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GitHub breaches and AI breakthroughs dominate tech news

20 May 2026
An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

An OpenAI model has solved the 80-year-old unit distance problem, disproving a central conjecture in discrete geometry. This groundbreaking achievement marks a significant milestone in the rapidly advancing field of AI-driven mathematics.

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GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension
GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension

GitHub confirmed a security breach affecting approximately 3,800 of its internal repositories. The compromise occurred after a company employee installed a malicious Visual Studio Code extension.

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Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE
Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE

Meta has blocked human rights organizations, including the Saudi-focused ALQST, from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The social media company's restrictions prevent these independent grassroots groups from promoting and protecting human rights in the region. This action has raised significant concerns about digital censorship and the suppression of independent advocacy on major tech platforms.

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Saying goodbye to asm.js
Saying goodbye to asm.js

Mozilla is discontinuing asm.js by disabling its specific optimizations within the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. This move reflects the broader industry's transition to WebAssembly as the modern standard for delivering high-performance web applications. Developers relying on asm.js should begin migrating their codebases to WebAssembly to maintain optimal execution speeds in future browser updates.

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Show HN: Forge – Guardrails take an 8B model from 53% to 99% on agentic tasks
Show HN: Forge – Guardrails take an 8B model from 53% to 99% on agentic tasks

Forge is a new Python framework that enables self-hosted large language model tool-calling and multi-step agentic workflows. By implementing specialized guardrails, the project boosts the performance of an 8B model on agentic tasks from 53% to 99%.

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Flipper One Tech Specs

The official technical specifications and comprehensive documentation for the Flipper One have been published. This release provides developers and hardware enthusiasts with detailed insights into the device's underlying architecture. Users can now access the full documentation to explore its complete feature set and integration options.

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Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back
Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back

A BBC investigation recently revealed that AI chatbots can be easily manipulated to generate misinformation through simple prompts. Google and other major AI companies are now actively working to patch these vulnerabilities and secure their models.

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How fast is N tokens per second really?

Recent reader discussions surrounding LLM output speeds explore how token generation rates impact both AI reasoning and human readability. While slow speeds hinder an AI agent's complex thinking, extremely fast outputs quickly overwhelm human readers. Ultimately, ultra-fast generation rates are impractical for human consumption because the physiological limits of visual processing cap comfortable reading speeds at around 20 to 30 tokens per second.

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Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier
Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier

Qwen Studio is pushing the agent frontier forward with the release of Qwen3.7-Max, introducing a highly comprehensive suite of multimodal capabilities. The platform supports a vast array of functionalities, including chatbot interactions, document processing, image and video understanding, and image generation. By integrating web search, tool utilization, and artifact creation, it offers a robust environment for complex AI workflows.

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GitHub is investigating unauthorized access to their internal repositories
GitHub is investigating unauthorized access to their internal repositories

GitHub is investigating unauthorized access to its internal repositories. The company stated there is currently no evidence indicating that customer data or external repositories were compromised by the breach.

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SpaceX S-1

A newly disclosed SpaceX S-1 filing reveals a $1.25 billion per month cloud services agreement with Anthropic to provide compute capacity across its COLOSSUS data centers. Income from this AI infrastructure contract has reportedly surpassed Starlink to become the company's largest revenue stream.

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FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive
FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive has compiled a comprehensive index preserving the historical content of the data journalism website FiveThirtyEight. This extensive digital collection ensures continued public access to the publication's articles, datasets, podcasts, graphics, and illustrations.

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Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment
Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment

Five leading European mobile payment providers are joining forces to challenge the dominance of American networks like Visa and Mastercard by creating a fully independent, Europe-wide digital infrastructure. This historic alliance aims to redirect millions of daily transactions to establish a sovereign payment ecosystem for approximately 130 million European consumers.

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Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026
Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026

The Gemini CLI will stop working on June 18, 2026, and is being replaced by the Antigravity CLI. This successor offers a more robust, agent-first platform specifically designed to handle the multi-agent complexities of 2026.

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Everything in C is undefined behavior

A recent article highlights the pervasive nature of undefined behavior in the C programming language, illustrating how easily even expert developers can trigger unpredictable outcomes. By playfully adapting a famous historical quote, the author emphasizes that no amount of programming skill can fully protect C code from the language's notoriously unforgiving rules.

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Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension
Incident Report: May 19, 2026 – GCP Account Suspension

Railway experienced a platform-wide outage on May 19, 2026, after Google Cloud mistakenly suspended its account. The erroneous action temporarily took down all of the company's GCP-hosted infrastructure.

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Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit
Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit

A Tennessee man who was jailed for 37 days over a Trump meme has won a settlement after filing a federal civil rights lawsuit. Larry Bushart sued Perry County for violating his constitutional rights, arguing that his imprisonment was unlawful retaliation for his protected speech.

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Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame
Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

Japan is currently experiencing a severe allergy crisis due to a 1950s reforestation project that planted vast areas of the country with just two types of trees. This decades-old environmental strategy has unexpectedly come back to haunt the nation, resulting in widespread pollen exposure and chronic health issues for millions of people.

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DOS Zone
DOS Zone

DOS Zone is a browser-based platform offering a comprehensive collection of free classic DOS games. It provides a seamless retro gaming experience by allowing players to jump straight into the action without requiring account registration or displaying advertisements.

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Map of Metal
Map of Metal

A newly launched interactive map offers a comprehensive visual history of heavy metal music. Users can trace the evolution of its many subgenres by exploring the influential bands that shaped the scene. This data visualization provides an engaging digital experience to discover the origins and connections of heavy metal.

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Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud [resolved]
Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud [resolved]

Cloud platform Railway has fully resolved a recent service outage caused by an underlying Google Cloud account issue. The company has since published a detailed post mortem explaining the incident and how it was addressed.

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SBCL: the ultimate assembly code breadboard (2014)

In a 2014 blog post, Paul Khuong explores the Steel Bank Common Lisp compiler, highlighting its effectiveness as a low-level breadboard for experimenting with assembly code. The article delves into advanced Lisp optimization and explores various mathematical and computer science concepts, providing valuable insights for developers interested in compiler internals and low-level programming.

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Google Declaring War on the Web
Google Declaring War on the Web

During its recent I/O keynote, Google announced a major shift in Search away from traditional web links toward AI-generated processed answers. Critics warn that this aggressive expansion of AI Overviews, which provide incorrect information up to 10% of the time, effectively declares war on the open web by keeping users confined to Google's ecosystem.

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Archaeologists find Egyptian mummy buried with the 'Iliad'
Archaeologists find Egyptian mummy buried with the 'Iliad'

Archaeologists have discovered an Egyptian mummy buried alongside a copy of the Iliad, revealing a fascinating cultural overlap between ancient Egypt and Greece. This remarkable find demonstrates that the two ancient civilizations coexisted and shared a mutual admiration for each other.

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Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)
Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)

The United States inadvertently altered global technological supremacy by forcing out brilliant scientist Qian Xuesen, who subsequently returned to China. This critical loss of aerospace expertise directly provided Communist China with the scientific foundation needed to build its formidable missile program.

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Why is Inkwell stuck in review
Why is Inkwell stuck in review

Apple recently delayed the App Store approval for an app named Inkwell, likely due to a trademark conflict with the name itself. Reader discussions also highlight other frequent rejection reasons for independent apps, such as mishandling the Sign in with Apple feature and failing to properly display privacy policies. Ultimately, the issue underscores the ongoing friction between small developers and Apple's rigid App Store review guidelines.

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Sharla Boehm, the programmer whose code underpins the Internet
Sharla Boehm, the programmer whose code underpins the Internet

Sharla Boehm was a math teacher who spent her summers programming and ultimately wrote foundational code that evolved into the modern Internet. Her pioneering work laid the essential technical groundwork for the global network infrastructure the world relies on today.

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Learnings from 100K lines of Rust with AI (2025)

A developer used AI coding agents to write over 130,000 lines of Rust in a few weeks, building a modern, high-performance multi-Paxos consensus engine to upgrade Azure's Replicated State Library. By leveraging AI-driven code contracts, lightweight spec-driven development, and automated performance tuning, the developer boosted system throughput from 23,000 to 300,000 operations per second. This project highlights the massive productivity gains and practical techniques available when using AI to architect and optimize complex, production-grade distributed systems.

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Apparently Google hates us now
Apparently Google hates us now

Pokémon Central Wiki, a prominent Italian fan site, has virtually disappeared from Google search results after more than 15 years of operation. The administrators expressed frustration over the sudden drop in visibility, accusing the search giant of unfairly suppressing their long-standing content.

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Infomaniak transitions to a foundation model to protect user data privacy
Infomaniak transitions to a foundation model to protect user data privacy

Infomaniak has transferred the majority of its voting rights to a Swiss public-benefit foundation to permanently safeguard user data privacy. This structural transition ensures that the company's cloud services will remain sovereign, independent, and committed to their core privacy values.

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