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The Artist Who Colored Ghibli

Animation Obsessive spotlights Michiyo Yasuda, Studio Ghibli’s color designer who defined the studio’s signature, nuanced palette. Beginning at Toei Doga, she collaborated with Miyazaki and Takahata, developing color as texture and atmosphere—from the gentle, transparent hues of Totoro to the naturalistic tones of Grave of the Fireflies. She expanded into Nausicaä, Mononoke, and Yamadas, guiding color across cels and later digital painting, sometimes arguing with Miyazaki to balance light and shadow. Her work shaped Ghibli’s sense of reality and depth. The issue also shares newsbits and closing comments from the editors.

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Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped

Judge dismissed Google's DMCA 1201 suit against SerpAPI for scraping Google results, though Google may refile on narrower grounds. The court found SearchGuard’s access-control measures do not clearly protect a copyright work, and claims fail where results lack copyrighted content. Google’s broad 1201 theory was not supported. The ruling curbs expanding DMCA 1201 to open web scraping; Google could pursue narrower claims about copyrighted content (e.g., Knowledge Panels). SerpAPI welcomed the decision as defending open web access.

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Bytecode-to-Source Mapping

This post analyzes mapping bytecode offsets to source lines in a VM. A second lines array is memory-heavy (O(n)); improve with run-length encoding (O(r)) but lookup can be O(r) or O(nr). A one-pass traversal with a cursor yields O(n). A better approach stores starting offsets per line (static predecessor), enabling binary search for arbitrary offsets (O(log r)) and a forward cursor for linear traversal (O(n)). Combines both: use binary search for random lookups and cursor for sequential disassembly. JVM and Lua have similar strategies; references to CS224 on predecessor problems.

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Watching Go's new garbage collector move through the heap

Go 1.26’s Green Tea is a non-moving garbage collector that scans memory spans instead of following every pointer. The piece revisits Go’s size-class allocation in 8 KiB spans, and compares Go with C# using small/medium/large object workloads. It shows Green Tea improves cache behavior and overall speed, supported by perf measurements and heap visualizations, though some tests reveal higher L3 MPKI. A key limitation is that non-moving GC cannot reclaim sparse pages, leading to fragmentation after mass frees unless survivors are compacted or moved. Overall, L1/L2 cache gains are real, with fragmentation challenges remain.

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Jensen Huang's first-ever post on X is in defense of open access to AI models

Jensen Huang posted on X defending open access to AI models, joining Google, OpenAI, and Meta in opposing premature restrictions. A letter signed by Nvidia and others argues open models—weights and code accessible and runnable locally—boost safety, innovation, competition, and sovereignty, and should be balanced with closed models. They acknowledge risks (uncontrolled weights, traceability) but contend open weights should not be prohibited. The open-model approach is framed as essential for AI growth and global leadership amid geopolitics over Chinese models and US policy debates.

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Show HN: FeyNoBg – Automatic background removal model and training library

FeyNoBg is a state-of-the-art background removal model built on BiRefNet. By deepening the third feature stage (18→24 blocks) it grows to 263M parameters and gains capacity to learn new skills. Trained on a diverse 26.1K-image, 10-dataset mix plus synthetic data, it improves foreground-background separation and boundary matting, delivering S-measures that lead on four of eight benchmarks and stay within 2% of the leader on others (e.g., UHRSD-TE 0.981 vs 0.957; HRSOD-TE 0.983 vs 0.961). The project releases NoBg, a matching open-source library for running/training background removal models with better throughput and memory; both are open source.

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Exploiting Volvo/Eicher's fleet platform to gain control over all users/vehicles

Exploiting Volvo/Eicher’s My Eicher fleet-management platform, a security researcher found unauthenticated internal APIs that allowed broad access to user accounts and fleets. Exposed endpoints could reveal 748k customers, 676k vehicles, 76k documents, 2.5 million OTPs, and even permit password updates, enabling account takeover and control of entire fleets in India. The issue was reported to VE Commercial Vehicles in Nov 2025; after no response, the primary vulnerability was fixed by late 2025. Findings were published July 27, 2026. My Eicher provides real-time tracking and geofencing for Indian commercial vehicles.

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Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website

Decathlon Germany added Wero to decathlon.de on July 20, making Germany the first market to adopt the European Payments Initiative’s real-time, account-to-account payment. It authenticates in the banking app and never shares card numbers, and Decathlon ties it to its loyalty program to boost retention and reduce card-fee costs. The rollout plans cover about 110 German stores for a seamless online/offline experience, plus a six-week October promo offering a €10 voucher funded by EPI. In-store POS support isn’t expected until 2026–2027, signaling remaining hurdles.

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AI companies are shredding rare books

AI firms are bulk-buying rare pre-2022 books, shredding the originals after scanning to train models; ISBNdb facilitates anonymous orders up to a million. Pre-2022 texts command a premium for being free of AI-generated text; a federal judge ruled this fair use because no original copies remain. Anthropic reportedly hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain “all the books in the world.” The piece argues this irreversible destruction risks irreplaceable history, calls the NDAs and “digital preservation” framing alarming, and predicts rapid intensification of such training practices.

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EU to make more money from fining US tech companies than taxing its own

EU fined Google €890 million for Digital Markets Act violations, accusing the company of self-preferencing and restricting access to alternatives on Google Search and Google Play. The post notes the EU will again earn more from fines on US tech firms than from tax income of Europe’s public tech companies, with varied reactions in the thread.

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Glue bonds to nonstick surfaces and wipes clean with ethanol

Aida's team developed Cyclic FP-fmoc, a small-molecule glue that bonds strongly to nonstick PTFE (≈1.3 MPa) via F–F interactions, hydrogen bonding, and π-π stacking. It can be fully removed with ethanol, leaving clean surfaces and reusable adhesions (~1.2 MPa) over cycles. This could aid recyclability of bonded parts, with potential PFAS environmental concerns to be studied; ethanol hand sanitizer could enable de-bonding in practice.

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Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts

Ed Zitron argues the AI boom is a bubble: LLM costs are token-based while software is sold as subscriptions, causing users to burn far more tokens than they pay for. Many AI startups are unprofitable; data centers require massive debt and capex with weak enterprise demand, risking systemic contagion. Hyperscalers have spent trillions on AI, memory prices have risen, and OpenAI/Anthropic dominate revenues. Apple’s AI push is modest and controversial. If the bubble bursts, Apple will largely sit on the sidelines, possibly pursuing selective acquisitions.

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