UC Berkeley's BAIR will present 33 main-conference papers, 4 late-breaking results posters and various workshop contributions at CoRL 2026, held November 9–12 in Austin, Texas, including an Early Career Keynote from Professor Negar Mehr. The schedule lists orals, spotlights and poster sessions covering topics such as vision-language-action models, humanoid control, dexterous manipulation and robot learning.
The author describes how their company restructured engineering hiring around AI: the AI app-building round is now mainly a screen, take-homes were dropped due to candidate churn and a desperation filter, and traditional no-AI problem-solving and system-design interviews remain the core test of engineering judgment. They also note that many candidates have limited AI budgets at their current employers, that AI fluency can mask shallow engineering depth, and that they look for a "spark" of exceptional upside in every hire.
A CBC article reports that businesses in British Columbia are responding to "AI slop" by using pen-and-paper advertisements. The story is linked from a Hacker News submission with 5 points and no comments.
Meta's Muse Ember scores 36 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, matching Claude Haiku 5.5 (max) at $0.14 per task versus $0.41, making it the cheapest model scoring 36 or higher. It stands out on AutomationBench-AA at 68.1% and scores 46 on the Coding Agent Index in Muse Code, but its AA-Omniscience accuracy of 21.1% is the lowest among similarly intelligent models, largely because it declines to answer 64% of questions, keeping its hallucination rate at 17.4%. Pricing is $0.10 input / $0.004 cached input / $0.50 output per 1M tokens, available via Meta's first-party API and Muse Code.
Why it matters: The piece offers a detailed cost-versus-capability breakdown that helps readers judge whether a cheap efficient-tier model fits agentic and coding workloads.
ComfyUI's October update (v0.44) added a Branch Node for selecting one of up to 32 wired paths, native Load LoRA (Model) and Load LoRA (Text Encoder) stack nodes supporting up to 20 LoRAs, and Comfy Desktop templates that automatically download their example inputs and required models. It also brought zip downloads for multiple outputs, EXR/HDR previews and a Convert SDR to HDR node, ProRes output in Save Video, and new tools to hide, box-select and delete links, plus per-widget Undo and Redo.
Baidu released ERNIE Evolve, an automated research system that selects research directions, edits code and runs experiments against a fixed objective, keeping only changes that pass a hidden evaluator and a separate reviewer. It beat the best public result on 3 of 4 public metrics, including 0.8763 validation BPB on NanoChat AutoResearch, 38.9 s on NanoGPT Speedrun Track 1 and 2,590 steps on Track 3, while scoring 0.819 mean SOL on SOL-ExecBench, behind the 0.827 leaderboard best. On ERNIE-5.5-Flash inference it reported 623.6% of baseline generation speed on Kunlunxin P800, +33.7% deterministic throughput and +14.9% single-request decode speed, though the system itself is not released.
Google announced two new eighth-generation TPU system configurations: TPU 8i Max, which packages two TPU 8i chips into one package to double compute, SRAM and HBM bandwidth for long-context workloads, and TPU 8tx, which pairs TPU 8t silicon with 5th Gen AMD EPYC hosts for confidential inference with up to 2x lower latency than TPU 8t. Google published no absolute specs, benchmarks, prices or regions for either system, and both are reported to arrive in 2027. The announcement also covered software updates including open-sourced TorchTPU, vLLM and SGLang TPU backends, a TPU agent suite preview, and TPU Sync, which cut median KV transfer latency on Qwen3 235B from several seconds to about 230 ms on Ironwood (TPU v7x).
The Financial Times reports that a UK growth minister said the UK will not slow its AI efforts despite backlash in the US. The supplied material contains only the article link and Hacker News metadata, with no further details.
A Hacker News user describes trying a voice conversation with ChatGPT during a morning walk to work through details of a new family project, and says it surfaced angles they hadn't considered and left them more motivated. They ask how many others on HN have voice conversations with AI, whether they find them immersive, and whether they stick to technical topics or explore other things.
An investigation by Science with the Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network found that neurology companies have accumulated tens of millions of hours of EEG recordings from sleep wearables and some are using them to develop brain foundation models, despite initially failing to spell out that use in their privacy policies. Interaxon, maker of the Muse sleep and meditation headband, has trained an AI model on about 50,000 hours of EEG recordings and says it removes identifying information such as names, emails and addresses before use. Its Chief Marketing Officer Nadia Kumentas said the company aims "to use as much of that eligible corpus as possible."
A DigitalJournal article argues that digital identity systems are heading for a reset as AI agents become customers. The supplied material contains only the article URL and Hacker News listing details (2 points, 0 comments), with no further content.
At the 2026 Conference on Robot Learning, UC Berkeley and NVIDIA announced "agentic robotics," an approach in which LLM-based coding agents decompose tasks like grocery packing into sub-tasks, write and iterate code in simulation, and even tune simulation parameters to match real-world video. UC Berkeley testing reached success rates up to 99 percent, matching human hand-engineered performance, versus 20 percent for baseline imitation learning, and NVIDIA's Spencer Huang said retasking a robot at Wistron drops from at least 8 hours to a minute or two. Intrinsic's Torsten Kroeger cautioned that no physics engine accurately models physical contact and raised alignment concerns about trusting agents.
A Register article at the linked URL discusses the AI bubble and argues that an exit plan cannot wait. The submission has 3 points and no comments on Hacker News.
An article at wsvincent.com titled "Claude's Wager: Why you don't have to believe in AI to bet on it," shared on Hacker News (2 points, 0 comments). The supplied material contains only the link and title, with no article text.
Anarlog is an open-source, MIT-licensed alternative to Granola that captures meeting audio directly on your device without sending a bot into the call, transcribes locally on supported Macs, and stores sessions, notes, and transcripts in a local SQLite database. It supports bring-your-own AI via hosted providers, your own API key, or OpenAI-compatible local servers such as Ollama, LM Studio, or Unsloth, with optional encrypted CloudSync and sharing off by default. The repo also includes source-visible, commercially licensed enterprise components, and the project notes it began as Hyprnote and briefly used the char name before splitting into two projects.
Meta Superintelligence Lab released Muse Ember, described as its lightest and most cost-efficient AI model yet, designed for complex reasoning execution and repetitive agent work such as tool calls, coding subtasks, routing, extraction, and long document parsing. At 10 cents per million input tokens, Meta says Ember is cheaper and smarter than competitors like Anthropic's Haiku and OpenAI's Luna on Artificial Analysis's composite benchmark, and it is meant to pair with a larger model like Muse Wonder in an agentic harness. Ember is Meta's fourth Muse-brand model, following Spark in April, Glimmer in August, and Wonder in October, and it was trained to handle text, images, and audio.
The Financial Times reported that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had an affair with Alice Huang, a former executive at Nvidia customer Megaspeed whom U.S. intelligence officials believe was recruited by Chinese intelligence to gather information about him and influence efforts to loosen chip export restrictions; Huang admitted the affair and apologized in a memo to the company on Sunday. Nvidia's independent directors are investigating with outside legal counsel, and Congress is demanding answers, as the controversy comes amid Huang's lobbying that helped reverse restrictions on Nvidia's H20 chips and allow exports of H200 processors. Nvidia recorded $7.9 billion in revenue from customers headquartered in China in the three months ended July 26, roughly 8% of total revenue.
Apiiro researchers found thousands of secrets, including database passwords, API tokens, and root logins, in Claude Code settings files embedded in public GitHub repositories. The leak stems from how Claude Code stores approved shell commands in the local ".claude/settings.local.json" file, sometimes writing the command as-is with any embedded sensitive information. Anthropic's documentation says this settings file is added to the developer's global .gitignore list, which usually prevents it from being shared publicly.
STE80 Humanizer is a skill that rewrites AI-written text in two passes: it removes the 26 "AI tells" from Wikipedia's Signs of AI writing catalog, then rebuilds sentences "80% of the way to ASD-STE100," the controlled English of aircraft maintenance manuals. It follows Andrej Karpathy's tip to ask LLMs for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" for readability, and states that its goal is easily read text, not passing AI detectors. It installs via the skills CLI or as a Claude Code plugin, includes a dependency-free Python linter (scripts/ste_check.py), and keeps every fact while flagging contradictions in the source.
Kotaku reports that the cast of Return of the Living Dead were horrified by an AI-made sequel they were originally set to star in. The article is at kotaku.com and is being discussed on Hacker News.
Latent Space's first deep dive with an AI data company examines Handshake's AI training business, which went from launch to $1 billion in gross annualized revenue in roughly a year. The episode walks through live demos of reinforcement learning environments across finance (Project Falcon's Excel grader), life sciences (the VIALS benchmark for scientific images), and safety/alignment simulations, with segments on how frontier labs buy and evaluate data.
This opinion piece discusses reports that Alice Huang, a former TV reporter turned executive at chip-buying firm Megaspeed, was allegedly recruited by China's Ministry of State Security and was photographed with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a Taipei bar in 2024. It notes Nvidia opened an investigation into Jensen Huang, who admitted in an email to colleagues that he had been "unfaithful," and argues that Nvidia's central role in financing AI neoclouds means trouble at the company could ripple through the AI industry.
Instagram has launched Effect Builder, which generates custom filters for Stories posts from AI prompts, available now to US residents over 18. Users can describe a filter, attach style reference images, preview effects on their own photos, request changes in follow-up prompts, and optionally have Instagram's AI rewrite the prompt. Filters can be submitted directly from Effect Builder but must pass a safety review before other users can access them, after which they appear in Instagram Stories with a link back to the creator's profile.
PwC US is launching a certification program starting in December for more than 85,000 employees across its US and Mexico offices and Acceleration Centers to build and demonstrate critical-thinking and judgment skills, with completion targeted by the end of its fiscal year in June 2027. The roughly six-month program begins with an assessment of thinking style, followed by classes developed with professors and veteran staff, realistic simulations, and a personalized AI coach, and proficiency will be evaluated in year-end performance reviews rather than through a pass/fail exam. PwC said AI is taking over foundational tasks that once helped employees develop judgment, and a recent analysis of US job listings found entry-level roles exposed to AI were far more likely to include senior-level skills such as judgment and leadership than in 2019.
An Ask HN poster says that with tools like Codex they no longer have many software problems to solve, and wonders whether this is making them intellectually lazy about finding problems. They say friends also struggled to name things they wish existed, and that most remaining work problems are process-related and interpersonal rather than technical.
A Science article reports that AI outperformed scientists at detecting errors in clinical research papers. The item links to the article and to a Hacker News discussion thread with 2 points and no comments.
Google Maps Platform is now available in Google AI Studio, letting users describe an app idea and have AI Studio handle configuration and API key management with no credit card required. The post lists core APIs for Maps, Places, Routes and Environment, plus example builds like a City Immersive Tour, Pet Grooming Route Optimizer and Store Locator. Built-in sandbox quotas of 100 calls per day per API reset every 24 hours, and linking a Google Cloud billing account unlocks production-grade quotas.
California state senator Scott Wiener, who won the San Francisco congressional seat vacated by Nancy Pelosi, authored SB 1047 (vetoed by Gavin Newsom) and SB 53 (signed), and says he wants Congress to act decisively on AI risk, citing a METR report on recursive self-improvement. He supports a strong federal AI regulator, whistleblower protections, testing and auditing requirements, and a kill switch, opposes broad federal preemption of state AI laws, and says he is only "cautiously optimistic" about Congress reining in AI.
This page is a GitHub Changelog entry titled "0.169.0-alpha.6," but the supplied material contains only site navigation and product menu text (Platform, Copilot, Actions, Codespaces, Advanced Security, pricing, and similar links) rather than the changelog content itself. No release notes, features, fixes, or dates are stated in the material.
Databricks describes how Sendoso's MCP server, installed from Databricks Marketplace as a governed MCP Service in Unity Catalog, lets Genie One users find intent signals in their own data and then select, preview, approve, track or cancel a gift without leaving the workspace. Send history sits alongside pipeline data for attribution, while Unity Catalog permissions, Unity Gateway controls and Sendoso budgets and approvals govern each send. The post cites Sendoso's 2026 Digital Fatigue Report finding that 84% of buyers are fatigued by cold calls and 83% by marketing emails.
Meta describes a vendor-neutral accelerator plugin architecture in lldb-server that separates shared debugger infrastructure from hardware-specific device control, representing the CPU and GPU as separate LLDB targets within one debugging session. The plugin translates a vendor's device debugging API into LLDB concepts such as processes, threads, registers, memory, modules, and stop reasons, and is activated only when the application uses a supported GPU runtime. Most of the common framework has been upstreamed to LLVM, including the plugin interface, GDB-remote packets, and hardware-independent mock tests.
The author reflects on Princess Mononoke, comparing Lady Eboshi's Irontown—which gives outcasts work and dignity while destroying the surrounding forest—to today's AI, which is genuinely empowering but carries costs borne by those who don't benefit. They note that Ashitaka, who seeks to "see with eyes unclouded by hate" and refuses to take sides, models the nuance they want in AI debates. The piece closes by asking not whether there will be iron, but what kind of Irontown we build with it.
This is a link to an IBM PDF ebook titled "How to Start Realizing Agentic AI ROI," posted to Hacker News with 1 point and 1 comment. The submission includes the article URL and the Hacker News comments URL.
The Bloomington City Council unanimously passed an ordinance barring the distribution and deployment of superintelligent AI in the city by any person or corporation, defining it as AI that outperforms humans at nearly all mental tasks and can act autonomously. The ordinance serves as an interim public safety measure that allows the city to seek civil penalties, injunctive relief and referral to the county prosecutor, and would expire 91 days after Indiana establishes a safety framework. In the same nearly five-hour meeting, the council also voted against removing Historic Preservation Commission advisory member Reynard Cross, passed seven Unified Development Ordinance amendments, and approved up to $6,868,664 in general obligation bonds 5-2.
The author distinguishes between predictions that AI will improve rapidly, which he says have been correct, and predictions that AI will transform the world, noting the absence of growth, job loss, and radical day-to-day impacts. He asks how much longer we must wait for these disruptive changes.
A Medium article by Mir Arshad Talpur poses the question of whether an AI incident could be reconstructed within a 15-day deadline. The submission has 1 point and no comments on Hacker News.
The author argues that AI does not create a new kind of fraud but energizes existing scams by making them faster, cheaper and easier to run at scale, drawing on three presentations about AI and fraud. He describes the anatomy of a scam (contact point, victim, continued interaction, confidence), explains tactics like the "spaghetti test," repetition and information gathering, and notes that AI voice systems can screen calls and that voice cloning enables vishing. He recounts a door-to-door impostor who used details from an old alarm-company data breach and possibly AI-generated talking points, and advises never confirming details, cutting off contact and verifying independently.
Codela checks each deploy against production behavior via observability tools like SigNoz, Datadog, Sentry, New Relic and Grafana, learns from failures, and writes lessons into the repo (.codela/lessons.md, plus lines in CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md) as pull requests that Claude Code, Cursor and Codex read before writing code. It also comments on pull requests that repeat a past mistake, and in the team's tests Claude Code repeated mistakes 8 of 8 times without Codela and 0 of 8 with it. Free for 1 repo and 20 PR checks a month; Pro is $7.99 per person per month.
Aleph is a declarative language for AI agents in which every route declares what it can read, write, and compute, and anything unbounded is rejected at build time. It compiles TypeScript into a manifest that a small open-source Rust engine interprets, with auth, databases, queues, and other backend pieces built in so many apps can share one runtime and database. The material also describes per-route worst-case usage checks, schema-change classification against what's deployed, and a typed vocabulary intended to make agent-written code easy to check.
Anthropic is spending $3.4 billion on Caterpillar natural gas generators capable of producing up to 1.7 gigawatts of electricity, buying units that equipment supplier OnePWR had originally ordered, according to a Financial Times report. The purchase marks a shift for Anthropic, which has generally rented rather than bought infrastructure and disclosed in its S-1 filing that it pays xAI $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for computing power. Natural gas turbine backlogs stretch into the early 2030s and grid connection queues can be just as long, and the report says OnePWR ordered the turbines a couple years ago but couldn't find financing to complete the purchase.