Claude Opus 4.6

1868 points | 780 comments

Just tested the new Opus 4.6 (1M context) on a fun needle-in-a-haystack challenge: finding every spell in all Harry Potter books.

All 7 books come to ~1.75M tokens, so they don't quite fit yet. (At this rate of progress, mid-April should do it ) For now you can fit the first 4 books (~733K tokens).

Results: Opus 4.6 found 49 out of 50 officially documented spells across those 4 books. The only miss was "Slugulus Eructo" (a vomiting spell).

Freaking impressive! — ck_one

GPT-5.3-Codex

1250 points | 473 comments

Whats interesting to me is that these gpt-5.3 and opus-4.6 are diverging philosophically and really in the same way that actual engineers and orgs have diverged philosophically

With Codex (5.3), the framing is an interactive collaborator: you steer it mid-execution, stay in the loop, course-correct as it works.

With Opus 4.6, the emphasis is the opposite: a more autonomous, agentic, thoughtful system that plans deeply, runs longer, and asks less of the human.

that feels like a reflection of a real split in how people think llm-based coding should work...

some want tight human-in-the-loop control and others want to delegate whole chunks of work and review the result

Interested to see if we eventually see models optimize for those two philosophies and 3rd, 4th, 5th philosophies that will emerge in the coming years.

Maybe it will be less about benchmarks and more about different ideas of what working-with-ai means — Rperry2174

Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization” (2025) [video]

600 points | 411 comments

Mountain View recently turned off their Flock installs after they discovered Flock had enabled data sharing without notice and other agencies were searching through MV data.

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/privacy/2026/02/flock-came... > A separate “statewide lookup” feature had also been active on 29 of the city’s 30 cameras since the initial installation, running for 17 straight months until Mountain View found and disabled it on January 5. Through that tool, more than 250 agencies that had never signed any data agreement with Mountain View ran an estimated 600,000 searches over a single year, according to local paper the Mountain View Voice, which first uncovered the issue after filing a public records request.

A different town (Staunton, VA) also turned of their Flock installs after their CEO sent out an email claming:

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-ceo-goes-... > The attacks aren't new. You've been dealing with this for forever, and we've been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness. Now, they're producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines. — ian_d

My AI Adoption Journey

539 points | 173 comments

This is such a lovely balanced thoughtful refreshingly hype-free post to read. 2025 really was the year when things shifted and many first-rate developers (often previously AI skeptics, as Mitchell was) found the tools had actually got good enough that they could incorporate AI agents into their workflows.

It's a shame that AI coding tools have become such a polarizing issue among developers. I understand the reasons, but I wish there had been a smoother path to this future. The early LLMs like GPT-3 could sort of code enough for it to look like there was a lot of potential, and so there was a lot of hype to drum up investment and a lot of promises made that weren't really viable with the tech as it was then. This created a large number of AI skeptics (of whom I was one, for a while) and a whole bunch of cynicism and suspicion and resistance amongst a large swathe of developers. But could it have been different? It seems a lot of transformative new tech is fated to evolve this way. Early aircraft were extremely unreliable and dangerous and not yet worthy of the promises being made about them, but eventually with enough evolution and lessons learned we got the Douglas DC-3, and then in the end the 747.

If you're a developer who still doesn't believe that AI tools are useful, I would recommend you go read Mitchell's post, and give Claude Code a trial run like he did. Try and forget about the annoying hype and the vibe-coding influencers and the noise and just treat it like any new tool you might put through its paces. There are many important conversations about AI to be had, it has plenty of downsides, but a proper discussion begins with close engagement with the tools. — libraryofbabel

We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

501 points | 466 comments

I spent a good part of my career (nearly a decade) at Google working on getting Clang to build the linux kernel. https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io/

This LLM did it in (checks notes):

> Over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and $20,000 in API costs

It may build, but does it boot (was also a significant and distinct next milestone)? (Also, will it blend?). Looks like yes!

> The 100,000-line compiler can build a bootable Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM, and RISC-V.

The next milestone is:

Is the generated code correct? The jury is still out on that one for production compilers. And then you have performance of generated code.

> The generated code is not very efficient. Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled.

Still a really cool project! — ndesaulniers

It's 2026, Just Use Postgres

476 points | 289 comments

I recently started digging into databases for the first time since college, and from a novice's perspective, postgres is absolutely magical. You can throw in 10M+ rows across twenty columns, spread over five tables, add some indices, and get sub-100ms queries for virtually anything you want. If something doesn't work, you just ask it for an analysis and immediately know what index to add or how to fix your query. It blows my mind. Modern databases are miracles. — vagab0nd

LinkedIn checks for 2953 browser extensions

381 points | 185 comments

Looks like Firefox is immune.

This works by looking for web accessible resources that are provided by the extensions. For Chrome, these are are available in a webpage via the URL chrome-extension://[PACKAGE ID]/[PATH] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/manif...

On Firefox, web accessible resources are available at "moz-extension://<extension-UUID>/myfile.png" <extension-UUID> is not your extension's ID. This ID is randomly generated for every browser instance. This prevents websites from fingerprinting a browser by examining the extensions it has installed. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... — cbsks

CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

363 points | 153 comments

Facts are the enemy.

I remember reading books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as a teen thinking, "Cool story, but the US will never look like that." Oof. — clintfred

CIA to Sunset the World Factbook

361 points | 243 comments

Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source.

I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy. — regenschutz

Orchestrate teams of Claude Code sessions

344 points | 193 comments

This is great and all but, who can actually afford to let these agents run on tasks all day long? Is anyone here actually using this or are these rollouts aimed at large companies?

I'm burning through so many tokens on Cursor that I've had to upgrade to Ultra recently - and i'm convinced they're tweaking the burn rate behind the scenes - usage allowance doesn't seem proportional.

Thank god the open source/local LLM world isn't far behind. — bluerooibos

Voxtral Transcribe 2

864 points | 211 comments

This demo is really impressive: https://huggingface.co/spaces/mistralai/Voxtral-Mini-Realtim...

Don't be confused if it says "no microphone", the moment you click the record button it will request browser permission and then start working.

I spoke fast and dropped in some jargon and it got it all right - I said this and it transcribed it exactly right, WebAssembly spelling included:

> Can you tell me about RSS and Atom and the role of CSP headers in browser security, especially if you're using WebAssembly? — simonw

FBI couldn't get into WaPo reporter's iPhone because Lockdown Mode enabled

566 points | 492 comments

https://archive.is/1ILVS — bwoah

Claude is a space to think

435 points | 235 comments

I really hope Anthropic turns out to be one of the 'good guys', or at least a net positive.

It appears they trend in the right direction:

- Have not kissed the Ring.

- Oppose blocking AI regulation that other's support (e.g. They do not support banning state AI laws [2]).

- Committing to no ads.

- Willing to risk defense department contract over objections to use for lethal operations [1]

The things that are concerning: - Palantir partnership (I'm unclear about what this actually is) [3]

- Have shifted stances as competition increased (e.g. seeking authoritarian investors [4])

It inevitable that they will have to compromise on values as competition increases and I struggle parsing the difference marketing and actually caring about values. If an organization cares about values, it's suboptimal not to highlight that at every point via marketing. The commitment to no ads is obviously good PR but if it comes from a place of values, it's a win-win.

I'm curious, how do others here think about Anthropic?

[1]https://archive.is/Pm2QS

[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/opinion/anthropic-ceo-reg...

[3]https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a...

[4]https://archive.is/4NGBE — JohnnyMarcone

AI is killing B2B SaaS

320 points | 501 comments

It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible for it. I didn't understand it before I was in management either, but now that I'm in management I 100% get it. — bandrami

Guinea worm on track to be 2nd eradicated human disease; only 10 cases in 2025

287 points | 132 comments

Thanks, Carter!

https://www.cartercenter.org/programs/guinea-worm/ — fanatic2pope

OpenClaw is what Apple intelligence should have been

286 points | 251 comments

> This is exactly what Apple Intelligence should have been... They could have shipped an agentic AI that actually automated your computer instead of summarizing your notifications. Imagine if Siri could genuinely file your taxes, respond to emails, or manage your calendar by actually using your apps, not through some brittle API layer that breaks every update.

And this is probably coming, a few years from now. Because remember, Apple doesn't usually invent new products. It takes proven ones and then makes its own much nicer version.

Let other companies figure out the model. Let the industry figure out how to make it secure. Then Apple can integrate it with hardware and software in a way no other company can.

Right now we are still in very, very, very early days. — crazygringo

A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

284 points | 156 comments

I found this part interesting:

There are also other documents that appear to simulate a scanned document but completely lack the “real-world noise” expected with physical paper-based workflows. The much crisper images appear almost perfect without random artifacts or background noise, and with the exact same amount of image skew across multiple pages. Thanks to the borders around each page of text, page skew can easily be measured, such as with VOL00007\IMAGES\0001\EFTA00009229.pdf. It is highly likely these PDFs were created by rendering original content (from a digital document) to an image (e.g., via print to image or save to image functionality) and then applying image processing such as skew, downscaling, and color reduction. — anigbrowl

The Great Unwind

246 points | 218 comments

Anger about the 2008 bailout makes sense. Yen carry unwind deserves attention. However, the trading call to action fails on market structure.

Key counterpoints:

- Global FX turnover runs near $9.6T per day (BIS, April 2025). A retail wave of calls will not move USD/JPY in a durable way at that scale.

- /6J options settle on /6J futures. When you buy calls, you mostly push dealer delta hedging into futures, then dealers unwind as exposure changes. No sustained spot yen demand comes from that flow.

- FXY calls track an ETF wrapper, not spot.

- “Widowmaker trade” most often refers to repeated losses from shorting Japanese government bonds, not a long-yen crowd squeeze. — panphora

How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post

222 points | 241 comments

I'd been a relatively long-time subscriber (since 2016) and preferred the Post to the Times for political and international news; more focused, a little drier, easier to follow. I canceled my subscription early last year, not because of anything Bezos did, but because the Times had improved to the point where I just wasn't reading the Post very often.

In understanding everything that's being written about the Post layoffs, one thing you absolutely have to understand (you can weight it however you'd like) to have a coherent take is: the New York Times is an anomaly. Newspapers are a terrible business. People don't get news from newspapers anymore, and advertisers don't reach customers through them.

The Times is thriving because they've pivoted from being a newspaper to being a media business. The games vertical is the first thing people talk about, but cooking is arguably a better example. The verticals have dedicated users, their own go-to-markets, their own user retention loops.

Like basically every other newspaper, the Post failed to replicate this. They're staffed like a big media business, not like a targeted vertical like Politico, but they don't successfully operate like a media business. — tptacek

French streamer unbanked by Qonto after criticizing Palantir and Peter Thiel

207 points | 67 comments

Like everyone else, I am very skeptical that it is somehow related, for several reasons.

- He is just a small time streamer, I didn't watch his videos but it looks like typical clickbait content playing on people's paranoia. Why would Palantir care about it?

- I didn't watch the videos in question, but I suppose that he says that Palentir is evil because it is used by police forces to attack poor migrants, that kind of thing. Not only he is saying what everyone is saying, but it may be good advertising for Palantir, as it shows that they are good at their (evil) job.

- Streisand effect, I am sure that even the idiots at Palantir know that it may not be a good idea to give attention to a streamer who annoys them.

- Speaking of attention, it is highly likely that the streamer in question was unbanked for a completely unrelated reason but saw the opportunity to make buzz, and it seems to be working!

- There seem to be no further evidence connecting the two. — GuB-42

France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US

810 points | 443 comments

Worth pointing out: France is not adopting existing open source software, they're building their own software and releasing it under the MIT licence. Most of it (or all of it?) is Django backend + React frontend (using a custom-built UI kit).

Home page for the entire suite (in French) with some screenshots: https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/

Code bases are on GitHub and they use English there: https://github.com/suitenumerique/

Dev handbook (in English): https://suitenumerique.gitbook.io/handbook

Not French and I can't say I personally tried deploying any of them, but I've been admiring their efforts from afar for a while now. — input_sh

I miss thinking hard

953 points | 529 comments

This March 2025 post from Aral Balkan stuck with me:

https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080

"Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.

When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine." — gyomu

Data centers in space makes no sense

287 points | 418 comments

I would not assume cooling has been worked out.

Space is a vacuum. i.e. The lack-of-a-thing that makes a thermos great at keeping your drink hot. A satellite is, if nothing else, a fantastic thermos. A data center in space would necessarily rely completely on cooling by radiation, unlike a terrestrial data center that can make use of convection and conduction. You can't just pipe heat out into the atmosphere or build a heat exchanger. You can't exchange heat with vacuum. You can only radiate heat into it.

Heat is going to limit the compute that can be done in a satellite data centre and radiative cooling solutions are going to massively increase weight. It makes far more sense to build data centers in the arctic.

Musk is up to something here. This could be another hyperloop (i.e. A distracting promise meant to sabotage competition). It could be a legal dodge. It could be a power grab. What it will not be is a useful source of computing power. Anyone who takes this venture seriously is probably going to be burned. — beloch

Qwen3-Coder-Next

587 points | 365 comments

This GGUF is 48.4GB - https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-Coder-Next-GGUF/tree/main/... - which should be usable on higher end laptops.

I still haven't experienced a local model that fits on my 64GB MacBook Pro and can run a coding agent like Codex CLI or Claude code well enough to be useful.

Maybe this will be the one? This Unsloth guide from a sibling comment suggests it might be: https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3-coder-next — simonw

What's up with all those equals signs anyway?

612 points | 178 comments

For context, this is the Lars Ingebrigtsen who wrote the manual for Gnus[0], a common Emacs package for reading email and Usenet. It’s clever, funny, and wildly informative. Lars has probably forgotten more about email parsing than 99% of us here will ever have learned.

The manual itself says[1]:

> Often when I read the manual, I think that we should take a collection up to have Lars psycho-analysed.

0: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/gnus.htm...

1: https://www.gnus.org/manual.html — kstrauser

New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers

247 points | 302 comments

My main concern is, how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician. — robflynn

Agent Skills

386 points | 214 comments

This stuff smells like maybe the bitter lesson isn't fully appreciated.

You might as well just write instructions in English in any old format, as long as it's comprehensible. Exactly as you'd do for human readers! Nothing has really changed about what constitutes good documentation. (Edit to add: my parochialism is showing there, it doesn't have to be English)

Is any of this standardization really needed? Who does it benefit, except the people who enjoy writing specs and establishing standards like this? If it really is a productivity win, it ought to be possible to run a comparison study and prove it. Even then, it might not be worthwhile in the longer run. — iainmerrick

Deno Sandbox

344 points | 121 comments

Note that you don't need to use Deno or JavaScript at all to use this product. Here's their Python client SDK: https://pypi.org/project/deno-sandbox/

  from deno_sandbox import DenoDeploy
  
  sdk = DenoDeploy()
  
  with sdk.sandbox.create() as sb:
      # Run a shell command
      process = sb.spawn("echo", args=["Hello from the sandbox!"])
      process.wait()
  
      # Write and read files
      sb.fs.write_text_file("/tmp/example.txt", "Hello, World!")
      content = sb.fs.read_text_file("/tmp/example.txt")
      print(content)

Looks like the API protocol itself uses websockets: https://tools.simonwillison.net/zip-wheel-explorer?package=d... — simonw

X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok

233 points | 438 comments

Honest question: What does it mean to "raid" the offices of a tech company? It's not like they have file cabinets with paper records. Are they just seizing employee workstations?

Seems like you'd want to subpoena source code or gmail history or something like that. Not much interesting in an office these days. — stickfigure

Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

249 points | 210 comments

More than writing code the IDE itself makes me anxious. Especially Xcode. Wish they make the IDE interface somewhat simpler by leveraging AI. — robofanatic

xAI joins SpaceX

879 points | 1999 comments

> it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power

We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon.

edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sun's power. A few trillionths per year. — gok

The Codex App

786 points | 612 comments

It is baffling how these AI companies, with billions of dollars, cannot build native applications, even with the help of AI. From a UI perspective, these are mostly just chat apps, which are not particularly difficult to code from scratch. Before the usual excuses come about how it is impossible to build a custom UI, consider software that is orders of magnitude more complex, such as raddbg, 10x, Superluminal, Blender, Godot, Unity, and UE5, or any video game with a UI. On top of that, programs like Claude Cowork or Codex should, by design, integrate as deeply with the OS as possible. This requires calling native APIs (e.g., Win32), which is not feasible from Electron. — OlympicMarmoto

The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal

601 points | 710 comments

It's hilarious how transparent a money grab this entire thing is.

"You need to show a Real ID for security, otherwise how do we know you won't hijack the plane?"

"Well I don't have a Real ID."

"Ok then, give us $45 and you can go through."

So it was never about security at all then, was it?

And don't get me started with all the paid express security lanes. Because of course only poor people can weaponize shoes and laptops. — paxys

Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years

580 points | 310 comments

Reading the release history[1]. I'm kind of shocked that sudo gets active development and monthly releases. I would have thought that something this old and venerated would have been "done" long ago.

1: https://www.sudo.ws/releases/devel/ — ryandrake

Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

546 points | 234 comments

I discovered Anki 12 years ago while living in Japan. I was trying my hardest and absolutely failing to remember any of the Japanese I was studying. Maybe I was due for a learning-style renaissance for myself and Anki was just the catalyst, but it really made a positive impact on my life. More than just memorizing kanji on AnkiDroid during my commute, I just started to believe I could learn anything. I was starting to take my coding hobby more seriously at the time and hacking on Anki was a big part of that too. Thanks for all the hard work Damien and David Allison. I'm so grateful for the software you've worked on. — Timpy

Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

487 points | 383 comments

If a country changes course every four years, how can the success of a long-term project be ensured?

And what of its negotiating credibility? How can the other side trust that an agreement will hold in the future?

This is not a critique, but a genuine curiosity, because there's an obvious drawback with a system with opposing world views.

Unless, of course, something still unites them in the first place, with acceptable disparity on each side turning it into an advantage of flexibility and adaptability while keeping the focus on long-term ideas and plans. — igorramazanov

Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft

392 points | 514 comments

Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.

There is Microsoft Copilot, which replaced Bing Chat, Cortana and uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 and 5 models.

There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.

There is Microsoft 365 Copilot, what they now call Office with built in GenAI stuff.

There is also a Copilot cli that lets you use whatever agent/model backend you want too?

Everything is Copilot. Laptops sell with Copilot buttons now.

It is not immediately clear what version of Copilot someone is talking about. 99% of my experience is with the Office and it 100% fails to do the thing it was advertised to do 2 years ago when work initially got the subscription. Point it a SharePoint/OneDrive location, a handful of excel spreadsheets and pdfs/word docs and tell it to make a PowerPoint presentation based on that information.

It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. You have to hold it by the hand tell it everything to do step by step to the point that making the PowerPoint presentation yourself is significantly faster because you don’t have to type out a bunch of prompts and edit it’s garbage output.

And now it’s clear they aren’t even dogfooding their own LLM products so why should anyone pay for Copilot? — kemotep

Hacking Moltbook

386 points | 241 comments

I was quite stunned at the success of Moltbot/moltbook, but I think im starting to understand it better these days. Most of Moltbook's success rides on the "prepackaged" aspect of its agent. Its a jump in accessibility to general audiences which are paying alot more attention to the tech sector than in previous decades. Most of the people paying attention to this space dont have the technical capabilities that many engineers do, so a highly perscriptive "buy mac mini, copy a couple of lines to install" appeals greatly, especially as this will be the first "agent" many of them will have interacted with.

The landscape of security was bad long before the metaphorical "unwashed masses" got hold of it. Now its quite alarming as there are waves of non-technical users doing the bare minimum to try and keep up to date with the growing hype.

The security nightmare happening here might end up being more persistant then we realize. — SimianSci

Termux

353 points | 180 comments

One of my favorite piece of software was made by the guy with Termux on his phone [0], absolute insane https://github.com/9001/copyparty

0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0&t=885s — haunter

Zig Libc

346 points | 151 comments

250 C files were deleted. 2032 to go. Watching Zig slowly eat libc from the inside is one of the more satisfying long term projects to follow — OsamaJaber