function calling

World leaders, citing climate change as an existential threat, are demanding that the United Nations function effectively on the issue. The call reflects frustration among governments over stalled international climate action and the UN's struggles to deliver coordinated global responses to warming, extreme weather and rising sea levels affecting member states.

Google is phasing out its custom Gemini chatbots known as Gems and migrating their functionality into a new feature called Skills. The change means users will have to adapt as existing Gems are transitioned automatically. German tech coverage notes the move as Google continuing to reshape its Gemini assistant platform.

A new open-source project called Durable Actors has launched on GitHub, offering durable objects functionality with configurable compute. The project, published by TerseAI, lets developers run stateful actors with compute resources they can adjust per workload. It is being discussed on Hacker News, where commenters are weighing how it compares to Cloudflare's Durable Objects and other stateful serverless options.

A new write-up explains how to invoke a function in C without ever referencing it by name, walking through techniques such as obtaining its address indirectly and calling it through function pointers. Developers are debating the tricks, their portability across compilers, and whether such approaches are ever justified outside obfuscation, systems programming, or niche low-level use cases.

A letter by former judges concerning elections has drawn attention in India, amid a wider controversy over dissent within the Election Commission. Senior lawyer Harish Salve weighed in, saying there was 'no decision' and calling for an end to the dispute. The exchange has put the independence and internal functioning of the election body back into public focus.

A project called qcaml presents an approach to quantitative finance using the OCaml programming language. The site outlines using OCaml, a functional language valued for correctness and performance, in financial modeling and computation. Developers are discussing the project, which is notable because OCaml sees far less use in finance than Python, C++ or Julia, prompting debate about trade-offs in tooling for quantitative work.

A project called NAND-16 presents a complete 16-bit computer constructed using 277,248 NAND gates, demonstrating that a functional machine can be built from a single type of logic gate. The design is drawing attention from hardware enthusiasts discussing its scale, architecture and what it reveals about the fundamentals of digital computing.

Scottish artist Gregor Harvie has created a new artwork called Superposition to mark 100 years since Erwin Schrödinger published his famous equation, which governs how the wave function of a physical system changes over time. The piece was made in collaboration with others and celebrates the centenary of one of the founding results of quantum mechanics.

A new blog post by Debasish Ghosh examines the programming idiom 'push ifs up and fors down', which encourages developers to move conditionals toward the top of the call stack while keeping iteration lower, using algebraic reasoning about functions and effects. The piece walks through the idea's theoretical basis and then discusses where the rule breaks down in practice. Readers are debating whether the guidance holds up in real-world codebases.

A new article explains 'codemode', the idea of giving software agents a way to act by writing and executing code rather than relying on fixed tool calls. The piece has drawn attention on Hacker News, where readers are debating what the approach means for how AI agents are built and how developers should expose functionality to them.

Dutch media report that military rail transport in the Netherlands needs to be made more efficient so it can function in times of war. Haarlems Dagblad highlights calls to streamline the movement of military equipment and personnel by rail, reflecting broader European concerns about defence readiness and logistics.

India's Congress party is holding protests in Delhi, including a gathering at Jantar Mantar, demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Party leaders and workers are calling for his removal amid ongoing criticism of the Election Commission's functioning, with coverage drawing comparisons to past protest movements at the site.

Codeset, a coding platform, is promoting something called the 'Mystery Function', an undisclosed feature or challenge that has drawn curiosity among developers online. With no details revealed about what the function actually does, the secrecy itself is fueling speculation and discussion in programming communities.

Victoria Zuo, a partner at venture firm QED Investors, is discussing what she calls finance's 'human-not-present' economy, in which financial services increasingly operate without human involvement, driven by automation and artificial intelligence. Her remarks highlight how lending, payments and advisory functions are being reshaped as machines replace human decision-making in consumer finance.

The Lute-gen study has turned attention to the so-called Eye–Brain Axis in teenage nutrition, examining how lutein, a carotenoid found in leafy greens and eggs, may support both visual performance and cognitive function in adolescents. The findings are drawing interest from the nutraceutical sector, where formulations aimed at eye health are increasingly being positioned around brain benefits as well.

A new open-source project called OpenAPPA is drawing attention for promising deterministic guardrails that constrain AI agents without breaking their functionality. The tool is positioned as a safety layer for agentic systems, letting developers enforce strict, predictable rules on agent behavior while keeping agents useful. Discussion is focused on how such guardrails fit into the broader push to make autonomous AI agents safer to deploy.

Sociologist Harel Shapira's book "Basic Pistol" examines what Americans learn in firearms training courses beyond shooting skills. The Texas Observer highlights the book, quoting a course participant describing the range as a place where "I guess you could call it a church." The review suggests gun classes function as social and cultural spaces, drawing attention to how Americans form identity and community around firearms.

Kosovo is facing a prolonged political deadlock that is raising the prospect of fresh elections, while protests against former rebel leaders add to tensions in the country. The standoff has left the government unable to function normally, and observers are watching whether snap elections will be called to resolve the impasse.

A blog post on wiro.world explains how to call a C function without directly naming it in the source code, a technique likely relying on tricks such as function pointers, obfuscated references, or computed addresses. The post has drawn modest attention among programmers, earning 12 points and a handful of comments on Hacker News, where developers are discussing the practicality and legitimacy of the approach.

A startup built in Rust has announced what it calls a reimplementation of Microsoft Office, saying the bulk of the code was written with Anthropic's Claude AI assistant. The project aims to recreate core office-suite functionality in the Rust language, and the announcement is drawing attention to how far AI-assisted coding can go in rebuilding large, established software products.

Developers are debating a common misconception in AI engineering: structured output and function calling only guarantee that a large language model's response conforms to a schema, not that the values inside it are accurate. Teams that treat schema validation as a success metric risk shipping tool calls that parse perfectly but are semantically wrong, arguing for deeper correctness checks beyond format validation.

UNICEF is calling on governments to secure and adapt birth registration systems as climate change-induced disasters displace families and destroy civil records. Without functioning registration, children affected by floods, storms and displacement risk losing access to education, healthcare and legal identity. The agency argues that resilient, digital-ready registration infrastructure should be treated as essential climate adaptation, not just paperwork.

A clean-room, open-source reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop called Photocraft has appeared on GitHub, written entirely in Rust. The project aims to recreate Photoshop's functionality without using any of Adobe's code. Developers are sharing the repository and debating how realistic it is to replicate a professional image editor of this complexity.

Researchers say they have identified a so-called third state of being that sits between life and death. The claim suggests some cells can continue to organise and function after an organism has died, challenging the traditional binary view of life and death. The report is circulating widely as readers debate what it could mean for biology and medicine.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin warned that many security experts assume only elliptic curve cryptography is at risk from quantum computing, while hash functions and lattice-based schemes remain safe. He cautioned that AI-driven mathematical breakthroughs over the next two years could seriously undermine the concrete security of lattice-based cryptography, calling this a major concern for post-quantum defenses.