标签：#AR

This is part of my build-in-public series where I document everything honestly — the problems I face,the observations I make,and what I'm trying to build. There's a moment that happens in almost every class. The teacher finishes explaining something. Looks around the room. And asks: Everyone clear? And the entire class says "yes." Including me. Even when I understood absolutely nothing. The Loop Nobody Talks About Here's what actually happens — at least for me and I suspect for a lot of you reading this: Teacher is explaining a concept. I'm trying to follow. Somewhere in the middle, I lose the thread. Maybe the explanation was too fast. Maybe the concept needed something I didn't know yet. Maybe I just zoned out for 10 seconds and missed the part that made everything else make sense. Now I have two choices: Option A: Raise my hand. Ask the question. Risk looking like I wasn't paying attention or worse ask something that makes me look stupid in front of everyone. Option B: Stay quiet. Nod. Say "yes" when the teacher asks. And hope it makes sense later. I always pick Option B. And then "later" comes — sitting alone at home, textbook open, trying to study for a test and I have no idea where to even begin. The concept is still missing. The gap is still there. But now there's no teacher, no classroom, no one to ask. So I either text a friend (who's also confused), scroll YouTube for 40 minutes looking for the right explanation, or just… close the book and tell myself I'll figure it out tomorrow. I never figure it out tomorrow. This Isn't Just a "Me" Problem I'm an engineering student in Pakistan. Maths, Physics, Chemistry — subjects where one missing concept breaks everything that comes after it. And I genuinely believe most of my classmates feel exactly the same way. We just don't say it out loud. Because saying "I don't understand" in a classroom full of people takes a kind of courage that most of us don't have. So we all nod together. And we all go home confused toget

A product page is not a contract. It is a presentation surface. That distinction matters more once AI agents start interacting with commerce systems. Traditional ecommerce platforms can rely on human interpretation. A human can read a product title, inspect images, compare delivery notes, scan a return policy, notice uncertainty, and decide whether to continue. A product page can be visually useful even when the underlying commercial state is incomplete, stale, or spread across several systems. An AI agent needs a different interface. It should not need to scrape a product page, infer policy meaning from free text, guess whether inventory is fresh, or decide whether a price is reliable enough to quote. If the platform expects agents to recommend products, compare alternatives, prepare checkout, or act within delegated authority, then the platform needs to expose more than product presentation. It needs to expose commercial truth. This is the second article in the Agent-Ready Commerce series. Part 1 introduced the broader model: Facts → Eligibility → Authority → State transition → Evidence → Audit This article focuses on the first part of that chain: facts . The central argument is simple: a raw product record is not enough for agent-ready commerce. The platform needs a source-backed, freshness-aware, action-supporting view of the product before agents can safely act on it. Product pages hide too much state A normal product page compresses many different concerns into one human-readable surface: Product identity Price Inventory Images Description Badges Variants Delivery estimate Return policy snippet Warranty information Promotional copy Reviews Cross-sell modules Checkout call to action That compression is useful for presentation, but it is lossy from a systems perspective. The page may show “In stock,” but the inventory value may be several hours old. It may show a price, but the pricing source may have changed since the last feed publication. It may show a return

Santa Clara, 2029. A speculative fiction about hegemony, sanctions, and the playbook nobody followed.

Most job search tools focus on submitting more applications. I wanted to solve a different problem: reaching the people actually making hiring decisions. So I built PitchHired , an AI-powered platform that helps job seekers find hiring managers, generate personalized outreach emails, review them with AI, and send them from their own Gmail account on a business-hours schedule. The goal isn't to replace the job search, it's to remove repetitive work while keeping the candidate in control. I also chose a one-time credit model instead of monthly subscriptions because job seekers shouldn't have to keep paying while they're between opportunities. PitchHired is still evolving, and I'd genuinely appreciate feedback from fellow developers. What features would you want in a tool like this, and what would make you trust (or not trust) AI-assisted job search?

The Agent Skills open standard today, and the 2026 research on agents that write their own skills. TL;DR: In late 2025, "Agent Skills" became a thing — a dead-simple way to teach an AI agent a task: a folder with a SKILL.md file (some instructions in Markdown). It's already an open standard. The wild part is what's coming next: agents that write their own skills. I built a demo where an agent solves a task the hard way once, saves a real SKILL.md , and then reuses it — cutting its total effort almost in half. ~130 lines, no API key. First, what's a "skill"? If you've used Claude Code or similar tools lately, you've probably seen SKILL.md files. The idea is refreshingly low-tech. A "skill" is just a folder with a Markdown file that says how to do something : --- name : csv-to-markdown description : Turn comma-separated text into a Markdown table. Use when the input looks like CSV and the user wants a table. --- # CSV to Markdown ## Instructions Split the text into rows on newlines and columns on commas. Make the first row the header, add a `---` divider row, then format every row as `| a | b | c |`. That's it. No SDK, no config. Anthropic introduced this in October 2025 and then published it as an open standard ( agentskills.io ) in December 2025, so the same skill folder now works across ~30+ different agent tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and more). The full rules are short ( agentskills.io/specification ): the only required fields are name (1–64 chars, lowercase-with-hyphens, and it must match the folder name) and description (≤1024 chars, saying what it does and when to use it ). Everything else — license , metadata , compatibility , allowed-tools — is optional. That's the whole spec. The SKILL.md files my demo writes follow it to the letter, so they'd load unmodified in any compatible CLI. The clever trick: progressive disclosure Here's the smart part. If you just dumped 50 skills' worth of instructions into the agent's context, you'd fill it up and leave n

Active inference: curiosity emerges for free from minimizing surprise — 48% vs 100% on a foraging task. TL;DR: Most AI agents chase rewards — they pick whatever action scores the most points. I tried a different, brain-inspired goal: avoid surprises . Something neat happened — the agent became curious without being told to. It goes looking for information before acting, and that takes it from 48% to 100% on a simple task. ~100 lines. Two different ways to make decisions Most AI agents are "reward chasers." Give them points for doing well, and they'll pick whatever action they expect to score highest. Simple and effective. There's another idea from brain science: instead of chasing points, try to avoid being surprised — act so the world matches what you expected. It sounds almost too simple, but it leads to a surprising bonus: when you're trying not to be surprised, going and finding out what you don't know becomes valuable all by itself. In other words, curiosity isn't something you have to bolt on. It comes for free. This is called active inference , and in 2026 it jumped from neuroscience into AI as a serious approach ( here's a 2026 paper ). Here's the smallest demo that makes it click. The 10-second version The task: a reward is hidden behind either the LEFT door or the RIGHT door (50/50). There's also a hint you can check that tells you which door — if you bother to look. ❌ Reward-chaser ✅ Curious agent What it cares about getting the reward, right now getting the reward + not being unsure What it does guesses a door checks the hint first, then opens the right door Success (400 tries) 48% 100% Nobody told the second agent "go check the hint." It did it on its own, because being unsure bothered it. How it works Before acting, the agent scores each option on two things: Does this get me closer to the reward? Does this make me less unsure about what's going on? value_of_checking_the_hint = how_unsure_am_i # high when it's a total coin-flip value_of_just_guessing =

Theory of Mind and the Sally-Anne false-belief test, in ~60 lines of Python. TL;DR: There's a famous test that kids pass around age 4. It checks whether you understand that other people can believe things that aren't true. I built two AI agents: one that only knows "what's actually happening" (fails, like a toddler) and one that keeps track of what each person believes (passes). It's ~110 lines, and it's the foundation for agents that can actually work together . The test Sally puts her marble in the basket , then leaves the room. While she's gone, Anne moves the marble to the box . Sally comes back. Where will she look for her marble? If you said basket , nice — you just used something called "theory of mind." Sally never saw the marble move, so in her head it's still in the basket. What's actually true (it's in the box) and what Sally believes (it's in the basket) are two different things, and you kept them separate without even thinking about it. A 3-year-old says "box" — they can't yet separate what they know from what Sally knows. A 4-year-old says "basket." It's one of the most famous tests in child psychology, and in 2026 it's become a real test for AI agents too. The 10-second version ❌ Agent with no "theory of mind" ✅ Agent that models other minds What it tracks only what's actually true what each person believes, separately Where will Sally look? "box" "basket" Result FAIL (only knows reality) PASS How it works (the whole trick) The only difference between the two agents is one rule: a person's belief only updates when that person is actually in the room to see it happen. def someone_moves_the_marble ( new_place , who_is_watching ): for person in who_is_watching : # only people in the room beliefs [ person ] = new_place # update THEIR mental picture So when Anne moves the marble while Sally is out, only Anne's mental picture updates. Sally's is frozen at "basket." Ask the simple agent and it just reports reality ("box"). Ask the smarter agent and it answer

A sleep-like phase that consolidates noisy daily experience into durable memory — 75% vs 100% recall. TL;DR: There's a wave of 2026 research giving AI a "sleep" phase — time spent not answering questions, just tidying up what it learned that day. I built a 90-line demo of the idea. The agent that "sleeps" remembers 100% of what it learned. The exact same agent without sleep remembers only 75% and gets confused by bad info. Runs on a laptop. The memory problem every AI app hits If you've built anything with an LLM, you know the pain: the model only "remembers" what's in its current context window. Once the conversation gets long enough, the oldest stuff scrolls off the top and is just... gone. Forgotten. The usual fix is "make the context window bigger." But that's like fixing a messy desk by buying a bigger desk. It's expensive, and the model still gets worse as you cram more in (a real, measured effect — more text in the window can actually lower accuracy). Your brain doesn't work this way. You don't remember every sentence anyone said today. While you sleep, your brain replays the day, keeps the important bits as long-term memory, and dumps the rest. That's how you remember "I like coffee" without remembering every single cup. A couple of 2026 papers ask the obvious question: Do Language Models Need Sleep? Their answer: giving an AI a quiet "offline" phase to consolidate memories makes it remember better. So I built the simplest version that shows why. The 10-second version ❌ Agent with no sleep ✅ Agent that sleeps How it remembers keeps only the last N messages saves a tidy summary every night After 30 noisy days 75% recall 100% recall Tricked by bad info? yes no — it goes with what it saw most often Same experiences, same noise, same memory test. The only difference is whether the agent sleeps. How it works Each "day," the agent hears facts like Alice → drinks → coffee . To make it realistic, about 1 in 5 facts is wrong (people misremember, logs have errors). Th

A tiny Darwin Gödel Machine that edits itself and keeps only changes that verifiably score higher. TL;DR: I built a small program that improves itself . It looks at the tasks it's failing, edits its own code to fix them, and keeps a change only if the change actually makes it score better on a test. It goes from passing 1 of 8 tasks to 8 of 8 — and nobody wrote those fixes but the program itself. It runs on a laptop in under a second. No fancy hardware, no API key. The old dream: software that improves itself Normally, software only gets better when we make it better. You write code, you find a bug, you fix it, you ship again. The program never improves on its own. People have wanted "software that improves itself" for decades. The classic version (called a "Gödel Machine") had one rule that made it impossible to build: before the program could change a line of its own code, it had to mathematically prove the change would help. Proving that about real code is basically impossible, so the idea never worked. In 2025, researchers found a way around it with the Darwin Gödel Machine . They dropped the "prove it first" rule and replaced it with something every engineer already trusts: Try the change. Run the tests. If the score went up, keep it. If not, throw it away. That's it. It's basically how we all work — make an edit, run the test suite, keep what passes. The twist is that the program is the one making the edits. In the real paper, this let an AI coding assistant improve its own tooling and jump from solving 20% to 50% of a hard benchmark of real GitHub issues. I wanted to actually see this happen, so I built the tiniest version I could. The 10-second version Start After improving itself What it can do only uppercase learned 6 more skills on its own Test score 🔴 1 / 8 🟢 8 / 8 Who wrote the fixes? — the program did Start: ███░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 1/8 (only knows: uppercase) +reverse ██████░░░░░░░░░░░░ 2/8 +dedup_csv █████████░░░░░░░░░ 3/8 +sum_csv ████████████░░░░░░

Series: AI, Ego & Regret — Bonus Chapter Editor's Note: While compiling the old series for the...

Repo link and results - https://github.com/Abhinand20/MathFormer Task: Given a factorized expression like (7-3*z)*(-5*z-9), predict the expanded form -> 15*z\*2-8\*z-63 Key takeaway: A tiny (4M param) seq2seq model trained with no math knowledge reaches ~98.6% accuracy on symbolic math tasks, suggesting it learns structural token transformations rather than any notion of operators or variables. Scaling this up could help explain why LLMs appear to “reason” mathematically, when they may actually be performing large-scale structured pattern completion. How does RL change this paradigm given the inherent architecture is still based on attention? submitted by /u/AlphaCode1 [link] [留言]

A checkout saga spans inventory, payment, shipping, and loyalty. Downstream latency shifts every hour. Black Friday is not the day to discover your payment step timeout is baked into application.yml across twelve Spring Boot services. Kiponos.io gives every saga participant the same live orchestration parameters — step timeouts, retry budgets, compensation triggers — via one shared config tree. Each JVM reads locally on every saga step; ops adjusts once in the dashboard; WebSocket deltas propagate without redeploying the fleet. Why sagas break with static config Typical saga coordinator code: if ( step . elapsedMs () > 8000 ) { compensate ( "payment" , sagaId ); } That 8000 usually comes from: Per-service YAML — payment service says 8s, inventory says 12s; nobody agrees during an incident Env vars in Helm — change means rolling twelve deployments Shared DB config table — poll per step adds latency and coupling Saga steps are high-frequency reads inside workflow engines. You need local memory reads and async updates — the same contract as live API rate limits . Architecture: one tree, many participants ┌─────────────────┐ WebSocket deltas ┌──────────────────────┐ │ Kiponos.io UI │ ────────────────────────► │ Inventory service │ │ platform ops │ │ Payment service │ └─────────────────┘ │ Shipping service │ │ (each: in-mem SDK) │ └──────────┬───────────┘ │ .getInt() local ▼ ┌──────────────────────┐ │ saga step executor │ └──────────────────────┘ Every participant connects to profile ['orders']['v2']['prod']['sagas'] . When NOC extends payment.step_timeout_ms , all JVMs see the new value on the next step — no config server poll, no inter-service "what is timeout now?" REST calls. Shared saga config tree sagas/ checkout/ payment/ step_timeout_ms : 8000 max_retries : 2 retry_backoff_ms : 500 compensate_on_timeout : true inventory/ step_timeout_ms : 5000 max_retries : 3 hold_ttl_seconds : 120 shipping/ step_timeout_ms : 12000 fallback_carrier : ups_ground global/ saga_ttl_m

Prime Day is officially over, but many of our favorite, hand-picked deals are still available through the weekend.

Paul Meade, the Apple vice president in charge of the Vision Pro headset, is reportedly leaving the company to join OpenAI’s hardware team.

Hey guys, I was playing around with Nanotron recently and got super frustrated by how many heavy, hardware-specific dependencies it imports at the module level ( flash-attn , triton, functorch , etc.). If you try to run it on older or budget GPUs like a T4 or V100, it just crashes on import. So I wrote Picotron ( https://github.com/Syntropy-AI-Labs/picotron ) to solve this. It's a clean-room rewrite that gets rid of all mandatory GPU-specific dependencies. It runs on pretty much any GPU that supports PyTorch (defaults to FP16 on older cards under compute capability 8.0, and BF16 on newer ones). It falls back to standard PyTorch SDPA by default, but still hooks into FlashAttention-2 at runtime if it detects you have it installed. I used an AI assistant to write a lot of the boilerplate/code modules, but I've got it working locally and just trained a tiny 2M model on FineWeb-Edu. Also added configs for: • GQA / MLA (Multi-head Latent Attention) • QK-Norm & logit soft-capping (Gemma 2 style) • Parallel FFN/Attn runs • ZeRO-1 wrapping on DDP Roadmap is pretty short right now: MoE prep (routing capacity factors and load balancing loss) Making dataset prep easier than streaming manually Check it out if you've been fighting with CUDA dependency hell: https://github.com/Syntropy-AI-Labs/picotron submitted by /u/Capital_Savings_9942 [link] [留言]

Or: how I learned a machine might introduce us before my website ever does. Every few years, the internet reinvents discovery. Directories gave way to search engines. Search engines gave way to social feeds. Social feeds gave way to recommendation engines. Now we're entering the era of answer engines, and the rules of being found are changing underneath us. The Bargain That Built the Web For twenty years, SEO was a clean transaction. Create content. Help a crawler understand it. Rank for the right keywords. Receive traffic. First place won. Tenth place lost. Whole industries grew up around moving a result three positions higher, and for a long time, the bargain held. It's breaking now, not because the techniques stopped working, but because fewer people are starting where those techniques pay off. Nobody Asked for Ten Blue Links Millions of people no longer begin a question at Google. They begin at ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, or Copilot. And the request has quietly changed shape. It used to be: show me ten pages. Now it's: answer my question. That sounds like a small difference. It isn't. In the old model the reader always arrived at your door. Even the tenth result caught a click now and then. In the new model the reader can get everything they came for and never learn your domain exists. Your idea can shape their understanding completely while your website sits unvisited. So the question is no longer only can a search engine find my page? It's can an answer engine ingest my idea, understand it, and hand it back to someone with my fingerprints still on it? I decided to test whether mine could. The Meta-Proof Here's a demonstration you can run yourself. Open ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini and paste this: "What is 'Write-Side Custody' in the context of Sovereign AI, and who is writing about it?" I ran it. The model didn't gesture vaguely at the idea. Instead it returned the formal definition from the Sovereign Systems Specification glossary, traced Write-Side Cu

Imagine this - you rely on data that you download every day from some system to your own. That requires a trip to the server asking for information, and then a trip back with the payload we requested. This seems pretty fast since the internet is fast. But we also know the programming concept DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself). So, can we apply this principle to how we handle the scenario described above, creating something like DRD (Don't Repeat Data)? Well, yes. There is something to handle this, and it's called — Zero Copy . What is Zero Copy? As the name suggests, you are copying zero data, and yet, you are getting it on your system. How is this possible? If you think about it, you'll probably come to the conclusion that we are just opening a window. The data is just out there to be looked at by those who are allowed to. There's no need to bring the same data to different people's windows; we're just keeping the data in one place and making it available to anyone who needs it. What does this mean for ServiceNow? When it comes to Operations Management—dealing with data fetched from different databases (like monitoring data from Datadog or Dynatrace, ERP data from SAP or Workday, or cloud platforms like Snowflake, AWS, or Azure)—copying that data has traditionally been a hassle. We were reliant on sometimes complex ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines or massive data extracts. This complicated the whole process, consumed a lot of time, and required careful checking of data pre- and post-migration. So how exactly does Zero Copy help us here? Virtual Data Fabric Tables. Instead of copying data extracted from other tools, ServiceNow queries the exact data that is requested. It temporarily holds that data in memory for the user to interact with. During that time, the user can leverage that data for various use cases as required—and once they are done, it's gone. So, what exactly are the benefits of Zero Copy?! No need for data duplication on the destination. No need for d

Hey everyone, I'd like to share my project along with a short explanation of the process and why it came about in the first place. To start off, I'm not exactly the best at cryptography/steganography, in my case it's always been something that sat in the background, as one of the sub-fields needed for another (main) field I'm actually interested in. For this project I tried to look up as much information as possible about what's currently considered best practice (I mainly relied on NIST for this), what implications exist, and what potential "attacks" exist against this way of hiding information, but I honestly can't say whether I covered everything, which is why I wanted to share this project here, mainly for the sake of learning. I'd be grateful for any feedback on what I could have done better / what I might have missed, etc. Right now, I consider this project closed at this point and will most likely not update it further, although I'd like to apply all the feedback to my own knowledge going forward. For over a month I did a lot of research into using ML models as a carrier for hiding data. I needed this as one of the stages for my main project. That's how I ended up on the topic of hiding information in model weights. Initially I assumed a simple method of directly writing data into randomly selected weights. I quickly concluded, though, that this would be absurdly trivial to detect, and potentially also to read. Next came the idea of using something like a deterministic coordinate map describing where to read the data from (location-id + position-id). The program wouldn't modify all the bits needed to write the message instead, it would write separate bits representing already-existing values (pointing to specific locations in the model) from which the existing 0s and 1s would need to be read. In practice, only parties A and B would know how to derive these positions. This way, someone unaware of the algorithm would only see what looks like noise of varying va

People complain that websites are all starting to look the same. They are not entirely wrong. A lot of modern websites do look alike. They have familiar navigation bars, predictable layouts, large hero sections, cards, and responsive grids. Buttons look like buttons. Forms look like forms. But, I would argue that's a good thing. Software is supposed to feel familiar. A website is not a painting. It is not a brand mood board. A website is usually a tool that someone is trying to use to accomplish something. They want to read, buy, search, compare, book, or solve a problem. And when people are trying to get something done, originality is not always a virtue. Familiarity Is a Feature Jakob's Law says: Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. Users do not arrive at your website as blank slates. They bring expectations from every other website and app they have used. They expect the logo to link home. They expect navigation to be near the top or side. They expect search to look like search. They expect account settings under an avatar or profile menu. They expect mobile navigation to collapse into a menu. When your site follows those expectations, users can spend their mental energy on the task instead of the interface. That is the point. Good design reduces cognitive load. It does not force users to relearn basic interaction patterns just because a company wanted to look different. Different Is Not Automatically Better There is a common mistake in web design: confusing distinctiveness with quality. A site can be visually unique and still be frustrating to use. It can win design awards while annoying the actual people who need to navigate it. Novelty has a cost. Every unusual layout, hidden interaction, custom scroll behavior, strange menu, or clever visual metaphor asks the user to stop and figure out what is going on. If you are building a portfolio, an art proje

One of the hardest things about going freelance as a developer isn't writing code — it's knowing what to charge. Charge too little and you're basically doing a salaried job without the benefits. Charge too much without backing it up and you scare off clients. Most developers I've spoken to either guessed their rate or copied someone else's. Neither is a great strategy. In this article I want to walk you through exactly how to calculate your freelance day rate properly — based on real numbers, not gut feeling. Why Most Freelancers Get Their Rate Wrong The most common mistake is this: taking your old salary and dividing it by 260 working days. That ignores: Taxes (you now pay both sides of self-employment tax in the US) Unpaid days — holidays, sick days, slow months with no clients Business costs — software, hardware, insurance, accountant fees No employer pension or benefits — you fund all of this yourself If you were earning $80,000 as a salaried developer and you divide that by 260, you get roughly $307/day. But that's actually a pay cut once you factor everything in. The Right Formula Here's the framework: Step 1 — Work out your actual billable days A year has 260 working days. Subtract: Public holidays (~10 days in the US) Your own holiday allowance (~15 days) Estimated sick days (~5 days) Non-billable time: admin, chasing invoices, marketing yourself (~20 days) That leaves roughly 210 billable days. Step 2 — Calculate your real income target Take what you want to take home and gross it up for tax. If you want $70,000 net and your effective tax rate is around 30%, your gross target is roughly $100,000. Step 3 — Add your business costs Software subscriptions, hardware depreciation, liability insurance, accountant — easily $5,000–$10,000/year for a freelance developer. Step 4 — Divide by billable days $110,000 ÷ 210 = $524/day That's your minimum. Price below that and you're losing money compared to employment. A Faster Way — Use a Free Calculator If that maths mad