Community Views

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.

A video post shows a robot vacuum parked inside a kitchen island behind a flap door. The builder writes that the door opens according to the cleaning schedule and closes when cleaning is done, using a 12V linear actuator, an LED strip that shows the actuator and robot status, and an ESP32-C3 microcontroller managed in Home Assistant.

The most-upvoted reply jokes about meeting the door with an ankle at 3 a.m.; others warn that it closes fast enough to worry about children, toes and pets. The builder replies that an infrared sensor reopens the door if anything is in its path, that it sends a notification if the flap stays open too long, and that an emergency stop can cut power to the actuator. Others asked for a write-up. About 2,500 upvotes in a 386,000-member community.

A new Home Assistant user posted 14 screenshots of a phone dashboard made in their first week, with an illustrated house, a floor plan that lights up occupied rooms, and panels for devices including a car and an oven. In replies, the poster says Claude designed the dashboard through the regular browser chat (no direct connection to their system), that they wired up the devices themselves, kept passwords and other secrets out of the chat, and stayed within a $20-a-month plan.

The thread splits. Some argue it shows why AI is here to stay, letting a beginner reach in a week what took others years; one of the top replies is surprised there isn't more anti-AI pushback. Others say the design looks good but makes odd choices on closer inspection, and prefer building it themselves with AI only as a helper. About 1,800 upvotes and 500 comments in a 386,000-member community.

Posted seconds after the Dodgers thread, this image post marks the Milwaukee Brewers clinching the National League pennant with a four-game NLCS sweep of the two-time defending champion Dodgers. It drew about 16,800 upvotes and 1,400 comments in a 2.8-million-member community.

Where the Dodgers thread is mostly about the loser, this one belongs to Milwaukee fans. The top reply describes a kind of euphoria the writer had never felt, after the Brewers came from behind in most of the games. Others call it a "team of destiny" and look ahead to the American League winner. One long, widely upvoted reply recalls weekly Brewers games with an elderly Wisconsin neighbor.

The post links Dexerto's report on a redesigned YouTube desktop layout that moves the dislike option into the three-dot menu. Dexerto has since updated it with YouTube's statement: "We are not testing hiding the dislike button on YouTube for users," calling it "a new UI for creators on their own uploaded videos." Creators can still see dislike counts in YouTube Studio. YouTube hid public dislike counts in November 2021.

Most of the thread was written before or without that clarification. Top replies argue that removing negative signals helps advertisers and rage-bait (one cites Nextdoor), credit Reddit's downvotes for keeping it saner, recall the five-star ratings Netflix and YouTube once used, and complain about scam ads. About 29,700 upvotes and 1,900 comments in an 18-million-member community.

A text-only post announcing that the Los Angeles Dodgers had been eliminated from World Series contention went up minutes after Milwaukee finished a four-game sweep in the National League Championship Series. It became the biggest thread of our sweep relative to community size: about 32,900 upvotes and 2,400 comments in a 2.8-million-member subreddit.

The replies are mostly a party. The top comments point out that the Dodgers were swept at home, ending their hopes of a third straight title, by the same Brewers team they had swept in last year's NLCS, and that it came two months after the Dodgers traded for Skubal. Others joke that rival fans (one describes a Yankees fan and a Red Sox fan hugging) briefly found common ground. A smaller group of Dodgers fans argue the sweep was a fluke.

This follows last week's thread on Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centers. What's new is a report from Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation, covered by UNITED24 Media: it tracked 22,664 messages from 5,201 accounts showing signs of inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Telegram between October 6 and 12. After the October 8 strike on the Sasovo data center, messages fell from 4,032 to 660 in a day (83.6%), then recovered and passed pre-strike levels by October 10 and 11. After the reported shutdown of a Vladimir data center, they fell again by 42.6% on October 12.

The most-upvoted replies take political shots or say Reddit has felt calmer; one widely upvoted reply notes that the earlier, widely shared drop was in Yandex's search crawler traffic, not spam bots. About 38,600 upvotes in an 18-million-member community.