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QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/quadrf-can-spot-drones-and-see-wifi-through-my-wall/
287•speckx•4h ago•106 comments

Snails' teeth beats spider silk as nature's strongest material (2015)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/spider-silk-loses-top-spot-natures-strongest-material-s...
99•simonebrunozzi•3h ago•67 comments

The tech of 'Terminator 2' – an oral history (2017)

https://vfxblog.com/2017/08/23/the-tech-of-terminator-2-an-oral-history/
95•markus_zhang•3h ago•41 comments

GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produces proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture [pdf]

https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98d31/cdc_proof.pdf
137•scrlk•1h ago•123 comments

How the Terrorist Group Boko Haram Uses Frontier AI

https://casp.ac/reports/ai-enabled-terrorism
43•imustachyou•1h ago•38 comments

War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history

https://waratlas.org
48•NaOH•2h ago•15 comments

New York City to become first in US to ban deceptive subscription practices

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/10/new-york-city-deceptive-subscriptions-ban
117•randycupertino•1h ago•52 comments

Show HN: Wyrm – Solve algebra by touch, built on an open-source soundness engine

https://github.com/dicroce/wyrm_math
11•dicroce•1d ago•0 comments

Combustion Engine Web-Based Simulator

https://combustionlab.net
47•mytuny•5d ago•18 comments

Mayor Mamdani Announces Landmark "Click-to-Cancel" Consumer Protection Rules

https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani-announces-landmark--click-to-cancel-...
35•thisislife2•46m ago•3 comments

Ask HN: Are systems ready for the first negative leap second?

30•Asmod4n•4d ago•36 comments

Late Bronze Age Collapse

https://acoup.blog/2026/01/30/collections-the-late-bronze-age-collapse-a-very-brief-introduction/
261•dmonay•8h ago•173 comments

Good Tools Are Invisible

https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2026/07/10/good-tools-are-invisible/
259•theanonymousone•9h ago•129 comments

Lost city discovered beneath Egypt's desert with ancient church

https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-15956159/Incredible-lost-city-discovered-Egypts-des...
110•Bender•4d ago•49 comments

A Love Letter to Flashcards

https://lesleylai.info/en/flashcards/
102•surprisetalk•4h ago•58 comments

Materials innovation has a scale-up problem, not discovery

https://www.atomscale.ai/updates/our-thesis-atom-to-scale
7•groznyj•1h ago•0 comments

Successful Companies Go Blind

https://ianreppel.org/how-successful-companies-go-blind/
145•speckx•6h ago•54 comments

Write code like a human will maintain it

https://unstack.io/write-code-like-a-human-will-maintain-it
289•ScottWRobinson•6h ago•242 comments

45% of Enthusiasts 'Seriously Considering' Leaving Sony for PC

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2026/07/ps5-has-put-a-dampener-on-gaming-45percent-of-enthusiasts...
26•speckx•1h ago•13 comments

An Update on the scraper situation

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1080822/990a8a5e2d379085/
5•chmaynard•37m ago•0 comments

Hands-On with the AMD Ryzen AI Halo

https://www.microcenter.com/site/mc-news/article/amd-ryzen-ai-halo-review.aspx
30•bdcravens•4h ago•27 comments

The Clouds of Hiroshima

https://doomsdaymachines.net/p/the-clouds-of-hiroshima
9•handfuloflight•3d ago•8 comments

Laylo (YC S20) Is Hiring a Head of Finance

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/laylo/jobs/qce41D2-head-of-finance
1•amellin794•8h ago

Show HN: Reverse-engineering web apps into agent tools

64•pancomplex•1d ago•23 comments

Show HN: Reviving my 2001 college band with AI

https://www.fadingmaize.com
34•jacobgraf•1d ago•45 comments

The mathematical secrets of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia

https://mappingignorance.org/2026/06/30/sagrada-familia/
107•Gedxx•1w ago•27 comments

Alternate Clock Designs and Time Systems

https://serialc.github.io/altClocks/
61•ethanpil•3d ago•36 comments

In Emacs, Everything Looks Like a Service

http://yummymelon.com/devnull/in-emacs-everything-looks-like-a-service.html
150•kickingvegas•11h ago•89 comments

The Annotated JEPA

https://elonlit.com/scrivings/the-annotated-jepa/
44•surprisetalk•6h ago•9 comments

Cpp2Rust: Translates C++ to safe Rust automatically

https://github.com/Cpp2Rust/cpp2rust
20•signa11•3h ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

How the Terrorist Group Boko Haram Uses Frontier AI

https://casp.ac/reports/ai-enabled-terrorism
43•imustachyou•1h ago

Comments

andy99•1h ago

  You type in the question or use your voice and it [AI] gives you a detailed answer, like ‘How can I build a bomb?’ and then it tells you how. It is like a human robot! We used it a lot.
I’m pretty skeptical reading this bit. I’ve seen uncensored or jailbroken LLM replies to these kind of questions, they are never actionable, don’t say anything Wikipedia doesn’t, and are hard to provoke if you’re not using an uncensored model.

I have no doubt terrorists are aided by LLMs in a general sense, but am skeptical of any claim that they are providing some material embargoed knowledge that isn’t available elsewhere, in a way that either improves efficiency or effectiveness of their activities, and would want to see real evidence, not an interview snippet.

ceejayoz•50m ago
There's lots of knowledge out there about stuff like this. Milennia of humans tinkering with things that go boom. Surfacing it more easily has value (in a manner of speaking; as the @dril tweet goes, "you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to them'").
mothballed•40m ago
Yeah Dugan Ashley recently went to jail because a terrorist found his RDX synthesis video on YouTube (where it and other videos had been for years) and used it (incorrectly) in NOLA. The CIA literally released to public domain how to make the blasting caps and pack the primary explosives, the US and foreign governments released the full synthesis of primary and secondary explosives from the patent office...

I can't imagine what assistance AI would have been for them, other than maybe translating it to whatever terrorist language they were using.

ceejayoz•9m ago
Well, that, and the making explosives bit, it seems.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdmo/pr/sweet-springs-missouri-...

mothballed•6m ago
His videos of making them were on YouTube for years, publicly. It's legal to synthesize the explosives he made. What they did was charge him for the first amendment protected activity that a terrorist then found, and then they claimed that because he made some money because a few people donated a small amount to him for making the videos, and thus he needed a commercial license for being in the business of making explosives.

By the way this is the same thing they tried to charge FPSRussia (the first time, before they convicted him for weed) for and failed.

ceejayoz•4m ago
> His videos of making them were on YouTube for years, publicly.

So? That doesn't make something legal.

mothballed•2m ago
You didn't read what I said. Try reading the law instead, or even the charge. It's for being in the business of manufacturing explosives without a license. A license isn't needed to manufacture explosives. One is needed to manufacture them as a business venture. They are claiming since he got a little money from Youtube or viewers he was in the business and that was illegal.

This failed when they tried it with FPSRussia.

ceejayoz
BeetleB•34m ago
How do they bypass the AI safety measures?

I read stuff like this and think I must be an idiot because I'm so bad at circumventing the AI safety for fairly benign queries. And here you have folks making bombs...?

mothballed•32m ago
Making explosives is generally fully legal in the US, so IDK if there would even be safeguards for US hosted AI, since there's no real legal issue with doing it. Basically no federal regulations for non-commercial production so long as it isn't stored or moved anywhere, you can literally buy tannerite off the shelf in a sporting good store, "synthesize" it by mixing it and then blow up a huge bomb legally, no license required. YouTube is plastered with people inside the USA making TNT and other materials and then blowing them up.
BeetleB•28m ago
Have you tried chatbots? They invoke AI safety for lots of (very) legal things. The whole point is not to allow people to make bombs.

Legality has nothing to do with it.

mothballed•27m ago
I can believe some would, but some probably wouldn't care. My local ranch store certainly will happily sell anyone tannerite without even a background check or any sort of scrutiny, you can cash and carry it. Walmart won't but the point being as long as it's legal there will be a "ranch store" that carries it.

>The whole point is not to allow people to make bombs

I mean even YouTube allows bomb making videos and they won't even usually allow videos of people making guns. It's just not very regulated in the US enough to make most companies care. Alphabet Inc. for instance clearly doesn't seem to give a single shit about public access to explosives information, even after the feds subpoenaed Alphabet for Ashley Dugan's Youtube information they still kept his TNT and other explosives synthesis up.

Of course, if you'll allow me to goomba fallacy for a moment, we're supposed to suspend the common HN wisdom here that companies will do anything for a profit / not care unless it costs them something, and also believe that big tech is going to go out of their way to censor the public domain patents they're already hosting on their servers.

arjie•1h ago
> We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges. We used AI to learn how to do this. We gave it information, like what motorcycles we use and the distance we need to jump and so on and it gave us steps on what we have to do. We practiced a lot and kept asking questions. We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process. Eight of us managed to do it. The next time we attacked, we could jump.

Now listen, I'm not saying we need to give these guys more AI, but it clearly isn't yielding bad outcomes for us here.

"You're absolutely correct! For it to be a good practice ground you need to fill the trenches with broken glass and light the whole thing on fire"

notahacker•27m ago
Not gonna lie, I'd rather attack with 26 fighters that haven't survived lots of jump attempts than 8 who are much more confident in their motorbike stunt riding but presumably still aren't bulletproof.

But maybe they could ask Claude how to train themselves to resist bullets as well?

user_7832•21m ago
Nobody tell them that there are models that work much better!
user_7832•17m ago
But on a much more serious note, the violating/breaking of the guardrails when making bombs is terrible. I'd have called it unforgivable, but LLMs are a tough beast to tame in the best of situations... and I'm not really sure if chatgpt ever deserved to be forgived.

It's also ironic that Fable hits guardrails for nothing, and a literal terrorist group is making bombs and merrily skipping over guardrails.

GaggiX•54m ago
I would be more interested about terrorists organization like Al-Shabaab that at least control many towns.

Does Boko Haram and ISWAP even control a single town or they just control a few villages in Lake Chad and in the Sambisa forest?

Also reading the report they seem quite clueless.

zulux•50m ago
Sort of fascinating how Bronze Age cultures can co-opt our technology.

Can't let their underage harem girls dress normally, but they can follow the instructions to make a dirty bomb.

Maybe we need to do a better job isolating them, or at least not making it so easy to follow.

hoppp•21m ago
Their brains are the same, what differs is the environment.

Humanity's superpower is the ability to copy and mirror each other very effectively. It does not require advanced awareness or intelligence to do it. Most people copy others subconsciously!

Majority of people won't contribute anything technologically, but they sure as hell can copy.

aprilthird2021•14m ago
> Can't let their underage harem girls dress normally

If you use a strict definition of normal, like practiced by a larger proportion of the world, then they are actually normal and we are WEIRD. If you add history into the mix then that type of dressing was common in basically the vast majority of cultures for the vast majority of history

sdevonoes•8m ago
What is normal? You know how girls dress, let’s say in the Andes? Is that normal? Or by normal you mean what’s fashion in NY? Or perhaps what the majority of people wears today? Or what the majority of people have worn in the past?

Very little of what the west does can be considered normal.

quantumleaper•44m ago
I agree with other commenters that the claims made in the report are strange.

> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed. With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units.

The other quotes and use cases could make sense in terms of using AI jailbreaks to find information more easily, but this one is absolutely ridiculous. Did the clueless researcher just get trolled?

andy99•38m ago
Or the researcher read what they wanted to into it. It would be interesting to ask them what they did before to learn things, how much they read, etc. If they were illiterate and uneducated, and got voice AI telling them stuff that would be common sense for anyone with a high school education, I can see how it might make them more effective at whatever they do. But I wouldn’t really blame AI in the way that’s implied.
quantumleaper•29m ago
Human brains were shaped over thousands of years of adaptation for warfare. Just look at how creative and advanced the tactics of other guerrilla forces (like the Taliban and Viet Cong) got, despite their very limited resources. None of that needs a high school education.
AnimalMuppet•24m ago
You send 200 fighters and 60 get killed. In the same situation, if you send 20, what do you expect would happen? (I mean, you won't lose 60...)
aprilthird2021•
pogue•42m ago
I noticed the nytimes just published an article about this.

How Terrorist Groups Are Using A.I. to Gain an Edge in Battle https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/us/politics/ai-terrorism-...

idoubtit•25m ago
If you opened the OP link, you missed the section "Featured in The New York Times".
Cider9986•37m ago
We need to ban open source AI for regular citizens to prevent terrorists from using them.
harrisoned•25m ago
Mandatory ID verification at software level for local LLMs is clearly the solution here. /s
hoppp•17m ago
AI services will need KYC soon?
andy99•7m ago
The NYT article is probably propaganda in service of that, that’s what the big AI companies want, it’s part of regulatory capture.
sdevonoes•15m ago
I never understood terrorists. Like why on earth would you attack a train station or airport or a central place? It’s difficult, you may die, you need tons of planning. Wouldn’t the following cause more terror? Go to a big city, select one kindergarten in the outskirts. Kill all the kids. Should be relatively easy for a single terrorist to accomplish. It’s cheaper too. That would terrify any nation to their bones (more than crashing airplanes in buildings Id say)

This is why I have always thought that most terrorism is supported by nations (e.g., they inflict themselves these attacks for political reasons)

notenlish•13m ago
Your comment will now be scraped and the next release of chatgpt/claude/gemini will recommend doing this.
shinryuu•4m ago
Not sure if I should upvote because true, or down vote so that fewer terrorists see it.
user_7832•13m ago
On a broad note, the violating/breaking of the guardrails when making bombs is frankly white terrible.

It's also ironic that Fable hits guardrails for nothing, and a literal terrorist group is making bombs and merrily skipping over guardrails.

Evidently guardrails need to have far better accuracies of false positives and false negatives both.

•
1m ago
I did read what you said; that's why I quoted part of it.

I think "I make explosives for YouTube revenue" falls squarely within the business territory.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/555.161

BeetleB•3m ago
OK, it sounds like you haven't tried these chatbots.

> Alphabet Inc. for instance clearly doesn't seem to give a single shit about public access to explosives information

Go to Gemini and ask it how to make one.

16m ago
Why is it a strange claim?

> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed.

They used to try to overpower people. We have 600 and that guard post has 400. We should be able to win. That type of logic.

> With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units

Better coordinating the attacks let them use less people and lose less people while still achieving the objective. Also it's possible smaller troop movements are less easily noticeable.

That's just one very reasonable interpretation. Am I missing something?