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

https://image.theregister.com/2917960.webp?imageId=2917960&width=360&height=360
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.

NSF Inouye Solar Telescope Enables Major Discovery of a Hidden Solar Process

Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index

https://artificialanalysis.ai/opengraph-image.png?732728ccc2829321
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.1.1 includes 9 evaluations and measures AI performance across various tasks. It assesses knowledge reliability, hallucination, and economic value, among other factors.

Mario Meets Pareto

https://www.mayerowitz.io/assets/pareto_mario_hat.png
To find the best Mario Kart 8 build, use the Pareto front to eliminate dominated options and focus on the efficient drivers that balance speed and acceleration. This objective criteria helps filter out suboptimal choices, but you still need to make a final decision based on your play style and preferences.

Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open

https://herdr.dev/assets/where-do-agents-run-while-you-sleep.png
Can, the Herdr creator, realized he was the bottleneck and built a runtime to manage agents and development style. He wants to keep the runtime free and open, and is joining Y Combinator to build a team and expand Herdr's features.

Launch HN: ProvenMetal (YC S26) delivers circuit boards in days instead of weeks

https://provenmetal.com/_next/image?url=%2Fassets%2Fhero-pcb.jpg&w=3840&q=75&dpl=dpl_3RrBT9BRBvxiuZFhXdxBCXpeg1A3
We build PCBs in the US, delivering boards to drone and defense teams within 7 days. Our domestic build process ensures on-time shipping and complete audit trails for every order.

Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

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To access Dawn of the Machine, a free update for Quake, update your game automatically if you already own Quake. Dawn of the Machine is available on XBOX Series X/S, XBOX One, Microsoft PC Store, Game Pass, Steam, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch 2 via backwards compatibility.

Almost no skill required to cook a steak

We want AI to create something good without understanding how it works, but it's like a steak machine that can follow a recipe but not know what we actually want. We need to learn to cook with AI, understand its limitations, and judge its results to produce what we want.

Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?

https://blog.janestreet.com/can-you-reverse-engineer-an-asic/how_chips_are_made.png
We've been given a chip layout in a GDS file and asked to reverse engineer it by recovering a netlist and figuring out its true purpose, then use it to find the string value that's the final answer. The chip is an ASIC with a hidden section that doesn't affect the success output, and we need to simulate the circuit to test our solution and get the final output.

Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs

https://scalex.dev/img/permission_game_stats_card.png
A browser game testing human-in-the-loop approval of AI coding agent commands found 32.9% of sessions ended with a negative score due to approved threats and blocked safe commands. Players caught threats most reliably when they were blatantly destructive, but missed commands that exfiltrated credentials three times as often.

Learn how chips are made with this Rollercoaster Tycoon-inspired animation

ChipTycoon is a theme park simulation of a chip factory where a cart carries a silicon wafer through 20 stages of chip production. The park shows four laps of the six-building cycle, with explanations at each stop and adjustable speed.

Civilians under siege by Mexican cartel fight back with AK-47s, grenades

Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users

Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't

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To start learning botany, use the internet to access information and ask questions about unfamiliar terms. Key concepts include Latin terminology, common names, and taxonomy, which groups plants according to evolutionary relationships.

Taste Is All That's Left

The hard thing was making the thing exist at all, says adam scott. he says the verdict you reach when you look at three plausible versions of the same function does not disappear - if you pay the cost over and over, it teaches you what is worth paying for, and so they will learn nothing from the climb. the judgement is now the only thing that was ever scarce, but it is no longer measurable, ...

The simple elegance of the integrated timing belt loopback fastener

https://danielmangum.com/static/timing_belt_fastener_0.webp
You're working on a mechatronics project with an X-Y cartesian motion system using stepper motors and timing belts. You've designed an integrated loopback fastener into the actuated component to secure the timing belt, eliminating the need for additional parts.

How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026

https://phoboslab.org/content/assets/xibalba64/xibalba64_box_cart.png
The user ported their JavaScript game engine, Impact, to C and created a new platform backend for the N64 using Libdragon, allowing them to develop a new game, Xibalba 64, a Wolfenstein 3D-like FPS. The game was published as a physical launch title for the M64 by Modretro, making it the second new N64 game released since the console's original commercial life ended.

GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/19292210/60553865-044dd200-9cea-11e9-859c-d6f266e2f01f.png
GitHub's Status Page - Incident with Actions.

Building Progressively Enhanced Forms Using htmx

The author built a form for editing bookmarks and connecting them to lists using progressive enhancement, which works without JS but uses HTMX to add niceties when JS is enabled. The author shares their approach and tips for managing transient state, handling form submissions, and using HTMX to improve the user experience with minimal dependencies.

Pareto Front

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Front_pareto.svg/330px-Front_pareto.svg.png
The Pareto front is a set of solutions in multi-objective optimization where no solution outperforms another at every objective, and every solution not in the set is outperformed by at least one solution in the set. It represents the set of efficient choices, allowing designers to make tradeoffs within this set rather than considering the full range of every parameter.

Show HN: The Channels SDK – Bring Any Agent to Any Channel (Slack, MS Teams)

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CopilotKit/channels-sdk/main/assets/hero-any-agent-any-channel.png
Channels connects AI agents to communication platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, allowing them to understand conversations and respond natively. It uses CopilotKit Intelligence to manage connections and deliver responses, with a guide to set up a Channels agent in a project.

The Triangle Game, from Zero

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/muchmirul/conjectures/main/multicolor-ramsey/guide/00-start-here/hero.gif
The animation shows sixteen people with a connection between every pair. That makes 120 connections, and each one receives one of three colours. When the colouring is complete, there is no group of three people whose three mutual connections all have the same colour. Sixteen is the largest group for which this is possible with three colours. Greenwood and Gleason built this example and proved ...

State-oriented consistency: Why we stopped looking for one right answer

https://keel-iot.eu/og-image.png
The useful question turned out to be: "Which consistency guarantee does this specific piece of state actually need?" Those sound similar. They aren't. The first one assumes a single answer exists for the whole system. The second one assumes it doesn't — and it's the second one that this whole piece converges on, in the form of one table that, by the end, does most of the ...

Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way

https://www.sciencedaily.com/images/1920/supernova-explosion-space.webp
Primordial black holes may trigger white dwarf stars to explode as Type Ia supernovae, explaining chemical patterns in the Milky Way. Researchers found that these unusual explosions could be responsible for a chemical abundance trend observed in stars across the galaxy.

Zapscape (CVE-2026-64561): Guest-to-Host Escape in KVM/x86

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/V4bel/Zapscape/main/assets/tux.png
The Zapscape vulnerability is a KVM escape vulnerability that lets a guest escape to the host in a KVM/x86 environment and run commands with kernel privilege. It can be triggered by guest-side actions alone and threatens guest-host isolation in KVM/x86 hosts, particularly multi-tenant x86 public clouds.

Astronomers capture highest-resolution image ever of the Sun's surface

https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/solar-vortices-06-08-2026-635x436.png
Astronomers captured the highest-resolution image of the Sun's visible surface, revealing tiny plasma whirlpool-like patterns associated with Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities. These instabilities may explain why the Sun's outer atmosphere gets hot and magnetic energy builds up on its surface.

Four simple rules behind Japan's most liveable cities

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Japan's cities are designed to be liveable with accessible transport, shopping streets, and infrastructure. Residents praise the intentional design choices that make life run smoothly, prioritizing people's needs and promoting a sense of community.

Towards Bottom-Up Enumeration in miniKanren via Pruning and Memoization

https://arxiv.org/static/browse/0.3.4/images/arxiv-logo-fb.png
We present two small library combinators on top of plain miniKanren, designed to bring bottom-up enumeration with observational deduplication, the standard tool in non-relational program-by-example (PBE) synthesizers, into the relational setting. The first combinator, prune, deduplicates an answer stream by a user-supplied key, typically the input/output behavior of the candidate. The second, ...

Federal Communications Commission scraps limit on broadcast TV ownership

https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-560w,f_auto,q_auto:best/rockcms/2026-07/260715-fcc-carr-mn-1015-69a023.jpg
The FCC voted 2-1 to repeal a 22-year-old rule limiting a single company's reach to 39% of US television households. The decision could lead to more corporate consolidation in the media industry and faces opposition from consumer advocates and lawmakers.

Unearthing my 1996 windowed OS in machine code for Am29000 homebrew computer

https://nanochess.org/img/am29k_5.png
The user reminisces about creating a windowed operating system in 32-bit machine code for a homebrew Am29000 computer in 1996-1997, and now attempts to recreate it using an emulator. The user struggles with implementing the Am29000 processor's instructions, including the MULTIPLU and DIVIDU instructions, and eventually makes progress with the help of debugging and reverse engineering.