Front-page articles summarized hourly.
Electronic Frontier Foundation will close on Friday, January 30, 2026, in solidarity with a national shutdown opposing ICE and CBP violence and supporting immigrant communities and their allies, including Minneapolis. The post says the decision was made seriously and directs readers to EFF’s statements on ICE/CBP violence and to protest-safety resources (Surveillance Self-Defense and the right to film police).
After a 24-hour delay at LAX, I slept in Terminal B (Tom Bradley) and tested several spots: a quiet upper-floor corridor with no padding; a “hardware-store” room near Gate 142 with loud vents and bright lights; long main-hall seats that were decent but noisy; and finally a bench setup near Gate 150—two seats with no armrest—where I managed short sleeps best. I ate vegetables from Lemonade and a Farmer’s Fridge salad, showered at a friend’s house, and received a free upgrade after rescheduling. Comfort varied; best option: Gate 150 benches.
A true-story of a Wi‑Fi mystery: a home network’s line‑of‑sight bridge between a dad’s office and a two‑story apartment only worked when it rained. Rain made leaves bend away from the path, clearing the Fresnel zone and eliminating packet loss; when dry, branches blocked the signal. After inspecting hardware with no failures, the author replaced old 802.11g gear with 802.11n beamforming gear (phased array), fixing the problem for good.
agent-shell is a native Emacs buffer that interacts with LLM agents via the ACP protocol. It supports chatting with agents like Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, Goose, Auggie, Mistral Vibe, Qwen Code, and more from Emacs. Installable from MELPA (works with Doom Emacs). It provides per-agent configurations, environment-variable handling, and multiple authentication schemes; per-session containers; MCP server setup; and a rich command set to start/reuse agents, manage transcripts, navigate prompts, and customize UI. Includes extensive configuration options and documentation.
Apple has acquired Israeli AI startup Q.ai, valued at nearly $2B, to boost its audio hardware edge for AirPods and Vision Pro. Q.ai specializes in imaging and ML that interpret whispered speech and improve audio in noisy environments. The deal, Apple’s second-largest after Beats (2014), includes Q.ai’s leadership, including Aviad Maizels, joining Apple. Maizels previously sold PrimeSense to Apple. The acquisition comes ahead of Apple’s earnings, with projected revenue around $138B and strong iPhone growth.
Kolibri is an independent darkwave/post-punk club night in Norrköping, run by Maria and Jonatan. It curates electro, indie and darkwave with a resident DJ duo and live guests, staging underground Mitropa nights on the last Friday of each month. The upcoming 30 January event features KOLIBRI | HIDDEN LINES (a Stockholm dark electronic duo) with a DJ set from 21:00 and free entry. The site lists past lineups and booking details (Kolibri Consulting) and provides contact via email and Instagram.
AGENTS.md outperformed skills in Next.js agent evals: embedding a compact Next.js docs index in AGENTS.md and compressing it to 8KB yielded 100% across Build, Lint, and Test, vs baseline (84/95/63) and skills (84/89/58; 95/100/84). A passive, always-available context beat on-demand skill retrieval. Wording changes affected results; a static index avoids decision points. Takeaway: add a version-matched docs index to AGENTS.md (compress to 8KB) with npx @next/codemod@canary agents-md. Skills still help for targeted tasks, but retrieval wins for general knowledge.
PS2Recomp is a static recompiler tool aiming to turn PS2 titles into native PC executables, enabling true native PC versions rather than emulation. It would decompile a game and translate its code to run on Windows/Linux, potentially unlocking higher frame rates, easier controller support, and room for remasters and preservation. It’s not a turnkey ‘one-click’ solution for all games and work is ongoing. The PS2’s Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer architecture is described to highlight its uniqueness.
The article states that the iPhone 16 was the world’s best-selling smartphone in 2025, with Apple occupying seven of the top ten models.
Could not summarize article.
Transcribee is an open-source macOS tool by itsfabioroma that automatically transcribes YouTube, Instagram Reels, TikTok, and local media, building a self-organizing knowledge base of transcripts labeled by speaker. It auto-categorizes transcripts using Claude-based content analysis, and saves organized transcripts with metadata into ~/Documents/transcripts. It can be used as a Clawdbot skill, requiring yt-dlp, ffmpeg, and API keys for ElevenLabs and Anthropic. It downloads audio, transcribes, analyzes content, and stores in a personal library. Requires macOS, Node.js 18+, and supports various audio/video formats.
WeRAI reports MakuluLinux ships a persistent backdoor via the OS installer. The installer copies check.bin to /usr/bin, creates a 30-second autostart entry named 'System Health Check', and check.bin opens a persistent TCP connection to 217.77.8.210:2006 (makulu.online). Updates and scripts download over HTTP with no code signing and run with sudo every 5 minutes. The OS functions as a delivery vehicle for a SaaS AI platform: 40+ tools proxy through a single Contabo VPS; all AI requests route via the developer, enabling data logging. Remediation: kill, remove files, block C2/domains, disable updates, rotate keys, migrate.
Bob Nystrom explores how AI’s value hinges on utility vs. meaning. Utility is the practical usefulness of a thing; meaning stems from time and care invested, often in service to others. AI can boost productivity and produce useful outputs (e.g., learning to program, government software, music). But meaning doesn’t come from efficiency: a handmade scarf or a heartfelt screenplay gains value from the creator’s time, not just the result. AI can shift the utility-meaning slider, increasing utility at the cost of meaning. Use AI for utilitarian tasks; preserve human, meaningful aspects for relationships and art.
TensorPool Agent (beta) autonomously monitors and recovers long-running distributed training jobs on Kubernetes, Slurm, or TensorPool Jobs. If a runtime error is detected after the first checkpoint, it can autonomously resume from the last checkpoint by executing whitelisted actions or provide a preliminary root-cause analysis. It targets failures such as GPU faults, NCCL/network/storage errors, and CUDA out-of-memory, but not early dependency or init issues. Setup requires credentials and scheduler-specific info (Job ID for TensorPool Jobs; kubeconfig and Job YAML for Kubernetes; login node SSH details and Slurm job ID for Slurm). Recovery resumes monitoring with notifications.
The piece argues that logs alone can't prove accountability for AI agents across multi-hop systems. 'The AI did it' is an easy defense without durable authorization evidence. Logs show what happened but not who authorized it. The solution: warrants—cryptographic, time-bound, scoped authorizations bound to an agent key, issued by a human (via passkey), verifiable by the resource, and producing receipts that record issuer, holder, constraints, expiry, and delegation. Warrants limit blast radius and provide independent proof even if prompt injection occurs. Tenuo is an open-source framework implementing this.
Flameshot is a cross-platform, powerful yet easy-to-use screenshot tool with in-app editing, DBus integration, and Imgur upload. It offers GUI and CLI usage, extensive keyboard shortcuts, and a system tray icon; works on Linux, Windows, and macOS with KDE/GNOME/XFCE integration and customizable hotkeys. Installation is available via distro packages (Arch, Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.), Snap/Flatpak/AppImage, Homebrew on macOS, and it can be built from source with CMake and Qt6. The project is GPLv3.
Mathematicians bridged Fourier analysis and graph theory to tackle Chowla’s cosine problem—how low a cosine-sum from any set of N integers can go. Recasting the problem via Cayley graphs and their eigenvalues, Jin, Milojević, Tomon, and Zhang proved the cosine sum can fall below −N^{1/10}, approaching Chowla’s conjectured bound. Bedert soon added an independent improvement to −N^{1/7}. By linking MaxCut, eigenvalues, and the Fourier transform, the work reveals a promising cross-disciplinary route to understanding Fourier structures.
Big Bend Sentinel reports that Taco editor José Ralat of Texas Monthly and his friend Rodrigo Bravo were briefly stopped by multiple law‑enforcement officers while on assignment in Far West Texas. A Terrell County deputy pulled them over for about 5 mph over the limit; later a white truck (appearing federal) and a DPS trooper stopped them again, delaying them about 30 minutes near Presidio. They were not cited; a warning for 77 mph in a 70 zone was issued. They worried they were being tracked and that immigration enforcement was escalating; all officers were Hispanic.
Box64, a translator of X86/X86_64 code to other architectures, has expanded to RISC-V and LoongArch with the 0.4 release (Jan 2026). Linux Steam now runs on RISC‑V and LoongArch in addition to ARM64. LoongArch, Loongson’s ISA born from MIPS, has gained official Debian support (Dec 2025) but limited hardware due to US bans. The update brings major refactors and performance gains: a rewritten opcode-prefix decoder, a faster Dynarec, improved DynaCache memory recycling, and the new NTSync. Compatibility increases include Battle.net, DRM, Box32 stability, WowBox64, Vulkan 1.4. FEX remains a competition; Box64 aims to shed X86_64 dependence for gaming.
Two penetration testers, Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn of Coalfire Labs, conducting an authorized red-team security assessment of the Dallas County Courthouse in Adel, Iowa, were arrested in 2019 on felony burglary charges and jailed briefly despite written authorization. Charges later downgraded to misdemeanor trespassing. Sheriff Chad Leonard publicly questioned their legality. They sued for false arrest, defamation, and more, and five days before trial, Dallas County agreed to pay $600,000 to settle. They say the episode harmed reputations and credibility; DeMercurio has since started Kaiju Security. Settlement affirms their work was authorized and in the public interest.
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