces this invariant, it's still necessary to use the `first` method which returns an `Option`, forcing the developer to handle the possibility of an empty vector even when it's known to be non-empty, highlighting the potential for improvement using the "Parse, don't validate" approach.

The article discusses arXivLabs, a collaborative framework that enables developers to create and share new features on the arXiv website, while emphasizing the importance of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only partners with organizations that adhere to them, inviting individuals and groups to propose projects that can add value to the arXiv community through arXivLabs.

The article criticizes the over-engineering of modern websites, arguing that they have become overly complicated with unnecessary dependencies and technologies. It suggests that many features, such as SEO, social cards, and accessibility, can be achieved using simple HTML tags, rather than relying on complex frameworks and libraries. The author argues that this approach not only simplifies the development process but also ensures that websites are more robust, accessible, and future-proof, citing examples of HTML elements like `<nav>` and `<details>` that can replace complex JavaScript components.

The author of a blog set up a honeypot to combat a botnet that was targeting their forum, after receiving a recommendation from the phpBB community forums. The honeypot, which is a simple trap that bans IP addresses that access a hidden link, revealed that the botnet appears to be originating from third-world countries, as well as some unexpected locations like Germany. The author noticed that the bots were targeting specific URLs on their forum, and that some IP addresses were sharing the same session ID, indicating suspicious activity. The honeypot adds banned IP addresses to the forum's htaccess file and throws a fake 500 error, but the author notes that this may not be effective against infected machines, and that server configurations may prevent the error from being displayed.

The Intel 8087, a floating-point chip introduced in 1980, significantly accelerated floating-point operations in the IBM PC and other systems. A recent analysis of the chip's circuitry and microcode has revealed the algorithm behind its tangent instruction, known as FPTAN, which combines the CORDIC algorithm and polynomial approximation to achieve high accuracy and performance. By reverse-engineering the chip, it was found that the FPTAN instruction computes a tangent in 90 microseconds, a substantial improvement over the 13,000 microseconds required by the 8086 microprocessor. The analysis involved creating a high-resolution image of the chip's die and examining its datapath, which consists of functional blocks that perform floating-point calculations on 80-bit values, to understand the algorithm's implementation and achieve a deeper understanding of the chip's architecture.

The article discusses the possibility of expressing reachability properties in TLA⁺, a topic that was previously thought to be unexpressible. Reachability properties refer to the ability to make a certain condition true, even if it's not actually chosen. The author revisits a section from Lamport's book, "A Science of Concurrent Programs", which explains how to express possibility and accuracy properties in TLA⁺, and provides an explanation of the concept in a more understandable way. The article aims to clarify the use of the ENABLED operator in TLA⁺, which is crucial in expressing reachability properties, and will explore two key questions related to this topic, providing a deeper understanding of how to express possibility properties in TLA⁺.