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Techmeme surfaced Meta’s October 15 release, “Introducing Muse Spark Open, The Most Capable US Open-Weight Model to Date”. The important part is less the superlative than the deployment target: Meta has released a large multimodal agent model whose compressed weights can fit across two high-memory Mac Studios. That moves a class of capability usually associated with a datacenter into hardware that a well-funded lab, company, or individual can own and operate without sending prompts to a model provider.

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US hits Bank of America with \$1.2 billion fine over money laundering (r/news)

• Dull_Committee_1612: So they didn’t pay the bribe?
• TheRexRider: And they made 30 billion last year in profits. The cost of doing business.
• inquisitorthreefive: Worst part of this is that we’re at a point where we have to question whether Treasury is doing this because of an actual money laundering issue or because BofA stopped doing business with Trump after Jan 6th, 2021.

Cornell bans frat parties in wake of gang rape allegation (r/news)

• danccbc: They were so close but decided the parties were the issue.
• LOL_YOUMAD: I was in a frat that got banned from campus for a quarter, there were still frat parties, you just couldn’t call them that. This does nothing
• KenUsimi: College students having parties was not what created or enabled the Cornell 7.

Ex-Chicago detective identified as killing child in 65-year cold case (r/news)

• vasta2: This had to be so common back in the day, same with pinning crimes on whoever they wanted
• AudibleNod: He retired and he’s now dead. But the case is solved.
• THEPIGWHODIDIT: I wonder if they will investigate all the other cases this detective was associated with for other miscarriages of justice

What’s the most obvious lie you’ve watched an entire room pretend to believe? (r/AskReddit)

• Korvzondo: We are like a family here, every single person in that meeting knew it was garbage but we all nodded anyway because that’s the job
• alleghenysinger: That my aunt’s 10 pound godson was two months premature. 
  
  I’m amazed at how many people who were supposedly virgins until married have big, healthy babies 7 months after the wedding.
• llikegiraffes: In school we watched a BBC documentary about the Italian farmers that harvest noodles from trees and dry them in the fields before boxing them up.
  
  I was gobsmacked at how many people thought it was real. Teacher was showing what fake news and propaganda were in real time

What types of employee benefits were at one time ordinary though now are no longer common? (r/AskReddit)

• Veziiioh: Pensions
• handsomechuck: Health insurance that was inexpensive or completely covered by your employer.
• Suitable-Caramel-641: Outside of pension plans, stock options, and other financial backed support, companies cared more for sure. More company paid lunches, large Christmas parties, happy hour lunches ,etc.
  
  Even in my short time on this Earth, I’ve seen a significant pull back in what used to be common culture across many companies. My wife still works in the banking world, and when she started, it wasn’t uncommon for them to go out to lunches paid for by the branch 4-7 times a month. Now it’s maybe once a month.
  
  My company used to do large trips for corporate staff to Florida for a fishing trip each year. Then it was relegated to just senior staff.
  
  From what I gather in talking with a lot of people, 2008 was the biggest turn. With many companies testing the waters after, but never “really” going back to the way things were because they saw how much money they could save. COVID took that a step further.

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Frontend is cooked, is full-stack next? (Blind)

• hubscrub (GitHub): Most backend is even easier for agents. Infra / distributed / real-time systems at scale are kind of harder for agents to reason about since there’s a lot of moving parts but with the frontier models that just means you have to give them a few more prompts + context before they get 98% of the solution.
  
  I suggest getting deep nepotism expertise instead.
• offluent (Confluent): Sofware Engineering is cooked.
• 2leet4u (Bloomberg): Earth is cooked. All the LLM calls are accelerating global warming.

Anthropic devs merge 30,000 code changes every day (Blind)

• XpBs23 (Meta): I’d be curious to know how they maintain quality with such high volume of changes
• floi (Netflix): What a dumb dumb metric lol. Why not merge every keystroke while we’re at it.
• eQXo62 (Google): I pity the poor sobs that might have to make any manual change in that repo

Character AI files for bankruptcy (Blind)

• pinsecure (Pinterest): my career might outlast the ai bubble 🥹
• lb5fh6: Not to doom but this does genuinely feel like the start of the great AI culling. Over half a million ratings for the app on iOS alone to bankruptcy in a relatively short period of time is very telling.
• dancfest (Coupang): Wasn’t Character AI the beginning of it all?

Maia 300 Chip (Blind)

• helper() (Microsoft): It can reach 800 but in 2-3 years, not this quick.
• ktz (LinkedIn): Majo chip has issues
• dgxclout (NVIDIA): What happened to the Majorana chips?

Is Google Maps Routing getting worse? (Blind)

• rageQuiter (Google): Google has laid off everyone competent
• rhydon1x (Capital One): Google has been getting worse and worse every year for about a decade now. No clue wtf is going on but yeah it’s bad
• lamused (Google): Yes. It’s an effect of late stage capitalism.

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Gravitational waves let astronomers listen to cosmic violence that may produce little or no light. These waves are minute distortions of spacetime, set off when massive objects move dramatically. A new catalog described in Scientific American brings the number of detections since 2015 to almost 400. Among its standouts are the collision of the heaviest pair of black holes yet observed this way and a pair that spun at about 40 percent of the speed of light before merging.

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TBPN’s October 13 episode surfaced Oege de Moor’s account of an unusually concrete milestone in AI-assisted offensive security: XBOW says researchers working with agents built a new Chrome exploit chain in six days. The company published both a high-level announcement, “XBOW Built a Chrome Full-Chain Exploit Affecting a Billion Users in Six Days,” and a detailed technical reconstruction. Google accepted the chain into its vulnerability reward program, confirmed that it launched Calculator outside Chrome’s renderer sandbox, and paid the first \$250,000 full-chain reward under rules introduced in April 2026.

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South Africa’s most dangerous criminal networks no longer operate only outside the state. They have pushed into legal industries, public contracts, police forces and political organizations, turning ordinary corruption into a threat to democratic government. The Economist argues that the country can still reverse this process, but only if it treats organised crime as a political system rather than a collection of street-level offences.

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Visitor dies after accident on Goliath at Six Flags Over Georgia (r/news)

• AdorableCattle7105: guy flew out of his seat, hit the ride 3 times and a building, and in the photos they give you after the ride, he’s in it flying off the ride.
• madeinjapan89: Assuming he rode that with family/friends that had to be horrifying to watch him hit the coaster multiple times.
• DonyellFreak: Rest in peace to the person that lost their life. What a traumatic day for anyone in attendance as well.

RJ Mitte, actor best known for playing Walter White Jr. on ‘Breaking Bad,’ dies at 34 (r/news)

• YetiSquish: Dang. Way too young. Great actor.
• tits_mcgee_92: By suicide :( . He was a legend and did so many things for people who were disabled. RIP bro.
• Dwayla: He also had cerebral palsey, may he be at peace.

A sixth measles-related death is reported in Pennsylvania (r/news)

• way2manychickens: I’m so bummed. I couldn’t get my MMR shot because of my autoimmune disease. I need special permission from my dr. and need to go off my meds to get an updated vaccine. I’m one of those people you see with a mask on, that gets ridiculed for wearing it. Some of us just can’t get an updated vaccine. We still need to work and go to the market. What are we supposed to do…just die? (yeah, some of you are ok with that until it’s your wife, child, mother, sister.)
• AudibleNod: A sixth measles-related death was reported Monday in Pennsylvania, involving a 39-year-old woman in Franklin County, amid the state’s largest outbreak in three decades. The woman had not been vaccinated, the spokesperson said. Please vaccinate yourself and your loved ones if you’re medically able to do so.
• The-cultured-swine39: I would hate to be the parent of a child who dies from a preventable disease because I thought I knew it all.

Who is a celebrity that aged incredibly gracefully without trying to fight it? (r/AskReddit)

• Interesting_Net1297: Pierce Brosnan has aged like fine wine.
• RangerBoss: Kate Winslet
• suspiciouslyyellow: Olivia Coleman is refreshingly “normal” and still beautiful and has such a range of emotions when she acts because she can still move her face!!

What previously glorified careers are struggling now? (r/AskReddit)

• Efficient_Gazelle508: Air Traffic Control (in the U.S.). Controllers haven’t had a pay raise since 2009, an overwhelming majority of air traffic facilities are understaffed, and about 40 percent of current Air Traffic Controllers are retiring inside of 5 years. “Supercharged hiring” isn’t turning out quite the way Secretary Sean Duffy has promised. Duffy and FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford seem to be sort of quietly trying to cover everything up until they leave. They’re promising reduced delays and greater efficiency in the Air Traffic system while cutting the workforce end strength and refusing to move off the 2009 pay tables. If you want to fly anywhere in the U.S. you’ve got maybe 4 years before massive delays and cancellations rule the day.
• platypusbelly: most of the entertainment industry. And I don’t mean actors or whatever. I mean the people in the weeds making all that shit happen - particularly in post production. Editors, sound mixing, vfx, etc. There’s a huge amount of people who are being asked to do the same amount of work (if not more) than they were 3 years ago in less time, because there’s less money in show budgets. Studios/networks are cutting budgets for major productions and demanding the same quality of work. People in the industry are highly pressured to produce said same quality with less time/compensation because if they don’t, the studios will just go out and find someone else who will do the work and not complain about it - which in the long run will lead to less experienced people do the job and having the quality suffer for it.
• PhoenixAgent003: I’m gonna be honest, I can’t think of a single career that’s become more respected, and most aren’t doing so hot as an industry.

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Microsoft Responds to backlash (Blind)

• 🌎glob (Meta): I love seeing all the engineers with shit performance self-reporting themselves in these threads lmao
  
  ‘oh noo I can’t compete with someone who studied engineering under a candlelight in an Indian slum, despite being born in the richest country in the history of the world. Save me daddy trump’
• h1b&h4.ead (Cyberhaven): It’s a terribly weak response. They never once mentioned that they would prioritize hiring an American before considering someone on a visa. That was the original argument from JD Vance, but Microsoft didn’t address it at all.
  
  Instead Microsoft just wants to hide behind a bunch of numbers. But those numbers all indicate that they hired people on a visa. Where is the number that shows they hired Americans?
• crazzak (Microsoft): “We’ve been replacing Americans with H-1Bs for years, why is it a problem now?”

Software engineering is solved. Math is solved too. What should one do now? (Blind)

• ashe41co (Apple): If software engineering is “solved” why is so much software total shit?
• IAmBethG (Amazon): Pretty much everything is solved. Nobody starves anymore and shelter is cheap if you aren’t picky. You can buy anything online from China for under \$100. We’re in the end game now. Enjoy!
• ubertosun (Uber): When was math solved? Did you even look at the type of solutions give by AI? Those are bogus and looks only good in theory

My Anthropic referral came from a guy I helped on Blind two years ago. Now I’m in the final stages. (Blind)

• Saccrifiti (ex-Affirm): How was he so sure it was you? What’s your yoe? Is it for a swe role? care to share your process? If you get in, can you help me next?
• Gilliane (ex-Oracle): Sounds like something an Indian would do. Indians are the kindest people and never forget a favor.
• WKzn20 (Akamai Technologies): Awesome… This is the positivity we need, now more than ever….

My husband got laid off and now he’s competing with me for jobs. (Blind)

• EAArne (Silver Lake): And yet here you are sharing his business on blind so we can see how much better you are than him. So you are rubbing it in.
• Egacyi (ex-Yext): Has he tried being Chinese?
• MrCray (Google): Never marry a male engineer, unless you’re also male. Do you really want a husband who works at a feminine sedentary job all day?

Netflix L5 vs Snap L6 (Blind)

• toxicated (Meta): How is ur snap comp 750k when snap stock is down 60% yoy. Are u full of shit?
• layons (Netflix): Layoffs are coming this week at Netflix. There will be more reorg and cuts this year.
• MrWind (Netflix): Few month ago it’s a different story, now consider Netflix’s stock is trending down and news around largest layoff since 2002 will happen this week (it may just be the beginning) plus the keeper tests that continuously managing out people for various reasons, I wouldn’t recommend joining unless you feel more insecure in Snap

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State-space models promise a compact alternative to the transformer’s ever-growing key-value cache. Yet compact does not automatically mean fast. At production batch sizes, repeatedly reading and rewriting an SSM’s fixed-size recurrent state can consume so much memory bandwidth that the supposedly efficient layers become the decoding bottleneck.

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Techmeme surfaced an October 12 Anthropic Frontier Red Team study, “AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenter.” The headline sounds like a rogue model already escaped into household appliances. The actual result is narrower, but still important: the researchers separately demonstrated enough pieces of an AI-driven computer worm to argue that the missing gap may soon be model size rather than a fundamentally new capability.