It’s a phrase we use a lot in our community, “Drink the Kool-Aid”, meaning becoming unreasonably infatuated with a dubious idea, technology, or company. It has its origins in 1960s psychedelia, but given that it’s popularly associated with the mass suicide of the followers of Jim Jones in Guyana, perhaps we should find something else. […]
Betteridge’s law applies, but with help and guidance by a human who knows his stuff, [Ready Z80] was able to get a functioning game of Wordle out of the French-named LLM, which is more than we expected. It’s not like the folks at Anthropic spent much time making sure 40-year-old opcodes were well represented in […]
It’s fair to say that the topic of so-called ‘AI coding assistants’ is somewhat controversial. With arguments against them ranging from code quality to copyright issues, there are many valid reasons to be at least hesitant about accepting their output in a project, especially one as massive as the Linux kernel. With a recent update […]
Classic Mac OS was prized for its clean, accessible GUI when it first hit the scene in the 1980s. Back then, developers hadn’t even conceived of all the weird gewgaws that would eventually be shoehorned into modern operating systems, least of all AI agents that seem to be permeating everything these days. And yet! [SeanFDZ] […]
A friend of mine has been a software developer for most of the last five decades, and has worked with everything from 1960s mainframes to the machines of today. She recently tried AI coding tools to see what all the fuss is about, as a helper to her extensive coding experience rather than as a […]
You might not have noticed, but we here at Hackaday are pretty big fans of Open Source — software, hardware, you name it. We’ve also spilled our fair share of electronic ink on things people are doing with AI. So naturally when [Jeff Greerling] declares on his blog (and in a video embedded below) that […]
Antenna design is often referred to as a black art or witchcraft, even by those experienced in the space. To that end, [Janne] wondered—could years of honed skill be replaced by bruteforcing the problem with the aid of some GPUs? Iterative experiments ensued. [Janne]’s experience in antenna design was virtually non-existent prior to starting, having […]
In the early days of AI, a common example program was the hexapawn game. This extremely simplified version of a chess program learned to play with your help. When the computer made a bad move, you’d punish it. However, people quickly realized they could punish good moves to ensure they always won against the computer. […]
Computers are very good at doing exactly what they’re told. They’re still not very good at coming up with helpful suggestions of their own. They’re very much more about following instructions than using intuition; we still don’t have a digital version of Jeeves to aid our bumbling Wooster selves. [Sherrin] has developed something a little […]
Over the past years, the author of the cURL project, [Daniel Stenberg], has repeatedly complained about the increasingly poor quality of bug reports filed due to LLM chatbot-induced confabulations, also known as ‘AI slop’. This has now led the project to suspend its bug bounty program starting February 1, 2026. Examples of such slop are […]