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AI is going to backfire badly (Blind)

• ssupbruh (Uber): Already happening. I don’t use Netflix much, but some Google apps like YouTube already feel like they are someone’s WIP branch build. Meta was abysmal even before AI so the change is not as noticeable there, but still.
• BroCoderz (Apple): Yes. This is called poor leadership.
• COck45 (Snowflake): You’re right. Unfortunately, constant fear mongering campaigns from AI labs and unqualified extroverts amplifying them brought us where we are now. But this madness faces reality — people give up on the nonsense such as spec-driven development without code reviews since it doesn’t work. Let them fail.

Anthropic’s team suggest SWEs will need to change careers (Blind)

• gudtime (Netflix): Wake me when Anthropic lays off all of their SWE
• TC1Billi (Indeed): Notice how all the researchers who claim it’s going to destroy the world and quit always do so around vest 🤣
• hljsnw88 (Amazon): Let’s just say that economists tend to have a track record of not being able to predict anything beyond what’s for lunch.

Why would anyone ever leave Google? (Blind)

• MrCurryMan (Google): Stuck in a bad team with no growth prospects. Fear of becoming irrelevant.
• pDlG34 (Google): Pretty simple - no upside. People who left and joined Anthropic 2 or 3 years ago will have absolutely dwarfed even lifetime earnings of a top Google SWE career.
• sontoall (Google): Because working in ads for over 3 years and no promotion makes a person go crazy

China Is Ditching Touchscreens For Essential Controls In New Cars (r/technology)

• mvw2: Good. Screens were stupid.
• The14thWarrior: Let’s hope China forces others to do the same in a cascading effect.
• slick7studios: Imho, a car built with the structure and safety as modern day 2026, with the electronics integration of 1998 is something I would buy right now.

Amazon workers on food stamps have tripled despite its record revenue—and it’s just the latest evidence of the new economy of shrinking labor shares (r/technology)

• No_Intern5991: It’s not broken. It’s working perfectly as intended, which is even worse.
• omnichronos: When you are employed and receive food stamps, you should be required to report your employer so that the government can charge the employer double the amount you receive. This would incentivize them to pay higher wages.
• mahaanus: You can make arguments that minimum wage is bad - and some of them are actually good and there is research that shows the negative effects of raising the minimum wage. That goes out the window when there are government subsidies for people below a certain threshold. If they’re working Amazon should be paying them enough so they’re not on the dole, otherwise Amazon is just outsourcing part of the salary to the taxpayers.

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Why every hairy sphere needs a cowlick

A coconut poses a surprisingly serious mathematical problem. Imagine that every fiber on its surface is combed flat and that neighboring fibers change direction smoothly. No matter how carefully the job is done, at least one place must remain bald, stick straight up or otherwise break the pattern. This is the playful image behind the hairy ball theorem, a result from topology with consequences for weather, radio antennas and nuclear fusion.

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Techmeme surfaced Dwarkesh Patel’s September 11, 2026 roundtable, AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement, with Thinking Machines chief scientist John Schulman, Zyphra CTO Beren Millidge, and Baseten head of model training Charlie O’Neill.

The discussion’s most useful contribution is to break recursive self-improvement, or RSI, into separate technical problems. A model might write training code quickly, optimize a measurable objective, or run many experiments in parallel without being able to choose the next important question, learn continually from deployment, or carry an open-ended research program through months of changing evidence. Faster execution can greatly accelerate a lab before those harder capabilities arrive, but it does not by itself close the loop in which AI designs its own increasingly capable successors.

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This summary covers The Economist’s August 22nd, 2026 Bartleby column, listed in the contents as On AI and ROI and published under the headline Returns policy.

Corporate enthusiasm for artificial intelligence has moved from “use it everywhere” to a harder question: is it creating value? Early adoption campaigns often rewarded visible activity, such as token consumption or rankings of the heaviest users. Those measures can help establish whether employees are experimenting with a new technology, but they say little about whether the work is faster, better or more profitable.

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Search underway for Indonesian passenger ship carrying at least 240 people after it loses contact (r/news)

• lucifer893: Local news says the ship capsized. 115 rescued so far with one dead.
• 00notmyrealname00: It’s incredible to me in this day and age with GPS, DSC, VMS, EPIRB, SATCOM, Starlink and even regular old radio communication equipment that we can lose a passenger ship and the 241 people onboard. Fucking tragic.
• chucchinchilla: Virgo Transport 8 is the name of the ship for anyone who wants to look it up.

Former US detention officer charged with 20 alleged forged Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainment documents (r/news)

• EldritchSlut: abducting people from the street illegally and we are all just sitting here, myself included.
• Ryan_e3p: Folks, bear in mind, that is what he was charged with. There are likely dozens, if not hundred more forged documents that have some evidence, but not enough that the government can know is a sure thing when it comes to trial.
• microthrower: Interesting detail in the article about how this guy could get out on a bond. He was specifically forging documents allowing for longer detainment, but of course he can get out of detainment with a few thousand dollars.

What is the ultimate example of ‘high risk, incredibly low reward’ behavior that you see people do every single day? (r/AskReddit)

• Candid-Sky-3258: Riding motorcycles without a helmet. Sorry bro, that backwards hat won’t prevent head trauma.
• LizardPossum: Not wearing a seatbelt. I’m a journalist. I responded to a car crash a couple of years ago where everyone but one person was wearing their seatbelts. The woman who didn’t wear hers was half ejected, hanging out of the window with the car on its side. Her face was quite literally gone. She was dead. Everyone else was fine. It was literally the difference between walking away and a closed casket funeral, and for what?
• Captain_Swing: Petty theft. The number of people I’ve seen lose decent jobs and get a criminal record because they wanted free stuff is ridiculous.

What are the unsexy, raw realities of a long-term relationship or marriage that no one warns you about? (r/AskReddit)

• jtbxiv: At some point you’re both going to be going through seriously difficult shit at the same time and it’s gonna be nose to the grind stone for both of you without the kind of support you’d like to get from each other. It’s a very complex array of feelings from sympathy for the other, feeling unable to do more, and also feeling left behind and sorry for yourself. This time requires so much patience and forgiveness for yourself and your partner. But sometimes you’ll be surprised in how you two can show up for each other despite it all.
• iwantamalt: There’s a point in the relationship where the dynamic shifts from intense desire to comfortable and routine. This isn’t a bad thing but a lot of people treat it as if it is because our society glamorizes romance and desire. You can absolutely still create romance in a long term relationship, but it feels different from that new relationship energy that everyone longs for. The grass is usually not greener and having the safety and security of a long term partner’s love and emotional support is worth way more than whatever short term intense desire you’re seeking.
• MbMinx: Always buy a house with at least two toilets. My BF and I both got food poisoning one weekend. Both people, both ends, one bathroom. I will never have a one-seater house again.

What’s something you’re grieving that isn’t a death? (r/AskReddit)

• Some-Possibility1738: The happy version of me.
• latesleeperfoodeater: Life before my chronic illness diagnosis. I’m so thankful to have treatment and support, but my life has changed so much. Hospital stays, medical trauma and pain have forever changed me
• MrsRobertshaw: The cost of living. We did everything correctly. Live modestly. Still feel crushed under the weight of simple groceries and petrol.

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I don’t see how jobs will be gone due to AI. AI will only create more jobs. (Blind)

• izeb46 (Bloomberg): Walk through a concrete example.
• slackerswe (Microsoft): Jevons paradox ?
• ovahFlow (Oracle): Not without a massive socioeconomic restructuring.

Haunted by “What If” (Blind)

• pour873!78 (ex-Salesforce): You can’t lose what you never had buddy.
• mpcy10 (Compass): Let me call you a whambulance
• toptalent✅ (Coinbase): Humble brag larping

Another round of layoffs at Amazon next month? (Blind)

• gjPd41 (Rivian): Is there a WARN notice yet?
• ❤️GayPride🏳️‍🌈 (Applied Materials): Confirmed 20%.
• amsecux (Amazon): Looks like Alexa will be impacted

Wiki documents at least 44 instances in which Sony says you own your games as digital games ownership lawsuit progresses — project is direct assault on Sony’s claim in recent ownership lawsuit (r/technology)

• Quigleythegreat: I want to see Crash Bandicoot operate a rube Goldberg device and drop a cage over Sonys lawyers at the end of the trial. For no particular reason.
• hjjs: Maybe a little bit cynical but if Sony gets hammered I reckon they’ll update the language of their TNCs instead of updating their practices
• pi_mai: Sony will burn so much money on this. They won’t back down. This sets the stage not for next consoles but all future consoles.

Two AI researchers leave Anthropic and Google over safety concerns: ‘There are no adults in the room’ (r/technology)

• fafatzy: You have no adults in goverment, why you would have serious people at the corporate ai slop factory ?
• williamgman: Depending on who leaves… We often compare this tech to the political world. I think of the US from 2017-2020 as being run by a mad man but with guardrails. Then 2025 he’s back… with no more guardrails. The AI industry is the same. We are seeing our current AI with some guardrails… When those rails are gone… Look out.
• onedayoneroom: I’m not sure I understand the thought process here. If they have safety concerns, why would they leave? Why aren’t these people staying on to work towards preventing the existential catastrophe they seem to think is coming?

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Model pricing tables make an awkward engineering problem look deceptively simple. A low price per token can still produce an expensive application if the model fails often, takes more turns to finish, repeats a growing context on every turn, or creates work that humans must repair. The useful unit of comparison is therefore not the token. It is a successful outcome at the quality level the application actually requires.

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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Design Circular Queue
• Topics: Array, Linked List, Design, Queue

Problem gist

The task is to build a fixed-capacity first-in, first-out queue. It must support inserting at the rear, deleting from the front, reading both ends, and checking whether it is empty or full. An attempted insertion into a full queue and an attempted deletion from an empty queue must fail cleanly.

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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Valid Parenthesis String
• Topics: String, Dynamic Programming, Stack, Greedy

Problem gist

The input contains opening parentheses, closing parentheses, and asterisks. Each * may act as (, act as ), or disappear. The task is to decide whether some choice for every asterisk makes the whole string a valid parenthesis sequence.

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Techmeme surfaced Terence Tao’s September 11 post, “A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics”. The post publishes an urgent declaration signed initially by 25 Fields Medallists. Its central warning is not that AI cannot do serious mathematics, but nearly the opposite: systems are becoming capable enough that optimizing them to solve famous problems may damage the institutions that turn correct results into shared understanding.