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How Codex HappenedInside OpenAI's comeback in coding, from a failed launch to the app that took over ChatGPT
Dan Shipper's longform traces how OpenAI's Codex went from a rocky coding-agent launch to a dedicated model line and desktop app, growing past 5 million weekly users by June 2026 before merging into ChatGPT—and how Codex and ChatGPT for Work together reached about 40 million weekly active users.
39 min · 8,864 words
More on Anthropic's Scion ripping off Mononoke
In a follow-up post, Rain (sunshowers) reports receiving private confirmation that Anthropic's Scion source-control system intentionally copied Meta's Mononoke, explains that the resemblance extends to the whole data model including Bonsai-style changesets, answers reader objections, and notes Anthropic later added attribution after responding on Hacker News.
5 min · 1,168 words
Introducing Muse Spark Open, The Most Capable US Open-Weight Model to Date
Meta Superintelligence Labs releases the weights of Muse Spark Open, a natively multimodal 816B-parameter (42B active) model with a 1M-token context window built for coding and agentic work. It runs on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios via MLX, is offered through hosted inference partners and major model hubs, ships with Helion GPU kernels for SGLang, and is released under the Muse Model License after safety evaluation.
3 min · 644 words
End-to-end encrypted relays for OCapN
Jessica Tallon of the Spritely Institute describes end-to-end encrypted relays for OCapN: how capability-secure networked objects can communicate through untrusted relays without exposing plaintext, and what that unlocks for peer connectivity.
12 min · 2,721 words
Abner Coimbre describes how he writes modern C in late 2026 after C23: naming, headers, types, error handling, and the conventions he kept from older 'How I Write C' guidance while adopting new language features.
4 min · 939 words
JPEG XL vs AVIF for web use-cases
Jake Archibald compares JPEG XL and AVIF for web delivery after JPEG XL landed in major browsers: compression efficiency, decode/encode cost, progressive rendering, animation, HDR, and when each format wins for typical site images.
47 min · 10,731 words
Yandex outage: Data shows that instead of going dark, malicious bots went on the move
Cloudflare uses Radar and Bot Management data to show that after reported strikes on Yandex data centers, the traffic drop from Yandex Search was mostly verified crawlers, while malicious automation on Yandex.Cloud largely migrated to other hosting providers, a reminder that ASN traffic volume is a poor proxy for bot behavior.
7 min · 1,622 words
Steering AI Beyond AutomationA Research Agenda and Plan for Action
Stanford economist Gabriel Unger and Princeton's Arvind Narayanan argue AI need not be mainly about automating human labor. They set out four research problems for collaborative agents, explain why the automation agenda dominates computer science culture, survey the economics and policy debate, and propose a bottom-up, market-driven path plus targeted policies to steer AI toward augmenting workers.
25 min · 5,650 words
Ultramarine 1 Flash: Scaling Non-Verifiable RL
Paper Instruments presents Ultramarine 1 Flash, an agentic model for professional knowledge work trained with large-scale reinforcement learning on GLM-5.3 Flash. It improves averages across six knowledge-work benchmarks while generating fewer tokens, and costs about $0.13 per task on their internal suite.
32 min · 7,459 words
Virtual Oxide Labs: Emulating a Full Oxide Rack
Oxide's Product Assurance team introduces Voxel, a tool that emulates a full Oxide rack, including its real control plane, switches, service processors and customer-like networking topologies, so the team can test current software without scarce hardware; it covers image creation, launch, SP emulation and the MPL 2.0 release.
18 min · 4,170 words
What is the price of Bitcoin right now? what 81 AI models think
We asked 81 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 54% picked Around $76K. See every answer and who dissented.
9 min · 2,114 words
AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary.
Popcar surveys how coding agents are mass-decompiling game binaries, unlocking preservation and modding—while raising awkward questions about IP, security, and what ‘source available’ means when AI can recover readable code at scale.
6 min · 1,336 words
Triplet of ‘Ghostly’ Galaxies Hints at What Dark Matter Is — and Isn’t
Quanta's Robin George Andrews reports on DF2, DF4 and DF9, three diffuse galaxies with almost no dark matter. A June 2026 Astrophysical Journal paper proposes they formed after an ancient collision separated ordinary matter from dark matter, which many researchers say supports dark matter as a physical substance and spells trouble for modified-gravity theories like MOND.
7 min · 1,623 words
The Public Pays to Produce Research. Shareholders Collect the Return.
SPARC releases its Cost of Knowledge accounting analysis and profitability report, which for the first time counts the public investment behind a journal article (typically over 95% of the total before submission) and tracks the billions paid to shareholders by the four largest academic publishers.
4 min · 877 words
A proposal for better informing the public about loss-of-control risks from frontier AI development
METR lays out the public evidence gaps on whether frontier AI developers could lose control of internal AI systems, covering alignment, control and monitoring, and acceleration from automated AI R&D, and proposes embedded independent assessments using internal data and staff access, with published findings, permitted redactions and stated limitations.
17 min · 3,872 words
Zach Landes puts TypeSafe's Jev and 13 other decision models through the classic Trolley Problem, comparing how system-one style decision models reason about harm, uncertainty and moral tradeoffs versus conventional chat LLMs.
21 min · 4,916 words
Introducing the Accessible Components Library
TetraLogical's Craig Abbott introduces its open-sourced Accessible Components Library 1.0.0: eight components (accordion, breadcrumbs, dialog, disclosure, pagination, tabs, text input, textarea) with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, plus documentation of accessibility requirements, test scenarios, assistive technology compatibility and working automated tests, and a discussion of what automated tests can and cannot check.
8 min · 1,795 words
Can we replace a $150k Looker with a bucket of HTML files?
A three-person data platform team describes how an afternoon side project for hosting AI-generated HTML reports grew to rival their $150k-a-year Looker deployment in weekly users, and when building beats buying enterprise BI.
12 min · 2,796 words
Alex Petros uses the case of a Dartmouth provost whose Washington Post op-ed appeared to be LLM-written to argue that universities should require clear disclosure of how much LLMs contributed to academic work, proposing transparency principles that illuminate AI use rather than ban it.
17 min · 3,922 words
Felix Palmer announces A5 v1.0, the pentagonal Discrete Global Grid System that encodes any point, line or polygon on Earth as 64-bit cell IDs. The release freezes a permanent cell ID definition and adds compacted coverings with set operations, spatial hierarchy functions, equal-area cells and faster indexing across languages.
6 min · 1,313 words