Fight Chat Control

https://fightchatcontrol.eu/data/logo.webp
Mass surveillance weakens privacy and security, misidentifies innocent content, and fails to prevent abuse. It creates a global precedent for authoritarian governments and undermines free expression worldwide.

Try and

Try can be followed by a noun phrase, an infinitival verb phrase with to, or a verb phrase with -ing. However, try and is a common alternative in British and American English, but its usage is deemed prescriptively incorrect.

GPT-OSS vs. Qwen3 and a detailed look how things evolved since GPT-2

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Pgmp!,w_520,h_272,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faef6cbf5-a7a4-449f-8229-e0722747a68b_1491x948.png
OpenAI has released two new open-weight LLMs, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, which are the first open-weight models since GPT-2 in 2019 and can run locally due to clever optimizations. The models' architecture has some interesting details, including the use of Swish activation function, GLU feed forward module, and sliding window attention, and they share similarities with other recent models ...

Show HN: Engineering.fyi – Search across tech engineering blogs in one place

Discover the latest engineering blog posts from Google, Meta, OpenAI, Stripe, Uber, and 20+ top tech companies. Software engineering insights, tutorials, and best practices in one place.

LLMs aren't world models

The author argues that language models (LLMs) don't learn a world model, instead relying on memorization and pattern recognition. They provide examples of LLMs failing to understand basic concepts like chess and image blending.

1910: The year the modern world lost its mind

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QkGQ!,w_520,h_272,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5598fa1c-5c64-43cf-800c-35ce14dd1a12_580x394.jpeg
The early 20th century faced rapid technological change, mass anxiety, and a sense of disorientation, echoing similar challenges in the 21st century. Artists like Stravinsky, Kandinsky, and Picasso responded to modernity by drawing inspiration from the past, creating works that rejected traditional representation and sought to capture primal emotions.

Abogen – Generate audiobooks from EPUBs, PDFs and text

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/denizsafak/abogen/refs/heads/main/demo/abogen.gif
Abogen is a text-to-speech tool that converts ePub, PDF, or text files into high-quality audio with subtitles. It supports queue mode, custom voices, and chapter markers for audiobooks.

GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that's not the worst of it

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sUbG!,w_520,h_272,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4fdcf54b-ecd8-43c5-ab19-8595aa26eca2_1481x1250.jpeg
OpenAI's GPT-5 was a major letdown, failing to meet expectations and showcasing the same flaws as previous models. The disappointing performance highlights the core weakness of large language models: their inability to generalize broadly.

One Million Screenshots

https://onemillionscreenshots.com/opengraph-image.jpg?0732f72851c2cd98
Explore the web's biggest homepage. Discover similar sites. See changes over time. Get web data.

Writing simple tab-completions for Bash and Zsh

https://mill-build.org/blog/_images/CompletionDescriptions.png
Setting up tab-completions for CLI tools can be complicated due to differences between Bash-on-Linux and Zsh-on-OSX, but it can be done with some work to provide a great user experience. By registering handler functions and using shell-specific completion APIs, developers can create tab-completions that work across both shells and provide features like completion descriptions.

Show HN: Bolt – A super-fast, statically-typed scripting language written in C

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/4773a19617f4c61549f61916cf0510d9b33ef8315f40926735aecbe1216e3954/Beariish/bolt
Bolt is a compact, blazingly quick language with a rich type system and minimal dependencies. It's designed for embedding in applications and has a growing community with a focus on stability and minimalism.

1976 Soviet edition of 'The Hobbit' (2015)

https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/archives/03gGWt8x1MUJtmE1DljZd7m/hero-image.fill.size_1248x702.v1647028188.jpg
The Hobbit, a classic by J.R.R. Tolkien, has been translated into over 40 languages and released in various illustrated versions. A 1976 Soviet edition features illustrations by M. Belomlinskij in a precise and charming style.

Zig's Lovely Syntax

Zig's syntax is designed to be simple, readable, and consistent, with features like implicit comptime coercion and raw strings. The language's syntax is influenced by Rust, but with improvements like a more uniform and mechanical approach to statements and expressions.

Booting 5000 Erlangs on Ampere One 192-core

https://underjord.io/img/logo2.svg
Lars from Underjord successfully ran 5100 virtual Linux devices on ARM64 using KVM and Nerves, achieving significant performance improvements. He's now tidying up the nerves_system_qemu_aarch64 project to make it part of Nerves tooling.

Diffusion language models are super data learners

https://jinjieni.notion.site/images/external_integrations/github-icon.png
A recent research highlights the potential of diffusion language models (dlms) authors pre-trained dlms and ar models from scratch for up to 480b tokens. the more unique data we train on, the later it overfits; the larger model, earlier it fits - e.g., at 0.5b token and 192epochs, they show fewer unique token runs, leading to premature model over-fitting

Happy BuyNothing Day

Open Lovable

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/ee68ebd089163b65192416765f028cb913aa1cc4b475f4f4b94e54b0809ebeb9/68747470733a2f2f6d65646961312e67697068792e636f6d2f6d656469612f76312e59326c6b505463354d4749334e6a4578626d5a746148466c654752734d544e6c61574e7964476469616e49344e475134644868795a6a42306432566b636a52796558427563435a6c634431324d563970626e526c636d35686246396e61575a66596e6c666157516d593351395a772f5a46564c574d61366456736b5158307175312f67697068792e676966
API keys are required for E2B, FireCrawl, and optional for Anthropic, OpenAI, and GROQ. These keys are obtained from respective websites for web scraping and AI services.

MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kwfs!,w_520,h_272,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F01350f9f-9ecd-4cb2-a28d-103a9ccc9027_1024x1024.png
The user discusses how USB-C and MCP (Model Context Protocol) can enable new possibilities beyond their original purposes, such as connecting a toaster to a monitor. MCP is seen as a universal protocol that allows different data sources and tools to connect and share functionality, creating a "well-designed hole" for innovation.

Compiling a Lisp: Lambda lifting

https://bernsteinbear.com/assets/img/compiling-a-lisp-og-image.png
The user implemented a compiler in Python for a tutorial on Ghuloum, rewriting the implementation from C and dropping instruction encoding for text assembly. They covered variable binding, free variable analysis, and closure forms, including indirect function calls and compiling closures into assembly.

AOL closes its dial up internet service

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/nggallery_import/aol-uk-homepage-from-the-past-e1754805650657-600x600.webp
AOL announced it will discontinue dial-up internet on September 30, 2025, in the USA and Canada. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans, but their email service will continue.

The History of Windows XP

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!q-Zz!,w_520,h_272,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F96751dae-6e24-4983-acd9-7bfd20f88021_640x359.jpeg
Microsoft's Windows XP was a revolutionary operating system that unified consumer and professional branches, raised user expectations, and sold extremely well. It remained dominant until 2012, with support ending in 2014, but still accounts for around half a percent of active PC operating systems globally.

Melonking Website

https://melonking.net/images/enter_0034-new.gif
You are now exiting the information superhighway! Enable Auto-Play Audio - Works best in Firefox! Welcome to Melonland :^]

I tried coding with AI, I became lazy and stupid

https://thomasorus.com/static/journal.png
The user's boss introduced AI tools at their day job, but they were skeptical due to personal reasons and past experiences with AI replacing jobs. After trying AI, they realized it can be helpful but also creates a trap of laziness and ignorance, making them question its value and their own employability.

Show HN: Play Pokémon to unlock your Wayland session

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdoPi/wlgblock/main/demo.gif
A user created a Gameboy emulator locker for Linux, using Wayland and ext-session-lock-v1 protocol, to replace passwords with a puzzle game. The project uses a patched Pokémon game and requires a compatible compositor like sway to unlock sessions securely.

Inside OS/2 (1987)

https://gitpi.us/img/os2-table1.jpg
OS/2 is a multitasking operating system for Intel 80286/80386 microcomputers with a rich programming environment and multitasking capabilities. It supports virtual memory, shared memory, and process and thread termination, making it a powerful tool for developers.

QNX: The Incredible 1.44M Demo

https://archive.org/serve/QNX_incredible_1.44m_demo_v4.0/floppy-front.png
EMBED (for Archive.org item Description fields) [archiveorg QNX_incredible_1.44m_demo_v4.0 width=560 height=384 frameborder=0 webkitallowfullscreen=true mozallowfullscreen=true]

How Boom uses software to accelerate hardware development

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Q_Nf!,w_520,h_272,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffed7d397-b45d-4061-841a-672abeb2b23d_6636x4424.jpeg
Boom developed the world's first independently-developed supersonic jet, XB-1, with a team of 50 people and a tenth of the traditional budget. They achieved this by building their own engineering software, mkBoom, which automates design workflows and allows for rapid iteration and design exploration.

POML: Prompt Orchestration Markup Language

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/91c3ae3df86c06d8063c50e7672eda30c45e0eda1faa1dcc404c2271af82b0b6/68747470733a2f2f69332e7974696d672e636f6d2f76692f623957446346734b69786f2f6d617872657364656661756c742e6a7067
POML is a markup language designed to bring structure and versatility to advanced prompt engineering for Large Language Models, addressing common challenges in prompt development. It provides a systematic way to organize prompt components, integrate diverse data types, and manage presentation variations, empowering developers to create more sophisticated and reliable LLM applications.

Adult sites are stashing exploit code inside svg files

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/adult-pron-website-640x425.jpg
Porn sites are using malware in .svg image files to secretly get Facebook likes. The malware, called Trojan.JS.Likejack, exploits JavaScript to like Facebook posts without users' knowledge.

Conversations remotely detected from cell phone vibrations, researchers report

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Researchers at Penn State demonstrated that phone conversations can be deciphered from radar measurements up to 10 feet away with 60% accuracy. This raises concerns about future privacy risks and the potential for eavesdropping on phone conversations from a distance.

Flintlock – Create and manage the lifecycle of MicroVMs, backed by containerd

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/7f1dd8f6fd588cf749dc03da22cf37201c8994ac7f5aacf8f6b07123aa076cb2/liquidmetal-dev/flintlock
Flintlock is a community-driven project for creating and managing microVMs on a host machine, supporting Cloud Hypervisor and Firecracker VMMs. It's useful for isolated workloads, pipelines, and virtualized Kubernetes clusters, with a Slack channel for community engagement.

Sunlight-activated material turns PFAS in water into harmless fluoride

https://scx0.b-cdn.net/pic/sadie.jpg
Researchers at the University of Adelaide developed a sunlight-activated material that breaks down PFAS in water into harmless components. The breakthrough discovery offers a low-energy solution for PFAS remediation and potential applications in environmental cleanup.

Hyprland – An independent, dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

https://hypr.land/imgs/chan/tongueout.svg
Hyprland offers a lightweight, feature-rich Wayland desktop with customization options and plugins. It provides the latest Linux features with optional first-party configurations and support.

Events

https://developer.mozilla.org/mdn-social-share.d893525a4fb5fb1f67a2.png
Events are signals fired by the browser when something significant happens, allowing developers to run code in response. To react to an event, you attach an event listener to it, which calls an event handler function when the event occurs.

Prominent Al Jazeera journalist killed in Israeli airstrike on Gaza

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2a1c8abb5c9aa430e0879ad80ae66856216adcd0/68_40_591_473/master/591.jpg?width=465&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none
Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and three colleagues were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City. Israel claims al-Sharif was a Hamas terrorist, but Al Jazeera disputes this, saying he was a journalist reporting on the conflict.

GPT-5: It just does stuff

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TAp2!,w_520,h_272,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fce7b1404-c298-41bf-a4d6-f9b7e099d4be_1000x730.gif
GPT-5 is a big deal due to its ability to automatically select models and put in the right amount of effort to solve problems. It is proactive, suggesting next steps and doing things on its own, making AI use more productive and less frustrating.

The Anti-Pattern Game

The anti-pattern game is a two-player game where players take turns placing black or white pebbles in a sequence, and the game ends when a pattern of three repeated pebbles is formed. The game has been solved for two players, but questions remain about the cooperative and three-player variants, including whether players can force the game to go on indefinitely.

Index 1.6B Keys with Automata and Rust (2015)

https://burntsushi.net/images/transducers/dot/cauchy.png
Finite state machines can be used to compactly represent ordered sets or maps of strings that can be searched very quickly, and they can be used to index large datasets such as 1,600,000,000 URLs. Deterministic acyclic finite state acceptors and transducers can be used to represent ordered sets and maps, and they can be constructed efficiently using a hash table to find redundant structure.

South Korea's military has shrunk by 20% in six years as male population drops

https://dam.mediacorp.sg/image/upload/s--Ig5yEuRN--/c_fill,g_auto,h_468,w_830/fl_relative,g_south_east,l_mediacorp:cna:watermark:2024-04:reuters_1,w_0.1/f_auto,q_auto/v1/one-cms/core/2025-08-10t074519z_1_lynxmpel7901q_rtroptp_3_southkorea-military.jpg?itok=rFm1ZXnK
South Korea's military has shrunk by 20% to 450,000 troops in six years due to low birthrate. The country faces a shortfall of 50,000 troops and 21,000 non-commissioned officers due to declining enlistment age males.

Why insurers worry the world could soon become uninsurable

https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/108062275-1731511007926-gettyimages-2158621274-europapress_6046459_person_holds_bottle_olive_oil_june_21_20.jpeg?v=1754550446&w=600&h=300&vtcrop=y
Top insurers fear climate crisis could make regions uninsurable due to rising extreme weather events. Insurers warn that if climate crisis worsens, they may no longer be able to offer cover for mortgages and investments.

Ask HN: Would you get a CS degree today?

Your son is considering the value of a 4-year computer science degree due to high costs and potential job scarcity. He's a skilled developer with self-taught experience, questioning if a degree is necessary for a programming career.

The great myth of empire collapse

https://images.aeonmedia.co/user_image_upload/4331/insert-32571001.jpg?width=3840&quality=75&format=auto
Historians often portray empires as beneficial for human progress, but archaeological evidence suggests that collapse can actually improve people's health and wellbeing. A 99-per-cent view of history, focusing on ordinary people, reveals that empires were often predatory and that collapse can lead to greater equality and improved welfare.

Hire People Who Care (2020)

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Hrpz!,w_520,h_272,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4a202d31-74f2-409a-8c19-715e10bc6bc4_2549x1523.png
The author of Scale emphasizes the importance of hiring people who genuinely care about the company's mission and product, and are willing to put in effort to achieve meaningful work. They believe that a company's culture is not defined by its cosmetics, but rather by the dedication and passion of its employees.

A telephony agent for my parents. Should I turn it into a full-fledged service?

Galileo’s telescopes: Seeing is believing (2010)

https://www.historytoday.com/sites/default/files/2025-08/galileo_telescope_history_today.jpg
Galileo Galilei discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610 and published his findings in Sidereus Nuncius. His work marked the birth of modern science, establishing the importance of facts and experimentation in scientific inquiry.

Usage – a shell completion / manpage / help documentation generator

Write scripts in bash or any other language with modern arg parsing, help, and completions

LHC's New Chip Tackles Radiation Challenges

https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/the-new-chip-designed-by-xu-et-al-is-able-to-withstand-the-harsh-conditions-of-the-large-hadron-collider-lhc-while-accuratel.jpg?id=61443890&width=1200&height=900
Scientists at Columbia University created a chip to digitally examine 1.5 billion particle collisions per second at the Large Hadron Collider. The chip can withstand intense radiation and accurately record data, enabling more efficient analysis of particle collisions.

A large number of protocols on Ethereum and Solana blockchains have no revenue

https://www.coindesk.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.sanity.io%2Fimages%2Fs3y3vcno%2Fproduction%2Fdd0a4d1db1cf8c9cefe9d909793436d680829c51-1000x667.jpg%3Fauto%3Dformat&w=3840&q=75
Disguised unemployment in blockchain refers to inactive protocols that don't generate revenue, wasting developer effort and capital. On Ethereum and Solana, 88% and 75% of protocols haven't generated revenue in the past 30 days.

So You Bought a Fancy Vintage Car. Now Who's Going to Restore It?

Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our and .

NASA finds multi-billion-year-old 'coral' on Mars

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/S8PNgyNweBLpeWrCRTRzGH.png
NASA's Curiosity rover found a coral-shaped rock on Mars that resembles Earth's reef-building creatures. The rock formed from ancient water and wind erosion, showing evidence of a potentially habitable past on Mars.

"Did you mean: Ed Sheeran"

Rupert Grint is an English actor known for his role as Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter series. He has appeared in various films including Driving Lessons and Knock at the Cabin.

Computational Music Synthesis

https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/book/synthesis/wavetablecloseup.jpg
This is an open-source online book on music synthesizers for undergraduate computer scientists, covering topics like subtractive synthesis and digital filters. The book is free to download and relies on user feedback to improve, with a Creative Commons license allowing non-commercial use.

Mesmerizing Hypnoloid, a Kinetic Desktop Sculpture

https://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/1744427_81_138054_t0urWtAVh.png
The Hypnoloid is an object that contacts a surface with its entire surface area, unlike a top which only contacts at one point. It has an oloid shape, discovered by Paul Schatz, which rolls smoothly.

Electrically controlled heat transport in graphite films

Researchers have developed an electrothermal switch using high-thermal conductivity graphite films to modulate heat flow at the device level. The device enables electrically tunable heat flow with a reversible electro-intercalation of ions to modulate the in-plane thermal conductivity of graphite film by more than 13-fold.

The Drone and AI Delusion

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hdUz!,w_520,h_272,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0837b74d-a85e-404b-bc4f-ca4d0fa429c1_1280x853.jpeg
Palmer Luckey's speech at National Taiwan University urged students to apply their talents to national defense, but his remarks recycled familiar assumptions about military power and technology. The US defense-tech ecosystem misinterprets the nature of military power and how wars are won, mistaking tactical disruption for strategic transformation.

The 5 stages of SaaS Death

https://arnon.dk/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/image-2.png
A SaaS founder lost a $2M deal to a 3-person startup with a half-finished AI product. This highlights the need for SaaS companies to adapt to AI, as it's replacing traditional software solutions.

Show HN: Llmswap – Python package to reduce LLM API costs by 50-90% with caching

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