A German lab releases a fully open model, and HN argues over whether it's any good.
What the article says
- Aleph Alpha has released Kolibri, an English and German model with open weights under the Apache 2.0 license.
- It is a large model that only uses a small slice of itself for each word, so it runs fast. It handles very long documents.
- The team says it built a repeatable training pipeline first, tested it on a smaller model, then scaled up.
- It is aimed at regulated work like government, industry and aerospace, with a pitch built around sovereignty and full transparency about data and training.
What HN is saying
- Many readers loved the openness. The tech report walks through the whole recipe, including the data, and several people called it unusually honest. thread ↗
- The sharpest complaint is quality. Alibaba's Qwen 27B model beats it on most benchmarks, and a team member replied that the two trade memory against compute. thread ↗
- Is it really sovereign? The company is set to merge with Canada's Cohere, though some argue independence from the US and China is the real point. thread ↗
- Hands-on tests were mixed. It invented an answer about a made-up song, overthought problems, and cited an outdated German law, but ran fast on a good GPU. thread ↗
- A side fight broke out over whether any competitive model can avoid training on copyrighted material, with a team member saying they don't think stealing is okay. thread ↗
Apple finally built a visual editor for Wallet passes, and HN has opinions.
What the article says
- Apple has released Pass Designer, a tool for building Wallet passes without hand-writing the file format.
- Start from Apple's templates or your own, and bring in logos, backgrounds and strip images from whatever design tool you like.
- The live preview uses the same rendering as iOS and watchOS, so what you see is what customers get.
- It's pitched at everyone from a local gym or music venue to a big airline or coffee chain.
What HN is saying
- Many call it long overdue. Developers who tried the old documentation say it was painful enough to make them give up. thread ↗
- A sharp complaint: why not agree on one pass standard with Google, instead of making businesses do the work twice? thread ↗
- Some wonder if it's really for normal users, since distributing passes still seems to need a developer certificate. thread ↗
- The macOS 27 requirement annoys people. Others say it's how Apple builds, and small libraries or cafes on old machines get shut out. thread ↗
- Wish lists: a barcode area that brightens alone, and codes that change over time so tickets are harder to copy. A warning too: one web alternative shared here looks like Apple but is the commenter's own undisclosed project. thread ↗
A beer-fuelled Idiocracy parody site run by a local model on two home GPUs.
What the article says
- The page is a satirical protest site called Extra Big Ass Intelligence, styled as a federally mandated super intelligence.
- It borrows heavily from the film Idiocracy, with Brawndo ads, a nonstop violence channel and a chatbot that likes you less with every question.
- The ads are jokes about the modern web: a close button that runs away, free money that is a subscription, and monetized dead space.
- There is a chat box with pre-approved dumb prompts, plus a disclaimer that your reaction is your problem.
What HN is saying
- The author says he built it with an AI coding tool while drinking Guinness, and it runs on an uncensored Qwen model on his own PC. Traffic was huge, and he is nearly out of free hosting quota. thread ↗
- Many people found it funny that the page looks exactly like an AI made it, with the same gradient bubbles and emoji icons. One person asked why AI loves that look. thread ↗
- Idiocracy comparisons were everywhere. One popular take is that the film was optimistic rather than prophetic. thread ↗
- Fans loved the runaway close button. Others recalled real 90s popups that resized your window so you could not close them, though one reader found a code bug that breaks the joke. thread ↗
- A commenter explained why the abliterated model suits this kind of satire: it will go along with almost anything yet still writes coherently. thread ↗
Newgrounds is still online, still weird, and still hosting your childhood Flash games.
What the article says
- Newgrounds describes itself as a home for games, movies, music and art, all made by its own users.
- The front page is a busy mix of featured animations, games and a wall of legendary classics like Friday Night Funkin.
- A Halloween event calendar shows community collabs, art challenges and real world meetups through October.
- Users vote on new games and movies, and the more you vote, the more your votes count.
What HN is saying
- Nostalgia runs the thread. People swap stories of skipping homework, running to school computers, and learning to code on the forums. thread ↗
- Many were delighted to find their old games, music and animations from twenty years ago still online. thread ↗
- The Ruffle emulator gets credit for keeping old Flash games playable, though one user says its browser extension made Twitch think their browser was outdated. thread ↗
- Some praise the site for staying loose and uncensored, while others guess the post was prompted by drama over a banned YouTube group. thread ↗
- A few said the site loaded slowly or not at all, with one blaming a stalled external stylesheet. thread ↗
A German open-weight model that would rather say "I don't know" than bluff, and thinks in German.
What the article says
- Kolibri is an open-weight German and English model from Aleph Alpha, trained in Germany and Finland. It is huge on disk but only a small slice of it works on each word.
- Its tokenizer chops long German compound words into fewer pieces, so German text is cheaper to read and write.
- It was trained to admit when the documents don't contain the answer, and it reasons in German on German prompts.
- The author is candid about the weak spots: poor trivia recall, shaky multi-turn tool use, and a middling coding agent. It also needs serious GPU memory.
- Best fit is German documents on your own hardware, such as public bodies, banks and manufacturers.
What HN is saying
- Most of the thread is a grumble that a blog post about someone else's project isn't really a Show HN. thread ↗
- Several readers say the official announcement is the better read than this write-up. thread ↗
- One commenter liked the explanation of the Merlin-Arthur training game as a clever way to tackle the "I don't know" problem. thread ↗
- A member of the training team says the model comes from a team formed less than a year ago, focused on fast iteration, with more to come. thread ↗
- The moderator merged most comments into a separate thread on the same release, which explains the thin discussion here. thread ↗