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86-DOS: The Untold Story Behind the PC Revolution

2025-08-28

86-DOS: The Untold Story Behind the PC Revolution

In April 1980, a young programmer at Seattle Computer Products (SCP), Tim Paterson, began developing a small disk operating system, codenamed QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), for the new Intel 8086-based board. This project, initially designed as a quick fix for SCP's 8086 computer, unexpectedly evolved into Microsoft's MS-DOS, dominating the PC industry for over a decade. The article details QDOS's development, including the controversy surrounding its compatibility with CP/M's API, and Microsoft's acquisition of QDOS and its renaming to MS-DOS. The simplicity and CP/M-inspired API of QDOS, despite the resulting controversy, allowed for a quick release and made it a cornerstone of the PC era.

(nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com)

Tech

Mastering the Core Math of Machine Learning: From Bayes to Attention

2025-08-28

This blog post provides a comprehensive guide to the most crucial mathematical equations in machine learning, covering probability, linear algebra, and optimization. It explains concepts like Bayes' Theorem, entropy, gradient descent, and backpropagation with clear explanations and Python code examples. Furthermore, it delves into advanced topics such as diffusion processes and the attention mechanism, providing practical implementations. This is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to understand the core mathematical foundations of machine learning.

(chizkidd.github.io)

AI math equations

Baba Yaga: A Minimalist Functional Programming Language

2025-08-30

Baba Yaga: A Minimalist Functional Programming Language

Driven by an aesthetic pursuit of programming languages, the author developed Baba Yaga, a functional programming language. Core features include minimalist syntax, immutability, and a functional-first approach, with pattern matching for control flow. It blends familiar functional programming concepts for ease of use, includes built-in utilities, and offers JavaScript interoperability, aiming for use in games, sketches, and live coding.

(eli.li)

Development

Rust-based aarch64 JIT Emulator: A 'Hello, World!' Story

2025-08-30

The author built an aarch64 instruction set architecture emulator using Rust and Cranelift's JIT compiler. The article details the journey from virtual machine instructions to native code execution, covering instruction decoding, JIT translation, memory management, and device emulation. A PL011 UART simulation was implemented, and gdbstub enables debugging. The emulator currently runs simple bare-metal programs, with future goals including Linux boot support. Further development will focus on exception handling, timer support, MMU implementation, and an interrupt controller.

(pitsidianak.is)

Development

Microsoft Copilot Lands on Samsung TVs: Your AI Sidekick, Now on the Big Screen

2025-08-29

Microsoft Copilot Lands on Samsung TVs: Your AI Sidekick, Now on the Big Screen

Microsoft's AI assistant, Copilot, is coming to TVs, starting with Samsung's 2025 lineup. Users can ask Copilot for movie recommendations, spoiler-free episode summaries, and answer general questions. Copilot appears as a friendly, animated character, bouncing around the screen with mouth movements synced to its responses. It's integrated into Samsung Tizen OS, Samsung Daily Plus, and Click to Search, accessible via voice or remote. Signing in allows for a personalized experience using past conversations and preferences. Supported models include Samsung's 2025 Micro RGB, Neo QLED, OLED, The Frame Pro, The Frame TVs, and M7, M8, and M9 smart monitors. Microsoft plans to bring Copilot to LG TVs as well.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech

Chinese Astronauts Create Rocket Fuel and Oxygen in Space

2025-08-27

Chinese Astronauts Create Rocket Fuel and Oxygen in Space

Chinese astronauts aboard the Tiangong space station have successfully produced rocket fuel and oxygen in space using a novel artificial photosynthesis technology. This breakthrough, achieved with relatively simple equipment and minimal energy, promises to be crucial for China's planned lunar base, slated for completion within a decade. The technology converts carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and rocket fuel components, offering critical support for human survival and exploration in space. This innovation could significantly reduce reliance on Earth-based resources for the lunar base, paving the way for future missions to Mars and beyond.

(www.livescience.com)

Tech space station lunar base

German Court Bans Apple's 'Carbon Neutral' Watch Ads

2025-08-27

German Court Bans Apple's 'Carbon Neutral' Watch Ads

A German court ordered Apple to stop advertising its Apple Watch as carbon neutral, deeming the claim misleading and a violation of German competition law. The court questioned the validity of Apple's carbon offsetting program in Paraguay, citing concerns about the short-term nature of land leases and the uncertainty of long-term carbon sequestration. Apple can appeal, but the ruling highlights the need for companies to be cautious about carbon offset claims and avoid greenwashing.

(www.theregister.com)

Tech Carbon Neutral Greenwashing

From $20K to $35M: A Startup Founder's Bank Adventure

2025-08-28

A young founder opened a business account at Chase bank early in his startup journey. As his company raised multiple funding rounds (from $1M to $24M), he interacted with a bank manager, Alex, who repeatedly called to 'check in' on his account, leaving him bewildered. Eventually, the founder moved the company's funds to Silicon Valley Bank and closed the Chase account. A year later, he was recognized at a Chase branch in LA as the founder of HashiCorp, revealing that local Chase employees knew about his company's massive account activity and used it as an internal training case. Even more shockingly, his previously unclosed Chase account revealed fraud, requiring him to withdraw a $1M cashier's check to close it, a process filled with unexpected challenges. This story highlights the naivete of startup founders concerning banking and the inner workings of large banks.

(mitchellh.com)

Startup

AI Inference Costs: Not as Expensive as You Think

2025-08-28

AI Inference Costs: Not as Expensive as You Think

This article challenges the narrative that AI inference is prohibitively expensive and unsustainable. By calculating the costs of running AI inference on H100 GPUs, the author demonstrates that input processing is incredibly cheap (fractions of a cent per million tokens), while output generation is significantly more expensive (dollars per million tokens). This cost asymmetry explains the profitability of some applications (like coding assistants) and the high cost of others (like video generation). The author argues that this cost disparity is often overlooked, leading to an overestimation of AI inference costs, which may benefit incumbents and stifle competition and innovation.

(martinalderson.com)

AI AI inference cost model economics

XSLT 3.0: A Major Upgrade for XML Transformations

2025-08-30

XSLT 3.0 isn't just an incremental update; it elevates XSLT from an XML transformation tool to a general-purpose transformation language for common data formats like JSON and XML. It introduces JSON support with `json-to-xml()` and `xml-to-json()` functions for seamless conversion. Further improvements include simplified syntax with text value templates (TVTs), dynamic XPath expression evaluation, functions, typed variables, function packages, and exception handling, boosting code readability and maintainability. XSLT 3.0 also supports streaming and performance optimizations, making it ideal for large-scale data streams.

(www.xml.com)

Development

Saying Goodbye to Certainty: Probabilistic Programming in Swift

2025-08-29

This article introduces a novel approach to handling uncertain data in Swift: Uncertain. It encodes probability directly into the type system, elegantly addressing issues like the imprecision of GPS coordinates. Using probability distributions and Monte Carlo sampling, developers can more accurately model real-world uncertainties, building more robust and reliable applications. The article provides a Swift library based on Uncertain and includes examples demonstrating how to handle various probability distributions and perform statistical analysis.

(nshipster.com)

Development Probabilistic Programming Uncertainty

Improved CIELAB Color Quantization with the HyAB Distance Formula

2025-07-10

This article explores an improved CIELAB color quantization method using a novel distance formula called HyAB, replacing the traditional Euclidean distance. HyAB uses absolute difference for lightness and Euclidean distance for chromaticity, showing better alignment with human perception in experiments. The author applies it to the k-means algorithm, further optimizing results by replacing the mean calculation of the L component with the median. While HyAB can improve image quality in some cases, the author notes that overall system design and post-processing techniques like dithering have a greater impact on the final outcome.

(30fps.net)

Development

The Tech Industry's Inclusion Illusion: A Schizoaffective Programmer's Story

2025-08-28

The Tech Industry's Inclusion Illusion: A Schizoaffective Programmer's Story

A programmer with schizoaffective disorder recounts their experience of being systematically excluded from over 20 tech companies over the past few years, each time after disclosing their mental health condition. This powerful essay details the systemic discrimination faced in healthcare, the workplace, and personal relationships, exposing the gap between tech companies' performative diversity initiatives and the reality of supporting employees with severe mental illnesses. The author calls for genuine inclusion across healthcare, professional environments, communities, and personal relationships, moving beyond superficial awareness.

(kennethreitz.org)

Tech workplace discrimination

Speed Up Python Code Testing: importlib and pickle Power Combo

2025-08-30

Speed Up Python Code Testing: importlib and pickle Power Combo

This post introduces two techniques to boost Python code testing efficiency. The first leverages the `importlib` library to reload functions for rapid iterative testing. The second combines `pickle` to save and load class objects, avoiding lengthy re-runs, especially beneficial for time-consuming code. These methods drastically reduce debugging time, improving development speed.

(andrewpwheeler.com)

Development code testing debugging tips

A 1989 Facit A2400 Terminal: A Nostalgic Unix Tale

2025-08-26

This post recounts the author's experience using Facit A2400 terminals and Unix computers in 1989. In the pre-internet era, manuals were physical, and the author even developed a special curses library. Years later, the author donated a Facit A2400 terminal to Linuxhotel for use in introductory Unix courses, allowing younger generations to experience the past work environment. The terminal is connected via a Shuttle PC running OpenBSD at 19200 baud. While lacking an ESC key, it's emulated via a compose key.

(jpmens.net)

Misc Retro Terminal

Fossil Fuel-Funded Groups Harass Scientists Blocking Offshore Wind

2025-08-27

Fossil Fuel-Funded Groups Harass Scientists Blocking Offshore Wind

A Brown University report exposes how fossil fuel-funded groups and their lawyers use legal battles and disinformation to impede the development of clean, affordable offshore wind energy on the US East Coast. These groups employ deceptive environmental claims, such as protecting North Atlantic right whales, to delay or cancel wind projects, thus protecting the fossil fuel industry's interests. One law firm even threatened Brown University to suppress research findings. The report highlights the connections between fossil fuel companies, the political right wing, and disinformation networks, and their obstruction of climate action. This incident underscores the challenges of energy transition and the pressures faced by academic research.

(electrek.co)

Tech Fossil Fuel Lobbying

Leeches: An Ancient Remedy Re-examined

2025-08-28

Leeches: An Ancient Remedy Re-examined

This article delves into the history of leech therapy (hirudotherapy) and its potential resurgence in modern medicine. While Western medicine remains cautious about its efficacy, leech therapy has been used for millennia across numerous cultures, including China and India. Leech saliva contains hirudin, a powerful anticoagulant, and other bioactive compounds that reduce inflammation and improve blood flow. Although large-scale clinical trials are lacking, leech therapy shows promise in specific surgical applications, such as microsurgery breast reconstruction. The article also explores the development of artificial suction devices to mitigate the risks associated with live leeches. Ultimately, the article calls for more research into this ancient therapy to fully understand its potential and limitations.

(www.asimov.press)

Tech leech therapy

FCC Rejects Regulatory Fee Proposals Targeting Big Tech

2025-08-30

FCC Rejects Regulatory Fee Proposals Targeting Big Tech

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has rejected proposals to impose cable-style regulatory fees on streaming services, tech companies, and broadband providers. Groups like the NAB argued that these companies benefit from FCC resources and should contribute financially. However, the FCC cited administrative difficulties and a lack of evidence showing increased regulatory burdens imposed by tech firms. Telecommunications and tech trade groups opposed the proposals, arguing fees should only cover directly regulated industries. The FCC's decision maintains the existing fee structure, with broadcasters, satellite operators, and licensees bearing the burden through fiscal year 2025.

(thedesk.net)

Tech Regulatory Fees

Deep Dive into GANs: The Math Behind Generative Adversarial Networks

2025-08-28

This post delves into the mathematical foundations of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Starting with the basic concepts, the author meticulously explains the loss functions of the generator and discriminator, deriving conditions for optimal discriminator and generator. Using mathematical tools like binary cross-entropy and JS divergence, the adversarial process between generator and discriminator during GAN training is clearly illustrated. The ultimate goal is to make the distribution of generated data as close as possible to that of real data. The post also briefly introduces GAN training methods and highlights subtle differences in formulas compared to Goodfellow's original paper.

(jaketae.github.io)

AI Generative Adversarial Networks

How Likely Is a Bitcoin Address Typo to Cause a Problem?

2025-08-29

Concerns exist about accidentally sending Bitcoin to the wrong address due to typos. This article uses checksum probabilities, the vast size of the address space, and edit distance calculations to demonstrate the extremely low likelihood of this happening. Even considering addresses that are a small edit distance apart, the probability of a typo leading to a collision with another valid address in the enormous address space is negligible. Therefore, address typos are not a major risk in using Bitcoin.

(www.johndcook.com)

Tech

Debian 13's /tmp Moves to tmpfs: Speed and Challenges

2025-08-29

Debian 13's /tmp Moves to tmpfs: Speed and Challenges

Debian 13 revolutionizes /tmp by moving it to the tmpfs in-memory filesystem, resulting in dramatically faster file access. However, this introduces challenges: users could consume significant RAM, impacting system performance. Debian defaults to a 50% RAM limit for tmpfs, but this is customizable. Furthermore, Debian 13 includes automatic cleanup, deleting unused files in /tmp after 10 days by default. For low-memory systems, users can easily disable tmpfs.

(lowendbox.com)

Development

TuneD: A Powerful Linux System Tuning Service

2025-08-28

TuneD is a robust system tuning service for Linux that monitors connected devices via udev, applies configuration profiles (sysctl, sysfs, kernel boot parameters), and uses a plugin architecture for flexible system optimization. It supports hot-plugging and can be controlled via the command line or D-Bus, integrating easily into existing admin solutions like Cockpit. TuneD uses a hierarchical configuration system simplifying maintenance and offers full rollback capabilities for testing and experimentation. Predefined profiles for various use cases (high throughput, low latency, powersave, etc.) are included, along with customizable profiles for specific applications (SAP, dBase, etc.). While documentation is still under development, resources include the Fedora Power Management Guide and a DevConf 2019 presentation. Development, bug reports, and downloads are managed on GitHub, welcoming community contributions.

(tuned-project.org)

Development system tuning

Turning an Old iPhone into a UniFi Protect Camera with Docker

2025-08-26

The author successfully integrated an old iPhone's camera into their UniFi Protect system using a Docker container. Lacking an iOS app with native ONVIF support, they cleverly used an RTSP app (IP Camera Lite) and an ONVIF proxy Docker container. ffmpeg was used to verify the RTSP stream, and after some configuration adjustments (including specifying the correct width/height), the DIY camera was successfully added to UniFi Protect, replacing their previous Surveillance Station and Scrypted setups.

(www.caseyliss.com)

Hardware Third-party Camera

Romania's Olympiad Miracle: A Hyper-Stratified Education System

2025-08-30

Romania's Olympiad Miracle: A Hyper-Stratified Education System

Romania's disproportionate success in international academic Olympiads, despite its average educational performance, is examined. The article delves into its highly stratified education system: top students are paired with top teachers in elite schools, incentivized by substantial rewards. While this produces exceptional Olympiad winners, it also leads to significant brain drain as these talents leave for other countries. The article concludes by suggesting other nations adopt similar strategies to maximize their high-potential students' capabilities.

(www.palladiummag.com)

Tech olympiads

Nginx-CGI: Bringing CGI Support to Nginx and Angie

2025-08-30

Nginx-CGI: Bringing CGI Support to Nginx and Angie

The Nginx-CGI plugin adds CGI support to Nginx and Angie web servers, making it easier to build low-frequency applications, resource-constrained systems, and prototypes. It supports various operating systems including Linux, macOS, and BSD. The article details installation, configuration, and usage, showcasing multiple ways to run CGI scripts: chroot, Docker, and FreeBSD jails. It also covers CGI script writing conventions and handling HTTP requests and responses.

(github.com)

Development

Laravel's Taylor Otwell: 14 Years of Building a Web Framework Legend

2025-08-30

Laravel creator Taylor Otwell reflects on his 14-year journey building and maintaining one of the world's most popular web frameworks. From humble PHP 5.3 beginnings to a thriving 70-person company, he shares insights on code maintainability, developer experience, and evolving without overcomplication. He emphasizes simplicity in design, the long-term benefits of sticking to conventions, and navigating the challenges of scaling an open-source project. The interview also touches on Laravel's funding round and the evolution of its team and culture.

(maintainable.fm)

Development

Hacker News Emoji Mystery: Length 36?

2025-08-29

A post on Hacker News sparked a discussion about the display of emojis. The author noticed that Hacker News seems to handle emojis in titles differently, replacing them with spaces or converting them into character encodings to fit the 80-column display limit. Tests revealed that a single emoji could have a length of 36, contrasting with its expected length. The post explores Hacker News's emoji handling mechanism and the variations in emoji display across different browsers and devices.

(zaerl.com)

Misc

Massive Industry Ties Revealed Among DSM-5-TR Panel Members

2025-08-27

Massive Industry Ties Revealed Among DSM-5-TR Panel Members

A study investigating financial ties between the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, text revision (DSM-5-TR), panel members and industry found that nearly 60% (55 out of 92) received substantial payments totaling over $14.2 million. These payments encompassed consulting fees, travel expenses, speaking engagements, and more. The research highlights the potential for conflicts of interest influencing the DSM-5-TR's objectivity and calls for stricter regulations to prevent such conflicts and ensure the independence and reliability of mental health diagnostic standards.

(www.bmj.com)

Misc

Pleasure Reading Plummets 40% in the US: A Digital Age Warning?

2025-08-28

Pleasure Reading Plummets 40% in the US: A Digital Age Warning?

A new survey reveals a stark 40 percent decline in daily pleasure reading among US adults between 2003 and 2023. Researchers highlight this isn't a minor dip, but a sustained 3 percent annual decrease. This trend correlates with increased consumption of digital media. While those who still read are doing so for slightly longer, the decline is sharper among Black Americans, lower-income individuals, and those living outside cities, highlighting socioeconomic disparities. The research team urges targeted strategies, such as community-led initiatives, to reverse this concerning trend.

(www.sciencealert.com)

Misc declining readership socioeconomic disparity

Decentralized Mastodon Defies Mississippi's Age Verification Law

2025-08-30

Decentralized Mastodon Defies Mississippi's Age Verification Law

Decentralized social network Mastodon announced its inability to comply with Mississippi's age verification law, the same law that prompted rival Bluesky to leave the state. Mastodon cites its user-tracking limitations and reluctance to employ IP-based blocks as reasons for non-compliance. Founder Eugen Rochko highlighted the importance of true decentralization, stating that no one can unilaterally decide to block Mississippi from the Fediverse. While Mastodon's own servers specify a minimum signup age, its software doesn't support age verification across all servers. Individual server owners must decide on age verification implementation. Mastodon claims it can't directly assist other server operators, suggesting they consult online resources and comply with local laws.

(techcrunch.com)

Tech

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