Jeff – Jev-compatible 0.8B decision models, trained at home, ~30 ms

200 points | 62 comments

Forgive my lack of understanding but how long before Jev type functionality is just built straight into all frontier models? — adrithmetiqa

World Labs Is Joining AMD

258 points | 108 comments

I hesitate to recast the discussion in a negative tone, but this doesn't sound right on technical terms.

Is World Labs' Atlas genuinely novel? Their demos do not seem to be better than the existing state of the art.

Fei Fei Li has been criticized even in the ImageNet days as a shower than a doer. Her roadshow past two years extolling "world model" in vague terms didn't show much insight, and her company's demo seems to merely rehash what has been available in the field for years. If you haven't seen the current SoTA in Gaussian splats, then World Labs' demos may seem cool, but they are mostly standard in the field now. If someone is more familiar with the inner workings of World Labs, I am happy to be corrected (but inner details wouldn't change the fact that demos are no better than SoTA).

I really had high hopes for World Labs, but I am quite saddened to realize that perhaps all this was just a financial maneuver and the detractors were right from the beginning.

source: I used to be in the downstream field: Gaussian spats for robotics. The exact field that World Labs' is supposed to help. — quanto

It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs

214 points | 72 comments

> We must move past vague discussions of “AI” and instead isolate the specific types of systems that are creating problems.

This is absolutely correct and its surprising how rarely you see commenters in the media push to go into the specifics on this. AI is just matrix math and its what you connect that math to that matters, we should talk a little more about what we are willing to connect AI to and little less about how scary or capable the models appear. — jimmyjazz14

MicroLLM Lab – Try 7 tiny LLM's in the browser

212 points | 77 comments

It's not loading for me on Firefox (v156.0.1, Arch Linux), works fine on Chromium.

Uncaught ReferenceError: GPUShaderStage is not defined <anonymous> https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/microllmlab/engine/web... webgpu-metal.js:24:17 <anonymous> https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/microllmlab/engine/web... [MicroLLM lab] App loader failsafe triggered after 6s microllmlab:55:21 — langurmonkey

So long Google, and thanks for all the nudes

203 points | 80 comments

> I was hoping to publish my new game on the store and charge for it, but their review process is so broken, I think I'll stick to fdroid and itch.io.

  The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. -- Princess Leia

— delichon

Sonnet 5.5

530 points | 358 comments

Unless you’re using frontier models like Astra, Sol, Fable, or Opus, I think you’re often better off using Chinese models for a fraction of the price. I’m not sure people realises just how competitive they’ve become.

GLM and DeepSeek are great examples. They’re a bit like Linux or Android in that there isn’t necessarily one best provider. You need to do some research, try a few, and pick whatever works best for your use case.

I think that’s partly why Anthropic has been pushing its most expensive models so heavily for a while now. Sonnet and Haiku were great, but at that level of intelligence it’s becoming much harder for them to compete on price with Chinese models that have largely caught up.

The main reason to use frontier models from Anthropic or OpenAI now is the combination of intelligence and speed. Chinese frontier models still struggle to match that, possibly in part because of hardware constraints. But judging by the recent GLM releases, they seem to be moving in the right direction. — azuanrb

Windows 11½

413 points | 127 comments

Having recently been reinstalling Win 95, 98 SE, and XP has been quite a reminder how much classic Windows got out of the way. Aside from a single, auto started Tour (with and easy+permanent opt out), there isn't much to slow you down or hold your hand.

Though for the kids it's quite unfamiliar and a bit intimidating. They're used to first-run tutorials and guides popping along their journey. Things are also more easily lost to them when not on the desktop.

I imagine the ideal is probably a first run wizard that could ask users how much help they'd like coming up to speed. Obviously this excludes selling the user's attention to advertisers, not even for first party offerings. — paulryanrogers

The problem is not AI code, but not knowing about system architecture or intent

341 points | 223 comments

I was reflecting on this on Saturday in an unformed way, trying to trace the lineage of a decision made at work.

The code change itself doesn't specifically matter. But suffice to say, it was about an AI feature in one of our products.

The code was stamped by Claude driven by a prompt. The prompt was for a ticket generated with the Atlassian AI integration. Atlassian had digested docs made with AI. The docs came from strategy memos I'm 90% sure were written entirely by Claude.

The strategy was chosen by management at the urging of exec leadership. The execs now communicate mostly via AI written memos. I do not know how they make decisions, but they reference tech influencers, market conditions, customer expectations.

This gave me pause. Who had actually made the decision then? Arguably there has been several layers of human review, but the actual source of the decision was hard to pin down.

We were not building the feature because we wanted it. We were building it because we thought other people expected it.

Perhaps reflecting on the state of the market, I thought, could indicate who was actually in control.

Where do investor and customer expectations come from in 2026? It is very murky, at least in tech. There appears to be hype. Some hype comes from true believers, some comes from cynics. But both respond to market incentives that reward bigger and bigger claims.

Where does the market's "action" come from? What is the driver?

Investors do not really seem to understand what the tech is or its limitations. Some are passive operators. Others are just responding to the overall froth and speculation in the market - which becomes a runaway feedback cycle.

This left me lost.

Nobody in this ecosystem, I thought, is actually in control here.

Nobody is actually orienting work and action to real, concrete goals. It's all based on speculation and anxiety about the future.

So it is not only that nobody understands what the code does. It is that we cannot, or at least I cannot, explain the motivation. There doesn't seem to "be" any form of "intention" in this environment.

It has all been hollowed out, replaced either be inscrutable machines, or inscrutable incentives.

Ironically it rather resembles the kind of "misaligned" superintelligence we are supposed to be avoiding. — zero_shift

Pirating the Pirates

379 points | 202 comments

"“To me, it [the original Star Wars trilogy] doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.” - George Lucas, 2004

It is insane how much George Lucas has edited the original Star Wars trilogy. I think no movies have had more edits over time than Star Wars. — thewizzardofnl

Hijacking the PS5's RTMP stream

244 points | 73 comments

Kinda sad that it's 2026 and this data still goes over the internet unencrypted...

RTMP and all the video and audio protocols behind it aren't trivial either - I bet there are hundreds of exploits waiting to be found that any three letter agency sitting on the internet can use to take over your PS5 and all credentials stored within too... — londons_explore

Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat

258 points | 158 comments

The Onion predicted this in 2014: "Teens Migrating From Facebook To Comments Section Of Slow-Motion Deer Video" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mMY2Kl3GY)

Reminds me a little bit of the agent improvised coordination schemes. — xnx

Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah

434 points | 245 comments

Not only should we be critical of how Israel wages this war, but we should also recognize the role of Hamas. Deliberate killing of non-combatants, civilian abductions, unguided rocket and mortar fire, use of human shields, perfidy and disguise, all war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Most of us here in the US don't have to worry about threats of terrorism like this. It doesn't excuse Israel's (many) war crimes but often we don't acknowledge the horror of Hamas on Israel and Palestinians when talking about this conflict. — gbriel

MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta

320 points | 257 comments

"effective immediately" means either... he doesn't have a contract with a notice period, or he does and is willing to forfeit any benefit from it like share options, etc.

One reason might be the share price has collapsed and he has no confidence in it coming back (pretty scandalous if he's the CEO!), or Meta has offered him inducements > what he's walking away from.

Good way to burn a lot of bridges. He's never going to be hired as CEO by anybody for the rest of his career. — everfrustrated

Coding Is Not Solved

274 points | 274 comments

Reading the code does not mean you understand the code. One lesson that experience in software gave me: I never understood the code. You think it works a certain way, until you find out that it doesn't.

What LLMs make possible is for me to say: find out all the ways this thing works. Analyze the different ways we can run this software, build a fuzzer, build property tests, and run this software in every scenario possible. Log full traces. Log all the outputs. Now, analyze each scenario for bugs. You can't do that by hand.

If we are committed to it, if we put the resources towards it and dedicate the time to it (and we could do this just by saying: it will take half as long as it used to take!), software built by llms in healthcare, finance, automotive, defense, power plans, aviation, manufacturing can all be made MORE reliable and better with LLMs... without ever reading a single line of code. The LLMS are very good at logic, by the way.

Anyway all of this reads like someone who is not actually using LLMs to build software or hasn't tried them in a while. I felt the same way in 2025. I've written 100s of thousands of lines of difficult code. You, the person reading this, has probably interacted with software I've written. For a time you would've interacted with it every time you made a debit card transaction in the united states, for example. I understand code, and care about quality, and that's why I'm all in on LLMs for code. — efficax

Parley: Federated, decentralised chat that speaks plain IRC

225 points | 108 comments

I'm searching for a simple, self-hosted chat system that allows me to host unlimited bots and send messages (with notifications) to my iPhone easily.

I currently have an XMPP server running, which is fine, I guess. I've looked into chatMail. I have considered hosting an IRC server.

At this point, I'm considering just setting up my own NTFY server and writing a chat client for it.

Does anyone have any ideas for what the lightest weight, simplest solution might be? — flymasterv

SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today

276 points | 271 comments

Starship is not yet reusable but they have the MVP and a fantastic position to iterate forward.

-- they have an orbital launcher with the largest diameter cargo bay

-- larger sats have bigger antennas and bigger PV area and more bus power. this scales as diam^2

-- 26 x Starlink v3 ~40-65 tons to LEO

-- every launch generates revenue, locks out the orbit for competitors.

-- they can launch more volume, more mass and cheaper than anyone else by a large margin

-- the design is validated - things will work

-- there is technical debt, issues but the rocket did the job

Caveats

-- timelines for full reusability are optimistic etc

-- there will be other issues in scaling to launching gigawats into orbit

-- cooling will have to be

-- Musk might go Full Villan mode before the thing works

[meta] I really didn't like that other negative comment getting voted to the top. Looks like it's made by someone who never worked in a bigco. For every bigco I worked, at any time there were hundreds if not thousands of open issues. You could list them and try arguing the company is about to fail and you'd scare people who don't know better.

It's the judgement of the severity of the issue that matters not #no_of_issues. And if there were 0 issues would our job exist?

[edit] getting the formatting right is very hard, maybe we could get a preview / TinyMCE ? — paulus_magnus2

AI companies in race to demonstrate their model most threatening to humanity

408 points | 366 comments

I’ve never seen CEOs work so hard to make the public aware of how dangerous and out of control their flagship product is. It makes me automatically assume they’re scheming about something else like regulatory capture to protect their market. — chasd00

Prompting Claude Opus 5.5

186 points | 206 comments

All that keeps jumping out at me is how they've set it to refuse giving users thinking tokens and prompts for full reasoning in output. Just drives me further away; I may not stop using Claude completely for now, but I'll be moving even more of my primary workload to Chinese providers. That's where openness and freedom is now at. — skeledrew

Thinking fast and slow in AI: The role of metacognition (2021)

160 points | 61 comments

There was this post a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49797323

It had this to say in the linked post:

  This led to the natural question: can gzip do language modeling? (...). Here’s some real, unedited output after priming it on tiny Shakespeare:

  gzipt --corpus data/tinyshakespeare.txt --prompt $'MENENIUS:\n' --length 200

  MENENIUS:
  'Though all at once canq

  MARCIUS:
  Pray now, nocamest thou to a morsel.

  LARTIUS:
  Hence, and
  I' the end admire, where G
  again; and after it ag .

Now thinking back, what's missing so that gzip could unwind the correct body of work from Shakespeare is just a correct sequence of bytes. One way to arrive at this is by just getting the body of work and doing the inverse, compressing it to get that golden sequence of bytes.

The other is what thinking does, it tries to predict the missing sequence of tokens from a high entropy source, the prompt, in order to increase the likelihood of correctly decompressing the desired results from its weights. — gchamonlive

Musk, the Movie

148 points | 92 comments

I just don't understand why this trailer starts with Musk accusing Gibney of this being a hit piece, then a snarky response from Gibney...and then a full trailer that sounds like a hit piece.

Maybe it's warranted maybe it isn't but it sure seems like Musk was right to be concerned. — rabidonrails

Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock

464 points | 192 comments

An open question is what happened to the 15,625 shares that he received when he exercised his options in 1996?

If he had held on to those, they would be worth even more than the additional 9,375 shares he was entitled to -- about $1.7 billion using the same numbers in the post.

My guess is that he probably sold them when they were worth a lot less then they are now, and would have done the same with the additional shares too. — jonas21

When did Google get so weird?

607 points | 325 comments

Yesterday I tried to google "can the Halifax Wanderers still make the CPL playoffs?"

So obviously what appears right at the top is the AI summary, which told me "they've already secured their #4 position and made the playoffs". I knew this wasn't true, and I guess I could have just scrolled down a bit further and found my answer but now I was curious.

So I said "that's not true, they're still #5, what I want to know is _could they still make the playoffs_"

It says they've got an upcoming game against Ottawa, and if they win their chances are good. That game has already taken place, so I correct it again and finally I get a reasonable answer.

My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering? Like, I can't wrap my head around that. The answer is on the same page as its hallucination. It could have done a cursory look around before first hallucinating something completely false, and when corrected the first time giving me outdated information. It's meant to be A SEARCH ENGINE! — Hugsbox

Self-Hosting on the Dark Web

195 points | 75 comments

What I really love about Onion sites is that if they are big enough, performance engineering really becomes Tor-specific. A few examples:

- Making assets embedded as base64 (img src the header logo as base64, all CSS should be inline, etc.).

- Leveraging CSS as much as possible (if you use animations and transitions, use CSS as much as possible for these, avoid JS for them).

- Make sure your website is mostly rendered on the backend. If you're to have JS, your website should work without it.

- Security becomes REALLY fun, as in, avoid XSS, CSRF, SQL Injection attacks and any other injections as much as possible.

As someone summarizes in another comment[0], keep the chattiness as minimal as possible. By chattiness I understand they mean, pack as much data as you can in the same Keep-Alive connection. Avoid making new HTTP requests as much as possible, as each one might get assigned to a new Onion route making things slow.

If you can ship your website to the browser in a single connection, you've won.

I've always been impressed by performance of these big Onion sites, they really push the limits of software engineering creativity, given these constraints and nature of Tor.

--

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49872320

EDIT: Formatting of bullet points. — ivanmontillam

Alan Kay's answer to “Did the ENIAC have a BIOS”?

173 points | 59 comments

EDSAC as early as 1949 had an "initial orders" module. A boot-up ROM. There was a bank of rotary selector switches, to set the octal digits in each ROM word.

David Wheeler (of subroutine fame) figured out the most sensible thing to put in the tiny ROM was a paper tape loader and mini-assembler that loaded the rest of itself from paper tape. So at switch-on the machine would start reading the tape input and run. Programs could be written on the teletype with mnemonics and relative addresses in octal.

It seems a little strange that more advanced later machines like the original PDP-11 from 1970, couldn't "autostart" from ROM like that. You had to toggle in a bootloader.

I think that was because core memory was non-volatile. (EDSAC didn't use core; it had a refreshing DRAM-like delay line memory.) With core, you only had to toggle the bootloader into once and, provided your software didn't accidentally overwrite it, it was still there after a power cycle. So re-toggling in the boot loader was not really that common, despite how much lore surrounds it. — retrac

Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi

216 points | 94 comments

The product hunt ad is breaking the immersion for me. I know that most cities have ads but still, I prefer ad free pixel art.

It’s also not realistic, in one landscape the billboard is taller than a 9 story building. — thih9

SNL Weekend Update: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on A.I.'S Threat to Humanity [video]

173 points | 87 comments

I listened to the interview that Dario did with Anderson Cooper after seeing this video.

"Nah, this is slapstick; she was clearly trying for laughs though the Gollum thing was absolutely hilarious."

But no. She ABSOLUTELY CRUSHED. I know Dario is a very smart Dude, but he gives heavy SBF vibes on camera. — nunez

Ember-1

311 points | 167 comments

This is the golden age of model training. Some days ago, I decided I wanted a local CPU only model that can perform exceptionally well for English to Bash translation (to avoid the googling for command syntax). I got a bunch of subagents to generate large amount of training data (140k+ samples), got the Qwen 3 0.6B base model, pointed Astra at it, and off to the races. It trained for 2 days (on and off) and I got a surprisingly good model for my task! The total active time I spent was a few hours. And it is still improving, what a time to be alive! — GodelNumbering

Don't couple your Go code to GitHub

215 points | 98 comments

True, but beware of the domain name you're using. Because VeriSign may unilaterally decide to delete your domain name along with thousands of others [1] and you're back to square one…

[1] https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/ — p4bl0

There are no "rogue" AI agents

324 points | 240 comments

A little over two decades ago, my then girlfriend was arrested for "writing malware" (which was not against the law at the time, and which was never released into the wild and never caused any damage). This set in motion a chain of events that effectively ruined her life.

Fast forward to today, and we have multi billion dollar corporations pumping out malware at breakneck speeds, compromising various systems (including those of foreign governments), and no one is getting arrested. Instead we're gawking at the marvel of these systems and are playing word games about whether or not it's a rogue system. If anything, it's making people richer.

Make it make sense. — elric

PostmarketOS is rebranding as Nura

157 points | 42 comments

Hm. The name collides with Nura, an audio company with a product called Nuraphone. I suppose any pronounceable 4-letter word has collisions. — Retr0id