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The post answers rumors from the previous few days that Qwen4 would be the last open-weight Qwen series and that later models would be available only through an API. It shares an image of a statement it attributes to Qwen head Liu Dayiheng, saying future Qwen 4.0 and Qwen 5.0 models will continue to be open source, that AI's value should not belong to only a few people, and that the series has passed 3 billion downloads, 460 open-source models and 300,000 derivative models. We could not find a separate report of the Qwen 4/5 wording; 36Kr reported very similar remarks, and the same figures, from Liu's first appearance as Qwen's leader at Alibaba's conference in Hangzhou on September 22.

It was the top thread of our sweep relative to community size: about 4,800 upvotes and 500 comments in a 329,000-member community. The most-upvoted replies celebrate the pledge; others praise how capable Qwen's models are for their size. Skeptics point out that a company's 'forever' promise lasts only as long as its current management and business conditions, and a few add that it holds only as long as China's government allows it.

The threads link a TRM Labs report on the theft of about $6.36 billion from Binance wallets on ten blockchains, most of it in roughly 20 minutes starting at 20:05 UTC on October 29. TRM calls it the largest crypto theft on record, about four times the $1.5 billion Bybit hack of 2025, and attributes it with high confidence to TraderTraitor, which it describes as North Korea's premier hacking unit. TRM says the attacker likely gained the ability to make Binance's hot-wallet signing system sign arbitrary transactions; on Ethereum it used pre-signed EIP-7702 authorizations to take over a wallet. Binance had not published a root cause. As of TRM's snapshot, about $2.7 billion had been frozen, led by Tether and Circle.

About 34,000 upvotes in r/technology and 1,200 in r/cybersecurity. Top replies point out that an industry built on avoiding regulation ends up wanting governments to step in, question keeping crypto on an exchange at all, and ask who actually bears the loss.

The Register reports that Revolut says it cut its AI coding inference costs by roughly 90 percent in under a year by making self-hosted models its default rather than relying mainly on commercial services such as Claude. Speaking at the AI Engineer conference in New York, ops and infrastructure lead David Abitbol said the fintech rolled AI coding tools out to about 2,000 engineers, adopted Z.ai's open-weights GLM-5.1 and now serves GLM-5.3 on 56 Nvidia B200 GPUs. Self-hosting cost about $0.30 per million tokens, roughly a tenth of Codex or Claude Code, and he said cheap tokens let engineers hand the AI debugging and ticket work, which is where the biggest gains came from. He also called very long context windows "a scam" in practice.

About 1,900 upvotes and 340 comments in a 329,000-member community. The top reply says this is why running models locally is not a waste of time; another argues that self-hosting means a company knows exactly which model it is running, while a cloud provider can change it without notice. One commenter who says they know people at Revolut describes its engineering culture as cautious.

The thread links a Business Insider article reporting that Texas voters chose Democrats James Talarico for the Senate and Gina Hinojosa for governor, despite heavy Republican spending backed by Elon Musk. It says no Democrat had won statewide in Texas since Ann Richards in 1990, and that Talarico is the first Democrat to win a Texas Senate race since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. The article collects reactions from tech figures who moved to the state: investor Jason Calacanis wrote on X that he never expected Texas to turn blue; his All-In co-host Chamath Palihapitiya said on a livestream that the way to sink the AI trade runs through West Texas power for data centers; Hello Patient CEO Alex Cohen posted "RIP AI it was fun while it lasted." LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, a Democratic donor, called the results "an overwhelming wave against Trump and his cronies."

About 54,000 upvotes and 3,000 comments in an 18-million-member community. Most top replies focus on Musk and are sharply critical of him; one argues Texas would have stayed red had he kept out of politics, and a self-described IT director says he is puzzled that tech work is so often linked with the political right.

FOX 2 Detroit (via FOX 11) reports that Democrat Abdul El-Sayed beat Republican Mike Rogers in Michigan's U.S. Senate race, for the seat left open by retiring Democrat Gary Peters, after a campaign it describes as bitter, with personal insults on both sides. El-Sayed declared victory after 1:30 a.m., leading 52% to 46%, and the Associated Press called the race at 2:27 a.m. FOX 2 describes him as the first Muslim to win the seat. A Newsweek piece from election day, linked in the r/Music thread, reports that Springsteen endorsed El-Sayed on Instagram while Minaj appeared with President Trump at an October 25 rally and led chants for Rogers and gubernatorial candidate John James.

The r/news thread drew about 67,000 upvotes and r/Music's about 82,000, whose title says all the candidates Minaj endorsed lost by landslides (the linked article predates the results). r/news commenters call it a big win for the party's progressive wing and praise his victory speech. In r/Music, most replies are criticism of Minaj; others note that a celebrity endorsement carries little weight with voters.

NBC News projects that Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, defeated Republican Sen. Darline Graham in South Carolina, making Andrews the state's first Democratic senator in more than 20 years. Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Graham in July after her brother, five-term Sen. Lindsey Graham, died suddenly; she then won the GOP nomination for a full term. NBC reports that Trump carried the state by more than 17 points two years ago, that Andrews raised more than $4 million in the final pre-election period against about $90,000 for Graham, and that the GOP-aligned Senate Leadership Fund spent $13 million backing Graham. In debates, Andrews called Graham a "rubber stamp" for Trump's agenda, and Graham accused Andrews of having "flip-flopped on everything."

About 52,000 upvotes and 3,900 comments in a 29-million-member community. The top reply criticizes the choice to run the late senator's sister; others call it one of the biggest upsets they can remember, including a commenter who says they have voted Democratic in South Carolina for 25 years.

The thread was posted on a CNBC live blog that, overnight, reported Dow futures jumping after the midterms. By the close on Wednesday, November 4, CNBC reports, the Dow rose 1,569.40 points, or 3.03%, to 53,356.12, with the S&P 500 up 1.58% and the Nasdaq up 1.44%. CNBC says Democrats won majorities in the House and Senate, removing political uncertainty; U.S. crude fell more than 8% after Vice President JD Vance blamed the Iran war for Republican losses; and Trump told The New York Times he was "absolutely willing" to accept the results. Jay Woods of Freedom Capital Markets said "there will be gridlock and historically this is good for the market." Tesla fell in early trading.

About 9,000 upvotes in a 5.2-million-member community. The top reply warns against both blaming and crediting a party for a single day's market move; others agree with the gridlock argument, and several point to declines in Tesla and other companies whose leaders were close to the administration.

A gallery post presents a densely designed Home Assistant dashboard. In replies, the builder says it is written entirely in custom JavaScript rather than standard cards, that the network map reads data from TP-Link Deco routers, that a Flightradar integration shows planes passing near the house, and that most of the configuration was done with an open-source AI tool connected to Home Assistant. The builder adds that it is too custom to reuse and is meant as inspiration.

About 700 upvotes in a 386,000-member community. The top reply calls it the most beautiful dashboard the commenter has seen; others say the layout is too crowded for daily use, with each card a different design to learn, and one argues that a good smart home should need so little intervention that it barely needs a dashboard at all.

Two of the week's biggest r/baseball threads come from the Brewers' World Series parade on Friday, October 30. One video shows the route crowded from street level to high-rise windows, with people in kayaks on the river. The other shows a fan throwing a can of beer to pitcher Jacob Misiorowski on the team's parade vehicle, and Misiorowski catching it and drinking it. FOX6 Milwaukee reports that the Milwaukee Police Department estimated more than 750,000 people attended the parade or the rally at Henry Maier Festival Park, nearly 1.5 times the city's population, and said it may be the largest single-day event crowd in Wisconsin history.

Together the threads drew about 25,600 upvotes in a 2.8-million-member community. Fans who say they waited decades for a title trade congratulations; one notes the parade stopped in front of the Bob Uecker mural. Under the beer clip, many joke that Misiorowski has better hands than the Packers' receivers, while several of the top replies warn that throwing full cans at a bus full of people, including children, could badly hurt someone.

A London commuter shares a framed e-ink display that, at 5:20 every morning, shows whether their train is on time, the Jubilee line's service status and the day's weather, styled to look like a vintage newspaper or flyer. They write that they built it on Home Assistant with a Seeed E1004 frame and used Claude to get a working prototype, then made themes based on a Victorian newspaper, a 1950s magazine cover and Star Wars; AI tools refused to help with the Star Wars theme over copyrighted material, so they designed that one by hand. In replies, the builder says the frame wakes once a day, downloads one image and goes back to deep sleep, so a charge should last six months or more, and that a script converts each image to the screen's six ink colours.

About 1,300 upvotes in a 386,000-member community. Many replies ask for the code (the builder says they will try to post it); some call the look generic AI style, which the builder rejects at length, and several say the frame's price put them off.

The post shares an image and a transcription of remarks it attributes to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: that local inference (running AI models on your own computer) is "a terrible allocation of scarce resources," because it leaves part of the world's limited supply of memory chips sitting in personal computers that are in use only a small fraction of the time, while cloud data centers can keep that hardware busy. The poster adds a joking summary framing it as a seller explaining why you shouldn't own the product. We could not find the original interview or post the quote comes from, so treat the wording as the poster's.

The most-upvoted replies read the remarks as self-interested. Several argue that hardware people own is also used for gaming and rendering, and one compares the argument to dismissing personal computers in the 1970s. A minority concede that, in purely technical terms, shared cloud hardware is probably more efficient, while saying they still don't want a few companies controlling it. About 3,800 upvotes and 1,700 comments in a 329,000-member community.

Milwaukee beat the Tampa Bay Rays 4-1 in Game 5 at Tropicana Field on Wednesday night to win the first World Series title in franchise history, AP reports: Jacob Misiorowski threw 5 2/3 scoreless innings, rookie Cooper Pratt had two hits and two RBIs, and catcher William Contreras was named Series MVP. The Brewers' only previous World Series, in 1982, ended in a Game 7 loss.

The r/baseball announcement drew about 21,100 upvotes in a 2.8-million-member community; a clip of the final moments in r/sports drew about 23,000 in a 21.8-million-member one. The top r/baseball reply lists what commenters see as the season's story: a first 100-win season, an 11-2 playoff record, and a sweep of the Dodgers on the way. Many fans of other teams call it well deserved and point to the young core. In r/sports, the top replies joke that Wisconsin will run out of beer, and one remembers the late broadcaster Bob Uecker.

Google's Finland country manager has apologized for unauthorized forest clearing near Muhos, Tom's Hardware reports, and Finland's licensing and supervision authority (LVV) has ordered the company to stop work there and near Otanmäki in Kajaani, where data centers are planned. Citing reporting by The Guardian, it says villagers report wolves and other wild animals moving into nearby villages; "We had wolves coming into the village because all the wild animals moved out of the forest," Otanmäki resident Anni Ranta is quoted as saying. Locals also complain of noise and browned streams. A Google spokesperson said the company "will fully comply with LVV's requests."

The r/technology thread drew about 45,500 upvotes in an 18-million-member community and the r/environment thread about 2,800 in a 1.5-million-member one. Replies are angry at Google; commenters call for large fines and years of required restoration, while others argue fines are too small to matter for a company that size. One explains why wolves are considered a keystone species.

Details of more than 41,000 Department of Homeland Security employees and contractors, including names, work email addresses, phone numbers and office locations, were published on Wednesday by the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets as an archive called "Icepick," WIRED and the BBC report. The groups say the data came from a hacking group calling itself the Department of Peace, via DHS's Okta single sign-on; Okta told WIRED it has no evidence its systems were compromised. WIRED says the records include undercover and surveillance programs; DHS said it is "aware of a potential breach."

The r/technology thread (WIRED) drew about 46,500 upvotes in an 18-million-member community and the r/news thread (BBC) about 43,600 in a 29.5-million-member one. Many top replies cheer the leak, quoting the hackers' note that "they have our information, so it's only fair that we have theirs"; others argue that names and work contacts of public employees should be public anyway, and some question why undercover immigration agents are needed.

The post is an image, titled "Who's excited?", about the size of the upcoming Home Assistant 2026.11 release. German Home Assistant blog simon42 reports the 2026.11 beta is out with the final release planned for November 4, and that it reads like three releases at once, with HACS (the community add-on store) becoming a built-in marketplace and support for Matter cameras.

The top reply, from user frenck_nl, who says the screenshotted post is his, explains that the release is big because of a large number of contributions, that bringing HACS in was only a few pull requests, and that AI shows up in many submissions. He writes that the team has added static checks and tuned automated Copilot reviews, that his analysis of 10,000 reviews found about 40% of review comments were repeats worth automating, and that human judgment still decides. Other commenters say they'll wait for a later point release, or doubt that a large count of merged changes is good news in the AI era. About 2,600 upvotes in a 386,000-member community.

Microsoft has offered voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees, about 27% of its global workforce, AP reports, as it spends heavily on AI. Chief People Officer Amy Coleman wrote that the offer was open to eligible employees in Canada, India, the United Kingdom and the United States, and that "The Voluntary Exit Offer is new for us." The company had about 223,000 full-time employees at the end of June and said in July it was cutting 4,800 jobs. An offer is not a layoff: how many people accept is not yet known.

The post, a short text calling it "25% voluntary buyout layoffs" and "an absolute bombshell," drew about 8,200 upvotes and 1,900 comments in a 1.1-million-member community. The top replies talk about anxiety over layoffs; one argues that if other big tech companies follow, AI taking jobs stops being speculation, another proposes limits on buybacks and executive bonuses after mass layoffs, and several former Microsoft employees say they ended up happier after leaving.

A photo gallery post shows a smart-home control panel assembled from vintage hardware. The builder writes that everything in it works and runs on Home Assistant, including a voice assistant, but that they wanted to draw attention to the physical side: every part they could buy is an original from the 1960s and 70s, some of it iconic to people who remember communist-era Poland, and whatever they couldn't find they built themselves. They describe the panel as one piece of a bigger retro project.

It was the top thread of our sweep relative to community size: about 5,000 upvotes in a 386,000-member community. The replies are almost entirely admiration ("completely over the top," one top comment says, approvingly); one praises it as a break from AI-generated projects, and many ask for a detailed video, which the builder says they will make.

The thread links an X post saying a person who was reverse-engineering his own TV had been banned from OpenAI, and the poster adds that an open-source reverse-engineering tool called REA was blocked by Claude a day later, linking another X post that says Anthropic stopped Claude from doing it. Gadget Review reports that a user known as @log4j says OpenAI closed his account, labeling the activity "Cyber Abuse," after he used AI help to reverse-engineer a Samsung TV he owns, reportedly over concerns about its telemetry and ad data collection; he says the work was local and that he never used OpenAI to find vulnerabilities. The site notes his account hasn't been independently verified, that OpenAI hasn't explained the case, and that claims about Claude come from user posts, not any Anthropic announcement.

The top replies urge tinkerers to keep quiet until work is done, suggest moving to open models (one replies that some of those are pulling cyber training too), and argue that safeguards shouldn't be decided by corporations. About 3,500 upvotes in a 329,000-member community.

Before Game 3 of the World Series, Brewers closer Trevor Megill complained that Tropicana Field's off-white roof is the same color as the baseball, making fly balls hard to track; EssentiallySports reports the quote, relayed by Talkin' Baseball, insulted whoever chose the color in profane terms. The site notes that under MLB's rules a ball that hits the Trop's roof or support cables over fair territory stays in play, and that a ball off a cable at Milwaukee's own retractable-roof park had gone the Brewers' way in the NLDS.

The thread, an image of the quote, drew about 13,000 upvotes in a 2.8-million-member community. The top replies ask for a tier list of roofs, with Toronto's SkyDome a popular pick; a Twins fan recalls loving the Metrodome until Target Field opened; others say the Trop was just renovated and could have been painted a different color. One commenter notes that tennis balls turned yellow partly because white ones were hard to see on black-and-white TV.

The thread links an Unusual Whales article (published in August) reporting that wages and salaries were roughly 43% of US gross domestic income in the first quarter of 2026, the lowest reading in a series dating back to 1929. The article adds context: the figure leaves out benefits such as employer health insurance and retirement plans; a broader labor-share measure including those stood at 54.1% in Q1 2026, the lowest since 1947; it doesn't mean pay was cut, since the Employment Cost Index shows wages and salaries up 3.2% in the year to June 2026; and a New York Fed analysis in June 2026 linked the decline to structural changes such as globalization and automation.

The thread drew about 23,800 upvotes in a 5.2-million-member community. The most-upvoted replies are largely political, with many blaming Republican economic policy and national debt; one top reply argues the real issue is that most people are being left out of gains they produce.

The post shares Harness2 (styled Harness²), released on GitHub by Google Research under the Apache 2.0 license. Its README describes a framework that keeps a model's weights fixed but lets the agent propose and test edits to everything around it (system prompt, guardrails, memory, tools, subagents, skills), then keep the better version and carry lessons to later tasks, without ground-truth answers. The authors report gains of up to 11.5 points on WorkBuddy-Bench, 4.5 on JobBench and 11.8 percentage points on the LAB legal benchmark with GLM-5 and Gemini 3.5 Flash. The README also says it is "not an officially supported Google product."

Top replies worry that all the self-refinement will eat context, a bigger problem for people running models locally, and that a harness tuned to a task can overfit benchmarks. Others answer that it changes context rather than growing it, and ask experts whether it is significant. About 1,600 upvotes in a 329,000-member community.

The post is a screenshot of a Linux kernel mailing-list reply in which Linus Torvalds calls the idea of "don't use AI for X" rules "idiotic" and, mockingly, proposes banning compilers and text editors for kernel submissions. He writes that he expects people "to understand what they are doing," and that this has "very little to do with what tools they use." The Next Web reports the reply came on October 13 after kernel maintainers moved to drop the "Assisted-by" tag that had asked contributors to disclose AI coding tools.

The top replies agree that quality work should be accepted regardless of where it came from, while others stress the other half of his message: contributors must understand their code. Several worry that AI makes it easy to flood open-source projects with low-quality pull requests that take maintainers time to sift. About 3,100 upvotes in a 329,000-member community.

The post linked a report that Katie Zacharia had been fired after five days as White House press secretary. The Associated Press (via FOX19) reports she is departing after a short tenure marked by her first and only briefing on October 13, which lasted about 14 minutes with questions from three reporters, and by criticism that she had described herself as a lawyer without passing the bar exam. President Trump told reporters he had advised her, "Honestly, if I were you, I'd reconsider," and said the press treated her unfairly; a person familiar with the matter said she was transitioning out. She had been named on October 9 to succeed Karoline Leavitt.

The thread is mostly jokes measuring her tenure against Anthony Scaramucci's brief 2017 stint as communications director. Others ask why the women in the administration seem to be the ones dismissed. About 47,900 upvotes in a 29-million-member community.

The post links Ars Technica's report that eight intermediate TLS certificates belonging to the India-based certificate authority eMudhra had private keys of only 3 to 8 bits (a normal P-384 key has about 384 bits), so anyone could use them to issue certificates that browsers and apps would trust for any site. Ars says browser makers and some major apps and programming languages had blocked all eight by Tuesday, with no sign yet of malicious use in certificate transparency logs, but cryptography engineer Filippo Valsorda called it "a massive cleanup job, bigger than Heartbleed," because of Linux distributions, containers and IoT devices. Exploiting it requires intercepting traffic.

Replies from defenders range from gallows humor about ruined evenings to disbelief at the key sizes. Others question why systems automatically trust so many certificate authorities, and note that the certificates had been cross-signed by Sectigo. About 3,100 upvotes in a 1.1-million-member community.