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Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters
Using GPT-6 and Opus 5.5 to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,697 posts.
482
LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators
LA Metro’s design specifications state that its escalators go 90 feet per minute, slower than nearly everything we found.
483
Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
the question everyone is asking
484
GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks
On the 31st August I got an email from a customer, telling me that they had found an imitation of my data wrangling software on Github. I’m not linking to it, but here is a screenshot: It is …
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Dynamic Abliteration: Non-Destructive Refusal Suppression via Engram Steering
Thoughts on technology, life and everything else.
487
Parsing Expression Grammar vs. Regexes: Building Org Parser in Lisp, Export HTML
Converting Org to HTML with (ice-9 peg) in Guile: OrgWebAlchemy
488
Hackers influence ChatGPT and Gemini to direct users to scam centers
Think you can trust AI to give you correct answer? Think again.
489
Two-tier encryption in the UK
Alice and Bill have identical Apple devices. Only one gets Apple’s strongest iCloud protection.
490
The Lost Atomic Update on Loongson CPU
杰哥的{教学，运维，编程，调板子}小笔记
491
Feds Target AI Critics as "Foreign Agents"
Trump admin sees China behind opposition to AI data centers
492
Claude's Load-Bearing Seams
Now that I have the full picture, the load-bearing seams are much clearer. They are not merely incidental details around the edges. They materially change how the entire situation needs to be understood, and that is the smoking gun I should have recognized earlier.Claude's load-bearing seams
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Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock
Colin's things that might be useful or interesting2026548 points116 commentsLife, Learning & Writing details
I got a message from a friend today which read along the lines of "I know we were going to meet in Edinburgh today, but do you fancy meeting in Portobello instead and trying to fix the clock in the old police station with me?"
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Why is Hacker News like that?
Hacker News (aka HN) is a link aggregator where “hackers” 1 gather to discuss technology, politics, and anything which “good hackers would find interesting”. HN is a means by which its host, prominent startup incubator Y Combinator, projects soft power, promotes startups it funds, and feeds people with ideas into its…
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The GitHub wiki is an anti-pattern (2022)
Using the wiki on GitHub makes life more difficult for your users, and you as a maintainer. Use the `/docs` folder and GitHub Pages instead and keep your docs in sync with code
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I don't want the details
Why reasonable explanations are one of the easiest ways to avoid changing anything.
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Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]
Claude Code 2.1.277 added AGENTS.md support, but the loader sits behind a remote feature flag. With telemetry or nonessential traffic turned off, a local AGENTS.md is skipped without a warning. This is what I measured and the one-line CLAUDE.md I use instead.
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The darker side of being a doctor
I’m a surgeon. I’d like to think that I’m resilient and well adjusted, having gone through medical school and rigorous surgical training. I’ve been a doctor for 13 years and much of that period has been spent training to be as good a surgeon as I could ever be. I have great family support, a physician wife who…
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Tokens too cheap to meter
tokens are going to be as cheap as electricity within the decade
500
The current balance of power in open models
The expanded form of a testimony I prepared for Congress.
501
Enjoy Every Sandwich
this captivating subtitle I wrote really makes you want to read it, doesn’t it?!?
502
My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps
My weird hobby lately is just wandering around Street View and zooming in on random stuff. Today I found a 350Z that shows up parked in the same Tokyo spot in every capture since 2009.
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Writing Rust code that's fast by asking agents to make the code faster
c’mon, try doing a breakthrough
504
I asked Meta’s Muse for its filesystem and it sent me 6.8GB
I asked Muse to archive the files it could see and send them to my Google Drive. It did.
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RAM: the forgotten history (2024)
We owe computers not to Charles Babbage, but to the invention of electronically-controlled working memory.
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OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005
On 15 September 2026, Carter Leffen contacted me to request validation of a break of the German Army Enigma message MVUEH of 10 July 1941. The message, which was sent by a radio station with the tactical callsign 2ny, was received by the radio station of the SS-Totenkopf Quartiermeister, Ib. Ib received the message at…
507
AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You
Certainly the industry is transforming, however, the people and organizations falling into the trap of no longer reading and writing code only do so at their peril.
508
The mystery animal on an ancient god's head
Several Egyptian gods are depicted with animal heads. Horus has a falcon head, Anubis has a jackal head, Thoth has an ibis head (except when he’s a baboon), and Set has…uhh, what is that, exactly? …
509
I said no and Apple said yes
The one where Apple decides consent doesn’t matter anymore.
510
Can gzip be a language model?
A while back I wrote about language modeling without neural networks, where I generated Shakespeare with an unbounded n-gram model: no weights, no training, …