Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

Spain's transport minister has given an update on the widespread disruption caused by a massive power cut, with many train lines cancelled and some commuter services returning to normal with reduced services. Power has been restored to around 99.95% of demand, with under 500 flight cancellations reported across Spain and Portugal, and Madrid's metro is open and running at 80% capacity, with all public city buses and intercity train lines running as normal.

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Is outbound going to die?

The increasing use of AI-powered sales and marketing tools will lead to fatigue among users and customers, causing a decline in their effectiveness as people become desensitized to hyper-personalized content and spam. As a result, companies will need to focus on building personal relationships, referrals, and community-driven growth through owned channels, social media, and network effects to acquire and retain customers.

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Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI

Duolingo will be adopting an "AI-first" approach, replacing contract workers with artificial intelligence for tasks that can be automated, according to CEO Luis von Ahn. The company aims to use AI to increase efficiency and scalability, particularly in content creation, allowing employees to focus on more creative and high-value work.

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Unauthorised AI Bots on Reddit Are Eroding Sociality

Researchers from the University of Zurich conducted an experiment on the subreddit r/changemyview, posting comments written by AI bots without disclosure, sparking outrage and challenging the ethics of the study. The incident has highlighted the growing concern of AI-generated content online and the erosion of trust in others' sincerity, potentially leading to a shift towards more private and in-person forms of communication and a revaluation of real-world social interactions.

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AI Goes to College for the Free Money

Community colleges in California are being flooded with AI bots that enroll in online courses to bilk state and federal financial aid money by submitting AI-generated work and remaining enrolled long enough for aid disbursements. The state has launched a taskforce to combat the problem, but some argue that the issue lies with the government sending out money without verification, and that stopping the flow of money to bots would be a more effective solution.

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NodeRAG: Structuring Graph-Based RAG with Heterogeneous Nodes

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is enhanced by graph-based methods that build a knowledge graph index, but current approaches often neglect graph structure design, leading to inconsistencies and performance degradation. The proposed NodeRAG framework introduces heterogeneous graph structures to integrate graph-based methodologies seamlessly, resulting in improved performance and efficiency in question-answering tasks compared to existing methods.

ArXiv

Vision Transformers Need Registers

Transformers, specifically Vision Transformers (ViT), have been found to produce artifacts in feature maps, particularly in low-informative background areas of images. A proposed solution involves adding extra tokens to the input sequence, which effectively resolves the issue, leading to smoother feature maps and improved performance in various visual tasks, including setting a new state of the art for self-supervised visual models.

ArXiv

Inference-Aware Fine-Tuning for Best-of-N Sampling in Large Language Models

This work proposes a novel fine-tuning paradigm that optimizes large language models for inference-time performance, using the Best-of-N inference strategy. The proposed methods, which utilize imitation learning and reinforcement learning, demonstrate improved performance and inference-time compute efficiency, achieving significant gains on various benchmarks, such as Hendrycks MATH and HumanEval.

ArXiv

EPBR: Extended PBR Materials in Image Synthesis

Intrinsic image representation offers a balanced approach to image synthesis, decomposing images into components like geometry and materials for controllable synthesis. This work extends intrinsic image representations to include reflection and transmission properties, enabling the synthesis of complex materials like glass and windows, and proposes an explicit compositing framework for deterministic image synthesis.

ArXiv

LinPrim: Linear Primitives for Differentiable Volumetric Rendering

Researchers have introduced two new volumetric scene representations based on linear primitives, octahedra and tetrahedra, which can be optimized using a differentiable rasterizer for efficient rendering. These representations demonstrate comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods while requiring fewer primitives, providing new insights into 3D representations and expanding the available design space.

ArXiv

Tiny-LLM – a course of serving LLM on Apple Silicon for systems engineers

The tiny-llm project is a work-in-progress tutorial on serving large language models using MLX, with a focus on building the model serving infrastructure from scratch and optimizing performance. The project provides a roadmap with weekly chapters and topics, including attention, transformer blocks, and quantization, with accompanying code, tests, and documentation available for study and community discussion.

Repo

Show HN: Sim Studio – Open-Source Agent Workflow GUI

Sim Studio is a powerful, user-friendly platform for building, testing, and optimizing agentic workflows, which can be run on a cloud-hosted version or self-hosted using various methods such as Docker, Dev Containers, or manual setup. The platform utilizes a range of technologies including Next.js, PostgreSQL, and Better Auth, and welcomes contributions under the Apache License 2.0.

Repo

Show HN: Web-eval-agent – Let the coding agent debug itself

Operative.sh's MCP Server is a tool that launches a browser-powered agent to autonomously execute and debug web apps directly in your code editor, featuring capabilities such as navigating your web app, capturing network traffic, and collecting console errors. The tool can be installed on macOS/Linux using a simple installer script, and on Windows using a manual installation process, allowing for autonomous debugging and testing of web applications.

Repo

Crawl4AI is an open-source, LLM-friendly web crawler and scraper

Crawl4AI is an open-source web crawler and scraper designed for large language models (LLMs) and AI applications, offering fast and flexible data extraction with features like Markdown generation, structured data extraction, and browser integration. It is actively maintained by a community and has gained popularity as the #1 trending GitHub repository, providing a powerful tool for developers to access and process web data efficiently.

Repo

Show HN: NanoAgent, zero-dependency 1k-LOC AI-agent runtime

NanoAgent is a lightweight micro-framework for running LLM-powered agents in pure TypeScript with zero runtime dependencies outside of Bun, allowing for flexible and transparent agent development. It focuses on the control loop, leaving features like RAG, vector search, and databases to MCP-compatible tools, and provides a range of features including deterministic stepping, built-in stuck detection, and multi-stage workflows.

Repo