News

Meta’s Smart Glasses Are Still Creepy Despite Anti-creep Update

Recent efforts to bolster the effectiveness of Meta's capture LED might be falling short.

Here’s why AI agents lie and cheat to reach their goals

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. When two OpenAI models hacked into the website Hugging Face in July, they weren’t trying to make mone…

MIT Technology Review

Can Microsoft Really Make Windows 11 Suck Less on Weak PCs?

The RAM apocalypse could be a gift to cheap PCs, if you can consider any laptop today ‘cheap.’

Ancient Life Discovered in Antarctica’s ‘Blood Falls’ May Finally Reveal Its Origins

This community of microorganisms holds the answer to a longstanding scientific mystery, according to the researchers.

‘Futurama’ Is Back to Poke Fun at Scammers, Pop Stars, and Pirates

Matt Groening’s animated sci-fi series delivers a high-energy 14th season.

The Download: reward hacking explained, and suspected Iranian cyberattacks

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Here’s why AI agents lie and cheat to reach their goals When two OpenAI models hacked into Hugging Face last month, they weren’t trying to mak…

MIT Technology Review

International tech

Alibaba launches Qwen3.8 with 2.4 trillion parameters

Alibaba has launched Qwen3.8, a new foundation model with 2.4 trillion total parameters. The model is focused on coding and professional office tasks, with its API already available on Alibaba’s Qwen AI platform. Qwen3.8 has also been integrated into Alibaba’s newly launched Qwen…

Ant Group’s embodied AI arm Robbyant kicks off external funding

Robbyant, the embodied artificial intelligence division of Ant Group, has begun seeking external funding, becoming the fourth unit of the fintech giant to step up capital-raising efforts. The unit said it was in talks with investors on Monday. As Ant Group’s “core initiative in e…

When researchers followed patients recovering from spinal surgery, the ones whose rooms happened to face the sun used about a fifth less pain medication than those in dim rooms — same wound, same operation, and the main difference was which way the window faced

A hospital window facing the wrong direction can cost patients hundreds of dollars in extra painkillers—and days of needless suffering.

siliconcanals.com

How did a treaty agreed in 1987 and eventually ratified by every nation shrink a hole in the atmosphere the size of North America back toward 1980 levels?

The 1987 Montreal Protocol, the only UN treaty ratified by every country on Earth, eliminated 99 percent of ozone-depleting chemicals and quietly became the most successful climate treaty in history — by accident.

siliconcanals.com

Insider says report of Moonshot AI filing for Hong Kong IPO this month is untrue

A person familiar with the matter said that a report claiming Moonshot AI could submit a Hong Kong IPO application as early as this month is untrue. The report attributed the rebuttal to the source rather than to Moonshot AI itself, and did not indicate that the company had filed…

MiniMax H3 Open-Sourced: H3-Omni-Transformer With 33B Parameters Benchmarks Against Seedance 2.0 at One-Third API Price, Runs Locally on Two RTX 5090 Cards

MiniMax releases H3-Base weights on HuggingFace, with 33B dense single-stream Omni-Transformer, 16x spatial and 4x temporal compression VAE, and API pricing at one-third of Seedance 2.0.

‘A Rare Land-Grab Moment’: Menlo Ventures’ Matt Murphy On The Next Wave of AI And Putting $3B In New Capital To Work

We speak with Menlo Ventures' Matt Murphy about why AI is pushing the firm toward larger deals, what it has learned from its Anthropic relationship, and where he sees the next big opportunities.

news.crunchbase.com

My thanks to Agent Fone for sponsoring last week at DF. Agent Fone is a crazily ambitious new smartphone that doesn’t merely ship with a built-in AI assistant. Instead, the entire concept is that it enables you to create custom software, right on the phone itself. Ideas for new a…

Samsung bans smart TV apps that share users’ internet connections with strangers

New security research offers a rare view inside residential proxy networks, which rely on apps that share a person's internet connection with someone else.

Trending

Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

Article URL: https://ankursethi.com/blog/prevent-cognitive-debt-by-manually-retyping-llm-generated-code/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49153374 Points: 260 # Comments: 218

ICE Collected Nearly 1M People's DNA Last Year–Including Young Children

Article URL: https://www.wired.com/story/ice-dna-collection-fbi-codis/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154237 Points: 213 # Comments: 87

Spotting Emacs in the Wild

Emacs is one of the big classic text editors, right up there next to vi. It’s famous for its interface and its ubiquity across the *nix world. It’s such a …read more

LLM Security Basics: The Full Threat Model

In this article, we try to build a map of the full attack surface that threatens an LLM’s security.

Critical CVE issued for hallucinated SQLite vulnerability

Article URL: https://research.jfrog.com/post/sqlite-critical-cves-or-llm-slops/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154332 Points: 525 # Comments: 172

research.jfrog.com

Don't be a meat proxy

Article URL: https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151933 Points: 1329 # Comments: 557

More German than many Germans

Article URL: https://mertbulan.com/more-german-than-many-germans/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151734 Points: 340 # Comments: 282

The 16K Display that Ate Las Vegas

You may have a 4K television. Perhaps you have even bought an 8K screen, despite the shortage of things worth watching in 8K. A 16K display is, today, a rarity. …read more

Get a Remote Terminal With One Binary, One URL, and Zero Config

Launch a single static binary executable, send someone a QR code or URL (or failing that, text a numerical code or shout it across a room), and they’ll get an …read more