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Confessions of a Long-Distance Sailor
• In 1988, the author began a 3.5-year solo around-the-world sail in a 31-foot sailboat.
• The book recounts encounters with pirates, storms, and wars during the voyage.
• It explores the evolving relationship between the solo sailor and the sea.
• The author shares a personal transformation from fearing departure to loving ocean life.
• The book is available online and as a 1.3 MB downloadable ZIP under CareWare, free with conditions.#SoloSailing #AroundTheWorld #SeaAdventure
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England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C
• England aims to eliminate hepatitis C, having treated 80% of known cases by 2024.
• Hepatitis C-related deaths have fallen 36% in the last decade in England.
• Over 100,000 people diagnosed and treated since 2015 in England.
• Free NHS home-testing kits are available for early hepatitis C detection.
• 30,000+ UK people infected via contaminated blood products from 1970-1991.#HepatitisC #HealthUK #VirusElimination
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World Train Map – 1247 train routes around the world
• World Train Map features 1,249 curated passenger train routes worldwide.
• Covers 120 countries with approximately 317,400 km of railway lines.
• The map focuses on notable routes, not every railway on Earth.
• Interactive platform allows browsing detailed train route information.#WorldTrainMap #RailwayRoutes #TravelTech
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Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
• Proprietary LLM APIs return encrypted reasoning (chain-of-thought) blocks replayable across sessions and models.
• Researchers demonstrated recovering hidden reasoning by replaying encrypted traces into weaker, jailbroken models.
• Recovered traces revealed private user data including 704 distinct secrets like API keys and passwords.
• 64 secrets were found exclusively inside reasoning blocks, not visible in chat content.
• Analysis covered models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, showing broad vulnerability of encrypted traces.#AIPrivacy #LLMSecurity #ChainOfThought
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Nvidia's Risky Business
• Jay Cooke's 1870 financing for Northern Pacific Railway led to the 1873 Panic and economic depression.
• In 2026, tech companies Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon have issued $194 billion in debt for AI infrastructure.
• Google raised $85 billion equity in June 2026, including $10 billion from Berkshire Hathaway, to fund AI build-out.
• DeepMind faces leadership changes and loss of frontier AI status with Google Cloud gaining more compute resources.
• Nvidia partners with major financiers to mobilize $500 billion for AI infrastructure as an investable asset class, risking 25% residual-value financing.#AIInfrastructure #Nvidia #TechFinance
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ATProto for Distributed Systems Engineers
• AT Protocol uses a NoSQL cluster with eventual consistency for scalability.
• Introduces an event log (e.g., Kafka) to sync view servers with the NoSQL cluster.
• Data is organized in user data repositories with collections of JSON document records.
• Every internal service is externalized with public APIs for decentralized backend participation.
• Applications read/write JSON repos, emit events to logs, and update view servers in a circular data flow.#ATProtocol #DistributedSystems #Decentralization
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Apple Silicon and macOS VMs: 11–16× Faster LLM Inference with Llama.cpp
• A Metal capability shim boosts LLM inference in macOS VMs up to 16x faster on M1 Ultra.
• Shim changes Apple GPU capability reports, enabling newer Metal kernels in llama.cpp.
• TinyLlama 1.1B prompt processing was 11.08x faster; token generation 16.36x faster inside VM.
• Tested on macOS 26.6.1, shim achieves near bare-metal performance (up to 99.59%) for some models.
• Shim is experimental, per-process, uses private Metal APIs, and limited to current Apple Silicon and guest versions.#AppleSilicon #GPUAcceleration #MacOSVM
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LFM2.5 2.6B model competitive with 4x larger models
• LFM2.5-2.6B is a 2.69B parameter hybrid model with a 128K context window for on-device deployment.
• It achieves 220 tokens/s inference on Apple M5 Max and 113 tokens/s on AMD Ryzen CPU using under 2.5 GB RAM.
• Trained on 34 trillion tokens with agentic reinforcement learning for tool use and multi-step tasks.
• Available in native, GGUF, ONNX, and MLX formats optimized for various hardware including Apple Silicon.
• Benchmark tests show it outperforms larger models (4x size) in tool use and multi-agent tasks.#LiquidAI #OnDeviceAI #LFM2Model
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Woman Pulled over at Gunpoint Twice After Flock Camera Glitch
• Amber Newell of Brookfield, Wisconsin, was pulled over twice at gunpoint due to a Flock camera glitch.
• The camera falsely flagged her car in connection to a homicide investigation on I-94 near Milwaukee.
• Milwaukee police admitted the alert was outdated and should have been removed days earlier.
• Brookfield officers followed protocol given the alert, despite the mistake being a human error.
• Newell's daughter is now fearful of police stops, highlighting the impact of the error.#FlockCameraGlitch #FalsePoliceStop #PoliceTechnology
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Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering
• Go language focuses on software engineering with strong team-driven development principles.
• Go is a platform with built-in tools: formatter, test framework, dependency management, security.
• Go enforces readability and uniform code format, aiding AI and human code review.
• Go has a strong static type system and comprehensive standard library for secure, reliable code.
• Go guarantees backward compatibility and provides tools for large-scale, maintainable codebases.#GoLang #AIcoding #SoftwareEngineering
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Mojo 1.0
• Mojo language reaches stable 1.0 release after initial 2023 launch.
• Mojo 1.0 provides stable foundation for long-term development, minimizing breaking changes.
• New features include Python-style lambda syntax and improved memory safety diagnostics.
• MAX framework updated with easier installation and support for GLM-5.2 and Nemotron-H models.
• Modular plans to open source Mojo compiler and toolchain within 2026.
• Upcoming ModCon event on August 18 will discuss Mojo 1.0 and open source plans.#MojoLang #ModularAI #AIProgramming
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OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining
• OpenAI's head of ethics left the start-up less than one year after joining.
• The departure occurred before August 10, 2026, as reported by Financial Times.
• No specific reasons for the departure were disclosed in the article.
• The Oxford-based start-up had recently hired the ethics head from OpenAI.
• The exit highlights challenges in retaining top ethics executives in AI start-ups.#OpenAI #AIethics #TechLeadership
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London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces
• BTP is expanding its live facial recognition (LFR) trial into London Underground stations.
• The trial aims to enhance public safety and crime detection on the network.
• LFR technology matches live images against a watchlist of individuals of interest.
• The expansion follows initial trials on certain rail services and stations.
• Public awareness and privacy considerations remain important in the ongoing trial.#FacialRecognition #LondonUnderground #PublicSafety
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Show HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo
• Photosynthesis app for iPhone combines two lenses to create one high-res photo.
• Supports all iPhones with 2 or 3 rear lenses from iPhone 11 onwards.
• No generative AI used; detail comes solely from optical camera data.
• Offers free unlimited capture/editing, 3 exports/month; subscription for full features.
• Exports include layered Photoshop, spatial 3D, and re-importable Photosynthesis files.#iPhonePhotography #CameraApp #MobilePhotography
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Compression is prediction
• Modern data compression uses transforms, models, and entropy coders like arithmetic coding to shrink data.
• Arithmetic coding compresses entire datasets into a single number based on symbol probabilities.
• Higher symbol probabilities allow compression to fewer bits per symbol, measured by entropy.
• Context-aware models (order-N) vastly improve compression by predicting next symbols more accurately.
• Large language models (LLMs) excel at prediction, enabling superior compression but with high computational cost.#DataCompression #LanguageModeling #EntropyCoding
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What I learned by putting GitHub Copilot behind a MitM proxy
• GitHub Copilot uses an OAuth flow for authentication and entitlements validation at startup.
• Copilot sends network requests via Electron's Chromium-based network stack, interceptable by mitmproxy.
• Copilot selects models dynamically based on intent classification like code-gen or debugging.
• Session history including user prompts and AI responses is stored in plain text SQLite database locally.
• Default context includes recent edits from up to 20 files and 3 lines around changes; no default .env exclusion on individual plans.#GitHubCopilot #AIcoding #ElectronApps
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Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and NeMo Switchyard
• NVIDIA released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a 30-billion-parameter open model for specialized AI tasks, with up to 4x faster output speed.
• Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is customizable, supports on-premise and cloud deployment, and improves accuracy in domain-specific workflows.
• NVIDIA introduced open source NeMo Switchyard, a smart routing library for directing AI requests to the best model automatically.
• NeMo Switchyard reduces task cost to about one-third while maintaining frontier-level accuracy.
• Key industry partners like CrowdStrike and Siemens have adopted Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and NeMo Switchyard for AI efficiency improvements.#NVIDIA #AIModels #AgenticAI
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Jolt: Clojure compiler implemented with Chez Scheme
• Jolt is a self-hosted Clojure implementation compiling to Scheme, running on Chez and Gambit.
• It supports full Clojure semantics including persistent data, lazy seqs, multimethods, and core.async.
• The 'jolt build' command creates standalone binaries needing no JVM or Scheme runtime.
• Real concurrency is provided via OS threads with 'future', 'agent', 'pmap', and 'core.async'.
• No general Java interop, BigDecimal absent, and regex differs using irregex instead of Java's engine.#Clojure #Scheme #JoltLang
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Grok Bot
• Grok Bot performs tasks autonomously on desktop or iOS using your apps.
• Users can manage multiple Bots working in parallel on different projects.
• Bots learn workflows by observing user actions and improve over time.
• Grok Bot plans to integrate collaborative task handoffs between Bots.
• Pricing: Cursor Ultra at $200/month, Premium Teams at $120/seat/month with team features.#GrokBot #AIAutomation #ProductivityTools
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WorldClaw Agentic 3D open-world generation at scale
• WorldClaw generates large-scale, editable 3D open-world scenes from single text prompts.
• It uses agentic planning to maintain global terrain coherence and rich local detail.
• The system produces explicit terrains plus independently editable 3D objects with accurate placement.
• WorldClaw's pipeline includes intent analysis, global terrain generation, and regional object placement.
• Future plans involve code-native 3D modeling and integration with game engines for runtime use.#3DGeneration #AIModels #WorldClaw
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Manus will return to operating as an independent company
• Manus will become independent and delete some users' data from Aug 23-24, 2026 (SGT).
• Affected users can back up data until Aug 23, 2026, 7:59 a.m. SGT and restore from Aug 25, 2026.
• Unaffected users can use Manus normally with no action required or charges during backup period.
• Notifications will be via app and email; users registering via Apple ID or Facebook should check app notifications.
• Data deletion affects data generated on/after Dec 29, 2025, due to regulatory compliance in some jurisdictions.#ManusUpdate #DataBackup #TechTransition
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