LWN needs you LWN counts on its subscribing readers to support its mission of creating relevant human-written news coverage of the Linux and free-software communities. Please subscribe to LWN and help to keep us on the net. As a special … Read more
If I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But … Read more
Zuckerberg’s increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers: Under no circumstances should you rush out and read the book that prompted Mark Zuckerberg to demand $111m and eternal auctorial silence. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Flame warriors; Cryptography … Read more
The top 20 stories on Hacker News on a split-flap departures board, with rank, score and title on flap cells. Each story row is RANK · POINTS · TITLE. Rank uses HN orange, score color changes with points, and the … Read more
Last week, I posted a visual demonstration of the sameness of AI-generated content. This makes the output easy to spot even if all the individual pieces are perfect facsimiles of what a human could create: The 100,000 whys of AI … Read more
I gave an AI a civilisation to run. By the midgame it was winning: a trade network that dominated the map, alliances on every border, a diplomatic victory within reach. It had outbuilt, outearned, and outmanoeuvred every rival on the … Read more
Every single time a post about atproto hits Hacker News, somebody asks in the comments: “But where are all the Bluesky instances?”. The problem is, there are no instances in atproto! The question is a category error. Instances are a … Read more
Every few weeks the “best open model” crown changes hands. This week it’s GLM-5.2, from the Chinese lab Z.ai — and unusually, the claim has teeth: it sits at #1 on the independent Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. It’s also MIT-licensed, … Read more
microcrad is a tiny scalar-valued automatic differentiation engine for C, with a small neural network implementation built on top of it. It is a re-implementation of Andrej Karpathy’s micrograd in C, written for people who want to understand how backpropagation … Read more
My head has been spinning after getting a spreadsheet roughly a week ago. Before we dive into my dirty laundry, let’s state the obvious: millions of people have a vague sense that AI is changing things. And LLMs sure are … Read more