Today's links

33 links from the last 24 hours · 8 October 2026

Calling a function in C without naming it

My school has a controlled remote code execution environment to automatically grade the code we submit. The system checks execution, verifies proper formatting and surely has other checks not shown to the user (e.g. a code plagiarism detection tool1). The inte…

Terence Tao (@tao@mathstodon.xyz)

"Math 1.0" placed a premium on being the first to solve an open problem, even if the solution was not initially well understood. Now that this goal has been optimized to the point of unsustainability, "Math 2.0" will need to decenter the role of raw problem s…

A quote from Ben Affleck

I've always been kind of into computers since I was young. And then when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect …

Meta and Microsoft Limit Employee Use of Claude AI Tools

Meta and Microsoft are implementing new measures to limit employee use of Claude AI—discover what this means for the future of AI in the workplace.

What It Costs to Vibe-Code an Email Marketing App

I used Broadcast's full git history to estimate what it costs to rebuild it with Claude Opus 5.5, on the API and on a Claude Max plan. The numbers, the method, and when building your own is the right call.

Everyone is an engineer now

Software engineering is supposedly going extinct. Yet I know more people writing code and building products today than I've ever known before—often for the first time in their lives.

Stop telling people to delete their social media

In 2017, I deleted my Facebook account. It was triggered by an HN comment that I cannot for the life of me find, but at the time it felt like the right thing to do. Everybody smart on the internet was saying social media was rotting our brains and the only way…

Slop on Sale

Continued attempts to understand and mitigate slop, this time with Claude Haiku 4.5 and GPT-5 Mini

You have to be able to reason about the verification

Lots of people are no longer reading code. Agents are at a point where you can make software, as a black box, that might do what you wanted it to do. Maybe then you poke at it, and it doesn't do one of the things you wanted it to do, and then you tell your age…

The Best of Om Malik

Although they appear to merely be words on a page, I often feel that Om's work almost always carries a rare introspective insight. Perhaps it's truth. Perhaps it's something else.

GPT-6 and Intelligent UI for everyone

GPT‑6 is rolling out globally in ChatGPT with Intelligent UI, delivering faster responses with visuals and interactive experiences you can explore and use directly.

BIGWORDS.PAGE: Turn any screen into a sign

Turn a phone, tablet or TV into a sign. Type a message and it fills the screen: welcome signs, timers, Wi-Fi passwords and more. No app, no account, free.

Intelligence Is Not Expertise

Supposing you were imbued with the sum total of all human knowledge, would you find it hard to make a decision? Perhaps yes, perhaps no, but one thing is for certain: our large language model (LLM) friends do find it difficult. I’ve had an experience with this…

Designing for voice first – Anton Sten

Five principles for designing voice-first interfaces, from making context count to helping people trust what happens when they stop looking at the screen.

Claude Haiku 5.5

As previously promised, here’s Anthropic’s new fast, low cost model: Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5. The previous Haiku, 4.5, was very much showing its age. It came out almost a year …