I spent $266 and four AI models to own my tablet. GLM-5.3 finished it in a day

dr_pardee · Hacker News: Best · ericpardee.github.io · 14 min

Amazon's own software keeps shutting down a Fire HD 10 kiosk, and the owner finds three protected packages hold reboot permissions only root can remove. After Claude's five months hit a safeguards wall, Kimi K3 unearths an unpatched 2022 Mali GPU CVE and builds an exploit; GLM-5.3 then completes the job in a single day, stripping 100 Amazon packages at a total cost of $266.15.

Hacker News: 3 points · 0 commentsComments

The asteroid currently hitting frontend web development

Nolan Lawson · Read the Tea Leaves · nolanlawson.com · 12 min

Frontend web development education is in decline as AI agents take over: respected educators are pivoting or quitting, and 'agent experience' now trumps developer experience. Standards work will shift away from ergonomics, and the field's future lies in educating agents, making sites agent-friendly, and fixing AI-generated code.

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Fixing an eMachines EL1200 BIOS bug with Claude

Doug Brown · downtowndougbrown.com · 10 min

Claude, an AI coding agent, diagnoses a seven-year-old BIOS bug in an eMachines EL1200 that hangs with 8GB of RAM installed, tracing it to an 8-bit divide overflow in the memory display routine. After a bricked first attempt, Claude writes its own LH5 compressor and produces a patched BIOS that finally shows all 8GB in setup—a hands-on test of AI-assisted reverse engineering.

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Christophe Pettus: All Your GUCs in a Row: listen_addresses

Planet PostgreSQL · postgr.es · 5 min

listen_addresses selects interfaces, not clients—that is pg_hba.conf's job. The piece walks through special wildcards, per-entry bind failures that can leave a dual-stack server listening on loopback only, and the three client errors that tell where to look, then prescribes: * behind a real firewall, a specific private address on multi-homed hosts, and an empty string for local-only deployments.

D-Matrix Raptor 3D-DRAM Accelerator for Generative Inference at Hot Chips 2026

rbanffy · Hacker News: Front Page · servethehome.com · 8 min

d-Matrix stacks a TSMC N4 logic die directly on a 3D DRAM die to attack the memory-bandwidth wall in LLM inference. The design claims 100 TB/s at 0.37 pJ/bit, about 20 times the bandwidth per square millimeter of HBM4, and sustains ~1,000 tokens per second per user for a 3-trillion-parameter model at 1M context. The article details three entangled challenges—bank mapping, I/O power, and thermal reliability—and the solutions.

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How Complex Systems Fail

shortcrct · Hacker News: Best · how.complexsystems.fail · 9 min

Catastrophe requires the linking of small latent failures; no single root cause exists, and hindsight bias poisons accident investigation. Practitioners are essentially gambles who must balance production and defense, and their moment-to-moment adaptations are what actually create safety in systems that always run in a degraded mode.

Hacker News: 1 points · 0 commentsComments

Volcanoes that made history

Alexandra Witze, Knowable Magazine · Ars Technica · arstechnica.com · 8 min

Krakatau's 1883 eruption is the first ever documented in near real time, via telegraph, and cools the Northern Hemisphere by 0.6°C. Ice cores and tree rings tie later eruptions to famines and plagues — a 1345 blast may have brought plague-bearing rats to Europe, and Tambora's 1815 'year without a summer' helped inspire Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. These historical shocks, the article argues, foreshadow how societies might respond to rapid climate change today.

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Why do hummingbirds buzz? Tiny tornadoes.

Laura Kiniry · Popular Science · popsci.com · 6 min

Hummingbirds' signature hum comes from wings rotating in a figure-eight, generating vortex-like whirlwinds that provide lift and allow hovering. Wingbeat rates from 40 to 200 per second create a species-specific continuous tone, from the giant hummingbird's helicopter-like whir to the woodstar's bumblebee-like drone. Includes the Anna's hummingbird's courtship dive, where tail feathers vibrate to produce a sonic pop.

I gave Qwen 3.8 27B a reverse-engineering job and it finished in 30 minutes

raybb · Hacker News: Best · xda-developers.com · 8 min

A 27B-parameter local model takes on a real reverse-engineering job: recovering an obscured RSA key from a commercial app's license check via pure static analysis, self-correcting a false first attempt, and producing a working bypass in 30 minutes. The writer notes this capability now fits on a consumer GPU, with implications for both privacy and threat models.

Hacker News: 159 points · 80 commentsComments

How homemade “slut serum” saved me from my own gay sex party anxiety

Editors · Queerty · queerty.com · 7 min

Eliot Glazer's homemade 'Sluttini'—unmeasured tequila poured into Gatorade Zero—becomes his ritual antidote to gay sex-party panic. At a party in the shadow of Dodger Stadium, he arrives naked, gets the giggles, and instead of spiraling, meets Instagram mutual Owen and ends up proud of himself. An excerpt from his new memoir.

Stop photographing the landmark. Start photographing the trip

Dale Baskin · Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com) · dpreview.com · 6 min

A photographer argues that the travel photos we value most are almost never the perfect landmark shots, but the candid, in-between moments. Dale Baskin recounts how a friend jumping into his Christ the Redeemer frame and a spontaneous fashion-shoot parody in France outlasted his technically perfect icons, urging travelers to personalize the famous shots and keep the camera ready for the unremarkable moments that become the real keepsakes.

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Big Walk is a new co-op puzzle game classic

tyler@pcgamer.com (Tyler Wilde) · PC Gamer · pcgamer.com · 5 min

Big Walk, a co-op puzzle-adventure for up to 12 players, insists on proximity chat and limited gestures, leading to miscommunications like an arm-flail signal for 'yes' being mistaken for 'no,' and inventive workarounds such as matching musical rhythms by arm-waving. The exploration and an excellent ending make it a GOTY contender after a 12-hour playthrough.

Sarah Davachi ~ The Will of Tongues

postrockcafe · a closer listen · acloserlisten.com · 4 min

Sarah Davachi's 140-minute album The Will of Tongues seeks to articulate a deep reverence for the act of listening. Davachi performs on historic pipe organs in three nations with ensembles including Chamber Choir Ireland, and the album unfolds from technical appreciation to transportive revelation, with videos serving as entry points rather than fixed associations.

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Garmin Cirqa In-Depth Review: Reality vs Expectations

Ray Maker · DC Rainmaker · dcrainmaker.com · 44 min

A month of 24/7 wear puts Garmin's screenless Cirqa through workouts, sleep, and side-by-side tests against the Whoop 5.0, Fitbit Air, Polar Loop, and Amazfit Helio. The review details its strengths—deep Garmin Connect customization, training readiness, HRV—and its rough edges: automatic workout detection falls substantially short, band swaps are fiddly, and battery burn outpaces competitors.

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Nightdive's Thief remaster unearths a 'very very out of date version control repository' with 'the wildest things to say about the code'

PC Gamer · pcgamer.com · 3 min

Nightdive's remaster of Thief: The Dark Project unearths the original Dark Engine codebase, revealing 'evil comments' from Looking Glass and Irrational programmers, including 'Giant hack! Never replicate this!' The engine, capable of impressive audio, AI, and lighting, turns out to be a clone of Quake, running Quake's precomputed visibility method in real time.

Sergio Cipriano: Two Debian Days in one week

Planet Debian · sergiocipriano.com · 6 min

At two Debian Day events in Brazil, Sergio Cipriano runs a packaging workshop for newcomers, guiding six participants through their first contributions via sbuild and gbp. He also recounts how the Debian Brasília community revived by staying close to the University of Brasília, which now counts at least seven Debian Developers among its students and former professors.

What is the Nature of Evil In LICENSE.MD?

Blogs on Erik McClure · erikmcclure.com · 6 min

A walk through the absurdity of licenses that try to define 'evil' — from joke licenses to the For Good Eyes Only License 0.2 with its Press Freedom Index qualifiers. Argues morality is too complex for LICENSE.md, and that developers who want to exclude evil users should simply not release open-source code at all.

Getting an LLM to Make Me a Tool for Enriching the Color Metadata in My Icon Collection

blog.jim-nielsen.com · 4 min

To find untagged icons in his 2,000+ collection, the writer has an LLM generate a standalone HTML page: a hue histogram scores each PNG by share of opaque pixels in each color bucket, and a threshold slider lets him visually pick the missed ones. He pastes selected IDs back to update metadata, concluding that LLMs are great for throwaway, single-purpose code.

Reintroducing 4 TB drives into our FreeBSD server

Ruben Schade · Rubenerd · rubenerd.au · 4 min

Ruben Schade walks through reinstalling a pair of old 4 TB Western Digital drives into his FreeBSD homelab server, using gpart and geli to set up GELI encryption with 256-bit AES-XTS keys before building a mirrored ZFS pool he names z4. The drives serve as scratch space for temporary data during ZFS maintenance, and he explains his preference for GELI over OpenZFS's inline encryption.