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Techmeme surfaced SemiAnalysis’s August 21 study, “Are Open Models Catching Up?”. Its answer is yes—but in a more interesting sense than a leaderboard snapshot suggests. Open models, many of them more precisely described as open-weight models, have repeatedly caught an earlier proprietary frontier, and SemiAnalysis finds that the delay has shortened with each major change in what language models can do.

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The Panama Canal is becoming more valuable just as it is becoming harder to manage. War in the Middle East has redirected energy shipments towards the Americas, pushing demand for the waterway close to its daily limit. Longer-term shifts in trade could keep that demand high. Yet drought and rivalry between the United States and China threaten the reliability and political independence on which the canal’s success depends.

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US retail giant receives \$1bn boost from tariff refunds (r/news)

• Doodl3s: Is this the tariffs helping the american people… Prices went up, tariffs being refunded to corporations… When do prices come back down now that tariffs are gone? Anybody?
• groovyinutah: And I’m sure we’ll see an immediate drop in prices…/s
• jackleggjr: Conservatives freak out when they hear about “socialism” and “redistribution of wealth,” but they seem totally fine with redistributing my wealth into the pockets of billionaires and corporations.

US to end summer blend gasoline requirement early in attempt to lower prices (r/news)

• jeterix7387: Winter blend fuel is a cheaper “crappie” blend of fuel. Worse fuel mileage and more pollution. My bet is prices stay high while oil companies increase profits yet again.
• bitNine: Anything to avoid ending what’s actually causing high gas prices: Donald Trump’s presidency.
• torcsandantlers: They’re really hoping that a dip in gas prices will help them out for the November elections. The turnout for the Primaries have been showing a very heavy shift to the left in turnout and voting trends.

What hobby do you secretly judge people for having? (r/AskReddit)

• Sad_Feeling5746: Collecting expensive sneakers that never actually get worn
• Beneficial_Mammoth_3: People who make their entire personality about collecting Funko Pops. I’m not saying it’s wrong but at some point the boxes start looking like they’re paying rent.
• Alpuka: Honestly, many of my own hobbies - I don’t really like the communities

What do you think is the single most terrifying photograph in history? (r/AskReddit)

• ElSquibbonator: The space shuttle Challenger exploding. The crew were still alive inside the cockpit, and when their bodies were recovered from the wreckage, the oxygen in their oxygen tanks had been used, showing that they were alive and conscious all the way until the cockpit hit the ocean. That would have taken nearly two minutes. They didn’t die instantly in the explosion; they had enough time to realize how hopeless their situation was and see their death approaching.
• Paratrooper101x: A lot of people here are talking about tragic or one-off “just-before-death” photos but any photo depicting the einsatzgruppen to me is bone chilling. Sometimes we tend to think of pictures as flashes in time, without any existence of a before or after. The einsatzgruppen photos depict a scene that played out for years in Europe. People being lined up in front of a pit and shot.
• Ryukotaicho: Pictures of Mount St Helens erupting in 1980. Robert Landsburg knew he couldn’t outrun nature to after taking the pictures, he rewound the film in the camera, put the camera in his bag, and laid over it to protect it.

What’s a horrible thing that a famous person did that everyone forgot about but you? (r/AskReddit)

• Zestyclose_Pass_652: Robert Kardashian carrying OJ Simpson’s briefcase out of the crime scene right in front of police and the press, cameras and all. Then being declared as part of his legal counsel so he couldn’t be called to testify.
• notyourbeans: George Lopez cheated on his wife after she donated her kidney to him
• neecho235: Karl Malone impregnated a 12 year old. edit: When he was 20.

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Anthropic’s coding bar is fucking ridiculous (Blind)

• Poloipl (Google): The bar is high on purpose. Companies like Anthropic and Google aren’t trying to be reasonable to every candidate , they’re trying to be selective. Insane that I have to explain this.
• jEoc64 (NVIDIA): The people I know who got into Anthropic / OpenAI already knew what was going to be asked. You’re either cracked or you cheat 🤷🏽‍♂️. Don’t complain kiddo
• hApT36 (Vouch Insurance): When you have unlimited numbers of applicants, you can ask whatever insane questions you want

Senior Engineers Can’t Do BFS Now? (Blind)

• Ekjuiop (Pinterest): If 30 candidates in a row are failing the same problem, I’d at least look at the interview itself before declaring an entire generation of engineers incompetent.
• nihtimsksn (Capital One): Because senior engineers have been busy building systems and applications. Not memorizing bullshit algos to pass interviews and never use them again. Are you brain dead?
• mydP87 (Highspot): Funny thing is if you were given the option to re interview for your own job to keep it, you’d fall just like 95% of other Googlers

Is everyone getting am massive paycut in 2026? (Blind)

• typhoonie (Amazon): constantly getting/hearing about down leveling even with good YOE
• YNBQ33 (OpenAI): I 5.5x’d my TC this year.
• rn17d (Discord): Couple years? The peak was mid 2022 for pay unless you’re in the ML field. The market has shifted downard since then with all the layoffs the last 4 years.

Zuckerberg Knew. A Whistleblower Has the Emails to Prove It. - Gadget Review (r/technology)

• Additional-Signal327: He knew? This was all intentional. Facebook and social media is 100% designed to addict its users.
• McHoff: Maybe we should hold people at the top accountable even if they didn’t “know”. It’s their goddamn job to run the company.
• Oye_Oso: Behold, as absolutely no consequences befall anyone! Ever! It’s like magic.

Republicans are realizing that no one wants data centers (r/technology)

• Virtual-Relation303: But will they listen to their constituents or just pocket the money and say ‘fuck you guys’?
• nautilator44: But their owners want data centers, so they have to ram them through regardless.
• The_High_Life: So weird that people wouldnt want to live near a giant super loud, resource hungry monolith that employs almost no one.

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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Search Tree
• Topics: Tree, Depth-First Search, Binary Search Tree, Binary Tree

The problem in plain language

Given a binary search tree and two different nodes p and q that are known to be in it, find their lowest common ancestor. This is the deepest node whose subtree contains both targets. A target may be its own ancestor, so if p is above q, the answer can be p itself.

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Accuracy Is Not the Question

A statistic can sound decisive while answering the wrong question. A test that is 99 percent accurate appears to make a positive result almost conclusive. But that percentage describes how the test behaves when a condition is already known; a person receiving a result wants to know the reverse: given this positive result, how likely is the condition?

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A kettle has an unusually clear purpose: it boils water. That simplicity makes it an ideal target for Bartleby’s satire of brand positioning, the marketing exercise that decides which audience a product should address and what identity it should project. The article imagines a strategist trying to replace a practical, successful message with something more exciting. What follows is a catalogue of familiar corporate fashions, each claiming to transform the same basic appliance.

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The Pragmatic Engineer surfaced the Asana Engineering Team’s August 7 post, “We migrated off Enzyme in 2 weeks. It should have taken five years.” The eye-catching result is real: Asana removed its remaining use of an obsolete frontend testing library in about a week and a half of engineering time. The more useful story is why this particular job was unusually well suited to coding agents.

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The difficult part of defending a shared compute platform is rarely a single missing check. It is the interaction among mechanisms that each look reasonable in isolation: a language sandbox, restricted timers, workload limits, anomaly detection, and efficient tenant placement. Cloudflare’s latest security research shows how those pieces can still compose into an unexpected attack path—and why the repair also has to be layered.

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The Secret That Once Had to Travel

Secure communication has an awkward starting problem: before two people can exchange encrypted messages, they need a shared key, but sending that key may expose it to the very eavesdropper they are trying to exclude. For most of history, cryptography solved this key-distribution problem physically. Trusted couriers carried codebooks, agents met in secret, and militaries risked lives to seize an opponent’s instructions.