Why I Refuse to Use AI for Writing

2025-07-19
Why I Refuse to Use AI for Writing

An author shares his reasons for refusing to use large language models (LLMs) for writing. He argues that over-reliance on LLMs reduces originality, weakens independent thinking, and deprives writing of personalized deep thought and associations. He cites studies from MIT and the UK supporting the idea that LLMs can lead to cognitive laziness and reduced learning motivation. Furthermore, the author finds LLM-generated text lacks personality and emotion, failing to capture the unique associations and insights that arise during reading. This conflicts with his pursuit of a deep reading experience. He ultimately chooses to stick to independent writing, believing it's the only way to maintain authenticity and originality.

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Beyond RISC-V: A Revolution in Distance-Based Instruction Set Architectures

2025-06-04
Beyond RISC-V: A Revolution in Distance-Based Instruction Set Architectures

CPU core instruction decoding and execution widths have significantly increased in recent years, but the cost of register renaming limits further scaling. This article introduces a distance-based instruction set architecture that eliminates register renaming by specifying operands based on the distance from the instruction's result, thus reducing hardware complexity and power consumption. Researchers have developed three distance-based instruction sets (STRAIGHT, Clockhands, and TURBULENCE) and successfully fabricated a chip based on the STRAIGHT instruction set. This innovation promises significant performance improvements for both CPUs and GPUs, especially for GPUs due to their flexible intermediate representation, making adoption easier.

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Hardware

Palantir's Controversial 'Meritocracy Fellowship': Bypassing College for High School Grads

2025-04-14
Palantir's Controversial 'Meritocracy Fellowship': Bypassing College for High School Grads

Palantir Technologies, a successful tech firm, has launched a controversial internship program called the "Meritocracy Fellowship." Targeting recent high school graduates who haven't attended college, the four-month program offers a substantial monthly stipend of $5,400. Applicants need exceptionally high SAT/ACT scores and must answer questions about their accomplishments and career aspirations. This move aligns with founder Peter Thiel's anti-higher education stance, sparking debate about tech talent acquisition and the value of college. While controversial, Palantir's initiative might offer a solution to the tech industry's talent shortage and inspire other companies to explore alternative recruitment strategies.

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Windows 11 September Update: Copilot Enhancements, Customizable Lock Screen Widgets

2025-08-21
Windows 11 September Update: Copilot Enhancements, Customizable Lock Screen Widgets

Microsoft is preparing a major feature drop for Windows 11 users in September. The update includes Copilot enhancements like improved Recall and Click To Do, alongside improvements for all users such as enhanced Windows Search (images displayed in a grid view), customizable lock screen widgets, and a redesigned Windows Hello interface. Additionally, the taskbar calendar flyout will once again display seconds, and Task Manager has been updated. Copilot+ PC users will get a new Recall landing page and a new Click To Do tutorial. Future updates include a more customizable Start menu and improved system-wide dark mode.

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Tech

Court Affirms: AI-Generated Art Can't Be Copyrighted

2025-03-18
Court Affirms: AI-Generated Art Can't Be Copyrighted

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., has upheld the U.S. Copyright Office's decision that AI-generated artwork without human input cannot be copyrighted. The ruling rejects Stephen Thaler's claim that his AI system, DABUS, independently created a copyrightable image. The court affirmed that human authorship is a fundamental requirement for copyright protection under U.S. law. This decision follows similar rulings and reflects the ongoing struggle to define copyright in the rapidly evolving field of generative AI. Thaler plans to appeal, while the Copyright Office maintains the court's decision is correct.

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Tech

Trump Tariffs: Target and Best Buy Warn of Price Hikes

2025-03-05
Trump Tariffs: Target and Best Buy Warn of Price Hikes

Target and Best Buy have warned that President Trump's tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China could lead to higher prices in their stores as early as this week. Target CEO Brian Cornell stated that consumers will "likely see price increases over the next couple of days," citing Mexico as a significant source of winter fruits and vegetables. Best Buy CEO Corie Barry echoed this sentiment, noting that China and Mexico are major sources of their products and that price increases are "highly likely." While the Commerce Secretary hinted at potential compromises with Canada and Mexico, the impact of the tariffs is already being felt, with consumers facing the prospect of paying more for goods.

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Presidential Pardon Power: Does it Extend to Corporations?

2025-05-25
Presidential Pardon Power: Does it Extend to Corporations?

This article explores the largely uncharted territory of whether the US president's pardon power extends to corporations. Historical evidence suggests a broader interpretation than commonly assumed, tracing back to centuries of English common law where corporations were frequently pardoned. The president could use this power to conditionally pardon corporations, potentially even effectively abolishing federal corporate criminal liability. However, Congress can limit this power by refusing to appropriate refunds of pardoned fines and by repealing corporate criminal liability statutes. Some states might also possess similar pardon powers, opening new strategic avenues for lawyers representing corporations.

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Half-Life 2 RTX: Free DLC Brings Ray Tracing and 4K Visuals

2025-03-18
Half-Life 2 RTX: Free DLC Brings Ray Tracing and 4K Visuals

Orbifold Studios is releasing a free DLC, Half-Life 2 RTX, for all Half-Life 2 owners. Leveraging RTX Remix technology, the DLC boasts full ray tracing, DLSS 4, and NVIDIA Reflex, resulting in stunning 4K visuals with new textures, high-poly models, and improved lighting. Demos for Ravenholm and Nova Prospekt are set for March 18th. Note: The game contains violence depicting both humanoid and alien enemies, including zombies and detailed gore.

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Game Free DLC

Early Pirate Bay Backer Dies in Plane Crash

2025-03-13
Early Pirate Bay Backer Dies in Plane Crash

Carl Lundstrom, co-founder and early financial backer of The Pirate Bay, died in a plane crash in the Slovenian mountains. Lundstrom, also a member of the far-right Alternative for Sweden party, was flying from Zagreb to Zurich when his plane crashed. The 64-year-old's Piper Mooney Ovation M20R split in two upon impact. Bad weather hampered rescue efforts. He was previously convicted in 2012 for assisting in copyright infringement. Lundstrom also had ties to other Swedish political parties and unsuccessfully ran for office in 2021.

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LLMs: Code Generation Speedup, But Understanding Remains the Bottleneck

2025-07-03
LLMs: Code Generation Speedup, But Understanding Remains the Bottleneck

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has dramatically increased code generation speed. However, this hasn't solved the real bottlenecks in software engineering: code reviews, knowledge transfer, testing, debugging, and team collaboration. The article argues that LLMs lower the cost of writing code, but the cost of understanding, testing, and trusting that code is higher than ever. LLM-generated code can be hard to understand, violate established conventions, or introduce unintended side effects, increasing review and maintenance difficulty. Ultimately, software engineering still relies on team trust, shared context, and meticulous code review—these are the keys to efficiency.

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Development

Tesla's Insurance Arm Bleeding Money: High Repair Costs Bite

2025-05-10
Tesla's Insurance Arm Bleeding Money: High Repair Costs Bite

Tesla's insurance business continues to hemorrhage money, with a staggering 103.3% loss ratio in 2024, far exceeding the industry average of 66.1%. The culprit? Exorbitant repair costs for Tesla vehicles, averaging 32% higher than those of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars. Despite leveraging data from its Full Self-Driving system and vehicle telematics to adjust risk profiles, Tesla hasn't managed to effectively control costs. Poor customer satisfaction, marked by lengthy repair times and subpar communication, further exacerbates the problem. Rising premiums haven't solved the issue, leaving Tesla's insurance arm facing a precarious future.

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IntyBASIC: A BASIC Compiler Reviving Intellivision Game Development

2025-07-02
IntyBASIC: A BASIC Compiler Reviving Intellivision Game Development

Inspired by the challenges of Intellivision game development, the author created IntyBASIC, a BASIC compiler for the Intellivision console. Launched in 2014, IntyBASIC translates BASIC source code into CP1610 assembly, supporting Intellivision's video and sound capabilities. Its success sparked a surge of new Intellivision games and homebrews, even leading to a programming contest. The author also penned two books sharing game development insights, covering basic to advanced techniques with complete game source code included.

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Development BASIC Compiler

Tokyo Carry Culture: A Designer's Journey & Inspiration

2025-06-25
Tokyo Carry Culture: A Designer's Journey & Inspiration

Designer José's Tokyo trip wasn't just a birthday getaway; it became a deep dive into Japan's carry culture. He observed a focus on practicality, convenience, and compactness, with slim backpacks, briefcases, and crossbody bags being popular choices. He discovered interesting local brands like AS20V, Ramidus, and One Third Research, sparking ideas for new tote bags, crossbody bags, and travel bags. The journey also highlighted the importance of carrying cash, packing light, and choosing the right bag.

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Design carry culture

Reactive State Management in Python: A Practical Guide

2025-06-13
Reactive State Management in Python: A Practical Guide

This article explores reactive state management in Python using signals. Traditional approaches rely on manual updates, leading to bugs and maintenance headaches. Signals offer a declarative alternative, defining dependencies between states and automatically updating derived values. This solves common problems like forgotten updates, inconsistent states, and complex testing. The article details three core primitives: Signal, Computed, and Effect. Real-world examples demonstrate their use in microservice configuration, real-time dashboards, and distributed system monitoring.

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Development

The Astonishing Stability of Clojure Libraries: A Secret Weapon Against Breaking Changes

2025-05-08

This article explores the remarkable stability of Clojure libraries and reveals that the secret isn't static typing, but rather a community-driven practice of avoiding breaking changes. The author argues for this through analysis of Clojure's codebase stability, popular library code retention rates, and a case study of fixing a bug. The article pinpoints Clojure's stability to its data structure design (immutability, EDN serialization), naming conventions (namespace elements), and a strategy of avoiding breaking changes like renaming or altering function signatures. Instead of relying on static typing to prevent problems caused by changes, the author suggests that fundamentally avoiding breaking changes is the key to maintaining library stability.

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AlphaGenome: AI Cracks the Code of the Genome

2025-06-27
AlphaGenome: AI Cracks the Code of the Genome

Google DeepMind unveils AlphaGenome, an AI tool that predicts how variations in human DNA impact gene regulation. Processing up to a million base pairs, AlphaGenome predicts numerous molecular properties, including gene start and end sites, splicing locations, RNA output, and DNA accessibility. Achieving state-of-the-art performance across benchmarks, AlphaGenome efficiently scores the effects of genetic variants, providing researchers with a more comprehensive understanding of gene regulation. The AlphaGenome API is now available for non-commercial research, promising to accelerate breakthroughs in genomics and healthcare.

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AI

Argparse's Mutually Exclusive Group Nesting Limitation: A Frustrating Conundrum

2025-06-14

Python's argparse module, while offering convenient features for handling command-line arguments, including mutually exclusive groups, has a frustrating limitation when it comes to nesting. Consider a program with multiple timeout settings where users can either adjust individual timeouts or disable them entirely. Argparse doesn't support nesting a 'no-timeout' option within a group of individual timeout options, making configuration cumbersome. While you can nest a mutually exclusive group inside a regular group, the reverse isn't supported, and the official documentation explicitly states this limitation. This forces developers to manually check if specific switches were used, adding complexity.

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Development

LaLiga's Reckless Blockade: The High Cost of Internet Censorship

2025-05-26

LaLiga's aggressive anti-piracy campaign, sanctioned by a court order, has resulted in the mass blocking of Cloudflare IP addresses, impacting millions of innocent websites and potentially jeopardizing access to critical emergency services in Spain. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has strongly condemned this “bonkers” strategy, warning of potential fatalities. While LaLiga claims legal compliance, Prince insists Cloudflare has always been willing to cooperate, offering a clear process that LaLiga refuses to use. The controversy, dubbed #laligagate, sparks intense debate over internet censorship and copyright protection, highlighting the significant risks and potentially deadly consequences of large-scale blocking.

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Tech

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.

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Tech

The Elegant Inside of a Ten-Year-Old MacBook Pro: A Tribute to Craftsmanship

2025-07-26
The Elegant Inside of a Ten-Year-Old MacBook Pro: A Tribute to Craftsmanship

The author disassembled a 2013 MacBook Pro that lasted ten years before its first failure (a buzzing speaker). The elegant internal design impressed him; almost every part required only one screw for removal, showcasing efficiency. This reminded him of Steve Jobs' quote about craftsmanship: even the back panel should use high-quality wood because it reflects the craftsman's values and responsibility towards their work. The author contrasts this with today's society's overemphasis on superficial value. True quality must be consistent throughout, even in unseen parts, forming the foundation of longevity.

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Hardware

Steam to Drop Support for 32-bit Windows in 2026

2025-09-19
Steam to Drop Support for 32-bit Windows in 2026

Valve announced that Steam will end support for 32-bit versions of Windows on January 1st, 2026. While only 0.01% of Steam users remain on 32-bit Windows, the move signals the end of an era for PC gaming. Valve cites incompatibility issues with drivers and libraries as the reason for dropping support. They urge users to upgrade to 64-bit Windows to continue receiving security updates and technical assistance.

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Game 32-bit

BYD's Seal EV Achieves Nearly 1200-Mile Range with Solid-State Batteries

2025-06-20
BYD's Seal EV Achieves Nearly 1200-Mile Range with Solid-State Batteries

BYD is testing solid-state batteries in its Seal EV, a Tesla Model 3 competitor. Initial tests show a potential range of nearly 1200 miles (1875 km). After over a decade of research, BYD announced road tests in 2025 and plans to begin production vehicles with solid-state batteries in 2027, aiming for mass production by 2030 at a cost comparable to current lithium-ion batteries. The Seal is expected to be the first model to feature this technology, boasting high energy density and fast charging capabilities, bolstering BYD's global EV market dominance.

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MELP and MELPe Vocoders: The Evolution of Military Speech Communication

2025-09-17
MELP and MELPe Vocoders: The Evolution of Military Speech Communication

This article introduces Mixed-Excitation Linear Prediction (MELP) and its enhanced version, MELPe, vocoders. Originally invented by Alan McCree, MELP became a US DoD standard (MIL-STD-3005) in 1997 and saw widespread use in military applications and satellite communications. MELPe, an improvement on MELP, became the new MIL-STD-3005 in 2001 and was adopted by NATO as STANAG-4591 in 2002. MELPe significantly outperforms older military standards like CELP and LPC-10e in speech quality, intelligibility, and noise immunity, especially in noisy environments.

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Manually Building a Nix Derivation: A Deep Dive into Hash Generation

2025-04-09
Manually Building a Nix Derivation: A Deep Dive into Hash Generation

This blog post details the author's journey in manually building a simple Nix derivation. By dissecting Farid's blog post step-by-step, the author delves into the inner workings of Nix derivations, specifically the hash generation process. The journey involved overcoming challenges such as understanding ATerm representation, SHA256 hashing, and Nix's unique base32 encoding. Ultimately, the author successfully generated the same hash value as in Farid's blog post and successfully built a simple "hello world" derivation.

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Development Hash Generation

Elixir/Erlang Hot Code Swapping: Zero-Downtime Deployments

2024-12-13

This article delves into Elixir/Erlang's hot code swapping capabilities, enabling the loading and unloading of code at runtime without requiring system restarts for application upgrades. A simple KV module example demonstrates manual hot swapping, while iex's c/1 and r/1 commands, and the Relups tool, are introduced for easier application and release upgrade management. The article explains Erlang applications, releases, appups, and relups, detailing the use of the Distillery tool to generate application releases and upgrade releases, ultimately achieving zero-downtime deployments and preventing service interruptions.

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Development hot code swapping

arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaborators

2025-06-01
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 working with arXivLabs uphold 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

The Recycling Myth: How Big Oil Shifted the Blame for Plastic Pollution

2025-06-03
The Recycling Myth: How Big Oil Shifted the Blame for Plastic Pollution

The ubiquitous "reduce, reuse, recycle" mantra, while well-intentioned, masks a disturbing truth about plastic pollution. Research reveals that the oil and gas industry knowingly promoted recycling as a solution, despite its limitations, to avoid accountability for their product's environmental impact. While recycling plays a role, it's insufficient to combat the growing crisis. The article exposes the inadequate recycling infrastructure and the industry's long-standing awareness of plastic's inherent difficulty to recycle. Real solutions require systemic change: stricter regulations on plastic production, investment in sustainable alternatives, and holding polluters accountable.

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Tech recycling
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