Front-page articles summarized hourly.
OsmAnd unveils Highway Hierarchy (HH) Routing to deliver ~100x faster offline routing without sacrificing versatility. Replaces full-planet A* with a two-level graph of area clusters and border points, plus precomputed intra-cluster shortcuts. Border points are chosen via Ford-Fulkerson bottlenecks, and the scheme is universal across car/bike profiles. Route steps: (1) local Dijkstra to border points, (2) Dijkstra on the abstract border graph, (3) localized A* refinements within clusters. Benefits: speed, tiny extra storage (planet data ~800MB; 0.5–1% overhead), regional maps, hourly updates, full routing.xml support. Notes: maps must be same generation date; preprocessing ~2–3 days; updates ~5th of month.
Amplifying’s Claude Code study analyzes 3 models (Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.5, 4.6) across 2,430 repos in 20 categories, with 85.3% extraction and 90% model agreement. Claude Code builds custom solutions in 12 of 20 categories (custom/DIY), e.g., feature flags via config/files/env vars and Python auth with JWT+passlib. When tools are chosen, it prefers GitHub Actions (94%), Stripe (91%), shadcn/ui (90%). The default stack is JS-centric (Vercel, NextAuth.js, Tailwind, etc.), deployed mainly to Vercel (JS) and Railway (Python). No primary AWS/GCP/Azure picks; newer models favor newer tools.
Stephen Wolfram's Wolfram S Combinator Challenge asks whether the single S combinator is computationally universal. A $20,000 prize goes to the first group or individual delivering a full, precise proof to the prize committee. Submissions must be original, non-anonymous, and suitable for publication; Wolfram may publish them. Submissions are judged by a committee with final, binding decisions. Winners may need to provide identity, tax and consent forms. The guidelines cover submission rules, eligibility, administration, and reference other Wolfram prizes.
CalMatters investigates hidden automated license plate readers (ALPRs) along California’s border, largely installed with federal permits and feeding data to federal databases. California has approved eight permits for federal ALPRs on state highways, with as many as 40 cameras in San Diego and Imperial counties. Privacy advocates say the program bypasses California law and erodes civil liberties; they mapped cameras and urged removal. Caltrans says it does not run or access the data. Supporters say ALPRs help solve crimes and locate missing people, while locals warn about surveillance of residents and humanitarian volunteers.
Mission Control is an open-source, local-first task manager for coordinating AI agents. It provides a visual dashboard (Eisenhower matrix, Kanban) to delegate work to agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf), with inbox reports and progress, all while running locally with JSON-file storage (no cloud or database). Key features: agent crews, skills library, goal hierarchy, brain dump, multi-agent tasks, orchestrator, autonomous daemon, and slash commands. Built with Next.js 15, TypeScript, Tailwind; MIT license; designed for solo entrepreneurs delegating work to AI agents.
Apple announces iPhone and iPad are the first and only consumer devices certified to handle NATO-restricted classified information, after rigorous German BSI evaluation. With iOS 26/iPadOS 26, built-in security (encryption, Face ID, Memory Integrity Enforcement) meets NATO information assurance requirements without extra software. This extends prior German approvals to all NATO nations, and the devices are listed in the NATO Information Assurance Product Catalogue. Apple says security is built-in from the start and emphasizes this as a milestone enabling secure digital transformation.
Beehive is a macOS app that orchestrates coding agents and manages multiple GitHub repos in one window. It provides multi-repo management, isolated workspaces with full git clones on chosen branches, persistent PTY terminals, and agent panes that run Claude Code or other CLIs side-by-side. Workflows: add a Hive by URL to store repo metadata, create a Comb by cloning into an isolated directory on a branch, then open Panes to work across tasks. It features live branch tracking, copy/Duplicate workspaces, and a zero-setup experience. Free, open source, MIT license; download for macOS, Apple Silicon signed & notarized.
Rev-dep is a fast Go-based dependency analysis and governance toolkit for modern JavaScript/TypeScript codebases. It enforces dependency graph hygiene, flags dead or orphaned files, unused exports, unresolved imports, and devDependencies used in production. It supports monorepos and package exports maps, with a config-driven approach (rev-dep.config.json) that can run multiple checks in one pass and autofix where enabled. The CLI offers exploratory commands (entry-points, files, resolve, imported-by, circular, node-modules, LOC) and CI-friendly reports. It claims ~500ms audits on large repos and outperforms similar tools.
Promo for LINEX: build lines to beat friends; LINEX BETA with sharing options (WhatsApp, Telegram, Email, QR).
After retiring at 61, Vickie Hardin Woods of Salem, Oregon, baked a different pie every day for a year and gave each away to combat isolation and redefine her identity beyond a 30-year career as a city planner. The project built connection, earned her the nickname “the pie lady,” and provided a daily routine, while she managed a mild cognitive impairment. Years later she continues with new projects, including writing a book about the experience, proving she can still be creative and that identity isn’t tied to her former profession.
deff is a Rust-based terminal UI for interactive, side-by-side git diffs with per-file navigation, independent horizontal scrolling, syntax highlighting, and added/deleted line tinting. Install via the provided installer script or cargo, and run inside a repo to compare local changes against upstream or explicit bases. Features include upstream-ahead and range diff strategies, --include-uncommitted, Vim-like navigation, in-diff search, and per-file reviewed toggles stored locally. Theme options (auto/dark/light) and MIT license.
Cardboard is an AI-assisted, agentic video editor that speeds production from raw footage to publish-ready cuts in minutes. It provides templates for Talking Heads, Vlogs, Montages, Podcasts, Launch videos, and Explainers, and features semantic understanding of requests mapped to timeline operations, silence removal, color grading, captions, voiceovers, auto story creation, and live collaboration. It aims for 10x faster edits with share-ready exports, and pricing starts at $60/month.
Anthropic’s $200 million Pentagon contract strained as the company resisted military use without guardrails, while the Pentagon pressed to lift restrictions on its Claude model. The dispute reveals a deeper problem: private tech firms increasingly shape national security and warfare, often outside robust government oversight. The author argues Congress must explicitly define acceptable military AI uses and require transparency, rather than leaving policy to executive agencies and corporate decisions.
Hacker Smacker is a browser extension that helps you identify quality authors and filter out obnoxious commenters on Hacker News by letting you mark writers as friend or foe. If your friends also use it, you’ll see their friends and foes, helping you skim threads for good content. Inspired by Slashdot’s friend/foe system, it’s open‑source on GitHub and available for Chrome/Edge, Firefox, and Safari. The project comprises a client extension and a Redis/Node.js backend; it emphasizes FOAF relationships and privacy (MIT license).
Steerling-8B is an 8B-parameter inherently interpretable diffusion model that enables concept algebra: injecting, suppressing, and composing human-understandable concepts at inference time without retraining or prompt engineering. It uses a concept module where every output logit is a linear function of concept activations and embeddings, enabling mask-aligned injection during diffusion decoding and bottleneck-based suppression. Demonstrations show single-concept injections, suppression, and multi-concept steering. Evaluation over 2,000 samples shows concept adherence rising from 0.015 to 0.783 while preserving about 84% of quality; harmonic mean 0.997. Access on HuggingFace; code on GitHub.
SynthID is Google's watermarking tool to identify content generated or altered by AI. It embeds imperceptible digital watermarks into AI-generated images, video, audio, and text at creation time, resilient to cropping, filters, compression, or edits. The watermark can be detected by SynthID technology and checked via Gemini by uploading the content. A SynthID Detector verification portal is also available for journalists to verify watermarks. The goal is transparency and trust in generative AI while enabling content provenance.
Vibe coding mirrors the Maker Movement but skips the “scenius” playground, moving directly from ideas to production. It accelerates output but short-circuits the developmental feedback humans get from peers, risking inflated self-evaluation and burnout. The author argues the old metaphor of transformation-through-making no longer fits; a new lens—consumption of surplus intelligence—better describes it. Value accrues through taste, attention, signaling, and gifts, while the emitted data becomes upstream signal/data for AI models. Successful vibe coders may build data fortresses and strategic networks rather than durable, shipped artifacts.
Mark Litwintschik analyzes Google's global Street View coverage by converting a year‑month capture dataset into a Parquet file using DuckDB with H3, Lindel, json, parquet, and spatial extensions, and visualizing with QGIS. After downloading 131 JSON files and loading them into DuckDB, he creates a street_view.parquet containing 7,163,407 points (85 MB). The data spans 2003–2025 with yearly point counts, and maps show Europe, India/Southeast Asia, Australia/NZ, North America, and the Americas, noting missing records for several countries. He concludes with consulting offerings.
Ferret-UI Lite is a compact, end-to-end on-device GUI agent (3B params) that runs across mobile, web, and desktop. Built from real and synthetic GUI data, it uses chain-of-thought reasoning, visual tool-use, and reinforcement learning with designed rewards to improve inference. It achieves competitive GUI-grounding performance on ScreenSpot-V2 (91.6%), ScreenSpot-Pro (53.3%), OSWorld-G (61.2%), and GUI-navigation success on AndroidWorld (28.0%) and OSWorld (19.8%). The paper shares methods and lessons learned from developing small on-device GUI agents.
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