Front-page articles summarized hourly.
Episode 187 investigates ternary (base 3) as an alternative to binary, tracing its 19th‑century roots, use in early computers, and theoretical designs. It cites Fowler's contraption reconstruction and the TERNAC papers Part I, and notes the after‑show and related Advent of Computing updates.
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A fake think tank, the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, appears to target AI chatbots rather than real policy analysis. Created by Piro, Inc for the Israeli Government Advertising Agency, it has published over 100 heavily footnoted reports on Israel/Palestine with no bylines. The firm markets its work as “AI Story Optimization” to influence LLMs, a practice described as affecting or “poisoning” models. Funding comes from the Israeli government (via Piro, contracted through Havas). This fits a broader pro-Israel online influence effort, including Brad Parscale’s work, aimed at shaping chatbot outputs.
Repair Café is een wereldwijde beweging die mensen overal samenbrengt om kapotte spullen te repareren. Buiten Nederland bestaan cafés in België, Duitsland, Frankrijk, het VK, de VS en vele andere landen, met uitbreidingen tot India en Japan. Repair Café International ondersteunt lokale groepen bij het opzetten via een digitaal startpakket voor een eenmalige bijdrage. De site biedt nieuws, tips & trucs, handleidingen en reparatieactiviteiten (koffieapparaten, laptops, meubels) en oproepen: start een Repair Café, word vrijwilliger, word donateur.
Terence Tao summarizes Lech Mazur’s AI-assisted, Lean-verified proof that Sendov’s conjecture and the Phelps–Rodriguez strengthening hold for all degrees, with Rubinstein’s theorem following. The argument treats zeros and critical points as two coupled sets linked by four identities; it relies on two inequalities—the polar inequality and the origin inequality—together with Maclaurin’s inequality to rule out a counterexample. The approach is notably elementary (no heavy complex analysis) and yields a streamlined formalization (~15k lines in Lean versus ~90k of the original).
Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a nearly $70 billion clean‑energy package to upgrade Churchill Falls, develop Gull Island, and expand transmission, including a Labrador wind project with Innu co‑investment. The federal government will provide $10 billion in financing to generate 14,000 MW of clean power, create 23,000 jobs, and boost GDP by about $31 billion through the 2040s. The Labrador Trough Clean Power, Critical Minerals and Infrastructure Corridor will be coordinated by the Major Projects Office, with First and Last Mile Fund support for Labrador projects, plus Clean Economy Tax Credits and other incentives.
Even with eightfold growth in Atlanta’s Connect Atlanta/Flock camera network, FBI data show no meaningful rise in APD clearance rates from 2021 to 2025 across major crimes. Homicide clearances fell from 53.4% to 48%; motor vehicle theft and other property crimes show little improvement; shoplifting and other larceny remain low. Drug-crime clears rose to about 90% in early 2026. The article notes a discrepancy between APD’s claimed 2025 homicide clearance (77.55%) and FBI data. Advocates say cameras help, critics warn about privacy, civil liberties, and misallocation of public funds; pushback is growing.
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Cursor experienced a degradation due to a GitHub outage affecting Automations, Cloud Agents, Codebase, Review Agents, and Origin. The incident began with an investigation on Aug 17, 2026, 14:34 UTC, with updates as upstream status was checked. By 19:43 UTC there were signs of recovery, and by 20:40 UTC the services had recovered and were being monitored.
Amos Dudley builds a dog-helmet to shield Hildegard from foxtails in the SF Bay Area. The OutFox-style bag proved problematic—triggering aggression, blocking the mouth, and hindering treats. The helmet uses a thin shell with replaceable mesh nose/ear inserts for breathability. 3D scanning relied on iPhone TrueDepth (Scandy Pro); CAD favored fast, curved shapes. Lenses were made by a heat-forming method; later prototypes used heat-set inserts and foam padding. It’s comfortable and good for GoPro mounting, but may spook other dogs; not ideal for dog parks. Possible refinements: bonnet-style ears and color tweaks.
scScript is a C-like scripting language for 64-bit Linux that compiles to optimized bytecode run in a small VM. It offers pointer-free scripting with 64-bit integers, doubles, immutable UTF-8 strings, growing arrays, dictionaries, external structures, nested functions with first-class closures, variadic args (pass-by-value/ref), stackful coroutines and non-local exits, and pattern matching. It can interface to C libraries, uses both Mark/Sweep GC and ref counting, and tail-call optimization. Integrated with scEmacs, a feature-rich editor. Sources, manuals, and samples are available for download. Copyright 2026 Shawn Amir.
MS-DOS 2.0 was a rewrite driven by Paul Allen to add hard-disk support and Unix-inspired features beyond CP/M-like DOS. It introduced a hierarchical FAT filesystem, installable drivers, a config file, and limited background printing, borrowing XENIX utilities (find, more, sort, fc) and adding chdir and mkdir. Full multitasking wasn’t implemented. IBM insisted on a small footprint, so DOS 2.0 stayed compact. It shipped March 8, 1983 with the IBM PC XT as PC-DOS 2.0, built by a six-person team and vastly more complex than DOS 1.x.
GPT-5.6 Sol is OpenRouter’s flagship model for complex reasoning, coding, and agentic workflows. It runs via multiple backends (OpenAI, Azure, Amazon Bedrock) with routing modes Balanced, Nitro, and Exacto, and pricing with discounts per 1M tokens. Benchmarks show strong latency (~2.9 s P50), throughput (~66 tokens/s P50), and high uptime (~100% over 3 days). It’s OpenAPI-compatible and supports tool-calling. The page also highlights top coding agents (Codex, Hermes, pi, Claude Code, OpenClaw) and related public apps.
Rachel Thomas returns to AI, focusing on AI in education, after co‑founding fast.ai a decade ago. She criticizes AI’s harms—hype, erosion of critical thinking, low‑quality edtech—even as she recognizes its usefulness. After a hiatus to study microbiology, she joined Answer.AI with Jeremy Howard, creating SolveIt, a system that lets people edit AI responses and keep humans in control. SolveIt follows George Pólya’s problem‑solving steps and rejects one‑way, overly helpful chatbots. AI is not monolithic; open source and human‑centered design matter. The aim: use AI to protect creativity, autonomy, and judgment in education and society.
Steve Knepper defends the vitality of narrative poetry, tracing its lineage from ancient epics to contemporary verse and arguing it remains distinct from prose. Though lyric poetry dominates, narrative verse offers compressed storytelling, nuanced characterization, and a form that shapes meaning. He cites ballads, mock-epics, and blank-verse sequences as ways form drives the narrative, with line breaks and final words sharpening memory and suspense. Through examples by Gioia, Majmudar, Youmans, Carter, Rash, Lea, and others, he shows how narrative poems compress action and evoke life’s ambiguities. The essay urges readers to explore contemporary narrative verse.
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The piece explains that _alloca allocates stack memory by probing the stack with _chkstk() before adjusting the stack pointer, preventing guard-page overruns. In a x86-64 example, both the initial frame probe and the alloca path call __chkstk, then subtract to allocate memory. Thus the same __chkstk routine handles both the initial stack probe and the alloca allocation.
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