GoKawiil
Tech News
A new episode of Dwarkesh Patel's podcast features researchers John Schulman, Beren Millidge and Charlie O'Neill discussing how close AI systems are to achieving recursive self-improvement, where models could enhance their own capabilities without human intervention. The conversation, drawn from researchers at leading AI labs, opens with arguments against the idea that such self-improvement is imminent.
Jane Street released a puzzle challenging participants to reverse engineer an ASIC chip from just two files: a GDS layout file and a VCD file with example inputs and outputs. Kjartan van Driel and Leander Post worked through the challenge, breaking down how the chip's physical layout, organized into layers and reusable cells representing logic gates, could be decoded to understand its function without access to the original Verilog design.
A blogger with an engineering background details how they spent about a month reverse-engineering an ASIC chip design as part of a public puzzle set by trading firm Jane Street. The challenge involved analyzing a GDS chip-layout file to determine the chip's function, first through an easier warmup version with more design information, then a harder unaided version. The author has published their code on GitHub and plans follow-up posts explaining each technical step in more depth.
OCaml maintainer Anil Madhavapeddy disclosed a path traversal vulnerability in cohttp 6.3.0 and found that attackers began probing his live server with the exact exploit pattern just minutes after he opened a public GitHub pull request to fix it. He also demonstrated that AI coding agents like DeepSeek V4 Pro could independently rediscover the bug and build a working exploit in under a minute, using only a vague description of the issue.