Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

OpenCut: A Privacy-Focused, Open-Source Video Editor

2025-07-14

OpenCut is a free and open-source video editor for web, desktop, and mobile. Prioritizing user privacy, all videos remain on your device. While its basic features are currently behind a paywall, its ease of use has been proven. It boasts timeline-based editing, multi-track support, real-time preview, and is free of watermarks or subscriptions. Built with Next.js, the project includes UI components, custom React hooks, utility and API logic, state management, and TypeScript types. Detailed setup and contribution guidelines are provided; contributions are welcome.

(github.com)

Development open-source video editor

Your Data, Your Privacy: AI Writing Assistant Running Locally

2025-07-14

This macOS application uses locally-running large language models (LLMs), ensuring your documents, text, and writing never leave your Mac. It's compatible with most macOS apps including Mail, Messages, Safari, and more. A 7-day free trial (no credit card required) is available, with a 50% discount for students and educators. All processing happens locally, prioritizing your data privacy and security.

(refine.sh)

Development

Let's Learn x86-64 Assembly! Part 0: Setup and First Steps

2025-07-14

This blog post is the first part of a series on x86-64 assembly language. The author recounts outdated university x86 assembly teaching and decides to write a modern tutorial. The tutorial uses Flat Assembler (FASM) and WinDbg, explaining core concepts like registers, memory addressing, and the 64-bit Windows calling convention. A simple Windows program is created, demonstrating compilation with FASM and debugging with WinDbg.

(gpfault.net)

Development x86-64 assembly

Infisical is Hiring a Developer Relations Lead to Build the Future of Open Source Security

2025-07-13

Infisical, the open-source security infrastructure platform backed by Y Combinator, Google, and Elad Gil, is seeking a Developer Relations expert. This role requires a strong technical background and exceptional communication skills to create engaging technical content (blogs, videos, livestreams) and foster community engagement. The ideal candidate will be deeply familiar with software engineering, developer tools, and infrastructure, and comfortable creating content across multiple formats. This is a challenging and fast-paced opportunity to shape Infisical's developer community strategy and help developers securely manage secrets, PKI, keys, and SSH workflows.

(www.ycombinator.com)

Development Developer Relations

C++ Coroutines: A Deep Dive into Customization

2025-07-13

C++ coroutines aren't a ready-to-use library like `std::vector`; they're a specification defining customization points requiring implementation by library writers. Extending the function concept, they support suspend, resume, and destroy operations. The `co_await` keyword marks a coroutine, and `Task::promise_type` customizes behavior at call, return, suspend, and resume points. The `awaiter` and `awaitable` mechanisms handle suspension and resumption, enabling resumption when dependencies are ready, providing flexible asynchronous programming.

(uvdn7.github.io)

Development

TorchLeet: A PyTorch Deep Learning Playground

2025-07-13

TorchLeet is a curated collection of PyTorch practice problems, categorized into two sets: a foundational set covering basic to advanced PyTorch concepts (linear regression, custom datasets, CNNs, etc.), and a challenging LLM set focusing on building LLMs from scratch (attention mechanisms, embeddings, and more). Each problem provides incomplete code with solutions, fostering hands-on learning. Perfect for beginners and experts alike.

(github.com)

Development

C3's Temp Allocator: Automatic Memory Management Without the Overhead

2025-07-13

C3 introduces a novel memory management solution called the Temp allocator, combining the ease of garbage collection with the performance of manual memory management. Leveraging memory regions (arenas), the Temp allocator automatically frees memory when a function's scope ends, preventing memory leaks without the complexity of RAII, reference counting, or garbage collection. Using the `@pool()` macro defines memory regions, allowing developers to easily manage temporary variable lifecycles, with Valgrind tests demonstrating its effectiveness. C3 even automatically adds a `@pool()` scope to the `main()` function if no explicit one is provided, further simplifying the development process. The Temp allocator lets C3 developers enjoy the performance of manual memory management without the risk of memory leaks.

(c3-lang.org)

Development C3 programming language Temp allocator

Simple Homelab Monitoring: Ditching Prometheus for a Tiny Go Program

2025-07-13

Tired of complex monitoring tools, the author built a minimalist monitoring system for their homelab. This Go program regularly checks HTTP, DNS, etc., and sends notifications via ntfy.sh. It's lightweight, easy to maintain, and only checks if services are running, sending failure and recovery notifications—no historical data or dashboards needed. Furthermore, healthchecks.io acts as a dead man's switch to prevent the monitoring program itself from going unnoticed. While simple, this system meets the author's needs and avoids complex configuration and maintenance.

(b.tuxes.uk)

Development

Tool Calling via REST API: A Step-by-Step Guide

2025-07-13

This article demonstrates how to call tools via a REST API, enabling interaction between an LLM and external tools. Using the query "Do you have AirPods Pro in stock?" as an example, it outlines a two-step process: sending the prompt and tool definitions to the LLM provider's endpoint, and then receiving the LLM's response with the tool call. This showcases how LLMs can leverage external tools to expand their capabilities and handle more complex tasks.

(muthuishere.medium.com)

Development

Critique of Graham's Lisp Coding Style

2025-07-13

This review analyzes the maintainability and portability of Graham's Lisp code, finding it concise with short, well-motivated function definitions. However, it criticizes his overly brief and cryptic naming conventions, excessive use of nested if statements, avoidance of loop constructs, and preference for recursion over iteration, even at the risk of stack overflows. These stylistic choices deviate from common Lisp practices and can negatively impact code readability.

(courses.cs.northwestern.edu)

Development Programming Practices

AI Coding Tools: Productivity Killers?

2025-07-13

A randomized controlled trial involving 16 experienced developers revealed that AI coding tools, contrary to expectations, decreased software development speed by 19%. The study attributed this slowdown to factors such as over-optimism about AI's usefulness, high developer familiarity with the codebase, the complexity of large repositories, and low AI reliability. While AI tools can expedite testing and automate tasks, the need for manual code validation and the lack of learning capabilities negate overall time savings. The researchers emphasize that these findings don't dismiss the future potential of AI tools but highlight the current limitations.

(www.theregister.com)

Development

A Plea for a Paid Version of Firefox

2025-07-13

A longtime Mozilla supporter urges the creation of a paid version of Firefox. They argue that the current ad-supported model ultimately leads to product degradation and compromised user experience. A paid version would allow users to directly fund Firefox development, receiving an ad-free, privacy-focused experience. A free and open-source version would remain available, ensuring accessibility. The author believes this model could attract more users and prevent Mozilla from following Facebook's path to 'enshittification'.

(discourse.mozilla.org)

Development Paid Model

Securely Deploy Web Services with Cloudflare Tunnel: A Beginner's Guide

2025-07-13

Tired of complex server configurations and security headaches? Cloudflare Tunnel offers a simple and secure solution to deploy web services without exposing ports. By creating an outbound connection from your server to Cloudflare's nearest datacenter, all traffic flows through Cloudflare's secure network, ensuring your server's safety and reliability regardless of its location. This guide walks you through setting up Cloudflare Tunnel, including installing the cloudflared client, creating a tunnel, configuring a system service, and setting up DNS records—a process easily manageable even for beginners.

(erisa.dev)

Development Web Service Deployment

GhidrAssistMCP: AI-Powered Reverse Engineering for Ghidra

2025-07-13

GhidrAssistMCP is a powerful Ghidra extension providing an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, enabling AI assistants and other tools to interact with Ghidra's reverse engineering capabilities via a standardized API. It boasts 31 built-in tools covering functions, data, cross-references, and more, along with a configurable UI, real-time logging, and dynamic tool management. This extension seamlessly integrates AI-powered analysis tools and custom scripts, boosting reverse engineering efficiency significantly.

(github.com)

Development

pattrns: A Novel Music Sequence Generator in Rust and Lua

2025-07-13

pattrns is an experimental imperative-style music sequence generator engine written in Rust, also offering a Lua scripting interface for dynamic music creation, ideal for live coding. It uses a three-stage architecture (Rhythm, Gate, Emitter) separating rhythmic and tonal aspects for flexible composition and recombination. It also supports Tidal Cycles mini-notation. Note that pattrns only generates raw musical events; audio output requires a compatible application.

(github.com)

Development

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: The Unreleased Audio/Video Chapter

2025-07-13

The third edition of "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" includes an unreleased chapter on working with audio, video, and webcams. This blog post shares the chapter's content, detailing how to write Python code to record and play multimedia. It covers audio and video data formats, recording from webcams and microphones, playing audio files (using playsound and Pygame), downloading videos with yt-dlp, and editing videos and audio with ffmpeg. Learn to automate tasks like batch-processing video files, creating time-lapses, or building a photo booth feature into your applications.

(inventwithpython.com)

Development Multimedia Processing

Parse, Don't Validate: Enhancing C Security with Type Safety

2025-07-13

This post advocates for a 'Parse, Don't Validate' approach in C programming. By defining custom types (e.g., email_t, name_t) and parsing untrusted input into these types immediately, the inherent risks of pointer manipulation and type mismatches in C are mitigated. This strategy confines raw string handling to the system's boundaries, prevents internal function misuse, and leverages the compiler's type checking to catch errors like parameter swapping. The result is more robust and maintainable C code with reduced attack surface.

(www.lelanthran.com)

Development

Aeron: Blazing Fast Messaging for High-Performance Systems

2025-07-13

Aeron is a high-performance, low-latency messaging system supporting UDP unicast, multicast, and IPC. It offers Java, C, C++, and .NET clients, enabling efficient message exchange across machines or via IPC. Aeron boasts exceptional throughput and predictable low latency, leveraging Simple Binary Encoding (SBE) for optimized message handling. Features include Aeron Archive for persistent message storage and Aeron Cluster for fault-tolerant services. Owned and operated by Adaptive Financial Consulting, Aeron also provides premium services including training, consulting, and performance enhancements like kernel bypass and high-speed encryption. Ideal for building high-frequency trading systems and other demanding applications.

(github.com)

Development low-latency messaging

R&D Startup Disaster: A Costly Mistake in Data Collection

2025-07-13

An R&D startup conducting a psychology study lost all collected data due to a simple yet devastating bug. Their PHP code used `mail() or die()`, causing the script to terminate prematurely when an email failed to send (due to lack of internet access in the testing environment). This resulted in no data being saved to the database. The experience highlighted the importance of graceful error handling and thorough testing across different environments. The team learned from the costly mistake, improved their coding practices, and transitioned away from PHP to safer languages like JavaScript, Go, and Python.

(thetechenabler.substack.com)

Development data loss

Zig's Asynchronous I/O Revolution: Decoupling Concurrency from Execution Models

2025-07-13

Zig is revolutionizing its asynchronous I/O model, aiming to decouple async/await from the execution model for improved code reusability and performance. A new `Io` interface allows users to customize I/O implementations and supports concurrent operations. `io.async` and `Future.await` simplify expressing concurrency without worrying about the underlying execution model. Zig will offer various `Io` implementations, including thread pool, green threads, and stackless coroutines, for different needs and platform compatibility. This enhances Zig's flexibility and efficiency in handling asynchronous I/O while avoiding the common "function color" problem in traditional async programming.

(kristoff.it)

Development

Hacking Coroutines into C: A Mad Macro Experiment

2025-07-13

This article details the author's ingenious use of C macros to implement coroutines in embedded software development, avoiding the need for an RTOS and simplifying complex control flow logic. The author illustrates the complexity of the traditional state machine approach with an LED blinker example, then uses macros to transpile coroutine code into explicit state machines, achieving async-like functionality. While this method is verbose, it demonstrates the possibility of concurrent programming without an RTOS and showcases programmer creativity and deep understanding of low-level techniques. The article concludes by recommending Rust for serious coroutine development.

(wiomoc.de)

Development

arXivLabs: Collaborative Development of arXiv Features

2025-07-13

arXivLabs is a framework enabling collaboration on new arXiv features directly on the website. Participants must embrace arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. Got an idea to improve arXiv for its community? Learn more about arXivLabs and join the effort!

(arxiv.org)

Development

Running Claude Code Securely in Docker with VSCode Dev Containers

2025-07-13

The author shares their experience transitioning from a less secure AI coding setup to running Claude Code in a Docker container using VSCode's Dev Container feature. Highlighting the security risks of running AI agents directly on the local machine, the author advocates for the isolated environment provided by Docker, limiting Claude Code's access to the filesystem. A detailed setup guide is provided, including creating a devcontainer.json file and using Fine-Grained access tokens for GitHub, making it easy for readers to replicate the setup.

(timsh.org)

Development

A Funny Bug in Chrome's MV3 Extensions

2025-07-13

Google Chrome's transition from MV2 to MV3 removed the webRequestBlocking permission, breaking many ad blockers. However, the author discovered a quirky bug: due to the use of JavaScript bindings in Chrome extension APIs, manipulating parameters in the `chrome.webRequest` event constructor allowed bypassing permission checks and enabling ad blocking. While this bug didn't pose a security risk, it highlighted potential issues lurking in legacy code and the possibility of achieving unexpected results by cleverly exploiting technical details. The author reported the bug to Google, and it has since been patched.

(0x44.xyz)

Development

BinaryRPC: A High-Throughput C++ RPC Framework

2025-07-12

Frustrated by performance issues with a Java WebSocket server, a newly graduated engineer turned to C++ and uWebSockets to build BinaryRPC, a high-throughput RPC framework. Inspired by Node.js and Express.js, BinaryRPC boasts a modern middleware and session management system, supporting multiple QoS levels for reliable messaging. Now open-source, it's well-documented and includes examples for easy adoption.

(github.com)

Development

Deus Ex Speedrun Timer in D: A Game Hacking Journey

2025-07-12

Frustrated by the lack of suitable speedrun tools for Deus Ex on Linux, a speedrunner embarked on a project to create a custom timer in D. This article details the process, from initial failed attempts at finding a loading flag, to learning Linux system calls (ptrace and process_vm_readv), reverse engineering to locate suitable memory for code injection, and finally implementing the core timer functionality. The author shares experiences using D, and notes limitations such as incomplete exception handling and save-screen support.

(bradley.chatha.dev)

Development

Building a C Compiler with "Writing a C Compiler": A Step-by-Step Journey

2025-07-12

The author plans to work through "Writing a C Compiler" chapter by chapter, documenting their progress in blog posts. This book provides a step-by-step approach to building a C compiler, culminating in a working compiler by the end of chapter one, with additional features added in subsequent chapters. A comprehensive test suite is included, enabling thorough verification. The author highlights the book's excellent, incremental approach, comprehensive test suite, and focus on a real-world language (C), praising it as an exceptional resource for learning compiler construction.

(jollygoodsw.wordpress.com)

Development

Fabrication of a Superconducting Qubit Chip: A Detailed Process

2025-07-12

This paper details the fabrication process of a superconducting qubit chip, improving upon existing methods to enhance reproducibility. The process involves: using a 6-inch silicon wafer as substrate, sputtering a 200nm niobium film, photolithography and plasma etching to pattern the niobium, electron beam lithography to prepare Josephson junctions, aluminum deposition to form the junctions, and finally dicing and lift-off. The paper also describes the experimental setup for qubit characterization and measurement, including the cryogenic measurement system and signal processing chain. The fabricated Josephson junctions exhibited lower-than-expected critical currents, resulting in low EJ/EC ratios.

(www.nature.com)

Development superconducting qubit chip fabrication Josephson junction

Incus: A Next-Gen Container and VM Manager

2025-07-12

Incus is a next-generation system container, application container, and virtual machine manager offering a public cloud-like experience. Easily mix and match containers and VMs, sharing the same underlying storage and network. Image-based, supporting numerous Linux distributions, Incus scales from laptops to server racks, accommodating diverse storage and network types. Manage instances via command line, REST API, or third-party tools. Developed by many of the original LXD creators, Incus boasts a feature-rich design including security, scalability, event logging, and remote access. It supports system containers, application containers, and virtual machines.

(linuxcontainers.org)

Development system management

Critical Security Alert: Gravity Forms Plugin Supply Chain Attack

2025-07-12

Security researchers have uncovered a supply chain attack targeting the Gravity Forms WordPress plugin, with malicious code embedded in version 2.9.12. The attackers used backdoor functions, `update_entry_detail` and `list_sections`, to steal website information, create administrator accounts, and execute arbitrary code. The malicious code has been removed from the official download, and version 2.9.13 has been released. All Gravity Forms users are urged to update immediately and check their servers for malicious files and network requests.

(patchstack.com)

Development WordPress plugin

Category: Development