Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock’s Cameras to Stalk People
404 Media remembers how a Florida police office looked up his ex-girlfriend’s license plate in the Flock automated license plate reader system at least 69 times in 2024 — even searching for her mom’s license plate at least 24 times. The police office was charged with stalking and hacking-related offenses, serving one day in prison with five … ⌘ Read more

The Rust Ecosystem Gets an AI Security Engineer in Residence
While the Rust Foundation has a Security Initiative to protect its ecosystem, “the threats have expanded,” they announced this week, “and so has the kind of help maintainers need.”

Much of this comes back to a single shift: Automated tooling (much of it now built on large language models) has gotten good enough to surface real vulnerabilities in o … ⌘ Read more

Adobe Adds Its AI Assistant To Premiere, Illustrator and InDesign
Adobe is expanding its Firefly AI assistant into Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, and Frame.io, where it can automate all sorts of tasks such as organizing clips, renaming assets, adding interview markers, rearranging layers, and finding missing fonts. It’s available starting today as part of a public beta. TechCrunch reports: Adobe is slowly tr … ⌘ Read more

Shutterstock ‘Evolves’ Into ‘Human-Led, AI-Powered Creative Platform’
Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes:
Shutterstock has unveiled what it calls a “human-led, AI-powered” creative platform that combines its massive library of [human] contributor-created content with AI image and video generation, AI editing, conversational search, prompt enhancement, and automated model selection tools. The company says the goa … ⌘ Read more

The Dynamo and the Computer: The Modern Productivity Paradox (1989) [pdf]
https://gwern.net/doc/economics/automation/1989-david.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479996

Points: 5

# Comments: 0 ⌘ Read more

Buildroot 2026.05 released
Version\
2026.05 of the Buildroot tool
has been released. Buildroot simplifies and automates the process of
building embedded Linux systems using cross-compilation. Notable
changes in this release include support for Arm Neoverse cores,
addition of XFS rootfs generation, as well as many package updates and
bug fixes. See the CHANGES
file f … ⌘ Read more

Global food automation surge drives new contracts for Scott Technology
Automation in global food production is accelerating, and manufacturers seeking to stay competitive must scale, Scott Technology’s chief executive, Mike Christman, says.

The NZX-listed company announced this week that it had secured “several” contracts within its Material Handling and Logistics (MHL) business across Europe and North America, with a total value of over $12 milli … ⌘ Read more

Launch HN: Intuned (YC S22) – Build and run reliable browser automations as code
Hey HN, we’re Faisal and Ahmad from Intuned ( https://intunedhq.com). We’re building a platform for building, deploying, and maintaining browser automations.

Customers primarily use the Intuned AI agent to automate websites that don’t expose APIs. Common use-cases include scraping data, pulling reports, and submitting forms. As the website changes, our agent also helps automatically heal the automation.

On Intuned, browser automations are … ⌘ Read more

My automated doubt development process
Article URL: https://www.alexself.dev/blog/automated-doubt

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48437305

Points: 4

# Comments: 1 ⌘ Read more

Launch HN: Hyper (YC P26) – Company brain to power agentic development
Hey HN, we’re Shalin & Kanyes, best friends who’ve been hacking together for 10+yrs, and now founders of Hyper ( https://heyhyper.ai/). Hyper is a shared “company brain” that plugs into information flowing inside a company to make AI agents and automations better and ultimately save people time.

Models have gotten good enough that they can (mostly) take on long-horizon, complex tasks. We believe the bottleneck now is that these … ⌘ Read more

Meet Microsoft Scout, Your AI Coworker That Never Logs Off
Microsoft’s OpenClaw-style agent appears in Teams, just like a human colleague, and automates your dull office tasks. ⌘ Read more

Please don’t spam people looking for employment. It’s just cruel
Earlier I posted in a “Who wants to be hired?” thread, looking for a place where I could apply my experience in hospitality, food tech and automation.

A couple hours later I received an email:

“Hi Ilia,

I saw your comment on the June Who’s Hiring thread. I build production-ready TypeScript and Python systems that integrate LLMs into real workflows, with particular focus on RAG, agent orchestration, and clear blah-blah-blah”

Come on.
I am a forced immigra … ⌘ Read more

Cybersecurity startup Blacklock aims to raise $5m for new AI software spinoff
Wellington-based cybersecurity startup Blacklock is separating its software development operations into a new company and is planning a US$3 million (NZ$5m) capital raise to develop and scale its products.

Blacklock was set up to streamline and automate services, including penetration testing, also known as white-hat hacking. The new spinoff company is known as Cyra. ⌘ Read more

Of course, @movq@www.uninformativ.de! Most of my points are also included in your list.

First of all, programming is what I really do enjoy the most. So, it doesn’t make any sense at all to not do this anymore. “But you could use your now free time to do something much cooler and more valuable!”, others might reply. Fuck no, I don’t want to waste my time with other shit that doesn’t fulfill me, why on earth would I want to do that?

All this hallucination reduces quality badly. In my experience, it’s also happening much more rapidly than I expected. Even though developers are still supposed to own and understand whatever has been generated under their name and even be responsible for that, the sad reality is that teammates often blindly trust the AI output. “But I asked the AI and it told me that $this was impossible”, “I’ve no idea either, but the AI just generated it” are responses I get more often. What really makes my angry is when I point out a flaw and suggest an alternative and this is the reaction. It happened several times that just trying it out and seeing it clearly work to proof my point only took me half a minute, but people still did something handwavy else instead.

The learning effect is drastically reduced. The more time I spend on a topic, the better the odds that whatever I learned actually makes it over into long-term memory. It’s like if a collegue just says “do it like that” or “this solves your problem”, but neither explains the why or how. Somehow, people are still convinced that it’s a completely different story when you replace the human counterpart with a computer program in this equation.

Skills are unlearned. It’s like with automation in general, just much worse. You end up in a state where you’ve no clue how anything works under the hood or how to actually find out important information that are needed to solve your problem. You’re screwed when a process breaks out of the blue. Even though it can become also rather terrible, with classical automation you’re typically still be able to decipher how exactly the thing was supposed to do something.

The energy consumption is sooo high, I absolutely do not want to be a part in burning down our planet. I’m sure I find (and probably have long found without knowing) other ways to contribute to worsen our climate crisis.

The scraper part is already covered in detail in your list. :-)

I’m convinced that license and copyright violations are only played down or even refused entirely because companies want to make big money quickly. With the work of others of course. Their double standards are obvious, they still try to actively keep their own stuff secret and out of any training sets. At most for internal use only. Virtually noone in charge is interested in good long-term solutions. Short-term for the win, when disaster eventually strikes, the causers are long gone, the responsibilities in other hands.

Vendor lock-in is something that lots of folks are only realizing very slowly. It’s completely crazy to me. This drug dealer routine should be well-known by now. It’s fucking everywhere. Yet, people are always surprised when they found themselves caught in it.

Adding new AI stuff only increases complexity. But complexity is the enemy that everybody should fear and reduce as much as possible. Of course, this is not limited to AI at all. And everywhere I look around, people in charge looooove to make things way more complicated than they ever need to be. Yet, simplicity is the real art and much harder to achieve.

I don’t understand why we have to go back full force to the ambiguity of natural languages. This alone should be more than enough to realize what a stupid idea all that is. Linked to that is that the “instruction set” is interpreted differently with newer model versions. I mean, is has to be. Why else would somebody want to upgrade in the first place than to get more Powerful™ Features™?

Some people argue that with AI the democratization is empowered. However, in my view, the exact opposite is the case. Models are getting so large that you can basically not run them locally or even train them. So, you have to rely on whatever the vendor offers you and runs for you. In the end, this only gives the owners more power, the multi billionaires. Not exactly what I understand by democratization.

Finally, technology assessments are missing completely. Or they are faked such that mostly only the (questionable) benefits are listed. But all the negative impact is just ignored.

Let’s keep some popcorn around for when this all explodes. :-)

Launch HN: Minicor (YC P26) – Windows desktop automations at scale
Hey we’re Faiz and Saheed and we built Minicor so AI companies who need to integrate to desktop systems with no API can quickly build scalable desktop RPAs. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD0GHZIJ1cw

We were working on non-RPA integrations when a customer promised to sign a deal in 2 days if we could unblock a sale of theirs that involved integrating with a clinic’s Windows based medical record system. We didn’t know it at … ⌘ Read more

AI Is Taking Over the Most Cursed Job in the World
There’s a mad dash to automate the world’s most hated calls. Have an unpaid bill? You’ll hear from an AI debt collector sometime soon. ⌘ Read more

Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage
Hey HN! We’re Gary and Ian, and we’re building Chert ( https://www.trychert.com/), an API for businesses to send, receive, and automate iMessage conversations at scale. Check out our demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRdwvVxMMoI.

We originally started by building products on top of iMessage because the blue bubble interface, typing indicators, and reactions made agentic conversations feel more human than ones on SMS … ⌘ Read more

A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: US lawmakers plan to introduce an amendment Thursday at a House committee markup hearing that would prohibit any recipient of federal highway funding from using automated license plate readers for any purpose other than tolling – a sweeping restriction that, if adopted, would bring … ⌘ Read more

A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide
One line tucked into a federal highway bill would strip funds from cities and states unless they kill their automated plate tracking programs—effectively banning the tech for all but toll collection. ⌘ Read more

StanChart To Cut Over 7,000 Jobs, Boost AI To Replace ‘Lower-Value Human Capital’
The London-headquartered lender Standard Chartered announced plans to cut more than 7,000 jobs by 2030, with CEO Bill Winters saying the bank will replace some “lower-value human capital” through automation and AI while offering retraining to affected workers. “It’s not cost-cutting. It’s replacing in some cases lower-val … ⌘ Read more

Google Search Goes Agentic—and Doesn’t Need You Anymore
Vibe-coded results! Super widgets! Bots that never sleep! Google’s vision for the future of Search is hyper-personalized, automated, and extremely AI. ⌘ Read more

FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers
The FBI is seeking up to $36 million for nationwide access to automated license plate reader (ALPRs) data, which could let it query vehicle movements across the U.S. and its territories through a commercial database. 404 Media reports: “The FBI has a crucial need for accessible LPRs to provide a diverse and reliable range of collections across the United S … ⌘ Read more

Advanced startups wow Techweek audience across biotech and AI
The breadth and scope of current AI and advanced technology development in New Zealand were highlighted on the opening day of the annual Techweek conference on Monday through a trio of case studies covering biotechnology, family management and efforts to digitise and automate sign language.

[BioOra chief executive and managing director John Robson](https://businessdesk.co.nz/article/startups/tech-st … ⌘ Read more

Mira Murati Wants Her AI to ‘Keep Humans in the Loop’
The Thinking Machines Lab founder and former CTO of OpenAI tells WIRED she isn’t interested in automating people out of jobs. Instead, she’s building AI that can collaborate. ⌘ Read more

InstaFarm Automated Indoor Microgreens Garden Review: Easy Being Green
The InstaFarm makes growing your own microgreens practical at home. ⌘ Read more

SOLAI Launches $399 Solode Neo Linux AI Computer
BrianFagioli writes: SOLAI has launched the Solode Neo, a $399 Linux-based mini PC designed for always-on AI agents, browser automation, and persistent developer workflows. The compact system ships with an Intel N150 processor, 12GB LPDDR5 memory, 128GB SSD storage, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a Linux-based operating system called Solode AI OS. The company says th … ⌘ Read more

CERN Open Sources Its KiCad Component Libraries
Ancient Slashdot reader ewhac writes: CERN, a longtime Open Source pioneer, has made several contributions over the years to KiCad (“KEE-kad”), an Open Source EDA (Electronic Design Automation) package widely used in the hobbyist and professional electronics communities. It’s gotten so widely used that users can now submit their KiCad design files directly to several electronics f … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Employees Are ‘Tokenmaxxing’ Due To Pressure To Use AI Tools
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times (via Ars Technica): Amazon employees are using an internal AI tool to automate non-essential tasks in a bid to show managers they are using the technology more frequently. The Seattle-based group has started to widely deploy its in-house “MeshClaw” product in recent weeks, allowing emplo … ⌘ Read more

Beatbot Pool-Cleaning Robots Are on Sale
Automate your pool cleaning with these surface-skimming, wall-scrubbing robots. ⌘ Read more

Job Cuts Driven By AI Are Rising On Wall Street
Firms like Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo, and others are reporting strong profits while reducing head count and automating more work. “All of them credited A.I. to some degree … in areas ranging from the so-called back office, where tens of thousands of employees fill out paperwork to comply with various laws and regulations, to the front office, where seven-figure salaried … ⌘ Read more

Videos Catch Amazon Delivery Drones Dropping Packages From 10 Feet in the Air
There’s been a few complaints about Amazon’s drone delivery service. “The automated mailmen are dropping off packages from 10 feet in the air,” reports the New York Post, “rendering the contents of each box susceptible to crashing and smashing.”
One example? Tamara Hancock filmed a drone delivering a bottle of Torani fla … ⌘ Read more

Another AI rant:

One of the “key features” of LLMs is that you can use “natural language”, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, “I automated this process using AI!”, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.

In prose.

This is a complete disaster.

Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.

But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.

People now throw these Markdown files at me … and … am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.

Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because “it works”.

We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.

Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.

Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.

I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?

(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)

OpenAI Calls For Robot Taxes, Public Wealth Fund, and 4-Day Workweek To Tackle AI Disruption
OpenAI is proposing (PDF) sweeping policy changes to help manage the societal disruption caused by advanced AI, including taxes on automated labor, a public wealth fund, and experiments with a four-day workweek. The company said the policy document offered a series of “initial ideas” to address … ⌘ Read more

The problem is, they jump hosts all the time.

Maybe it’s time to add automated blocking after all … God, I’m too lazy for that. 😞

Colorado’s New Speed Camera System Makes Waze Nearly Useless
Colorado is rolling out an average-speed camera system that tracks vehicles across multiple points instead of catching them at a single camera, making it much harder for drivers to dodge tickets with apps like Waze and Radarbot. Motor1 reports: The state’s new automated vehicle identification systems (AVIS) use several cameras to calculate your average spe … ⌘ Read more

This Friendly Robot Just Installed 100 MW of Solar Power
Utility-scale solar construction… by robots! It’s “one of the largest real-world demonstrations,” notes Electrek, with 100 MW of capacity installed by the “Maximo” robots from AES, one of the world’s top power companies.

Maximo uses AI “to automate the heavy lifting of solar panels and accelerate solar installation,” according to their web page, which sho … ⌘ Read more

Reddit Takes On Bots With ‘Human Verification’ Requirements
Reddit is rolling out human-verification checks for accounts that show signs of bot-like behavior, while also labeling approved automated accounts that provide useful services. The social media company stressed that these checks will only happen if something appears “fishy,” and that it is “not conducting sitewide human verification.” TechCrunch reports: To i … ⌘ Read more

Jeff Bezos Seeking $100 Billion to Buy Manufacturing Companies, ‘Transform’ Them With AI
Jeff Bezos “is in early talks to raise $100 billion,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “for a new fund that would buy up manufacturing companies and seek to use AI technology to accelerate their path to automation.”

“The Amazon.com founder is meeting with some of the world’s largest asset managers to raise … ⌘ Read more

Walmart Wins Patents To Give Algorithms More Sway Over Prices
Walmart has secured patents for systems that use machine learning to forecast demand and automate pricing decisions, “pushing the U.S. retail behemoth into a debate over the use of algorithms to adjust product costs,” reports the Financial Times. From the report: In January Walmart obtained a U.S. patent for a “system and method for dynamically and auto … ⌘ Read more

Perplexity’s ‘Personal Computer’ Lets AI Agents Access Your Local Files
Perplexity AI has introduced a “Personal Computer” agent system that can run on a local machine such as a Mac mini, giving its AI agents access to a user’s files and applications to automate tasks. According to CEO Aravind Srinivas, the heavy AI processing runs on Perplexity’s “secure servers” but sensitive actions will require user approval … ⌘ Read more

Claude AI Finds Bugs In Microsoft CTO’s 40-Year-Old Apple II Code
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: AI can reverse engineer machine code and find vulnerabilities in ancient legacy architectures, says Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, who used his own Apple II code from 40 years ago as an example. Russinovich wrote: “We are entering an era of automated, AI-accelerated vulnerability discov … ⌘ Read more

How AI Assistants Are Moving the Security Goalposts
An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: AI-based assistants or “agents” – autonomous programs that have access to the user’s computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task – are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful and assert … ⌘ Read more

Could Home-Building Robots Help Fix the Housing Crisis?
CNN reports on a company called Automated Architecture (AUAR) which makes “portable” micro-factories that use a robotic arm to produce wooden framing for houses (the walls, floors and roofs):

Co-founder Mollie Claypool says the micro-factories will be able to produce the panels quicker, cheaper and more precisely than a timber framing crew, freeing up carpente … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s Former Research Chief Raises $70M to Automate Manufacturing With AI
“OpenAI’s former chief research officer is raising $70 million for a new startup building an AI and software platform to automate manufacturing,” reports the Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the matter.

“Arda, the new startup co-founded by Bob McGrew, is raising at a valuation of $700 million, according to pe … ⌘ Read more

The 19th Century Silent Film That First Captured a Robot Attack
The Library of Congress has restored Gugusse et l’Automate, an 1897 short by Georges Melies that likely features the first robot ever shown on film. Long thought lost, the reel was discovered in a box of decaying nitrate films donated from a Michigan family collection. NPR reports: The film, which can be viewed on the Library of Congress’ websi … ⌘ Read more

Rubin Observatory Has Started Paging Astronomers 800,000 Times a Night
On February 24th, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory activated its automated alert system, sending out roughly 800,000 real-time notifications flagging asteroids, supernovae, flaring black holes and “other transient celestial events,” reports Scientific American. And this is only the beginning – that number is projected to climb into th … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Snapshot 4 Released
The fourth and final monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 26.04 “Resolute Raccoon” is now available for testing. This alternative to the Ubuntu 26.04 daily ISOs is a monthly test release that also helps exercise the Ubuntu Linux release automation processes… ⌘ Read more

IBM Shares Crater 13% After Anthropic Says Claude Code Can Tackle COBOL Modernization
IBM shares plunged nearly 13% on Monday after Anthropic published a blog post arguing that its Claude Code tool could automate much of the complex analysis work involved in modernizing COBOL, the decades-old programming language that still underpins an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the United States and … ⌘ Read more

Pinterest Is Drowning in a Sea of AI Slop and Auto-Moderation
Users say Pinterest has become flooded with AI-generated images and heavy-handed automated moderation, with artists reporting wrongful takedowns and their hand-drawn work mislabeled as “AI modified.” As the company doubles down on AI features and layoffs, longtime users argue the platform’s creative ecosystem is being undermined. 404 Media reports: “I … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s AI Chief Says All White-Collar Desk Work Will Be Automated Within 18 Months
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman expects “human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks” from AI, and believes most work involving “sitting down at a computer” – accounting, legal, marketing, project management – will be fully automated within the next year or 18 months. He pointed to ex … ⌘ Read more