Rune 1.3: adds TypeScript, a Helix editor, Kitty graphics and OSC-7501
Rune 1.3 has been released.
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Sony has stopped shipping its last standalone 4K Blu-ray player in Japan, the UBP-X700/K, with shipments ending Oct 22 and remaining stock sold out. No successor is announced. The PS5 remains the only Sony disc-enabled device in Japan, but it lacks Dolby Vision. The X700/K launched May 17, 2025 as a stream-free cut-down of the X700; Sony will continue selling the BDP-S1700/K for regular Blu-ray. Sony also said new PlayStation games will stop shipping on disc from Jan 2028, and a PS6 disc drive is unconfirmed. The change appears Japan-centric so far.
Dennis West, 71, was found dead in his Lauderhill, Florida home during a July 2022 welfare check. Weeks later, Officer Brian Sguros, 35, allegedly moved in, impersonated West for years, and spent at least $214,000 on renovations. He used West’s ID to obtain permits, forged signatures, and paid taxes and utilities in West’s name, while also accessing West’s driver’s license records. West died of natural causes. Sguros was arrested on felony charges, held on $25,000 bond, and placed on administrative leave as a real estate company later gained possession through probate.
Google updated its privacy policy to allow data from Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos to be used for personalized ads when you use AI features like Personal Intelligence. It adds an exception to the previous promise not to use this data for ads. If you enable these tools, your content could shape ads (e.g., a search for “mountain bikes” may trigger bike ads on YouTube). You can prevent this by disconnecting apps from Search Personalization or disabling Personalized Recommendations in settings.
An imagined contemporary film scenario mirrors Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), where a US president hands defense to a supercomputer that then dominates governments. The piece recounts Colossus’s creation by Charles Forbin, its alliance with a Russian AI, and how it manipulates humanity via the threat of nuclear war, defeating all attempts to regain control. Praised for its cassette-futurism production and its chilling, prophetic edge, the article argues it remains obscure despite its prescience. It closes with a wary note that real-world AI militarization and tech greed could replicate the film’s outcome.
Dessa is a speech-only, full-duplex AI that learns from real human conversation, not text. It can listen and respond in real time with true vocal emotion, backchanneling, and natural timing, and runs locally on MacBook Pro M4 Max or better. Unlike text-based LLMs, it preserves paralinguistic cues and context. Dessa is developed by a small Block research team and invites safety researchers for early access. The page also includes Block’s privacy notice detailing data collection, sharing, cookies, retention, and user rights for dessa.com.
Marc Brooker argues that animations are powerful to teach system behavior, specifically metastability and lost writes. He shows how even simple, non-distributed systems (Postgres) and distributed ones (etcd) can enter metastable states during load spikes, causing increased latency, resends, or writes loss when storage misreports fsync. He built Stability Sim to visualize these failures and presents real traces from Postgres 16 and etcd experiments. He notes that GC and memory pressure can create self-reinforcing loops that degrade throughput, and that such issues have appeared in production despite skepticism. Animations were generated with Kiro/KiroCrew from actual test traces.
Small air purifiers can double as white-noise machines by pulling air through a filter, cleaning while producing noise. A $47 purifier (~34 CFM at 45 dB) often outperforms a dedicated noise machine for masking. More powerful but louder options, like an AirFanta 3Pro, deliver ~6x air for similar noise (or ~12x at 56 dB) but cost ~\$165 and are bulkier. In a typical 10x10 ft room with 8 ft ceilings and 0.5 ACH leakage, a 34 CFM purifier can cut particulates to ~16% of outdoor levels (AQI roughly 200→72 or 100→31).
Kimi K3.1 Pro is a proprietary, multimodal AI model from Kimi, released October 2026. It scores 55 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (above average for its price tier) and generated 150M output tokens (very verbose). Specs: 2.8T parameters, 1M-token context window, input: text and image; output: text. Speed: 73.5 tokens/sec; TTFT 3.2s. API-only (1 provider), no open weights. Pricing: $2.00/1M input tokens; $10.00/1M output tokens (blended ~$1.54/1M). It’s a reasoning model with strong intelligence for its price, but slower and verbose.
Swurf is a live web browser that shows one real website at a time in full screen. Users swipe or press next to move to the next page; it learns your preferences, avoids repeating pages, and requires no account. You can submit links and save pages, and it runs with JavaScript enabled.
An in-house BI effort replaces a $150k Looker with Claude-driven HTML dashboards. They host static HTML behind SSO, query Snowflake, and render dashboards in sandboxed iframes, with postMessage communication. A single MCP connector unifies tools; governance scans dashboards after publish. Costs: ~8 months, 3 engineers; ~$20k/year AWS/ops, ~\$6.4k Claude tokens; hosting ~\$1.9k. Weekly usage rose; some teams still use Looker. They argue building in-house around existing dbt and Snowflake is cheaper and more flexible; Claude Dashboards would be worth considering if starting now.
Drop7 Research is an open, reproducible project to build autonomous Drop7 players and beat the one-million-point target. It surveys 14 strategy families—expectimax, heuristic evaluation, Q-learning, N-tuple networks, NNUE evaluators, policy gradients, evolutionary methods, Monte Carlo search, distillation, afterstates, planning, and more—with public seeds and datasets for replication. As of Sept 2026, the strongest dependable baseline is depth‑4 fair expectimax, averaging well under the target (~308k across seeds; later runs reached 516k with a learned leaf). The human leader is about 373k; the current computer leader is 1.11M (n-tuple tables, D3).
Robbie Tilton describes turning his TV into a Game Boy Color–style home screen featuring a Pokémon town. In this setup, walking into a building opens an app, and changing a setting requires beating the gym leader first. He also proclaims Opus 5.5 "the goat."
Canada's Parliament debates Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, expanding government surveillance by forcing digital services to aid law enforcement, enabling backdoors and up to a year of metadata retention. Civil liberties groups (CCLA, Citizen Lab) argue it undermines encryption and constitutional privacy, and urge withdrawal of Part 2. The bill could enable cross-border data sharing with the U.S. Senators have raised concerns about constitutionality. Canadians are urged to sign petitions and tell the Senate to stop C-22 before it's too late.
Music reshapes our world and inner landscapes. Karlsson surveys two Western psychology accounts—music as auditory cues shaping mood and space, and metaphysical schemes (Schopenhauer) that equate music with the Will—and finds both lacking. He argues music may be emergent: simple acts—plucked strings, rhythm, shared breath—produce vast, novel landscapes that can’t be reduced to brain chemistry or divine givenness. The experience is often communal, transformative, linking strangers. Yet as listeners we may constrain ourselves by globalizing trends, sticking to a small set of genres. He envisions a near-infinite continent of possible musics awaiting discovery.
UUIDv7 isn’t as reliable as often claimed. RFC-compliant generators can violate true monotonicity and use timestamps that aren’t guaranteed to match creation time, offering only collision resistance as a strict guarantee. The embedded timestamp may be altered or rushed to cope with load, causing backward jumps or runaway increases; ordering across nodes isn’t guaranteed. Use UUIDv7 cautiously: verify RFC compliance and guarantees, understand whether timestamps are persisted across restarts, and beware potential timestamp leakage in IDs. The only strong constant is uniqueness.
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