2026-09-01
AnkiDroid (the open-source Android app for Anki flashcards) can't get its Play Store updates approved anymore: Google rejected the app's Open Collective donation link, and the maintainers need Google to clarify whether their IRS 501(c)(6) status qualifies as a tax-exempt donation. Updates have been blocked since August 28, and the team is asking the community to spread the word to anyone at Google who can help.
Mithil Vakde trained a small transformer from scratch in about 1.5 hours on a single RTX 5090, at a total cost of ~67 cents, and it scores 44% on ARC-AGI-1 — matching far larger models (TRM/HRM) that do similar test-time training — plus 7% on ARC-AGI-2. It's the third installment of his open-source series pushing the limits of sample efficiency in deep learning.
Fastpotify is a lightweight, open-source (MIT, Rust + librespot) Spotify client for Linux, macOS, and Windows. It's a native binary with no browser engine — starts in under a second, uses ~100–250 MB of RAM, plays locally at up to 320 kbps gapless, and includes library/search access, Spotify Connect control, and a bonus Winamp mini-player with classic .wsz skin support.
GPU World is a writing contest (themed on William Gibson's quote) asking people to imagine the future, evenly distributed: a world around 2040 where every human has 24/7 access to the compute equivalent of a top-tier GPU serving a frontier LLM. Submissions explore what that means for surveillance, education, social media, healthcare, and the developing world.
Azriel 'Al' Blackman, the American Airlines mechanic who died on July 24 at age 100, held the Guinness World Record for the longest career as an airline mechanic — more than 80 years, starting in 1942 with American Export Airlines (AA's predecessor) at age 16. He stayed with one airline for his entire career, witnessing its transformation from flying boats to modern twin-engine widebodies.
Tmp.0ut is ghuntley's long-running newsletter for people who love computers, computing, and computing history — the spirit of the old USENET newsgroup. Volume 5 (August 2026) opens with an interview with Unix legend Doug McIlroy, includes a piece on a 57-byte program, and continues the series of essays, interviews, and links about the history and culture of computing.
Restroom Archive is a crowdsourced catalog of public and semi-public restrooms around the world, with photos and rich detail on each: location, access rules, maintenance state, interior design, and quirks. Entries range from the Met Cloisters in Manhattan to a coffee shop in Brooklyn to a market in Shanghai, and it's become a beloved curiosity project.
Apple quietly cut the price of its Polishing Cloth from $19 (introduced five years ago) to $9, with no stated change to the product. The post digs into the update, including Apple's expanded compatibility list covering the full range of iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks from iPhone 5 through iPhone 17 Pro and M5 Macs.
Playa Phone is a repurposed phone booth installed for the week of Burning Man in Black Rock City, Nevada (in front of the Temple of the Flying Spaghetti Monster). Anyone can dial +1 (775) 557-4848 to try to reach a random Burner, or call out to a loved one for a free 5-minute Internet call — no payment, just a regular booth with the internals swapped for VoIP.
A home-security-camera + BirdNet-Go setup turns existing outdoor cameras into an automatic bird identification system: the microphones feed 24/7 local AI inference (no cloud, runs on a Raspberry Pi or server) that identifies birds, bats, and even frogs in real time. The author added species-list alert rules, novelty tracking for new yard visitors, and pushes detections into a Discord channel — including Google's Perch v2 model for ~14,795 species.