Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

Stop Saying 'Click Here'! Better Link Text Writing

2025-07-02

W3C released a guide on writing more effective link text. It advises against using mechanical phrases like 'click here', suggesting instead concise, meaningful text that clearly describes the link's content, not the mechanics of clicking. The article also introduces W3C QA Tips, a resource offering practical advice for web developers and designers, including how to submit tips and an index of existing ones.

(www.w3.org)

Development Link Text

Portabl E: A Cross-Platform AmigaE Compiler

2025-07-02

Portabl E is a recreation of the AmigaE programming language, enhanced with improvements and designed for cross-platform compatibility. Version r6b is now available, fully supporting AmigaOS4, AROS, and MorphOS, with good AmigaOS3 support and basic Linux/Windows functionality. Download requires the username "user" and password "password". The project includes example code, screenshots, pre-compiled programs, documentation, forums, and mailing lists for community support.

(cshandley.co.uk)

Development

arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaborators

2025-07-02

arXivLabs is a framework enabling collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on the arXiv website. Individuals and organizations working with arXivLabs embrace openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only partners with those who share them. Got an idea for a project that will benefit the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

(arxiv.org)

Development

arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

2025-07-02

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

(arxiv.org)

Development

Building a Self-Improving AI Code Factory

2025-07-02

This article details the author's experience building a personal AI code factory using Claude, o3, and Sonnet AI models. The core principle is "fix inputs, not outputs": instead of directly patching generated code, the author adjusts plans, prompts, or agent combinations. The factory iteratively improves through planning (o3), execution (Sonnet), and verification (o3 and Sonnet), using Git worktrees for parallel development. The author shares scaling strategies, such as creating specialized agents and enforcing consistent code style. The ultimate goal is an AI system that autonomously generates, verifies, and improves its own code.

(www.john-rush.com)

Development

Spegel: A Terminal Browser Using LLMs to Rework Webpages

2025-07-02

Spegel is a proof-of-concept terminal web browser that leverages LLMs to transform HTML into markdown, rendering it directly in your terminal. Built as a weekend project, its practicality was significantly boosted by the release of Google's faster Gemini 2.5 Pro Lite. Spegel allows for personalized views through custom prompts, such as extracting only essential recipe information. While lacking POST request support, it streamlines browsing by focusing on user-defined needs, offering a cleaner, less cluttered experience than traditional terminal browsers.

(simedw.com)

Development terminal browser personalized browsing

arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaborators

2025-07-02

arXivLabs is a framework that lets collaborators develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Individuals and organizations working with arXivLabs embrace our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners who share them. Have an idea for a project that will benefit the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

(arxiv.org)

Development

Real-Time Bidirectional Editing Between Code Editor and GUI via LSP Server

2025-07-02

A programmer built a proof-of-concept system using an LSP server to enable real-time bidirectional editing between any modern code editor and a GUI. Changes in the code editor instantly update the GUI, and vice-versa, solving a key limitation of existing code-based CAD systems. This allows users to leverage their preferred editors while enjoying real-time visual feedback. While currently a small demo, it showcases the potential of LSP servers for building more powerful code-based CAD tools.

(jamesbvaughan.com)

Development LSP server code CAD

Claude Generates a Mandelbrot Fractal in x86 Assembly

2025-07-02

Inspired by a tweet, the author challenged Claude AI to generate x86 assembly code to create a Mandelbrot fractal. Initial attempts failed to compile, but leveraging Claude Code's iterative debugging and modification capabilities, the author successfully compiled and ran the code within a Docker container, generating a satisfying ASCII art fractal. This showcases Claude Code's impressive code understanding and debugging abilities.

(simonwillison.net)

Development

A Discord Bot That Saved Our Friendship

2025-07-01

In 2022, a group of friends scattered across the globe struggled to stay connected during the pandemic. Their Signal group chat became a chaotic mess, making it hard to coordinate game nights. One friend built a simple Discord bot that sends a notification to a text channel whenever someone joins a voice channel. This seemingly small solution not only solved the communication problem but unexpectedly fostered more casual daily interaction, becoming a digital 'batsignal' for spontaneous hangouts. Now, they use Discord almost nightly, even creating an annual "Discord Wrapped" event to celebrate their digital connections.

(blog.danpetrolito.xyz)

Development Bot

Abstraction Boundaries Are Optimization Boundaries: Lifting Abstractions for Database Query Optimization

2025-07-01

The N+1 query problem, where an application sends one SQL query per collection element, stems from leaky abstractions. Instead of lowering the abstraction boundary (e.g., explicitly telling the ORM to fetch in bulk), this article proposes raising it. By integrating the ORM into the language, rewrite rules can merge N queries into one. This mirrors Haskell's use of rewrite rules for list optimization, leveraging its declarative nature to abstract away low-level operational semantics for better optimization. The key takeaway: raising the abstraction boundary also raises the optimization boundary.

(blog.snork.dev)

Development abstraction boundary N+1 query problem

Multiple Discoveries: The Case of Prolly Trees

2025-07-01

Prolly trees, a novel data structure crucial to Dolt, weren't invented once, but at least four times independently. From Avery Pennarun's 2009 bup project (which predates even Noms), to Noms' 2015 coining of the term, to Inria's 2019 'Merkle Search Trees,' and DePaul University's 2020 'Content-Defined Merkle Trees,' the same fundamental data structure emerged repeatedly in different contexts. This highlights the common phenomenon of multiple discovery in science and underscores the role of demand in technological innovation. The authors, from DoltHub, discuss this phenomenon and its implications for future technology, using their own experience with prolly trees as a case study.

(www.dolthub.com)

Development Multiple Discovery

Open Source YouTube Translation Blocker

2025-07-01

This open-source YouTube add-on prevents automatic translation on YouTube. It keeps video titles and descriptions in their original language, defaults to the original audio track (including Shorts), and lets you choose your subtitle language (or disables them if unavailable; auto-generated subtitles are always ignored), ensuring an authentic viewing experience.

(addons.mozilla.org)

Development

Pluto: A Supercharged Lua Dialect

2025-07-01

Pluto is a powerful dialect of Lua designed for general-purpose programming. It boasts accelerated development through an enhanced standard library and new syntax features like switch statements, compound operators, and ternary expressions. While largely compatible with Lua 5.4, a compatibility mode resolves potential conflicts from new keywords. Pluto executes Lua bytecode and most Pluto features generate Lua-compatible bytecode. Comprehensive documentation, tooling, and details on improvements are available on its open-source website. Try it out in the interactive browser playground or download pre-built binaries.

(github.com)

Development

Elevating Rust CLIs: Type-Driven Design for Robustness and Maintainability

2025-07-01

This article champions a type-driven approach to building command-line interfaces (CLIs) in Rust using the clap crate. Instead of relying on string parsing, the author advocates for defining the CLI interface using Rust's type system. This offers several key advantages: improved code maintainability and readability, reduced test surface area and better mock support for unit tests, and easier semantic versioning. The article details clap's derive and env features, showcasing how to define command-line arguments and environment variables using types, resulting in more robust and maintainable CLIs.

(tucson-josh.com)

Development

Claude Code Hooks: Extending Functionality with User-Defined Shell Commands

2025-07-01

Claude Code introduces hooks, user-defined shell commands that execute at various stages of its lifecycle. This allows for deterministic control over Claude Code's behavior, ensuring actions like automatic code formatting, logging, and custom permission checks always occur. Hooks transform suggestions into reliable application-level code, enhancing functionality and simplifying workflows. While powerful, users must prioritize security and ensure commands are safe and reliable.

(docs.anthropic.com)

Development Hooks Shell Commands

Qualcomm Open-Sources EUD: In-Circuit Debugging Over USB

2025-07-01

Qualcomm quietly released the source code for its Embedded USB Debug (EUD) interface, enabling developers to perform SWD debugging directly over USB without external JTAG tools. EUD, integrated into nearly every Qualcomm SoC since ~2018, provides debugging access to CPUs and Hexagon co-processors. While the initial open-source code had some compilation issues, the community quickly addressed them. Currently supporting chips like Snapdragon 845, 855, and 865, it simplifies debugging U-Boot and the secure world, but kernel debugging support is limited, and SMP support is incomplete.

(www.linaro.org)

Development

arXivLabs: Community Collaboration on arXiv Features

2025-07-01

arXivLabs is a framework enabling collaborative development and sharing of 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 enhance the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

(arxiv.org)

Development

Nimtable: The Control Plane for Apache Iceberg™

2025-07-01

Nimtable is a lightweight, user-friendly platform for monitoring, optimizing, and governing your Iceberg-based lakehouse. Its web-based interface simplifies browsing tables, running queries, analyzing file distributions, and optimizing storage layouts. Supporting multiple catalogs (REST Catalog, AWS Glue, AWS S3 Tables, and PostgreSQL) and seamless integration with object stores like S3, Nimtable offers interactive querying, AI assistance (including AI-generated table summaries and intelligent suggestions), file distribution analysis, and table optimization features (such as file compaction and snapshot expiration management).

(github.com)

Development Data Management

Type-Safe Generics in C: A Clever Use of Unions

2025-07-01

This article presents a technique for implementing type-safe generic data structures in C using unions to associate type information with a generic data structure. The author illustrates the approach with a linked list, showing how macros and unions enable compile-time type checking, avoiding the type-unsafety and code bloat of traditional generic methods. Comparisons are made with `void*` and flexible array member approaches, culminating in a solution that provides compile-time type safety, resulting in compiler errors when incorrect types are added.

(danielchasehooper.com)

Development

AI-Assisted LLVM Compiler Optimization: An ASN.1 Serialization Tale

2025-07-01

While maintaining a Rust library for ASN.1 DER serialization, the author discovered inefficient code in integer length calculation. He experimented with Claude AI to optimize the code and used the Alive2 formal verification tool to validate the results. Surprisingly, Claude AI even helped generate a patch for an LLVM compiler optimization, which passed code review and was ultimately submitted to the LLVM project. This demonstrates the immense potential of AI in software development, particularly in compiler optimization, while also highlighting the importance of manual review when using AI tools.

(alexgaynor.net)

Development

Reverse Engineering Vercel's BotID: A Surprisingly Basic Bot Protection System?

2025-06-30

This post delves into Vercel's newly released BotID anti-bot system, focusing on its free Basic mode. The author reveals that the Basic mode's current detection mechanisms are surprisingly rudimentary and easily bypassed by manipulating browser properties. While BotID collects various signals including browser fingerprints and GPU information, its processing of these signals is basic, failing to effectively identify sophisticated bots. The author speculates that Vercel is using Basic mode to quietly gather data for training future, more robust anti-bot models. The paid Deep Analysis mode, utilizing Kasada's anti-bot scripts, is significantly more complex than Basic mode.

(www.nullpt.rs)

Development

TokenDagger: A Blazing Fast TikToken Implementation

2025-06-30

TokenDagger offers a high-performance alternative to OpenAI's TikToken, optimized for large-scale text processing. Benchmarks show TokenDagger achieving over 4x speedup on code tokenization and a 2x throughput increase compared to TikToken. Leveraging an optimized PCRE2 regex engine and a simplified BPE algorithm to mitigate the performance impact of large special token vocabularies, TokenDagger provides a drop-in replacement. Installation and performance testing are straightforward with a few simple commands.

(github.com)

Development

Ensō (Occult Vampire Keanu) Public Beta Released

2025-06-30

The new Ensō version, codenamed "Occult Vampire Keanu," is now available for public testing! This release focuses on a simplified UI, improved accessibility, and enhanced privacy. New features include a "Coffeeshop Mode" to conceal text, multiple accessibility-focused themes, and a refined text rendering engine. Future updates will include RTL support and more, but this version significantly improves the user experience.

(untested.sonnet.io)

Development UI update

C Pointer Aliasing and Compiler Optimization: A Game of Source Code Safety

2025-06-30

This article delves into the impact of pointer aliasing on program optimization in C. Pointer aliasing refers to two pointers pointing to the same memory object. Compilers, during code optimization, need to perform alias analysis to determine if pointers are aliases. Misjudgment can lead to program errors or performance degradation. The article uses a reciprocal calculation example to illustrate that when two pointers may alias, the compiler cannot perform certain optimizations, as this might alter the program's algorithm. The author also discusses mechanisms in C that aid alias analysis, such as the restrict pointer qualifier and the volatile qualifier, along with advanced alias analysis techniques like type-based and flow-based alias analysis. Finally, the author proposes a novel pointer aliasing analysis model that considers the pointer's lifetime and information flow, aiming to improve compiler optimization efficiency and program safety.

(gustedt.wordpress.com)

Development Pointer Aliasing

Modeling API Rate Limits as Diophantine Inequalities

2025-06-30

This article explores a mathematical approach, specifically using Diophantine inequalities, to solve API rate limiting problems. The author uses a scenario with a 10-requests-per-hour limit and three retry attempts per task as an example, demonstrating how to transform the task scheduling problem into an integer feasibility problem. By analyzing the task retry pattern and time windows, the author establishes an inequality model and uses Go to write a program that determines whether a new task can be safely scheduled without exceeding the rate limit. The article also mentions optimizing the algorithm to reduce time complexity from O(n^2) to O(n*log(n)).

(vivekn.dev)

Development API Rate Limiting Diophantine Inequalities

Cross-Compiling Raylib Lisp Bindings and Games for Windows from Linux

2025-06-30

This article details the process of cross-compiling C code and an SBCL Lisp program for Windows from Linux, using Wine to run a Windows SBCL within a Linux-based Emacs, and loading .dll files into the Lisp image to produce a .exe executable. The author outlines cross-compiling C code using mingw-w64-toolchain, configuring the Raylib library for cross-compilation to generate .dll files, installing and using SBCL within Wine, leveraging vend for dependency management, and finally using sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die to create the Windows executable.

(www.fosskers.ca)

Development

arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

2025-06-30

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

(arxiv.org)

Development

Rust Error Handling: Evolving from Monolithic Enums to Elegant Error Sets

2025-06-30

Rust's error handling has been a point of contention. The traditional approach of defining massive error enums per module or crate leads to bloated and hard-to-maintain code. This article explores alternatives: representing individual errors with structs and managing error sets using tools like the `error_set` crate. `error_set` simplifies error enum definition and conversion via macros, supporting composition and subset relationships between error sets for cleaner, more efficient error handling. While extra work is still needed for complex errors requiring additional information, `error_set` provides a more elegant and maintainable approach to Rust error handling.

(felix-knorr.net)

Development

Blazing Fast In-Process Event Dispatcher for Go

2025-06-30

This Go package delivers a high-performance, in-process event dispatcher ideal for decoupling modules and enabling asynchronous event handling. Boasting speeds 4-10x faster than channels (processing millions of events per second!), it supports both synchronous and asynchronous operations with a focus on simplicity. Perfect for intra-process module decoupling, lightweight pub/sub, and high-throughput scenarios, but not suitable for inter-process communication, event persistence, or advanced routing.

(github.com)

Development Event Dispatcher

Category: Development