Sir Patrick Stewart has died
Patrick Stewart’s account posted memorial donation information for Alzheimer’s research and caregiver support. The message did not explicitly announce his death, though commenters responded with tributes.
Patrick Stewart dies, Binance's $5.6B theft, and Mistral Large 4
First things first
Big tech is shifting, as search loses ground, delivery giants merge, and open models spread. But AI’s biggest question remains simple: can we trust what systems say, build, or decide, while fresh gadgets keep making the future feel oddly close and messy?
Security scares, shaky statistics, and workplace pressure make the stakes feel real. Still, there’s plenty of clever engineering around, and good tools need careful humans and healthy communities.
The top 6
Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance
Arkham’s explorer page identifies an entity called “Binance-hacker-1029” and attributes $5.6 billion in theft from Binance to it. The attribution is an unverified claim, not proof that the funds were stolen.
Mistral Large 4 (Le Chonk) is now Open Weight
Mistral released the weights for Mistral Large 4, a trillion-parameter multimodal model with improved coding, defensive cybersecurity, and reasoning efficiency. The open-weight model is designed for customizable, self-hosted use and was trained on European infrastructure.
DoorDash to Acquire Instacart
DoorDash plans to acquire Instacart, combining the food-delivery company with the grocery marketplace. The deal is described as a way to help local stores compete.
Read the letter the FBI sent MLK to try to convince him to kill himself (2014)
The FBI surveilled Martin Luther King Jr. in an effort to discredit him, but found no evidence that he was a communist. In 1964, an FBI official sent King an anonymous letter threatening to expose his private life and urging him to kill himself.
For the first time ever, Google Search is less than 50% of Alphabet's revenue
Google Search generated $63.4 billion, or 49.7% of Alphabet’s $128 billion revenue in the quarter ending September 2026, its first reported quarter below half. Google Cloud revenue surged 103% year over year to $30.7 billion, accounting for 24.1% of Alphabet’s revenue.
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Quote of the day
What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.
Jane Goodall
Also big today
LLM Voice
LLM-generated prose can trigger an uncanny-valley reaction that readers recognize even when they cannot explain it. Martin Fowler advises authors to write prose themselves, use AI cautiously, and disclose how it helped.
If IPv4 Were Land
An interactive map reshapes countries according to their share of the world’s locatable IPv4 addresses, comparing those areas with real land size. Its calculations use IP Trust’s October 2026 geolocation data and exclude Antarctica and about 70 small territories.
Mexico is a showroom for electric vehicles you can't buy in the U.S.
Mexico’s growing market for Chinese electric vehicles offers feature-rich cars at prices far below comparable U.S. models, while tariffs and trade barriers keep them out of the United States. Chinese brands are gaining ground globally, and experts say their vehicles or technology will eventually reach American buyers.
H.264 Is Magic
H.264 makes video practical by compressing enormous streams of raw pixels into much smaller files. It combines lossy compression, which discards less noticeable details, with techniques that exploit patterns within and between frames.
Gemini 4 Carbon is the new #1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5
Google’s Gemini 4 Carbon ranks first on Artificial Analysis’s Intelligence Index v5, scoring 59 and leading four of nine evaluations. It ranks second to Claude Opus 5.5 on coding agents and costs about 23% less per intelligence task, but is currently available only to selected users.
Alleged Chinese spy had 'close relationship' with Nvidia boss Jensen Huang
Alice Huang, a Megaspeed executive, was suspected by US intelligence agencies of secretly passing information to Beijing. She had a close relationship with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, but there is no evidence he knew of her alleged activities.
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Worth a look
We ran AI agent swarms in Minecraft and Mindustry
AI agent swarms were tested in Minecraft and Mindustry. The project explores how multiple agents behave while playing these games.
Herdr has released native app
Herdr has released a native desktop app, with its source code available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. The public repository includes documentation, tests, and contribution guidelines.
Hackers expose the identities of more than 40k DHS employees
Hackers breached DHS’s single sign-on system and exposed personal information for more than 40,000 employees, including personnel connected to undercover operations. DHS says it is responding to the breach, while activists say the searchable database can help people investigate the department and file records requests.
Show HN: Auto Dismiss Mac OS "Allow <app> to find devices on local networks?"
Dontallow is a macOS utility that automatically presses “Don’t Allow” on prompts asking apps to find devices on local networks. It uses no CPU while idle and is designed to keep running after reboots.
Duet is the future of chatbot interaction
Duet stands out as a fast chatbot that organizes work into channels and keeps projects separate with channel-specific access to GitHub repositories. It avoids storing credentials and gives concise responses, making it feel less tedious than other assistant apps.
A tiny world model running games on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W
TinyWorldFormer is a compact world model designed to run games on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W. The public repository includes Rust and Python code for the project.
Song of the day
Deep cuts
Only 40% of AI-cited statistics trace back to a study
A study traced 1,285 statistics given by five AI assistants and found only 40% led back to an underlying study. Some widely repeated figures, such as the claim that 44% of salespeople quit after one follow-up, had no supporting research.
Why are good developers so wary of agentic development?
Experienced developers are wary of coding agents because generating code is not the same as building reliable, maintainable software that works safely in production. Their caution centers on whether agent-produced systems meet customer needs, handle failures, and remain easy to evolve.
Manifestos, Fear, and 'Loser Thinking': Inside Proton's AI Reckoning
Proton CEO Andy Yen is pressuring employees to use AI to write code, tracking AI-generated output and signaling that future hiring will focus on AI users. Employees say the push has created fear and clashed with concerns about security, code quality and job security.
Pico CSS is no longer maintained
Pico CSS has ended maintenance, with version 2.1.1 as its final release. Its maintainer says AI can now generate lightweight, accessible HTML and CSS, making the framework less useful without a major rewrite.
The importance of communities around software
Software ethics depend on more than a free or copyleft license: the project’s community, governance, inclusion, and values matter too. Users should examine who controls a project, how it treats contributors, and whether its practices align with their priorities.
Proton goes all in on using AI
Proton is making artificial intelligence a central part of its product strategy. The company plans to bring AI features to its privacy-focused services.