Agentic coding notes from Galapagos Island

The user discusses their experience with AI and testing, highlighting the benefits of using AI to generate tests and the limitations of relying solely on LLMs for testing. They propose a testing methodology that combines fuzzing, randomized testing, and human review to achieve high-quality results, and discuss the importance of feedback loops and independent perspectives in reducing false positives.

Bloomberg Terminal Is Ugly and Clunky–Everyone Still Uses It

https://oztalking.com/images/issues/bloomberg-terminal-lock-in-1.png
The Bloomberg Terminal is a financial information workstation used by 350,000 finance professionals worldwide, with a $30,000-a-year subscription fee and a steep learning curve, making it difficult to switch to alternative platforms. Despite its high cost and clunky interface, the Terminal has maintained its near-monopoly status for 44 years due to its network effect, with users locked in by ...

Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper

https://www.wafer.ai/assets/blog/covers/sunset.png
AMD's Instinct MI350 series offers cheaper GPUs with comparable specs to NVIDIA's Blackwells, but lacks day-0 support for frontier models. With optimization and tweaks, AMD can achieve competitive performance per dollar, closing the gap with NVIDIA, but still requires more support and development.

Leanstral 1.5: Proof abundance for all

https://mistral.ai/_astro/Leanstral-charts_Z1P0BDJ.webp?dpl=6a47cdd357510b0008482aed
Leanstral 1.5 is a free, open-source model that delivers a performance upgrade for formal verification, achieving a new state-of-the-art on FATE-H/X and PutnamBench. It verifies complex code properties and uncovers previously unknown bugs in open-source repositories.

Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

https://news.exeter.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/A-57m-tall-Dipterocarp-tree-with-a-double-rope-technique-DRT-rigged-for-canopy-access.-Credit-Palasiah-Jotan-x-1024x550.jpg
New research reveals that the world's tallest tropical trees can pump water to their topmost branches without difficulty. The study found that these trees' water systems are perfectly adapted to their height, making them no more vulnerable to drought than shorter trees.

Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

https://mirtitles.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/the-frog-rider-folk-tales-from-china_0000.jpg?w=640
The book is a narrative by geologist Ekaterina Radkevich about her expeditions and research on Earth and its resources. It completes the Science for Everyone Series, a collection of scientific knowledge for the general public.

Synthesis is harder than analysis

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/image-6.png?w=823
Calculus has two main branches: differential calculus, which calculates the slope of a function, and integral calculus, which calculates the area under a curve. The two are connected by the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, which states that integrals are anti-derivatives, but integral calculus is generally harder than differential calculus due to its global nature.

MSI Center – How to gain SYSTEM privileges in seconds

The user discovered a severe vulnerability in MSI Center, a pre-installed software on MSI laptops and desktops, allowing for Remote Code Execution (RCE) with valid login credentials. MSI patched the vulnerability within two days and the user is still waiting for a CVE from VulDB after submitting their report.

Steam Controller Auto-Charge – pilot to magnetic charging puck using CV

https://opengraph.githubassets.com/2d7d83b385db4cbd78ec95a023ceb8335b975486efecea13c2de773b0b1bf14f/FossPrime/Steam-Controller-Auto-Charge
Steam Controller Auto-Charge is an open-source app that automatically charges a Steam Controller using computer vision and WebHID telemetry. It uses optical flow tracking, haptic navigation, and battery status polling to guide the controller to its charging puck.

SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/searxng/searxng/master/client/simple/src/brand/searxng.svg
SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. - searxng/searxng

David Beazley – Programming Courses

The author taught project-based programming courses from 2007-2023 but had to stop due to a collapse in the continuing education market. They're now pursuing a Professional Educator's License in Secondary Education.

FreeBSD ate my RAM

https://crocidb.com/post/freebsd-ate-my-ram/images/Pastedimage20260701210436.png
The user investigated why memory usage reported by fastfetch and btop differed on FreeBSD, discovering that the discrepancy was due to btop's incorrect handling of the ARC cache and filesystem metadata buffer cache. The user contributed patches to btop and htop to improve their memory usage reporting, and also submitted a PR to fastfetch, which was later merged with improvements.

The firefighting system of the Van der Heyden brothers in 17th century Amsterdam

https://worksinprogress.co/.netlify/images?url=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.worksinprogress.co%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2026%2F07%2FRP-P-1921-311-AWK-copy.jpg&w=2560&h=2000&q=65&fit=cover
Amsterdam's fire-fighting system improved in the 17th century with the introduction of new engines and a culture of inventiveness. The city's fire damage decreased dramatically after implementing the Van der Heyden brothers' suction and pressure hoses.

Jamesob's guide to running SOTA LLMs locally

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jamesob/local-llm/master/images/rig.png
User has $2k to spend on local machine intelligence and $40k for top-of-the-line. They have 4x RTX Pro 6000s and built a DDR4 system to host them.

Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

https://katamari64.se/assets/2026/odin2_gb_following_libs.png
GingerBill, the creator of the Odin programming language, expressed concerns about Wikipedia's deletion of the Odin article due to lack of reliable sources, but his tone shifted from dismissive to concerned after Casey Muratori, a famous videogame programmer, pointed out the flaws in Wikipedia's notability rules for programming languages. Casey argued that Wikipedia's rules prioritize ...

Maybe you should learn something

Learning new things is fun and makes life richer, but it requires a daily time investment of up to an hour. It's a long journey with initial struggles, but consistent practice leads to improvements over time.

Soatok's Informal Guide to Threat Models

https://i0.wp.com/soatok.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/BlogHeader-2026-ThreatModel-Guide.png?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1
The user discusses the importance of threat modeling in cybersecurity, explaining that it's a formal process that helps identify potential threats and vulnerabilities in a system, and provides a framework for understanding assumptions and accepted risks. They also apply threat modeling to real-world examples, including hybrid post-quantum cryptography and end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, ...

Applied Category Theory Course (2018)

This is a course based on Fong and Spivak's book Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory, taught by John Baez and turned into nice webpages by Simon Burton. © 2018 John Baez

New serious vulnerabilities spiked around release of Claude Mythos Preview

https://epoch.ai/assets/images/trends/trends-thumbnail.png
Anthropic and OpenAI announced efforts to use frontier models for cybersecurity, but this led to a significant increase in high-severity vulnerabilities. The number of high- and critical-severity CVEs jumped 3.5x in June after the announcements.

Gone but Not Forgotten: Recovering the Dead Web

https://blog.archive.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/image-4-1024x512.png
The Pew Research Center study found that 38% of webpages from 2013 are no longer accessible, but the Wayback Machine has rescued roughly 15% of those dead pages. Web archives like the Wayback Machine play an increasingly important role in rescuing the dead Web and minimizing the fracture of the knowledge graph on the Web.

Costco is the anti-Amazon

https://phenomenalworld.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/pexels-photo-4030670-scaled.avif
Amazon's complex logistics model may not be the most efficient or socially beneficial, while Costco's simpler model offers lower costs and better worker treatment. A public grocery store model, inspired by Costco and the military commissary system, could provide cheaper groceries for New Yorkers with lower overhead.

Reverse-engineering Codemasters' BIGF archive format in Ruby

https://davidslv.uk/img/og-reading-binary-in-ruby.png
When you say “I’m going to reverse-engineer a binary file format,” people picture C, or Python with struct, or Kaitai. Nobody pictures Ruby. Ruby is for web apps and DSLs and being pleasant; it is not, in the popular imagination, for byte-banging floats out of a 2003 racing game. That popular imagination is wrong. The reader for Codemasters’ BIGF archive format — the container that holds the ...

Show HN: A statically typed, cross-platform, easily bootstrappable build system

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rochus-keller/BUSY/main/docs/logo_small.png
BUSY is a lean, cross-platform build system for GCC, Clang, and MSVC toolchains that uses a statically typed build specification language and requires minimal system requirements. It is designed to be easy to use and integrate with source trees, with features such as Lua scripting and support for multi-core builds.

Infracost (YC W21) Is Hiring a Marketing Lead to Shift FinOps Left

https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/fe6b97eef16a2d22e437f6cf663c11b64b223fc8.png
Marketing Lead at Infracost will develop and execute marketing strategies, manage the marketing function, and drive customer acquisition. The role requires 5+ years of B2B marketing experience, strong project management, and a bias toward action in a fully remote US and Canada timezone-based team.

Study reveals what people see when they read lips

https://news-archive-assets.ku.edu/data/16/25/01kwcanktnypf3bxa78q1h0aqm.jpg
LAWRENCE — New research from the University of Kansas uses network science to determine why people make mistakes when lip reading. Michael Vitevitch, professor of speech-language-hearing at KU, and his co-authors created a visual map of around 20,000 words in English, hoping to better grasp why some words are more difficult to lip-read than others. The results appear in the Journal of the ...

Espionage Against the European Parliament

https://citizenlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/olive-oil-report-web.jpg
Stelios Kouloglou, a former European Parliament member, was hacked with NSO Group's Pegasus spyware twice, in October 2022 and March 2023, while investigating spyware abuses. The infections likely captured non-public information about committee activities, breaching EU parliamentary confidentiality.

Hunting a 16-year-old SQLite WAL bug with TLA+

https://ubuntu.com/wp-content/uploads/f847/Isometric-One-logo-Dark.jpg
SQLite fixed a long-standing bug in WAL checkpointing that could lead to database corruption. The dqlite team used TLA+ to model SQLite's behavior and found that dqlite is not affected by the bug due to its stricter locking mechanism.

International chess federation sanctions Kramnik

https://www.fide.com/wp-content/uploads/FIDE-Blue-3.png
FIDE's EDC imposed a one-year ban on Vladimir Kramnik for violating FIDE's Ethics Code and Disciplinary Code. Kramnik must also serve 12 months of unpaid service for the benefit of the chess community.

Factories are just rooms

https://interconnected.org/home/2026/07/03/factories.png?v=1
You spoke to a year group about manufacturing, sharing your experience making an AI clock and showing them various stages of design and production. You aim to normalize hands-on learning and inspire kids to become makers and inventors.

GitFut – Your GitHub stats turned into a World-Cup-style player card

https://gitfut.com/mascot.webp
Rate any GitHub profile out of 99 as a FIFA-Ultimate-Team-style player card, scored from real commits, stars and contributions. Get scouted and share your card.