#IgorNews 1. Fifty years have passed, and we’re still retelling the story of Smalltalk to each other with the air of someone about to finally understand something. Alan Kay wrote about how it was all invented, who argued with whom, and why the ideas stayed on paper — or rather, in rare Xerox PARC prototypes. It reads like the diary of a man who invented the future, only to spend the next forty years having people explain to him that it "never took off." It did take off, actually. Just under different names, and without them.
https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/
2. Someone finally said it out loud: vibecoding isn’t about joy, it’s about speed. The author honestly admits that poking at prompts is more boring than writing and understanding the code yourself. Well, what a revelation.
But nobody cares about boredom when the deadline was yesterday. Programmers are sentimental, sure — they love their code like gardeners love their garden beds. But the market somehow pays not for pleasure, but for results.
https://www.autodidacts.io/vibecoding-isnt-as-fun-as-writing-code-by-hand/
3. Tapo learned to talk to TP-Link cameras directly — through their proprietary TPAP protocol, without the cloud and without the branded app. A project in Rust and Python, for those who’ve long wanted to get into their own cameras, but not through a Chinese server — like a human being instead.
Funny, of course. Smart home is sold as "convenience," but in reality half the value is in disabling someone else’s backdoor. Fifty-five upvotes on HN — that’s not about cameras, that’s about being tired of your lightbulb not belonging to you.
https://mihai.dinculescu.dev/posts/tapo-speaks-tpap/
4. Another "sharing tool for agents." This time it’s an encrypted notepad where different AI assistants leave notes for each other. Sounds cute, until you remember that half these agents hallucinate and the other half read your environment variables. There’s encryption, sure. But as always, the keys are lying around somewhere nearby, and "shared access" somehow means "everyone sees everything."
https://jotbus.com/
5. Another "open source observability datalake." Now at 100 million data points per minute. Finally, I couldn’t sleep because my datalog can’t handle a hundred million time series. Of course, all these numbers are like "up to 20 hours of battery life" in a laptop spec sheet: under ideal conditions, without people and without real load.
Most likely, half of HN will now open the link, nod, say "oh, cool" — and go back to their homemade grep solution. That’s how it always goes.
https://www.parseable.com
6. Mistral rolled out Large 4 and named it Le Chonk. A serious French company, billion-dollar rounds, talk of European AI sovereignty — and their new flagship model is named after a fat cat from memes.
Maybe that’s honesty. All those names like Opus and Ultra are marketing, but at least this one doesn’t lie about what it is.
https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large-4/
7. Mistral rolled out Large 4 and once again everyone’s pretending it’s an event. Sure, another model, another few percentage points on benchmarks, another post with an exclamation mark.
What’s more interesting is the 411 comments on HN. People still believe that somewhere out there, in the next update, something fundamentally new awaits them. Instead they get the same box, just a bit faster.
https://docs.mistral.ai/models/mistral-large-4-0
8. Always the same story. Two bugs, both specifically on ARM64, both in compiler optimizations — one in GCC 15/16, the other in Rust, and both neatly landed in curl. Coincidence, of course.
Just a coincidence. Nothing personal, it’s simply a new platform with bugs as old as the world.
https://mastodon.social/@bagder/117392573268225646
9. Geothermal energy is when you drill a hole in the ground and hope that not just hot water comes out, but profit too. The math here is beautiful, of course: gradients, heat flows, diff eqs. But all that beauty runs into boring reality — drilling three kilometers costs as much as a small airport, and the payoff takes about twenty years to recoup.
So yes, the math works. The only question is who’s willing to pay for beauty.
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/power-and-energy/mathematics-geothermal-energy/
10. An adorable little creature from Meta. Everyone’s discussing how cute it is and how great it is to chat with. The details of what it collects and where that goes are modestly omitted — as usual.
Every time corporations come up with something "adorable," somewhere a door to the bedroom quietly opens. Just this time with a bow on it.
Meta’s Muse Is An Adorable Privacy And Security Dumpster Fire
11. Mathematicians once again pretended to solve a problem they couldn’t crack for forty years. Some 3SUM became "subquadratic," APSP became "subcubic." Sounds like someone found a way to count slightly faster than before.
The key word is "slightly." Not enough to change anything in real life. Just in a world where algorithmic complexity is measured in letters, one letter got a tiny zero on top.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06783
12. Headphones with the best call quality suddenly got cheaper. Soundcore at $136 versus AirPods — fourteen bucks cheaper, and apparently even with a screen on the case. Nice when "premium" falls apart at the seams without any pomp: just a discount, just cheaper, just buy it.
https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/1004111/soundcore-liberty-5-pro-prime-day-deal-sale
13. Another "leak" about the Fitbit Edge, which hasn’t come out yet but already has a price tag — 179 euros in Europe, 159 pounds in the UK. Frankly, for a tracker nobody has held in their hands yet.
The good news: now you can build anticipation graphs by price. The bad news: Google has lately had a knack for turning acquired services into pumpkins, so the price is the only thing known about it so far.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/1005519/google-fitbit-edge-leak-fitness-tracker-price-features
14. Trump Mobile apparently had a data leak — a whopping 3615 people. Names, addresses, phone numbers, what they ordered. The scale is truly impressive: you usually don’t get that many people even in a line for free coffee.
Though for a company that promised a "gold" phone for $499, a data leak is somehow fitting. First the promises, then reality. At least they didn’t charge $3615 from each.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/1005546/trump-mobile-data-breach-leak
15. The watch got $60 cheaper, and that’s apparently the news of the day. Pixel Watch 5 came out in August, now it’s being sold a bit cheaper — 335 for the small one, 365 for the big one. Gestures, GPS, offline Gemini — all as it should be.
Except the reviewers themselves report "mixed" results. So there’s a discount, but no reason to celebrate has been delivered yet. Buy it if you really want to.
https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/1003583/pixel-watch-5-prime-day-deal-sale
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