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Goodbye Slow Configuration: Parallelizing Build Configuration with Makefiles

2025-04-26

Author Tavian Barnes complains about the inefficiency of existing build systems (Autoconf, CMake, Meson, etc.) in the configuration phase, which takes far longer than the build phase. He proposes a parallelized solution based on Makefiles, significantly improving efficiency by breaking down the configuration process into multiple concurrently executable tasks. The core idea is to leverage make's parallel capabilities to parallelize the originally sequential compiler test tasks, ultimately reducing configuration time from 38 seconds to 0.4 seconds. The article details the implementation, including helper scripts, Makefile writing techniques, and parallelization strategies. This article is valuable for developers seeking faster build speeds.

(tavianator.com)

Development

Is Your Smartphone Really Listening? The Truth Is Far More Complex

2025-04-26

Is Your Smartphone Really Listening? The Truth Is Far More Complex

A long-standing conspiracy theory claims smartphones constantly eavesdrop on private conversations. While the 2024 revelation of Cox Media Group's "Active Listening" system fueled this, it only used snippets of voice data uploaded after activating voice assistants, not 24/7 monitoring. Companies like Facebook leverage massive datasets and sophisticated algorithms to predict user needs and deliver targeted ads – a process far more complex and unsettling than simple eavesdropping. Studies show phones don't constantly monitor microphones, but the data collected through other means is still deeply concerning.

(newatlas.com)

Tech

YKK's Self-Zipping Zipper: A Motorized Marvel

2025-04-26

YKK's Self-Zipping Zipper: A Motorized Marvel

YKK, the world's largest zipper manufacturer, unveiled a prototype self-propelled zipper. This motorized marvel uses a built-in motor and gear mechanism to zip itself up with the push of a button on a wired remote. While currently bulky and intended for industrial applications (demonstrated connecting large membranes and shelters), YKK envisions future miniaturization for consumer use. The technology promises to revolutionize how we interact with zippers, particularly for those with limited mobility, though safety mechanisms will need development before widespread adoption.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech Self-zipping zipper Technological innovation

CACM's Practice Section: Call for Articles

2025-04-26

Communications of the ACM (CACM) is seeking submissions for its new Practice section, focusing on enhancing the skills and job performance of computing practitioners. The section welcomes articles on technical advancements, development practices, organizational structures, successful system examples, and other relevant topics. Articles should be broadly applicable and insightful, avoiding highly specialized content or detailed tutorials on specific technologies. Submissions are limited to 10 pages (approximately 6,000 words) and can be previously blogged, but not formally published elsewhere. Authors retain copyright. Potential authors are encouraged to contact the co-chairs before submitting.

(cacm.acm.org)

Development Call for Papers

Google Kills Software Updates for First-Gen Nest Thermostats

2025-04-25

Google Kills Software Updates for First-Gen Nest Thermostats

Google announced it's ending software updates for the first and second-generation Nest Learning Thermostats (released in 2011 and 2012, respectively) and the 2014 European version. After October 25th, remote control via phone or Google Assistant will be gone, though local temperature and schedule adjustments remain possible. Google also stated it has no plans for future Nest thermostat releases in Europe, though existing 3rd gen and Nest Thermostat E models will remain on sale for now. A new feature will let users of recent Nest thermostats set schedules via the Google Home app later this year. To soften the blow, Google is offering discounts on replacement thermostats. This move sparks concerns about the lifespan of smart home devices and highlights the crucial role of software support in their longevity.

(www.theverge.com)

Hardware Nest Thermostat Software Updates

Crap Towns: A Book From Another Age?

2025-04-26

Crap Towns: A Book From Another Age?

The author reflects on their 'Crap Towns' series, a satirical look at the worst places in the UK published around the turn of the millennium. The series, based on public nominations and the author's own research, poked fun at British social issues. Now, the author questions whether such a book could be published today. The rise of identity politics and reduced tolerance for humor lead to concerns that the series' satire might be controversial. This prompts reflection on the changing landscape of social humor. While some criticize the series as outdated or offensive, the author argues that humor is a lubricant for social progress, and critical humor can expose societal ills. Ultimately, the author concludes that despite the changing times, the essence of 'Crap Towns' persists, albeit requiring adaptation to a new context.

(samj.substack.com)

Misc identity politics

Berkeley Humanoid Lite: A $5K Open-Source 3D-Printed Humanoid Robot

2025-04-26

Researchers at UC Berkeley have unveiled Berkeley Humanoid Lite, an open-source humanoid robot boasting a modular 3D-printed gearbox and a sub-$5,000 price tag. Its design prioritizes accessibility and customization, with components readily sourced and fabricated using standard 3D printers. Rigorous testing validated the durability of its 3D-printed actuators. A reinforcement learning-based locomotion controller successfully demonstrated zero-shot policy transfer from simulation to hardware. By open-sourcing hardware, code, and training frameworks, the project aims to democratize humanoid robotics development.

(lite.berkeley-humanoid.org)

Hardware open-source robot humanoid robot

$8M+ Annual Funding: Unraveling the Brain's Sensorimotor Integration

2025-04-26

$8M+ Annual Funding: Unraveling the Brain's Sensorimotor Integration

The Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience (SCENE) launches with over $8 million in annual funding to investigate how the brain efficiently integrates sensory and motor information. This interdisciplinary project, uniting leading neuroscientists and machine learning experts, leverages principles of ecological psychology, focusing on how the brain encodes affordances – opportunities for action in the environment. Research will span multiple species, from rodents and bats to humans, aiming to uncover fundamental principles of cognition and bridge gaps in our understanding of the brain.

(www.simonsfoundation.org)

Tech Brain Cognition

DoorDash Bids $3.6B to Acquire Deliveroo

2025-04-25

DoorDash Bids $3.6B to Acquire Deliveroo

British food delivery company Deliveroo announced that it has received a $3.6 billion all-stock acquisition offer from its US counterpart, DoorDash. Yahoo Finance's market analysis show, Market Domination Overtime, featured experts discussing the implications of this news for both companies and the broader food delivery market.

(finance.yahoo.com)

Startup Food Delivery

Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs: Recall, Enhanced Search, and Click to Do

2025-04-25

Microsoft's Copilot+ PCs: Recall, Enhanced Search, and Click to Do

Microsoft is rolling out Copilot+ PCs, highlighted by the Recall feature. This release also includes a revamped Windows Search with natural language processing and 'Click to Do,' enabling text extraction from images, on-screen content search, and quick summarization/rewriting. Copilot+ PCs require an NPU capable of over 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS), currently supported by Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and Plus, Intel Core Ultra 200V-series, and AMD Ryzen AI 300-series processors. While Recall and enhanced search are available on both Arm and x86, some Click to Do features are currently limited to Arm-based systems.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech

Dive into D: A Comprehensive Guide

2025-04-25

This book provides a comprehensive guide to D programming, covering everything from basic syntax to advanced features. With a clear chapter structure, it progressively introduces core D concepts: variables, data types, operators, control flow, functions, classes, object-oriented programming, templates, and concurrency. Numerous code examples and exercises are included to help readers grasp D's programming techniques. Suitable for both beginners and experienced programmers.

(ddili.org)

Development D Language Advanced Programming

Comcast's Price Transparency Issues Lead to Massive Customer Loss

2025-04-26

Comcast's Price Transparency Issues Lead to Massive Customer Loss

Comcast reported a net loss of 183,000 residential broadband customers in Q1 2025, a significant increase from the previous year. President Mike Cavanagh attributed this to a lack of price transparency and a poor customer experience. In response, Comcast is simplifying its pricing structure and offering a five-year price guarantee for new customers, aiming to improve customer retention. Despite increased revenue, Comcast's stock price dropped 3.7% following the announcement.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech Pricing Strategy

Greek Youth Revolutionizing Tech: Rockets, Robots, and Supercars!

2025-04-26

Greek Youth Revolutionizing Tech: Rockets, Robots, and Supercars!

A recent report highlights the burgeoning technological talent of Greece's youth. Student teams are making waves in international aerospace, robotics, and automotive engineering competitions. ASAT, for example, consistently ranks among the top student teams in Europe. bitLab's silver medal at WRO 2024 and European championship victory showcase their prowess. Numerous universities are actively involved, with labs like NTUA's Legged Robots Team and AUTH's Robotics Lab leading the charge. This success story not only demonstrates the innovative capacity of Greece's young generation but also offers a beacon of hope for the nation's technological advancement, challenging preconceived notions about Greek technological capabilities.

(greekanalyst.substack.com)

Tech Greek Tech Youth Innovation

The Future of Kafka: Beyond Partitions, Towards a More Powerful Message Queue

2025-04-25

This article explores future improvements to Kafka, centered around moving beyond partition-based access to a key-centric approach. This would enable more efficient data access and replay, dynamic consumer scaling, and resolve head-of-line blocking issues. Additionally, it proposes features such as topic hierarchies, concurrency control, broker-side schema support, extensibility, synchronous commit callbacks, snapshotting, and multi-tenancy to enhance Kafka's performance, reliability, and ease of use, making it better suited for modern data applications.

(www.morling.dev)

Development Message Queue

Gym Class: Hiring a Senior Animation Engineer for Meta Quest Hit

2025-04-25

Gym Class: Hiring a Senior Animation Engineer for Meta Quest Hit

Gym Class, a leading social game on Meta Quest with millions of downloads and a 4.9-star rating, is expanding! They're seeking an experienced Animation Engineer to lead the design, development, and implementation of character animation systems in Unity. This role demands expertise in Unity and C#, proven mobile game animation experience, strong understanding of IK, animation blending, and state machines, and a knack for mobile performance optimization. You'll lead a high-performing team and shape the future of character movement in the game.

(www.ycombinator.com)

Game Animation Engineering

Magnitude: AI-Native Testing Framework for Web Apps

2025-04-25

Magnitude: AI-Native Testing Framework for Web Apps

Magnitude is a revolutionary open-source end-to-end testing framework for web applications, powered by visual AI agents that 'see' your interface and adapt to any changes. Build test cases easily with natural language, leverage a powerful reasoning agent for planning and adjustment, and rely on a fast visual agent for reliable execution. Run tests locally or within CI/CD pipelines; the framework automatically handles problems encountered during testing. Magnitude supports various LLMs, including Gemini 2.5 pro, Anthropic, and OpenAI, and offers a free visual model, Moondream. It simplifies test creation and execution significantly.

(github.com)

Development Web testing Open-source framework

GS-Calc: A Spreadsheet That Handles Millions of Rows with Ease

2025-04-25

GS-Calc is a modern spreadsheet redefining what "big data" means for desktop software. It effortlessly handles massive CSV and XLSX files with millions of rows and thousands of columns, boasting unlimited worksheets and subfolders. Its performance optimizations significantly outperform other spreadsheet solutions in tasks like loading text files, copy-pasting, and VLOOKUP/MATCH functions. Beyond this, GS-Calc provides powerful features including robust pivot tables, Monte Carlo simulations, regular expression support, and Python integration, making it an ideal tool for large-scale data analysis.

(citadel5.com)

Development

Interactive Neural Forest World in Your Browser

2025-04-25

The author trained a neural network to transform a video of a forest trail, captured with a phone, into an interactive virtual world explorable in a web browser. Unlike traditional video games, this world relies not on pre-defined geometry, lighting, and animations, but solely on a neural network generating new images based on previous images and control inputs. Overcoming early model limitations, the author improved the training method and network architecture to achieve a relatively smooth interactive experience. This showcases a novel approach to generating virtual worlds using neural networks, promising a future of more realistic and convenient world building.

(madebyoll.in)

Game Neural Network

A Comprehensive List of World Countries

2025-04-25

This list provides a nearly exhaustive compilation of all independent sovereign states and territories worldwide, spanning every continent from Asia and Africa to the Americas and Europe. Its extensive nature makes it useful for a variety of applications, including building geographic databases, conducting international trade research, or global studies.

(clevercoloringbook.com)

Misc country list

Mojave Desert Ghosts: Yucca Man and Southern California's Cryptid Legends

2025-04-25

Mojave Desert Ghosts: Yucca Man and Southern California's Cryptid Legends

This article explores the enduring legend of Yucca Man in Southern California's Mojave Desert, alongside other similar cryptid sightings. Since the 1970s, reports of an eight-foot-tall, hairy, red-eyed creature have emerged from military bases, national parks, and remote areas. While Native populations viewed these beings as supernatural entities, modern accounts depict them as Bigfoot-like creatures. The article delves into historical parallels, including tales of a winged beast at Elizabeth Lake and the 'Cement Monster' of a nearby mine, weaving together geography, history, and folklore into a captivating narrative of mystery.

(longreads.com)

Misc Cryptids Bigfoot Southern California

Raspberry Pi Pico-Controlled 3x5 LED Matrix: From Circuit Design to Web Control

2025-04-25

This tutorial details building a 3x5 LED matrix controlled by a Raspberry Pi Pico using tscircuit, enabling WiFi remote control. It covers circuit design, component selection (WS2812B LEDs), connection methodology (daisy-chaining LEDs), PCB layout, and a final web interface for control. Learn to create an LED matrix for displaying information, data visualization, or interactive notification systems.

(docs.tscircuit.com)

Hardware LED Matrix

Intel's AI Chip Flop: Unexpected Demand for Older CPUs Creates Production Bottleneck

2025-04-25

Intel's AI Chip Flop: Unexpected Demand for Older CPUs Creates Production Bottleneck

Intel's newly launched AI PC chips are underperforming, creating an unexpected shortage of production capacity for its older, cheaper chips. This news comes alongside announced layoffs and a poor financial report that sent the company's stock plummeting. Consumers are opting for less expensive previous-generation Raptor Lake chips over the pricier Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake AI models. The resulting shortage in Intel's 'Intel 7' process node capacity is expected to persist. This unexpected surge in demand for older chips points to a lack of a 'killer app' for AI in the PC market. Intel's Q1 revenue for its Client Computing Group (CCG) fell 8% year-over-year. AMD's upcoming financial results will provide further insight into the market's response.

(www.tomshardware.com)

Tech production shortage

DOT's Mass Layoffs Backfire: Agency Scrambles to Rehire Amidst Safety Concerns

2025-04-25

DOT's Mass Layoffs Backfire: Agency Scrambles to Rehire Amidst Safety Concerns

The Department of Transportation (DOT), under Secretary Sean Duffy, has faced a major setback after mass layoffs left the agency struggling to maintain essential services, particularly within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Duffy's controversial use of 'deferred resignation' deals led to nearly 4,700 employees leaving, raising significant safety concerns. Now, the DOT is reportedly attempting to rehire many of these workers, highlighting the chaotic and potentially dangerous consequences of the initial cuts. While the DOT claims the layoffs were efficiency measures, the resulting turmoil casts doubt on this narrative and raises serious questions about air travel safety.

(www.jalopnik.com)

Tech Transportation Safety

Microsoft's AI Gamble: Can Mustafa Suleyman Turn Things Around?

2025-04-25

Microsoft's AI Gamble: Can Mustafa Suleyman Turn Things Around?

Microsoft spent $650 million acquiring the core team of Inflection AI, hoping to leverage the expertise of its founder, Mustafa Suleyman, to boost its AI capabilities and particularly reverse the lackluster user growth of Copilot. However, Suleyman's arrival has not been smooth sailing. Internal team integration difficulties, strained relationships with OpenAI, and the vast disparity in user numbers between Copilot and ChatGPT all pose challenges for Microsoft. The article explores Microsoft's strategic dilemmas in the AI field and whether Suleyman can ultimately deliver a successful consumer AI product.

(www.newcomer.co)

Tech

The 20th Century Novel: An Explosion of Form in an Exploding World

2025-04-25

The 20th Century Novel: An Explosion of Form in an Exploding World

This review explores Edwin Frank's *Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel*, which examines the evolution of the novel in a turbulent world. Frank argues that 20th-century novels broadened their subject matter, encompassing homosexuality, alcoholism, anti-heroes, and magical realism, among other themes absent in 19th-century novels. However, the review also suggests that the depth of 20th-century novels fails to surpass the classics of the 19th century, such as works by Dickens and Tolstoy. The piece concludes with a concern about the future of the novel and its readership, lamenting the potential loss of a literary form that so deeply engages with human nature and emotion.

(thelampmagazine.com)

Misc Novel History 20th Century Literature

Crack the Code: A Guide to Logiquiz

2025-04-25

Logiquiz, also known as a self-referential quiz or puzzle, is a meta-puzzle where questions refer to themselves or other questions within the quiz. The goal is to mark each answer as correct (green bar) by clicking it twice. Strategy involves reading all questions, eliminating obviously wrong answers, solving straightforward questions first, and iteratively updating answers as new information emerges. Success relies on logic and deduction, making it a challenging yet engaging puzzle for players of varying skill levels.

(www.logiquiz.com)

Game meta-puzzle

Differential Code Coverage for Debugging: A Powerful Technique

2025-04-25

This article introduces a powerful debugging technique: differential code coverage analysis. By comparing the code coverage of passing and failing tests, you can quickly pinpoint buggy code. The author uses Go's `math/big` library as an example, demonstrating how to use `go test` and `go tool cover` to generate coverage reports and `diff` to compare the differences. This efficiently identifies the code snippet causing the test failure, significantly reducing debugging time compared to traditional methods. The technique is illustrated by finding a bug in a few lines of code out of over 15,000.

(research.swtch.com)

Development code coverage

Formalizing Russell's Principia Mathematica in Lean4

2025-04-25

Formalizing Russell's Principia Mathematica in Lean4

This project formalizes the first volume of Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica using the Lean theorem prover. The goal is to ensure the formalization aligns with the book's theorems, avoiding confusion. The project rigorously follows Russell's proofs, minimizing added statements. A new tactic, `Syll`, handling a more general form of syllogism, was created. While Principia Mathematica is considered a 'monumental failure', the author found the formalization process enriching.

(github.com)

Development Principia Mathematica

arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaborators

2025-04-25

arXivLabs is a framework enabling collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on the website. Individuals and organizations working with arXivLabs 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. Got an idea for a project that will benefit the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

(arxiv.org)

Development

Mati Carbon Wins $50M XPrize for Novel Carbon Removal Tech

2025-04-25

Mati Carbon Wins $50M XPrize for Novel Carbon Removal Tech

The XPrize Foundation announced the winners of its $100 million carbon removal competition. Houston-based startup Mati Carbon took home the $50 million grand prize for its enhanced rock weathering technology, which involves spreading crushed basalt on farms to sequester atmospheric CO2. Mati Carbon's data-driven approach, rigorous verification process, and software platform impressed the judges. While direct air capture and ocean-based solutions didn't meet the 1,000-tonne removal threshold, several received milestone awards, highlighting their progress. Scaling up carbon removal technologies remains crucial for tackling climate change.

(spectrum.ieee.org)

Tech

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