Nine years of glitches and quacks

  1. Nine years to hack an Xbox 360: A nine-year personal project culminates in a glitching modchip that destabilizes the console's power rail just long enough to slip past Microsoft's boot security. (kennedn.com)
  2. The NIST elliptic curve seeds bounty is claimed: The seemingly arbitrary seeds behind NIST's elliptic curves turn out to be drand48 output seeded with 1997-98 timestamps, netting solvers a $36,864 bounty donated to Let's Encrypt's parent nonprofit. (words.filippo.io)
  3. Using AI to reverse-engineer hardware: A GNOME developer pairs Claude Code with a Windows VM to sniff USB traffic and write a working Linux driver for an unsupported film scanner chipset. (blogs.gnome.org)
  4. Google's Willow chip pulls off magic state cultivation: Picking up where yesterday's bottleneck story left off, Google says its Willow processor has demonstrated magic state cultivation in practice, cutting quantum error rates by roughly 40x. (techmeme.com)
  5. It ain't AGI until H100s go for $30 an hour: An essay argues AGI won't really have arrived until H100 rental prices spike roughly tenfold from today's ~$3.52 an hour, working the compute economics with an interactive calculator. (corbt.com)
  6. Anthropic built its own source control platform: Anthropic's engineers built an in-house version control system, Scion, after Claude-driven code generation pushed merge rates from 2,500 to over 30,000 changes a day and broke their git-based infrastructure. (anthropic.com)
  7. Inline rendering with document.currentScript: A neat trick lets an inline script tag read document.currentScript and replace itself with computed content, making a tiny templating pattern work straight in HTML. (simonwillison.net)
  8. Handwired turns JavaScript into neural circuits: Handwired compiles ordinary JavaScript logic like comparisons and branches into exact, fully differentiable neural circuits made of ReLUs, runnable in-browser with no GPU required. (chenglou.me)
  9. coopiano: a piano modeled in C++17, no samples: coopiano is an open-source C++17 piano synthesizer that models the hammer, string, and soundboard directly, producing sound through physics rather than recordings. (github.com)
  10. A high-quality duck audio synthesizer: The Duck Pond conjures an ambient flock of mallards in the browser, with every quack synthesized live rather than played from a recording. (celphase.github.io)
  11. Making chicken transparent using Dorito dust: A hobbyist physics blogger reproduces a research technique for making tissue see-through, soaking raw chicken breast in tartrazine, the yellow dye also found in Doritos, with partial success. (chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com)
  12. Filtered for ears and memory: A wandering essay threads EEG research on ASMR together with a 1970s Chinese sensation about a boy who claimed to read with his ears, and how political language shaped early AI discourse in China. (interconnected.org)

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