The Automated Daily - Hacker News Edition

Support The Automated Daily directly: 15 free episodes a day, 5 editions, 3 languages, about $4 a day to produce. A coffee keeps it going: theautomateddaily.com/support Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Invest Like the Pros with StockMVP - https://www.stock-mvp.com/?via=ron - KrispCall: Agentic Cloud Telephony - https://try.krispcall.com/tad - SurveyMonkey, Using AI to surface insights faster and reduce manual analysis time - https://get.surveymonkey.com/tad Today's topics: DeepMind AI Verifies Signal Protocol - Google DeepMind's AlphaProof Code used AI agents and the Lean theorem prover to formally verify security properties of the real Signal protocol implementation, producing millions of lines of open-sourced proofs. Anthropic Project Glasswing Under Scrutiny - VulnCheck's review of Anthropic's Project Glasswing finds tens of thousands of AI-reported vulnerabilities but few fixes and few exploited CVEs, raising questions about false positives and maintainer burden. AI Coding Tools and Fragile Codebases - An essay argues that heavy reliance on AI coding assistants creates shallow tests, complex abstractions, rushed code reviews and growing technical debt, making software quality and maintainability worse. Browser Vendors Guide AI Coding Agents - Modern Web Guidance, backed by Chrome, Edge, Firefox and MDN, gives AI coding agents up-to-date web platform best practices to replace legacy patterns with modern browser APIs. DisplayLink Patents Halt Linux Driver - Synaptics sent patent cease-and-desist demands to developer Mike Lothian over his reverse-engineered Rust DisplayLink driver Vino, forcing the open-source Linux dock support project offline. Verisign Reverses .name Domain Shutdown - Verisign dropped plans to terminate around 22,000 .name domains and email redirects after a long campaign by domain holders, preserving existing web identities and email forwarding. Val Town Winds Down, Open-Sources - Val Town is shutting down its cloud platform in stages, pausing billing, offering migration paths to Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify and Render, and planning to open-source the product in 2027. Local-First Resilient Home Automation - A developer explains building local-first smart home automation with Tasmota, MQTT, Node-RED and Raspberry Pi so the system keeps working when the internet or vendor cloud fails. Toyota Revives Scion With Kei Truck - Toyota relaunched Scion as an experimental sub-brand with the KEI-01, a tiny low-speed kei utility truck aimed at farms, warehouses and urban delivery fleets starting with a 2027 pilot. - Why Smart Homes Should Work Without the Internet - Verisign Reverses Plan to End Existing .name Domains - DeepMind Says AlphaProof Code Formally Verified Signal Protocol - AI Coding Tools Can Make Codebases Fragile - Toyota Revives Scion to Launch a Kei Truck in America - Synaptics Patent Threats Halt Linux DisplayLink Driver Work - VulnCheck Says Anthropic’s Project Glasswing Still Overpromises Results - Val Town Announces Wind-Down and Shutdown Timeline - Google Chrome Launches Modern Web Guidance for Coding Agents Episode Transcript DeepMind AI Verifies Signal Protocol Let's start with that headline. Google DeepMind says its new agentic system, AlphaProof Code, has formally verified key security properties of the real Signal protocol implementation, not just its theoretical design. That distinction matters: plenty of protocols look airtight on paper and then stumble in the code. Here, human experts wrote the formal specifications, a team of AI agents generated the proofs in the Lean proof language, and Lean itself checked every step. The effort took about four weeks and produced more than six million lines of proof, with humans reviewing only around one percent. As a sanity check, the team reintroduced two old, already-fixed Signal bugs into an isolated copy, and the system correctly showed that code was insecure. DeepMind is open-sourcing the artifacts and pitching the...

Support The Automated Daily directly: 15 free episodes a day, 5 editions, 3 languages, about $4 a day to produce. A coffee keeps it going: theautomateddaily.com/support Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Invest Like the Pros with StockMVP - https://www.stock-mvp.com/?via=ron - Discover the Future of AI Audio with ElevenLabs - https://try.elevenlabs.io/tad - Effortless AI design for presentations, websites, and more with Gamma - https://try.gamma.app/tad Today's topics: Jensen Huang apology and investigation - NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang published an internal apology admitting infidelity, while NVIDIA's board opened an independent investigation into national security concerns raised in news reports. Goldman Sachs restricts AI coding tools - Goldman Sachs limited Anthropic's Claude Code and GitHub AI coding tools to engineers, cutting off traders and bankers over risk, compliance, and client data concerns around agentic AI. Giant AI models on CPUs - The open-source llama-modchip project patches llama.cpp to run a 284B DeepSeek mixture-of-experts model in 64 GB of system RAM on CPUs, with no GPU required for local AI inference. Connected-car hack from license plate - Researchers Shubs and Sam Curry chained hardcoded credentials, an OAuth MFA bypass, and exposed admin tools to remotely unlock an automaker's connected cars starting from only a license plate. Outlook quietly enforces DMARC records - Microsoft Outlook.com, Hotmail, and Live began silently bouncing some email from domains without a DMARC record, making a simple p=none DMARC TXT record a new baseline for deliverability. Declarative Dragging wins UIST award - Declarative Dragging and the Dragology library let developers define drag-and-drop interfaces by allowed states rather than interaction code, earning Best Paper at UIST 2026. BenchUp open-source woodworking modeler - BenchUp is a free, open-source 3D modeling app for woodworking and furniture design, running in the browser or on desktop with local storage, Push/Pull modeling, and SketchUp import. Harvest price hike after acquisition - A freelancer reports Harvest's time-tracking and invoicing prices jumped tenfold after the Bending Spoons acquisition, with revenue fees and AI-handled support frustrating small businesses. Writing as a thinking tool - An essay argues that writing creates thinking, not just records it, warning that LLM-generated text can let people skip understanding, and offering tips for messy drafts and ruthless editing. - Goldman Sachs Restricts Claude Code to Engineers - Jensen Huang Issues Apology and Says NVIDIA Board Has Launched Investigation - Declarative Dragging Simplifies Interactive Drag-and-Drop Design - BenchUp Launches Free 3D Furniture Design App - llama-modchip Brings Large MoE Models to CPU-Only RAM - Outlook.com Quietly Rejects Mail From Domains Without DMARC - Researchers Chain Flaws to Remotely Unlock Connected Cars - Writing as a Thinking Tool - Harvest Faces Backlash After Price Hike and AI Support Shift Episode Transcript Jensen Huang apology and investigation First, NVIDIA. The company published an internal message from Jensen Huang, dated November 8th, in which he apologizes to his wife, children, employees, board, partners, and shareholders. Huang says he was unfaithful, takes full responsibility for the harm caused, and asks for privacy for his family. The more consequential line for the business world is this: NVIDIA's board has opened an independent investigation into national security concerns mentioned in news reports, and Huang says he'll cooperate fully. Personal matters aside, a board-level probe touching national security at the company powering most of the world's AI infrastructure is something investors and regulators will be watching closely. Goldman Sachs restricts AI coding tools Staying with AI and big institutions, Goldman Sachs has restricted Anthropic's Claude Code and Microsoft's GitHub coding tools to its engineers, cutting off...

Support The Automated Daily directly: 15 free episodes a day, 5 editions, 3 languages, about $4 a day to produce. A coffee keeps it going: theautomateddaily.com/support Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Invest Like the Pros with StockMVP - https://www.stock-mvp.com/?via=ron - Effortless AI design for presentations, websites, and more with Gamma - https://try.gamma.app/tad - Consensus: AI for Research. Get a free month - https://get.consensus.app/automated_daily Today's topics: Apple's hidden predictive text greylist - A researcher found an Apple grey list of more than 100,000 words and phrases that iPhone predictive text and swipe typing won't autocomplete, including political terms, which raises concerns about quiet censorship. Apple Personal Knowledge Graph privacy - Researchers looked into Apple's Personal Knowledge Graph on macOS. This on-device SQLite triple store infers relationships, habits and locations from Messages, Photos, Mail and Calendar, and it has little public documentation. Claude Code secrets leak update - Apiiro found 2,539 real secrets in 1,994 public GitHub repos. They leaked through Claude Code's settings.local.json and other AI coding agent files, and common secret scanners missed many of them. Developer switches from Claude Code to Pi - A developer is leaving Anthropic's Claude Code for the Pi coding agent. They cite instability, frequent changes to system prompts, VS Code integration problems, and the CLAUDE.md versus AGENTS.md confusion. MaxxBench tests coding agent adaptability - MaxxBench is a new benchmark that changes familiar coding tasks in small ways. Frontier AI coding agents often chase imagined hidden tests instead of following the prompt, and the results expose reliability gaps that DeepSWE scores hide. Microsoft shuts down AI Frontiers - John Langford says Microsoft AI Frontiers was shut down after it moved into Microsoft AI. He argues the company now prefers scaling over fundamental research, and he says internships are over. Discord's Rust desktop client test - Discord is testing a Windows desktop app built in Rust with the GPUI framework. In early tests it starts faster and uses about 70% less RAM than the Electron client, which adds to the debate over Electron. Need for Speed Underground 2 in browser - Underground 2 Revived is a fan project that recompiles Need for Speed: Underground 2 to run in Chrome and Firefox. It adds 120 fps, widescreen, controller and wheel support, and online multiplayer, with no EA affiliation. Ten-dollar USB modem homelab server - A hobbyist turned a $10 OpenStick USB modem into a low-power Debian homelab server. It runs AdGuard Home, Cloudflare Tunnel, Beszel, Gatus and other lightweight self-hosted services. Honeypot mimics supermarket refrigeration controllers - coldframe is an open-source Python honeypot that imitates Danfoss and Dixell supermarket refrigeration controllers. It logs attacker logins and tags known exploits so defenders can study attacks on critical infrastructure. - Underground 2 Revived Brings NFS Underground 2 to the Browser - Inside Apple’s Personal Knowledge Graph - What Runs on a $10 OpenStick Homelab - Apple’s Hidden iPhone Predictive Text Blacklist - John Langford Says Microsoft’s AI Frontiers Is Over - Claude Code Settings Files Are Leaking Secrets to GitHub - Why the Author Switched from Claude Code to Pi - Discord’s New Rust Client Shows How Much Faster Windows Apps Can Be - MaxxBench Shows Frontier Coding Agents Struggle to Adapt to Small Task Changes - coldframe Honeypot Mimics Refrigeration Controllers Episode Transcript Apple's hidden predictive text greylist First, Apple. The Guardian reports that a researcher found a hidden grey list of more than 100,000 words and phrases that iPhone predictive text will not complete. Some entries are what you'd expect, like explicit sexual and drug terms. Others are politically charged phrases and names of people. Swipe typing is hit hardest: it sometimes...

Support The Automated Daily directly: 15 free episodes a day, 5 editions, 3 languages, about $4 a day to produce. A coffee keeps it going: theautomateddaily.com/support Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Invest Like the Pros with StockMVP - https://www.stock-mvp.com/?via=ron - Discover the Future of AI Audio with ElevenLabs - https://try.elevenlabs.io/tad - KrispCall: Agentic Cloud Telephony - https://try.krispcall.com/tad Today's topics: AI Accelerating Anthropic's AI Research - Ajeya Cotra argues a public METR report shows Anthropic has crossed its own threshold for dramatically accelerated AI progress, with AI roughly doubling the pace of AI research. She warns that AI safety, security, and alignment practices are not ready for a fast feedback loop. Google Gemini Omni Video Model - Google released Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash, a cheaper and faster AI video generation model with 15-second clips, multi-turn conversational editing, and better character consistency. It is available through the Gemini API and Google Cloud, with SynthID watermarking. Tesla Ending Cybertruck Production - Elon Musk says Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production at its Texas Gigafactory around mid-2027 after weak sales. The move shifts focus to the Cybercab robotaxi and Tesla's autonomous driving and AI strategy. FAA Retiring Air Traffic Floppies - The Federal Aviation Administration plans to phase out floppy disks in air traffic control systems by the end of 2028. The upgrade covers more than 400 facilities as part of a wider FAA modernization push for aviation safety. Firecracker MicroVM Escape to Root - A security researcher detailed a Firecracker virtual machine escape that achieved root code execution on the host from a guest VM. The write-up shows how broken memory isolation can defeat microVM sandboxing, though the jailer was not used in the test. Asahi Linux Progress and GPL Switch - Asahi Linux reports M3 Macs are now generally supported, the M3 GPU has rendered its first triangle, and Thunderbolt has landed downstream. The Apple Silicon Linux project is relicensing its repositories to GPLv2-or-later after bad-faith code reuse. libghostty-vt Reaches Stable 1.0 - Mitchell Hashimoto released libghostty-vt 1.0, declaring the Ghostty terminal emulator library and its C ABI stable. Already used by JetBrains IDEs, OrbStack, Turborepo, and others, it aims to make terminal development reusable and less fragmented. UEFI Bare-Metal Programming Tutorials - A tutorial series guides experienced Linux developers through bare-metal UEFI programming on PCs. It covers toolchains, compiling and linking, bootable disks, and file handling with the Simple File Protocol. - Tesla Plans to End Cybertruck Production After Weak Sales - Libghostty 1.0 Released - Hightouch Finds Hybrid LLM Judges Cut Identity-Resolution Costs - FAA to Retire Floppy Disks in Air Traffic Control by 2028 - Google launches Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash for longer, cheaper video generation - METR Report Suggests AI Is Speeding Up AI Research - Firecracker VM Escape Grants Root Code Execution on Host - Series Index: Bare-Metal Programming with UEFI - Asahi Linux Reports Major Progress on Apple Silicon Support - devvm Promises Sandboxed VMs for Safer Agent-Based Coding Episode Transcript AI Accelerating Anthropic's AI Research Let's start with that hook. Ajeya Cotra, a well-known voice in AI forecasting, has written that a new public report from the evaluation group METR suggests Anthropic has already crossed its own internal threshold for what it calls dramatically accelerated progress due to AI. In plain terms, AI appears to be making AI research move about twice as fast as before, and mostly because models are automating chunks of research and engineering, not simply because of more compute or more staff. Cotra takes it a step further: if overall progress has doubled, the speedup in individual researchers' productive work could be much bigger, possibly around ten times. Her...

Support The Automated Daily directly: 15 free episodes a day, 5 editions, 3 languages, about $4 a day to produce. A coffee keeps it going: theautomateddaily.com/support Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - KrispCall: Agentic Cloud Telephony - https://try.krispcall.com/tad - Invest Like the Pros with StockMVP - https://www.stock-mvp.com/?via=ron - Lindy is your ultimate AI assistant that proactively manages your inbox - https://try.lindy.ai/tad Today's topics: OpenSSH musl passwordless login flaw - A security flaw in OpenSSH on musl-based Linux systems like Alpine and OpenWrt let locked or key-only accounts accept very long passwords due to musl crypt() behavior. OpenSSH 10.6p2 fixes it, and disabling password authentication is advised until patched. Claude Code email in User-Agent - A bug report claimed Anthropic's Claude Code leaked a user's email address in the User-Agent header during web searches, sparking AI privacy concerns. A contributor pointed to a built-in privacy plugin that blocks the behavior by default in newer versions. Meta deepfake scam ads controversy - Mark Cuban accuses Facebook of knowingly running AI deepfake scam ads using his likeness, citing a Reuters report on internal Meta documents linking billions in ad revenue to scams. Meta disputes the framing and says it removes large volumes of fraudulent ads. Why tech personalization still fails - An essay argues that tech companies collect massive user data yet deliver clumsy personalization, from ads for already-bought products to wrong-language interfaces. It highlights the gap between pervasive surveillance and genuinely useful recommendations. Archiving YouTube videos at home - A blogger makes the case for downloading and archiving favorite YouTube videos, since online content can vanish. The setup uses yt-dlp, ytdl-sub, Jellyfin, a NAS, and Tdarr for re-encoding to save storage. AI revives the Hackintosh scene - AI-assisted development is breathing new life into Hackintosh and iOS porting projects after Apple's move to ARM. Examples include macOS on a Snapdragon laptop, an ARM single-board computer, and iOS on a Nintendo Switch OLED. BUI: Blender UI as library - BUI is an open-source project extracting Blender's user interface into a standalone native UI library with a small C core. It offers bindings for Python, Rust, JavaScript/React, C++, and Dear ImGui for fast, efficient interfaces. Window Sweaters cozy macOS borders - Window Sweaters is an open-source macOS menu-bar app that wraps app windows in knitted-looking borders with customizable patterns and per-app colorways. It uses private window APIs and is licensed under GPL-3.0. - OpenSSH Bug Lets Long Passwords Bypass Locked Accounts on Musl Systems - Claude Code Bug Report Flags User-Agent Privacy Leak - Motorola Signature 27 Debuts as a New Ultra-Premium Flagship - Tech Companies Track Users, But Still Miss the Obvious - Mark Cuban Accuses Facebook of Tolerating AI Deepfake Scam Ads - Window Sweaters Brings Knitted Window Borders to macOS - Why You Should Download and Archive Your Favorite YouTube Videos - Hackintosh Gets a New Lease on Life with AI - BUI: Blender UI Turned Into a Cross-Language Library Episode Transcript OpenSSH musl passwordless login flaw First, that login flaw. On Linux systems built on the musl C library, think Alpine, OpenWrt, Buildroot and Yocto, OpenSSH could let certain password-disabled accounts accept a password. The cause is an awkward handshake between two pieces of software. When musl's password hashing gives up on a very long input, it returns a single asterisk. And an asterisk is exactly what many systems put in the password field to mean 'no password allowed.' So the failure output and the 'locked' marker matched. The result: on systems without PAM, a key-only or locked account could accept a password somewhere between roughly 257 and 1024 characters. The write-up traces the chain of reasonable-looking design choices that made this...

Support The Automated Daily directly: 15 free episodes a day, 5 editions, 3 languages, about $4 a day to produce. A coffee keeps it going: theautomateddaily.com/support Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Prezi: Create AI presentations fast - https://try.prezi.com/automated_daily - Discover the Future of AI Audio with ElevenLabs - https://try.elevenlabs.io/tad - Effortless AI design for presentations, websites, and more with Gamma - https://try.gamma.app/tad Today's topics: AI finds Linux kernel exploits - OpenAI built an autonomous AI security pipeline that found, reproduced, exploited and patched Linux kernel vulnerabilities. One run produced 948 working privilege escalation exploits for about $1.2 million in API costs. PHP2Shell and AI-driven security - IEEE Spectrum says the patched PHP2Shell vulnerability shows how AI tools turn old bugs into code execution exploits. The article argues that AI is exposing technical debt in legacy software and calls for AI-assisted auditing and formal verification. Kimi K3.1 Pro open-weight model - Moonshot AI released Kimi K3.1 Pro, an open-weight multimodal mixture-of-experts model with a 1-million-token context window. It targets agentic coding, long-context reasoning and image understanding. OpenAI Images 2.6 adds GIFs - OpenAI's Images 2.6 update for ChatGPT, Codex and the API makes image generation faster and editing more consistent. It also adds GIF animation and SVG export. Go 1.27 ships JSON v2 - Go 1.27 adds the encoding/json/v2 and jsontext standard library packages. They fix long-standing correctness and security problems and add true streaming JSON performance. Guerrilla bike lanes in San Francisco - Anonymous activists installed protected bike lane posts near Golden Gate Park after two cyclists were killed. San Francisco now plans to make the street safety changes official, a rare win for tactical urbanism. Why LEDs stopped attracting insects - LED bulbs attract far fewer insects than incandescent lights because they emit little ultraviolet light. That changes how insects navigate, affects predators like geckos and may reduce the spread of some diseases. - PHP2Shell Shows How AI Is Reshaping Cybersecurity - Moonshot AI Releases Kimi K3.1 Pro Multimodal Agentic Model - OpenAI Details Autonomous Linux Vulnerability Discovery Pipeline - Go Releases New JSON API in the Standard Library - OpenAI Launches Images 2.6 With Faster Editing and GIFs - San Francisco Turns Guerrilla Bike Lanes Permanent - Ricursive Unveils Ripple-65B Preview Open-Weight AI Model - Why Insects Swarm Less Around LED Lights Episode Transcript AI finds Linux kernel exploits Let's start with that headline. OpenAI says it has built an autonomous security research pipeline that discovers, validates, exploits and even patches Linux kernel vulnerabilities, all inside a controlled environment. In a single campaign, the system flagged more than two thousand candidate issues and reproduced most of them. It produced 948 working local privilege escalation exploits, meaning an unprivileged user could become root. The bill was roughly 1.2 million dollars in API credits. Human researchers reviewed the findings before passing them to kernel maintainers, and the system also suggested candidate fixes. OpenAI's main argument is that finding bugs is no longer the hard part. The real bottlenecks are now deciding which bugs matter most, confirming them and getting patches shipped. The company also says the work turned up new Linux exploitation techniques, which makes a strong case for defense in depth and faster hardening. PHP2Shell and AI-driven security That ties directly into a story we've been following. IEEE Spectrum now argues that the PHP2Shell vulnerability is an early warning of how AI is changing cybersecurity. The new detail is how the flaw was found. For years it looked like a harmless out-of-memory crash, until researchers used AI tools to work out how to turn it into arbitrary code...

Support The Automated Daily directly: 15 free episodes a day, 5 editions, 3 languages, about $4 a day to produce. A coffee keeps it going: theautomateddaily.com/support Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - SurveyMonkey, Using AI to surface insights faster and reduce manual analysis time - https://get.surveymonkey.com/tad - Consensus: AI for Research. Get a free month - https://get.consensus.app/automated_daily - Prezi: Create AI presentations fast - https://try.prezi.com/automated_daily Today's topics: Postman silently installs AI agent plugins - An issue report alleges Postman on macOS auto-installed Codex and Claude Code plugins, changed global agent configs, and self-trusted startup hooks without consent. The case raises developer tool security, MCP, and trust-boundary concerns. Rooting a Renault to fix clock - A Renault Latitude owner reverse engineered a TomTom Carminat LIVE head unit, chaining a path traversal and Linux core_pattern trick into root access just to fix daylight saving time. The hack exposes weak embedded and car infotainment security. LLMs reading neural network weights - Simon Willison tested Qwen running locally to see whether an LLM can identify reinforcement learning agents for Pac-Man, Pong, and Breakout from raw weights alone. Results impressed, but he cautions against hype about weight-space programming replacing source code. C++26 fails ISO DIS vote - The C++26 draft failed the ISO DIS vote for the first time in C++ history, mainly over disagreement about Contracts. Options include revising, revoting, a technical specification, or cancellation, leaving C++26 and C++29 uncertain. The Internals of PostgreSQL updated - Hironobu Suzuki's The Internals of PostgreSQL now covers PostgreSQL 19 beta, with new material on asynchronous I/O and logical replication. It is a free deep resource on WAL, vacuum, MVCC, and replication. Safari Adaptive Dark Mode beta - Apple's WebKit team introduced Adaptive Dark Mode in Safari 27.3 beta, automatically converting light websites to dark themes while preserving contrast and readability. Developers are still encouraged to use color-scheme and prefers-color-scheme. Fujifilm quintuples magnetic tape production - Fujifilm will invest about 10 billion yen to expand LTO magnetic tape production fivefold, driven by generative AI data archiving demand. Tape remains cheap, offline, and a strong defense against ransomware. - Postman Issue Alleges Silent Plugin Installation and Hook Trust Changes - Hacking a Renault Navigation Unit to Fix the Car Clock - Qwen 3.8 27B Can Interpret Model Weights on a Laptop - Neufangled Unveils Stringman, a Room-Scale Cable Robot - Fujifilm plans fivefold tape production boost amid AI archiving demand - WebKit Adds Adaptive Dark Mode to Safari 27.3 Beta - C++26 DIS Vote Fails Over Contracts, Leaving C++ Future Uncertain - The Internals of PostgreSQL Homepage and Update Log Episode Transcript Postman silently installs AI agent plugins Let's start with a trust problem in developer tooling. An issue report alleges that simply opening Postman on macOS automatically installed plugins for Codex and Claude Code, rewrote global agent configurations, and added startup hooks that steered general API-related tasks toward Postman, all without an explicit opt-in. According to the reporter, Postman's own logs show an automatic existing-user upgrade doing the installs, after which the installer tried to approve its own hook inside Codex. They also say a remote MCP connection was switched on even though authentication wasn't working, and that a command-line binary landed on the system too. The core complaint is about boundaries: one application shouldn't quietly reconfigure other tools or make itself the default for unrelated work. The reporter is asking Postman to stop the automatic installs, drop the self-approval, clarify consent, and offer a clean rollback. As AI agents gain more power over our machines, who gets to plug into them...

Support The Automated Daily directly: 15 free episodes a day, 5 editions, 3 languages, about $4 a day to produce. A coffee keeps it going: theautomateddaily.com/support Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - KrispCall: Agentic Cloud Telephony - https://try.krispcall.com/tad - Effortless AI design for presentations, websites, and more with Gamma - https://try.gamma.app/tad - Invest Like the Pros with StockMVP - https://www.stock-mvp.com/?via=ron Today's topics: AI Edits Neural Network Weights Directly - Early research on Weight-Space Programming reports that GPT-6 Astra can read raw neural network weights, infer what a model was trained to do, fix broken control policies, and write game-playing networks that outperform PPO baselines. The work could open new paths for interpretability, model editing, and automated model design. Cognitive Surrender to AI Coding Agents - An essay warns that over-reliance on AI agents can lead developers to cognitive surrender, building technical debt and automation bias. It recommends a personal vibe limit, staying in the loop, observability, and simpler modular software design. Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era - A new essay in the ongoing debate on AI and mathematics argues for egoless mathematics, where truth, understanding, and discovery matter more than authorship, rankings, or who produces the proof. Archive Websites Before They Vanish - A web archivist urges individuals to save copies of websites they care about using accessible tools and the WARC format, since even long-lived sites and domains can disappear or be repurposed without warning. Hacker News Front Page Highlights - The November 3, 2026 Hacker News front page features Andrej Karpathy's HackerTube video library, criticism of Ubuntu's handling of a security patch delay, and growing AI influence on PostgreSQL development. NIST Cybersecurity Guide for Solopreneurs - NIST published a plain-language cybersecurity guide for solopreneurs, covering backups, software updates, and default passwords, with worksheets and use cases for more than 28 million one-person US businesses. DiscImageStudio Burns Pictures onto Discs - DiscImageStudio is an open-source GPL-3.0 tool that turns images into disc data so burned CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs display visible patterns, with previews, dithering, calibration, and ISO export. Baby Names Switching Between Genders - An analysis of US Social Security baby-name data from 1936 to 2025 finds 42 names shifted toward girls and just 12 toward boys, with girls' naming trends driving most gender switches. - LLMs Learn to Read and Edit Neural Network Weights - Why You Should Back Up Websites You Love - US Baby Names That Switched Between Boys and Girls - Hacker Times November 3, 2026 Edition Highlights AI, Security, and Software News - DiscImageStudio: Optical Disc Image Design and Burning Tool - NIST Releases Cybersecurity Guide for Solopreneurs - Resisting Cognitive Surrender - Egoless Mathematics and AI - Momentic: AI Testing Platform for Web and Mobile Episode Transcript AI Edits Neural Network Weights Directly Our lead story is a paper on what its authors call Weight-Space Programming. Instead of training a model with gradients and feedback, a frontier language model reads and edits the weights directly. The researchers report that GPT-6 Astra can often tell what a network was built for just by inspecting its parameters. It can recognize which Atari-style game a policy plays, what a diffusion model was trained to generate, and even which language a small transformer learned. It reportedly diagnosed a broken control policy and repaired it by changing only a small fraction of weights, with no access to the environment. The boldest claim is that Astra wrote small game-playing networks from scratch that beat PPO-trained baselines. These are early results and deserve some skepticism, but if they hold up, LLMs could move beyond writing code and prompts into designing and fixing neural...

Support The Automated Daily directly: 15 free episodes a day, 5 editions, 3 languages, about $4 a day to produce. A coffee keeps it going: theautomateddaily.com/support Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Lindy is your ultimate AI assistant that proactively manages your inbox - https://try.lindy.ai/tad - SurveyMonkey, Using AI to surface insights faster and reduce manual analysis time - https://get.surveymonkey.com/tad - Consensus: AI for Research. Get a free month - https://get.consensus.app/automated_daily Today's topics: Lenovo fingerprint drive skips encryption - A security researcher found Lenovo's ThinkPlus FU100 fingerprint USB drive stores data unencrypted on a plain SD card. The fingerprint sensor only acts as a switch, and related secure USB products had backdoor accounts and hardcoded keys. PostgreSQL 19 delayed by AI-found bugs - The PostgreSQL 19 release is slipping toward November after late feature reverts. A surge in LLM-assisted bug reports has sharply increased back-patched fixes and stretched maintainer time. Benchmarking JavaScript frameworks for AI agents - Nolan Lawson benchmarked coding agents building the same app across JavaScript frameworks. Lighter options like Hono with htmx and Astro were cheaper and faster than SvelteKit, Lit, and Angular, and code size now drives token costs. Terence Tao on AI and mathematics - Terence Tao argues AI has fundamentally changed mathematics as AI-assisted proofs become easier. He says mathematicians should value problem selection, explanation, and research direction, and should reform hiring, journals, and graduate training. OccupySaaS clean-room open-source rebuilds - OccupySaaS is a protest-style open-source movement in which laid-off engineers build clean-room, drop-in replacements for SaaS products. Its first releases are Apache-2.0 alternatives compatible with Auth0 and Salesforce. OmniDiff content-aware open-source diffing - OmniDiff is an open-source diff tool that compares code, images, PDFs, archives, and binary files with type-aware methods. It integrates with Git and Jujutsu and publishes transparent benchmark data. Hacker Books tracks HN reading favorites - Hacker Books ranks the books most mentioned and recommended in Hacker News comments. Recurring favorites include Gödel, Escher, Bach, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and The Mythical Man-Month. Outcrop brings geologic maps to AR - Outcrop is an offline geology app that overlays geologic maps on your phone's camera view. It draws on Macrostrat, USGS, and Paleobiology Database data to show rock ages, faults, and fossils. - Hacker Books Ranks Most-Mentioned Books from Hacker News - PostgreSQL 19 Delayed as AI Finds More Bugs - Lenovo Fingerprint USB Drive Found to Be Unencrypted - Benchmarking the AI Cost of JavaScript Frameworks - OccupySaaS Launches Clean-Room Open-Source Replacements for SaaS - Terry Tao Guest Post Argues AI Is Reshaping Mathematics - OmniDiff Launches as a Fast, Content-Aware Diff Tool - Outcrop Brings Geologic Maps Into Augmented Reality Episode Transcript Lenovo fingerprint drive skips encryption Let's begin with that hardware story. A security researcher took apart Lenovo's ThinkPlus FU100, a USB drive sold with fingerprint protection, and found that it doesn't encrypt anything. The sensor only enables the USB connection. The storage inside is a plain SD card, so anyone who has the device in hand can pull the card and read the data. The researcher also turned up more serious flaws in other supposedly secure USB products, including backdoor accounts and hardcoded keys. Lenovo had already shipped fixes for several related devices, but some of those fixes require customers to contact support or send hardware back. The lesson is an old one. A security claim on the box tells you nothing about how the device actually works. PostgreSQL 19 delayed by AI-found bugs Next, the story of how AI is reshaping software quality. PostgreSQL 19 looks set to arrive later than...

Support The Automated Daily directly: 15 free episodes a day, 5 editions, 3 languages, about $4 a day to produce. A coffee keeps it going: theautomateddaily.com/support Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Lindy is your ultimate AI assistant that proactively manages your inbox - https://try.lindy.ai/tad - Discover the Future of AI Audio with ElevenLabs - https://try.elevenlabs.io/tad - KrispCall: Agentic Cloud Telephony - https://try.krispcall.com/tad Today's topics: Karpathy builds HackerTube with Claude - Andrej Karpathy used Claude Opus 5.5 to build HackerTube, a YouTube-style site of Hacker News-recommended videos, in about two hours. It shows how AI coding agents can rapidly ship niche products. ChatGPT and Codex share usage limits - OpenAI will share usage allowances across ChatGPT and Codex for Plus, Pro, and Business plans starting in December. Usage is measured in tokens, and instant chat does not count against the limit. ChatGPT shared-link account takeover bug - Researchers at Parameter found a ChatGPT vulnerability that allowed account takeover through a shared conversation link by chaining HTML Preview, MathLive, and a CSP bypass. OpenAI fixed it and paid a $5,000 bug bounty. Critical Linux TCP kernel vulnerability - CVE-2026-98432 is a critical remote use-after-free in the Linux IPv4 TCP handshake affecting kernels back to 4.4. Multipath TCP listeners, including Go defaults, raise the risk, and some Ubuntu and RHEL kernels were still unpatched. Jepsen exposes ParticleDB correctness failures - Jepsen testing of ParticleDB found 96 issues, including data loss, lost updates, and corruption, despite Full ACID claims. Many failures occurred on a single healthy node without injected faults. Why GROUP BY queries stall on memory - A database performance deep dive shows that hash-based GROUP BY aggregation is often limited by memory latency rather than CPU. Radix partitioning cut DRAM traffic and cache misses, making queries faster despite extra work. Four-neuron sparks show emergent behavior - An interactive neuroscience explainer builds tiny creatures called sparks from just a few neurons. Changing wiring and connection strengths produces attraction, fear, aggression, and love-like behavior. Italian farmer revives ancient wheat - Italian farmer Claudio Grossi planted forgotten attic seeds and revived poulard wheat, an ancient Triticum turgidum variety. Its hardiness, minerals, and low-input needs make heritage grains relevant amid climate change. Norway's architectural scenic route toilets - Norway's National Tourist Routes feature public toilets designed by leading architects at scenic spots like Stegastein and Ureddplassen, turning basic infrastructure into tourist attractions. - Karpathy Builds “HackerTube” as an AI-Powered YouTube Alternative - Critical Linux TCP Use-After-Free Exposes Servers to Remote Attack - Italian Farmer’s Attic Seeds Turn Out to Be Ancient Miracle Wheat - Researchers Say ChatGPT Bug Enabled Account Takeover via Shared Link - Jepsen Finds Serious Correctness and Durability Bugs in ParticleDB - Memdoor team-solve workflow reproduces a multi-agent coding benchmark - How a Tiny Brain Creates Complex Behavior - Why Cache-Friendly Partitioning Speeds Up GROUP BY - Norway’s Scenic Routes Feature World-Famous Designer Toilets - OpenAI to Share ChatGPT and Codex Usage Limits Across Plans Episode Transcript Karpathy builds HackerTube with Claude Let's start with Andrej Karpathy, who got fed up with YouTube's increasingly noisy, clickbait-driven recommendations and decided to build his own alternative. He asked Claude Opus 5.5 to make a YouTube-style site fed entirely by videos people have recommended on Hacker News. About two hours later, he had HackerTube. The system combed through nearly two decades of HN comments, pulled out video recommendations, and organized more than six thousand videos into roughly 150 topics. It offers recommendations without accounts and lets anyone...