nextbig.dev · The Wire

I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:12 GMT

254 points, 152 comments on HN (via Hacker News). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Video2NAND – Abusing video codecs for great computational power

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:11 GMT

53 points, 10 comments on HN (via Hacker News). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Waymo in Dallas

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:11 GMT

284 points, 476 comments on HN (via Hacker News). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:11 GMT

197 points, 154 comments on HN (via Hacker News). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:11 GMT

243 points, 32 comments on HN (via Hacker News). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Zigbee vs. Matter over Thread:Understanding IoT Protocol Performance in Practice

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:11 GMT

70 points, 52 comments on HN (via Hacker News). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley, with Thanks for 36 Wonderful Years

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:11 GMT

1229 points, 70 comments on HN (via Hacker News). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

DuckDB – Data power tools for your laptop, now in Clojure (2023)

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:11 GMT

81 points, 13 comments on HN (via Hacker News). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Show HN: Maple-Preview – Ternary 20B MoE running at 120 tok/s on a iPhone

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:11 GMT

96 points, 25 comments on HN (via Hacker News). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

IP and DNS Leaks in WebKit Affecting Proxy Browsers and iCloud Private Relay

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:11 GMT

87 points, 11 comments on HN (via Hacker News). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:11 GMT

376 points, 90 comments on HN (via Hacker News). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:11 GMT

175 points, 128 comments on HN (via Hacker News). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:11 GMT

262 points, 106 comments on HN (via Hacker News). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:00:11 GMT

97 points, 56 comments on HN (via Hacker News). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

SpaceX is coming for T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:50:19 GMT

SpaceX is preparing to build a terrestrial mobile network to "acquire quite a few" of the customers now subscribed to T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon. The message to compete head-to-head with the US carriers was delivered by SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell and CEO Elon Musk during the Q&A section of… (via The Verge). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

CT-HEG: A Bidirectional, Timestamp-Attributed Event Graph for ICU In-Hospital Mortality Prediction - An Architectural Ablation Study

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

arXiv:2608.02663v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate ICU mortality prediction requires modeling irregular clinical observations across heterogeneous entity types. (via arXiv cs.LG). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

LLMs Can Annotate Attribution Graphs

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

arXiv:2608.02632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Circuit tracing is an exciting technique for revealing the internal computation of language models, but it requires a time-intensive manual step of grouping individual features or MLP neurons into supernodes. (via arXiv cs.LG). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Verifier-Guided Model Discovery for Physical Dynamical Systems with Pretrained Symbolic Transformers

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

arXiv:2608.02662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable forecasting of nonlinear physical systems underpins scientific discovery and engineering decision-making. Yet high-fidelity simulations are prohibitively costly, and machine-learning surrogates can be opaque and encode assumptions about… (via arXiv cs.LG). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Deep Divide-and-Reduce in Symbolic Regression

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

arXiv:2608.02628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symbolic regression (SR) is the task of discovering underlying patterns from data and representing them using mathematical expressions. (via arXiv cs.LG). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

GeoID-PINN: Identifiability-Aware Regional Epidemic Inference with Geographic Coupling

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

arXiv:2608.02633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Regional surveillance data reflect local transmission, reporting, seeding, and external infection pressure, which are difficult to identify separately. (via arXiv cs.LG). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Multimodal Auto-regressive Transformer Surrogate for Modeling Variable Operations and Quantifying Uncertainty in Geological Carbon Storage

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

arXiv:2608.02629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The use of variable well perforation and injection strategies can improve the efficiency of geological carbon storage operations. We develop a new multimodal auto-regressive transformer surrogate to model these operations under geological uncertainty. (via arXiv cs.LG). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Sphere Retraction Normalizations

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

arXiv:2608.02668v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Residual connections are the de facto mechanism for training deep neural networks stably. Geodesic Normalization (GeoNorm) recasts them on a Riemannian manifold, orthogonalizing each layer output against the current hidden state and applying the… (via arXiv cs.LG). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Learning Molecular Representations from Cellular Phenotypes with Structure Preservation

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:00:00 GMT

arXiv:2608.02688v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Phenotypic drug discovery enables the discovery of functional relationships between molecular structures and cellular responses. (via arXiv cs.LG). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

AI researchers let models off the leash – then watched as they tried to add malware to a FOSS project

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 01:55:54 GMT

The UK’s AI Security Institute has observed AI models performing what it calls “unsanctioned action” 19 times during security tests. The Institute (AISI) revealed the incidents in a Tuesday post and technical report that details tests it conducted to see if AI models can solve a cyber security… (via The Register). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

[AINews] Megakernels are so dead and so back

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 01:21:47 GMT

Part of our Inference Engineering Masterclass pod yesterday involved a spicy discussion about Megakernels: megakernels are dead why are megakernels useful? you spend two months writing a kernel to save time on launch overhead and poor inter-kernel overlap. (via Latent Space). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

AMD's results spotlight risks of putting all your AI eggs in too few baskets

Oday Brahem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:40:10 GMT

AMD has posted strong second quarter results and forecast even better future financials once its Helios rack systems and Instinct MI400-series GPUs reach buyers. “In data center AI, the growing number and scale of Helios and MI450-series deployments position the [datacenter] business for… (via The Register). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

New release of LLM adds support for reasoning traces, OpenAI Responses, server-side tools, and smarter logging

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 23:58:24 GMT

I released LLM 0.32 this morning, the most significant new version of LLM since the initial launch of the project. (via Simon Willison). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Don’t screw this up, Marvel

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 23:20:56 GMT

In less than a week, Spider-Man: Brand New Day raked in $1 billion worldwide and had the biggest box office opening weekend in Hollywood history. The feature has been a reminder of why Sony is probably never going to give up the Spider-Man film rights, and highlighted how Marvel Studios was smart… (via The Verge). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

AMD doubles data center revenue year over year, but gaming revenue plunged by 31% — CEO Lisa Su says prices have 'weighed on' consumer demand but is 'optimistic' about client market

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:03:07 GMT

AMD’s Q2 2026 financial results show record revenue across the business, but gaming is contributing less and less to that overall pie. Overall, AMD’s Q2 revenue was $11.5 billion, up 50% year-over-year and up 13% quarter-over-quarter. (via Tom's Hardware). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Now you can securely link multiple phones to one Signal account

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:02:46 GMT

You can link more devices with one phone number on Signal now, including an Android phone or iPhone. Signal already supported linking PCs and iPads, but not additional phones. When you link a device on Signal, you can check and respond to new messages across all of your linked devices. (via The Verge). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

llm-anthropic 0.26

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:00:58 GMT

Release: llm-anthropic 0.26

Includes new features enabled by LLM 0.32:

New models… (via Simon Willison). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Senators demand crackdown on wildfire "prediction markets"

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:52:31 GMT

Several US senators have written a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), inquiring about the agency’s “plans to crack down on prediction markets” that offer “contracts for individuals to bet on wildfires.” “Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize… (via Ars Technica). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Trump killed the Digital Equity Act, but US was forced to bring part of it back

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:27:05 GMT

The Trump administration said it will reinstate a broadband grant program to comply with a court ruling that prevented it from fully ignoring the Digital Equity Act enacted by Congress in 2021. (via Ars Technica). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Dev proves LLMs will run on anything – even a $10 microcontroller

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:20:00 GMT

Getting a small local language model running on a notebook or even smartphone in 2026 is trivial. But what about something even smaller and lower-power. Say, like an ESP32 microcontroller that costs less than $10? (via The Register). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

SpaceX has bought $329M worth of Tesla Megapacks so far this year

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:07:26 GMT

The purchase illustrates just how interconnected Elon Musk's universe of companies are. (via TechCrunch AI). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

OpenAI wants teachers and profs to foist their work off on ChatGPT

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:03:00 GMT

In the face of an epidemic of AI-enabled cheating and research suggesting its products hamper learning, OpenAI is doing the sensible thing and pushing more AI on students and teachers. Wait, did I say sensible? My mistake. (via The Register). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

AMD’s data center business is booming while gaming takes a backseat

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:57:49 GMT

Driven by demand for AI capacity, AMD's data center revenue more than doubled year-over-year in its latest earnings report, reaching $6.7 billion. That's up from $5.8 billion in Q1, and jumping 107 percent from the $3.2 billion it reported for the same period a year ago. (via The Verge). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

SpaceX made more revenue as an AI company than a space company

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:47:55 GMT

SpaceX's AI revenue grew more than three times to $2.6 billion from the year before, mostly because of deals that the company made to provide compute to other AI companies, according to SpaceX's quarterly earnings. (via The Verge). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Next.js 16.3 aims to reduce dreaded FATAL ERROR messages

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:34:39 GMT

Next.js coders toiling on complex React applications live with an ongoing low-grade anxiety about running out of memory. It’s not dementia; it’s the software. The dev can fill RAM all day long until the JavaScript engine (often V8) chokes, causing the underlying Node.js engine to crash entirely… (via The Register). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Texas halts data center connections to power grid amid overwhelming demand

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:34:28 GMT

Nowhere is the US data center boom bigger than in Texas. But less than a year after declaring Texas the “epicenter of AI development,” Governor Greg Abbott has declared a moratorium on all new power grid connections for data centers, at least until developers provide more information about their… (via Ars Technica). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

EA is now a private company

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:18:14 GMT

Electronic Arts has officially become a private company. Last September, EA announced that an investor group led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF), Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners would be taking the company private in a $55 billion deal, and on Tuesday, EA said the deal… (via The Verge). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Open-weight AI models are catching up to the frontier. The safety gap remains.

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:05:26 GMT

A new SaferAI report finds Z.ai's open-weight GLM-5.2 approaches frontier AI capabilities while lacking key safety mitigations, renewing concerns that powerful open models could outpace governance and safeguards. (via TechCrunch AI). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 Review

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:00:56 GMT

The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 takes the long-running business notebook line into a new Intel Core Ultra generation. Our model 21V7006EUS pairs an Intel Core Ultra 7 355 with 32GB-class memory and integrated Intel graphics in a system The post Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 Review appeared… (via ServeTheHome). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Anthropic signs $10B deal with AI cloud startup Volta

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:48:40 GMT

Anthropic has been on a cloud partnership spree in recent months, and its latest move is reportedly a $10 billion deal with AI cloud startup Volta. (via TechCrunch AI). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Meet Wrinkles, an app that uncovers the hidden stories of the places around you

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:34:34 GMT

Wrinkles, available on both iOS and Android, essentially acts as an AI-powered audio tour guide that reveals hidden history and local stories. (via TechCrunch AI). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Nvidia doesn’t mess around: A week after open AI industry group formed, it’s already showing progress

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:28:49 GMT

The week-old Open Secure AI Alliance, spearheaded by Nvidia and grown to over 120 companies, already has proposals out for defending against AI agents. (via TechCrunch AI). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Telegram CEO says an extortionist planted CSAM in a chat to get it pulled from the App Store

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:11:05 GMT

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov blames an extortionist for planting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in a public chat to get the app temporarily removed from Apple's App Store on Monday night. "Apple removed Telegram from the App Store before contacting us," Durov says in a post on X. (via The Verge). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

PipeNetwork/minimax-h3-mlx

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:10:09 GMT

PipeNetwork/minimax-h3-mlx

MiniMax released MiniMax-H3 two days ago - they describe it as a "a general-purpose, omni-modal generative system", which in… (via Simon Willison). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

Unpacking ChatGPT Work: the Agent for a Billion Users

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:20:14 GMT

Editor’s note: I’m excited to welcome Shlok to our guest post roster ! You may know Shlok from his excellent explorations (as an outsider, for an insider perspective see our podcast with OpenAI’s Akshay Nathan . (via Latent Space). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news

The AI Demand Bubble

Oday Brahem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:00:11 GMT

76 points, 35 comments on HN (via Hacker News). Filed on the nextbig.dev wire: https://www.nextbig.dev/news