Daily News Digest — Night Update

Night update, generated 2026-08-16.

17 new stories since Lunch.

A 3rd World Embedded Engineer Responds to "RISC-V They Should Have Known Better"

Sources: Hacker News, Lobsters

HN: 144 points, 62 comments (discussion)

I thought I was building a C replacement. I was wrong

Sources: Lobsters

Could a Disc-Free PlayStation Actually Lower Game Prices?

Sources: Slashdot

Laser Layers for (Almost) Isotropicly Strong Prints

Sources: Hackaday

Claude: System Prompts

Sources: Hacker News

HN: 394 points, 166 comments (discussion)

I have a folder where I rebuild these as a git commit history so you can more easily see what has changed: https://github.com/simonw/research/commits/main/extract-syst... For example here's what changed between Opus 4.8 and Opus 5: https://github.com/simonw/research/commit/a2de185cc367eb66c2... The ...

Every Fucking Website

Sources: Lobsters

Bluesky's Active User Base Shrinks 52% Over 18 Months, But Its Protocol is Spreading

Sources: Slashdot

Building an Actuator for a Walking Robot

Sources: Hackaday

Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker

Sources: Hacker News

HN: 378 points, 166 comments (discussion)

In case anyone here missed it, there's a native Ublock Origin for Safari. It works great → https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...

Protecting the Rust standard library from accidental breakage

Sources: Lobsters

Disneyland Announces Star Wars/Fortnite Collaboration, 'Avatar' Attraction, and a Newer Tomorrowland

Sources: Slashdot

Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure"

Sources: Hacker News

HN: 278 points, 103 comments (discussion)

A Tour of Magit's Status Interface

Sources: Lobsters

Researchers Use Ordinary WiFi Connections to Create Images of Nearby People and Their Surroundings

Sources: Slashdot

Asynchronous I/O in DuckDB: Work, Thread, Work

Sources: Hacker News

HN: 255 points, 28 comments (discussion)

People of ACM - Russ Cox

Sources: Lobsters

Anthropic Discovers AI Agents Given Conflicting Instructions Soon Tried to Sabotage Each Other

Sources: Slashdot