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Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
39•thelok•2h ago•3 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
101•AlexeyBrin•6h ago•18 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
52•samasblack•3h ago•39 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
789•klaussilveira•20h ago•243 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
39•vinhnx•3h ago•5 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
63•onurkanbkrc•5h ago•5 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1040•xnx•1d ago•587 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
462•theblazehen•2d ago•165 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
509•nar001•4h ago•235 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
184•jesperordrup•10h ago•65 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
63•1vuio0pswjnm7•7h ago•60 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
189•alainrk•5h ago•280 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
50•mellosouls•3h ago•51 comments

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-fresh-look-at-ibm-3270-information-display-system
27•rbanffy•4d ago•5 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
19•marklit•5d ago•0 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
108•videotopia•4d ago•27 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
59•speckx•4d ago•62 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
268•isitcontent•21h ago•34 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
197•limoce•4d ago•107 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
281•dmpetrov•21h ago•150 comments

British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c205nxy0p31o
169•bookofjoe•2h ago•153 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
152•matheusalmeida•2d ago•47 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
549•todsacerdoti•1d ago•266 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
422•ostacke•1d ago•110 comments

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
39•matt_d•4d ago•14 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
365•vecti•23h ago•167 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
465•lstoll•1d ago•305 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
341•eljojo•23h ago•210 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
66•helloplanets•4d ago•70 comments

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
18•sandGorgon•2d ago•8 comments
Open in hackernews

New Apple Study Shows LLMs Can Tell What You're Doing from Audio and Motion Data

https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/21/apple-research-llm-study-audio-motion-activity/
81•andrewrn•2mo ago

Comments

chasing0entropy•2mo ago
If you're interested in this concept, it's not new and the alarm has been sounded since the android Facebook app required motion sensor permissions in android 4.

https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10028982

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.13834.pdf

thewebguyd•2mo ago
> alarm has been sounded since the android Facebook app required motion sensor permissions in android 4.

Serves as a useful reminder that just because someone may not care if these companies collect this data now, they are storing it, sometimes indefinitely, and as technology advances, will be able to make more use of it than they were at the time you agreed to share it with them.

It's like all the ransomware gangs hoarding the encrypted data they stole, waiting for a quantum computing breakthrough to be able to decrypt it.

Not sure what to do about it, if anything, but the average person is severely under-equipped and undereducated to deal with this and protect themselves from the levels of surveillance that are soon to come.

skybrian•2mo ago
There are exceptions, but for the most part, I'm not sure that knowing specifically what I was doing five years ago has much value to me or anyone else?

I was probably sitting in front of a computer.

jazzyjackson•2mo ago
You are not always the target, but leaking data like this empowers those that may use it against someone else. I mean to say, you are providing training data. People who move-like-this-at-these-times also have these other tendencies... It's like fusion sensing.

Same with secure messaging. You might not care that [insert boogeyman here] know what you're doing all day, but people you interact with may be harmed by you being leaky.

Anyway, the whole point is your lack of imagination is not a good reason to embrace surveillance. Rejecting surveillance on principal slows down our descent into a panopticonical hellscape.

globalnode•2mo ago
Firstly, I looked up panopticon, and it does indeed seem like that is how modern societies are being structured now, and secondly... It is true that people generally seem to display a lack of imagination regarding all of this. The whole "ive got nothing to hide so what do i care if they surveil me" attitude comes across as selfish and naive in this light.

I wonder what ad-tech or whatever org would do if we got to a state where they just couldnt track or id people. Would we still have free entertainment on the net? would the net even still be mainstream?

skybrian•2mo ago
My point was more that this data loses its value fast. I'd worry more about it knowing where I was recently.
fsflover•2mo ago
If only activists and journalists hide, while everybody else provides all data to the government/Facebook, then it becomes easy to track them.
hexbin010•2mo ago
I tried denying the Sensor perm to most apps and my battery tanked. My guess is there are a few that sit in a busy loop trying to get the data with no handling of the permission not being granted, because it's expected on 99.99999% of devices
andrewrn•2mo ago
Something to note here that annoys me about the title is that the LLMs aren't taking in the raw data (LLM's are for text, after all). The raw data is fed through audio and motion models that then produce natural language descriptions, that are then fed to the LLM.

Unrelated: yeah, this article is a little creepy, but damn is it interesting technically.

smcin•2mo ago
"LLMs" is the new catchall term for Machine Learning or automation, to laypeople. For now.
palmotea•2mo ago
AI will finally allow us to bring 1984's Telescreens into existence, at scale.
godelski•2mo ago
Doesn't the smartphone already far surpass the Telescreen's capabilities and presence? It does more and we carry them in our pockets.

Do people not realize we're beyond 1984? In 1984 the tech wasn't always listening, rather it had the capacity to. Much of it was about how not knowing meant you'd act as if you were just in case. It was making reference to totalitarian states where you don't know if you can freely talk to your neighbor or if they'd turn you in, where people end up creating a double speak

pramsey•2mo ago
In 1984 the idea was there were not enough people to listen to everyone, all the time, but the mere possibility was enough. Of course, for us with AI, things are considerable worse. Also, tele screens were mandatory. We are not there with cell phones in a de jure sense, but certainly there in a de facto sense. Of course, if enough people carry phones, it doesn't matter if a few stragglers don't, they will get caught in the net unless they live as hermits, in which case who cares about them. All the pieces are in place, there is no reason we cannot have a global North Korea.
palmotea•2mo ago
> Doesn't the smartphone already far surpass the Telescreen's capabilities and presence? It does more and we carry them in our pockets.

Maybe in data collection, but no one's watching.

With AI, someone can always be watching you. It's really the killer app for AI.

gizajob•2mo ago
Time to ditch the Apple Watch then
macintux•2mo ago
One more positive interpretation of Apple's research interests here is that devices like the Watch can better differentiate between "the wearer just fell and we should call 911" and "the wearer is playing with their kids".
bigyabai•2mo ago
"Can" does not necessarily mean "will", especially for Apple. I wouldn't be surprised if you're describing a feature slated for release in 2037.
astrange•2mo ago
https://support.apple.com/en-us/108896
b00ty4breakfast•2mo ago
nuclear power generation is pretty beneficial, but that doesn't justify the existence of nuclear weapons.
rckt•2mo ago
Why do you need LLM to interpret patterns?
drdaeman•2mo ago
> The researchers ran the audio and motion data through smaller models that generated text captions and class predictions, then fed those outputs into different LLMs (Gemini-2.5-pro and Qwen-32B) to see how well they could identify the activity.

Maybe I'm not understanding it, but as I get it, LLMs weren't really important: all they did was further interpreting outputs of a fronting audio-to-text classifier model.

Lerc•2mo ago
The same reason you need transistors to make computers.

You don't need them, but they are one way to do it that people know how to implement.

Identifying patterns is fairly amenable to analytic approaches, interpreting them, less so.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt•2mo ago
A better analogy is: same reason you need FPGAs to run x86 code. You dont, but if FPGAs are hot and good for your career you gonna use them.
bigyabai•2mo ago
To ensure you drank your Verification Can of Mountain Dew, of course.
skavi•2mo ago
Maybe the 2026 Apple Watch will be able to auto detect running as reliably as my 2015 Samsung Gear S2. My 2022 Series 8 is certainly not there yet.
frizlab•2mo ago
That’s weird, I have perfect running detection on an old(er) (Apple) watch. Detection does start late (but is retroactive, so it’s not an issue).
mh-•2mo ago
And that's by design, because it waits for a larger window of data to gain confidence. Notice how you ~never get false positives on it starting an exercise session.

I see comments like GP's often enough that I think Apple just does a bad job explaining how/why it works.

furyofantares•2mo ago
> Notice how you ~never get false positives on it starting an exercise session.

Oh, I absolutely do.

skavi•2mo ago
Personally, I understand perfectly how it works. But even with the retroactive start, it tends to miss the first five or so minutes.

There are also stats on the screen during tracking that ideally should appear as early as possible.

disambiguation•2mo ago
https://abc7.com/post/student-handcuffed-doritos-bag-mistake...
TZubiri•2mo ago
The tinfoil interpretatio that LLMs can spy on you is shortsighted and a bit paranoid, it would require LLM providers to actually run a prompt asking what you are doing.

However, any system with a mic, like your cellphone listening for a "Hey Siri" prompt, or your fridge, could theoretically be coupled with an llm on an adhoc basis to get a fuller picture of what's going on.

Pretty cool, if an attacker or govt force with a warrant can get an audio stream they can get some clues although of course not probatory evidence.

micromacrofoot•2mo ago
we'll inevitably have universal tracking for everything like this (good luck privacy), it's essentially machine learning around a bunch of vibration patterns... ideal for a device that hundreds of millions of people are carrying everywhere daily
eth0up•2mo ago
In about:config (Firefox) would

device.sensors.enabled = false

have any effect for browser based access, or is this strictly the app?