daily

2026-08-03
1

Karpathy’s Pelican

Hacker News · original → · 8/10 · AI: Claude Opus 5 advanced code generation capabilities
We're starting to leave the territory where you'd test an LLM by e.g. "create an svg of pelican on a bicycle". As one idea to generalize it, I was interested what Opus 5 would do if I gave it the…

We're starting to leave the territory where you'd test an LLM by e.g. "create an svg of pelican on a bicycle". As one idea to generalize it, I was interested what Opus 5 would do if I gave it the first paragraph of the Lord of the Rings, a 1M token budget (~$10) and asked for three js render of it. Opus went off for ~2 hours and wrote 5500 lines of code that (procedurally) rendered the story. It's kind of janky but fun. But it's a bit mindboggling that the LLM has to place and orchestrate various polygon assets in (x,y,z) coordinates and write code that animates it all, and that it even does anything at all. I also like this kind of examples because no one in their right mind would ever spend the time to write something this custom but LLMs have all the stamina and patience in the world, so it's an example where we go from "no one would ever do this" to "sure, why not, it's ~free". There might be a lot more. But I'm excited about creating hyper custom worlds that you can imagine dropping players into, e.g. here to participate in the LoTR story as a spectator NPC, or one of the characters, or etc. Something like an ephemeral GTA of X on demand. Last thought is that the domain of worlds/games exposes a weakness in LLMs: they can't easily audit their work because they aren't able to efficiently and natively perceive videos or play games within them. Here, Opus 5 had to very slowly and painstakingly take screenshots at different points, and it messed up a few times and created a bunch of jank. An example of raw capability (multimodal, gameplay) that I think is still quite lacking. - More on the pelican on the bicycle test from @simonw: simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/6/six… I uploaded the source here so it's playable in the browser, forkable etc. karpathy.ai/lotr-movie/ Look out for GTA Hobbiton dropping before GTA VI :)

2

Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

Simon Willison · original → · 8/10 · AI: Claude and OpenAI cryptographic research breakthroughs
1st August 2026 - Link Blog Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science (via) A few days ago it was Anthropic discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude using Mythos Preview,…

1st August 2026 - Link Blog Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science (via) A few days ago it was Anthropic discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude using Mythos Preview, spending $100,000 on tokens and with prompts that included "again we are not looking for low hanging fruit, we want proper research to find genuinly hard findings." Now it's OpenAI's turn to flex. They set "an internal version of Astra, our next major model" on finding solutions to ten mathematical problems that "have seen no progress on the main result for at least a decade". They claim to have spent less than $2,000 at GPT-5.6 Sol token prices on each one. (No news on how many problems they spent $2,000 on without reaching a solution though.) The openai/ten-proofs repository has Lean 4 formalizations of their results, and there's also a paper describing the solutions and an additional LLM-generated PDF where the model "reconstructs how the proof came together" based on the unpublished reasoning traces. That's a decent level of transparency, but I want to see the prompts they used! A lot of mathematicians online are experiencing a collective burst of Deep Blue. Mathematician Kirwin Hampshire published an impassioned essay last week, The Dark Night of Mathematics, describing "a profound spiritual crisis" brought on by previous (and less significant) results. OpenAI's results reminds me of what Terence Tao described as "big mathematics" in IEEE Spectrum in June: Unlike some of his peers, Tao is neither dismissive of AI nor fearful. Instead, he sees it as the catalyst for a fundamental shift in the discipline—a transition toward what he calls “big mathematics.” He envisions a future of large-scale, decentralized collaborations between humans and machines, where complex mathematical tasks can be diced and sliced, with humans claiming the creative parts and AI doing the lion’s share of the technical grunt work.

3

Appeal for witnesses to Castlebridge crash

Wexford Local · original → · 7/10 · Local Wexford: car-pedestrian crash witness appeal Castlebridge
By Dan Walsh [image →] Gardaí in Wexford are appealing for witnesses to a road traffic collision involving a car and a pedestrian at Castlebridge shortly before midnight on Saturday. The collision…

By Dan Walsh

Gardaí in Wexford are appealing for witnesses to a road traffic collision involving a car and a pedestrian at Castlebridge shortly before midnight on Saturday.

The collision occurred at approximately 11.51pm on the R741, near Keating Insulation outside Castlebridge village.

The pedestrian, in his 20’s was taken to Wexford General Hospital for treatment. It is understood that his injuries are “non-life threatening.”

Gardaí are asking anyone who travelled on the R741 between Castlebridge and Wexford Town from 11.30pm to midnight, and who may have witnessed the collision or seen the pedestrian beforehand, to come forward.

Road users who were travelling in the area at the time and who may have camera footage, including dash cam recordings, are asked to make this footage available to investigating Gardaí.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Wexford Garda Station on (053) 916 5200, the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111, or any Garda station.

4

Don't be a meat proxy

Hacker News · original → · 7/10 · AI: practical critique of using LLMs as intermediaries
Don't be a meat proxy Too often I ask a question in Slack or leave feedback under a merge/pull request or argue with friends in a WhatsApp group and get back: Claude said: [giant response verbatim]…

Don't be a meat proxy Too often I ask a question in Slack or leave feedback under a merge/pull request or argue with friends in a WhatsApp group and get back: Claude said: [giant response verbatim] Please don't do this. I mean, I've done this. But I've been on the receiving end too many times now. This is not adding value. I can talk to Claude myself. It's going to be faster and I get to control the context. I don't need a meat proxy in between. Reading AI output is extra effort. It's verbose, frequently contains all too plausible nonsense, and is increasingly jargon dense. I recently got this sentence from Claude: NATS control-plane events: stream leader election / R3 quorum re-form during pod churn. Jesus. I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this. By all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you've done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add. Take code review in particular. Shipping some code can be done with close to zero effort now: Copy/paste the ticket description into Claude Code. Don't look at the code or read what Claude has written. If there's any feedback from reviewers, copy/paste that into Claude Code as well. If necessary, iterate. That works. But who has done the implementation? The reviewers did, using Claude Code, and you as a meat proxy.

5

AI migrated legacy COBOL programs to Java, bugs included

Hacker News · original → · 7/10 · AI: agentic methods for legacy code migration validation
Computer Science > Software Engineering [Submitted on 30 Jul 2026] Title:Agentic Method for Deterministic Validation of Legacy Code Migration View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Migration of legacy…

Computer Science > Software Engineering [Submitted on 30 Jul 2026] Title:Agentic Method for Deterministic Validation of Legacy Code Migration View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Migration of legacy COBOL programs to Java requires extensive testing to ensure correct functionality. This effort is often complicated by the lack of test data and the difficulty of validating all corner cases. In this paper we propose a novel agentic test-synthesis method, the "Locksmith Loop," which is initiated by preparing two runtime environments: the COBOL source and the generated Java target are each instrumented with mocks and executed off-mainframe on commodity hardware, then an iterative agentic loop performs Witness Search over input mocks to penetrate program branches, followed by parity-preserving mutations. When routing boundaries are reached, an analyzer identifies a Locked Paragraph: a condition preventing deeper exploration. Across three COBOL-Java case studies, spanning two open-source programs and one internal production-like COBOL program and ranging from 430 to 4,114 source lines, Locksmith consistently improved coverage beyond input-search plateaus, reaching nearly complete coverage on the two open-source programs and 91.90% branch coverage on the internal production-like COBOL program. The generated Java matched the COBOL reference under deterministic parity checks in all accepted test cases. Through these findings we demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge, a novel approach for validating agentic coding output using a deterministic oracle. References & Citations Loading... Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Recommenders and Search Tools Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

6

Open letters about AI development

Simon Willison · original → · 7/10 · AI: open letters on AI development and regulation
2nd August 2026 Open letters about AI development I wrote this summary of the past few weeks of open letters as a section of my sponsors-only newsletter but I've decided to share it here as well.…

2nd August 2026 Open letters about AI development I wrote this summary of the past few weeks of open letters as a section of my sponsors-only newsletter but I've decided to share it here as well. Open Weights and American AI Leadership was shepherded by Microsoft, dated July 24th, and signed by 235 AI-adjacent companies including NVIDIA (see Jensen's first ever tweet), Amazon, Y Combinator, The Linux Foundation, and (a later signer) OpenAI. It's clearly an argument designed to counter any instincts by the current US government to ban or limit open weight models over "safety" concerns - a reasonable consideration given what happened to Claude Fable 5! Relying solely on closed models is not inherently safe: they can be breached, misused, or fail in ways that outsiders cannot detect. And concentrating advanced AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models compounds that risk. It results in a small number of single points of failure, weakens competition, and leaves critical technology in the hands of a few providers. Open weight models, on the other hand, allow a broad community of researchers and developers to examine their behavior, identify vulnerabilities, develop safeguards, and improve them over time. The one surprising note in the letter is that it comes out in support of distillation, where models train on output from other models: In shaping this ecosystem, policymakers should be careful not to conflate legitimate model-development techniques with misappropriation. Distillation, or the practice of using one model’s outputs to help train or improve another, is a widely used technique for model improvement, evaluation, and validation. It reflects a long tradition of learning from, building upon, and improving existing technologies, a tradition that has helped drive innovation since the rise of the open-source software movement. Notably absent from the signatures: Anthropic, who published their own response Our position on open-weights models three days later. CEO Dario Amodei doubled down on the risk of authoritarian governments building "AI models that are more powerful than those built by the US", and models being "misused to carry out cyberattacks or biological attacks", and called for "a crack down on industrial-scale distillation operations", while also stating that "Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models". Then on July 28th Pacing the Frontier was published, featuring signatures from "1,324 employees of frontier AI companies" - with names like Jakub Pachocki (Chief Scientist, OpenAI), Ilya Sutskever (Safe Superintelligence Inc, previously OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Jack Clark (Anthropic) and more. Their core message: We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development. Their concern is intense competitive pressure combined with accelerated AI progress caused by automated AI research - and given that Anthropic produce 80% of their code with Claude Code, OpenAI had Sol reduce their end-to-end serving costs by 20%, and Kimi K3 designed a chip to serve a nano model built on its own architecture, you can see why people are taking that risk more seriously right now.

7

Quoting Greg Brockman

Simon Willison · original → · 7/10 · AI: OpenAI president on AI-human workplace dynamics
1st August 2026 at openai, many people hook their chatgpt up to slack. people really don't like when a coworker's chatgpt contacts them asking for help with a task, even when they'd be perfectly…

1st August 2026 at openai, many people hook their chatgpt up to slack. people really don't like when a coworker's chatgpt contacts them asking for help with a task, even when they'd be perfectly happy doing that same work if asked by that coworker. reinforces how much people care about human relationships and helping each other, and want AI to give time back — or enhance time together — rather than become a layer separating people. — Greg Brockman, President and Co-Founder, OpenAI

Items scoring 7/10 or above from 11 sources, scored by claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 on relevance to my interests. At most 3 per source.

Scoring categories & sources
  1. Local Wexford or South East Ireland news
  2. Irish or EU-wide affairs affecting citizens broadly: elections, new laws or policy being debated, cost of living, education — especially impacts on mid-life adults or teenagers. Never courts/crime stories.
  3. Irish news on a topic relevant to my interests
  4. Work and tech topics: networking, AI, Kubernetes, platforms, SaaS
  5. AI news including critical or anti-AI perspectives
  6. Gaming: PC gaming, indie gaming, retro gaming
  7. General interests: gardening, woodwork, cycling, fitness, travel
  8. Comics

Sources: Breaking News Ireland, Wexford Local, Hacker News, r/gaming, r/pcgaming, r/antiAI, r/indiegaming, Lenny's Newsletter, One Useful Thing, Newcomer, Simon Willison