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  1. 3

    IBM Built the Cold War’s Most Powerful Code Breaker for the NSA

    IBM’s Harvest (IBM 7950) was a 1960s NSA‑dedicated streaming coprocessor attached to an IBM Stretch mainframe. It ran up to 200× faster than contemporary machines, used a custom bit‑addressable memory model, pipelined parallel streams (P, Q → R), and introduced the world’s first automated tape library. IBM also created a domain‑specific language, Alpha, for cryptanalytic programmers. The article…

    Lobstersieee.org13 minHN10125lobste.rs8
  2. 4

    M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review

    The M5 Ultra Mac Studio (256 GB RAM) uses a quad‑die M5 Max architecture with an 80‑core GPU and 1.2 TB/s memory bandwidth, delivering ~70 % faster prompt‑to‑first‑token and token‑generation rates than the M3 Ultra. In the author’s tests Qwen3.8‑Flash‑Next hits 100 tokens/s on short prompts and 60‑85 tokens/s with 64‑256 KB context, making local AI agents (Open Minis, Hermes, Codex) feel snappy a…

    Hacker News front pagemacstories.net39 minHN234235
  3. 5

    PCB is brought to you by Fable 5

    The author used the AI tool Fable 5 to generate a 4‑layer RP2350 development board for an E‑ink display from a short English description and ordered it from JLCPCB. While the AI handled component placement, it left many DRC errors and routing gaps, requiring manual fixes and highlighting the limits of current AI‑driven PCB design.

    Hacker News front pagea6mzero.com6 minHN159106
  4. 6

    Custom home server built from spare parts

    A DIY home NAS built from a repurposed Zotac mini‑PC, 6×8 TB WD Red drives in a RAIDZ2 ZFS pool, encrypted boot, Wi‑Fi, custom Noctua cooling, and a front‑panel ESP32‑S3 touch screen driven by LVGL. Runs Kubuntu 24.04 with Docker‑Compose services behind Caddy, plus a self‑written dashboard and API.

    Hacker News front pageasmat.ca7 minHN8949
  5. 9

    Announcing Project Zenith: The ready-to-code Windows experience on developer-class devices

    Microsoft announced Project Zenith, a Windows 11 configuration bundled with high‑end developer PCs (64 GB+ unified memory, ≥250 GB/s bandwidth) that ships with VS Code, Windows Terminal and tuned settings for a distraction‑free coding workspace. It also adds built‑in WSL container support and MXC security, enabling on‑device execution of 30B‑parameter AI models without cloud token costs.

    Microsoft Edgewindows.com4 minHN143
  6. 10

    Fingers as Legs: Learning Self-Supported Locomotion and Manipulation with an Anthropomorphic Hand

    The authors train an anthropomorphic robotic hand to crawl, steer, and recover from falls using its fingers for both support and manipulation, via a reinforcement‑learning reward formulation tuned to the hand's asymmetry. Sim‑to‑real experiments show faster locomotion than quadruped‑style rewards and successful untethered tasks without onboard vision.

    Hugging Face Daily Papersarxiv.org1 minpaper
  7. 12

    Why Deploying Physical AI at Scale Demands Safety at Every Layer

    NVIDIA’s Halos platform is a full‑stack safety system for physical AI (autonomous vehicles and industrial robots). It bundles safety‑engineered hardware (DRIVE AGX Thor, IGX Thor), an ASIL‑D certified OS (Halos OS), middleware for isolation and monitoring, AI models for explainability (Alpamayo), and simulation/validation tools (Isaac Lab, Omniverse). The blog argues that scaling physical AI requ…

    Nvidianvidia.com5 min