DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731

https://arcprize.org/results/deepseek-v4-flash-0731/opengraph-image?7e3c06b0774752c2
At max effort, DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 scores 89.0% on ARC-AGI-1 Semi-Private at $0.02 per task and 61.4% on ARC-AGI-2 Semi-Private at $0.04 per task.

Assembly Hall of Shame

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Researchers are finding the slowest single instructions on CPUs by using various techniques such as starving the PCIe fabric, loading large amounts of data from high-latency MMIO regions, and leveraging microcode assists.

Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK

Oracle banned AI-generated code from OpenJDK contributions due to safety, security, and intellectual property risks. This policy contrasts with Oracle's internal use of AI models for coding, despite investing $70 billion in datacentre expansion.

Responding to the next frontier of critical cyber capabilities

An all-sky map of half a million supermassive black holes

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The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) released Data Release 20 (DR20), marking a milestone in the study of accreting supermassive black holes. DR20 includes over 3.3 million optical spectra, providing unprecedented insights into black hole masses, growth, and physics across cosmic time.

Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it

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A complete parsing reader for the classical canon. Click any word in any text for its lemma, morphology, and full dictionary entry — Lewis & Short for Latin, Liddell-Scott-Jones for Greek. 1060 works · 293 Latin · 767 Greek · 140 authors · browse the full A–Z index

Databricks drove down AI coding spend 70%

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Companies are facing exponentially growing costs from AI coding tools, but several large-scale adopters have converged on approaches to manage costs while maintaining access to AI tooling. Techniques such as adopting newer, more efficient models, using meta-harnesses, and routing work to the cheapest capable model can help reduce costs while preserving productivity gains.

New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health

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A New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $567m into a fund to address mental health impacts from its platforms. The ruling brings the total amount Meta is responsible for to $942m, with $420m going towards treatment services for young people in New Mexico.

What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

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Knowledge Workers are increasingly disillusioned with their careers, feeling a sense of existential angst and questioning the point of their work, as AI threatens to automate many tasks and make their jobs seem meaningless. This disillusionment could lead to a paradigm shift, where workers start to value the human experience of work over the appearance of productivity, and seek to create ...

Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD

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The pgrust query engine is 10x faster than the previous version and outperforms Postgres by 30% on OLTP benchmarks and 300x on Clickbench. Optimizations such as batching, operator fusion, and SIMD enabled pgrust to achieve these performance gains, with the goal of further improving performance through JIT compilation.

AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon

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AMD acquired AI chip company Taalas, which etches model weights into silicon for faster inference performance. The deal aims to boost AI hardware and compete with Nvidia's dominance in the market.

A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

Möbius-Strip Crosswords

https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/images/2026-08-04-guilbert.jpg
Robert Guilbert Sr invented a competitive crossword game called Pago Pago in 1986, but details are unclear. A Möbius-strip crossword puzzle was proposed but proved difficult to create due to letter symmetry constraints.

App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours

The developer of Dark Hours, an astronomy app, was rejected by Apple's App Store due to mistaken association with astrology. The rejection was upheld despite the app's clear distinction from astrology and its high quality design.

Kitesurf: Agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates

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Cloudflare has developed a new browser called Kitesurf, designed specifically for AI agents and automation tasks, which is more efficient in CPU and memory consumption than Chromium. Kitesurf is built on top of Cloudflare Workers and uses AI to accelerate the development process, with a focus on scalability, performance, and cost-effectiveness.

Carl's Required Reading

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As an engineering leader, I often send articles to my team, which I jokingly call “required reading”. My goal is to help us digest some of the wisdom of other programmers who have probably faced challenges similar to ours. By popular demand, I’m putting the list here for anyone else interested! Most articles are on this list because they make a point that I think is important or insightful ...

Show HN: Wyzer Programming Language

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Wyzer is a statically typed, compiled language with integrated distributed safety via choreographic programming and a perceus memory model. It uses a single ownership rule to manage memory, threads, and networks safely without a garbage collector or complex borrow checker.

Show HN: textlog – A quiet, text-only microblogging platform, open-source, no JS

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Textlog is a simple social platform for short notes, following people and hashtags, and joining conversations without performance pressure. It's free, public, and easy to use, with a focus on straightforward sharing and community respect.

Why Are There Statues of Beavers on Top of This Oxford Street Shop?

Petri Nets as a Music Sequencer

https://blog.stackdump.com/images/petri-net-sequencer/token-ring.svg
A music generator called beats.bitwrap.io uses Petri nets, a mathematical model of circles and arrows, to create full tracks with drums, bass, and melodies based on music theory and random numbers. The system is flexible and efficient, allowing for polyrhythms, melodies, and control nets to create complex songs with a single primitive carrying concurrency, state, and scheduling.

Building community out of strangers (2023)

The author updated their blogroll to include personal blogs of acquaintances and strangers, shifting focus from news to people's daily lives. They value the authenticity and connection found in personal blogs, which offer a return to human scale and a sense of community.

Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

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A new study suggests that life may have emerged twice, with bacteria and archaea independently developing metabolism and becoming free-living cells. This challenges the traditional view of a single origin of life, with two separate lineages evolving from a primordial soup.

Taste Is All That's Left

The author argues that the value of human judgement, or "taste," has become more important in software development now that machines can generate code quickly and efficiently. However, this judgement is difficult to measure and is often overlooked in favor of productivity and efficiency, leading to a flood of mediocre software that lacks quality and purpose.

Energizing a vacuum-tube flip-flop module from a 1948 IBM system

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The IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch was a programmable calculator introduced in 1948, using vacuum tubes and capable of processing 100 cards per minute. It was a significant innovation in computing, combining a vacuum tube and its circuitry into a pluggable module, allowing for easy replacement of faulty components.

São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

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Hélio Silva transformed an abandoned lawn in São Paulo's East Zone into the Tiquatira Linear Park, a 320,000 square meter green space with 32,000 trees. His initiative, which began with 200 seedlings in 2003, inspired the city to create São Paulo's first linear park in 2007.

2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

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RAM prices are expected to rise due to sold-out 2027 capacity to AI companies through long-term purchasing agreements. NAND storage is also in high demand, with SSD prices increasing, potentially leading to further price hikes in the near future.

Bioengineered chewing gum may offer a way to fight HPV and other microbes

https://www.sciencedaily.com/images/1920/young-woman-biting-chewing-gum.webp
Researchers developed a bioengineered chewing gum that reduced HPV by 93% and nearly eliminated two bacteria linked to head and neck cancer. The gum preserved beneficial mouth bacteria, raising hopes for a safer and more affordable therapy for head and neck cancer.

Scientists discover Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability on the surface of the Sun

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Scientists using the U.S. National Science Foundation Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope discovered Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability on the Sun's surface. This finding could help explain explosive solar activity and other solar phenomena, and may be a key reason why the Sun's outer atmosphere gets hot.

TypeStax: A type scale generator with vintage audio hardware interface

Build harmonious type scales on a skeuomorphic analog control panel. Per-element editing, Google Fonts, live previews, and Figma export.

Thoroughly Understanding C++ ABI

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The Application Binary Interface (ABI) is a concept that affects the compatibility and stability of binary program modules, and its stability is influenced by factors such as CPU instruction sets, operating system, and compiler implementations. The C++ standard does not explicitly specify an ABI, but it has some requirements for compiler implementations, and the Itanium ABI has become a ...