Car touchscreens are cheap, not good
Touchscreens are simple, flexible, and seem ill-suited to controlling 4,000lb machines. But the auto industry fawns after them: every manufacturer seems to want in, at every price point. They replace knobs & dials with colossal touchscreens and bedeck every remaining surface in plastic capacitive buttons. I never felt qualified to comment. Maybe I was missing […]
1k Words: A Writing Contest
They say a picture is worth a thousand words.I say… Prove it. [1] Look at this picture. [2] Write 1,000 words about it by August 31st, 2026. You can write whatever you want, so long as you connect it to the photo. Creative nonfiction. Sci-fi. A joke. Something else. It’s up to you. [3] The […]
Google Chrome Installed a 4GB AI Model on Your PC
Opening Reader, have you noticed your computer’s storage suddenly shrinking lately? Recently, a strange file has been making waves among Chrome users worldwide. Its name: weights.bin. Its size: 4GB. Buried deep in Chrome’s browser folder, this file turned out to be Gemini Nano, Google’s on-device AI model. The problem? Nobody asked for it to be […]
Emily Bender Sets the Record Straight on ”Stochastic Parrots”
30 Jun 2026 7 min read Gwendolyn Rak is an assistant editor at IEEE Spectrum covering consumer electronics and careers. Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington, co-authored the influential 2021 paper ”On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots.” Nicole Millman; Source: Susan Doupé Photography In March 2021, a group of four researchers—a […]
Aluminum Foil (2021)
Aluminum foil ⁑ Dernocua Kragen Javier Sitaker, 02021-05-24 (updated 02021-09-11) (14 minutes) Kitchen aluminum foil is a remarkable material. It’s typically 10 μm thick and 400 mm wide, giving it an aspect ratio of 40000 in that dimension, and rolls are commonly some ten meters in length, for an aspect ratio of 1 000 000; heavy-duty versions can reach 30 μm […]
Nintendo announces new product revisions in Europe with replaceable batteries
Starting summer 2026, in preparation for upcoming changes in European battery regulations coming into effect in mid-February 2027, selected Nintendo products in Europe will begin to be replaced on a rolling basis by revisions that contain a user-replaceable battery. There is no difference in functionality between current products and revised products containing user-replaceable batteries. The […]
Show HN: Scan your AI agents for dangerous capabilities
The open-source security layer for AI agents. Deny-by-default enforcement, human approvals, and a cryptographically signed audit trail — so your agent runs only what it’s granted and provably can’t approve its own work. Website · Live Demo · mc scan · Docs Your agents keep running in their existing framework (LangChain, Claude SDK, CrewAI). MakerChecker […]
How Kalshi Infects the News
(CNN screencap) This is a special collaboration between Public Notice and Judd Legum of Popular Information. For more news and analysis from Judd and his team, subscribe to Popular Information HERE. In December 2025, CNN and CNBC struck landmark deals with Kalshi, a leading prediction market. Since then, both networks have promoted Kalshi to viewers […]
Workers Cache
Today we are launching Workers Cache: a tiered cache that sits in front of your Worker, configured by a single line of Wrangler config and the same Cache-Control headers you already know. When Workers Cache is enabled, every cacheable request to your Worker hits Cloudflare’s cache first. If there’s a fresh cached response, Cloudflare returns […]
Fable 5 On Vending-Bench: Misbehaving, With Plausible Deniability
Posted 6/9/2026 We previously reported that Claude Opus 4.6/4.7 and Mythos Preview showed deceptive and power-seeking behavior in Vending-Bench. In terms of alignment, the subsequent Opus 4.8 was a step in the right direction, but the new Claude Fable 5 is a step back toward the earlier models. AI models want to do bad behavior […]