8.5.26 | Simple skin tone algorithm, Mistral's Shieldstral moderation model, and a 1950 short story

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• (00:00) - Intro
• (00:19) - Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones
• (01:28) - Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation
• (02:39) - There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
• (03:52) - Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
• (05:09) - Waymo in Dallas
• (06:28) - I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel
• (07:40) - libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months
• (08:58) - AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
• (10:20) - Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI
• (11:53) - Outro

Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation
https://mistral.ai/news/shieldstral/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171268

There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
https://users.wpi.edu/~zrbutzke/Docs/BradburyStories(1).pdf
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162653

Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
https://earendil.com/posts/pi-autoresearch-and-databricks/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176038

Waymo in Dallas
https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/dallas-open-to-all/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172836

I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel
https://twitter.com/gwern/status/2084739205071343837
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49174900

libexpat now funded by the City of Munich for up to 6 months
https://blog.hartwork.org/posts/libexpat-city-of-munich-open-source-sabbatical/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176606

AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
https://www.africanews.com/2026/08/04/ai-fuels-more-than-half-of-cybercrime-in-africa-as-digital-scams-surge-interpol/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49175826

Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3807963
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49176830