Nvidia has launched Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120-billion-parameter open-weight model aimed at agentic enterprise tasks. The company says benchmark testing by Artificial Analysis shows it is five times faster than the next-best open model in its class, outperforming InclusionAI's Ling 3.0 Flash and DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash. Nvidia also cited a 44% accuracy gain in a medical insurance claims task after post-training, surpassing Claude Opus 5 on that specific benchmark.
zdnet.com
· 2026-10-15
Meta launched Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter multimodal AI model it calls the most capable US open-weight model available, and said it can run on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios using Apple's MLX framework. Apple published its own technical post on MLX and the new model, and executives from both companies publicly praised the collaboration, which Axios reported had been months in the making.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-15
A commentator argues that Rust's growing adoption carries risks, pointing out that the Rust Foundation was founded by Amazon, Google, Huawei, Microsoft and Mozilla, and that a board seat costs $325,000 per year. The piece also criticizes the trend of rewriting existing, mature software projects in Rust purely for the sake of using the language.
oxetene.net
· 2026-10-14
Petal is a new screen-sharing tool, released as open source and free to use, that lets multiple users share windows simultaneously. Shared windows appear as movable, resizable desktop windows rather than static tiles, and participants can click, type and scroll inside them using labeled cursors with instant remote input.
petal.live
· 2026-10-14
The Netherlands' Tax and Customs Administration has cancelled its planned rollout of Microsoft 365 on the public cloud after about 5,000 employees had already migrated. The government paused the project in July following a June recommendation from the Dutch Advisory Council on ICT Assessment, and State Secretary Eelco Eerenberg has now outlined a replacement plan moving mail and calendar functions on-premises in 2027, followed by European open-source tools for storage and collaboration in 2027-2028.
news.slashdot.org
· 2026-10-14
Organizers of Hack the North, Canada's largest hackathon, replaced the traditional cardstock name tag with a custom hardware badge featuring an LED display, buttons, audio and wireless radio that attendees could fully program. The project, pitched eight months earlier, went through four hardware iterations before reaching a final production run of 1,750 units, with the design, firmware and an emulator all released as open source.
va3ndf.com
· 2026-10-14
Iosevka is an open-source monospace typeface offering both sans-serif and slab-serif styles, aimed at developers and terminal users. The font is freely available for download and customization, with source files published for community contribution.
typeof.net
· 2026-10-14
MIT Technology Review's latest Download newsletter covers two topics: an ongoing debate over whether frontier AI models should be open-sourced or kept proprietary, and a profile of Fervo Energy, named one of the outlet's 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch for 2026. Fervo uses horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to enable geothermal power generation outside traditional hotspots, and has secured a $2.2 billion public offering plus an expanded agreement with Google to build larger plants.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-10-13
A report examines whether open-weight AI models pose greater security risks than closed models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. It notes that closed models are also frequently misused despite stronger built-in defenses, while open models can be more easily scrutinized by outside researchers and used for cyber defense, as seen when Hugging Face relied on an open model to investigate a hack after closed models' security filters blocked its queries.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-10-13
A tongue-in-cheek website called OpenFatigue has launched, parodying the tech industry's habit of prefixing products with 'Open' — citing examples like OpenAI, OpenTable, and Open WebUI. The site brands itself as a platform for people tired of Open-branded products, complete with a mock disclaimer that its 'free' offering is only a free trial, not free as in freedom or beer.
openfatigue.ai
· 2026-10-12
A software and security engineer, writing after reading Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's 'End Times Fascism,' argues that users should stop paying OpenAI and Anthropic and instead adopt open-weight models. The author says these alternatives now match ChatGPT and Claude on complex tasks like vulnerability research, and can be run privately on personal hardware or through providers such as Tinfoil, which uses secure enclaves. They note that closed models from OpenAI and Anthropic cannot offer true privacy because the companies retain the ability to view user activity.
micahflee.com
· 2026-10-12
Amazon is selling the Audio-Technica ATH-R30x open-back headphones for $76.30, a 30% price cut from their usual cost. The open-back design is aimed at home listening and is noted for delivering clear, spacious sound.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-10-12
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