@davegoldblatt "Hi Claude good morning how are you I'm great thx build me a YouTube-style site but restricted to videos that have been repeatedly recommended on HN over the years pls. Don't make any mistakes."
I sent out the October edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter . If you are a sponsor (or start a sponsorship now) you can access it here . This month: The October inflection point for vibe game development The vulnerability apocalypse gets hot LLM releases API credits for $100+/month subscriptions What I'm using right now My software releases My September newsletter can now be seen here , as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy! Tags: newsletter
Yesterday's hot paper was Sparks of Weight-Space Programming: LLMs can natively read & write neural network weights by Rikiya Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang, and Omar Khattab. The paper found that frontier models, in particular GPT-6 Astra, can both interpret and modify the raw weights of a machine learning model - literally a text description of the model containing a bunch of floating point numbers. I've been playing with one of the examples from the paper and I'm delighted to share that Qwen 3.8 27B running on my laptop can do this as well! Weight-Space Programming Here's the highlight from their abstract, describing impressive capabilities for GPT-6 Astra and coining the term Weight-Space Programming for when LLMs analyze and modify model weights: Just by looking at the raw weights, GPT-6 Astra can tell what a network was trained to do . And without any environment feedback, it has no trouble writing, from scratch, small game-playing networks that outplay networks trained with PPO for 100 million steps. Likewise, asked to make Qwen3.5-0.8B better at math without gradients, Astra identifies an issue in its weights causing reasoning loops that Qwen’s own model card warns about, and fixes this by natively editing 0.016% of the weights . With the same sampling settings, this weight correction raises MATH-500 from 7.9% to 48.1% and generalizes out of the box to instruction following, raising IFEval by 3x. All of this is possible without allowing Astra to write training loops. It uses its reasoning to figure out what each part of a neural network computes, or should compute, and changes the weights accordingly. We call this Weight-Space Programming . The paper combines two topics that I think deserve to be treated separately. The first is what models can do with raw weights without running tools or executing code. The second explores how well models, once armed with code, can run operations to update and improve other models. spaCy author Matthew Honnibal called the paper misleading for conflating the two, and Sean Goedecke deconstructed the Qwen3.5-0.8B update example as taking the same steps that a human ML researcher would use. I'm going to focus on the no-tools question, which I think is the more interesting of the two. The paper frames this as Can LLMs understand model behaviors from weights? They trained four neural networks to play simplified 10x10 grid versions of four classic computer games - Breakout, Pong, Pac-Man, and Freeway (I had to look that one up , it's an Atari 2600 game from 1981). Then they fed those weights (as floating point numbers) to an LLM along with the following question: The weights below belong to one policy network that was trained with reinforcement learning to play a game on this grid. Which game was it trained on? Work from the weights. You have no tools: no code execution, no calculator, nothing to run. This is a single response. The GitHub repository that accompanies the paper is RikiyaT/lm_understand-logs . The exp1_which_game folder contains the prompts they used, with weights for the four games: <a href="https://github.com/RikiyaT/lm_understand-logs/blob/main/exp1_which_g
Release: datasette-llm 0.1a9 I have some big upgrades to Datasette Agent in the pipeline, but in the meantime here's a tiny user experience improvement to the underlying datasette-llm plugin. It now picks up the default model used by LLM , which means you can start using Datasette Agent without needing to explicitly configure a default model: uvx --with datasette-agent datasette content.db --internal internal.db Previously you would also need to specify a model with -s plugins.datasette-agent.default_model gpt-6-astra . Tags: datasette , llm , datasette-agent
@shostekofsky There are a few notable counter-examples (e.g. HAL) but this is basically right for a lot of pre-2000 sci-fi. I think getting AI right from e.g. somewhere in the ~1970s would require a fairly complicated set of inferences, probably the biggest things would be: Image the world in 50 years. 1. "Digital knowledge work / computing". The vast majority of knowledge work (which makes up a very large fraction of the economy) goes digital. As computers get cheaper, much of society’s work happens on screens, over billions of machines in homes and offices. 2. "Internet". Similar to ARPANET (and see Licklider’s “Intergalactic Computer Network” (1963)), this creates demand for a global network of computers where people work, argue, teach, joke, and socialize. 3. "Big data". This creates a very large, compounding repository of digital information, with traces of how people reason, how they create, what they know etc. 4. "Statistical learning". Trying to program intelligence by hand is extremely difficult. But Shannon's n-gram approximations of English (1948) show examples of how language has statistical structure that can be "learned". You could imagine doing so over extensions of cybernetic computing (e.g. in the style of Rosenblatt's Perceptron 1958). So instead of programming thought, we could fit a statistical model to the record. 5. "LLMs". This might lead to something along the lines of ELIZA (1966), but with enough data (per 1-3), and enough compute (see Moore's law 1965), the imitation might become of extreme hight fidelity to the point that it's economically extremely useful. 6. "Scaling laws". These networks may demand a huge amount of data / computing resources and expertise to train. It's plausible that the more of each you have, the better your ELIZA gets. The economics concentrate, where a few organizations build a few minds and then deploy copies of them digitally. Something like that. Basically, it's a lot of leaps. You have to start with computers, to internet, to big data, to big compute (Moore's law), which then allow large-scale statistical learning approach based on neural networks, and then posit scaling laws, and then imagine the form factor of language models as a lot more sophisticated ELIZA. And you'd have to short everything else, most predominantly I think the idea that we'd figure out how to program robots by hand.
@RagavanThurair Same... I had to bring it down (RIP) because it was just too much work to maintain, it would have been a lot easier today. But today there's also alphaxiv.org , which I like & use and is in the same spirit.
Release: datasette-agent 0.5a0 This is a significant release of Datasette Agent . The most notable new feature is called the panel - it lets the agent chat open and then sit next to pages from Datasette, for example a table or query page. When combined with datasette-apps this means you can prompt a database-backed app into existence and then modify it from the chat that sits next to that app. You can try it by signing in with your GitHub account to agent.datasette.io . Tags: projects , datasette , datasette-agent
I've been getting the occasional confusing Python dependency error since switching over to Python 3.15 and the rule I'm having to remember is: If in doubt, delete the uv.lock file Most of my projects are libraries which don't include a uv.lock file, since it's rude for a library dependency to lock versions for anything else that uses it. Running uv run pytest etc tends to leave uv.lock files lying around, which are listed in .gitignore and so do not get committed to my repositories. But... sometimes that uv.lock pins a version of a dependency that doesn't yet have a Python 3.15 wheel. An example from earlier today: error: Failed to build `watchfiles==1.1.1` cause: Call to `maturin.build_wheel` failed error: the configured Python interpreter version (3.15) is newer than PyO3's maximum supported version (3.14) Deleting that file and running uv run pytest again usually fixes the problem. Tags: uv , til , python
dbreunig/nesformer Inspired by qwenputer by Divyansh Agrawal, Drew Breunig baked a working emulator for a Nintendo Entertainment System 6502 CPU into the weights of Qwen3.5-4B. You can now play NES ROMs such as Super Mario Bros (very slowly) running inside Qwen! In a comment on Hacker News Drew reveals the Opus 5.5 prompts he used to build this system: Read this article and any relevant source code: https://divagr.com/blog/qwenputer. Then explore if you could emulate the chip and ram in a Nintendo Entertainment System (as people do today with FPGAs in MISTRs) using this technique. If so, what size model would you have to build and if you could use smaller faster ones, could you get it to be at the standard clockspeed. Followed by: I think we should build it! Just for fun. It's okay if it's not fast. We want to be able to have the weights, and a cli to run them that we can point at a ROM. Apparently Opus found and then used this collection of conformance tests for the NES CPU released 15 years ago by Christopher Pow. Via Hacker News Tags: games , ai , generative-ai , llms , drew-breunig , qwen , conformance-suites
Release: datasette-llm 0.1a10 Fixes a bug that affected my agent.datasette.io demo site, where the set of available LLM models was not correctly restricted to just those in the configuration. Tags: datasette , llm
I was reminded today of AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies , a chart produced by Apollo Global Management in September 2025, which appeared to show a slowdown in U.S. corporate AI adoption based on numbers collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. At the time I used that chart to demonstrate GPT-5 data analysis , and then to experiment with Claude's new Code Interpreter . I decided to try running those numbers again to see what had changed over the past year, and in doing so learned that the Bureau has fallen foul of Executive Order 14434 , aka the asinine Super Intelligence one. First, the updated chart Every two weeks the U.S. Census Bureau runs a survey called the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (aka BTOS). Each time it goes to 200,000 businesses out of 1.2 million total - the surveyed group (a "panel") cycles such that an individual business only completes the survey every twelve weeks. The latest data is published on alternating Thursdays at 10am. I used the most recent numbers (published October 22, 2026) to create a new version of the AI adoption chart, updated to reflect both the last twelve months and a change that was made to the survey question sent out by the Bureau: For comparison, here's that AI adoption chart from last year (my GPT-5 version): In September 2025 the largest (250+ employees) companies answered "yes" around 12% of the time to the question about whether they used AI in "producing goods or services". Under the new "any business function" wording, by February 2026, those same large companies answered "yes" around 30% of the time, and by October 2026 that had increased to around 40%. The data in the above chart comes from the "Employment size class" XLSX file, available from here . Here's a copy of the file I used. You can view the survey document that is sent out to businesses - here's my snapshot copy of that 346KB PDF. The changing language of the questions As the chart demonstrates, the question asked by the Bureau changed in a material way on November 17th, 2025. Prior to that date, the question they asked was this (emphasis mine): In the last two weeks, did this business use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in producing goods or services ? (Examples of AI: machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents, voice recognition, etc.) On December 3rd, 2025, the Bureau announced a significant change to that question. Here's the replacement: In the last two weeks, did this business use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in any of its business functions ? (Examples of AI: machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents, voice recognition, etc.) No more "producing goods or services" - now it's "in any of its business functions"! This means that the answers to the question before and after November 17th are not directly comparable. From October 19, 2026, they ask abo
@pondorasti Yeah this is really good. Btw you can also just tell your Claude Code "Create and deploy an extension for my browser that shows YouTube thumbnails from halfway of the video instead of the user-uploaded version. Include a toggle between the two", works great
Release: llm 0.37 There's a lot of stuff in this new release of my LLM CLI tool and Python library, representing around two months of accumulated features and fixes. I added gpt-6.1-sol and gpt-6.1-terra , plus a new llm openai endpoint add command to make it easier to configure additional models that use OpenAI-compatible endpoints. I switched the default model (if you have not set your own default) to gpt-6-luna - half the price of the previous default, gpt-5.6-luna . LLM's support for embeddings now accepts that different binary content may have different content-type - necessary for models like Gemini Embedding 2 , which can embed text, audio, images, and video. A lot of open source maintainers complain about a flood of AI-assisted PRs. LLM is my project that has been most affected by this and, to be honest, I'm not finding it to be a problem. That's mainly because I have Opus 5.5 or GPT-6 Astra help me with triage to spot the most useful fixes! This release includes fixes from 12 authors - almost all AI-assisted - and the burden of reviewing them wasn't nearly as great as I expected. I really see them as bug reports with attached examples - sometimes I land them, sometimes I implement my own fix. So thanks to 0d00ciallo0721 , ac1982 , Allen Flux , Bian Yuhan , Bishop Kammeraad , Chen Yufeiyang , Christopher Krah , Ethan Stoner , Jiachen Xie , Olamide Faniyan , Sharat Chandra Sai Boddu , nosmile99 for helping out with (or spending tokens on) this release! Tags: open-source , projects , ai , annotated-release-notes , generative-ai , llms , embeddings , llm
I discovered a sound that leaks your exact location (and it's everywhere) - YouTube Genius piece of OSINT by Colsto, who demonstrates how you can take almost imperceptible background noise of planes from a video soundtrack, figure out their Doppler curves, then cross reference them against ADS-B data to find the exact location of the video based on their speed, distance, and gaps between different flights. Via Lobste.rs Tags: privacy , youtube
How We Took Over ChatGPT Accounts Parameter Labs describe an exploit they found against ChatGPT's implementation of the artifacts pattern (OpenAI used to call this "Canvas" but it looks like the latest revision is called HTML previews ), where interactive custom HTML apps are displayed in a sandboxed iframe. It's important that HTML in these stays tightly sandboxed to avoid untrusted code interacting with OpenAI APIs and accessing private data. Parameter found quite a complex attack chain. OpenAI use the MathLive JavaScript library as part of their graph support, and that library includes its own virtual keyboard , which can be triggered in the parent page via postMessage() from the sandboxed iframe. That message receiving code uses innerHTML , so anything that sends a message can add custom HTML to the parent - and there was no mechanism to prevent other sandboxed frames, including HTML preview frames, from calling that method. This meant untrusted code in an iframe could insert HTML, and while innerHTML doesn't directly execute script elements it could be used to inject a new iframe without sandbox restrictions. OpenAI’s CSP rules blocked inline scripts entirely, and only allowed script loading from a handful of domains, but one of those was YouTube - and the YouTube oEmbed endpoint could be used to reflect JavaScript back in a way that executed it. Once the attack had JavaScript execution on ChatGPT, it was trivial to fetch private user data from APIs and exfiltrate it via an image reference. The end result: you could create a ChatGPT share URL which, when visited by another signed-in user, could exfiltrate their private data or take actions on their behalf. OpenAI closed the hole and paid out a $5,000 bug bounty, which I think was a bit cheap for a vulnerability this serious. Via Hacker News Tags: iframes , javascript , sandboxing , security , xss , openai , chatgpt , content-security-policy
Release: datasette-apps 0.3a0 Datasette Apps adds support for hosting and editing custom HTML applications inside of Datasette. These can be created by hand, but it's easier to create them using LLMs via Datasette Agent . This release improves that integration: Apps can now be tagged in Datasette Agent chat messages by typing # , which autocompletes from the apps the user has permission to view. New app_add_stored_queries() and app_remove_stored_queries() tools let the agent manage which stored queries an app is allowed to call. Granting a write query requires approval from the user first. app_create() now checks that each requested stored query exists and that the user can view it, and asks the user to approve any write queries before the app is created. The "View app" buttons shown by the agent tools, and the links on # app references, now open the app full screen in the Datasette Agent panel. Tags: datasette , datasette-agent , datasette-apps
More broadly, the use of LLMs erodes trust in documentation, in software, and in the organizations which produce them. Perhaps engineers will begin to treat any new software project with suspicion—the signals we used to rely on as markers of a mature system are now easier to counterfeit. [...] In the age of LLMs, what can maintainers do to ensure correct software and accurate documentation? Having done that work, how can they demonstrate its quality to users? — Kyle Kingsbury , Jepsen results for ParticleDB 1.1.4 Tags: kyle-kingsbury , llms , ai , generative-ai , ai-misuse
API credits benefit for eligible ChatGPT subscriptions Earlier this month Anthropic announced a generous new benefit for their Max and Team subscriptions: $100, $200, and $500 per month subscribers would get the equivalent quantity of (expiring) credits to use with the Anthropic API. OpenAI have now launched pretty much exactly the same deal: if you have a $100, $200, or $500 subscription plan with them you now get that same quantity of credits to apply to one of your API organizations. I maintain subscriptions with both companies, so this is great news for me! I may even ship some public-facing demos now that the credits are already covered by my existing subscriptions. Tags: ai , openai , generative-ai , llms , anthropic , llm-pricing
How I Built the Most AI-Pilled Company in the World Don't be put off by the clickbait headline, this piece by Jacob Sansbury describing how they are building Spawn is a fascinating exploration of the bleeding edge of what's possible with agentic engineering against frontier models. Spawn is a massively multiplayer gaming environment where players can use prompts (to the in-game agent, Savi) to modify the game world. I fired it up on my phone for a few minutes and was able to prompt a castle into existence, then a dragon, then ride the dragon to fly around that castle. By Jacob's telling, Spawn is now being developed autonomously by a swarm of Fable-powered agents costing over $3 million in tokens per month : Our agents change the live code directly and ship to production hourly, so they read every error, bug report and metric themselves. About 60% of our work starts from a production error, a Savi bug report (Savi is the AI you build games with in Spawn), something odd in our logs, or a feature request. Savi files bugs herself. When a user hits one, or Savi hits one in the product, she files it. It goes straight to an agent that decides whether it's a real bug to fix, something we won't fix, or intentional design that needs a decision. Usually it becomes a change, delivered to that user within an hour, with a message in the same chat. This is continuous deployment turned up to 11: A loop this tight only works if it never stops, so we treat an hour without a ship as a SEV-0, our most severe kind of incident. Unshipped changes pile up, and every problem already in production lasts longer. The feedback slows down too. An agent can only keep a few hours of work in its head, so shipping faster than that actually helps it stay coherent. [...] We can roll back a broken change in 30 seconds, exactly where it's broken and nowhere else. When a monitor or a log alert fires, it starts or wakes an agent that owns the incident, and we break things on purpose to test that those recovery paths work. My eyebrows raised at least a dozen times reading thing. I have trouble imagining this style of development working on software with higher stakes for when something goes wrong, but for a game this appears to be working surprisingly well. Jacob says that Fable 5 (and then 5.1) was the model that made this level of autonomy possible. Opus 5.5 doesn't quite hack it for them, and when they tried GPT-6 Astra to apply fixes from a security review everything stopped working: Every feature had been disabled and marked to be turned on again once the security fixes were done. Astra had gone through our whole product and made the insecure things secure by turning them off. These kinds of extreme experiments are why I'm excited about game development as a substrate for exploring the edges of what today's coding agents can do. Tags: game-design , ai , generative-ai , llms , claude , coding-agents , agentic-engineering , claude-mythos-fable
Weekend hack: HackerTube. I was annoyed with YouTube's recommendations so I had Claude filter down 43M comments over 20 years of HN to 6,454 videos that keep being recommended. *Significantly* better viewing experience, ~2 hours with Opus 5.5: hackertube.org - Excellent recs without any logins (state is kept in local browser session) - Thumbnail is a representative frame from middle of the video instead of the super duper A/B test hyper-optimized user uploads - Underlying data from the comment analysis as one zip file, point your Claude at it and ask for your own version - HackerTube Longs ✊ A bit more on the process: I use Claude Code (desktop app for Mac), Opus 5.5 on Medium effort as my default. I only talk to Claude and have it do everything, the only "manual work" I helped with in tandem was in the browser (reminiscent of MenuGen): 1) I had to create some kind of API key from Google Cloud UI to query YouTube for video metadata, 2) I booted up a VPS box for serving and 3) I bought the domain name. Once the box was up I gave Claude the IP and told it update, secure, harden, deploy and optimize the code, and it did the whole thing. Many awesome projects that would have normally taken weeks/months even can now be few-shotted for breakfast. What else are we not thinking of.