Encrypted ZFS Backups with zfsbackrest: An Experimental Tool

2025-09-01
Encrypted ZFS Backups with zfsbackrest: An Experimental Tool

zfsbackrest is an experimental tool providing pgbackrest-style encrypted backups for ZFS filesystems. It requires the age tool for key generation; encryption is mandatory. It supports full, diff, and incremental backups, and offers cleanup for expired and orphaned backups. Restoring requires your age identity file (private key). zfsbackrest leverages zfs snapshots for backup and restore, without directly modifying zfs datasets.

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Development

India's E-Waste Crisis: A Tale of Two Recycling Industries

2025-09-01
India's E-Waste Crisis: A Tale of Two Recycling Industries

India's booming electronics sector has fueled a $1.5 billion e-waste recycling industry, but 95% of its workforce consists of informal laborers facing dangerous and toxic conditions for meager pay. The article highlights Khatta, a Delhi dumpsite where a complex informal network operates, controlled by powerful families like the Maliks. While formal companies like Recyclekaro showcase a modern, regulated approach, the informal sector persists due to its profitability and resistance from large tech firms challenging new regulations. The story underscores the stark contrast between the formal and informal e-waste recycling industries in India, highlighting the environmental and social inequalities at play.

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Bear Note-Taking App Changes License to Combat Free-Riding

2025-09-01
Bear Note-Taking App Changes License to Combat Free-Riding

Herman, the developer of the Bear note-taking app, has announced a change in the app's open-source license from MIT to the Elastic License. This decision stems from instances of others forking the project to create competing services, harming the developer's interests. The Elastic License is nearly identical to MIT but adds a stipulation prohibiting the software from being offered as a hosted or managed service. The developer cites the rise of AI-powered coding, making it easier to create competing products, as a reason for this change, prioritizing the protection of their work and the app's long-term sustainability.

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Development

ABC: A Surprisingly Powerful and Easy-to-Learn Programming Language

2025-09-01

ABC is an interactive programming language designed as a user-friendly replacement for BASIC. Born from a task analysis of programming, it's surprisingly easy to learn (an hour or so for experienced programmers) yet powerful enough for experts. It boasts a concise set of five data types, strong typing without declarations, and no limitations besides memory exhaustion. Its environment is equally impressive, eliminating file management hassles and offering a consistent interface with undo functionality. ABC programs are often one-fourth to one-fifth the size of equivalent Pascal or C programs. The ABC Programmer's Handbook offers comprehensive documentation.

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Using Git for Music Production: A Developer's Approach

2025-09-01

A musician and software engineer discovered a clever use for Git, the version control system, in music production. Instead of creating numerous project file copies (like my-cool-song-new-vocals-brighter-mix-4.rpp), the author uses Git to track versions, simplifying project management and version rollback. The article details initializing a Git repository in Windows using Git Bash, creating a .gitignore to exclude unnecessary files, and using a Git GUI to view different versions. While Git isn't ideal for large binary files (like WAVs), it suffices for managing the main project file. The author also suggests using GitHub for backups and a TODO list, essentially giving the music project its own private, updatable online 'website'.

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Development

Master AI-Assisted Development: The Vibe Coding Resource Hub

2025-09-01
Master AI-Assisted Development: The Vibe Coding Resource Hub

This comprehensive resource hub offers a complete guide to Vibe Coding, catering to developers of all levels, from beginners to experts. Learn both traditional and streamlined Vibe Coding approaches through step-by-step tutorials, real-world examples, and expert guidance. Benefit from free, comprehensive content built on 10+ years of engineering expertise, perfect for zero-to-one founders, indie hackers, and junior developers.

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Development programming tutorials

arXivLabs: Building New arXiv Features with Community Collaboration

2025-09-01
arXivLabs: Building New arXiv Features with Community Collaboration

arXivLabs is a new framework that enables developers and community collaborators to build and share new features directly on the arXiv website. Individuals and organizations involved share arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners who adhere to them. If you have an idea for a project that will add value to the arXiv community, learn more about arXivLabs.

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Development

Amazon's Leadership Principles: A Critical Examination

2025-09-01

This article offers a critical look at Amazon's leadership principles, particularly "Customer Obsession," "Ownership," and "Bias for Action." The author argues that Amazon overemphasizes speed and meeting superficial customer demands, neglecting true customer needs and long-term value. Regarding "Customer Obsession," the author criticizes Amazon's over-reliance on customer feedback rather than proactively developing potentially impactful technologies. On "Ownership," the author points to a lack of communication and collaboration within Amazon, with significant information silos between teams. Concerning "Bias for Action," the author believes Amazon overemphasizes speed at the expense of product quality and customer trust, advocating for a "bias for inaction" mechanism at senior engineering levels to ensure high standards before product launches.

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Startup

High-Protein Diets: Hype or Health?

2025-09-01
High-Protein Diets: Hype or Health?

The recent surge in popularity of high-protein diets is challenged in this article. The author debunks claims of significant health and muscle-building benefits, citing numerous studies that link excessive protein intake, particularly from animal sources, to increased risks of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and premature mortality. A detailed analysis of research reveals how high protein may activate the mTOR pathway, promoting atherosclerosis. The importance of consistent exercise is emphasized. The conclusion? Don't obsess over protein intake; balanced nutrition and regular exercise are key.

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Building a Spherical Voxel Planet in Unity: Challenges and Solutions

2025-09-01
Building a Spherical Voxel Planet in Unity: Challenges and Solutions

A developer created a tech demo called Blocky Planet in Unity, attempting to map Minecraft's cubic voxels onto a spherical planet. This post details the challenges and solutions, including mapping a 2D grid to a 3D sphere, handling depth distortion while preserving block width, and efficiently finding neighboring blocks. The developer also discusses gravity, terrain generation, and block structures. While currently a tech demo, future plans include multiple planets/moons, chunk-based gravity, and planet collisions.

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Game Voxel Game

Ordered Concurrency in Go: Achieving Speed Without Sacrificing Order

2025-09-01
Ordered Concurrency in Go: Achieving Speed Without Sacrificing Order

Go's concurrency is a powerful feature, but it can disrupt the natural order of data processing. This article explores three approaches to building a high-performance ordered concurrent map in Go. The author presents three methods: a reply-to channel approach, a sync.Cond based turn-taking approach, and a permission-passing chain approach. Benchmarks reveal the permission-passing chain, especially when combined with a channel pool to eliminate allocations, as the clear winner in terms of performance and memory efficiency. This method cleverly uses channels for efficient point-to-point signaling, avoiding the 'thundering herd' problem and achieving a balance between concurrency and order.

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arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

2025-09-01
arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

arXivLabs is a framework for collaborators to build and share new arXiv features directly on the site. Individuals and organizations involved uphold arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only partners with those who share them. Got an idea to improve the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

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Tech

Beyond Text-to-SQL: Building an AI Data Analyst

2025-09-01

This article explores the challenges and solutions in building an AI data analyst. The author argues that simple text-to-SQL is insufficient for real-world user questions, requiring multi-step plans, external tools (like Python), and external context. Their team built a generative BI platform using a semantic layer powered by Malloy, a modeling language that explicitly defines business logic. This, combined with a multi-agent system, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and strategic model selection, achieves high-quality, low-latency data analysis. The platform generates SQL, writes Python for complex calculations, and integrates external data sources. The article stresses context engineering, retrieval system optimization, and model selection, while sharing solutions for common failure modes.

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Intel Patents 'Software Defined Supercore': A Single-Threaded Performance Boost?

2025-09-01
Intel Patents 'Software Defined Supercore': A Single-Threaded Performance Boost?

Intel has patented a technology called 'Software Defined Supercore' (SDC) designed to significantly improve single-threaded performance. SDC fuses multiple physical cores into a virtual 'supercore' by dividing a single thread's instructions and executing them in parallel. Specialized instructions maintain program order, maximizing instructions per clock (IPC) without increasing clock speed or core width. While currently just a patent, if successful, SDC could dramatically enhance single-thread performance in select applications on future Intel CPUs. The technology tackles the limitations of building extremely wide cores by using software and a small hardware module to manage synchronization and data transfer.

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CocoaPods Trunk Going Read-Only in December 2026

2025-09-01

The CocoaPods team announced plans to make the CocoaPods Trunk repository read-only on December 2nd, 2026, ceasing acceptance of new Podspecs. This move aims to enhance security and simplify maintenance. A phased notification process will be implemented, with a test run scheduled for November 2026. Existing builds will remain unaffected, but developers relying on CocoaPods Trunk for updates will need to adapt.

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Development read-only

Chronicle: A Pragmatic Event Sourcing Toolkit in Go

2025-09-01
Chronicle: A Pragmatic Event Sourcing Toolkit in Go

Chronicle is a pragmatic and type-safe event sourcing toolkit for Go. It simplifies versioning with embedded `aggregate.Base`, ensuring type safety with sum types. Supporting various backends (in-memory, SQLite, PostgreSQL), Chronicle tackles concurrency with optimistic locking, improves performance with snapshots, and offers features like event metadata and transformers for encryption and data transformation. This robust library streamlines modern event sourcing in Go applications.

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Development

ChatGPT-Assisted Swift App Dev: From Amazing to Crashing

2025-09-01
ChatGPT-Assisted Swift App Dev: From Amazing to Crashing

The author attempted to build a Swift app using ChatGPT-5. Initially, it was impressive, with ChatGPT generating code and modifying the UI based on natural language prompts. However, testing revealed numerous issues: search functionality failed, adding shows to the library didn't work, and ChatGPT's modifications introduced increasing errors and unwanted UI changes. Eventually, the app became unbuildable, leading to a frustrating cycle of troubleshooting that the author couldn't resolve with ChatGPT. This experience highlights that while ChatGPT can assist in development, its reliability and accuracy need improvement, especially for complex projects, requiring significant manual intervention and code review.

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Development

Turso: A 1GB Mystery Solved by an LLN

2025-09-01
Turso: A 1GB Mystery Solved by an LLN

Turso, a Rust rewrite of SQLite, encountered a bizarre issue: databases exceeding 1GB were reported as corrupted by SQLite, despite being perfectly intact. The root cause? SQLite inserts a special page at the 1GB mark, a step missing in Turso. Nikita, a remarkably skilled engineer on the Turso team (suspected to be an LLM or alien!), leveraged his seemingly superhuman knowledge to pinpoint and fix the bug. This highlights the importance of thorough testing and comprehensive documentation, showcasing the potential of LLMs in code understanding and debugging.

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Development

Blizzard's Diablo Team Unions, Citing Layoffs and AI Concerns

2025-09-01
Blizzard's Diablo Team Unions, Citing Layoffs and AI Concerns

Over 450 Blizzard developers on the Diablo team have successfully unionized with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), following a wave of layoffs at Microsoft. The unionization, fueled by concerns about job security and the increasing use of AI in game development, aims to secure better pay equity, address ethical AI concerns, ensure proper crediting, and advocate for remote work options. The Diablo team joins thousands of other unionized Microsoft game studio workers, highlighting a growing trend of worker organization within the gaming industry in response to corporate restructuring and technological advancements.

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USB-C Power Delivery: A Negotiation of Power Modes

2025-09-01
USB-C Power Delivery: A Negotiation of Power Modes

USB-C power delivery isn't a simple pass-through; it's a sophisticated negotiation. The source first broadcasts its supported voltages, current limits, and features (including optional PPS mode, allowing the sink to fine-tune voltage and current). The sink selects a mode and sends a request. The source assesses and decides to accept or reject. Upon acceptance, the source prepares the power and sends a ready signal. The sink also sends acknowledgements. Furthermore, Vendor Defined Messages (VDMs) negotiate data direction and other information; their openness determines whether they're good or bad.

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Hardware Power Delivery

Populist Strongmen: Threat or Remedy to Democracy?

2025-09-01

This paper investigates the relationship between populist attitudes and support for strongman leaders. It argues that populist attitudes are not monolithic, but rather encompass distinct forms: anti-establishment populism and authoritarian populism. While the former favors more direct democracy, the latter leans towards strongman leadership, even at the cost of democratic institutions and economic stability. Analyzing survey data from nine countries, the study finds that in most cases, support for populist leaders stems primarily from authoritarian populist attitudes, not anti-establishment ones. This suggests the appeal of populist strongmen lies not in democratic ideals, but in the allure of authoritarian governance.

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LLMs Democratize Compiler Creation: From Recipes to Workflows

2025-09-01
LLMs Democratize Compiler Creation: From Recipes to Workflows

This article presents a novel perspective on everyday tasks as compilation processes. Using cooking as an example, the author likens recipes to programs and the cooking process to compilation execution. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) makes creating domain-specific compilers unprecedentedly easy, even for those without programming experience. With LLMs, we can transform everyday tasks – fitness routines, business processes, even music creation – into programmable environments, increasing efficiency and deepening our understanding of everyday systems. This is not only a technological innovation but also a shift in thinking, extending the concept of compilers from code to all aspects of life.

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20 Rules for Efficient Knowledge Formulation in Learning

2025-09-01
20 Rules for Efficient Knowledge Formulation in Learning

This article by Piotr Wozniak outlines 20 rules for efficient knowledge acquisition, emphasizing the importance of understanding before memorization. It advocates for building a holistic picture before focusing on details, adhering to the minimum information principle, and utilizing imagery, mnemonic techniques, and avoiding sets and enumerations. The article uses numerous examples to illustrate how to transform complex knowledge into easily digestible formats, stressing the avoidance of interference, optimization of wording, personalized learning, leveraging emotional states, providing contextual cues, and the benefits of knowledge redundancy. Finally, it recommends providing sources, date stamping, and prioritization to ensure learning efficiency and long-term knowledge retention.

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Development

Nim: An Undervalued Systems Programming Language

2025-09-01

Nim is a systems programming language that blends the conciseness of Python with the power of C++. This article explores its strengths and weaknesses based on the author's experience. Nim boasts excellent cross-compilation capabilities, powerful metaprogramming features, and a memory management model (ORC/ARC in Nim 2) that rivals C++ and Rust. However, areas for improvement include tooling and debugging experience. Overall, Nim is a compelling systems programming language, offering a balance of conciseness, flexibility, and performance that makes it suitable for diverse applications.

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Development

Swift 6's Puzzling `@isolated(any)`: What You Need to Know

2025-09-01
Swift 6's Puzzling `@isolated(any)`: What You Need to Know

Swift 6 introduces the `@isolated(any)` attribute, which describes the isolation of asynchronous functions, initially appearing confusing. It always requires an argument, but this argument cannot vary. The article explains its introduction: to solve the problem of lost isolation information during asynchronous function scheduling. `@isolated(any)` provides access to a function's isolation property, enabling more intelligent scheduling, especially when handling `Task` and `TaskGroup`, ensuring the execution order of tasks on the MainActor. While it can mostly be ignored, understanding `@isolated(any)` is crucial for writing efficient and reliable concurrent code when dealing with asynchronous function isolation and scheduling.

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Rethinking Event-Driven Programming: A Bidirectional Observer Pattern in PHP

2025-09-01
Rethinking Event-Driven Programming: A Bidirectional Observer Pattern in PHP

Traditional observer patterns are observer-centric: events trigger passive reactions. This PHP Observer package shifts the perspective to the emitter. Emitters dispatch signals (events, plans, inquiries, commands), and observers can return counter-signals, creating a bidirectional dialogue. This allows for dynamic handling of complex workflows, such as canceling orders based on inventory or dynamically configuring libraries. The package offers seven signal types, robust error handling, and observability features, making it ideal for building responsive, emitter-driven applications.

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C++20's Strongly Happens Before: Untangling the Memory Model

2025-09-01

This article delves into C++20's newly introduced "strongly happens before" relationship, which solves a tricky problem within the C++ memory model. Using a simple multithreaded program example, the author progressively explains how modification order, coherence ordering, and the "strongly happens before" relationship constrain the order of concurrent execution. The article also analyzes why certain executions seemingly violating the C++ memory model are allowed on Power architectures and explains how "strongly happens before" fixes these inconsistencies, ultimately guaranteeing a single total order for all `memory_order::seq_cst` operations.

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Development

The Bloody Cane: Gutta-Percha, the Transatlantic Cable, and Environmental Destruction

2025-09-01
The Bloody Cane: Gutta-Percha, the Transatlantic Cable, and Environmental Destruction

The 1856 caning of Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks is a notorious event highlighting the fractured political climate before the American Civil War. Less known is the story of the cane itself, crafted from gutta-percha, a natural rubber from Southeast Asia. This seemingly innocuous material proved crucial to the 19th-century communications revolution, enabling the transatlantic telegraph cable. However, the insatiable demand led to widespread deforestation and environmental devastation, ultimately replaced by synthetic plastics. The story serves as a cautionary tale about the unforeseen consequences of technological advancement and the need for sustainable practices.

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Misc

Headless Saints and the French State's Neglect of its Churches

2025-09-01
Headless Saints and the French State's Neglect of its Churches

Many French churches feature a disturbing number of decapitated statues, a legacy of the French Revolution's anti-clerical sentiment. While nearly 250 years have passed, these heads remain absent, highlighting the French state's complex relationship with the Catholic Church. The state owns most churches built before 1905, yet their upkeep is often neglected, leaving many in disrepair. The article contrasts the decaying state of rural churches with the architectural marvel of Vézelay's Basilica of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, showcasing the enduring beauty of medieval religious architecture against the backdrop of secularization and state indifference.

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