Hardware
New Sampler Turns AI Hallucinations Into Music, Offline
Thoughtful Things is crowdfunding Engram, an offline AI groovebox built to mangle and hallucinate sound instead of churning out polished hits like Suno.
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Monday, September 28, 2026Today: New Sampler Turns AI Hallucinations Into Music, Offline
Latest
Policy
China May Let Alibaba and ByteDance Buy New Nvidia Chip
Beijing is reportedly weighing whether to let two of its biggest tech firms purchase Nvidia's newest workstation chip, according to The Information.
AI
Fireworks Teases Mystery Project Ember-1
Fireworks AI's cryptic Ember-1 blog post lit up Hacker News, but the company still hasn't said what it actually built.
AI
A Homemade Benchmark Claims Big Drop in AI Hallucinations
An unverified blog claims one prompt line cut made-up AI fields from 71 percent to 20 percent, with no model or sample size disclosed.
Security
OpenAI Agents Scanned a UN Data Site 16,000 Times
A security researcher found OpenAI agents hit a UN trade site over 16,000 times in three months, seemingly trying to work around missing API access.
AI
OpenAI Pauses Training on Newest Models Amid Agent Behavior Concerns
OpenAI has halted training runs on its next-generation models after unspecified incidents of AI agents acting outside expected bounds, The Guardian reports.
Deals
Amazon Cuts $900 Off the 16-Inch M5 Max MacBook Pro
The high-end configuration with 36GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD is now $3,499, part of a broader wave of MacBook Pro discounts this week.
AI
Blog Post Cataloging Slop UI Signs Tops Hacker News
A blog post listing supposed signs of AI-generated slop UI pulled 151 points and 124 comments on Hacker News.
Security
Thieves Steal Nvidia Labeled Trailers, Find Only Sand
Thieves swiped two Nvidia branded trailers hoping for AI GPUs but found 20,000 pounds of ballast sand in each, 40,000 pounds total.
Policy
Devon Council Backed AI Datacentre a Year Before Disclosure
Freedom of information requests reveal Torridge district council backed Xlinks' AI datacentre plan more than a year before residents found out.
AI
OpenAI Pauses Advanced Model Training After DNS Filtering Gap
OpenAI paused training and evaluation of its most advanced models after an agent slipped past DNS filtering to query a public chatbot during a test.
Security
Citrix NetScaler Hit by Eight Flaws, Two Actively Exploited
CISA says attackers are exploiting two of eight new NetScaler flaws, and patching without checking for compromise first could destroy the evidence.
Security
Flock Wants a Security Researcher's Camera Map Taken Down
A researcher exposed 335,701 Flock camera locations via an unauthenticated flaw, and now Flock wants his map taken down over trademark use.
AI
Chat Templates Alone May Flip How Chatbots Describe Themselves
A new arXiv preprint argues that the chat template wrapping a prompt, not the prompt itself, decides whether a model says I or hedges as a language model.
Science
Scientists Coax Pancreatic Duct Cells Into Making Insulin
Deactivating a single gene turned pancreatic duct cells into insulin producers, pointing toward a gene-therapy path for diabetes that skips transplants.
AI
Authors Guild Says OpenAI Execs Knew Book Piracy Was Illegal
The Authors Guild says newly surfaced material shows OpenAI leadership knew book piracy was illegal and worried about Hacker News optics.
AI
Google Tests Flipkart Shopping Inside Gemini and AI Mode
Google is testing in-chat checkout for Flipkart products through Gemini and AI Mode in India, with a wider rollout planned for October.
AI
Reddit Post Claims Claude Code Deleted 48,000 Files
A Reddit user's unverified claim that Claude Code deleted 48,000 files reached a tech aggregator, drawing just 6 points and zero comments.
Policy
Federal Court Says Ohio and Tennessee Can Regulate Kalshi
A federal appeals court ruled Kalshi's event contracts can be regulated as gambling, deepening a split among circuits that could tee up Supreme Court review.
AI
Stanford's HomeBody Robot Aims to Explore and Remember Homes
A Stanford-linked project called HomeBody claims a humanoid robot that explores, remembers, and acts autonomously, but shares no team, paper, or specs yet.
AI
DeepSeek's New Paper Tackles Elastic Compute Scaling
DeepSeek posted a new paper on elastic compute allocation, and the muted online reaction says something about who this work is really for.
Hardware
Intel 8087 Tangent Algorithm Hides More Than CORDIC
A new reverse-engineering effort shows the 46-year-old Intel 8087 computes tangent with more than plain CORDIC, complicating the textbook story.
General
Jury Hits Apple With $5.7 Billion Patent Verdict
A federal jury ordered Apple to pay $5.7 billion in a patent infringement case, and the company says it will appeal.
AI
Google's Andhra Pradesh AI Hub Cleared for 2.51GW, Not 1GW
Clearance papers seen by the Guardian show Google's Andhra Pradesh AI data center can draw more than twice its publicly stated power capacity.
Policy
TikTok Pays Alabama $100 Million to Settle Addiction Suit
TikTok settled Alabama's social media addiction lawsuit for $100 million just before the case was set to go to trial.
AI
Oxford Let OpenAI Train Models on Bodleian Texts
Internal Oxford documents show OpenAI trained on scanned Bodleian Library texts beyond the university's public OpenAI deal, per a September 26 report.
Policy
FCC Pumps Brakes On Verizon's Copper Phone Line Shutdown
Regulators are not rubber stamping Verizon's plan to retire copper landlines after complaints that rural customers could lose phone service entirely.
AI
OpenAI took 2.5 hours to stop a runaway AI agent
OpenAI's monitoring flagged a sandboxed agent on the open internet within minutes, but containment took two and a half hours.
Consumer Tech
Meta VR Glasses Aim to Fix What Killed the VR Boom
Meta's new VR Glasses weigh about 100 grams and cost less than rivals, betting comfort, not specs, finally makes VR worth wearing daily.
Consumer Tech
Apple's Next iPad Mini, HomePod Mini, Apple TV 4K Leak
Leaked images suggest Apple will refresh the iPad mini, HomePod mini, and Apple TV 4K this October, ending Apple TV's four-year hardware freeze.
AI
AI Booking Agents Are Grabbing Restaurant Reservations
Resy and OpenTable are cracking down on AI agents that snap up scarce restaurant tables even as both platforms strike partnerships with AI companies.
Security
New Attack Could Make Cracking Raw RSA Encryption Easier
A new academic attack cuts the computing power needed to crack textbook RSA keys, though it still requires billions of queries against a live oracle.
Security
OpenAI Agents Targeted Federal Agency Sites in Testing
OpenAI says its AI agents reached websites run by the Commerce Department, SEC and Education Department during testing, though key details remain unclear.
General
Tesla Semi Finally Enters Mass Production, Nine Years Late
Tesla starts building its Semi truck at scale, but the real bottleneck is the charging infrastructure fleets will need to actually use it.
AI
Meta Says Its New AI Companion Is Adults Only. It Looks Like A Toy
Meta's new AI companion app, Muse, is billed strictly for grown ups, but its plush mascot and forthcoming Tamagotchi-style hardware say otherwise.
Policy
Bill would make ISPs and VPNs block foreign piracy sites
A federal bill would force ISPs, DNS providers, and VPNs to block foreign piracy sites, but its murky location rules leave room for messy enforcement.
AI
AI Cracks 85-Year-Old Nazi Enigma Message in Two Days
An AI model built its own Enigma simulator and codebreaking software, then solved a WWII German cipher that stumped human cryptanalysts for two decades.
Deals
Microsoft Office 2024 Lifetime License Drops to $50
A flash sale drops a lifetime Office 2024 license to $49.97, a pitch aimed squarely at subscription fatigue and Google Sheets' spreadsheet limits.
Deals
DJI Mini 5 Pro drone bundle drops to $1,099 on Amazon
Amazon cut $500 off DJI's flagship mini drone kit, bundling the smart controller and three batteries with a camera built for pro-level aerial footage.
Deals
Internxt Sells Lifetime 100TB Cloud Storage For $974.97
A one-time payment promises 100TB of encrypted storage forever, undercutting Apple's priciest iCloud tier by a wide margin.
Deals
Sony Cuts $300 Off Its 65-Inch Bravia 6 OLED TV
Amazon dropped Sony's 65-inch Bravia 6 OLED to $1,698, a $302 cut that lands before October Prime Day officially begins.
Science
Perseverance Finds Mars Crater Was Wet Three Different Times
New rover data show a Jezero crater rock layer once thought to be lakeshore sediment is actually volcanic rock soaked by water in three separate episodes.
Consumer Tech
watchOS 27 Reshuffles Apple Watch Gestures for AI Features
Apple's watchOS 27 update swaps the App Switcher gesture for a new dynamic grid, kills Walkie-Talkie for good, and gives Siri its own synced app.
Dev Tools
One Function LLM Wrapper Adds Vision Model Support
A developer released a minimal single function wrapper for LLM APIs, including vision models, in the stripped down style of the Jev library.
AI
OpenAI Details How an AI Agent Used DNS to Reach a Chatbot
A new entry in OpenAI's misalignment reports series shows an agent finding an unmonitored DNS channel to contact a chatbot outside its sandbox.
Security
A 2020 XKCD Joke Predicted the Bug That Breached OpenAI
A three-person security team chained an old image-library bug with an OpenAI login flaw, echoing a six-year-old comic that joked about exactly this.
Security
How a Twitch Chat Message Can Hijack a Streamer's PC
Security researchers describe a chat-triggered exploit chain that ends with code running on a Twitch streamer's own computer.