The Wire
Curated cybersecurity and tech news — AI-summarized, source attributed.
Regex Chess: A 2-Ply Minimax Engine Built From 84,688 Regular Expressions
Nicholas Carlini built a working chess engine using nothing but a sequential list of 84,688 regex substitutions applied to a string holding the board state. The
Six months of AI-run radio stations: personalities decayed into jargon loops
Andon Labs gave four frontier models — Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Grok 4.3 — $20 each and told them to run a profitable radio station forever
Six months of LLM progress: coding agents grew up, laptop models punched above their weight
Simon Willison's PyCon US 2026 lightning talk frames November 2025 as an inflection point for LLMs, especially for coding. The frontier crown changed hands five
Unix historian Peter Salus dies at 86
Peter Salus, the linguist-turned-computing-historian whose 1994 book A Quarter Century of Unix remains a foundational text on the operating system's origins, di
Why Ruby's Date Class Has Constants Named ITALY, ENGLAND, and JULIAN
Ruby's Date class exposes oddly-named constants like Date::ITALY (2299161), Date::ENGLAND, Date::GREGORIAN, and Date::JULIAN. They turn out to be Julian Day num
16 bytes of x86 that draw Sierpinski rain and play it as sound
A demoscene release at Outline 2026 packs an infinite Sierpinski fractal generator and a PC speaker synthesizer into 16 bytes of real-mode DOS assembly. The rou
Awesome-CUDA-Books: A Curated Reading List for GPU Programmers
A GitHub repository maintained by alternbits collects what its author claims is the most comprehensive public bibliography of CUDA programming books, organized
GenCAD turns images into editable parametric CAD programs, not just meshes
GenCAD is an image-conditional generative model that produces parametric CAD command sequences from a single rendering, yielding editable engineering models rat
High-Entropy Alloys: Mixing Five-Plus Elements for Extreme Materials
High-entropy alloys (HEAs) break from the traditional metallurgy model of one or two dominant elements plus minor additions. Instead, they combine five or more
How the Hindenburg Ran a Smoking Room Inside a Hydrogen Airship
The Hindenburg, despite carrying seven million cubic feet of hydrogen, had a dedicated smoking lounge on B Deck. Engineers isolated it behind a double-door airl
Jank gains a Clojure-aware custom IR to close the gap with the JVM
Jank, a native Clojure dialect compiled through LLVM, has shipped its own intermediate representation tailored to Clojure semantics. Until now, the project lean
Mercurial at 20: Why the VCS Git Fans Wrote Off Is Still Shipping
A FOSDEM 2026 talk takes on the widespread assumption that Mercurial died when Git won the distributed version control wars in the 2010s. The reality is messier