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Nevada Under Siege: Major Cyberattack Cripples State Services

2025-08-28

Nevada Under Siege: Major Cyberattack Cripples State Services

Nevada is grappling with a significant cyberattack that has knocked out numerous government digital services. The attack, announced on August 24th, has left state websites and phone lines offline, forcing the closure of state offices until further notice. While emergency services remain operational, officials are working to restore services and warn citizens about potential phishing scams. This incident presents a major test for Nevada's newly established cybersecurity office.

(www.theregister.com)

Tech

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

Say Goodbye to Email Clutter: Smart Filters Organize Your Inbox

2025-08-26

Say Goodbye to Email Clutter: Smart Filters Organize Your Inbox

Tired of endless promotional emails clogging your inbox? This open-source smart email filter automatically identifies and archives promotional emails, leaving only important personal emails in your main inbox. It runs within your Gmail or Fastmail account, ensuring safety and privacy. No emails are deleted; they're simply organized for better efficiency. It works seamlessly across desktop, mobile, and web interfaces, and it's completely free!

(unfuck.email)

Misc email filter inbox organization

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

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

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

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

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

A Bug That Saved a Company

2025-08-26

A Bug That Saved a Company

In 2002, Rogue Amoeba released the first version of Audio Hijack with a 15-day unlimited trial, hoping to attract customers. Sales were disappointing. However, a bug in version 1.6 accidentally limited the trial to 15 minutes of recording. Surprisingly, this stricter limitation dramatically increased sales, transforming Rogue Amoeba from a side project into a company employing over a dozen people. This fortunate mistake saved both Audio Hijack and the company itself.

(weblog.rogueamoeba.com)

Startup

Google Translate Gets AI-Powered Language Learning

2025-08-27

Google Translate Gets AI-Powered Language Learning

Google is integrating AI-powered language learning tools into its Translate app. This beta feature creates personalized lessons based on your skill level and goals, such as preparing for a vacation. Currently, it supports English speakers learning Spanish and French, and vice-versa for Spanish, French, and Portuguese speakers. Users select their skill level and goals (professional conversations, daily interactions, etc.), and Google's Gemini AI generates tailored lessons. A new live translation feature also lets users have real-time conversations in over 70 languages, translating speech via AI-generated transcription and audio.

(www.theverge.com)

AI

Lago: Open-Source SaaS Billing Platform Raises $22M, Boasts 7000+ GitHub Stars

2025-08-28

Lago: Open-Source SaaS Billing Platform Raises $22M, Boasts 7000+ GitHub Stars

Lago is an open-source billing platform simplifying, clarifying, and adapting SaaS billing for companies. Having raised over $22 million in funding from top-tier investors, Lago boasts over 7,000 GitHub stars, highlighting a strong developer community and technical prowess. Next-gen companies like Mistral.ai, Together.ai, Groq, and Laravel utilize Lago for their billing needs. The Lago team comprises ambitious, focused individuals dedicated to solving challenging problems with excellence and accountability, fostering a culture of rapid iteration and learning from mistakes.

(www.ycombinator.com)

Development Billing Platform

spaCy 3.8 Released: Powering Up Industrial-Strength NLP

2025-08-27

spaCy 3.8 Released: Powering Up Industrial-Strength NLP

spaCy 3.8 is out! This advanced Natural Language Processing library for Python and Cython is built on cutting-edge research and designed for real-world applications. Supporting tokenization and training for 70+ languages, it boasts state-of-the-art speed and neural network models for tasks like NER, text classification, and more. It features multi-task learning with pretrained transformers like BERT, a production-ready training system, and easy model packaging, deployment, and workflow management. Check the release notes for details on improvements.

(github.com)

Development

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

Elon Musk Denied Entry to Berghain: A Berlin Triumph of Anti-Elitism

2025-08-27

Elon Musk, the world's richest man, has become infamous in Berlin for his support of Trump and Germany's far-right AfD party, and for performing a Nazi salute. Adding to the irony, he was denied entry to Berghain, Berlin's most exclusive nightclub, a symbolic victory for Berlin's anti-elitism and commitment to authenticity. The incident sparked numerous memes and songs, becoming a part of Berlin's culture and highlighting the city's embrace of inclusivity and anti-establishment values.

(berlinguide.de)

Misc Berlin Culture

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

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

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

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

Intentionally Slowing Down Programs: A Surprising Boost to Developer Tool Accuracy

2025-08-27

Intentionally Slowing Down Programs: A Surprising Boost to Developer Tool Accuracy

Most research on programming language performance focuses on speeding up programs, but a new study explores the benefits of intentionally slowing them down. By inserting NOP or MOV instructions into program basic blocks, researchers achieved fine-grained control over program execution, leading to more precise race condition detection, speedup simulation, and profiler accuracy assessment. Experiments on an Intel Core i5-10600 showed that NOP and MOV instructions are best suited for this purpose, opening new avenues for future advanced developer tooling.

(stefan-marr.de)

Development profilers

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

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

Scala Capture Checking: The Tech Behind a Failed Talk

2025-08-26

This article recounts the author's failed presentation on capture checking at Scala Days 2025 and the subsequent deep dive into the technology. Capture checking aims to solve the problem of values escaping their intended scope, such as premature closure of resources in try-with-resource patterns. Scala implements capture checking by introducing 'capture sets', a type system feature that allows marking a type and all values it captures. The article details capture sets, subtyping, syntactic sugar, and the mechanisms for capturing functions and classes, exploring capture set behavior in type parameters. Ultimately, the author argues that while capture checking involves many details, it's a largely invisible feature for most developers, improving Scala's safety and enabling wider capabilities usage.

(nrinaudo.github.io)

Development Capture Checking

The Death of SSL Certificate Management (as We Know It)

2025-08-26

Managing SSL certificates is becoming a nightmare. What was once a quarterly task is now a weekly struggle, driven by increasingly stringent validation requirements and drastically shortened certificate lifespans—down to a mere 47 days by 2029! This escalating burden is pushing organizations towards platform-integrated certificate management or free alternatives like Let's Encrypt, potentially disrupting the traditional CA market. The author questions whether these changes genuinely enhance security or simply add unnecessary overhead for already strained IT teams.

(www.chrislockard.net)

Development certificate management

Workplace Jargon Kills Collaboration: New Study Reveals Negative Impacts

2025-08-27

Workplace Jargon Kills Collaboration: New Study Reveals Negative Impacts

A new study reveals that excessive use of jargon in the workplace hinders employees' ability to process information, leading to negative emotions, decreased confidence, and reduced willingness to collaborate and share information. The study also found that age plays a role; older workers, while struggling more with jargon, were more likely to seek clarification, whereas younger employees were less likely to do so. Researchers advocate for minimizing jargon to improve team efficiency and employee morale.

(phys.org)

Misc Workplace Communication Jargon

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

The Secret of Parabolic Microphones: Why High Frequencies Are Easier to Capture

2025-08-26

The Secret of Parabolic Microphones: Why High Frequencies Are Easier to Capture

Parabolic microphones are renowned for their extreme sensitivity, stemming from their considerable size. Similar to how telescopes use large parabolic mirrors to gather faint light, parabolic microphones use reflecting dishes to harvest faint sounds. However, this design has drawbacks: it's biased towards higher frequencies, leading to a sometimes 'tinny' sound quality, and lower frequencies experience reduced gain, with a cutoff frequency dependent on dish diameter. This article delves into the physics of parabolic microphone operation, explaining its frequency-dependent performance and the physical mechanisms behind its high-frequency gain, including reflection, reciprocity, interference, diffraction, and Huygens' wavelet model.

(legallyblindbirding.net)

Tech

arXivLabs: Community Collaboration on arXiv Feature Development

2025-08-26

arXivLabs is a new collaborative framework enabling developers to build and share new arXiv features directly on the arXiv website. Individuals and organizations participating in arXivLabs embrace arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners who share them. Got an idea for a project that will benefit the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs!

(arxiv.org)

Development

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

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

The Secret to Long-Lasting Beer Head: It's All About Fermentation

2025-08-27

The Secret to Long-Lasting Beer Head: It's All About Fermentation

A seven-year study by Swiss researchers reveals the crucial role of fermentation in beer foam longevity. The research, published in Physics of Fluids, shows that the number of fermentations (single, double, or triple) significantly impacts foam stability. Foam stability is a complex interplay of factors including surfactants, gravity, and bubble interactions. Understanding these dynamics not only enhances our appreciation of beer but also offers insights into the broader field of foam science.

(arstechnica.com)

Misc foam fermentation

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