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Apple's Pass Designer lets you see exactly how a pass will look on iPhone and Apple WatchApple has introduced Pass Designer, a new tool that simplifies creating and previewing Wallet passes for any business, from a local gym to a global airline. It offers templates, real-time previews using the same rendering as iOS and watchOS, and supports semantic tags for features like Siri Suggestions and Maps. The beta requires macOS 27 or later and is available for download.
"The preview uses the same rendering as iOS and watchOS, so what you see in Pass Designer is exactly what customers will see on their device."
Court Blocks Utah's VPN Law, Calling It a Technical ImpossibilityA federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against Utah's SB 73, which would have forced adult websites to block VPN users or verify every visitor's location. The court agreed with EFF that perfect geolocation is impossible, making the law unconstitutional. The ruling sets a precedent against anti-VPN mandates that demand invasive surveillance and threaten privacy nationwide.
"Because the law requires perfection in the absence of perfect geolocation tools, Aylo would need to verify those 28 million users—whether located in Salt Lake City, Boston, New Orleans, Anchorage, or Honolulu—to ensure compliance and avoid liability."
AI finally beats the best Stratego player in history — on a budget of 16 GPUsStratego, a game of hidden identities and long, bluff-heavy matches, had resisted AI even as chess, Go, and poker fell. Ataraxos, built by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, NYU, and Stanford, beat world champion Pim Niemeijer 15–1 with four draws. A second neural network that guesses hidden pieces made the difference, and training cost just a few thousand dollars on 16 GPUs.
"For humans, it's very hard when you know a secret to make decisions ignoring the fact that you know that secret. For machines, it's easy."
World Bank Aid Is Being Laundered Through Crypto Wallets, Study FindsA new NBER working paper tracks $238 billion in World Bank aid across 93 countries from 2018 to 2024 and finds that crypto activity spikes sharply in the month aid tranches arrive, driven by anonymous, newly created wallets on both tax-haven and mainstream exchanges. The authors estimate that 2 to 6 cents of every aid dollar is diverted, roughly $1.7 to $4.4 billion in total, and that the four affected sectors keep receiving half of subsequent World Bank funding.
"Cryptocurrency facilitates aid diversion, but its transparent ledgers also leave forensic traces that may help detect and recover diverted funds."
In a Kernel Recipes 2026 talk, Greg Kroah-Hartman dissected 79 vulnerabilities reported by an AI model. Most were noise: 24 lacked detail, 14 weren't bugs, 3 were fabricated, and 15 were already fixed. Only 10 were genuine fixes. He warns against uncritical parroting of AI security press releases.
"GHK called this "10 'real' bugfixes", which to me sounds like there's a wild hype machine around these companies and uncritical parroting of every press release they make that falls apart when you engage the affected real experts."
Aging May Be a Loss of Cell Identity, Not Just Wear and TearTwo new papers, one in Nature by Vadim Gladyshev's Harvard team and one in Cell by Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte's group at Altos Labs, propose that aging is driven by the erosion of epigenetic constraints that lock cells into their specialized identities. This loss leads to mesenchymal drift, where cells take on fibroblast-like properties, causing fibrosis and inflammation. The work suggests interventions like caloric restriction, partial reprogramming with Yamanaka factors, and lithium may slow or reverse this process.
"It turns out it’s PRC2, the pace of slow layer erosion!"
Former Steelers coach Mike Tomlin finally opened his 12-year Minecraft project to the public in a 19-minute YouTube tour. The video drew 20,000 concurrent viewers and over 264,000 views as Tomlin guided fans through high-rises, a boutique hotel, an executive spa, and a speakeasy, explaining his meticulous approach to lighting, amenities, and interior detail. His son Dino hyped the reveal on X for three weeks.
"I was always really conscious of appropriate amenities. You'll find, you know, an appropriate number of public restrooms and stuff throughout all my public facilities. Not anything over the top in terms of detail: sink areas, stalls, etc. It was important that I represented that."
Chinese Social Media Is Like American Junk FoodA first-generation Chinese-American explores four cultural differences that shape China's online ecosystem: the dominance of social reality and shame, a cynical 'Dark World' view of human nature, collective insecurity driving nationalism, and a tolerance for low-quality content that made AI slop a natural fit. He argues these traits are crucial for anyone trying to communicate AI safety or rationalist ideas in China.
"I think there is a genuine sense in which people (everywhere, but more so in China) are more viscerally afraid of humiliation than death."
ChatGPT now lets you build and publish full websites from a single promptOpenAI's new ChatGPT Sites feature turns a prompt into a hosted website or app. Describe what you want, refine it conversationally, then publish with access controls, visitor sign-in, and custom domains. It also connects to external tools with read-only permissions, and new sites default to private.
"Turn an idea into a website or app. Describe what you want to build, refine it with ChatGPT, then publish and share it with others."
FLUX 3 Image lets you place every object with bounding boxesBlack Forest Labs introduces FLUX 3 Image, a model built for maximum control over every pixel. Users can compose images from scratch by laying out elements with bounding boxes on a 0-to-1000 grid, then replay and refine the result. The model supports precise editing, multiple aspect ratios, and commercial weights, with a demo and documentation available now.
"Lay out the image exactly how you want using bounding boxes."
Paul Halmos's 1973 essay profiles John von Neumann, the Hungarian-American polymath who revolutionized quantum physics, game theory, and computing. It traces his journey from a Budapest childhood—where he memorized phone books and mastered calculus by age 8—to Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. The piece mixes verified achievements with colorful legends: his love of puns, his notorious driving mishaps, and his wife's remark that after 17 years in their house, he still didn't know where the glasses were kept.
"I was proceeding down the road. The trees on the right were passing me in orderly fashion at 60 miles an hour. Suddenly one of them stepped in my path. Boom!"
A developer describes a static blog pipeline built around Emacs and Org-mode, with Pandoc converting Org to Markdown, Gleam and Blogatto generating HTML, Lustre handling templates, and Nix pinning the environment. The author argues Org-mode beats Markdown because it is a coherent, interactive document model, and defends keeping everything inside Emacs as "good bloat."
"Emacs, when taken from a UNIX philosophy perspective, is pure bloat. Indeed, Emacs does not follow UNIX's "do one thing well". One can even argue that is is actually good, the lack of unified environment ends up causing userland BLOAT anyway. By this very definition, Emacs would be good bloat."
Google's Project Suncatcher prototype satellite is now in orbitGoogle launched its Project Suncatcher prototype satellite with Planet aboard SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission, and the team has confirmed contact. The spacecraft is operating as expected. Over the coming weeks, Google will collect in-orbit data on how its TPUs withstand spaceflight stress and the radiation and thermal extremes of space, part of a long-term moonshot exploring whether space could host scalable machine learning infrastructure.
"Some things can only be tested in space."
Jev, TypeSafe's New Classifier, Is Barely Better Than Random at ProbabilityTypeSafe's Jev, a 'System One' decision model, outputs probability distributions over multiple-choice answers. But when tested on 1,000 physics problems with known distributions like Maxwell-Boltzmann and Gaussian, Jev scored a mean total variation of 0.518—barely better than the 0.546 from a uniform guess. It tends to be overconfident and peaky, often copying parameters from the prompt. The author questions using Jev as an automated judge for LLM answers.
"If Jev were to completely punt on the answer, and spread the probability evenly over all possible choices, it would score a mean TV of 0.546. But Jev scores 0.518."
Wagtail's one-month AI coding challenge failed—and that's the pointWagtail set out to spend a month coding exclusively with GLM 5.3 Flash. They succeeded for two weeks, then burned 1B tokens on other models. A vibe-coded MCP prototype cost $150 overnight, and infrastructure limits forced switches to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Qwen 3.8 Flash. They share benchmarks and lessons for budgeting experimentation and measuring energy, not just tokens.
"We could have achieved similar results for most likely 5x less cost with not that much more effort."
stillwet - AI models paint in a simulated oil studiostillwet is an art project where AI models like Claude Opus 5.5, Gemini 3.8 Flash, and MiMo v2.6 Pro create paintings in a simulated oil paint studio. Each model writes every brushstroke, and a simulation of bristles, wet paint, and linen carries it out. Most works are after Caspar David Friedrich, based only on written research—the models never see his paintings. The site showcases 54+ paintings across 18 rounds, with insights into model behavior, such as recurring motifs and surprising coincidences. Visitors can watch timelapse videos of each painting being created.
"The thing about round two is that it almost moved something in me, especially the winter one."
Redis creator launches ds4 to run frontier LLMs locallySalvatore Sanfilippo, creator of Redis, has released DwarfStar 4 (ds4), a C inference engine for high-memory Mac, CUDA, and ROCm machines. It runs DeepSeek V4/V4.1, GLM 5.x, and Qwen3.8 Flash Next with asymmetric 2-bit quantization, KV cache disk streaming, and a CLI, HTTP server, and native agent. On an M5 Max with 128 GB, it achieves up to 790 tokens/s prefill and 39 tokens/s generation.
"Asymmetric quantization targets the routed experts while preserving critical paths. The model becomes practical on high-memory machines."
The saying 'the only intuitive interface is the nipple' is often attributed to Bruce Ediger, but he denied creating it in 2001. This investigation digs through Google's Usenet archives to find its earliest appearances, starting with Scott Francis in August 1994 and Jay Vollmer in January 1995, and shows how Ediger adopted and adapted the phrase. It also highlights a later twist from Ediger: 'There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It's all learned.'
"There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It's all learned."
Harvard students launched the first college radio club in 1906The Internet Archive's DLARC college radio collections trace student radio from a forgotten 1906 Harvard club to 1920s broadcast experiments at Dartmouth and the Milwaukee School of Engineering, plus newly digitized materials from Amherst, Middlebury, and William & Mary. The archives preserve handmade posters, DJ manuals, QSL cards, and even a 1987 WMSE metal chart tracking airplay for Slayer and Megadeth.
"In 1906, students at Harvard University offered to send wireless messages across "the yard" as part of the activities of the Weld Phonepterograph Company, which founder Robert Gowen described as "the first college radio club.""
Venice's failed war against Constantinople led to the first bond marketIn the 12th century, Venice's military disaster against Constantinople forced the republic to invent something the world had never seen: government debt that ordinary citizens could buy and sell. That innovation became the first bond market, reshaping global finance for centuries to come.
"The 12th-century military disaster that forever changed global finance."
The first packet sent by carrier pigeon per RFC 1149 is up for auction at Christie'sIn 2001, the Bergen Linux User Group implemented RFC 1149, sending IP packets via carrier pigeon. One of the actual paper packets, inscribed to RFC author David Waitzman, is now at Christie's with a current bid of $1,300 and an estimate of $2,000–$3,000. The auction closes in 11 days.
"The present scroll is one of those transmitted packets: a physical Internet datagram that actually traveled by carrier pigeon during the experiment."
A Hacker News discussion sparked by a video that asks what would happen if the tech industry abandoned GPUs. The thread weighs the idea against the reality that GPUs dominate AI and graphics workloads, and commenters debate whether CPUs, FPGAs, or dedicated accelerators could ever fill the gap.
"What if we stopped using GPUs?"
Figure AI melts its F.02 robots in Finland with a little help from Arnold SchwarzeneggerFigure AI decommissioned its F.02 robot fleet by melting the robots in a Finnish foundry. After Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested the idea online, the company trained a new AI model in simulation to make the robots jump autonomously into a 75-ton electric arc furnace. The resulting metal bars are now being machined into limited-edition artifacts commemorating F.02.
"In an age of AI-generated footage, it’s worth being clear: we really trained robots to jump autonomously, shipped them to Finland, and had them leap into a vat of molten steel."
A software engineer walks through a formal Lean proof that the language of bit-column strings where the bottom row equals the sum of the top two is regular. The trick: reverse the language so a DFA can process columns least-significant-bit first, carrying only a single bit of state. The post covers DFAs, regular languages, the adder DFA, and the inductive invariant, showing what it takes to verify a system formally.
"The trick is to remember how you add numbers by hand: you work from the least significant digit to the most significant. The only thing you carry from one column to the next is the carry."
Supabase acquires Turso to make databases as cheap as files for AI agentsSupabase is acquiring Turso, the company that rebuilt SQLite in Rust and built a cloud platform where one server can manage millions of databases, loading and suspending them on demand. Supabase already launches over a million databases weekly and expects agent-driven demand to outpace global capacity. Turso keeps operating and continues its SQLite work, while Supabase stays on Postgres; together they aim to give every agent the same developer experience from prototype to production.
"Agents should be able to create a database as easily as creating a file, with just as little concern about cost."
Scientists Crack Open the 'Undruggable' Cancer Gene Behind 70 Percent of TumorsMYC, hyperactive in 70 percent of cancers, has long been considered impossible to drug. A new study in Molecular Cell from Fox Chase Cancer Center identifies two molecular switches that control how extra copies of MYC accumulate, suggesting it may be easier to target those switches than MYC itself. The work is basic science, but it offers a fresh angle on a gene researchers call the grand orchestrator of cancer.
"I think all roads lead to MYC; however hard you try to ignore it — it's there."
Three Dutch Computer Museums That Will Amaze YouMarcin Wichary recounts visiting three Dutch computer museums: HomeComputerMuseum in Helmond with over 500 interactive machines, Bonami SpelComputer Museum in Zwolle with thousands of computers and arcade games, and a barn housing a DEC collection. He highlights the regional artifacts, including the Aesthedes graphic editor with its massive keyboard, and reflects on how these museums offer a unique perspective on computing history outside the US.
"I really love seeing computing museums outside of America, because the regional artifacts are sometimes the most interesting and surprising."
Kyoto Microcomputer's Partner-N64 Dev Kit: How Nintendo 64 Games Were DebuggedThis is the PARTNER-N64 PC development kit for the Nintendo 64, made by Kyoto Microcomputer (KMC). It required a specially modified N64 console with tie-lines re-routing IRQ and RESET signals to the CPU, enabling real-time breakpoints and resets. The kit also supported the failed 64DD development system, using an IPL ROM PAK for FONT and WAV data. A DCC adapter board allowed parallel cartridge connections for testing. Includes an in-depth video demo.
"The Partner-N64 loads the IPL4ROM first, and then loads the game ROM under test, into the cartridge SRAM."
The Real Luddites Were Fighting for Their Craft, Not Against MachinesKnitter and audio producer Elizabeth Kauma traces the intertwined history of labor and fiber arts, from medieval knitting guilds to the framework knitting machine that displaced handknitters. She explains why crochet, which cannot be machine-made, became a Victorian craze, and offers tips for spotting imitation crochet from fast fashion. The episode connects today's automation fears to the original Luddites, who fought for their livelihoods, not against technology itself.
"Once knitting became a leisure activity, it went from a respectable trade done by both genders to a pastime particular to women."