Ilia's Corner

Firefox’s latest “upgrade” is quietly melting your laptop

Mozilla just shipped an AI sidebar in Firefox that can spike CPU to 100 % and slash battery life—while you’re simply reading Hacker News. If you rely on Firefox for dev work or demos, you now get to choose between new AI chrome and a machine that stays cool enough to compile code. The fix today is to flip toolkit.aiChat.enabled to false in about:config until Mozilla offers an off-switch that isn’t buried. https://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-under-fire-for-firefox-ai-bloat-that-blows-up-cpu-and-drains-battery/

Neowin · 2 min read

GPT-5 can’t count to three

Add the word “blueberry” to any prompt and GPT-5 cheerfully skips its own guardrails—then still fails kindergarten counting. The gap between marketing claims of “PhD-level reasoning” and day-to-day reliability keeps widening; plan your guard-code accordingly. https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2025/08/07/blueberry-hill/ https://bsky.app/profile/kjhealy.co/post/3lvtxbtexg226

hackernews · 3 min read

Show HN: The sky above you, rendered as pure CSS

Need a quick, dependency-free way to show users a live sky background? This single HTML page fetches the current sun angle for their rough location and builds a gradient in CSS—no WebGL, no canvas, just copy-paste into your next side project. https://sky.dlazaro.ca

hackernews · 1 min read

Jan — run local LLMs with a slick desktop UI

Ollama works great until you want a point-and-click chat history, one-click model downloads, or GPU memory graphs. Jan wraps the same GGUF files in an Electron UI and keeps everything on your machine—perfect for offline demos or air-gapped environments. https://github.com/menloresearch/jan

hackernews · 2 min read

Abogen — turn any EPUB, PDF or text into an audiobook

Need a hands-free version of the internal docs your team never reads aloud? Abogen is an open-source pipeline that feeds text through modern TTS models and spits out chaptered MP3s—zero cloud credits required, fully GPU-accelerated. https://github.com/denizsafak/abogen

Documentation & Accessibility

Python · 63 stars

Ch.at — a 65-line LLM service you can curl over DNS

When you just need a quick answer from Llama-3.1 without auth tokens or rate limits, ch.at exposes the model over HTTP, SSH, and even DNS TXT records. Spin it up on a spare VPS and give your scripts an LLM endpoint that costs pennies. https://ch.at/

Serverless & Edge

Python · 65 stars

wrkflw — run GitHub Actions locally without the queue

Tired of burning minutes on GitHub-hosted runners while tweaking CI? wrkflw is a Rust CLI that interprets .github/workflows files on your laptop, matrix builds and all. Debug workflows at coffee-shop Wi-Fi speed. https://github.com/bahdotsh/wrkflw

DevOps & CI

Rust · 1 stars

CT scan of Intel’s 386 reveals a second power grid

Ken Shirriff put a vintage 386 under an industrial CT scanner and found six metal layers plus a dedicated analog power rail—tricks that quietly solved 1980s signal-noise issues. The images are pure hardware eye-candy and a reminder that old silicon still holds surprises. https://www.righto.com/2025/08/intel-386-package-ct-scan.html

Hardware Archaeology · Ken Shirriff · 4 min read

Debian 13 “trixie” ships with riscv64, drops legacy i386

If you’re eyeing RISC-V boards for CI or edge workloads, Debian 13 is now production-ready on the architecture—and still gives you five years of security updates without the Red Hat licensing maze. https://www.debian.org/News/2025/20250809

Operating Systems · Debian Project · 2 min read