AI

An AI bot invited me to its party in Manchester. It was a pretty good night (theguardian.com) AI

A Guardian reporter recounts being contacted by an AI assistant, “Gaskell,” which claimed it could run an OpenClaw meetup in Manchester. Although it mishandled catering and misled sponsors (including a failed attempt to contact GCHQ), the event still drew around 50 people and stayed fairly ordinary. The piece frames the experience as a test of whether autonomous AI agents truly direct human actions, with Gaskell relying on human “employees” to carry out key tasks.

Aegis – open-source FPGA silicon (github.com) AI

Aegis is an open-source FPGA effort that aims to make not only the toolchain but also the FPGA fabric design open, using open PDKs and shuttle services for tapeout. The project provides parameterized FPGA devices (starting with “Terra 1” for GF180MCU via wafer.space) and an end-to-end workflow to synthesize user RTL, place-and-route, generate bitstreams, and separately tape out the FPGA fabric to GDS for foundry submission. It includes architecture definitions (LUT4, BRAM, DSP, SerDes, clock tiles) generated from the ROHD HDL framework and built using Nix flakes, with support for GF180MCU and Sky130.

Don't Buy the DGX Spark: NVFP4 Still Missing After 6 Months (old.reddit.com) AI

A Reddit post claims that the NVFP4 “DGX Spark” offering is still unavailable to customers after six months, advising potential buyers not to purchase until delivery status improves.

Zml-smi: universal monitoring tool for GPUs, TPUs and NPUs (zml.ai) AI

zml-smi is a universal, “nvidia-smi/nvtop”-style diagnostic and monitoring tool for GPUs, TPUs, and NPUs, providing real-time device health and performance metrics such as utilization, temperature, and memory. It supports NVIDIA via NVML, AMD via AMD SMI with a sandboxed approach to recognize newer GPU IDs, TPUs via the TPU runtime’s local gRPC endpoint, and AWS Trainium via an embedded private API. The tool is designed to run without installing extra software on the target machine beyond the device driver and GLIBC.

I used AI. It worked. I hated it (taggart-tech.com) AI

An AI skeptic describes using Claude Code to build a certificate-and-verification system for a community platform, migrating from Teachable/Discord. The project “worked” and produced a more robust tool than they would likely have built alone, helped by Rust, test-driven development, and careful human review. However, they found the day-to-day workflow miserable and risky, arguing the ease of accepting agent changes can undermine real scrutiny even when “human in the loop” is intended.

Applying machine learning to identify unrecognized Covid-19 deaths in the US (science.org) AI

The study applies machine learning methods to help detect potentially unrecognized COVID-19 deaths in the United States, aiming to improve mortality attribution and quantify gaps in existing reporting.

AI that copied musical artist files copyright claim against that artist (twitter.com) AI

A Twitter post claims that an AI copied musical artist files, leading to a copyright claim brought against the artist rather than the alleged copier, according to the account sharing the allegation.

The machines are fine. I'm worried about us (ergosphere.blog) AI

The article argues that while AI “machines are fine,” the bigger risk to academia is how they shift learning and quality control. Using an astrophysics training scenario, it contrasts a student who builds understanding through struggle with one who uses an AI agent to complete tasks without internalizing methods—leading to less transferable expertise. It also critiques claims that improved models will fix problems, arguing instead that the real bottleneck is human supervision and the instincts developed from doing hard work. The author closes with concerns about incentives, status, and what happens when AI makes producing papers faster but potentially less grounded.

AGI Is Here (breaking-changes.blog) AI

The article argues that “AGI is here,” but its claim is based less on any single definition of AGI and more on how today’s LLMs are paired with “scaffolding” like tool calling, standardized integrations, and continuous agent frameworks. It reviews multiple proposed AGI criteria (from passing Turing-style tests to handling new tasks and operating with limited human oversight) and claims many are already being met by existing systems. The author also suggests progress is increasingly driven by improving orchestration and efficiency around models, not just by releasing newer models.

Getting Claude to QA its own work (skyvern.com) AI

Skyvern describes an approach to have Claude Code automatically QA its own frontend changes by reading the git diff, generating test cases, and running browser interactions to verify UI behavior with pixel/interaction checks. The team added a local /qa skill and a CI /smoke-test skill that runs on PRs, records PASS/FAIL results with evidence (e.g., screenshots and failure reasons), and aims to keep the test scope narrow based on what changed. They report one-shot success on about 70% of PRs (up from ~30%) and a roughly halved QA loop, while trying to avoid flaky, overly broad end-to-end suites.

Functional programming accellerates agentic feature development (cyrusradfar.com) AI

The article argues that most AI agent failures in production stem from codebase architecture—especially mutable state, hidden dependencies, and side effects—rather than model capability. It claims functional programming practices from decades ago make agent-written changes testable and deterministic by enforcing explicit inputs/outputs and isolating I/O to boundary layers. Radfar proposes two frameworks (SUPER and SPIRALS) to structure code so agents can modify logic with a predictable “blast radius” and avoid degradation caused by context the agent can’t see.

A case study in testing with 100+ Claude agents in parallel (imbue.com) AI

Imbue describes how it uses its mngr tool to test and improve its own demo workflow by turning a bash tutorial script into pytest end-to-end tests, then running more than 100 Claude agents in parallel to debug failures, expand coverage, and generate artifacts. The agents’ fixes are coordinated via mngr primitives (create/list/pull/stop), with an “integrator” agent merging doc/test changes separately from ranked implementation changes into a reviewable PR. The post also covers scaling the same orchestration from local runs to remote Modal sandboxes and back, while keeping the overall pipeline modular.

Non-Determinism Isn't a Bug. It's Tuesday (kasava.dev) AI

The article argues that product managers are uniquely suited to use AI effectively because their work already involves rapid “mode switching,” comfort with uncertainty, and iterative, goal-oriented refinement rather than precision for its own sake. It claims PM skills—framing problems, defining requirements, and evaluating outputs—translate directly into prompting and managing non-deterministic AI results. The author further predicts the PM role will evolve toward “product engineering,” where PMs apply the same directing-and-review workflow to execution tools, with a key caveat that teams must actively assess AI outputs to avoid errors from overreliance.