Category: Hackaday Columns

It appears that we’re approaching the HAL-9000 point on the AI hype curve with this report, which suggests that Anthropic’s new AI model is willing to exhibit some rather antisocial behavior to achieve its goals. According to a pre-release testing summary, Claude Opus 4 was fed some hypothetical company emails that suggested engineers were planning […]
In a marvelous college lecture in front of a class of engineering students, V. Hunter Adams professed his love for embedded engineering, but he might as well have been singing the songs of our people – the hackers. If you occasionally feel the need to explain to people why you do what you do, at […]
Elliot and Dan teamed up this week for the podcast, and after double-checking, nay, triple-checking that we were recording, got to the business of reviewing the week’s hacks. We kicked things off with a look at the news, including a potentially exciting Right to Repair law in Washington state and the sad demise of NASA’s […]
The CIA ran a series of web sites in the 2000s. Most of them were about news, finance, and other relatively boring topics, and they spanned 29 languages. And they all had a bit of a hidden feature: Those normal-looking websites had a secret login and hosted CIA cover communications with assets in foreign countries. […]
If you’ve been following environmental news over the past couple of decades, you’ve probably heard about PFAS – those pesky “forever chemicals” that seem to turn up everywhere from drinking water to polar bear blood. They’re bad for us, and we know it, but they’ve been leeching into the environment for decades, often as a […]
This week Jonathan chats with Ben Meadors and Rob Campbell about the boatload of software Microsoft just released as Open Source! What’s the motivation, why is the new Edit interesting, and what’s up with Copilot? Watch to find out! https://github.com/microsoft/edit https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/1 KDE4 on Windows Did you know you can watch the live recording of the […]
When you’re hunting for a signal with your oscilloscope, the stronger it is, the better. If it’s weak, you might struggle to tease it out from other interference, or even from the noise floor itself. You might wish that you were looking for something more obvious rather than the electromagnetic equivalent of a needle in […]
Genetic defects are exceedingly common, which is not surprising considering just how many cells make up our bodies, including our reproductive cells. While most of these defects have no or only minor effects, some range from serious to fatal. One of these defects is in the CPS1 gene, with those affected facing a shortened lifespan […]
Have you heard that author Andy Weir has a new book coming out? Very exciting, we know, and according to a syndicated reading list for Summer 2025, it’s called The Last Algorithm, and it’s a tale of a programmer who discovers a dark and dangerous secret about artificial intelligence. If that seems a little out […]
We wrote up a video about speeding up Arduino code, specifically by avoiding DigitalWrite. Now, the fact that DigitalWrite is slow as dirt is long known. Indeed, a quick search pulls up a Hackaday article from 2010 demonstrating that it’s fifty times slower than toggling the pin directly using the native pin registers, but this […]