FLOAD: Facebook Video Downloader & Converter - No Signup Required!

2025-04-06
FLOAD: Facebook Video Downloader & Converter - No Signup Required!

FLOAD is a powerful Facebook video downloader and converter that requires no registration. It offers unlimited downloads and converts videos to various formats including MP3, MKV, and FLV, supporting up to 4K resolution. Utilizing multi-regional servers and CDN acceleration, FLOAD boasts fast download speeds and a user-friendly interface, compatible with popular browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Edge, as well as Windows, MacOS, Android, and iOS.

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BYD: World's Largest Automaker by R&D Workforce

2024-12-31
BYD: World's Largest Automaker by R&D Workforce

BYD has become the world's largest automaker by R&D workforce after a major hiring spree, boasting over 110,000 R&D employees among its 900,000-strong workforce. This follows a strong Q2 2024 where it outsold Honda and Nissan, solidifying its position as the world's seventh-largest automaker. BYD's massive R&D team is focused on developing longer-range, more affordable EVs, and the company is expanding into new markets with plans for new plants in Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, and Pakistan. This aggressive expansion, coupled with its already significant position as the world's second-largest EV battery maker, positions BYD for continued growth and leadership in the electric vehicle market.

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AgentGuard: Real-time Budget Protection for AI Agents

2025-07-31
AgentGuard: Real-time Budget Protection for AI Agents

Developers often face the problem of AI models unexpectedly consuming massive API calls, leading to high costs. AgentGuard is a real-time budgeting tool that, with just two lines of code, lets you set a cost limit for your AI projects. When the cost reaches the limit, AgentGuard automatically stops the process, preventing further expenses and providing a detailed report to help you save money. It supports various AI APIs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, and offers multiple protection modes, such as throwing errors, issuing warnings, or forcefully terminating the process. AgentGuard is the only tool that actually prevents runaway AI costs in real time.

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Decentralized CVE Allocation: Introducing GCVE

2025-04-16

GCVE (Global CVE allocation system) offers a decentralized approach to vulnerability identification and numbering. It improves flexibility and scalability for participants while maintaining compatibility with the traditional CVE system. Key to GCVE is the introduction of GCVE Numbering Authorities (GNAs), independent entities capable of allocating identifiers without a centralized system or rigid policies.

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Tech

Meta's Llama and the EU AI Act: A Convenient Coincidence?

2025-04-20
Meta's Llama and the EU AI Act: A Convenient Coincidence?

Meta's labeling of its Llama models as "open source" is questionable, as its license doesn't fully comply with the Open Source Definition. A theory suggests this is due to the EU AI Act's special rules for open-source models, bypassing OSI compliance. Analyzing the Act with Gemini 2.5 Flash, the author found exemptions for models allowing users to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve software and data, even with attribution requirements. This supports the theory that Meta strategically uses the "open source" label, although this practice predates the EU AI Act.

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AI

Fine-tuning LLMs Without Reinforcement Learning: Introducing Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)

2025-05-28

The Together platform now supports Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a technique for aligning language models with human preferences without reinforcement learning. DPO trains models directly on preference data—prompts, preferred responses, and non-preferred responses—resulting in more helpful, accurate, and tailored AI assistants. Compared to traditional reinforcement learning methods, DPO is simpler, more efficient, and easier to implement. This post details DPO's workings, usage, and code examples, recommending a two-stage process: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by DPO refinement.

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World's Smallest Injectable, Light-Controlled Pacemaker Developed

2025-04-08
World's Smallest Injectable, Light-Controlled Pacemaker Developed

Scientists have developed the world's tiniest temporary pacemaker—smaller than a grain of rice, injectable, light-controlled, and bioresorbable. This breakthrough aims to help children with congenital heart defects and adults recovering from heart surgery. Unlike traditional pacemakers, it eliminates the need for invasive implantation and removal, avoiding risks like the internal bleeding that contributed to Neil Armstrong's death in 2012. Successfully tested in animals and human tissue, human trials are expected in 2-3 years. Future applications could extend to nerve regeneration, wound healing, and smart implants.

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Musk's GDP Misconception: The Limits of Economic Indicators

2025-04-29
Musk's GDP Misconception: The Limits of Economic Indicators

Elon Musk's recent tweet suggesting that government spending should be excluded from GDP sparked debate. This article dissects the fallacy of this idea, arguing that GDP measures economic output, not quality of life. Excluding government spending would hinder our understanding and stabilization of the economy. The article further explores GDP's limitations, such as its inability to accurately capture the value of unpaid work and government services, and its neglect of environmental and social well-being. The author concludes that instead of modifying GDP, more comprehensive indicators and policies are needed to measure quality of life and societal progress.

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Prequel: A rapidly growing startup enabling B2B data access for customers

2025-03-14
Prequel: A rapidly growing startup enabling B2B data access for customers

Prequel is a rapidly growing startup empowering B2B companies to make their data accessible to customers. They sync tens of billions of rows of data daily, tackling challenging technical problems, and have achieved strong product-market fit. Currently expanding, they're developing a new product and seeking experienced engineers to build it from the ground up, create excellent React experiences and SDKs, and own key architectural and design decisions. Ideal candidates have 3+ years building software at scale, expertise with React and TypeScript, and a proven ability to design excellent APIs/SDKs. They offer competitive salaries, equity, benefits, and a fantastic work environment.

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Startup

The Angel and the Devil on My Shoulders: A Programmer's Dilemma

2025-04-27

A programmer recounts their internal struggle between the angel advocating for coding for fun and the devil urging pursuit of wealth and success. From childhood fascination with computer games to a college degree, their coding journey has always involved learning and exploration. However, influenced by the 'hustle' culture, they're often tempted by the allure of startups, torn between passion and profit. Ultimately, they realize the key is balancing both, avoiding burnout, and discerning when to heed the devil's advice for sustainable growth.

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Development

Brave Browser's New Custom Scriptlets: Take Control of Your Browsing Experience

2025-02-11
Brave Browser's New Custom Scriptlets: Take Control of Your Browsing Experience

Brave Browser version 1.75 introduces 'custom scriptlets' for desktop users, allowing advanced users to inject their own JavaScript into websites for deep customization. Similar to Tampermonkey and Greasemonkey, this feature enables users to create scripts modifying website functionality. Initially developed for debugging Brave's ad blocker, its value led to its release. Custom scriptlets enhance privacy, security, and usability by blocking trackers, customizing appearance, and improving accessibility. However, caution is advised as untrusted scripts pose risks. The feature is located in `brave://settings/shields/filters` and requires enabling 'Developer mode'.

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arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaborators

2025-04-18
arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework enabling collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on the website. 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. Have an idea to enhance the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

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Development

Microsoft Restructures to Unleash AI Power: LinkedIn and Microsoft 365 Converge

2025-06-04
Microsoft Restructures to Unleash AI Power: LinkedIn and Microsoft 365 Converge

Microsoft announced major organizational changes to fuel its AI ambitions. LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky expands his role to lead Microsoft 365 Copilot, while remaining LinkedIn CEO. Charles Lamanna and his Business and Industry Copilot team will report to Rajesh, reflecting Microsoft's strategy to integrate Modern Work and Business Applications into a unified AI Business Solutions Center. This move aims to break down traditional industry silos, creating greater customer value by leveraging the combined power of LinkedIn, Microsoft 365, and Dynamics 365 to unlock the next wave of AI innovation.

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Pakistan's Solar Surprise: From Fragile State to Clean Energy Giant

2025-04-08
Pakistan's Solar Surprise: From Fragile State to Clean Energy Giant

In 2024, Pakistan, a nation long associated with conflict and instability, unexpectedly surged to the forefront of global solar adoption, importing a staggering 22 gigawatts of solar panels in a single year. This remarkable achievement wasn't accidental. Two decades of gradual improvements in governance and a pragmatic approach to energy policy laid the groundwork. Capitalizing on plummeting solar panel prices and rising fossil fuel costs, Pakistan streamlined regulations, reduced tariffs, and facilitated rapid solar adoption. While challenges remain, such as utility revenue shocks, Pakistan's clean energy transformation offers a valuable lesson: even fragile states can achieve rapid clean energy progress through effective governance and seizing global market opportunities. The story extends beyond solar, encompassing wind, hydro, and storage, showcasing a transition driven by economic pragmatism and quiet competence.

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The Mystery of 'Goat-Time': A Machine Translation Enigma

2025-09-25

A Japanese user, employing machine translation, sought help for a runtime error dubbed 'Goat-Time'. The error message is bizarre, featuring terms like 'vomit', 'wind, pole, and dragon', leaving everyone puzzled. Analysis suggests 'vomit' might refer to exceptions, 'lumber' to logs, and 'Goat-Time' to the runtime environment. 'Spank' is speculated to be a mistranslation of 'execute', and 'skill' of 'experience'. 'Insult to father's stones' might allude to software dependencies. The 'wind, pole, and dragon' remain a mystery. This is a machine translation-induced enigma waiting for more information to unravel.

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Challenging the Big Bang: New Model Replaces Dark Matter and Dark Energy

2025-04-18
Challenging the Big Bang: New Model Replaces Dark Matter and Dark Energy

Dr. Richard Lieu from the University of Alabama in Huntsville proposes a novel cosmological model that replaces the Big Bang with a series of temporal singularities to explain the universe's expansion. This model obviates the need for dark matter or dark energy to account for the universe's accelerated expansion and the formation of structures like galaxies. It posits that the universe expands due to step-like bursts of 'transient temporal singularities' injecting matter and energy, happening too quickly to be observed. These singularities generate negative pressure, similar to dark energy, causing accelerated expansion. Future validation will involve deep-field observations using ground-based telescopes.

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Thai Pro-Democracy Movement Targeted by State-Sponsored Online Harassment Campaign

2025-04-21
Thai Pro-Democracy Movement Targeted by State-Sponsored Online Harassment Campaign

A Citizen Lab report exposes a sustained, coordinated social media harassment and doxxing campaign, codenamed "JUICYJAM," targeting Thailand's pro-democracy movement since at least August 2020. The operation used fake personas across multiple platforms (primarily X and Facebook) to dox protesters, harass them, and incite reports to the police. A leak of confidential documents in March 2025 revealed the Royal Thai Armed Forces and/or Royal Thai Police as the perpetrators. JUICYJAM's high engagement demonstrates a successful state-sponsored influence operation, part of a broader network of judicial harassment and suppression posing a significant threat to civil society. The report highlights the inadequacy of social media platforms in addressing such coordinated, harmful campaigns.

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Dolt's go-mysql-server at Five: A Query's Journey

2025-04-27
Dolt's go-mysql-server at Five: A Query's Journey

This post reflects on five years of Dolt using go-mysql-server, detailing the inner workings of its SQL engine. It walks through a query's journey from parsing to result spooling, encompassing parsing, binding, plan simplification, join exploration, cost-based optimization, and execution. Dolt employs a left-recursive parser and bottom-up dynamic programming for query plan optimization, selecting the optimal execution strategy using a cost model. The post also discusses memory management and future optimizations, such as unifying intermediate representations and reducing memory churn.

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Development

How Cursor Got the Best Tab-Completion Model

2025-05-08
How Cursor Got the Best Tab-Completion Model

Cursor's code completion initially lagged behind Supermaven's Babble model, which boasted a massive context window and superior speed and accuracy thanks to its innovative edit-sequence-based training. However, Cursor acquired Supermaven, gaining Babble and leveraging its massive user data to solidify its leading position in code completion. This acquisition highlights the importance of AI model training methodologies and the crucial role of data scale in model performance.

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Development data advantage

9front OS 11091 Released: Major Improvements and New Features

2025-04-27

The 9front operating system has released version 11091, featuring numerous updates. These include an improved snapshot scheduler, a new Intel i225 2.5 GbE driver, AMD Ryzen CPU temperature support, a Unicode 16.0 normalization interface in libc, and support for multiple architectures (x86, amd64, arm64). Furthermore, the release boasts extensive improvements to compilers, libraries, and programs, such as AWK's support for a new rc-quote format, and bug fixes and performance optimizations across various programs. Multiple installation media are provided for PC, Raspberry Pi, MNT Reform, and QEMU.

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Development

Dominion Energy's Net Metering Overhaul Threatens Virginia's Solar Future

2025-05-19
Dominion Energy's Net Metering Overhaul Threatens Virginia's Solar Future

Dominion Energy's proposed "NEM 2.0" plan drastically alters Virginia's net metering program, potentially crippling solar adoption. Instead of a 1:1 credit for excess solar energy, Dominion proposes a significantly lower export rate based on their power purchase agreements (PPAs), effectively slashing homeowner savings by up to 65%. They also aim to claim ownership of generated SRECs. This move clashes with Virginia's renewable energy goals and discourages individual solar installations. While existing systems are grandfathered, those planning to install solar should act quickly before the mid-2026 deadline. Public comment to the SCC, proactive installations, and contacting legislators are crucial to influencing the outcome.

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EU Eyes Cookie Consent Overhaul: The End of Annoying Pop-ups?

2025-09-25
EU Eyes Cookie Consent Overhaul: The End of Annoying Pop-ups?

The 2009 e-Privacy Directive requiring websites to obtain user consent for cookies has led to a deluge of consent banners, prompting user fatigue. The EU Commission plans a December “omnibus” regulation simplifying digital company oversight, potentially easing cookie rules. This might include allowing one-time cookie preference settings or exempting cookies for technically necessary functions and simple statistics. Denmark has proposed similar changes. However, the upcoming Digital Fairness Act focusing on advertising suggests further battles over cookie regulation are on the horizon.

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Tech

Walmart's Honeycomb Delivery Network: Reaching 12 Million More Homes

2025-04-22
Walmart's Honeycomb Delivery Network: Reaching 12 Million More Homes

Walmart is leveraging a hexagonal map segmentation strategy to optimize its same-day delivery network. This approach, inspired by honeycombs' efficient space utilization, surpasses traditional ZIP code or radius-based methods. By analyzing customer locations and store inventory more precisely, Walmart can now reach an additional 12 million US households with same-day delivery. The hexagonal grid allows for dynamic catchment areas, optimizing delivery routes based on road networks and minimizing travel time, ultimately boosting delivery efficiency.

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PromptArmor: Breaking LLMs and Building the Future of AI Security

2025-06-04
PromptArmor: Breaking LLMs and Building the Future of AI Security

PromptArmor is a startup focused on AI security, specializing in breaking large language model (LLM) applications to build robust defenses. They serve major American enterprises, helping them securely accelerate their AI adoption. The team boasts experience from companies like Google and Tesla, and is backed by top investors including Y Combinator. They emphasize a customer-centric approach and offer competitive compensation, including a base salary of $120k-$180k and 0.75%-2% equity. Located in San Francisco, they're seeking engineers with strong technical skills and product sense to join their team.

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Startup

LLM Plugin: Summarize Hacker News Threads with Ease

2025-04-08
LLM Plugin: Summarize Hacker News Threads with Ease

A new LLM plugin, `llm-hacker-news`, lets you easily summarize Hacker News conversation threads. Simply install the plugin and use the command `llm -f hn:ID 'your instruction'` (e.g., `llm -f hn:43615912 'summary with illustrative direct quotes'`) to get a summary of the thread with the specified ID (found in the thread's URL). Installation and local setup instructions are provided in the README.

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Development

The Unexpected Economics of Planned Website Downtime

2025-04-10

This article challenges the conventional wisdom of 24/7 website uptime. Using B&H Photo's Saturday closures as a case study, it argues that not all e-commerce sites need to be constantly available. The author explores the high cost of continuous uptime and suggests that planned downtime doesn't necessarily lead to significant customer loss. The article draws parallels with Google's SRE team intentionally introducing minor outages to force users to consider fallback plans. Finally, it calculates the potential cloud cost savings from scheduled downtime and weighs the trade-offs against employee on-call compensation.

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Startup

Gecode: A High-Performance Open-Source Constraint Solver

2025-07-05

Gecode is an open-source C++ toolkit for building constraint-based systems. Known for its state-of-the-art performance and modular design, it boasts a comprehensive set of features including constraints over integers, Booleans, sets, and floats (over 70 global constraints from the Global Constraint Catalog and many more). Gecode offers advanced branching heuristics, multiple search engines (including parallel search), MiniZinc support, automatic symmetry breaking, and restart mechanisms. Its extensive documentation and over 50,000 test cases ensure reliability and ease of use. Gecode swept all gold medals in the MiniZinc Challenges from 2008 to 2012, showcasing its exceptional performance.

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Development constraint solver

Pocket Casts' Ad Bug Angers Lifetime Subscribers

2025-09-25
Pocket Casts' Ad Bug Angers Lifetime Subscribers

Podcast app Pocket Casts is facing backlash after showing ads to legacy users who paid for ad-free lifetime access. Originally a one-time purchase app (2010), it switched to a subscription model in 2019. While Automattic, the parent company, promised ad-free access to early payers under the 'Pocket Casts Champion' program, some users are now seeing ads. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg attributed this to a bug and stated that all paid users shouldn't see ads. The incident highlights challenges in maintaining 'lifetime' promises during business model shifts. Only a few thousand users are affected.

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Coinbase Data Breach Sparks Fears of Kidnappings and Deaths

2025-05-20
Coinbase Data Breach Sparks Fears of Kidnappings and Deaths

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington claims that a recent Coinbase data breach, exposing sensitive user data like addresses and balances, will lead to deaths due to a surge in kidnapping attempts targeting high-net-worth crypto holders. Arrington calls for a re-evaluation of KYC regulations and imprisonment for executives failing to protect customer data. Former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan counters that the problem stems from government-mandated KYC data collection. The incident highlights serious security and privacy concerns in the crypto space and sparks debate over the merits of KYC.

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Model Context Protocol: A Web 2.0 Revival?

2025-05-23
Model Context Protocol: A Web 2.0 Revival?

Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows large language models (LLMs) to interact with various applications. OpenAI's adoption in ChatGPT spurred widespread use, even extending to Windows. While MCP's specification is somewhat vague, its openness and rapid adoption have sparked renewed interest in the spirit of Web 2.0. True Web 2.0 wasn't about closed platforms like Facebook, but rather about open APIs and collaborative development seen in sites like Flickr and Delicious. MCP's rise could inspire developers to prioritize openness, making platforms more programmable and less controlled by a few giants. However, challenges remain, including security risks.

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Tech
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