Signal Weekly
Signal Weekly — Sep 28–Oct 5, 2026
Sep 28–Oct 5, 2026 · 14 stories
A roundup of what came through the dashboard this week, across 4 categories.
Tech news
Star Wars: Galactic Racer is my childhood podracing dream come true
Yes, Sebulba is in the game. The podracing scene in The Phantom Menace is one of my favorite movie sequences ever. It's just so dang cool: The futuristic racers tear over treacherous Tatooine terrain while various Star Wars aliens bark at…
AI hallucinations are making entitled customers even worse
Madison, a server in New York City, greets every table by asking about each diner's allergies. Lately, there have been some close calls. "Sometimes people will tell me they have a shellfish allergy, and I'll come back, and they won't ask…
If a data center is camouflaged in the woods, will anyone hate it?
San Antonio City Councilmember Ric Galvan remembers when data centers first arrived in his city in the 2000s, looking like relatively unassuming office buildings. But that's changed in recent years, as data centers have grown into massive…
Amazon writes scary blog warning communities not to block data centers
Amazon is calling for people to support AI data center projects, or risk irreparable harm to the US economy and national security. In a more than 3,000 word blog posted today, Amazon web services CEO Matt Garman pushed back on public…
Amazon Says It's No Longer Using NDAs for Data Centers
The company announced it has stopped using secret agreements with county officials and acknowledges community backlash is leading to data center moratoriums across the…
Best Smart Cat Trackers of 2026: Fi Mini vs. Tractive
After months of monitoring Basil’s activity and sleep, I found that Fi and Tractive cat trackers come with their own…
AI papers
One Basis to Animate Them All: Gaussian Blendshape Distillation for Real-Time Avatars
3D Gaussian avatars support fast rendering, however, their real-time animation is often challenged by the costly neural inference. We address this bottleneck and show that the animation of pretrained avatar models can be closely approximated by a linear combination of identity-independent blendshapes. Building on this finding, we introduce GALA (Gaussian Animation via Linear Approximation), a…
KaliBench: A Fine-Grained Benchmark for Cybersecurity Tool Use on Kali Linux with Runtime-Free Verifiable Rewards
LLMs are increasingly applied to cybersecurity workflows, where they are expected to translate analysts' intent into tool invocations. However, existing evaluations focus on knowledge-based assessments or end-to-end agentic tasks, and do not directly measure LLMs' ability to generate executable commands for real-world cybersecurity tools. This gap is critical because cybersecurity operations rely…
Reconstruct, Practice, Go Real: Guided Self-Improvement for Embodied Agents
Building reliable robot capabilities across diverse tasks requires substantial human effort to develop and maintain skills, design rewards, and integrate perception with control. We present Reconstruct, Practice, Go Real (RPG), a framework for autonomous improvement of robot execution systems without updating model weights. RPG identifies manipulation capabilities in an offline dataset and…
Embedding Prediction Helps Image Generation
In diffusion transformers, a class label or a text prompt is embedded once, and the same condition is reused at every denoising step. We ask whether predicted embeddings can serve as this condition instead. Next-Embedding Predictive Autoregression (NEPA) trains a Transformer to predict the next continuous embedding in a sequence. In generation, the clean image follows the noisy image, so its…
Reviews
Tesla rolls out an emergency drive-away feature after Supercharger shooting
Tesla's new feature will let you drive away with the Supercharger still connected in case of…
FDA approves artificial heart valve for kids that grows as they do
The FDA has approved a new artificial heart valve that eliminates the need for multiple surgeries in children with certain congenital heart…
Balcony solar installations will soon be legal in America's most populous state
California has joined nine other US states in approving balcony solar…
New Mexico wants Meta to pay $40 billion in penalties for Cambridge Analytica scandal
New Mexico's attorney argued that the penalties Meta has to pay need to be significant enough to make an impact on the…
That is the week in Signal. See the full dashboard for everything else that came through.