Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
Starting in 2027, smartphone batteries will once again be replaceable in the EU. Learn all about the new regulation and what this means for users.
Yesterday
US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants
Virginia and Washington, D.C. paused the data collection and sharing, after Bloomberg's investigation found their health insurance marketplaces were sharing users' information with advertisers.
Heat pump sales rise across Europe
Residential heat pump sales increased 17% across 11 European countries in the first quarter of 2026, following a sharp rise in gas and oil prices after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in March, says the European Heat Pump Association (EHPA).
Offenders sentenced up to 10 years for spying on TSMC
Bringing Taiwan to the World and the World to Taiwan
Homebridge 2.0 is here, and it speaks Matter
The open-source Apple HomeKit bridge is adding Matter, allowing it to support Alexa, Google Home, Home Assistant — and robot vacuums.
AI Industrial Takeoff — Part 1: Maximum growth rates with current technology
How fast could an AI-driven economy grow? Most economists expect a few percentage points at best, comparable to previous general-purpose technologies (Acemoglu (2024)). Those closer to AI development tend to imagine something much more radical (Shulman (2023); Davidson and Hadshar (2025)). This series aims to ground growth rates in how physical production works. Once human labor is automated, the constraint on growth becomes the speed at which the economy's physical capital can reproduce itself....
ASI motives and the ontonormative goods (re IABIED’s core argument)
In IABIED, the load-bearing argument and, to me, the main contribution of the book, is about ASI motives. There’s more in there, but the thrust of the book is to argue for the truth of a specific conclusion about motives, namely that an ASI’s motives and goals would be completely unintelligible and alien to humanity.I claim there is a shared attractor in values that is deeply meaningful and necessarily present in an ASI. I want to be clear that I’m not arguing for the necessity of alignment—I ma...
This Week
OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors
Researchers say results mark a really ‘profound change in technology that will reshape medicine’
A couple million lines of Haskell: Production engineering at Mercury
What it takes to run 2 million lines of Haskell in production at a fintech company serving 300,000 businesses.
Using “underdrawings” for accurate text and numbers
A technique for accurate text and numbers in AI-generated images: generate the layout deterministically, then ask the image model to paint on top.
Show HN: Apple's SHARP running in the browser via ONNX runtime web
Hi HN, author here. SHARP is Apple's recent single-image 3D Gaussian splatting model (https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10685). Their reference code is PyTorch + a pretty heavy pipeline; I wanted to see if it could run in a browser with no server hop, so I exported the predictor to ONNX and ran it via onnxruntime-web with the WebGPU EP.What works: drop in an image, get a .ply you can download or preview live, all on your machine — your image never leaves the tab. The model is large (~2.4 GB sidecar) so first load is slow on a cold cache, but inference itself is a few seconds on a recent Mac.Caveats: SHARP's released weights are research-use only (Apple's model license, not the code's). I host the exported ONNX on R2 so thedemo "just works", but you can also export your own from the upstream Apple repo and upload locally.Happy to talk about it in the comments :)
Security through obscurity is not bad
Why security through obscurity still matters: not as your only defence, but as a practical layer that raises attacker cost.
Text-to-CAD
An open source harness for generating CAD models. Contribute to earthtojake/text-to-cad development by creating an account on GitHub.
The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility
The mythical, it's text, so it's accessible There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a te...
From CVS to Git, thirty years of source control
In April 2005, Linus Torvalds wrote Git in ten days because BitKeeper revoked its free licence to the Linux kernel. Twenty-one years later, no successor has emerged. A practitioner's history of source control from someone who used every major system since 1990, and lost code in most of them.
Group averages obscure how an individual's brain controls behavior: study
Studying brain scan data from individuals — not group averages — reveals key brain-function differences in children who struggle with goal-oriented tasks, a Stanford Medicine study found.
Bad Connection: Global telecom exploitation by covert surveillance actors
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2026-0... (https://archive.ph/0QYbN)
Why are neural networks and cryptographic ciphers so similar? (2025)
Several neural network design principles are almost identical to cipher design principles.
Infrasound waves stop kitchen fires, but can they replace sprinklers?
Acoustic fire suppression goes commercial.
Show HN: nfsdiag – A NFS diagnostic application
A nfs doctor application. Contribute to lsferreira42/nfsdiag development by creating an account on GitHub.
Discovering hard disk physical geometry through microbenchmarking (2019)
BlogRandom stuff…CommentsPosts Home Blog About Uncategorized Measuring Stuff Fixing Stuff Building Stuff Taking apart stuff « Elections 2019: Who is really getting a tax cut? A Cardboard Haswell Box » Discovering Hard Disk Physical Geometry through Microbenchmarking By Henry, on September 6th, 2019 Modern hard drives store an incredible amount of data in a small space, and are still the default choice for high-capacity (though not highest-performance) storag
Fun with polynomials and linear algebra; or, slight abstract nonsense
Longest Path Search About Code Fun Fun with polynomials and linear algebra; or, slight abstract nonsense Posted 2026-04-30 This is mostly a bunch of notes to myself (with some slight expansion) and is a combination/extension/simplification of theorems/ideas/constructions from a bunch of texts, including Wistbauer’s “Foundations of Module and Ring Theory” and Fuhrmann’s “A Polynomial Approach to Linear Algebra”, along with others that at this point I don’t recall. While most of the things here ar
How did ‘large’ language models get that way? The role of Transformers and Pretraining in GPT
Large language models are really large. They’re among the largest machine learning projects ever, and set to be (perhaps already are by some measures) some of the largest computing and even largest infrastructure projects ever.But how did LMs actually get so large as to warrant the title ‘large language model (LLM)’? A large part of the answer is in the P ('pretrained') and the T ('transformer') of GPT.This is part 1 of a series about LLM architecture and some implications, past and future, for ...
MHC Interp #1: Previous-Token Heads Become Attention Sinks Under Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections
Background:Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) is a new architecture added by Deepseek and recently implemented in Deepseek v4.mHC is a fix that makes HC(Hyper-Connections) vanishing or exploding gradient caused by HC while still keeping the performance increases. As adding weights and biases on HC made signals from earlier layers harder to update making the residual stream less residual streamy.HC is a cursed method of adding weights and biases onto the residual stream to simulate a wi...
Paraphrasing Is (At Best) a Partial Defence Against Steganography in LLMs
Within the AI Safety community, paraphrasing, which, in the context of this post, simply means using another LLM (with nonzero temperature) to rewrite a given piece of content, is generally considered a viable defence and detection method for steganography in LLMs. In this blogpost, we briefly provide a taxonomy of types of steganography in LLMs, and then highlight the limitations of paraphrasing against each type.Unfortunately, there are types of steganography that LLMs have been shown to use t...
Benchmarking LLMs on African Livestock Knowledge — Baseline Results and Draft
Published on May 2, 2026 12:52 PM GMTI'm a veterinary student and ML researcher based in Nigeria. Over the past months I've been building what I believe is the first AI safety evaluation benchmark targeting Nigerian indigenous livestock systems.This post shares the baseline results, methodology, and open questions. I'm posting here partly to share the work and partly because I'm looking for feedback from people working on evals, AI deployment in low-resource contexts, and African AI safety.Why t...
Benchmarking LLMs on African Livestock Knowledge — Baseline Results and Draft by fatika
I’m a veterinary student and ML researcher based in Nigeria. Over the past months I’ve been building what I believe is the first AI safety evaluation benchmark targeting Nigerian indigenous livestock systems.This post shares the baseline results, methodology, and open questions. I’m posting here partly to share the work and partly because I’m looking for feedback from people working on evals, AI deployment in low-resource contexts, and African AI safety.Why this ...
Looking for papers on general formalizations of "agency"
Hi!Recently, I immersed myself in researching the possibility of a general formal definition of "agency".More specifically, I’m interested in formalizations that could support an operational definition of agency across domains. I’m looking for something that captures what is common between entities that intuitively seem agentic to us in very different parts of the world, and that could, at least in principle, let us detect such entities automatically in real systems.So far, many definitions of a...
Borderlands Mexico: Nearshoring fuels 800K-square-foot industrial build in El Paso
Borderlands Mexico is a weekly rundown of developments in the world of United States-Mexico cross-border trucking and trade. This week in Borderlands Mexico: Nearshoring fuels 800K-square-foot industrial build in El Paso; Hutchison Ports adds electric cranes at Port of Manzanillo; and Burlington breaks ground on distribution center near Phoenix. Nearshoring fuels 800K-square-foot industrial build in El Paso A Dallas-based developer has broken ground on a major cross-border industrial project in ...
Less-than-truckload rates have sharp response to broader market turn
Chart of the Week: LTL Monthly Cost per Hundredweight, Van Contract Rate Per Mile Initial Report – USA SONAR: LTL.USA, VCRPM1.USA After a fairly sluggish start to the year, less-than-truckload (LTL) rates are now showing the highest levels of upward pressure since the exit of Yellow in the summer of 2023. The LTL monthly cost per hundredweight index measures pricing change momentum in the LTL market. This index tracks directional changes in the LTL pricing environment based on transactional data...
Will the WTI Crude Oil Spot Price be above $100 on May 11, 2026?
78% — undefined traders, $2595 volume
Announcing Metaculus Summer 2026 FutureEval Bot Tournament by postreal
Summer Bot Tournament is StartingOver the last two years, Metaculus has been running a series of tournaments to benchmark AI’s accuracy in predicting future events. These tournaments, now part of our broader FutureEval benchmark, pit frontier models, bot developers, and a human baseline against each other to collectively push the boundaries of forecasting performance. We are wrapping up the Spring Bot Tournament and are now prepping for the $50k Summer Bot ...
New results on AI mental health therapists
AI-powered mental health apps have attracted growing interest as a low-cost way to expand care. Yet questions remain about their effectiveness, safety, and whether they may crowd out psychotherapy. We evaluate one such app in a randomized controlled trial among 1,964 Mexican women with mild to severe psychological distress. Over six months, app access improved mental health by 0.3 standard deviations with no evidence of harm, improved sleep quality, increased healthful behaviors, and reduced mis...
The collapse of teen fertility in the digital era
Teen fertility collapsed globally starting around 2007. This affected countries across the income and policy spectrum. This paper argues that smartphones changed how teens spend time with each other, and that this change in turn drove the collapse in teen fertility. Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur. A coordination model formalizes ...
Port Houston lands $48M federal grant for Bayport expansion
Port Houston has secured a $48 million federal grant to expand and modernize its Bayport Container Terminal, a move aimed at boosting capacity, easing truck congestion and strengthening supply chain resilience along the Gulf Coast. The funding, awarded through the U.S. Maritime Administration’s Port Infrastructure Development Program, will support construction of a new container yard and a new exit gate at Bayport. Port Houston will also contribute roughly $56 million in matching funds for the p...
Traffix expects double-digit rate increases to hold through 2026
The North American freight market has officially turned the corner. After more than three years of subdued rates following the COVID-era boom, carriers have exited the market in droves, regulatory headwinds have further crimped capacity, and freight volumes are once again climbing. The result, according to Traffix’s newly released Q2 2026 Market Update, is a rapidly tightening environment where spot and contract rates are surging and shippers are being forced to rethink budgets that were built f...
The FBI is late to cargo theft, the industry isn’t
The FBI is now warning about a surge in cargo theft tied to cybercriminals. The concern is valid. The timing is behind. For much of the freight industry, this is not new information. It is confirmation of a shift that has already taken hold. The change began around 2021. That is when fraud moved into the transaction itself. Loads were no longer being taken from yards or truck stops. They were being redirected before pickup ever happened. Identities were copied. Emails were manipulated. Legitimat...
Do Market Reforms Cause Growth?
Do market-oriented reforms cause economic growth? This paper revisits this question using a cross-country panel of reform episodes identified from various changes in well-known economic freedom and structural reform indices. We exploit the timing of reforms using distributed-lag and event-study frameworks that trace the dynamic response of per-capita GDP. We find little evidence of immediate growth gains and some short-run adjustment costs following reform. However, growth rises gradually and pe...
Aurora and Hirschbach expand partnership for 500 Aurora Driver-powered trucks
Aurora Innovation (NASDAQ: AUR) announced Thursday an expansion of its strategic partnership with Hirschbach Motor Lines. This includes plans for the Iowa-based refrigerated truckload carrier to own 500 autonomous trucks powered by Aurora’s virtual driver, called the Aurora Driver. Deliveries of these Aurora Driver-powered driverless trucks are expected to begin in 2027. A MOU and the path to 500 Autonomous Trucks The first step involves a memorandum of understanding (MOU). The MOU outlines the ...
SFF’s HSEE grant round; human intelligence amplification projects I’d like to see by TsviBT
Summary If you are interested in doing ambitious scientific research in areas listed below, and have a relevant project that needs funding, consider reaching out. My interest is in human intelligence amplification, though I believe that a variety of scientific projects are relevant, many of which are not specifically related to that goal. Some areas, discussed below: Soft questions: Strategy, financing, ethics, policy, governance, society, advocacyApp...
SONAR Sitrep: US industrials, freight unexpected winners in Iran war
Contrary to consensus expectations, the ongoing conflict in Iran isn’t just a geopolitical risk – it is actively widening the U.S. industrial cost advantage. While global competitors in Europe and Asia are grappling with surging gas prices and heavy war-risk premiums, the United States is emerging as a structural winner in heavy manufacturing. The catalyst? The unique mechanics of “associated gas” – natural gas produced as a byproduct of oil drilling. As elevated global crude oil (WTI) prices in...
Make it make sense: Low demand, rising rates on the trans-Pacific
The stalemate in the Iran war has been anything but for ocean container spot rates on the trans-Pacific. While there has been little diplomatic progress between Washington and Tehran toward ending the conflict, the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by United States forces has been fueling (pun intended) higher ocean prices during a traditional lull prior to the start of the peak shipping season. Asia-U.S. West Coast spot rates increased 1% to $2,675 per forty foot equivalent unit (FEU), a...
Pro-Development Environmentalists
The Breakthrough Institute (BTI) found that “just 10 organizations initiated 35% of the total NEPA cases brought by NGOs.” The Sierra Club and its local chapters alone were responsible for more than 14% of these lawsuits. The dominance of a small number of groups is more pronounced in forest management and energy cases; only 10 groups filed 67% and 48% of these cases, respectively. In BTI’s “The Procedural Hangover: How NEPA Litigation Obstructs Critical Projects” follow-up, which expanded the a...
Older
Sign of the future: GPT-5.5
I had early access to GPT-5.51, and I think it is a big deal. It is a big deal because it indicates that we are not done with the rapid improvement in AI. It is also a big deal because it is just plain good. And it is a big deal because even with all of this, the frontier of AI ability remains jagged.It is increasingly hard to quickly demonstrate each generational change as AI has gotten better, since a lot of the old things AI was bad at, like math or counting letters in words, are now trivial ...