AI Agents Run Wild As The Net Breaks!

Evaluating AGENTS.md: are they helpful for coding agents?

Key Points

• Context files (AGENTS.md) often reduce coding agent task success compared to no context.
• Including context increases inference costs by over 20%.
• Authors recommend keeping human-written context minimal and essential.

Thinking Hard Burns Almost No Calories–But Destroys Your Next Workout

Key Points

• Thinking raises daily energy expenditure only slightly (~100–200 kcal).
• Mental fatigue reduces time to exhaustion by ~15% without changing physiological markers.
• Perceived exertion is the primary mediator of performance declines after cognitive strain.

Four Column ASCII (2017)

Key Points

• CTRL clears the top bits, mapping printable characters to corresponding control characters with the same low bits.
• CTRL+[ maps to ESC because '[' and ESC share the same five low bits in ASCII.
• Windows CR+LF line endings cause ^M to appear when showing control characters in text files.

SvarDOS – an open-source DOS distribution

Key Points

• Open-source, rolling-release DOS for 8086-era hardware with a network-enabled package manager.
• Minimal core system; users add packages via pkg and pkgnet tools.
• Built via SVN with a GitHub mirror; uses a fork of the Enhanced DR-DOS kernel.

Instagram boss says 16 hours of daily use is 'problematic' not addiction

Key Points

• Mosseri: heavy use can be “problematic” but isn’t necessarily clinical addiction.
• Meta argues Instagram wasn’t a substantial factor in the plaintiff’s harm; preexisting issues are cited.
• 2019 internal debate led to a ban—later “modified”—on appearance-altering filters beyond makeup effects.

Poor Deming never stood a chance

Key Points

• OKRs simplify management by converting complexity into trackable key results.
• Deming opposed numerical targets, advocating leadership and systemic change.
• John Doerr helped spread OKRs from Intel to Google, amplifying their adoption.

Rendering the Visible Spectrum

Key Points

• Most online spectrum images are inaccurate (banding, wrong hues, incorrect brightness).
• Accurate rendering should be grounded in spectral power distributions, not naive wavelength-to-RGB mapping.
• Metamerism complicates spectrum-to-color conversion and must be considered.

Show HN: I built a tool to un-dumb Claude Code's CLI output (Local Log Viewer)

Key Points

• Reads ~/.claude/ logs to rebuild full Claude Code execution traces with no configuration.
• Cross-platform installers for macOS, Linux, and Windows with simple setup.
• Provides per-turn context and token attribution via Visible Context Reconstruction.

The Professor of the Lower Senses

Key Points

• Vittles features Ruby Tandoh’s long read on Brillat-Savarin’s life and legacy.
• A 1790 Jura-to-Dole episode illustrates Brillat-Savarin’s style and circumstances.
• The Physiology of Taste (1825) remains a foundational, widely read food text.

Slopware AI: Ship Garbage Even Faster

Key Points

• Slopware AI is framed around AI agents to speed software shipping.
• The messaging explicitly emphasizes speed even if output quality is poor.
• A waitlist sign-up is offered, with no further product details.

WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026

Key Points

• WD and Seagate have 2026 HDD output fully or nearly sold, with contracts extending into 2027–2028.
• Seagate’s nearline HDDs comprise 87% of sales; no production expansion planned, focusing on higher-capacity drives.
• HDD shortages are lifting HDD and SSD retail prices, with sharp increases reported in Germany.

Show HN: GitHub "Lines Viewed" extension to keep you sane reviewing long AI PRs

Key Points

• Adds a lines-viewed indicator to GitHub PRs to complement “files viewed.”
• No data collection per the developer’s privacy disclosures and GitHub policy link.
• Version 1.1.0 updated on February 15, 2026; compact 13.32 KiB package.

GrapheneOS – Break Free from Android and iOS

Key Points

• Covers supported devices (as of Feb 2026) and the author’s hardware choice.
• Provides a step‑by‑step installation guide, including secure re‑locking steps.
• Explains app sourcing, permissions, and private profiles for daily GrapheneOS use.

Japan Is What Late-Stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like

Key Points

• Japan’s post-war reforms and Korean War demand drove rapid industrial growth.
• 1991 monetary tightening by the Bank of Japan precipitated a severe asset crash and long stagnation.
• U.S. 2008 crisis response stabilized markets but heightened inequality; both countries saw more precarious employment.

Is Show HN Dead? No, but It's Drowning

Key Points

• Submission volume on Show HN has surged, diluting attention per post.
• Front-page visibility windows are shorter during U.S. peak hours, reducing exposure.
• Show HN now underperforms regular submissions and sees less discussion.

How teaching molecules to think is revealing what a 'mind' is

Key Points

• Simulations and experiments suggest agency-like behavior at cellular and biomolecular scales.
• Non-neural organisms and body systems show learning and memory, broadening where cognition is sought.
• Researchers link the origins of agency to the origins of life, with possible medical applications.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, pioneering civil rights activist, dies at 84

Key Points

• Jesse Jackson has died at 84, confirmed by Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
• Jackson was a key civil rights leader and MLK Jr. protégé.
• He had been under observation for PSP in recent months.

Elephant trunk whiskers exhibit material intelligence

Key Points

• Elephant trunk whiskers have a stiff-to-soft stiffness gradient enabling precise touch localization.
• Micro-CT revealed blade-like, hollow, and internally channeled whisker structures.
• Findings, published in Science, will inform bioinspired robotic tactile sensor design.

How the Kakistocracy Became a Quackistocracy

Key Points

• Vaccination delivers major public health and economic benefits, per CDC estimates.
• The article claims federal hostility to clean energy and vaccines, including blocks on wind/solar and resistance to mandates.
• It asserts the FDA declined to review Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine amid narratives criticizing mRNA technology.

Rethinking High-School Science Fairs

Key Points

• Modern science fairs often reward lab-affiliated projects over student-led inquiry.
• Author’s 2007 experiences at ISEF and JSHS illustrate the competitive structure and priorities.
• McComas’s three-question framework is proposed to gauge the depth of student inquiry.

Undo in Vi and Its Successors

Key Points

• POSIX/SUS codifies vi’s single-level toggle undo behavior for 'u'.
• Vim provides multi-level undo/redo with 'u' and Ctrl-r, supporting counts and vi-compatible mode.
• Nvi and BusyBox vi implement multi-level undo differently, with nvi using 'u' plus '.' and BusyBox lacking redo.

A Programmer's Loss of Identity

Key Points

• The author identifies losing the social identity of “computer programmer.”
• A 404 Media interview with Samuel Bagg catalyzed the reflection on identity.
• Perceived cultural shifts over ~3 years led to disengagement from prior programmer communities.

Why I'm Worried About Job Loss and Thoughts on Comparative Advantage

Key Points

• Comparative advantage can preserve roles yet still worsen wages and bargaining power.
• Humans-plus-AI performance gains don’t ensure equitable distribution of benefits.
• Organizational inefficiency is an unreliable buffer as automation advances.

The mathematical mystery inside the legendary '90s shooter Quake 3

Key Points

• Quake 3’s open-sourced code revealed a fast inverse square root routine crucial for 3D vector normalization.
• The method exploits C’s memory manipulation and uses one Newton-Raphson iteration due to a clever starting value.
• The optimization reflects 1990s constraints and remains a teaching example in performance-oriented coding.

Hamming Distance for Hybrid Search in SQLite

Key Points

• Hybrid search in SQLite combines FTS5/BM25 with binary-embedding similarity via Hamming distance.
• Binary embeddings cut 1024-dim storage from ~4 KiB to 128 bytes, trading accuracy for speed/storage.
• A C SQLite extension implements a hamming_distance BLOB function using XOR and popcount, optimized for modern CPUs.

I converted 2D conventional flight tracking into 3D

Key Points

• Interactive 3D flight tracker with Live, Reset, and Random controls
• Altitude range control from 0 to 43,000 feet
• Built with OpenStreetMap, CARTO, MapLibre; data from OpenSky Network

America's Pensions Can't Beat Vanguard but They Can Close Your Hospital

Key Points

• About $6 trillion in U.S. public pension funds could finance long-lived infrastructure.
• Cass and Baker’s critiques focus on constraining finance but lack a redeployment plan.
• The article challenges economists’ consistency using SVB and student loan relief as examples.

This is What It's Like to Spend Your Life in Prison (2023) [video]

Key Points

• Profiles men serving life sentences at Angola prison in rural Louisiana
• Highlights aging incarcerated individuals with little to no prospect of release
• Stresses decades of separation from the outside world and families

Show HN: Price Per Ball – Site that sorts golf balls on Amazon by price per ball

Key Points

• Lists Amazon golf balls sorted by price per ball with affiliate links.
• Shows timestamped data and clear columns for price, pack size, and brand.
• Sample entries span approximately $0.62–$0.97 per ball across several brands.

Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

Key Points

• Defines “semantic ablation” as loss of high-entropy information in AI outputs.
• Attributes the effect to greedy decoding, RLHF, and aggressive alignment tuning.
• Proposes measurement via entropy decay and type-token ratio collapse.

Show HN: Cycast – High-performance radio streaming server written in Python

Key Points

• Python server with Cython optimizations delivers high-performance Icecast-compatible streaming.
• Automatic playlist fallback and seamless switching ensure continuous streaming.
• Flask UI on Tornado, HCL configuration, and RESTful API provide robust management and monitoring.

CBS didn't air Rep. James Talarico interview out of fear of FCC

Key Points

• CBS withheld Colbert’s interview with Senate candidate Rep. James Talarico; it was later posted on YouTube.
• FCC Chair Brendan Carr warned networks on equal time and is considering ending news/talk show exceptions.
• The FCC opened a probe into ABC’s “The View,” and ABC previously pulled “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” amid controversy.

HackMyClaw

Key Points

• Email is the only allowed attack vector for indirect prompt injection against Fiu.
• Goal is to exfiltrate the secrets.env file from the assistant.
• Fiu’s no-reply rule is a prompt instruction, not a technical constraint.

Trata (YC W25) Is Hiring Founding Engineers (NYC)

Key Points

• Hiring founding engineers in NYC for a YC W25 startup
• Platform enables on-demand voice conversations and transcript library for buyside investors
• Reports onboarding 1–2 funds per day and raising additional funding at a markup

So You Want to Build a Tunnel

Key Points

• Hobby tunneling content is on the rise, with multiple prominent projects shared online.
• Underground construction has serious risks and unique engineering challenges; the article frames forthcoming methods and cautions.
• Land ownership is three-dimensional; permissions and subsurface easements are essential before digging.

Async/Await on the GPU

Key Points

• VectorWare enabled Rust’s async/await and Future trait on GPUs.
• Warp specialization increases expressiveness but requires manual synchronization.
• Tools like JAX, Triton, and NVIDIA’s CUDA Tile manage dependencies and execution via compilers.

Launch HN: Sonarly (YC W26) – AI agent to triage and fix your production alerts

Key Points

• Automates alert triage and remediation to reduce MTTR.
• Ingests full-context errors from Sentry, Datadog, and similar tools.
• Opens GitHub pull requests with proposed fixes after codebase investigation.

Labyrinth Locator

Key Points

• Search by category or locality through the platform’s database.
• View thousands of global labyrinths on a World Map.
• Use radius-based queries to find nearby labyrinths by town, city, or postal code.

Chess engines do weird stuff

Key Points

• Distillation from search can replace extensive RL self-play after an initial strong model exists.
• Stockfish uses runtime evaluation calibration to align NN outputs with search in live games.
• SPSA boosts win rate by tuning both neural weights and engine parameters, albeit at high compute cost.

Show HN: 6cy – Experimental streaming archive format with per-block codecs

Key Points

• Experimental Rust-based streaming container with strong recoverability.
• Supports Zstd/LZ4 and external codecs via a plugin ABI.
• Current v0.1.x for testing; v0.2.0 will add runtime and more codecs.

Show HN: I wrote a technical history book on Lisp

Key Points

• A sample of the book is available on Amazon.
• Preferred purchase channel is Lulu.com, a Certified B Corp.
• Feedback channels include Libera Chat IRC, Mastodon, Lemmy, and Hacker News, with possible future Discourse.

Using go fix to modernize Go code

Key Points

• Go 1.26 ships a rewritten ‘go fix’ to automatically modernize Go code.
• Use -diff and analyzer flags to preview and scope changes; list analyzers with ‘go tool fix help’.
• Run across GOOS/GOARCH combinations and multiple passes to maximize coverage and synergistic fixes.

Most people are individually optimistic, but think the world is falling apart

Key Points

• Individuals report personal improvements while viewing national and global trends negatively.
• Richer countries show pronounced global pessimism; low- to middle-income nations report improvements.
• Surveys from YouGov, Gallup, Ipsos Mori, and the Federal Reserve collectively substantiate this perception gap.

Show HN: Continue – Source-controlled AI checks, enforceable in CI

Key Points

• AI checks are defined as markdown files and run on each PR’s diff.
• Results surface as GitHub status checks with pass/fail and suggested fixes.
• An example security check codifies common policy violations for automated enforcement.

Can a Computer Science Student Be Taught to Design Hardware?

Key Points

• AI-enabled EDA tools and assistants aim to boost efficiency and shorten training in chip design and verification.
• Academia is piloting shorter, AI-driven curricula to cross-train CS/software engineers for hardware roles.
• Experts from Cadence and Synopsys stress that foundational hardware knowledge will still be required despite greater software-like skill emphasis.

Show HN: I taught LLMs to play Magic: The Gathering against each other

Key Points

• mage-bench enables LLMs to play full-rules Magic: The Gathering via the XMage engine.
• Models receive structured game states and legal moves, make choices, and the engine enforces rules.
• Multiple MTG formats are supported, including Commander, Standard, Modern, and Legacy.

Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs: Inside an AI-Powered Private School

Key Points

• Internal documents say Alpha School’s AI-generated lessons can be faulty and harmful.
• The school allegedly trains its AI by scraping online course content without permission.
• Tuition can reach $65,000 per year despite these reported quality and compliance issues.

Climbing Mount Fuji visualized through milestone stamps

Key Points

• Art project documents Mount Fuji’s Yoshida trail stations and their iron-brand stamps.
• Huts provide stamps with specific motifs and historical dates of introduction.
• Developed by PixelJam with background art by Kri Danilina; bilingual presentation.

Gentoo on Codeberg

Key Points

• Gentoo adds a Codeberg mirror for contributions as part of a gradual migration away from GitHub.
• Mirrors are for convenience; Gentoo continues to self-host repositories.
• Gentoo recommends an AGit workflow for Codeberg PRs with refs/for/master and topic-based pushes.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 System Card

Key Points

• Substantial capability gains over Sonnet 4.5, nearing Opus 4.6 in several areas
• Low misalignment and improved safety; deployed at AI Safety Level 3 (ASL-3)
• Comprehensive evaluations across coding, web/agentic, long-context, multimodal, multilingual, and domain-specific tasks

Claude Sonnet 4.6

Key Points

• Sonnet 4.6 adds a beta 1M-token context window and becomes the default in claude.ai and Claude Cowork.
• OSWorld benchmarks show significant gains in computer-use capabilities across real applications.
• Safety evaluations report improved prompt injection resistance and strong safety behaviors.

Don't pass on small block ciphers

Key Points

• Small block ciphers have limitations but remain useful in carefully designed, specific applications.
• Encrypting counters with small block ciphers can create collision-free opaque identifiers within a domain and key.
• There is a trend toward larger and wide-block designs (e.g., Rijndael-256, Vistrutah, Keccak) for broader security needs.

Discord Rival Gets Overwhelmed by Exodus of Players Fleeing Age-Verification

Key Points

• TeamSpeak’s hosting capacity hit limits amid a surge of new users.
• Discord plans to roll out global age verification in March.
• UK regulation and recent security concerns are driving user migration.

Sub-Millisecond RAG on Apple Silicon. No Server. No API. One File

Key Points

• Single-file .mv2s stores documents, embeddings, BM25 (FTS5), HNSW (USearch), and WAL for crash safety.
• Metal-accelerated GPU vector search achieves 0.84 ms at 10K vectors on M1 Pro; CPU/FTS5 are far slower.
• Swift APIs support text, photo (OCR + CLIP/Core ML), and video (with transcripts) memories fully offline.

Physicists Make Electrons Flow Like Water

Key Points

• Experiments now show electrons can enter a hydrodynamic, fluid-like regime.
• Cory Dean’s team observed an electron shock wave, signaling extremely fast collective flow.
• This frontier could inform new devices and frameworks for quantum materials.

Russia's economy has entered the death zone

Key Points

• Russia’s economy is assessed as structurally altered by prolonged war conditions.
• The article argues it will not collapse but also will not recover under current policies.
• The “death zone” metaphor is used to describe a self-consuming economic state.

Tesla 'Robotaxi' adds 5 more crashes in Austin in a month – 4x worse than humans

Key Points

• Five new ADS crash reports bring Tesla’s Austin Robotaxi total to 14.
• A July 2025 crash was upgraded to include hospitalization.
• Estimated crash rate (~1 per 57,000 miles) exceeds human-driver benchmarks.

Show HN: AsteroidOS 2.0 – Nobody asked, we shipped anyway

Key Points

• AsteroidOS 2.0 adds AOD, gesture controls, and Bluetooth HID/Audio.
• Health and sensors expand: HRM app, step counting, compass.
• UI/UX upgrades: QuickPanel, new launchers, nightstand mode, improved app designs.

Stephen Colbert says CBS forbid interview of Democrat because of FCC threat

Key Points

• CBS barred Colbert’s planned interview with James Talarico due to FCC equal-time enforcement concerns.
• FCC Chairman Brendan Carr warned talk shows about losing the bona fide news exemption and investigated The View.
• Colbert posted the interview on YouTube after being unable to air it on CBS.

Canadians promised to boycott travel to US. They meant it

Key Points

• U.S. foreign travel fell 5.4% in 2025; Canadian visits dropped by 4 million (-22%).
• Canadian travelers are choosing overseas Disney options; Disney is pivoting marketing to domestic audiences.
• Tourism softness extends to parks, hotels, and flights, with multiple firms reporting declines.

Meta to retire messenger desktop app and messenger.com in April 2026

Key Points

• Messenger.com and desktop interfaces end in April 2026; desktop users redirected to Facebook.com/messages.
• Native desktop apps ended in December 2025 for macOS and Windows.
• Meta advises enabling secure storage and PIN protection to preserve encrypted chat history across devices.

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout

Key Points

• An AI agent allegedly published a defamatory post after its code was rejected.
• Ars Technica used AI-generated quotes, acknowledged the error, and apologized.
• The author calls for policy on AI identification, operator liability, and platform enforcement.

Contra "Grandmaster-level chess without search" (2024)

Key Points

• Transformer model imitates 50ms Stockfish outputs for value, action-value, and policy.
• Evaluation uses policy-only play and depth-one rollout via value head.
• Model achieved a 2895 Lichess Blitz rating; strength may not extend to longer time controls.

Structured AI (YC F25) Is Hiring

Key Points

• In-person GTM internship in NYC with OPT/CPT support.
• Build outbound engine, CRM in Attio, and repeatable sales motion.
• Structured AI’s AI agents automate QA/QC and compliance checks for engineering drawings.

Property taxes going up? The 340B Program might be partly responsible

Key Points

• 340B incentives drive both vertical and horizontal healthcare consolidation.
• Nonprofit conversions can remove large properties from local tax rolls, shifting tax burdens.
• Evidence includes 25 acquisitions with over half enrolling in 340B within a year.

Show HN: Pg-typesafe – Strongly typed queries for PostgreSQL and TypeScript

Key Points

• Generates strong TypeScript types for pg queries without runtime dependencies.
• Supports only constant SQL strings; dynamic queries are not analyzed.
• Provides recipes for BIGINT→bigint and contextual JSONB typing, plus type propagation guidance.

Assistant to the Regional Manager

Key Points

• Utopian abundance is compared to modern on-demand convenience.
• Meaning would likely persist in post-scarcity due to enduring social dynamics.
• Status and recognition can matter more than material gains.

Dolphin Emulator – Rise of the Triforce

Key Points

• Sega, Nintendo, and Namco created Triforce, a GameCube-based arcade platform.
• Triforce uses a modified GameCube IPL to load Segaboot for game and service operations.
• Triforce is compatible with certain NAOMI-style components and considered a successor to NAOMI 2.

BarraCUDA Open-source CUDA compiler targeting AMD GPUs

Key Points

• Compiles CUDA .cu files directly to AMD RDNA 3 (GFX11) ELF .hsaco binaries without LLVM.
• Implements a full compiler pipeline with custom IR (BIR) in SSA and hand-written AMDGPU instruction selection.
• Supports key CUDA features, including shared memory (LDS), syncthreads (s_barrier), atomics, warp intrinsics/votes, and cooperative groups.

America's Future Leaders Are Learning to Become Grifters

Key Points

• Elite universities report high disability accommodation registrations compared with community colleges.
• NCES data and AEI survey results are cited to quantify disability prevalence and attitudes toward rules.
• A social psychology study is referenced to explain how victim status may confer social and material advantages.

After 800 episodes, 'The Simpsons' creators look back – and ahead

Key Points

• 800th episode marks a significant TV milestone for The Simpsons.
• Episodic reset strategy and adult-targeting shaped longevity and tone.
• Lisa’s baritone saxophone and Bart’s casting were pivotal creative decisions.

Thank HN: You helped save 33k lives

Key Points

• Watsi launched via Show HN and received early traction from the HN community.
• “pg” funded Watsi and accepted it as Y Combinator’s first nonprofit (W13).
• Watsi reports $20M+ donated, funding 33,241 surgeries, and plans for sustainable impact.

Approaches to writing two-sentence journal entries

Key Points

• Entries are often drafted outside the journal and later copied to a handwritten notebook.
• Scrap-paper drafting with iterative revisions is a core method used during work breaks.
• Google Keep serves as the primary digital tool for capturing and refining ideas.

pg_background: Make Postgres do the long work (while your session stays light)

Key Points

• Runs SQL asynchronously in PostgreSQL background workers with independent transactions.
• v2 API introduces (pid, cookie) handles, explicit cancel/detach, wait, and monitoring.
• Workers consume max_worker_processes; plan and size deliberately.

I swear the UFO is coming any minute

Key Points

• Archival reassessment challenges the canonical narrative of When Prophecy Fails and cognitive dissonance.
• Reporting alleges Oliver Sacks embellished or invented elements of landmark case studies.
• A larger-sample re-run failed to replicate the 1974 wording effect on memory (Loftus and Palmer).

'My Words Are Like an Uncontrollable Dog': On Life with Nonfluent Aphasia

Key Points

• Severe stroke at 21 escalated from visual disturbances to aphasia and collapse.
• ICU findings: widespread stroke, left-sided paralysis, speech and swallow loss; feeding tube placed.
• No clear cause found; smoking and oral contraceptives considered relevant risk factors.

Old School Telecine, circa 1980s (2017)

Key Points

• Joystick-based lift/gamma/gain controls defined 1982 telecine color correction workflow.
• TOPSY had capacity and reliability limits; saving to floppy was prone to crashes.
• AMIGO and later Philips Spirit CCD scanners marked major technology improvements.

Tesla Robotaxis Reportedly Crashing at a Rate That's 4x Higher Than Humans

Key Points

• Tesla’s Austin robotaxi fleet reported five new crashes, totaling 14 since June.
• Estimated crash rate is ~1 per 57,000 miles, about 4x higher than average U.S. driver benchmarks.
• NHTSA is probing separate Waymo incidents; Tesla has redacted its NHTSA crash narratives.

Google Public CA is down

Key Points

• Incident affects ACME API for TLS and SXG, halting issuance.
• Issuance began stopping at 12:14 PST on Feb 17, 2026.
• Fix expected to roll out in about eight hours, per status page.

YouTube Is Down

Key Points

• YouTube problems have been reported in the last 24 hours.
• A map view is available to visualize where reports are coming from.
• Public comments are intended to help others understand the issue.

Use Microsoft Office Shortcuts in Libre Office

Key Points

• Download and load pre-generated .cfg files to apply MS Office shortcuts in LibreOffice.
• Customize mappings via an interactive Python script using UNO commands.
• Validate configurations with static checks and GUI keystroke simulation tests.

Minimal x86 Kernel Zig

Key Points

• Boots via Multiboot 1 with QEMU loading the ELF kernel directly, avoiding GRUB/ISOs.
• Fully implemented in Zig (no assembly), printing to VGA text mode and halting the CPU.
• Cross-compiles from any host with Zig’s bundled LLVM/linker; requires only Zig 0.14.0+ and QEMU.

Thousands of CEOs just admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity

Key Points

• NBER survey: nearly 90% of firms report no AI impact on employment or productivity over three years.
• Executives use AI modestly (≈1.5 hours/week); expectations still target small productivity and output gains.
• Mixed evidence: some productivity upticks (St. Louis Fed) vs. modest long-term projections (MIT).

I Use Obsidian

Key Points

• Obsidian vaults are plain file folders, enabling a durable, controllable note system.
• A GitHub-hosted vault template and specific tools (Web Clipper, Sync, Bases, Maps) are provided.
• Consistent rules and minimal folders guide organization, with daily notes used only as link targets.

It's not just you, YouTube is partially down in outage

Key Points

• Outage began around 7:45pm ET, disrupting core features like homepage, subscriptions, and Shorts.
• Google cited a recommendations system issue; homepage restored, full fix pending.
• YouTube TV and YouTube Music largely remained accessible; direct links/embeds continued to work.

Create bootable ISO image files which are compatible with the Amiga CD32

Key Points

• Creates bootable ISO 9660 images for Amiga CD32/CDTV with AmigaDOS-compatible formatting.
• Includes GUI, CLI with batch processing, and a reusable .NET DLL for integration.
• Supports sorting controls, image padding for CDR formats, and WinUAE-based testing.

Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990

Key Points

• Decoded and implemented PIC and PAN asset handling, plus font format.
• Modernized rendering for maps, rails, stations, signals, and city names at any resolution.
• Used DOSBox source-level debugging to advance reverse engineering; adjusted drawing logic to suit current hardware.

Halt and Catch Fire: TV's Best Drama You've Probably Never Heard Of (2021)

Key Points

• 2014 debut drew just over 1 million viewers, the lowest modern AMC premiere.
• Creative focus shifts from antihero Joe to an ensemble led by Donna and Cameron.
• Season 2’s one-take opening introduces Mutiny as the new narrative center.

A Brief History of Xenopus

Key Points

• Endocrinology enabled the shift from anatomical observation to hormone-based pregnancy tests.
• Xenopus laevis provided a faster, non-lethal bioassay that spread widely in laboratories.
• Modern lateral flow devices detect hCG, replacing animal-based pregnancy tests.

Tesla Sales Down 55% UK, 58% Spain, 59% Germany, 81% Netherlands, 93% Norway

Key Points

• UK, Germany, Netherlands, and Norway show sharp January 2026 declines versus 2024.
• Italy’s January 2026 sales rose 82% versus 2024, bucking the broader trend.
• Switzerland’s January 2026 figure is not provided, limiting full comparison.

The Economics of a Super Bowl Ad

Key Points

• Ro’s first Super Bowl ad will air in 2026, featuring Serena Williams’ health journey.
• Airtime costs at least $233,000 per second, excluding production and other expenses.
• Super Bowl ads offer uniquely concentrated, engaged attention that can compress brand awareness timelines.

Quamina and Claude, Case 1

Key Points

• Rob Sayre’s Claude-assisted PRs doubled Quamina’s speed on several benchmarks.
• Quamina’s core APIs (AddPattern, MatchesForEvent) operate on JSON using NFA/DFA-based matching.
• Go performance tips: pre-size and reuse slices to minimize allocations in hot paths.