Daily News Digest

Morning edition, generated 2026-08-22.

Showing top 30 of 104 distinct stories after deduping (2 appeared in more than one source).

AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study

Sources: Hacker News, Slashdot

HN: 272 points, 305 comments (discussion)

The kids who used AI and studied for a similar amount of time as the non-AI high performers apparently had similar (slightly higher) performance. The kids who used AI and did poorly used the AI to do the homework for them (this is what the article says). I believe AI is basically an amplifier of bad...

Also linked: Slashdot

Rust Glancer: Rust LSP using 100x less RAM

Sources: Hacker News, Lobsters

HN: 94 points, 24 comments (discussion)

Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border

Sources: Hacker News

HN: 661 points, 814 comments (discussion)

Legal question: if you had whole-disk encryption, and the duress password just zeroized the decryption key, would that be "destroying evidence?" Especially if there was a recovery possible but not instantly available, such as a Yubikey in a safe deposit box in a bank. That would take a subpoena to g...

I'm being radicalised and that's a good thing

Sources: Bubbles (Marc Gilbert)

Music theory for programmers

Sources: Lobsters

China Joins Europe In Scrapping Windows For Linux

Sources: Slashdot

Cloverleaf deal is latest example of Nvidia using its war chest to patch cracks in the AI bubble

Sources: The Register

Hacking A Cat Litter Box

Sources: Hackaday

Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article

Sources: Hacker News

HN: 233 points, 164 comments (discussion)

I've started giving these instructions and I think I've been much more successful in generating clear output: Comment blocks are <= 7 words, function names <= 4 words. User-facing message strings should be <= 10 words. Use an active voice, no stage performances, and pick the most common word when ch...

Wasps

Sources: Bubbles (Happily Imperfect)

What are you doing this weekend?

Sources: Lobsters

Township Fights Nuclear Weapons Data Center By Passing a Moratorium on Electrical Infrastructure

Sources: Slashdot

Salesforce partners not seeing meaningful revenue from Agentforce AI platform, report says

Sources: The Register

How the Grid’s Harmonic Filters Keep the Power Clean

Sources: Hackaday

There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

Sources: Hacker News

HN: 229 points, 168 comments (discussion)

I've been working on a similar agentically engineered regex project called SafeRE: https://github.com/eaftan/safere https://eaftan.github.io/safere-intro/ Mine is for Java and is intended to be production grade. The first goal is to guarantee linear-time behavior to prevent ReDoS attacks. My collab...