Max Headroom 
UNCLASSIFIED
AI has so thoroughly colonized every technical discipline that it’s becoming hard to organize items of interest in Radar Trends. Should a story go under AI or programming (or operations or biology or whatever the case may be)? Maybe it’s time to go back to a large language model that doesn’t require any electricity and has over 217K parameters: Merriam-Webster. But no matter where these items ultimately appear, it’s good to see practical applications of AI in fields as diverse as bioengineering and UX design.
AI
- Alibaba’s Ling-1T may be the best model you’ve never heard of. It’s a nonthinking mixture-of-experts model with 1T parameters, 50B active at any time. And it’s open weights (MIT license).
- Marin is a new lab for creating fully open source models. They say that the development of models will be completely transparent from the beginning. Everything is tracked by GitHub; all experiments may be observed by anyone; there’s no cherrypicking of results.
- WebMCP is a proposal and an implementation for a protocol that allows websites to become MCP servers. As servers, they can interact directly with agents and LLMs.
- Claude has announced Agent Skills. Skills are essentially just a Markdown file describing how to perform a task, possibly accompanied by scripts and resources. They’re easy to add and only used as needed. A Skill-creator Skill makes it very easy to build Skills. Simon Willison thinks that Skills may be a “bigger deal than MCP.”
- Pete Warden describes his work on the smallest of AI. Small AI serves an important set of applications without compromising privacy or requiring enormous resources.
- Anthropic has released Claude Haiku 4.5, skipping 4.0 and 4.1 in the process. Haiku is their smallest and fastest model. The new release claims performance similar to Sonnet 4, but it’s much faster and less expensive.
- NVIDIA is now offering the DGX Spark, a desktop AI supercomputer. It offers 1 petaflop performance on models with up to 200B parameters. Simon Willison has a review of a preview unit.
- Andrej Karpathy has released nanochat, a small ChatGPT-like model that’s completely open and can be trained for roughly $100. It’s intended for experimenters, and Karpathy has detailed instructions on building and training.
- There’s an agent-shell for Emacs? There had to be one. Emacs abhors a vacuum.
- Anthropic launched “plugins,” which give developers the ability to write extensions to Claude Code. Of course, these extensions can be agents. Simon Willison points to Jesse Vincent’s Superpowers as a glimpse of what plugins can accomplish.
- Google has released the Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model into public preview. While the thrill of teaching computers to click browsers and other web applications faded quickly, Gemini 2.5 Computer Use appears to be generating excitement.
- Thinking Machines Labs has announced Tinker, an API for training open weight language models. Tinker runs on Thinking Machines’ infrastructure. It’s currently in beta.
- Merriam-Webster will release its newest large language model on November 18. It has no data centers and requires no electricity.
- We know that the data products, including AI, reflect historical biases in their training data. In India, OpenAI reflects caste biases. But it’s not just OpenAI; these biases appear in all models. Although caste bias was outlawed in the middle of the 20th century, these biases live on in the data.
- DeepSeek has released an experimental version of its reasoning model, DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp. This model uses a technique called sparse attention to reduce the processing requirements (and cost) of the reasoning process.
- OpenAI has added an Instant Checkout feature that allows users to make purchases with Etsy and Shopify merchants, taking them directly to checkout after finding their products. It’s based on the Agentic Commerce Protocol.
- OpenAI’s GDPval tests go beyond existing benchmarks by challenging LLMs with real-world tasks rather than simple problems. The tasks were selected from 44 industries and were chosen for economic value.
Programming
- Steve Yegge’s Beads is a memory management system for coding agents. It’s badly needed, and worth checking out.
- Do you use coding agents in parallel? Simon Willison was a skeptic, but he’s gradually becoming convinced it’s a good practice.
- One problem with generative coding is that AI is trained on “the worst code in the world.” For web development, we’ll need better foundations to get to a post–frontend-framework world.
- If you’ve wanted to program with Claude from your phone or some other device, now you can. Anthropic has added web and mobile interfaces to Claude Code, along with a sandbox for running generated code safely.
- You may have read “Programming with Nothing,” a classic article that strips programming to the basics of lambda calculus. “Programming with Less Than Nothing” does FizzBuzz in many lines of combinatory logic.
- What’s the difference between technical debt and architectural debt? Don’t confuse them; they’re significantly different problems, with different solutions.
- For graph fans: The IRS has released its fact graph, which, among other things, models the US Internal Revenue Code. It can be used with JavaScript and any JVM language.
- What is spec-driven development? It has become one of the key buzzwords in the discussion of AI-assisted software development. Birgitta Böckeler attempts to define SDD precisely, then looks at three tools for aiding SDD.
- IEEE Spectrum released its 2025 programming languages rankings. Python is still king, with Java second; JavaScript has fallen from third to fifth. But more important, Spectrum wonders whether AI-assisted programming will make these rankings irrelevant.
Web
- Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is pushing for regulation to prevent Google from tying web crawlers for search and for training content together. You can’t block the training crawler without also blocking the search crawler, and blocking the latter has significant consequences for businesses.
- OpenAI has released Atlas, its Chromium-based web browser. As you’d expect, AI is integrated into everything. You can chat with the browser, interrogate your history, your settings, or your bookmarks, and (of course) chat with the pages you’re viewing.
- Try again? Apple has announced a second-generation Vision Pro, with a similar design and at the same price point.
- Have we passed peak social? Social media usage has been declining for all age groups. The youngest group, 16–24, is the largest but has also shown the sharpest decline. Are we going to reinvent the decentralized web? Or succumb to a different set of walled gardens?
- Addy Osmani’s post “The History of Core Web Vitals” is a must-read for anyone working in web performance.
- Features from the major web frameworks are being implemented by browsers. Frameworks won’t disappear, but their importance will diminish. People will again be programming to the browser. In turn, this will make browser testing and standardization that much more important.
- Luke Wroblewski writes about using AI to solve common problems in user experience (UX). AI can help with problems like collecting data from users and onboarding users to new applications.
Operations
- There’s a lot to be learned from AWS’s recent outage, which stemmed from a DynamoDB DNS failure in the US-EAST-1 region. It’s important not to write this off as a war story about Amazon’s failure. Instead, think: How do you make your own distributed networks more reliable?
- PyTorch Monarch is a new library that helps developers manage distributed systems for training AI models. It lets developers write a script that “orchestrates all distributed resources,” allowing the developer to work with them as a single almost-local system.
Security
- The solution to the fourth part of Kryptos, the cryptosculpture at the CIA’s headquarters, has been discovered! The discovery came through an opsec error that led researchers to the clear text stored at the Smithsonian. This is an important lesson: Attacks against cryptosystems rarely touch the cryptography. They attack the protocols, people, and systems surrounding codes.
- Public cryptocurrency blockchains are being used by international threat actors as “bulletproof” hosts for storing and distributing malware.
- Apple is now giving a $2M bounty for zero-day exploits that allow zero-click remote code execution on iOS. These vulnerabilities have been exploited by commercial malware vendors.
- Signal has incorporated postquantum encryption into its Signal protocol. This is a major technological achievement. They’re one of the few organizations that’s ready for the quantum world.
- Salesforce is refusing to pay extortion after a major data loss of over a billion records. Data from a number of major accounts was stolen by a group calling itself Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters. Attackers simply asked the victim’s staff to install an attacker-controlled app.
- Context is the key to AI security. We’re not surprised; right now, context is the key to just about everything in AI. Attackers have the advantage now, but in 3–5 years that advantage will pass to defenders who use AI effectively.
- Google has announced that Gmail users can now send end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) regardless of whether they’re using Gmail. Recipients who don’t use Gmail will receive a notification and the ability to read the message on a one-time guest account.
- The best way to attack your company isn’t through the applications; it’s through the service help desk. Human engineering remains extremely effective—more effective than attacks against software. Training helps; a well-designed workflow and playbook is crucial.
- Ransomware detection has now been built into the desktop version of Google Drive. When it detects activities that indicate ransomware, Drive suspends file syncing and alerts users. It’s enabled by default, but it is possible to opt out.
- OpenAI is routing requests with safety issues to an unknown model. This is presumably a specialized version of GPT-5 that has been trained specially to deal with sensitive issues.
Robotics
- Would you buy a banana from a robot? A small chain of stores in Chicago is finding out.
- Rodney Brooks, founder of iRobot, warns that humans should stay at least 10 feet (3 meters) away from humanoid walking robots. There is a lot of potential energy in their limbs when they move them to retain balance. Unsurprisingly, this danger stems from the vision-only approach that Tesla and other vendors have adopted. Humans learn and act with all five senses.
Quantum Computing
- Google claims to have demonstrated a verifiable quantum advantage on its quantum processor: The output of the computation can be tested for correctness. Verifiable quantum advantage doesn’t just mean that it’s fast; it means that error correction is working.
- Researchers at Institute of Science Tokyo have developed a quantum error correction method that’s efficient and (in theory) scales to hundreds of thousands of qubits. Quantum computers of that size haven’t been built yet but will be needed to perform real work.
Biology
- Scientists have discovered a new narrow-spectrum antibiotic that could be used to treat inflammatory bowel disease. AI was able to predict how the antibiotic would work, apparently a first.
- A red-teaming security group at Microsoft has announced that they have found a zero-day that allows malicious actors to design harmful proteins with AI.
- AI has successfully designed the DNA for a bacteriophage (essentially a very simple virus) capable of infecting and killing E. coli, a common bacteria. This is the first time AI has been used to synthesize an entire genome.
Radar Trends, Commentary
Radar
