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GPT-5.6 Sol can beat Factorio on peaceful mode

https://ryanmadden.net/gpt-56-beats-factorio/
69•ryanmadden•1h ago•54 comments

TCP Use-After-Free: CVE-2026-98432 / CVSS 9.8

https://atlasum.net/blog/cve-2026-98432-linux-ipv4-tcp-uaf
40•oger•53m ago•16 comments

The Duty of a Scholar

https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2026-10-31-The-Duty-of-a-Scholar.html
33•gslin•1h ago•6 comments

It's the Memory Latency, Stupid

https://pivotlake.io/blog/its-the-memory-latency-stupid/
25•ntur1337•1h ago•2 comments

Molly (Signal fork) has not been updated since 3 months and is vulnerable

https://piefed.world/post/1503394
260•DeepLogin•9h ago•158 comments

Hackers hijack Egypt highway billboard and Malaysian screens to show porn

https://www.cairoreport.org/p/egypt-brazil-iraq-billboard-hack
30•entryleveljobsc•2h ago•31 comments

Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4

https://jepsen.io/analyses/particledb-1.1.4
110•aphyr•6h ago•48 comments

Do the math: How we took over ChatGPT accounts

https://www.parameter.ai/labs/we-found-a-gap-at-openai
276•armcat•9h ago•126 comments

Much Ado About None: Sentinel Values in Python

https://florianwilhelm.info/2026/10/sentinel_values/
10•sebg•1d ago•1 comments

Redox: Ring Buffers Project Summary

https://www.redox-os.org/news/nlnet-rb-summary/
31•g0xA52A2A•3d ago•4 comments

Noctua Fan Swap on a Calnex Rb/GPS Frequency Reference

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/noctua-fan-swap-calnex-rb-gps-frequency-reference/
18•aray07•2d ago•9 comments

Show HN: A language model that lives in a boot sector

https://github.com/kerlenton/bootgpt
10•kerlenton•7h ago•0 comments

Show HN: NES Contra (1987) port (ASM –> C and then C –> WebAssembly)

https://epoyraz.github.io/nes-contra-us/
4•tevlon•50m ago•1 comments

William Nordhaus has died

https://news.yale.edu/2026/10/31/william-nordhaus-nobel-laureate-who-integrated-economics-and-cli...
25•ilreb•2h ago•1 comments

I post trained a model on Demoscenes

https://datavorous.com/writing/demoscener/
28•datavorous_•2h ago•17 comments

Simple circuits can create complex behaviors

https://aatishb.com/myriad/lets-build-a-brain/
166•aatish•4d ago•53 comments

Casio Watches of the 1980s

https://www.casio.com/us/watches/50th/Heritage/1980s/
160•karagenit•4h ago•77 comments

Reading and writing are less symmetric than you (probably) think

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2015/10/25/reading-and-writing-are-less-symmetric-than-you-probably...
53•luu•3d ago•18 comments

Switch Lowering in GCC

https://xoranth.net/gcc-switch/
176•signa11•12h ago•33 comments

Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament

https://www.science.org/content/article/serbia-just-elected-world-s-brainiest-parliament
729•input_sh•9h ago•419 comments

Digital minimalism

https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/10/31/digital_minimalism.html
263•wilbertliu•13h ago•195 comments

Show HN: Ghostman – A fast, keyboard-driven TUI API client and webhook inspector

https://github.com/4yk5/Ghostman
29•4yk5•1d ago•23 comments

Malware uses LLMs to rank victims by how much they're worth

https://blog.talosintelligence.com/appraisal-by-ai-model-driven-victim-prioritization-in-the-volt...
204•khalidkhair•5h ago•108 comments

The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported (2025)

https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3706598.3713778
58•the-mitr•2h ago•38 comments

AI, Lean, and the Future of Formal Verification, with Lean Creator Leo de Moura

https://thedataexchange.media/leo-de-moura-lean-aws/
169•datascientist•2d ago•38 comments

What is a light-day? The milestone Voyager 1 is closing in on

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-1/voyager-1-what-is-a-light-day/
64•geox•3h ago•33 comments

Show HN: Marelleo, an open-source story box I built for my kids using ESP32

https://zebra.rodeo/en/blog/marelleo/
171•foOg•4d ago•46 comments

Show HN: A USB-C LTE modem that gives my computer a phone line

https://github.com/Koppar-AI/koppar-lte-modem
15•abijahkaj•4h ago•5 comments

Copyright Office is restoring copyright to something you have to work to get

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/31/burn-berne/#unvictored
37•beardyw•2h ago•24 comments

My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii

https://virtuallyfun.com/2026/10/29/my-favourite-powermac-is-a-nintendo-wii/
367•DHowett•1d ago•109 comments
Open in hackernews

GPT-5.6 Sol can beat Factorio on peaceful mode

https://ryanmadden.net/gpt-56-beats-factorio/
66•ryanmadden•1h ago

Comments

mwt•51m ago
> The rocket launch was only achieved through significant ‘manual’ effort on Sol’s part as it papered over its late-game failures to connect certain production systems by repeatedly ferrying supplies between areas of the factory.

Robots: they're just like us!

8note•27m ago
i think its more of an effect of factorio's hidden information.

youre not really sure how to set up some of the logistics/how much of what you will need where ahead of time

scrollaway•9m ago
What do you mean? Factorio is an extremely calculable game and tends to show most of its information (ratios aside, those are in the wikis)
jstummbillig•9m ago
How do you mean? (I have played 1 hour of Factorio)
VoidWhisperer•46m ago
Factorio is a much easier game without the bugs being a pain in the arse as you expand - i wonder how Sol would handle the bugs
numlock86•41m ago
That was exactly my thought when reading the headline, before even looking into the article. Sure it's still somewhat complex to get to a rocket launch, but without the biters where is the challenge, other than complexity? It's like a big excel sheet with conveyor belts, pipes and electricity poles at that point only.
ang_cire•38m ago
> where is the challenge, other than complexity

Patience, for one. I reach a point where I'm looking at a mess of coal-fed sorters that need a complete rip-and-replace with electric ones, and that's usually the point where I close the game and go back to something easier like Kenshi.

richwater•33m ago
I know it's a pipe dream, but these kinds of games (Factorio, Satisfactory, etc) would all benefit from sort of brain-game interface where I could just think about what I wanted to do.

The tedium and repetition is really what kills the enjoyment for me. The problem solving, planning, forethought, etc are super fun but it's killed by the former.

roncesvalles•28m ago
It's basically programming with really bad ergonomics. I'm a programmer by profession and I was immediately frustrated by Factorio because I realized I'd rather just write code and build a project because it would scratch the exact same itch while actually being useful.
dfedbeef•41m ago
Good to know it's good at something, I suppose? Sol seems like it always just wastes my time and writes terrible code.
mickeyp•40m ago
Watching AI play games is fun, but I can't wait for someone to crack having small LLMs in games to enrich them in useful and interesting ways.
direwolf20•33m ago
SS13 but the ship's AI is actually an AI instead of a player in disguise
jbm•31m ago
I have been playing with this. Having tiny models provide more contextual information when an NPC speaks is cool but the "small enough" models tend to go off the rails.

It's fun if you have a handful of people playing, but it would quickly go towards negative reviews if you tried to sell it.

Jtarii•15m ago
I don't think an LLM should ever be having a two-way conversation with the player. It would be more suited to 2 npcs having conversations amongst themselves. All dialogue delivered to the player should be human written.

At most it should be mildly tweaking existing dialogue, e.g updating a line to reflect game events. But as soon as you present a prompt window to the player the entire illusion that you are in a game world instantly dies.

HDThoreaun•10m ago
Most dialogue in games is crap. I would much rather have an LLM writing the dialogue so that it can include references to player choices over what currently exists.
Buttons840
ang_cire•40m ago
Another thing AI can do that I can't...
CSMastermind•36m ago
I tried a few recently on Civ 6 Deity, and they all lose pretty quickly.
kyle_grove•31m ago
Sounds like an experiment I'd like to give a try--what integration layer did you use to get LLMs to control the civ?
Kotlopou•27m ago
To be fair, Deity on Civ games is brutal. I'd be interested in where the cutoff is.
mh-•15m ago
Doesn't the AI (the computer players, I mean) "cheat" at that high of difficulty level?
kanemcgrath•31m ago
It is weird and almost alien how AI designs factories. When Claude announced Fable 5 they also did a Factorio demo that was the same kind of designs and a lot of hand feeding and direct insertion. In some sense it proves to me that llms are not just copying and are actually creating a bespoke solution. But I honestly expected more from frontier models
plorntus•19m ago
I think one of the problems is that AI has no sense of laziness or time. Unless it's in their training data or prompted they're not going to bother automating something
QuantumNomad_•19m ago
> In some sense it proves to me that llms are not just copying and are actually creating a bespoke solution.

Is the weirdness of the designs meaningfully beneficial in any way that the AI has figured out, or could it for example be that the training data the LLMs learned from are too different from the type of data it would need to learn from in order to interface properly and play the game better? And then because of that incompleteness, the LLM has to hallucinate a lot and it results in weird outcomes.

Jtarii•10m ago
To them the player character is just as good as a belt for transporting materials.

The player character actually does have an extremely high capacity so if you are constantly running between chests your factory will still be reasonably high throughput.

bosshawg•29m ago
interesting artifact of over investment and subsidies of AI and datacenters
artninja1988•26m ago
Who determines "over investment"
bosshawg•11m ago
the market, and investors opinions on their returns.
fasterik•26m ago
It doesn't seem to understand the core mechanic of Factorio, which is putting outputs onto belts and routing them to other inputs. It does this in a few places, but for the most part everything is put into chests and moved around by the player.
hartator•15m ago
To be fair, I do do the same.
root_axis•7m ago
It's just easier to do manual stuff when the complexity of scaling the automation becomes cognitively demanding. A new player does mostly everything manually while experienced players have a natural intuition for planning and scaling the automation.
CrimsonRain•6m ago
If you don't have enemies, you have unlimited time. Doing it thru player is what it learned and wasn't pressured to do better (it has no fatigue as opposed to humans).
gavmor•5m ago
Coding agents are bad at architecture, Exhibit no. 12057.
blobbers•15m ago
This is a much better benchmark as a concept (without knowing the details of how the problem is framed to the agent) than some of these ridiculous things the frontier labs are reporting (vending machine simulator? come on).

Can you report more in depth at stumbling blocks? It's a surprisingly linear curve.

I'm going to try it on a local run.

I wonder if there is room for "recommendorio" where it gives you AI advice on your current factory.

Is the model pre-trained with any knowledge of the game?

sdwvit•7m ago
how much did it cost I wonder
mh-•16m ago
I tried really hard to like Factorio, and I bounce off of it each time after playing a save for 4-8 hours for exactly this reason. I know a lot of programmers who love it, so I almost wish I could get into it.

Now I'm tempted to try again, because it feels like the kind of game I should really enjoy.

cjbgkagh•25m ago
Factorio rewards the players progression through the game by taking away points of pain. The helper bots being a key transition. Without that pain there would be no reward. The fact that refactoring is expensive in time and complexity is what makes it realistic - it makes the earlier decisions important and consequential.

You can always enter creative mode and make whatever changes you want in the game instantly, but in my experience that does make it less fun.

Vetch•30m ago
The more interesting challenge is the one you eliminated, complexity, in getting efficient logistics and arrangements. Dyson Sphere Program (until late in its existence) and Satisfactory don't have waves of enemies attacking your bases but remain challenging and a satisfying puzzle. I remember I used a constraint solver to help me optimize some late game recipes for Satisfactory.
RHSeeger•21m ago
Its puzzle solving. For a lot of people, that _is_ the fun part.
sagarm•10m ago
The biters are just a line item in the spreadsheet. Early players might build a wall with an ammo belt, for example. There's lots of options that don't involve responding in real-time.

Though these days I just manually clear the pollution cloud with a pocket full of turrets. The forward deployed engineer model, if you will.

chrisfosterelli•29m ago
The biggest thing the bugs introduce from an LLMs perspective is a necessity for realtime response. Without them, the LLM can take as long as it wants to decide and do its next operation on the factory. With them, not responding fast enough results in death (particularly early game where a lot of biter combat is player driven). I presume it doesn't do great at this.
blobbers•14m ago
Glad to hear we've got LLMs controlling military drones in real life :(
•
29m ago
I hope to experiment with using classic tabular reinforcement learning in game AI one day. Imagine a framework that makes setting up small Q-learning tables easy, and you can just sprinkle dozens of Q-learning algorithms throughout your traditional AI scripting.

These old basic algorithms often have mathematical proofs that they will converge to optimal behavior, and they do so fairly quickly. Turning the complex world of the game into a Q-table would require some creativity and judgement, but is not that hard I think.

In the end we would have a controllable AI that actually does adapt. That's my hope anyway.

Vetch•26m ago
With the aid of SOTA LLMs, you can encode specialist intelligence into computer programs without going through the roundabout route of training small LLMs. And even when you do go the route of ML, it doesn't necessarily have to be an LLM or even a Neural network.
thi2•14m ago
I would love the revival of the RTS genre with better computer enemies.
80fj0348i•6m ago
Such AIs have existed in Brood War and Dota 2 for a very long time now (pre-LLM), problem is they aren't very fun for humans to play against.
8note•12m ago
i think hooking in an llm to dwarf fortress for turning the very mechanistic descriptions into prose. same with the adventure mode talk. instead of a constant "well weve got beasts" an llm could read a bunch of the language tree to make a unique introduction for each.

same with the df artworks. get kitfox to design some art styles for dwarves, elves, goblins, and humans, and then instead of just reading

"this is a fine engraving of a dwarf. it concerns the events of 102 when ulrist fastbuttons was elected mayor. ulrist fastbuttons is sobbing"

jstummbillig•7m ago
There has to be a AAAA studio building the new, greatest MMO, that also utilizes LLMs as part of the game loop, surely?
scott01•6m ago
In "Where Winds Meet" you can talk to NPCs