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The Function That Beat the Model: What We Measured When We Removed the LLMs
SPERIXLABS replaced a 1B-parameter local model that validated sensitive-data detections with a 40-line Python function, then published the four experiments showing where classical checks beat the LLM on accuracy and latency.
7 min · 1,535 words
Alice and Bill own identical UK iPhones, but only Alice still has Apple Advanced Data Protection. MacAnorak explains how Apple's UK ADP withdrawal created a two-tier encryption outcome for otherwise identical devices.
13 min · 2,953 words
Making portable my unportable transputer C compiler
Oscar Toledo recounts porting his 1990s transputer C compiler from 32-bit DJGPP assumptions to a modern 64-bit Mac—fixing int/pointer aliasing, FILE*, and self-hosting constraints along the way.
14 min · 3,196 words
Introducing Strands harness: frontier performance with 28% lower token cost
Arron Bailiss introduces Strands harness: a fully assembled, customizable local/cloud agent that aims for Claude Code/Codex-like “it just works” behavior with about 28% lower token cost.
5 min · 1,198 words
Trail of Bits explains why SAML—the XML-based SSO protocol—is structurally fragile: XML complexity, canonicalization pitfalls, enveloped signatures, and a long history of authentication bypasses.
11 min · 2,464 words
Patrik Inzinger on AI-polished internal writing: a robot emoji says an agent typed the post, not whether a person owned the ideas—and why that can make a small team less legible.
3 min · 758 words
PgDog’s Lev Kokotov on why engineers fix open problems they care about, why ownership beats closed-source support tickets, and how free-as-in-freedom Postgres sharding funds itself with enterprise SLAs.
2 min · 387 words
This Digital Radio Gets Messages to the World's Remotest LocationsIt sends encrypted signals with no satellites or relay towers required
IEEE Spectrum interviews Rhizomatica’s Peter Bloom on HERMES, an open-source HF data radio that pushes files and optional encryption over the ionosphere for remote and emergency communities.
3 min · 594 words
Announcing the Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
Nine leading mathematicians announce an independent IAS-hosted advisory group to counsel AI labs on releasing math results—starting with OpenAI’s claim of 100+ solved open problems—and invite community input.
2 min · 378 words
Spymarks, not WatermarksWatermarks that spy on users are no mere watermarks
Brandon Thomas coins “spymark” for hidden tracking signals in media—like SynthID payloads that can encode user IDs—arguing privacy-hostile watermarks need a clearer name and stronger pushback.
5 min · 1,042 words
In Search of a Compositional Theory of Self-Stabilization
Murat Demirbas connects metastable failures to classical self-stabilization and asks what a compositional theory would need to make distributed recovery composable.
10 min · 2,248 words
AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up
Linear's Mufeez Amjad explains how agent-accelerated shipping made CI the bottleneck, and how they cut PR wait time and runner cost while test suites nearly quadrupled.
8 min · 1,907 words
dlab Open Source Week: Frontier AI on Your Own Hardware
Tim Dettmers argues that small academic labs can compete by building coherent open-source ecosystems rather than isolated papers. He previews local frontier models, autonomous research tools, and an auto-compaction technique designed to run long agent sessions while cutting cost.
1 min · 276 words
M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review: The Dream Mac for Local AI Agents
Federico Viticci reviews the M5 Ultra Mac Studio with 256 GB RAM—why it is a dream machine for local AI agents, what workloads it unlocks, and where it still falls short.
14 min · 3,293 words
Python Workers are now generally available
Cloudflare announces Python Workers GA: run Python on the Workers runtime with packages and frameworks that just work, two years after the first preview.
9 min · 2,066 words
Alice GG on the Tetris effect for modern feeds: how attention gets hijacked, why it is the scarce resource, and what reclaiming it means for builders and users.
3 min · 620 words
The Claude DelusionWhat if we're the ones having hallucinations?
Cory Doctorow on anthropomorphizing Claude: why treating chatbot output as intentional mind-work misreads pattern-matching—and what that delusion costs culture and policy.
9 min · 1,958 words
Inside the Tiny Unfixable Eye: iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max Teardown
iFixit’s teardown of the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max covers the new variable aperture camera, battery tray, cooling, and the repair tradeoffs—including plastic frames that tore on multiple units.
12 min · 2,777 words
Amit Shekhar walks through how LLM design moved from RNNs to attention, Transformers, scaling laws, Mixture of Experts, and the open problems still ahead.
25 min · 5,729 words
Dan McKinley argues that obsessing over prompt text misses the point: build interlocking evaluation and optimization pipelines, and treat LLMs as non-conscious systems whose 'meaning' is mostly our projection.
12 min · 2,673 words