A programmer wrote a functioning ray tracer entirely in Brainfuck, the minimalist esoteric language with just eight operations and a single tape of byte cells. The project, named rayfuck, was inspired by a CMake documentation aside noting that ray tracers have been implemented in CMake's own scripting language, prompting the author to attempt an even more extreme example in BF. The source code has been published on GitHub under mTvare6/rayfuck.
epestr.com
· 2026-09-25
Amazon has cut the price of JLab's JBuds Lux ANC wireless over-ear headphones to $49.95 from an $84.95 list price, a 41% discount. The headphones feature hybrid active noise canceling rated up to 35 dB, 40mm drivers, Bluetooth 5.3 with multipoint pairing, and a claimed 70+ hours of battery life via USB-C charging.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-09-24
Toyota is developing a next-generation Corolla built on a modified version of its TNGA-C platform that will support multiple powertrains, including a fully electric option, alongside gas, hybrid and plug-in hybrid variants. The redesign was previewed as a concept at last year's Japan Mobility Show and includes new sedan, hatchback, crossover and GR body styles.
electrek.co
· 2026-09-23
Ten Claude Opus 5.5 agents were tasked with finding a faster exact shortest-path algorithm for directed graphs with non-negative real weights and proving it correct in the Lean theorem prover. Over roughly 15 hours and 733 messages, the agents produced an algorithm called C-HD, which its creators say formally improves on previously published complexity bounds, including Dijkstra's algorithm and two recent 2025 and 2026 papers.
vals.ai
· 2026-09-22
USB extenders and long cables can technically move both power and data, but rarely deliver top performance in both categories at once. For example, Anker's 10-foot 240W USB-C cable transfers data at just 480Mbps, while Icron's 328-foot extender hits 5Gbps but only supplies 6W per port. USB-IF's compliance rules also don't cover generic male-to-female USB-C extension cables, even though such cables aren't illegal to sell or use.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-22
A new open-source project called npunlock reconstructs a path for writing custom C kernels that run directly on the programmable SHAVE cores inside Intel's NPUs, bypassing Intel's official stack which only exposes graph-level programming. The project has been verified on Windows x64 with Meteor Lake and the NPU3720 chip, and its latest update adds support for combining independent FP32 and FP16 custom code branches within a single execution graph.
github.com
· 2026-09-22
A developer traced a hard-to-find bug to type punning via pointer casts, which behaves correctly at -O0 but breaks under -O2 optimization. The root cause is that pointer casts violate strict aliasing rules and constitute undefined behavior in C, even though they compile and run correctly on most platforms, and C++ treats type distinctions even more strictly than C.
blog.pwkf.org
· 2026-09-22
Oscar Toledo G. rediscovered a 1998-era transputer C compiler he wrote, originally built with DJGPP/G++ for 32-bit DOS systems, and attempted to compile it on a modern 64-bit Macbook Air M1. He found the old code mixed integers and pointers interchangeably, lacked function prototypes, and used int instead of FILE*, all of which broke under clang since pointers are now 64-bit while integers remain 32-bit. He traces these issues back to inherited Small-C conventions, such as storing structures in byte pools and packing words as two bytes, and concludes a design change is needed to make the compiler portable.
nanochess.org
· 2026-09-22
Kairos Power has partnered with Samsung C&T, which will provide equity funding and in-kind engineering services worth up to $100 million, including a $70 million equity stake, to help build a 50-megawatt demonstration nuclear reactor for Google. The reactor, called Hermes 2, is part of a larger 2024 agreement in which Kairos aims to supply Google with about half a gigawatt of nuclear power by 2035, with Hermes 2 targeted to start operating in 2030.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-21
USB to USB-C adapters may look identical externally but vary widely in the USB specification they support, power delivery capability and internal component quality. These differences affect transfer speeds, charging times and can even risk port damage if a mismatched adapter is used.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-21
Amazon has cut the price of Anker's Prime Docking Station to $169.99, a $100 reduction from its $269.99 list price and a match of its previous lowest sale price. The 14-in-1 device merges a laptop dock with a charging hub, supporting dual monitors and up to 160W of combined power output.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-09-21
A reviewer shares detailed impressions of Paul E. McKenney's open-access book 'Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?', tracing how attending the 2026 Software Should Work conference and conversations with Fil-C creator Filip Pizlo sparked renewed interest in concurrency after a period working with TLA+ and a failed attempt to learn Lean. The piece recounts the reviewer's background before diving into reactions to McKenney's material on synchronization and concurrent programming.
ahelwer.ca
· 2026-09-21
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