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The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring

FromSoftware’s Elden Ring AI uses a pushdown automaton: each Actor has a stack of Goals, with the top Goal updating, pushing Sub-Goals, and returning Continue, Success, or Failure. Failure pops to the parent; Interrupts bubble up to swap behavior; timeouts contain bugs. Decisions rely on Lua/Havok Script: Activate selects among Actions via weighted randomness, with dynamic weights and cooldown checks. Data are stored in a simple Actor float array; animation drives actions. Level designers configure the Top Level Goal; most decisions are runtime and efficient, avoiding complex planners.

Show HN: Treedocs: Documentation that automatically checks for staleness

Treedocs is a Swift CLI (v0.2.0) that documents a codebase as a readable, colored file-and-folder tree, with descriptions stored in treedocs.yaml. It runs on macOS 13+ and currently builds from source (no binaries). It supports live drift checks, pre-commit hooks, and automatic syncing of the YAML with the filesystem via treedocs sync. Users can init, show, check, and explore the tree; update descriptions with treedocs update; and validate against a canonical JSON Schema. Install via mise, Homebrew, or Mint with a Swift 6 toolchain.

Open Source for IBM Z and LinuxONE

IBM’s Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE Open Source Software Report for May 2026 highlights ongoing IBM–open source collaboration to validate Linux on s390x (SLES, RHEL, Ubuntu). May 2026 saw validation of versions across many projects, including Cassandra, HBase, Apache HTTP Server, Ignite, Grafana, PostgreSQL, Python, Terraform, and more. Over 10 projects gained s390x support (Kuadrant, go-simdjson, poof, nginx-opentracing, OpenSCM). IBM expanded hosted GitHub Actions (ncruces/wasm2go, go-sqlite3, NumPy). Open Mainframe Project added InfluxDB and MySQL builds; Spire and Beats updates followed. Developers can join the IBM LinuxONE Community Cloud (free 120 days) or apply for permanent VMs.

AI's Affordability Crisis

David Rosenthal argues that AI platforms have subsidized usage to spur demand and investments, creating an unsustainable burn and pressuring prices as subsidies retract. He cites Sequoia’s David Cahn and Ed Zitron on subsidies up to 40–70x revenue. OpenAI’s 2025 figures show about $13B in revenue, $34B in costs, and a $38.5B net loss after adjustments. With Microsoft moving Copilot to token-based billing and Anthropic pausing pricing changes, the industry shifts to usage-based pricing. He cautions that debt and profitability pressures could force mass automation to replace many jobs.

Lift4D: Harmonizing Single-View 3D Estimation for 4D Reconstruction In-the-Wild

Lift4D presents a test-time optimization framework that reconstructs complete 4D dynamic scenes from monocular in-the-wild video. It first yields temporally coherent per-frame 3D predictions by adapting a single-view image-to-3D DiT with causal latent propagation, then encodes the scene as a deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting representation. It jointly optimizes geometry with occlusion-aware appearance using per-frame occlusion-inpainted frames and a novel-view diffusion prior to hallucinate unobserved regions. The method achieves complete, temporally coherent geometry and sharper appearance, outperforming prior 4D methods on synthetic and real-world footage, especially with severe occlusions and non-rigid motion.

80386 Early Start Memory Access

Small Things Retro describes implementing Early Start memory-latency hiding in z386, an open-source 80386 core for FPGA. By computing the effective/linear address at i_pop and forwarding in-flight values, z386 hides memory latency and gains ~9% from Early Start, with most gains from a faster memory pipeline: shorter store queue, issuing reads/writes at i_first, folding TLB/cache into one cycle, and a 16KB+16KB split cache. A wider frontend (32-byte prefetch, 1-cycle decoder) reduces decode-queue-empty from ~20% to under 10%. Clock remains 85 MHz; z386 reaches ao486-like performance in Doom/3DBench but not Windows boot yet; feedback requested.

Lossless GIF recompression via exhaustive search

Investigates lossless GIF recompression by exhaustive search, contrasting with ZopfliPNG and flexiGIF. Explains GIF/LZW encoding and why greedy can miss better compressions. The author codes a brute-force search (ZGIF) to find the smallest bitstream, but Python-based search is extremely slow (a 16x16 image takes minutes). By adding 1-step lookahead pruning, speed improves to about 4 seconds and still outperforms the current state of the art. Documents experiments and evolution of search strategies (A*, DP, hybrid) and points to the ZGIF repo.

You already have a Git server

Git can serve as your server-side workspace: clone a repo on the server via SSH, edit locally, commit, and push back. By default you can't push to the branch currently checked out, but enabling remote config with git config receive.denyCurrentBranch updateInstead allows updates to the active branch. This avoids SSH lag and manual copying; changes land exactly as in the repo. For auto-deploy, add a post-update hook to run a build/site generator on push, with output sent to your terminal. Write. Commit. Push. Live.

Researchers used math to crack Wordle

Researchers at Binghamton University used information theory (Shannon entropy) to solve Wordle with 99% success, outperforming a traditional letter-frequency approach (99% vs 90%). The method prioritizes guesses that maximize information gain to reduce uncertainty rather than simply aiming for the most likely word. Originated as a class project led by Assistant Professor Congyu “Peter” Wu, with co-authors Talal Aladaileh and Donald Stephens; the paper, “Solving Wordle Using Information Theory,” was published in the Northeast Journal of Complex Systems.

Show HN: Bun-sqlgen – Type-safe raw SQL for Bun, no ORM

bun-sqlgen is a type-safe code generator for Bun.sql queries with no ORM. Tag a query with a name (e.g., GetUser) and receive fully typed, null-safe rows at the call site. It generates types by validating against a real Postgres or SQLite database (no Docker) and writes src/queries.gen.d.ts for compile-time checks. Use migrations as the schema source (db/migrations), wrap your client with withTypes, and run bun bun-sqlgen generate to produce types. The runtime stays Bun-native; install via bun add @ilbertt/bun-sqlgen.

Mistral OCR 4

Mistral AI unveils OCR 4, a compact document-understanding model that returns text plus bounding boxes, block types, and per-word confidence in 170 languages. It runs in a single container for self-hosted deployments and feeds enterprise search, RAG, and data pipelines. OCR 4 provides structured outputs for downstream tasks and supports high-volume parsing, invoices, forms, and compliance. Benchmarks show strong accuracy, speed, and cost advantages. Pricing: OCR 4 API $4/1,000 pages (Batch-API $2); Document AI $5/1,000 pages. Available via API, Mistral Studio, SageMaker, Microsoft Foundry; self-host option; Snowflake Parse Document coming.

Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX

Could not summarize article.

MSG Made Dossier on Activists Who Opposed Facial Recognition

MSG compiled a dossier called 'Facial Recognition Activists.docx' in its SharePoint, profiling three public critics—Evan Greer, Albert Fox Cahn, and Adam Schwartz of the EFF—with bios, contact handles, and quotes about MSG’s facial-recognition program. The file was part of a 45GB data cache hackers posted online and appears accessible to employees. MSG’s system has blocked entry for critics and, per reporting, even lawyers from firms involved in MSG litigation. The activists’ criticism has been covered by NPR and the New York Times; MSG did not comment.

Spying on kids to save kids from spying is stupid

Doctorow argues that “age verification” to shield kids from online harms is actually mass surveillance that normalizes pervasive tracking. He describes a coalition of anti-Big Tech crusaders and culture-war conservatives pushing for age checks, often with VPN bans as a next step. Such mandates would force fine-grained online monitoring and widen corporate spying. He contends harms come from surveillance, not access limits, and critiques weak US privacy laws while noting EU gaps. The cure is privacy, not more spying on children.

Elevated error rate across multiple models

Claude experienced an elevated error rate across multiple models. The incident is under investigation, has been identified, and a fix has been implemented with monitoring ongoing. Affected services: claude.ai, Claude Console, Claude API, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork.

CL-BBS: the schemeBBS-like textboard rewritten in Common Lisp

cl-bbs is a high-performance Common Lisp textboard engine inspired by SchemeBBS. It renders threads, indexes, and posts with a SchemeBBS-style HTML layout and supports bold/italic/monospace, spoilers, blockquotes, post references, image previews, and dynamic headers. No JavaScript; themes stored via cookies and data stored as S-expressions. Run with Hunchentoot/Clack, Roswell, and Qlot; install by cloning, qlot install, then start the server on port 8222. Config vars: SBBS_DATADIR, SBBS_LOCKED_BOARDS, SBBS_ADMIN_USER, SBBS_ADMIN_PASSWORD.

Epidurals are a miracle technology

Epidurals are presented as the most effective, safe pain relief for labor, letting women stay alert while numbing the lower body. The piece covers how the technique works, its history, and modern 'mobile' epidurals that preserve leg movement. Side effects can include low blood pressure, itching, shivering, and rare headaches; some births may take longer or involve instrumental delivery. Not all women experience full relief, with up to 13% needing repositioning and about a third reporting patchy pain relief. Uptake varies by country due to culture, cost, and staffing, but in many places epidurals reduce childbirth suffering.

Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger blocked from editing Wikipedia

Asks readers to set a user-agent and respect the site's robots policy, with references to related pages.

Show HN: Shumai – open-source Frame.io alternative for creative work

Shumai is an open-source platform for creative work that stores assets locally or in S3-compatible storage, supports frame-by-frame annotations, secure sharing, granular access control, and uses Temporal for distributed transcoding. It includes an AI agent in the workspace, extensible skills/tools, sandboxed script execution, AI-powered metadata with Google Gemini, and semantic search via vector embeddings. Quickstart installation options include Docker Compose or npm-based deployment with PostgreSQL+pgvector, ffmpeg, and other dependencies; supports local or remote deployments. MIT license.

Oracle shed about 20k roles globally in the last year

Oracle disclosed it cut about 21,000 jobs globally over the past year to focus on artificial intelligence. Headcount fell to around 141,000 as of May 31, 2026, from about 162,000 a year earlier (~13% reduction). The layoffs contributed roughly $1.8 billion in severance and restructuring costs, up from the prior year. Oracle says reorganizations may disrupt near-term productivity but will help scale cloud and AI offerings. It is part of a broader tech wave of AI investment and data-center spending, alongside rival cuts at Amazon and Meta.

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