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[Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) @MIT]

We’ve lost an icon. Margaret Hamilton, a computer science pioneer best known for her work at MIT leading development of the flight software for the Apollo missions to the moon, has died at 90. Read about her legacy via MIT News: https://t.co/ODkbdIsoHw

[prinz @deredleritt3r]

GPT-6 Astra deciphered a 1918 German radio transmission that, to my knowledge, has never been deciphered before.

The message below translates to:

"EIN ENGLISCHER KREUZER EINLIEG X SEWASTOPOL X S4STEN X EIN GESCHWADER DER X ALLIIERTEN FOLGT 26STEN X"

or, in English:

"AN ENGLISH CRUISER ARRIVED AT SEVASTOPOL ON THE ?4TH AN ALLIED SQUADRON FOLLOWS ON THE 26TH"

Astra even double-checked its work by determining that an English cruiser, HMS Canterbury, reported its arrival in Sevastopol on November 24, 1918 and the arrival of an allied squadron on November 26, 1918.

This message is one of the ~20 WWI German radio messages that appear as one of the entries in the https://t.co/H7yLaI1edV list of top 50 unsolved ciphers (https://t.co/Qu2gp90pmD).

A minor, but really cool result!

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

Tomorrow will be my last day at Google after 27 years, and watching it grow from 25 people to 190,000+ has been an amazing journey. Below is a note I shared with many people internally at Google today. An excerpt is:

It has been an absolute pleasure to work with you and to help build some of the most widely used and impactful products of all time. As a kid, I dreamed of helping build software that would be used by many people, and Google now has thirteen products used by more than a billion people (amazing!). Our work has had a tremendous impact in the world, and I have been lucky enough to collaborate and form friendships with many colleagues that I deeply admire, respect, and enjoy. It still brings me joy every time I see people out in the world using our products to find information, handle email, translate documents, watch videos, learn new things, navigate and understand the physical world, browse the web, use their phone, run large-scale computations on our infrastructure, ride in an autonomous vehicle, or perform complex tasks with the help of our AI systems. I hope you all share this sense of joy, because it is a shared accomplishment! Thank you to all of my colleagues at Google over many years!

Now I'm excited to go start @DiscoLoopAI with my longtime friends and colleagues @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML, and @quocleix.

(Updated post: slightly redacted to not have some personal info)

[clem 🤗 @ClementDelangue]

Banning open-source AI would hurt defenders 10x more than attackers, which would make the world 10x more dangerous and this is a good example why!

[BijanBowen @bijanbowen]

Had Claude Fable 5 log network packets and display them as cars on a highway, different car types = different packet types

[机器之心 JIQIZHIXIN @jiqizhixin]

Huge!

Google just proved Image Generators are Generalist Vision Learners!

They introduce Vision Banana, a model built by instruction-tuning a base image generator (Nano Banana Pro). Instead of using special systems for different tasks, they reframe every vision problem—like segmentation or depth estimation—as simply generating a new image. Think of it as drawing the answer instead of calculating it.

The result? Vision Banana beats domain-specific experts, including the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) on segmentation and the Depth Anything series on metric depth estimation, all without sacrificing its original ability to create images.

This suggests generative pretraining is the new foundation for all of computer vision.

[Son Luong @sluongng]

Codex just found a “workaround” of not having sudo on my pc…

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Today, we share a breakthrough on the planar unit distance problem, a famous open question first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946.

For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed the best possible solutions looked roughly like square grids.

An OpenAI model has now disproved that belief, discovering an entirely new family of constructions that performs better.

This marks the first time AI has autonomously solved a prominent open problem central to a field of mathematics.

[PULKIT @Pulkit_Meen]

@karpathy Ai labs feels more like football clubs nowdays.........

[Lex Fridman @lexfridman]

I'm traveling the world for a bit, starting with China but then hopping around the globe, anywhere. Open to any adventure. No plans, only a backpack. Hoping to meet & get to know humans from all walks of life. The pic is from a long hike on the Great Wall. For me, as a fan of history, this was an epic experience.

In China, first I'm visiting a few big cities & talking to engineers at the heart of China's AI revolution. After that, if feeling crazy enough, I'm hitchhiking (first time) across rural China for a few weeks. Hitchhiking because I think it's the best way to meet rural folks who I would otherwise never get the chance to meet. I hope to do the same in US and other places.

I have a request, if you have a travel recommendation, fill out the form(s) below if you feel like it. Or share with folks who might have advice about such travel.

Form 1 - travel recommendation:
If you can, recommend to me an interesting place I should visit anywhere in the world. For this, fill out form 1. Not touristy stuff, but something off the beaten path, that tourists may not know about, but is legendary. It could be as remote as meeting a herder in the mountains who is a local legend. Asia, Middle East, Europe, India, South/North America, Africa, Australia, anywhere. In China, I'm hoping to visit maybe Heibei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Gansu, Sichuan, Yunnan, etc, so recommendations for spots to visit are helpful.

Form 2 - coffee:
If you want to grab a coffee with me anywhere in the world, fill out form 2 (please don't use form 1 for that).

Anyway, I hectically tossed stuff in backpack. Realizing I don't have a clear plan of any kind, which is probably the only way to do it. LFG.

Love you all ❤️

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

It isn't unexpected that the focus of the Bun Rust rewrite is on the anti-Zig side more than anything, since the internet loves to hate. What is unexpected and unfortunate is that leadership within Bun hasn't tried to steer the conversation away from that at all.

There are so many positive and interesting takeaways from this and I'm not really seeing any of them pushed as the primary message.

A positive thing that hasn't been talked about at all is how far Bun came thanks to Zig. And even if you dump it now, its meaningful for how good Zig was to even build a product to this point and impact by any metric. I would've loved to see anyone in leadership say this.

On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programming languages used to be LOCK IN, and they're increasingly not so. You think the Bun rewrite in Rust is good for Rust? Bun has shown they can be in probably any language they want in roughly a week or two. Rust is expendable. Its useful until its not then it can be thrown out. That's interesting!

There's been a lot of talk about memory safety and no doubt Rust provides more guarantees than Zig. But I'd love to see a better analysis of why Bun in particular suffered so much rather than take the language-blame path. How could engineering as a practice been more rigorous to prevent this? What were the largest sources of crashes other programs should watch out for? How does Rust prevent them? How could Zig theoretically prevent them? That's interesting.

I know the official blog post hasn't come out yet from Bun. But they're smart enough to know that that PR would stir up controversy the moment it opened, or they should've been. And plenty in the company have been tweeting and writing about it. Its somewhat telling to me in various dimensions what they chose to talk about first.

I tend to think I'm pretty good at corporate PR/comms (especially when it comes to developer audiences) and I think appealing to the negative is never the right long term strategy; it does work to get short term eyes though.

[Yann LeCun @ylecun]

@eladgil BS.
Attention was born in Montréal
PyTorch in NYC.
AlphaGo in London
AlphaFold in London
ESMFold in NYC
Llama 1 in Paris.
Llama 2 in Paris+NYC+SV
DeepSeek in Hangzhou

Plus:
DINO in Paris
JEPA in Montréal+Paris+NYC

SV is 3 mos ahead on topics SV is singularly obsessed with.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

At the 2025 Penn Relays in Philadelphia, 82-year-old Domenic Stellato delivered a standout performance by winning the Masters 80+ 100m dash in 16.02 seconds.

[Xint @xint_official]

Patch your Linux boxes!

https://t.co/VWOUDbLAn2 is a trivially exploitable logic bug in Linux, reachable on all major distros released in the last 9 years. A small, portable python script gets root on all platforms.

Found by the teams at @theori_io and @xint_official
More details below
https://t.co/9f6T96PvPX

[Tencent AI @TencentAI_News]

🥳We just open-sourced Cube Sandbox! An instant, concurrent, secure and lightweight sandbox runtime for AI Agents.

Built with RustVMM and KVM, it achieves the perfect balance of security and performance:

→ Sub-60ms cold start (2.5-50x faster)
→ Under 5MB memory overhead per instance (6x less memory)
→ Dedicated kernel per sandbox (hardware-level isolation)
→ Thousands of concurrent sandboxes per node
→ 100% E2B SDK compatible. Swap the endpoint, zero code changes

Full-stack capability, one-click deployment. 3 steps to spin up your own private AI sandbox 👇 🔗
https://t.co/zyxiP2A92W

[Steve Yegge @Steve_Yegge]

I was chatting with my buddy at Google, who's been a tech director there for about 20 years, about their AI adoption. Craziest convo I've had all year.

The TL;DR is that Google engineering appears to have the same AI adoption footprint as John Deere, the tractor company. Most of the industry has the same internal adoption curve: 20% agentic power users, 20% outright refusers, 60% still using Cursor or equivalent chat tool. It turns out Google has this curve too.

But why is Google so... average? How is it that a handful of companies are taking off like a spaceship, and the rest, including Google, are mired in inaction?

My buddy's observation was key here: There has been an industry-wide hiring freeze for 18+ months, during which time nobody has been moving jobs. So there are no clued-in people coming in from the outside to tell Google how far behind they are, how utterly mediocre they have become as an eng org.

He says the problem is that they can't use Claude Code because it's the enemy, and Gemini has never been good enough to capture people's workflows like Claude has, so basically agentic coding just never really took off inside Google. They're all just plodding along, completely oblivious to what's happening out there right now.

Not only is Google not able to do anything about it, they don't seem to be aware of the problem at all. I'm having major flashbacks to fifty years ago as a kid at the La Brea Tar Pits, asking, "why can't they just climb out?"

My Google friend and I had this conversation over a month ago. I didn't share it because I wanted to look around a bit, and see if it's really as bad as all that. I've been talking to people from dozens of companies since then. And yeah. It's as bad as all that.

Google is about average. Some companies at the bottom have near-zero AI adoption and can't even get budget for AI. They may have moats and high walls, but the horde is coming for them all the same.

And then there are a few companies I've met recently who are *amazingly* leaned in to AI adoption. One category-leader company just cancelled IntelliJ for a thousand engineers. That's an incredibly bold move, one of many they're making towards agentic adoption. In my opinion, that company is setting themselves up for a _huge_ W.

As for the rest, well, it's the Great Siloing. Everyone's flying blind. With nobody moving companies, no company knows where they stand on the AI adoption curve. Nobody knows how they're doing compared to everyone else.

Half of them just check a box: "We enabled {Copilot/Cursor} for everyone!" Cue smug celebrations. They think this is like getting SOC2 compliance, just a thing they turn on and now it's "solved." And they don't realize that they've done effectively nothing at all.

All because of a hiring freeze.

[staysaasy @staysaasy]

The degree to which you are awed by AI is perfectly correlated with how much you use AI to code.

[Cheng Lou @_chenglou]

My dear front-end developers (and anyone who’s interested in the future of interfaces):

I have crawled through depths of hell to bring you, for the foreseeable years, one of the more important foundational pieces of UI engineering (if not in implementation then certainly at least in concept):
Fast, accurate and comprehensive userland text measurement algorithm in pure TypeScript, usable for laying out entire web pages without CSS, bypassing DOM measurements and reflow

[Like Xu @lkml_likexu]

P99 CONF 2025 | The Gory Details of a Full-Featured Userspace CPU Schedu... https://t.co/ACwclJgR9U via @YouTube