Saveitforparts picked up a heavy Sigma 400mm XQ lens and its matching 2x teleconverter at a local thrift store for $14.99. He carried the whole assembly home, attached a simple adapter, and mounted it on a decade-old Sony NEX-3 digital camera. The goal looked simple on paper: point the bargain rig skyward when the International Space Station passed overhead and record whatever showed up in the frame.

He began by checking the pass predictions on n2yo.com and the NASA Spot the Station app to determine when and where the ISS would cross the sky above his position. Timing was critical since the ISS moves so quickly that one second too late leaves you with nothing but an empty blue sky. He placed the lens on its built-in tripod foot, approximately oriented it along the projected route, and simply waited for the bright little dot formed by sunlight reflecting off the station’s solar panels.

Sale

Gskyer Telescope, 70mm Aperture 400mm AZ Mount Astronomical Refracting Telescope for Kids Beginners…

• Superior Optics: 400mm(f/5.7) focal length and 70mm aperture, fully coated optics glass lens with high transmission coatings creates stunning images…
• Magnification: Come with two replaceable eyepieces and one 3x Barlow lens.3x Barlow lens trebles the magnifying power of each eyepiece. 5×24 finder…
• Wireless Remote: This refractor telescope includes one smart phone adapter and one Wireless camera remote to explore the nature of the world easily…

Getting a clear focus was difficult from the start, as dirt had gathered inside the old lens over time, dispersing light and destroying the details. So he began by practicing on the moon, adjusting the focus until the craters appeared sharp enough to see through the viewfinder. Getting the shutter speed and exposure exactly right required a delicate balance; too slow and the station blurred into a streak, too quick and the small dot vanished against the sky.

The first few passes produced exactly what he expected: a small white speck dead center in each frame. He switched to a Canon HF G70 camcorder with a 2.2x telephoto converter, which produced video rather than stills, but the results were still unimpressive. He was able to re-capture the station as a moving blob, occasionally catching a glimpse of its center body and extending solar arrays when the alignment and illumination conditions were exactly right.

He was fired up and undeterred, so he focused on solar transits. These events last less than 4 seconds and occur low on the horizon, 12,000 kilometers away from the station. He put a pair of solar viewing glasses over the camcorder lens to block out some of the sun’s brightness, programmed the camera to capture a series of photos in quick succession at 1/250th of a second, and waited for the projected moment to arrive. But the atmospheric haze from the morning added another layer of distortion, making it a little difficult, but he still managed to capture a few frames that showed the station as a clear black speck traveling across the sun’s disk. Taking those frames and putting them together in software proved that the timing was exactly what the transit calculation predicted.

Every attempt revealed the same limitations, with the total focal length reaching a whopping 800mm on the still camera and even more on the camcorder, but the station remained too far away to capture any full-on structural details. Hand-tracked motions were a pain; there was no fancy motorized mount to speak of, so any tiny movement during the limited window could put the target straight out of view. A full moon transit was cut short by a bank of clouds and a lot of bad luck.
[Source]

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need Connections hints.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc’s Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.

Sam Altman posted on X at 2:33 a.m. on 2 May: “you can sign in to openclaw with your chatgpt account now and use your subscription there! happy lobstering.” The announcement, delivered with the casual register of a founder pushing a minor product update, is anything but minor. OpenAI has made its ChatGPT subscription the authentication and billing layer for OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent framework that became the fastest-growing project in GitHub history, accumulated 346,000 stars in under five months, and is now used by more than three million people. ChatGPT Plus subscribers can log in via OAuth, access GPT-5.4 through the Codex endpoint, and run autonomous AI agents on their own hardware for $23 per month total. OpenAI did not build the most popular AI agent in the world. It hired the developer, backed the foundation, and opened the login.

The lobster

OpenClaw was created in November 2025 by Peter Steinberger, an Austrian developer who had previously sold a software company for $100 million and was experimenting with AI coding tools in a Madrid cafe. The first version was called Clawdbot, a play on Anthropic’s Claude with a lobster mascot. Anthropic filed a trademark complaint. Steinberger renamed it Moltbot, then, because that “never quite rolled off the tongue,” renamed it again to OpenClaw. The lobster stayed.

The product is a locally hosted AI agent that connects to large language models, Claude, GPT, DeepSeek, and others, and operates through the messaging apps people already use: WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Discord, Slack, iMessage, Microsoft Teams. It manages calendars, sends emails, organises files, writes code, browses the web, and executes multi-step workflows autonomously. The data stays on the user’s machine. The agent runs continuously in the background. Jensen Huang called it “the most popular open-source project in the history of humanity” at Nvidia’s GTC conference in March. It surpassed React’s ten-year GitHub record in 60 days.

In February, Altman announced that Steinberger was joining OpenAI to “drive the next generation of personal agents” and that OpenClaw would be moved to an independent foundation with OpenAI’s continued support and funding. Sequoia distributed 200 engraved Mac Minis at an AI event as OpenClaw became the infrastructure layer that venture capitalists could not own, and the signal from Silicon Valley’s most influential firms was clear: the agent layer was going to be open, and the business models would have to be built around it rather than on top of it.

The opposite bets

On 4 April, Anthropic blocked Claude Pro and Max subscribers from using their flat-rate subscription plans with OpenClaw and other third-party AI agent frameworks. The reason was cost: OpenClaw agents running autonomously can generate thousands of API calls per day, consuming far more compute than a human typing queries into a chat window. Anthropic decided that unlimited subscription access through an agent framework was economically unsustainable and shut it down.

Anthropic’s decision to ban OpenClaw from Claude subscriptions was a defensive move to protect margins. OpenAI’s decision to do the opposite, to open ChatGPT subscriptions to OpenClaw, is an offensive one. By making ChatGPT the default backend for the world’s most popular agent framework, OpenAI is betting that the volume of new subscribers will more than compensate for the increased compute cost per user. The economics only work if OpenClaw converts a significant number of its 3.2 million users into paying ChatGPT subscribers. If it does, OpenAI will have acquired a distribution channel for its subscription product that no amount of marketing could have built.

The competitive dynamics are stark. Anthropic looked at OpenClaw and saw a cost problem. OpenAI looked at the same product and saw a distribution opportunity. One company locked the door. The other opened it and handed out the keys.

The risks

OpenClaw’s rapid growth has been accompanied by equally rapid security failures. In late January, a critical remote code execution vulnerability, CVE-2026-25253, was disclosed: any website a user visited could silently connect to the agent’s local server through an unvalidated WebSocket, chaining a cross-site hijack into full code execution on the user’s machine. Security researchers audited ClawHub, OpenClaw’s skills marketplace, and found 824 confirmed malicious entries out of 10,700 available skills, with 335 traced to a single coordinated attack operation. More than 30,000 OpenClaw instances were found exposed on the public internet without authentication. Moltbook, the social layer for agents, suffered a breach that exposed 1.5 million API tokens and thousands of private conversations.

The vulnerabilities have been patched in current versions. The problem is that a significant portion of the installed base is running older, unpatched versions. Anything before version 2026.1.30 remains vulnerable to at least some of the disclosed exploits, and attackers are still targeting them. OpenAI’s decision to tie its ChatGPT subscription to OpenClaw means that OpenAI’s brand, its billing system, and its user credentials are now flowing through an open-source platform that has had more security incidents in four months than most enterprise software accumulates in a decade.

The ecosystem

Nvidia turned OpenClaw into an enterprise platform with NemoClaw, adding security hardening, compliance features, and integration with Nvidia’s inference infrastructure. Tencent launched ClawPro, an enterprise AI agent platform built on OpenClaw’s architecture and optimised for the Chinese market. Meta launched Manus AI as a desktop agent, a competing approach that runs as a native application rather than through messaging apps. The agent layer is now a battlefield where every major technology company is staking a position.

The ChatGPT subscription integration positions OpenAI at the centre of this ecosystem without requiring it to own or control the agent framework itself. OpenClaw remains open source, governed by an independent foundation, and compatible with multiple language model providers. But with Anthropic blocking access and OpenAI enabling it, the practical effect is that OpenClaw’s three million users are being funnelled toward ChatGPT as their default model. The foundation structure gives OpenAI deniability. The subscription integration gives it distribution.

The model

The economics are unusual. A ChatGPT Plus subscription costs $20 per month. OpenClaw Launch Lite, a hosted management layer, costs $3 per month. For $23, a user gets access to GPT-5.4 through OpenClaw’s agent framework without per-token API charges. This is substantially cheaper than using the OpenAI API directly, which would cost hundreds of dollars per month at the volume an autonomous agent generates. OpenAI is subsidising agent usage through its subscription tier, betting that the lifetime value of a subscriber who uses ChatGPT through OpenClaw is higher than the compute cost of serving their agent’s requests.

This is the same logic that drove mobile carriers to subsidise smartphones: give away the hardware economics to lock in the subscription revenue. OpenAI is giving away the agent access to lock in the ChatGPT subscription. If the bet works, ChatGPT becomes not just a chatbot but the default intelligence layer for a generation of autonomous AI agents that manage people’s digital lives. If it does not work, OpenAI will have opened its most valuable product to a compute-intensive use case that burns through inference capacity without generating proportional revenue.

Altman’s tweet was seven words and a lobster joke. The decision behind it is one of the most consequential distribution bets OpenAI has made since launching ChatGPT. The most popular open-source project in history now runs on your ChatGPT subscription. Whether that is a masterstroke or a margin trap depends entirely on whether three million lobster enthusiasts convert into paying customers, and whether the agent they are running on their laptops is secure enough to deserve the trust that both OpenAI and its subscribers are placing in it.

Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

You’ve seen this comic before: An anthropomorphic dog sits smiling, surrounded by flames, and says, “This is fine.”

It’s become one of the most durable memes of the past decade, and now AI startup Artisan seems to have incorporated it into an ad campaign — an ad for which KC Green, the artist who created the comic, said his art was stolen.

A Bluesky post seems to show an ad in a subway station featuring Green’s art, except the dog says, “[M]y pipeline is on fire,” and an overlaid message urges passersby to “Hire Ava the AI BDR.”

Quoting that post, Green said he’s “been getting more folks telling me about this” and that “it’s not anything [I] agreed to.” Instead, he said the ad has “been stolen like AI steals,” and he told followers to “please vandalize it if and when you see it.”

Software that collects public data from the Internet and uses it to provide half-assed answers to your questions might seem like a modern craze, but today we bid farewell to a website that helped pioneer pretend conversations all the way back in 1997 — as of May 1st, Ask Jeeves is no more.

Well, technically they dropped the “Jeeves” part back in 2006. Since then it’s just been Ask.com, but as the name implies the idea was more or less the same. Rather than the relatively rigid parameters and keywords required by traditional search engines, you could ask Jeeves questions about the world using natural language. Early advertisements showed the virtual valet answering arbitrary questions like “How many calories in a banana?,” which of course today seems commonplace and utterly unimpressive, but was a pretty wild for the 1990s.

It might seem surprising that a site designed from day one to offer a human-like Q&A experience should fold right as such technology is becoming commonplace. But of course, that commonality is the problem. When Google can answer your questions just as well (or poorly…) as Jeeves or anyone else, what’s the benefit for the average Internet user to seek out another service? But it’s still somewhat ironic, which is probably why the farewell message on Ask.com ends with the line “Jeeves’ spirit endures.”

While on the subject of technology that’s potentially ahead of its time, MacRumors is reporting that Apple is giving up on their Vision Pro augmented reality googles. They haven’t been formally discontinued as of yet, but sources indicate that the internal development team for the entire product line has been disbanded and reassigned to other projects within the company. This comes after a October 2025 refresh of the hardware still failed to connect with consumers. Insiders have said that not only were sales sluggish on the ~$3,500 headsets, but that they were getting returned at a far higher rate than any of Apple’s other hardware products.

Now, we’re hardly Apple apologists here at Hackaday. It sort of goes without saying that the whole “Walled Garden” thing doesn’t really fit our ethos. But we can’t deny that the Vision Pro is an impressive piece of technology. After years of sticking our phones in crappy plastic headsets, or trying to force hardware designed for VR gaming to do literally anything else, the Vision Pro offered a practical way to put augmented reality to work. But even for a company known for producing expensive hardware, the price tag was just too much for most consumers.

We’ll go out on a limb here and predict that the Vision Pro will one day be looked back on like the Newton — a product that was too expensive and niche to be a commercial success when it came out, but still a technical milestone that gave us a glimpse into the shape of things to come.

Speaking of a technology that will inevitably become more common, the European Patent Office (EPO) released a report this week showing a seven-fold increase in the number of inventions intended for battery reuse and recycling over the last decade. Given our insatiable demand for rechargeable batteries, it should come as no surprise that there’s a huge push for new methods of squeezing more use out of cells. As noted several times by the EPO, it’s not purely about saving money either. Even if Europe produces the batteries domestically, they need to import the raw materials. Relying on foreign countries to provide critical infrastructure can be precarious in the best of times, and is likely to only become more politically onerous in the future.

Finally, we’ll leave you with a fun way to waste some time on a Sunday evening: Visible Zorker. Created by Andrew Plotkin, this website allows you to not only play through all three installments of Zork, but presents a debugger-style view of the source code as the game is running. Even if you’re not terribly interested in seeing how your responses are parsed, the map that shows your progress through the world is certainly handy. The project was actually started back in 2025, but Andrew just completed the trilogy by adding support for Zork III a couple days ago so now is the perfect time to check it out.

See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.

Apple has set its sights on India’s antitrust watchdog, questioning the legality of a request for its financial data as part of an ongoing battle over its App Store policies.

India’s competition body wants the information so it can calculate what penalty Apple should face. This comes after a 2024 investigation found that Apple had abused its dominant position in the market.

Reuters reports that Apple could be on the hook for a whopping $38 billion penalty. However, in court documents seen by the news outlet, Apple has pushed back on India’s request for financial data. The company doesn’t believe that the antitrust body has exceeded its powers as part of its request for financial data.

Apple had previously been given until May 21, 2026, to submit the data required to calculate the penalty. Now, it’s gone on the offensive and chosen to challenge India’s entire antitrust penalty system via a New Delhi court.

The court will convene on May 15 to discuss the matter.

A recurring theme for Apple

India remains a key market for Apple, with iPhones making up almost 10% of the smartphone market. That’s double the 4% figure from just two years ago, the report notes.

For its part, Apple argues that it is still small fry compared to Google’s Android. Android makes up the vast majority of the Indian smartphone market.

India is far from the first country to consider Apple in breach of local antitrust laws. The company has been embroiled in a legal battle with the European Union for years.

Antitrust bodies around the globe believe that Apple is abusing its market position by preventing third-party iPhone app stores. The EU successfully forced Apple to allow such stores in the bloc, and others are working to follow suit.