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Today's topics:

AI agent catches Mac hack - Ben Thompson says an always-on Claude AI agent detected malware on his hacked Mac mini and guided cleanup. He also criticizes Apple's macOS security updates, privacy prompts, and walled garden for agentic workflows.

ChatGPT forges cartoonist signatures - ChatGPT has generated fake New Yorker-style cartoons carrying real cartoonists' signatures, including Brendan Loper's. The case raises questions about AI image generation, attribution, impersonation, and artists' rights.

Reflection releases Beam open model - Reflection unveiled Beam, a 501-billion-parameter sparse mixture-of-experts open-weight model built for coding, reasoning, and agentic tasks. It was trained with large-scale reinforcement learning, and weights are expected later this month.

Dust: training without backpropagation - Dust is a zeroth-order method for training transformer language models that adds noise to activations instead of using a backward pass. Its authors say it can match backpropagation in some settings and outperform evolution strategies like EGGROLL.

AI finds spintronic semiconductor candidates - AI-assisted materials discovery flagged YBaMnFeO5 and the existing compound KV[Cr(CN)6] as possible room-temperature antiferromagnetic semiconductors. Both could be relevant to spintronic memory, but the predictions still need experimental confirmation.

Example.com gets multilingual redesign - IANA redesigned example.com in September 2026 with rotating multilingual text and animation. A history of the reserved documentation domain also warns developers not to use it for testing or monitoring.

Competitive Programmer's Handbook resurfaces - Antti Laaksonen's free Competitive Programmer's Handbook covers algorithms, data structures, dynamic programming, and graph theory. It serves as a guide for IOI, ICPC, and coding interview preparation.

Flatten SF hill-avoiding routes - Flatten SF is a browser-based tool that finds walking and biking routes in San Francisco by balancing distance against elevation gain. It uses LiDAR and street-graph data.

A love letter to designer lamps - A blogger tours the designer lamps in his home, including the Tolomeo, Tizio, Noguchi Akari, and PH lamps. The post celebrates lighting design, craftsmanship, and atmosphere.

-Cloudflare Launches Web Search API in Beta
-Reflection Announces Beam, a 501B Open-Weight Model
-ChatGPT Is Falsely Si