U.S. Science Is in Chaos

Last year Christopher Reynolds started to worry that his space telescope was going to be killed. The mission had started taking shape nine years earlier, a billion-dollar orbiting observatory that would look back in time into the early universe to study the first black holes, the formation of galaxies, and more. Eight teams of researchers […]
Show HN: High-Res Neural Cellular Automata

The NCA operates on a coarse lattice of cells (in this example vertices of a mesh). Center: A sampling point (Point) (red dot) inside a triangle primitive, whose vertices correspond to NCA cells (State_i,,State_j,,State_k). The local coordinate (u(Point)) expresses the point’s position inside the primitive, while the locally averaged cell state (bar{State}(Point)) is obtained by […]
GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis

Z ai’s GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index scoring 51 and it sits on the Pareto frontier of Intelligence vs Cost per Task GLM-5.2 is the same size as GLM-5.1 (744B total / 40B active parameters) but scores 11 points higher on the Intelligence Index v4.1, placing […]
Hacker News but for Independent Blogs

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The founder’s playbook: Building an AI-native startup

AI is reshaping how startups are being built. Founders who’ve never written a line of code before are shipping production applications, reaching revenue before scaling headcount, and building tools to automate their most tedious workflows. The founder’s role is shifting from individual contributor to orchestrator, allowing them to focus on the work only they can […]
Why do commercial spaces sit vacant?

In yesterday’s mailbag post, Matthew Yglesias responded to a question about why commercial spaces sometimes sit vacant for years at a time. Matthew’s answer started off on the right track, then veered off course. So, as one does, I quickly fired off a note in response. That note went (and is still going) more viral […]
Apple plans change to Hide My Email that could make it less effective

Apple’s plan to change a privacy feature that lets paying customers hide their real email addresses when creating online accounts could make it easier for apps and websites to block anonymous sign-ups. Apple’s Hide My Email is an iCloud+ feature that generates anonymous email addresses under the @icloud.com domain, which then forward messages to a […]
DOJ claims xAI’s gas turbines are a matter of ’national and energy security’

The Department of Justice on Monday sided with xAI in a lawsuit that sought to stop the company’s use of dozens of unpermitted natural gas turbines near its Memphis data centers, according to Wired. The DOJ said if the NAACP, which filed the lawsuit in April, prevails, the result would undermine “American national, economic, and […]
Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn

Sam Altman (@sama)’s OpenAI lost $38.53 billion attributable to the company in 2025, according to audited financial documents viewed by Ed Zitron and independently verified by the Financial Times, a set of figures that an Ars Technica story pushed into broader circulation Tuesday. The documents themselves are not public. But the reported figures are specific […]
Wolfram Language and Mathematica Version 15, AI Assistant, Symbolic Music, More

An Impressive Release for Modern Times June 23, 1988 is when we launched Version 1.0 of Mathematica. Today—almost 38 years later—we’re launching Version 15 of what—in recognition of how far it’s expanded beyond “math”—we now call Wolfram Language. It’s an impressive release, with a lot of new core functionality. It might perhaps seem surprising that […]