| 1. | Open Source Low Tech(opensourcelowtech.org) |
| 662 points by grep_it 57 days ago | 138 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Daniel Connell designs open-source, license-free low-tech tools that anyone can build from recycled materials and basic tools, aimed at enabling self-sufficient infrastructure for energy, food, water, and communications. The site hosts full construction tutorials, with a Facebook community for Q&A and build sharing. His work has been featured in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Le Monde, and Makezine. | |
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| 2. | Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development(quesma.com) |
| 1175 points by stared 53 days ago | 747 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Qwen 3.6 27B is a locally-runnable dense model that reportedly matches mid-2025 frontier models (GPT-5/Claude Sonnet 4.5) on benchmarks, handling coding, writing, and general tasks well from a single prompt. On a MacBook M5 Max, it runs at ~32 tok/s via llama.cpp with multi-token prediction using ~42GB RAM (8-bit quantization), and fits on a 5090 at Q6 quantization. The author prefers it over the faster MoE 35B A3B variant for higher-quality output, and sees local models as increasingly viable alternatives to subsidized proprietary APIs. | |
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| 3. | .self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting(hccf.onmy.cloud) |
| 671 points by HumanCCF 53 days ago | 379 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: The Human-Centered Computing Foundation is applying through ICANN's Applicant Support Program to create a new .self top-level domain dedicated to self-hosting and ethical, human-centered technology. The initiative aims to counter the data-extraction and attention-exploitation practices of the current tech industry by providing an alternative web architecture. Details on implementation are light, with the announcement primarily serving as a campaign launch pointing to a downloadable initiative overview. | |
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| 4. | Free the Icons(weblog.rogueamoeba.com) |
| 682 points by zdw 55 days ago | 253 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: MacOS 26 (Tahoe) forced all third-party app icons into a uniform "Liquid Glass" squircle shape, imprisoning non-conforming icons in an ugly gray background and reducing usability by making icons harder to distinguish at a glance. While MacOS 27 (Golden Gate) betas show Apple walking back some Liquid Glass excesses on their own icons, the author urges Apple to go further and restore the ability for app icons to have distinct, varied shapes. | |
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| 5. | Rocketlab acquires Iridium(investors.rocketlabcorp.com) |
| 462 points by everfrustrated 53 days ago | 302 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Rocket Lab is acquiring Iridium Communications for approximately $8.0 billion ($54/share in cash and stock), combining Rocket Lab's launch and satellite manufacturing with Iridium's LEO constellation, L-band spectrum, and 2.55M subscribers. The deal gives Rocket Lab immediate entry into satellite IoT, direct-to-device, and PNT services, plus Iridium's $871.7M in 2025 recurring revenue. Closing is expected mid-2027, funded partly via a $3.6B bridge loan from Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo. | |
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| 6. | Ornith-1.0: self-improving open-source models for agentic coding(github.com) |
| 259 points by danboarder 53 days ago | 50 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Ornith-1.0 is an MIT-licensed family of open-source coding models (9B dense, 35B and 397B MoE) post-trained on Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.5, claiming SOTA results among open models on Terminal-Bench, SWE-Bench, and related agentic coding benchmarks. Its key trick is an RL framework that jointly optimizes both the solution rollouts and the scaffolds that generate them, allowing the model to discover better search trajectories. The checkpoints support 256K context, expose an OpenAI-compatible API via vLLM/SGLang, and work with agent harnesses like OpenHands, Claude Code, and OpenCode. | |
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| 7. | One million passports leaked online(theverge.com) |
| 404 points by jruohonen 54 days ago | 235 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Security researcher Sammy Azdoufal discovered that Cannabis Club Systems (Nefos Solutions), an Irish company providing software to Spanish cannabis clubs, exposed nearly 1 million photo IDs—including passports, driver's licenses, addresses, and consumption data—at unprotected public URLs, with 5,000 new IDs added daily. The PuffPal companion app contained a plaintext Stripe key and APIs that leaked full user profiles by incrementing an ID number. Nefos took over a month to respond meaningfully, briefly re-exposed images to appease clubs, has now shut down PuffPal, and blames outsourcing firm 9Series. | |
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| 8. | US Supreme Court rules geofence warrants require constitutional protections(theguardian.com) |
| 602 points by cdrnsf 53 days ago | 291 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: The US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Chatrie v US that geofence warrants—which compel tech companies to hand over location data for all devices within a specified area and timeframe—constitute Fourth Amendment searches requiring constitutional protections. Justice Kagan's majority opinion rejected the government's argument that users voluntarily surrender privacy by enabling location services, noting Google repeatedly prompts users to enable tracking without disclosing how the data could be shared. The appeals court will still determine whether the specific search in the case was reasonable and supported by probable cause. | |
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| 9. | 30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech(theintercept.com) |
| 708 points by xrd 54 days ago | 458 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Daniel Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for transporting anarchist zines allegedly to conceal evidence tied to his wife's case—she received 70 years in connection with a protest where a police officer was shot, though she wasn't accused of the shooting. The case is the first prosecution under Trump's NSPM-7 "counterterrorism" memo targeting leftist dissent, and the DOJ has signaled more cases will follow, including warrants seeking YouTube subscriber identities for journalists covering protests. Critics warn the prosecutions effectively criminalize possessing political literature and shared ideology. | |
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| 10. | Dark Sky Lighting(savingourstars.org) |
| 241 points by alexandrehtrb 57 days ago | 53 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Dark-sky lighting reduces light pollution by fully shielding fixtures to direct light downward, using amber colors (instead of blue-rich white LEDs) at lower brightness levels, and employing timers or motion sensors. Proponents argue it improves safety (less glare), health (preserves circadian rhythms), and wildlife protection while restoring visibility of the night sky—citing Flagstaff, AZ as a successful example. The article urges readers to pressure local officials to adopt amber LEDs rather than the white LED streetlights currently replacing older lighting. | |
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| 11. | A native graphical shell for SSH(probablymarcus.com) |
| 366 points by mrcslws 53 days ago | 218 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Outer Shell is an open-source project that provides a browser-based graphical "shell" for SSH, letting servers serve up native GUI apps to remote clients. Each app runs as a small HTTP server communicating over Unix domain sockets (with SSH handling encryption), and apps can register capabilities so they interoperate—e.g., one app opening files in another. The author argues this fills a long-neglected gap alongside tools like Jupyter, and AI-assisted coding now makes truly native per-platform apps practical. | |
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| 12. | WATaBoy: JIT-Ing Game Boy Instructions to WASM Beats a Native Interpreter(humphri.es) |
| 225 points by energeticbark 53 days ago | 37 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: A student built WATaBoy, a Game Boy emulator that JIT-compiles SM83 instructions to WebAssembly bytecode, relying on the browser's JS engine to further compile the Wasm to native machine code—a workaround for iOS's JIT restrictions. Benchmarks show the JIT-to-Wasm approach runs ~1.2x faster than a native interpreter and ~1.5x faster than a Wasm interpreter, with Safari outperforming Chrome and Firefox. The post also walks through Wasm codegen, linking, and indirect dispatch from Rust, and argues this technique could enable faster cross-platform emulation if codegen tooling matures. | |
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| 13. | What happens when you run a CUDA kernel?(fergusfinn.com) |
| 286 points by mezark 53 days ago | 32 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: A simple CUDA vector-add kernel triggers an enormous stack: nvcc chains cicc and ptxas to produce PTX and SASS bundled into a fatbin embedded in an ELF, while the host stub registers the kernel and packs arguments into constant bank 0. At launch, libcuda builds a QMD, writes it as methods into a pushbuffer, advances GP_PUT, and rings an MMIO doorbell; the GPU's work distributor then spreads 4096 blocks across 128 SMs, with ptxas-encoded stall counts and scoreboard barriers governing warp eligibility, ultimately bottlenecked by DRAM bandwidth at ~80% of peak. | |
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| 14. | South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots(arstechnica.com) |
| 255 points by jnord 53 days ago | 204 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: South Korea is committing $1 trillion to three megaprojects: $585B from Samsung and SK Hynix to double DRAM production via new fabs, $357B from SK Group, GS, and Naver for AI data centers, and a physical AI push including Hyundai's plan to mass-produce 30,000 Boston Dynamics Atlas robots annually by 2028. The plans face hurdles, including massive electricity and water demands, multi-year fab construction timelines, and pushback from Hyundai's labor union, which just approved a potential strike over robot deployment. | |
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| 15. | Halvar's Guide to Entrepreneurship(thomasdullien.github.io) |
| 235 points by nekitamo 57 days ago | 55 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Halvar Flake (founder of zynamics and optimyze, sold to Google and Elastic respectively) shares lessons on B2B SaaS entrepreneurship, covering why to start a company, choosing a target market (and how market size dictates funding strategy), and the realities of VC dynamics—including misaligned risk appetites, herding behavior, and managing perception of momentum. He also details practical advice on product development (start from a problem, not a solution; use development partners and clickable prototypes), the distinction between user and buyer personas, and hiring practices like take-home interviews over whiteboards. | |
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| 16. | European ISPs Want Rightsholders Held Accountable for Overblocking Damage(torrentfreak.com) |
| 410 points by Brajeshwar 53 days ago | 124 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: EuroISPA, representing 3,300+ European ISPs, is petitioning the EU Commission to hold rightsholders financially liable for collateral damage from overblocking, citing incidents like Italy's Piracy Shield taking down 7,700 domains and Spain's LaLiga blocks knocking out banking apps and developer tools. The group argues existing IPRED legislation already supports such accountability and warns against expanding blocking obligations to DNS resolvers and VPN providers, noting Cisco pulled OpenDNS from France and Belgium after blocking orders. They also oppose rapid-blocking mandates like Italy's 30-minute requirement, which disproportionately burden smaller providers. | |
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| 17. | Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Sued in US over Memory Price Fixing(en.sedaily.com) |
| 420 points by donohoe 53 days ago | 193 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Summary not available | |
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| 18. | HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88(danunparsed.com) |
| 1012 points by sambellll 54 days ago | 432 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: HackerRank's open-sourced ATS (hiring-agent) produces wildly inconsistent resume scores—the same resume scored anywhere from 66 to 99 across 100 runs, meaning candidates can fail an 85-point cutoff 65% of the time purely by luck. The author traces this to LLM non-determinism on subjective judgments (projects vary hugely, while checklist-style skills stay consistent) and a two-line "experience" prompt with no rubric that awards 25/25 to everyone from interns to principal engineers. The takeaway: LLMs are fine for parsing resumes but shouldn't be making qualitative scoring calls that decide who gets filtered out. | |
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| 19. | The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party(det.social) |
| 669 points by Risse 53 days ago | 1509 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Summary not available | |
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| 20. | GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks(semgrep.dev) |
| 1097 points by jms703 54 days ago | 504 comments | permalink | |
tl;dr: Semgrep benchmarked open-weight and frontier models on detecting Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) vulnerabilities, and found that Zhipu AI's GLM 5.2 scored 39% F1 with just a bare prompt, beating Claude Code (32%) at roughly $0.17 per vulnerability found and ~1/6 the cost. However, both trailed Semgrep's own purpose-built multimodal pipeline (53–61% F1), reinforcing that the harness around a model matters more than the model itself. Other open-weight models (MiniMax M3, Kimi K2.7) lagged significantly, so GLM 5.2 appears to be a standout rather than evidence of open weights broadly catching up. | |
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