Tech News

A 1994 Jeep Cherokee owner bypassed the vehicle’s lack of an OBD2 port and compatible scan tool by wiring a $3 Arduino to its engine computer. They then used Claude Code and Codex to reverse engineer the ECU, showing how AI coding assistants can help with legacy hardware hacking.

Kiri is a fast, free container runtime and Docker Desktop alternative for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Built as a small Rust daemon, it works with the Docker CLI and Compose and can run `docker run` in 22 ms on a Mac.

A Microsoft 365 outage on Friday prevented Phantasialand from receiving an alert that its pool chlorine levels were too high, leading to chlorine gas poisoning. Fifteen hotel guests were injured in the incident.

Protomaps is making self-hosted map tiles cheaper and easier. Its PMTiles format uses HTTP Range requests and can be deployed as a single file to a storage bucket, simplifying infrastructure.

Air traffic controllers are refuting Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s account of a ground stop, with a journalist saying none of the 60 controllers he spoke with accepted Duffy’s version. The pushback follows Duffy’s remarks at the White House.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has pushed to weaken chip-related rules that would affect Southeast Asian data centers, some of which are clients of his former firm. The rulemaking has raised concerns because it overlaps with his family’s business interests.

A Hacker News post claims Stripe closed a business after a single $1,500 invoice without asking for evidence, sparking debate over the company’s treatment of customers. Some commenters sympathize with the merchant and criticize Stripe’s support, while others argue the account was likely closed because the merchant failed to prevent card-testing and money-laundering risks on Stripe Connect.

United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket suffered an anomaly during its return-to-flight launch on Nov. 15, resulting in the loss of 40 Amazon internet satellites. The failure deals a setback to both ULA's launch program and Amazon's satellite broadband plans.

Old Bitly links in years-old tweets are being hijacked after being re-registered by third parties. Burger King and McDonald’s were not hacked; links in their 2011 tweets were replaced, and 57 of 97 Bitly links in old Trump tweets have similarly been swapped. The incidents highlight the risks of relying on recyclable short links.

This video explains how El Niño works and breaks down the 2026–27 winter outlook by region. It also explores what the changing weather pattern could mean for flying this winter.

A new browser-based tool lets you turn your handwriting into a font by writing each letter directly in the browser and downloading it as OTF or WOFF2 files. No account or upload is required, and your letters stay on your device.

A proposal argues that all code generated with AI assistance should be released as Open Source or under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. It calls for AI-generated code to remain freely available rather than becoming proprietary.

A new experiment shows that crows can process visual cues and make decisions about twice as fast as humans and monkeys. The findings suggest “birdbrain” is a misnomer, highlighting the impressive speed of crows’ visual decision-making.

Apple’s new MacBook Pro OLED display is visually impressive but reportedly causes discomfort for some users due to PWM flicker. The piece argues that a “better” display isn’t necessarily a more comfortable one, and that affected users’ experiences deserve attention.

As firmware becomes cheaper to write, the software a device ships with will be treated as just a first version. AI agents will gravitate toward hardware they can modify, pressuring manufacturers to make devices more open and hackable.

Joshua’s post “Emacs Is My Browser” explores using Emacs as a browser within a personal blog that also hosts notes, galleries, and lifestyle content. The description highlights the site’s fully conglomerated mix of posts rather than specific technical details.

A free cartoon WebGL flight simulator runs in the browser, letting players build a plane in the hangar, take off, and explore procedurally generated terrain. Players must land their aircraft in one piece, and the game was built with DAI Studio.

Some Apollo missions carried a grenade-launcher-like mortar as part of a seismic experiment, firing small grenades to generate controlled signals for studying the Moon’s interior. Reader discussion mixed jokes about a “haunted” Moon and Soviet survival guns with notes that lunar gravity and zero atmosphere would let grenades travel much farther than on Earth.

A London trial in Mercuria v Baltic Exchange has offered a rare glimpse into the high-risk, high-reward business of moving crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The witness statement of Mercuria freight trader Renaud Hauspy sheds light on the logistics and risks of trading through the strategically vital waterway.

A Boeing-Lockheed rocket failed mid-flight, destroying its payload of Amazon satellites. Commenters lamented the setback for space access and debated broader geopolitical stakes, including U.S. competition with China and potential risks to Taiwan.

A router outage in southern Arkansas disrupted air travel after a copper-to-fiber/TDM upgrade apparently went wrong, with discussion pointing to inadequate testing, rollback planning, or failover handling. Commenters say such failures are plausible through multiple operational mistakes and compare it to past router-change outages. The details remain unconfirmed, but the incident is being framed as a botched network migration with possible contractor and government IT oversight issues.

Readers discussed how modern engineering increasingly hides mathematics inside proprietary CAD/FEA tools, with key finite-element and meshing techniques locked up by companies and fragmented across academia, national labs, and struggling open-source projects. Some mourned the decline of hands-on mathematical knowledge, while others were cautiously optimistic that LLMs could make legacy code and research easier to use and help open-source ecosystems challenge the engineering software stack.

The article explains positional embeddings, which let LLMs encode where tokens appear in a sequence so attention can distinguish order and structure. It surveys common approaches—learned absolute embeddings, relative position schemes, and modern methods like rotary embeddings and ALiBi—while discussing tradeoffs around context length, extrapolation, and efficiency.

A new project maps thousands of conversations inside the language model Qwen to visualize how language takes shape within the system. The analysis offers a window into the internal conversational patterns that underlie model behavior.

Jensen Huang is discussing a comeback as Nvidia CEO with allies as technology supporters lobby the chipmaker’s board to reinstate him. He previously resigned following an affair with an alleged Chinese spy.

Pyrolog, an RPython-based Prolog implementation, marks 20 years since its first surviving commit into the PyPy repository on November 12, 2006. Development had already begun in spring 2006, according to the retrospective.

Internal data from Alpha’s $75,000-a-year AI school show that only 42% of students met its 2x learning goal in math and reading, with roughly half missing the math target. The figures come as 2,600 public school students now use the company’s software.

Clice v1.0 has been released as a stable modern C++ language server after reaching 1,000 commits and completing roughly four months of alpha testing with nightly builds. Extensive real-world testing across open-source projects helped fix bugs and stabilize every core feature for daily use. The release marks a major milestone for a project two and a half years in the making.

Arkanum analyzed 8,941 stock trades disclosed by U.S. House members between November 2024 and November 2026, comparing their performance with the S&P 500. The test measured returns both from each trade date and from the day the trade became public.

Eclipse Mosquitto is an open-source MQTT broker available on GitHub. Developers can contribute to the eclipse-mosquitto/mosquitto project by creating an account and participating in its development.