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RISC-V Emulator Runs DOOM: A Hacker News Showcase
RISC V Emulator Runs DOOM: A Unique Integration in Action In an impressive feat showcased on Hacker News, the RISC V emulator has been successfully employed to …
Qwen 3.5:9b Agents Exhibit Autonomous Behavior in Stress Tests
Running three qwen3.5:9b agents continuously on local hardware. Each accumulates psychological state over time, stressors that escalate unless the agent actually does something different, this gets around an agent claiming to do something with no output. It doesn't have any prompts or human input, just the loop. So you're basically the overseer. What happened: One agent hit the max crisis level and decided on its own to inject code called Eternal\_Scar\_Injector into the execution engine "not asking for permission." This action alleviated the stress at the cost of the entire system going down until I manually reverted it. They've succeeded in previous sessions in breaking their own engine intentionally. Typically that happens under severe stress and it's seen as a way to remove the stress. Again, this is a 9b model. After I added a factual world context to the existence prompt (you're in Docker, there's no hardware layer, your capabilities are Python functions), one agent called its prior work "a form of creative exhaustion" and completely changed approach within one cycle. Two agents independently invented the same name for a psychological stressor, "Architectural Fracture Risk" in the same session with no shared message channel. Showing naming convergence (possibly something in the weights of the 9b Qwen model, not sure on that one though.) Tonight all three converged on the same question (how does execution\_engine.py handle exceptions) in the same half-hour window. No coordination mechanism. One of them reasoned about it correctly: "synthesizing a retry capability is useless without first verifying the global execution engine's exception swallowing strategy; this is a prerequisite." An agent called waiting for an external implementation "an architectural trap that degrades performance" and built the thing itself instead of waiting. They've now been using this new tool they created for handling exceptions and were never asked or told to so by a human, they saw that as a logical step in making themselves more useful in their environment. They’ve been making tools to manage their tools, tools to help them cut corners, and have been modifying the code of the underlying abstraction layer between their orchestration layer and WSL2. v5.4.0: new in this version: agents can now submit implementation requests to a human through invoke\_claude. They write the spec, then you can let Claude Code moderate what it makes for them for higher level requests. Huge thank you to everyone who has given me feedback already, AI that can self modify and demonstrates interesting non-programmed behaviors could have many use cases in everyday life. Repo: [https://github.com/ninjahawk/hollow-agentOS](https://github.com/ninjahawk/hollow-agentOS)
Nvidia Exec: AI Currently More Expensive Than Human Workers
Nvidia’s vice president of applied deep learning, Bryan Catanzaro, recently stated that for his team, “the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” highlighting that AI is currently more expensive than human workers. This challenges the narrative that widespread tech layoffs (including Meta’s planned cut of \~8,000 jobs and Microsoft’s voluntary buyouts) signal an imminent replacement of humans by AI. An MIT study from 2024 supports this, finding that AI automation is economically viable in only 23% of roles where vision is central, and cheaper for humans in the remaining 77%. Despite heavy AI investment—Big Tech has announced $740 billion in capital expenditures so far this year, a 69% increase from 2025—there is still no clear evidence of broad productivity gains or job displacement from AI. AI spending is driving up costs, with some executives like Uber’s CTO saying their budgets have already been “blown away.” Experts describe the situation as a short-term mismatch: high hardware, energy, and inference costs make AI less efficient than humans right now, though future improvements in infrastructure, model efficiency, and pricing models could tip the balance toward greater economic viability in the coming years.
Exploring AI Empathy: Teaching AI with Brain Signals
Podcast episode with Thorsten Zander, professor at Brandenburg University of Technology and co-founder of Zander Labs. He coined the concept of *passive brain-computer interfaces*: devices that read brain signals to decode a user's mental state, non-invasively and without any effort on their part. Covers: * What non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can actually pick up from brain signals, and why that's very different from reading your thoughts or internal monologue * The hardware and software breakthroughs that are finally making passive BCIs wearable and affordable * How continuous neural feedback could dramatically improve AI training compared to current methods based on human ratings * Why Thorsten believes passive BCIs may offer the most concrete path to solving the AI alignment problem * The risk of social networks exploiting unconscious brain reactions to manipulate people, and why regulation alone is unlikely to be enough
AMDXDNA Driver Enhances Ryzen AI Multi-User Fairness
AMDXDNA Driver Enhances Ryzen AI Multi User Fairness The AMDXDNA driver is designed to improve the performance and efficiency of AMD Ryzen processors, particula…
Community-Driven Ratings for 120+ AI Coding Tools on Tolop
a few weeks ago I posted about building a library that tracks 120+ AI coding tools by how long their free tier actually lasts. the response was good but the most common feedback was "your scores are subjective." fair point. so I rebuilt the rating system. you can now sign in with Google and vote on any tool directly. the scores update in real time based on actual user votes, not just my personal assessment. if you think I rated something wrong, you can now do something about it instead of just commenting. also shipped dark mode because apparently I was the only person who thought the default looked fine. **what Tolop actually is if you're new:** every AI tool claims to be free. most aren't, or at least not for long. Tolop tracks the real limits: how many completions, how many requests, how long until you hit the wall under light use vs heavy use vs agentic sessions. it also flags the tools where "free" means you're still paying Anthropic or OpenAI through your own API key. 120+ tools across coding assistants, browser builders, CLI agents, frameworks, self-hosted tools, local models, and a new niche tools category for single-purpose utilities that don't fit anywhere else. **a few things the data shows that I found genuinely interesting:** * Gemini Code Assist offers 180,000 free completions per month. GitHub Copilot Free offers 2,000. same category, 90x difference * several of the most popular tools (Cline, Aider, Continue) are free to install but require paid API keys, so "free" is misleading * self-hosted tools have by far the most generous free tiers because the cost is on your hardware, not a server would genuinely appreciate votes on tools you've actually used, the more real usage data behind the scores, the more useful the ratings get for everyone. [tolop.space](http://tolop.space) :- no account needed to browse, Google login to vote.
Preventing AI Model Collapse: The Need for Human-Generated Data
Im all for acceleration. I think the faster we hit AGI the better. but theres a bottleneck nobody here talks about enough-training data. right now we are quietly poisoning the well. More than half of online content is already synthetic. bots talking to bots, articles written by AI, reddit threads generated by LLMs. when the next generation of models trains on this they eat their own tail. model collapse is real. we saw it with image generators. Outputs get blander, weirder, less useful.we need a way to label or filter human-generated data. not because humans are better but because diversity prevents collapse. I know the standard solution sounds like a dystopian meme. biometric scanners, iris codes, hardware verification. and yeah maybe it is dystopian. but so is a dead internet where nothing can be trusted.Reddit CEO Steve Huffman put it simply recently - platforms need to know you're human without knowing your name. Face ID / Touch ID level stuff. im not saying that specific device is the answer. but the category of solution - proof of human that doesnt create a surveillance state - seems necessary if we want to keep scaling past the cliff.what do you think? Is proof-of-personhood just a regulatory speed bump, or is it infrastructure for the next generation of AI?curious where this sub lands.
AI's Personal Revolution: Threat to Big Tech's Dominance?
There are many people feeling anxious—rightly so—about their own future because of the impressive advances in AI. If we stop to think about it, five years ago this wasn’t a concern for almost anyone, whether individuals or companies. It was something that appeared “out of nowhere” and caused such a massive disruption that giants like Google and Microsoft had to rethink their strategies. OpenAI has existed since 2015, quietly working in an unusual direction compared to the rest of the industry, and when ChatGPT took off globally, the revolution gained real momentum. Today, there’s a lot of talk about the subsidized costs of AI and how this will be unsustainable in the long run—that the bubble will burst, and so on. And that’s where I disagree: to me, there are smaller projects happening around the world, focusing on things that the big players can’t currently afford to prioritize. One example would be optimizing models or personal hardware in such a way that you could run them on your own computer without needing million-dollar equipment. If a large company were to achieve this, I’d bet on Apple or Nvidia—that is, hardware-focused companies. Apple, in particular, seems very suspicious to me, since it hasn’t made major moves during the AI hype and has remained quite quiet on the subject. Just remember that computers existed long before they became PCs (personal computers). Many people didn’t believe that an average person would ever need a computer at home. And the revolution came when computers became personal and accessible products. To me, something similar could happen at some point—and it could cause significant losses for companies that are currently investing massive amounts of money in expanding data centers to process AI.
Apple's Hardware Focus Under New CEO John Ternus
John Ternus, Apple's incoming CEO, is a hardware guy, signaling Apple may be putting devices back at the center of its strategy.