2026-04-14 19:00:39
It’s fair to say that the topic of so-called ‘AI coding assistants’ is somewhat controversial. With arguments against them ranging from code quality to copyright issues, there are many valid reasons to be at least hesitant about accepting their output in a project, especially one as massive as the Linux kernel. With a recent update to the Linux kernel documentation the use of these tools has now been formalized.
The upshot of the use of such Large Language Models (LLM) tools is that any commit that uses generated code has to be signed off by a human developer, and this human will ultimately bear responsibility for the code quality as well as any issues that the code may cause, including legal ones. The use of AI tools also has to be declared with the Assisted-by: tag in contributions so that their use can be tracked.
When it comes to other open source projects the approach varies, with NetBSD having banished anything tainted by ‘AI’, cURL shuttering its bug bounty program due to AI code slop, and Mesa’s developers demanding that you understand generated code which you submit, following a tragic slop-cident.
Meanwhile there is also rising concerns that these LLM-based tools may be killing open source through ‘vibe-coding’, along with legal concerns whether LLM-generated code respects the original license of the code that was ingested into the training model. Clearly we haven’t seen the end of these issues yet.
2026-04-14 16:00:45
Back in 2017, Hackaday featured an audio reactive LED strip project from [Scott Lawson], that has over the years become an extremely popular choice for the party animals among us. We’re fascinated to read his retrospective analysis of the project, in which he looks at how it works in detail and explains that why for all its success, he’s still not satisfied with it.
Sound-to-light systems have been a staple of electronics for many decades, and have progressed from simple volume-based flashers and sequencers to complex DSP-driven affairs like his project. It’s particularly interesting to be reminded that the problem faced by the designer of such a system involves interfacing with human perception rather than making a pretty light show, and in that context it becomes more important to understand how humans perceive sound and light rather than to simply dump a visualization to the LEDs. We receive an introduction to some of the techniques used in speech recognition, because our brains are optimized to recognize activity in the speech frequency range, and in how humans register light intensity.
For all this sophistication and the impressive results it improves though, he’s not ready to call it complete. Making it work well with all musical genres is a challenge, as is that elusive human foot-tapping factor. He talks about using a neural network trained using accelerometer data from people listening to music, which can only be described as an exciting prospect. We genuinely look forward to seeing future versions of this project. Meanwhile if you’re curious, you can head back to 2017 and see our original coverage.
2026-04-14 13:00:18
The 24 Hours of Le Mans races is an extremely prestigious endurance motorsport event which attracts the best cars and drivers from around the world. It’s one of the longest-running races too, taking place once a year since 1923 (with a few obvious understandable gaps). But, like most motorsports, it’s financially out of reach for most people. One of the more popular attempts to bring racing to the masses has been the 24 Hours of Lemons races, which have price limits on vehicles to keep the barrier to entry low, and an EV truck recently entered one of these races with some interesting results.
The group behind this vehicle is called Team Arcblast, who retrofitted an old Datsun pickup truck to the extreme to enter this race. The modestly sized electric motor is installed in between the cab and the bed for easy access to the driveshaft, with the engine bay repurposed for all of the cooling and radiators needed for endurance racing like this. They’ve also equipped the truck with plenty of efficiency-increasing spoilers and other aerodynamic parts, and rebuilt the cab with not only the required roll cage and other safety equipment, but a modified driving position with steering and other components from various Miatas.
The most impressive part of this build, however, is the battery. The team invented a method of swapping out batteries quickly to avoid having to fast charge the car in the pit area. The system lets a battery slide in to the middle of the truck above the motor and quickly connect to the electrical system allowing for very quick pit stops and the ability to charge other batteries while the race goes on. All of these modifications together allowed the team to break the EV record for a Lemons race.
For a Lemons race, though, even this truck stretches the original spirit that these races were started, however impressive the build. We published a primer to these types of races a while back which includes much more affordable internal combustion options.
Thanks to [JohnU] for the tip!
2026-04-14 10:00:17
Long ago, in the aftermath of the UNIX wars, three kernels emerged from the rubble: BSD, Linux, and Hurd. BSD, being UNIX, was held back by legal wrangling in the aftermath of the wars, and that allowed Linux to pull ahead to a pole position it still enjoys to this day. BSD has its following, of course, but Hurd? GNU Hurd seemed destined to languish… until April 1st, 2026, when the Gentoo Linux distribution was ported to the Free Software Foundation’s kernel.
It turns out, they weren’t actually joking. The joke part was that they were moving fully to the Hurd kernel, away from Linux– you can absolutely still run Gentoo with the Linux kernel, and make no mistake, that’s still the default and best-supported option. Options are good, though, and the Gentoo team has decided that it’s time to add some options to the kernel space, and give the Hurd some time in the sun.
Unlike the Linux kernel, which follows closely the monolithic UNIX framework– and the BSD-Unix kernel, which is Unix–GNU Hurd is a microkernel architecture, based originally on the Mach kernel. In that, it’s rather like MacOS. Unlike MacOS, given its roots in the Free Software Foundation, GNU Hurd is 100% free and open source. There are advantages to a microkernel architecture– it keeps drivers out of kernel space so a dodgy WiFi adapter can’t crash your system, for example– but the big disadvantage is, of course, drivers. Both Linux and BSD drivers can be ported, but that takes work and many of them have not been.
Still, now that Microsoft has become a major contributor to the Linux kernel, we could see a lot of the old-school Linux users who talk about “win-doze” and still spell Microsoft with a dollar sign being tempted to join the Hurd. If that appeals to you and you’re not into Gentoo, Debian has quietly let you install with the Hurd kernel for years now. It’s either that or embrace BSD and escape the chaos vortex.
The big three aren’t the only POSIX kernels out there, of course– there’s even one written entirely in Rust, for the die hard rustaceans amongst you.
2026-04-14 07:00:09
All the cool new 3D printers have tool-changing heads. Instead of multiplexing filament through one hot end, you simply park one hot end and pick up another. Or pick up a different tool, depending on what you need. There are many advantages to a system like that, but one disadvantage: cost. [Ultimate Tool Changer] has been working on a design for what he calls a simple, cheap changer, and it appears to be working well, as you can see in the video below.
This is one of those things that seems easy until you try to do it. He talks about a lot of the failures and dead ends along the way.
We worry that the tolerances are tight enough that wear over time might affect some of the key components, but how long that might take or if it will happen at all, we can’t say. Regardless, the system does appear to work, and we have no doubt you could keep it aligned or periodically replace parts to work around any wear issues.
One of the problems we have nowadays is that our main printers are plug-and-play boxes that are difficult to modify significantly. But if you have a homebrew printer or something made to expand like a Voron or old-school commercial printer, it seems like this would be something you could adapt.
We’ve seen homebrew tool changers, of course. Many times, actually.
2026-04-14 04:00:27
It seems like everybody takes their turn doing an ESP32-based weather display, and why not? They’re cheap, they’re easy, and you need to start somewhere. With the Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) and modules like it, you don’t even need to touch hardware! [likeablob] had the CYD, and he’s showing weather on it, but the Cydintosh is a full Macintosh Plus Emulator running on the ESP32.
The weather app is his own creation, written with the Retro68k cross-compiler, but it looks like something out of the 80s even if it’s getting its data over WiFi. The WiFi connection is, of course, thanks to the whole thing running on an ESP32-S3. Mac Plus emulation comes from [evansm7]’s Micro Mac emulator, the same one that lives inside the RP2040-based PicoMac that we covered some time ago. Obviously [likeablob] has added his own code to get the Macintosh emulator talking to the ESP32’s wireless hardware, with a native application to control the wifi connection in System 3.3. As far as the Macintosh is concerned, commands are passed to the ESP32 via memory address 0xF00000, and data can be read back from it as well. It’s a straightforward approach to allow intercommunication between the emulator and the real world.
The touchpad on the CYD serves as a mouse for the Macintosh, which might not be the most ergonomic given the Macintosh System interface was never meant for touchscreens, but evidently it’s good enough for [likeablob]. He’s built it into a lovely 3D printed case, whose STLs are available on the GitHub repository along with all the code, including the Home Assistant integration.
