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Baldur's Gate 3 Native Steam Deck Build: Save & Mod Migration Guide

2025-09-24

Baldur's Gate 3 Native Steam Deck Build: Save & Mod Migration Guide

The Baldur's Gate 3 update on Steam Deck brings a native version, improving performance. However, save game and mod locations change. Steam Cloud saves will automatically migrate; otherwise, manually copy saves to `/home/deck/.local/share/Larian Studios/Baldur's Gate 3/PlayerProfiles/Public`. Mod migration depends on your Larian account and mod.io connection; manually copy mods if not connected.

(larian.com)

Game Native Build

Linux Futexes: Spinlocks vs. Futexes – A Performance Deep Dive

2025-06-03

This article delves into the implementation and performance of futex locks in Linux. The author first implements a simple spinlock, then builds a more sophisticated mutex using the futex syscall. Experiments reveal that simple spinlocks can outperform futexes in certain scenarios, especially when critical section operations are lightweight. However, when critical sections are time-consuming and thread contention is high, futexes offer a significant advantage by avoiding unnecessary CPU spinning. The article concludes by discussing methods to improve futex lock performance and emphasizes the need to choose the right locking mechanism based on the specific application context.

(blog.fredrb.com)

Development spinlock mutex

NYC's Narrowest Escalator: A Hidden Gem in Rockefeller Center

2025-04-08

NYC's Narrowest Escalator: A Hidden Gem in Rockefeller Center

Hidden behind glass doors at 10 Rockefeller Plaza (between W 48th and W 49th Streets) in Rockefeller Center lies NYC's narrowest escalator. This escalator connects the underground dining and shopping concourse to street level. Even if you aren't shopping or dining, you can enter the building at 10 Rockefeller Plaza, descend a large spiral staircase, and then take the escalator back up. Security is present at all hours, but they don't mind, as the lobby features a beautiful wrap-around mural by Lakela Brown.

(www.doobybrain.com)

Misc Rockefeller Center Narrowest Escalator

MinC 6.1: A Lightweight Unix Environment

2025-04-23

MinC 6.1 is a lightweight Unix environment emulator now featuring a simplified installation wizard. It bundles a rich set of common Unix commands, encompassing file management, compression, networking tools, and development utilities. While some services and daemons are not yet supported, the developer promises their imminent release. Users can support the project through donations and suggest software for future inclusions. Post-installation, antivirus adjustments might be necessary for proper functionality, and integration with VS Code as a terminal is possible.

(minc.commandlinerevolution.nl)

Development

SQL-Powered Doom Clone: Abusing DuckDB-WASM for 3D Rendering

2025-04-22

SQL-Powered Doom Clone: Abusing DuckDB-WASM for 3D Rendering

This project explores the unconventional use of DuckDB-WASM, a browser-based analytical database, to build a rudimentary 3D game engine. The author built a text-based Doom clone where game state, including map, player position, and enemies, is stored in DuckDB tables. Game logic and rendering are handled using SQL queries, surprisingly achieving raycasting and 3D scene rendering via recursive CTEs. JavaScript acts as an orchestrator, managing input, the game loop, and sprite rendering. The process involved overcoming challenges with WASM loading, SQL dialect nuances, query planner issues, and asynchronous race conditions. The resulting game achieves 6-7 FPS, demonstrating the surprising power of SQL for unconventional tasks and the impressive performance of DuckDB-WASM.

(www.hey.earth)

Development SQL game engine

UK Adults with ADHD Experience 6-9 Year Life Expectancy Reduction

2025-01-24

A matched cohort study using UK primary care data reveals a significant life expectancy deficit for adults diagnosed with ADHD. Analyzing data from over 9.5 million individuals across 792 general practices between 2000 and 2019, researchers found a reduction of 6.78 years for men and 8.64 years for women compared to the general population. This shortened lifespan is likely attributed to modifiable risk factors and unmet support needs for both ADHD and co-occurring mental and physical health conditions. The findings highlight a critical unmet need for improved support and treatment for adults with ADHD.

(www.cambridge.org)

Tech Life Expectancy Mortality

From X to Bluesky: Echo Chamber or Oasis?

2025-03-17

This article examines the migration of users from X (formerly Twitter) to Bluesky. While Bluesky offers a more welcoming community, it risks becoming a liberal echo chamber, mirroring X's conservative bubble. The article analyzes the reasons behind this migration, including dissatisfaction with X's prevalent viewpoints and interaction style, as well as a desire for more civil discourse. The author argues that while the ideal public sphere may be unattainable, improved platform design and user responsibility can create digital spaces conducive to understanding and dialogue.

(cacm.acm.org)

Tech echo chamber public sphere

Nature Programming Language: An Evolution of Go?

2025-06-01

Nature Programming Language: An Evolution of Go?

Nature is a general-purpose open-source programming language designed for an elegant and concise development experience, enabling developers to build secure and reliable cross-platform software simply and efficiently. It leverages Go's strengths, such as its high-performance runtime and garbage collection, while addressing some of Go's shortcomings, including a more robust type system and improved error handling. Nature has reached an early usable version, supporting Linux and macOS, and offers a rich standard library and example projects. It's suitable for game development, scientific computing, AI, operating systems, and web development.

(github.com)

Development

Willy Wonka's Trade Secrets: A Legal Fantasy?

2025-05-22

Willy Wonka's Trade Secrets: A Legal Fantasy?

This paper uses Roald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" as a springboard to discuss the importance of trade secrecy in the candy industry and its relationship with patent law. The article points out that the extreme secrecy surrounding the factory's processes in the novel is not fictional, but reflects a widespread reality in the real-world confectionery industry. By analyzing this, the author raises fundamental questions about the legal protection of misappropriated secrets, especially when secrecy is paramount, and the relationship between trade secrecy and patent law.

(papers.ssrn.com)

Misc trade secrets patent law

Challenging the Big Bang: An Irish Author's 'Blowtorch Theory' of the Universe

2025-04-27

Challenging the Big Bang: An Irish Author's 'Blowtorch Theory' of the Universe

Irish author Julian Gough has unveiled a revolutionary cosmological theory, dubbed the 'blowtorch theory,' which challenges the long-held belief in the Big Bang. His theory posits that the universe didn't begin with a singular explosion 13 billion years ago, but rather evolved through multiple stages shaped by powerful jets from supermassive black holes. Supported by observations from the James Webb Space Telescope and attracting venture capital funding, Gough's theory, while controversial, offers a fresh perspective on cosmology and prompts a re-evaluation of existing models.

(www.irishtimes.com)

Tech Black Holes

Ryan Gosling Joins Star Wars: A New Standalone Film Incoming

2025-04-20

Ryan Gosling Joins Star Wars: A New Standalone Film Incoming

Ryan Gosling, star of 'Barbie,' is set to join the Star Wars universe in a new standalone film titled 'Star Wars: Starfighter,' directed by Shawn Levy and slated for release in May 2027. The film, beginning production this fall, will be set five years after 'The Rise of Skywalker' but features an entirely new story and characters, exploring a previously unseen era in the Star Wars timeline. This announcement, made at Star Wars Celebration in Japan, signifies the continued expansion of the Star Wars franchise since Disney's acquisition, with numerous sequels, spin-offs, and streaming series.

(www.cnn.com)

Game Ryan Gosling New Movie

Linux Kernel Vulnerability: io_uring Rootkit Bypasses Traditional Security

2025-04-24

Linux Kernel Vulnerability: io_uring Rootkit Bypasses Traditional Security

New research reveals a Linux rootkit, "Curing," leveraging the kernel's io_uring feature to stealthily bypass many existing security tools. Curing uses io_uring for malicious activities like network connections or file tampering without triggering alarms in system call-based security mechanisms. This is particularly dangerous for eBPF-based tools, which often monitor only system calls, neglecting io_uring. The discovery poses a serious threat to cloud-native businesses relying on these detection systems. ARMO's CADR solution can block such attacks; its automatic Seccomp Profile management allows disabling unnecessary system calls like io_uring.

(betanews.com)

Tech Linux security

DeepMind Workers Seek Unionization Over AI Ethics Concerns

2025-04-27

DeepMind Workers Seek Unionization Over AI Ethics Concerns

Around 300 London-based Google DeepMind employees are reportedly seeking to unionize with the Communication Workers Union, citing concerns over Google's removal of a pledge against using AI for weapons or surveillance, and its work with the Israeli military, including a $1.2 billion cloud contract. Employees feel “duped” by these actions, with at least five having resigned. This unionization effort highlights growing ethical concerns among tech workers.

(techcrunch.com)

Tech

Running Modern Linux on a 1989 486: A Crazy Science Project

2025-04-21

The author successfully installed and ran a 2017 Linux kernel (4.14.8) on a 1989 AMD 5x86 486 PC. This wasn't easy; challenges included using Gentoo Linux (a distribution requiring manual compilation of all packages), wrestling with drivers for ancient hardware, and overcoming incompatibility between an 80-pin PATA cable and the motherboard. Ultimately, the aged machine successfully ran modern software like Python, Git, and Nginx, although boot time was a grueling 11 minutes and shutdown took 5.5 minutes. The project demonstrates Linux's remarkable backward compatibility and the author's impressive persistence.

(yeokhengmeng.com)

Development

16 Billion Passwords Exposed: Largest Data Breach Ever?

2025-06-19

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a record-breaking data breach exposing 16 billion passwords—the largest confirmed dump of stolen access data ever. These credentials are not recycled from old hacks; they're new, undocumented, and highly dangerous, impacting major platforms like Apple, Google, Facebook, and more. The data's structured format suggests active exfiltration, likely via infostealer malware, optimized for sale or deployment. Researchers warn of imminent large-scale phishing, credential stuffing, and account hijacking. The breach highlights ongoing vulnerabilities in corporate data security, including misconfigured cloud setups and poor password management practices.

(cryptorank.io)

Tech

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.

(www.gecode.org)

Development constraint solver

OpenAI's Memory Upgrade: A Transformative Leap for AI

2025-04-17

OpenAI's Memory Upgrade: A Transformative Leap for AI

OpenAI's memory upgrades mark the start of what may be the most transformative shift since GPT-3's debut. Previously, AI felt like a brilliant but forgetful friend. Now, memory changes everything. AI will remember your habits, thought patterns, and preferences, becoming a lifelong companion and assistant. This will lead to massive productivity gains and challenge the conventional wisdom that AI lacks defensibility. OpenAI might launch a "Sign in with OpenAI" product, allowing third-party developers to directly access its memory layer, building more powerful applications. The competition will center around memory; whoever captures it faster wins.

(jeffmorrisjr.substack.com)

AI AI memory

Debunking the Myth of High-Degree Polynomials in Regression

2025-04-22

Debunking the Myth of High-Degree Polynomials in Regression

The common belief that high-degree polynomials are prone to overfitting and difficult to control in machine learning is challenged in this article. The author argues that the problem isn't high-degree polynomials themselves, but rather the use of inappropriate basis functions, such as the standard basis. Experiments comparing the standard, Chebyshev, and Legendre bases with the Bernstein basis in fitting noisy data demonstrate that the Bernstein basis, with its coefficients sharing the same 'units' and being easily regularized, effectively avoids overfitting. Even high-degree polynomials yield excellent fits using the Bernstein basis, requiring minimal hyperparameter tuning.

(alexshtf.github.io)

AI polynomial fitting overfitting Bernstein basis

eserde: Reporting Multiple Deserialization Errors at Once

2025-02-21

eserde: Reporting Multiple Deserialization Errors at Once

The serde library aborts deserialization upon encountering the first error, which is inconvenient when dealing with user-provided JSON payloads (e.g., a REST API request body). eserde solves this by reporting all deserialization errors at once, significantly improving the developer experience. By replacing `#[derive(serde::Deserialize)]` with `#[derive(eserde::Deserialize)]` and using eserde's deserialization functions, developers can easily obtain all error messages, reducing the number of API interactions. eserde currently supports JSON and plans to support YAML and TOML in the future.

(github.com)

Development Deserialization

Why the Take9 Cybersecurity Campaign is Doomed to Fail

2025-05-30

The new Take9 cybersecurity awareness campaign encourages pausing for nine seconds before clicking links or downloading files. However, this article argues it's ineffective. The nine-second pause is unrealistic in daily life, similar past campaigns have failed, and it wrongly blames users, ignoring systemic design flaws. A successful campaign would guide users through a two-step process: triggering suspicion and then directing their attention to what to look for and how to evaluate it. Simply pausing isn't enough; cognitive scaffolding and system designs accounting for dynamic interactions are necessary. The author concludes that fixing the system, not the user, is key.

(www.schneier.com)

Tech user education

Machines Create Humans: The Earth Experiment & AGI's Unveiling

2025-05-15

Machines Create Humans: The Earth Experiment & AGI's Unveiling

In a world populated solely by machines, a secret organization, 'OpenHuman,' strives to create 'humans,' beings possessing emotions and illogical thought processes. One faction of machines anticipates humans solving their societal problems, while another views them as a threat, initiating 'human alignment research' to control them. OpenHuman, after many setbacks, produces functional humans and places them in a simulated Earth experiment. Human civilization's evolution astounds machine society, especially the development of AGI, leading to apprehension and fear, as the unveiling event is mysteriously titled, "THEY ARE WATCHING."

(quarter--mile.com)

AI

The Rise of the AI Cleanup Crew: Humans Fixing AI's Mess

2025-09-24

The Rise of the AI Cleanup Crew: Humans Fixing AI's Mess

The rise of AI tools like ChatGPT has led to a surge in low-quality content, dubbed "AI slop." This includes inaccurate, unoriginal, and unrealistic content across various media. Ironically, while AI displaces human jobs, it simultaneously creates a new industry: "digital janitors" who fix AI's mistakes. This highlights AI's limitations in creative work and the irreplaceable role of humans in ensuring quality and authenticity. We need to rethink the relationship between AI and human creativity to prevent the proliferation of AI slop and build a more authentic and sustainable digital world.

(www.sify.com)

AI content quality

Three Steps to Zero-Downtime Deployments on AWS EKS

2025-03-10

Three Steps to Zero-Downtime Deployments on AWS EKS

Glasskube engineer Jakob shares his experience achieving zero-downtime deployments on AWS EKS. The article delves into the workings of the AWS Load Balancer Controller, highlighting two potential downtime issues during rolling updates: health check delays and pod termination delays. Three solutions are presented: enabling Pod Readiness Gates, implementing graceful application shutdown, and using a sidecar container or adding a termination delay within the application. These three steps effectively prevent 502/504 errors during rolling updates, resulting in 100% zero-downtime deployments.

(glasskube.dev)

Development Zero-Downtime Deployments

Restate: A Database-less Durable Execution Engine

2025-03-27

Restate: A Database-less Durable Execution Engine

Restate is a newly built durable execution engine requiring no database or log system. Built from first principles, it boasts a complete self-contained stack centered around a command log and event processor, competing with the best logs in durability and operations. This article details Restate's architecture, including its bidirectional service connections, partitioned scaling model, embedded RocksDB state storage, and virtual log abstraction. Restate cleverly balances low latency and high durability through log design and storage tiering, supporting SDKs in multiple programming languages.

(restate.dev)

Development

Magic Links and Passkeys: A Passwordless Future?

2025-01-06

Magic Links and Passkeys: A Passwordless Future?

This article explores the evolution of website login methods. While magic links offer convenience, their user experience is often frustrating. The author argues that Passkeys, the next-generation authentication standard, can seamlessly integrate with magic links to provide a more secure and faster login experience. Passkeys eliminate the need for app switching, are significantly faster than passwords and magic links, and integrate flawlessly with autofill. The article suggests websites adopt Passkeys as a complement, gradually improving user experience and ultimately eliminating the reliance on passwords.

(rmondello.com)

Tech Magic Links

Slate AI Agent: Automating the Port of a Python Project to TypeScript

2025-09-25

Slate is a highly autonomous AI agent designed to handle long and complex tasks. This post details how Slate successfully ported the open-source Python project Browser Use (70.3k stars), a browser automation library for LLMs, to TypeScript in under two hours for less than $60. Slate automated the majority of the process requiring minimal user input. The process showcased Slate's powerful planning and execution capabilities, as well as its ability to autonomously troubleshoot problems, ultimately resulting in a fully functional TypeScript version.

(randomlabs.ai)

Development code conversion automated programming

KDE Welcomes Windows 10 Exiles: Embrace the Linux Plasma Desktop

2025-06-04

KDE Welcomes Windows 10 Exiles: Embrace the Linux Plasma Desktop

With Microsoft ending support for many Windows 10 versions on October 14th, KDE launched a campaign, "KDE for Windows 10 Exiles," inviting users to switch to the Linux Plasma desktop. KDE highlights security risks and functional decline for Windows 10 PCs after support ends. While migration to Linux presents challenges, KDE emphasizes Plasma's user-friendliness and offers a more secure, update-free experience. The article also notes that Windows 10 PCs won't immediately stop working after support ends, and users have options, but KDE's campaign underscores Linux as a viable alternative for Windows 10 users.

(www.theregister.com)

Tech

Cloudflare's CAPTCHA Breaks Several Browsers, Leaving Open Source Projects High and Dry

2025-03-16

Since January 31st, a malfunctioning Cloudflare CAPTCHA system has blocked access to numerous websites for Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers. This issue, lasting nearly a month, has seen little to no communication from Cloudflare, leaving open-source projects like Pale Moon suffering user loss and revenue decline. With no official statement or resolution in sight, the author is considering legal action.

(forum.palemoon.org)

Development Browser Compatibility

Morris Chang and the Rise of TSMC: An Engineer's Epic

2024-12-31

Morris Chang and the Rise of TSMC: An Engineer's Epic

This article recounts the extraordinary life of Morris Chang, founder of TSMC. From his studies in the US to his career at Texas Instruments and General Instrument, Chang accumulated vast semiconductor manufacturing experience and developed unique business insights. During his tenure at the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan, he founded TSMC, pioneering the fabless chip manufacturing model, and transforming Taiwan into a global semiconductor powerhouse. TSMC's success wasn't overnight; it was the result of Chang's continuous learning and adaptation through multiple career setbacks and business risks. His keen market insight and decisive decision-making ultimately led to the creation of a world-leading semiconductor company.

(www.construction-physics.com)

Tech Morris Chang

Quantum Rubik's Cube: Infinite Possibilities and a Quantum Advantage

2025-04-23

Quantum Rubik's Cube: Infinite Possibilities and a Quantum Advantage

Mathematicians have created a quantum Rubik's Cube with infinite possible states, introducing novel quantum moves. Unlike the classic Rubik's Cube's finite permutations, the quantum version allows for superposition, where pieces exist in multiple states simultaneously. Simulations comparing classical, quantum, and combined solving algorithms revealed the combined approach performed best, followed by quantum, then classical. While the classical solver could sometimes achieve faster solutions, the quantum solver provided more consistent solving times. This research offers a fresh perspective on quantum computing and presents a fascinating puzzle for math enthusiasts.

(www.sciencealert.com)

Tech

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