Ahbar — All Technical, Scientific & Strategic Dispatches

Discord Patch Notes: November 9, 2026. Check out the finer details of the more technical fixes implemented into Discord recently.

2026-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

Check out the finer details of the more technical fixes implemented into Discord recently.

Source: Discord Systems & Database Engineering · Tags: #rust #databases

Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations

2026-09-15T12:31:10Z

Published via Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) in Computer Science & Software. Primary discussion and technical specification available at the linked source.

Source: Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) · Tags: #trending-repo #open-source

Show HN: Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing

2021-02-25T01:47:30Z

Published via Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) in Computer Science & Software. Primary discussion and technical specification available at the linked source.

Source: Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) · Tags: #trending-repo #open-source

TTB: Test-time Baking for Efficient Rendering of Decoder-only View Synthesis Models

2026-11-11T19:00:00.000Z

Decoder-only Large View Synthesis Models (LVSMs) with KV-cache have recently achieved state-of-the-art quality by regressing novel views from neural networks without reconstructing 3D geometry, while Test-Time Training (TTT) layers save computation but sacrifice quality. We propose Test-Time Baking (TTB), a strategy that learns to bake global scene information from cross-view attention into a lightweight MLP, enabling fast and high-fidelity novel-view decoding. The first key is to repurpose the fast-weight MLP of TTT to learn the cross-view attention mapping explicitly from its input-output pairs, rather than replacing attention entirely, achieving the same rendering efficiency as TTT while delivering substantially higher quality.

Source: Hugging Face Daily Papers · Tags: #llm #open-weights #neuroscience

Show HN: This up votes itself

2012-03-23T00:40:39Z

Published via Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) in Computer Science & Software. Primary discussion and technical specification available at the linked source.

Source: Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) · Tags: #trending-repo #open-source

Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now

2025-12-09T15:00:38Z

Published via Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) in Computer Science & Software. Primary discussion and technical specification available at the linked source.

Source: Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) · Tags: #trending-repo #open-source

Show HN: I made an open-source laptop from scratch

2025-01-22T20:41:52Z

Published via Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) in Computer Science & Software. Primary discussion and technical specification available at the linked source.

Source: Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) · Tags: #trending-repo #open-source

Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

2024-08-14T15:10:06Z

Published via Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) in Computer Science & Software. Primary discussion and technical specification available at the linked source.

Source: Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) · Tags: #trending-repo #open-source

Show HN: A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time

2019-03-14T20:25:03Z

Published via Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) in Computer Science & Software. Primary discussion and technical specification available at the linked source.

Source: Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) · Tags: #trending-repo #open-source

Show HN: Redbean – Single-file distributable web server

2021-02-26T03:33:56Z

Published via Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) in Computer Science & Software. Primary discussion and technical specification available at the linked source.

Source: Show HN (Trending Repos & Tools) · Tags: #trending-repo #open-source

Open Vision Banana: A Fully Open Recipe for Generative Visual Perception. Recent work suggests that pretrained image generators encode real-world understanding beyond image synthesis.

2026-11-10T19:00:00.000Z

Recent work suggests that pretrained image generators encode real-world understanding beyond image synthesis. Vision Banana exploits this by framing vision tasks as conditional image editing. However, its data, weights, code, and implementation details are not public.

Source: Hugging Face Daily Papers · Tags: #llm #open-weights #infosec

Actor, Judge, or Teacher? Understanding Decision Models in Long-Horizon Agents

2026-11-11T19:00:00.000Z

Decision models answer a question with a typed output, such as a choice among options with a probability for each, so one model can choose an agent's actions, evaluate actions already taken, or score every action to teach a policy with reinforcement learning. Prior work has studied them mainly as actors, judging their usefulness by how well they act. We ask whether a decision model that acts poorly can still teach well.

Source: Hugging Face Daily Papers · Tags: #llm #open-weights #agents #reinforcement-learning

Ropedia Xperience 2: A Gold Standard for Scaling Physical AI Environments and Behaviors

2026-11-11T19:00:00.000Z

Large foundation models such as GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 have recently been shown to control robots directly from visual observations. They nevertheless remain brittle on long-horizon, contact-rich tasks in real-world environments. Further progress depends on two complementary resources: demonstrations of human behavior that supervise how tasks are performed, and interactive environments in which policies can be rolled out, evaluated, and improved in closed loop.

Source: Hugging Face Daily Papers · Tags: #llm #open-weights #robotics

Unbundling Multimodal Vision Encoding. How multimodal language models should encode visual input remains up for debate.

2026-11-11T19:00:00.000Z

How multimodal language models should encode visual input remains up for debate. Most models use a pretrained vision encoder, while some recent recipes train the encoder from scratch with the language model or remove it entirely. Vision encoders bundle together three design choices: a visual prior from upstream pretraining, dedicated vision capacity, and pre-fusion placement of that capacity (i.e., before the multimodal backbone).

Source: Hugging Face Daily Papers · Tags: #llm #open-weights #clean-tech

Factored One-sided Adam-Moment for Practical and Scalable SOAP

2026-11-11T19:00:00.000Z

Second-order optimizers (e.g., Shampoo, SOAP) have emerged as compelling alternatives to Adam/AdamW and promise faster per-step convergence than AdamW in transformer training. However, they still remain costly in practice, and even SOAP still pays substantial optimizer-state memory and eigendecomposition overhead. We ask whether the benefits of SOAP can be retained at nearly the efficiency of AdamW.

Source: Hugging Face Daily Papers · Tags: #llm #open-weights

Back to Pixels: Lifting Latent Video Diffusion into Pixel Space. Frontier video generation models work in a VAE latent space that compresses video in both space and time.

2026-11-11T19:00:00.000Z

Frontier video generation models work in a VAE latent space that compresses video in both space and time. This compression made training tractable, but now limits high-resolution, controllable, and interactive generation -- doubling resolution quadruples token count, conditions apply to groups of frames rather than individual ones, and each response must wait for the rest of its multi-frame block. We present PixVid, a simple yet effective method that lifts a pretrained latent video model to directly generate every frame in pixel space.

Source: Hugging Face Daily Papers · Tags: #llm #open-weights #clean-tech #computer-vision

The Value of Thinking: Learning When to Reason in Hybrid Decision Models

2026-11-11T19:00:00.000Z

Existing adaptive-reasoning methods shorten the explicit reasoning a model writes, or skip it by switching modes; either way the answer is still written out token by token. Rather than deciding how much to think, we explore a different paradigm, zero-or-T thinking: a single model either answers from the implicit thinking inside one forward pass, generating no token, or performs full autoregressive reasoning at a cost of T tokens when that is worth paying. We realise it in a hybrid decision model (HDM), where one frozen backbone serves both modes and a lightweight self-routing block chooses between them.

Source: Hugging Face Daily Papers · Tags: #llm #open-weights #agents

Agent-R^2: Scaling Agents for Realistic Productivity Work via Real-Source Data Synthesis

2026-11-04T19:00:00.000Z

Large language models have made rapid progress in agentic reasoning and tool use, raising expectations for agents that can take over realistic productivity work from humans. However, current agents still struggle to finish such tasks, where success requires following long-horizon professional workflows, understanding heterogeneous file contexts, and producing usable deliverables under fine-grained requirements. A key bottleneck is the lack of scalable post-training data that reflects real work intent, authentic file environments, and deliverable-level evaluation.

Source: Hugging Face Daily Papers · Tags: #llm #open-weights #agents #reinforcement-learning

Accuracy Is Not Welfare: Evaluating AI Buyers under Strategic Price Complexity in a Synthetic Duopoly

2026-11-12T08:28:49+00:00

AI buying agents may alter sellers' incentives as well as consumers' decisions. In a synthetic duopoly, we evaluate price-comparison pipelines on a fixed menu and in empirical correlated-equilibrium games. Calculator assistance selects an optimal offer 84.00% of the time, versus 68.57% under verified-total disclosure, yet disclosure has a 20.14-unit higher consumer-worst equilibrium surplus.

Source: arXiv Economics (econ.EM, econ.GN, econ.TH) · Tags: #econometrics #macroeconomics #decision-theory #quant-finance

Long-lived light-driven bimagnons at finite momentum in NiO. Light can manipulate magnetic order and its excitations on ultrafast timescales, including through resonantly driven phonons.

2026-11-12T18:59:55+00:00

Light can manipulate magnetic order and its excitations on ultrafast timescales, including through resonantly driven phonons. In antiferromagnets, light can also create correlated magnon pairs, or bimagnons. Unlike single magnons, whose damping has been measured and modeled in detail, little is known about the lifetime, interactions and decay of such correlated pairs: prior two-magnon measurements show broad linewidths or coherences that dephase within 200 fs.

Source: arXiv Quantum & Condensed Matter (quant-ph, cond-mat) · Tags: #quantum-computing #condensed-matter #materials-science #optics-photonics

Possible futures of the Ethereum protocol, part 6: The Splurge

2024-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Published via Vitalik Buterin's Blog in Cryptography, Web3 & Protocols. Primary discussion and technical specification available at the linked source.

Source: Vitalik Buterin's Blog · Tags: #zkp #consensus

Verifiable Settlement and Pricing for Local Energy Markets: Architecture and Deployment on Hyperledger Besu

2026-11-12T09:02:06+00:00

We implement privacy-preserving local electricity exchanges using an automated market maker on the Hyperledger Besu network under QBFT consensus. The proposed protocol operator collects individual electricity positions off-chain and publishes aggregate supply and demand on the blockchain, where smart contracts compute market prices every fifteen minutes. Individual positions remain off-chain; Poseidon2 commitments and UltraHonk zeroknowledge proofs, generated from Noir circuits, verify aggregation, payments, and daily balance updates.

Source: arXiv Cryptography & Security (cs.CR) · Tags: #cryptography #zkp #decision-theory #quant-finance

Security updates for Friday

2026-11-13T14:25:42+00:00

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, firefox, gcc, grafana, grafana-pcp, gstreamer1, gstreamer1-plugins-base, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, libimobiledevice, mingw-libpng, nginx:1.24, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, perl-CGI, perl-DBI, qt5-qtbase, tigervnc, vim, and xorg-x11-server), Debian (apache2, c-ares, linux-6.12, node-shell-quote, nova, parted, postgresql-17,…

Source: LWN.net (Linux & Kernel Engineering) · Tags: #kernel-os #performance #rust #databases

Hot Chips 2026: Intel’s Crescent Island. All about making things affordable

2026-08-27T05:12:31+00:00

All about making things affordable

Source: Chips and Cheese (Microarchitecture Deep-Dives) · Tags: #computer-architecture #semiconductors

Doom GPU Flame Graphs

2025-04-30T14:00:00+00:00

Imagine halving the resource costs of AI and what that could mean for the planet and the industry -- based on extreme estimates such savings could reduce the total US power usage by over 10% by 2030 1 . At Intel we've been creating a new analyzer tool to help reduce AI costs called AI Flame Graphs : a visualization that shows an AI accelerator or GPU hardware profile along with the full software stack, based on my CPU flame graphs . Our first version is available to customers in the Intel Tiber AI Cloud as a preview for the Intel Data Center GPU Max Series (previously called Ponte Vecchio).

Source: Brendan Gregg (Systems Performance & eBPF) · Tags: #kernel-os #performance #compilers #combinatorics

Toward the abelian category of positive Lagrangians

2026-11-12T18:51:25+00:00

We introduce a geometric construction whose terminal configuration determines the kernel and cokernel of a morphism between positive Lagrangian branes in the derived Fukaya category of a Calabi-Yau manifold. Thus, if the construction always terminates, the full subcategory of positive Lagrangian branes is abelian, as conjectured by Joyce. We show that this abelian category admits Harder-Narasimhan filtrations with respect to the central charge defined by the holomorphic volume form.

Source: arXiv Mathematics (NT, CO, AG, LO, AT, GR) · Tags: #number-theory #combinatorics #high-energy #algebra-geometry

Sowing the Seeds of Intractability: Kalah is PSPACE-complete. Kalah is a classic two-player game in the mancala family of sowing games.

2026-11-12T18:38:34+00:00

Kalah is a classic two-player game in the mancala family of sowing games. Computers have solved several standard-size starting positions, but the complexity of the game on boards of growing size has remained open. We study the natural generalization in which the number of pits per side is part of the input and an arbitrary position is given, with the stone counts given in unary.

Source: arXiv Mathematics (NT, CO, AG, LO, AT, GR) · Tags: #number-theory #combinatorics #algorithms #decision-theory

Dimension drop for superlevel sets of the uniform Littlewood constant

2026-11-12T17:54:36+00:00

For $(x,y)\in\mathbb{R}^2$ and $Q\ge 1$, set $F_Q(x,y)=Q\min_{1\le q\le Q}\lVert qx\rVert\lVert qy\rVert$, where $q$ ranges over positive integers and $\lVert\cdot\rVert$ denotes distance to the nearest integer. The set on which the uniform Littlewood constant $L=\limsup_{Q\to\infty}F_Q$ is positive has full Hausdorff dimension. We prove that for every fixed $c>0$ the superlevel set $\{L\ge c\}$ has Hausdorff dimension strictly less than two.

Source: arXiv Mathematics (NT, CO, AG, LO, AT, GR) · Tags: #number-theory #combinatorics #analysis-pde #post-quantum

Learning Dynamics of the Influencer's Game in Resource Landscapes

2026-11-12T17:33:27+00:00

Across domains as varied as ecology, economics, and online platforms, individuals are incentivized to position themselves within resource-rich strategy spaces. In this work we introduce a new spatial game framework called the influencer's game. Within this new framework players' strategies are represented as positions within a trait space.

Source: arXiv Economics (econ.EM, econ.GN, econ.TH) · Tags: #econometrics #macroeconomics #decision-theory #market-design

Unequal Rewards and the Direction of Scientific Work: Evidence from U.S. Public Universities

2026-11-12T12:58:45+00:00

Research on pay dispersion has long asked whether unequal rewards increase or depress performance. Tournament theory expects stronger effort, while social comparison accounts expect withdrawal. Both perspectives, however, treat performance as a single scale on which workers can be ranked.

Source: arXiv Economics (econ.EM, econ.GN, econ.TH) · Tags: #econometrics #macroeconomics #complex-systems

Designing Information in a Forest: Algorithmic Aspects. The Bayesian persuasion framework models strategic information revelation by a sender to one or more receivers.

2026-11-12T05:49:55+00:00

The Bayesian persuasion framework models strategic information revelation by a sender to one or more receivers. We study an intricate version of the multi-receiver persuasion setting in which the communication hierarchy is a forest - i.e., some receivers observe more informative signals than others, and the partial ordering of the receivers according to the information they get is represented by a pre-specified directed forest. This model naturally captures interactions in hierarchical organizations, and it lies in between the two most commonly studied versions of Bayesian persuasion: private persuasion and public persuasion.

Source: arXiv Economics (econ.EM, econ.GN, econ.TH) · Tags: #econometrics #macroeconomics #decision-theory #market-design

A deployed four-city entanglement-based QKD network with real-time key delivery, benchmarked against finite-key security bounds

2026-11-12T18:45:08+00:00

Quantum key distribution (QKD) generates shared secret keys whose security rests on the laws of physics rather than on computational assumptions. We report the entanglement-based segment of the Slovak national quantum communication infrastructure, connecting four cities in western Slovakia over deployed telecommunication fiber. Polarization-entangled photons generated at a central node are passively routed by wavelength to form a trusted-node-free, fully meshed sub-network of three cities, with the fourth connected through the central node and all links operated simultaneously.

Source: arXiv Quantum & Condensed Matter (quant-ph, cond-mat) · Tags: #quantum-computing #condensed-matter #optics-photonics #rust

Non-interferometric tests of gravitational decoherence models with mechanical oscillators

2026-11-12T18:43:12+00:00

Phenomenological models of quantum-gravity-induced decoherence can leave observable effects even in experiments that do not rely on interferometric measurements. We study three such models, based respectively on deformed relativistic symmetries, stochastic metric fluctuations, and a stochastic generalized uncertainty principle, all of which induce decoherence in the momentum basis. For a free particle, the models preserve momentum distribution and mean energy but produce position diffusion and momentum-space decoherence with model-specific momentum dependences.

Source: arXiv Quantum & Condensed Matter (quant-ph, cond-mat) · Tags: #quantum-computing #condensed-matter #astrophysics #clean-tech

Implementation of a 1D Gaussian-modulated CV-QKD under finite-size parameter estimation

2026-11-12T18:37:36+00:00

Continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) is a promising technology for quantum-secure communications, offering high secret-key rates and straightforward integration with coherent optical communication systems. Conventional Gaussian-modulated CV-QKD encodes information in both optical-field quadratures, increasing requirements for state preparation, modulation, and calibration, while potentially introducing additional preparation imperfections. Unidimensional (1D) Gaussian modulation offers a simpler alternative by encoding information in only one quadrature, while the conjugate quadrature constrains the protocol's security.

Source: arXiv Quantum & Condensed Matter (quant-ph, cond-mat) · Tags: #quantum-computing #condensed-matter #optics-photonics

Lattice response theory for subsystem symmetry-protected topological phases

2026-11-12T17:50:53+00:00

We develop a framework to study subsystem symmetry-protected topological (SSPT) phases using lattice response theory. We begin with a systematic construction of spacetime lattice gauge fields from general microscopic $X$-type symmetry actions on qudit systems, including global symmetries, subsystem symmetries, and more general modulated symmetries. Given a gauge-invariant response action, we then construct a corresponding entangler and explicitly show that it implements stacking with the SSPT phase described by the response action.

Source: arXiv Quantum & Condensed Matter (quant-ph, cond-mat) · Tags: #quantum-computing #condensed-matter #high-energy #post-quantum

Fictitious Play When Agents Are Not Expected-Utility Maximizers: A Geometric Analysis in $2$-Action Games

2026-11-12T18:52:14+00:00

Fictitious play (FP) is one of the earliest and most fundamental learning procedures in games, where each agent independently chooses a best response to the empirical distribution of opponents' past actions by maximizing the expected payoff with respect to it. However, learning agents may not always be expected-utility maximizers: they may use nonlinear evaluation functionals to account for the uncertainty induced by the opponents, e.g., via risk measures. In this work, we study nonlinear fictitious play (NL-FP), in which each pure action is evaluated by a general, possibly nonlinear functional of the payoff distribution induced by the opponent's empirical belief.

Source: arXiv Analysis, PDEs & Probability (AP, PR, NA, OC) · Tags: #analysis-pde #probability-stats #decision-theory #optimization

Price-impact Martingale optimal transport

2026-11-12T18:35:02+00:00

Martingale optimal transport (MOT) provides model-independent bounds for option prices calibrated to vanilla options, assuming frictionless trading in the underlying. In this work, we consider the case where dynamic trading incurs quadratic temporary price impact. First, we prove a duality result for the superhedging price.

Source: arXiv Analysis, PDEs & Probability (AP, PR, NA, OC) · Tags: #analysis-pde #probability-stats #quant-finance

Structure-Preserving Leaky Integrate-and-Fire Dynamics on Arbitrary Time Scales

2026-11-12T18:16:14+00:00

The leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neuron combines a passive membrane law with threshold-triggered firing and reset. We formulate this hybrid neuron model, under constant input, on an arbitrary Hilger time scale $\mathbb{T}$. Our central result is that, after the first spike, the firing times satisfy $t_{n+1}=Π_{\mathbb{T}}^{+}(t_n+T_c)$, where $T_c$ is the classical reset-to-threshold travel time.

Source: arXiv Analysis, PDEs & Probability (AP, PR, NA, OC) · Tags: #analysis-pde #probability-stats #neuroscience #post-quantum

Dana’s talk on OpenAI’s proof of the Unique Games Conjecture, now on YouTube!

2026-11-10T20:27:28+00:00

In my “Mathocalypse” post, I mentioned that my wife Dana—who’s been working on Subhash Khot’s Unique Games Conjecture since ~2009, for the entire time I’ve known her—has for the past few weeks (while on sabbatical at the Simons Institute in Berkeley) been spending essentially all of her time laboring to understand OpenAI’s recent proof of […]

Source: Shtetl-Optimized (Scott Aaronson) · Tags: #quantum-computing #algorithms

Podcasts about the Topic: Part III, with Brian Greene. As always, I strongly recommend 2x speed, which compensates somewhat for my verbal infelicities!

2026-10-31T21:40:33+00:00

As always, I strongly recommend 2x speed, which compensates somewhat for my verbal infelicities! New! More podcasts keep dropping! This one is with the AI alignment researcher Roman Yampolskiy, about … well, AI alignment, plus the Mathocalypse, plus quantum computing, plus whether the universe is a simulation, and I forget what else!

Source: Shtetl-Optimized (Scott Aaronson) · Tags: #quantum-computing #algorithms