"Hopefully a meteor will strike the earth soon": Game devs talk genAI witchhunts and the importance of honing your visual literacy

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell · Rock Paper Shotgun Latest Articles Feed · rockpapershotgun.com · 16 min

Developers at Failbetter, New Blood and Abandoned Sheep recount false accusations of AI-generated art, from live-action horror footage to a hand-painted key art replaced to silence suspicion. Artist-researcher Janna Sophia Koppenwallner's survey finds humans detect AI images 74% of the time, with training offering no improvement, while denoising artifacts and polished styles trigger false positives. The piece argues for cultivating visual literacy as the real defense against AI slop.

Umair Shahid: How Fast Should You Patch Production PostgreSQL?

Planet PostgreSQL · postgr.es · 7 min

PostgreSQL's August 2026 release closed 28 CVEs, the most ever, and the piece argues the real metric is patch latency—the time from fix release to production deployment. It recommends severity-based SLAs, patching RCE-level bugs within days, and standby-first failover to cut downtime. A remote code execution flaw in to_char() already has a public proof of concept.

Building a mini Homelab that fits in my carry-on

jeff@jeffgeerling.com (Jeff Geerling) · Jeff Geerling's Blog · jeffgeerling.com · 6 min

To demo NTP time history on vintage Macs at VCF Midwest, a homelabber builds a portable UniFi network rack with 12 Ethernet ports, 5G WAN backup, and an hour of battery life. He shares first impressions of UniFi—local-first, no licensing fees, locked bootloader—and tests a 5G modem at 500 Mbps down, though it only works with UniFi gear.

Hacker News: 2 points · 0 comments

Oscar Winner Brings Monsters to Life With His Simulation Software

Joanna Goodrich · IEEE Spectrum · spectrum.ieee.org · 9 min

An IEEE profile follows Jernej Barbič, whose Ziva VFX software uses physics-based muscle, fat, and skin simulation to bring movie creatures to life; it has been used in more than 60 films and won a 2025 technical Academy Award. The story traces his path from a Slovenian village to USC, and his latest project builds a digital twin of the human hand from MRI scans of four people.

Hacker News: 4 points · 0 comments

How to Think About Thinking

Kristen French · Nautilus · nautil.us · 16 min

Neuroscientist Adrian Owen defines executive function as controlling subordinate brain processes, argues it is a better measure of mental capacity than IQ, and cites his 2010 study of 11,000 people showing brain training doesn't generalize. He also explains how Hitchcock movies require theory of mind and describes his own notification-free routine for focusing.

How NASA’s new Nancy Grace Roman space telescope compares with Hubble and Webb

Meghan Bartels · Popular Science · popsci.com · 6 min

Roman's field of view is 100 times larger than Hubble's, allowing it to survey 50 times more sky in five years than Hubble did in thirty. It complements Webb's deep zoom with a wide-angle survey, targeting dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanets across billions of galaxies.

Prompt Engineering Best Practices in 2026: Why the Advice Contradicts Itself

amyzyuan.com · tyler's Top Finds on Scour Today · amyzyuan.com · 14 min

The advice circulating in 2026 is conditional on unstated factors—artifact type, external verifier, output structure—so contradiction is the field's normal condition. The essay resolves four live contradictions with five cheap diagnostic tests, citing Anthropic's removal of over 80% of Claude Code's system prompt with no regression, and the finding that 49% of automated prompt-optimization runs score below zero-shot. Instruction compliance decays multiplicatively, making rule count the real lever.

Hacker News: 3 points · 0 commentsComments

What GLM-5.3 Flash running on Chinese hardware actually means

martin@martinalderson.com (Martin Alderson) · martinalderson.com · 7 min

China's AI hardware remains years behind Western chips, constrained by lack of EUV fabrication and fast HBM memory. Z.AI's GLM-5.3 Flash runs on unverified HiSilicon parts that are only 60% as fast as the H100, forcing a strategy of sheer quantity that makes inference slower and power costs up to five times worse. The gap will likely widen.

Hacker News: 1 points · 0 comments

AI Doesn’t Mean the End of Mathematics—at Least Not Yet

Bruce Schneier · Schneier on Security · schneier.com · 4 min

An essay co-written with mathematician Kasra Rafi argues that current frontier AI, despite recent successes like disproving the 80-year-old unit distance conjecture, remains far from the deep creativity of human mathematicians. It categorizes AI's achievements into counterexamples and novel applications of known techniques, noting no AI has yet built substantial new theory. The authors predict that capability may arrive sooner rather than later.

Hacker News: 3 points · 1 commentsComments

You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It

matduggan.com via siddhartha_golu · Lobsters · matduggan.com · 14 min

GDPR's unpopularity with the US tech industry is a mark of success, not failure, the piece argues, channeling FDR's line about welcoming enemies' hatred. It attributes GDPR's global spread to the 'Brussels Effect' and cites Max Schrems's complaint, which voided the transatlantic Safe Harbor treaty, while the US remains paralyzed by lobbying and surveillance capitalism.

Hacker News: 163 points · 180 commentsLobsters: 1 points · 0 commentsComments

Frank Sinatra’s Last Great Performance Served as the Bridge Between ‘Dirty Harry’ and ‘Se7en,’ but Was Bleaker Than Either

Jim Hemphill · Features – IndieWire · indiewire.com · 7 min

A retrospective on Sinatra's 1980 comeback 'The First Deadly Sin' argues it is his best performance: a weary NYPD detective hunting a killer while his wife dies, bleaker than Dirty Harry or Se7en. It also covers the new Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray, whose commentaries spot a young Bruce Willis as an extra.

This house trumpets its history in the face of gentrification. Now it's a landmark

Marissa J. Lang · News : NPR · npr.org · 8 min

San Francisco's Latin Rock House, a mural-covered home honoring Mission District musicians, now stands as an officially protected historic landmark. Owner Richard Segovia, 72, calls it a stake in the ground against gentrification, which has displaced over 12,000 Latino residents in 25 years. The mural features more than 87 musicians and activists, and young bands still jam in his home studio.

Now Hiring: Senior Open Source Maintainer

Andrew Nesbitt · nesbitt.io · 5 min

A job posting for an unpaid maintainer role in Lincoln, Nebraska offers $0 compensation while demanding ownership of one of the most widely deployed libraries: roadmap, releases, security on-call, community moderation, grant writing, and legal advice. The long list of requirements includes 8+ years experience, global availability, and a second job as a nice-to-have.

Hacker News: 9 points · 2 comments

Why the Lindsay Clancy trial has energized maternal mental health advocates

GBH News · wgbh.org · 10 min

As jurors weigh Lindsay Clancy's culpability, maternal mental health advocates argue the case exposes gaps in Massachusetts postpartum care. The article details postpartum psychosis — rare, treatable, but unrecognized in the DSM — and highlights efforts like MCPAP for Moms, legislative proposals, and survivor Kriti Lodha's story to push for earlier intervention.

For this Haverhill athlete, bare-knuckle fighting at Fenway Park is part of a family legacy

GBH News · wgbh.org · 5 min

Harry Gigliotti, a 31-year-old undefeated bare-knuckle fighter from Haverhill, trains in a Lawrence basement gym for Saturday's BKFC main event at Fenway Park — the promotion's first Massachusetts show. He faces champion Kai Stewart, continuing a family boxing legacy that includes his cousin, 'The Contender' alum Jeff Fraza, who died in 2012, and his 90-something grandfather Norman Fraza, who still calls before every fight.

RSS Chat explained

twowavesandadot.blog · tyler's Top Finds on Scour Today · twowavesandadot.blog · 7 min

rss.chat turns out to be three things: RSS extensions for posts and threaded comments, a small JavaScript server and client, and the running site. The open protocols are read-only, server-to-server interoperability is absent, and the author sees the comment extensions as the most likely part to gain wider adoption.

Hacker News: 1 points · 0 commentsComments

Joey Hess: Debian and the sirens

Planet Debian · joeyh.name · 3 min

Joey Hess, thirty years a Debian developer and twelve years out, explains why the project's likely vote to allow LLM use alarms him. He contrasts his debhelper, which stripped packaging boilerplate to the legal minimum, with a future where LLMs entrench Debian's rigidity and its inability to handle modern dependency trees. He warns of dependence on proprietary software and even more unpalatable scut-work for humans.

Hacker News: 4 points · 0 comments

Warlock's magic system was built on game-bending player choices

Chris Kerr · gamedeveloper · gamedeveloper.com · 5 min

Invoke Studios grounds Warlock's magic in D&D's core principle of player agency, making spells interact systemically with weather, terrain, and monsters. When playtesters break the game, bugs become features: a tentacle spell daisy-chained to reach unintended areas now unveils secret treasure troves.

Leaving Lightroom

Light Stalking · tyler's Top Finds on Scour Today · lightstalking.com · 6 min

A photographer whose free Adobe subscription ended after years with Adobe Stock resubscribes while exploring alternatives. He compares paid options—Capture One Pro, DXO Photolab 9, ON1 Photo RAW, Skylum Luminar—and free ones—Darktable, Gimp, RawTherapee—noting Adobe's one-year commitment trap and urging readers to match software to their needs.