arXivLabs is a framework for developing and sharing new arXiv features directly on the arXiv website. Collaborators, both individuals and organizations, embrace arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. Got an idea to enhance the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
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Blender 5.0's upcoming Linux release will experimentally support High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays, but only when using Wayland and Vulkan. This means you'll need an HDR monitor, a Wayland desktop environment, and Vulkan acceleration to use it. The feature is currently under testing and its inclusion in the final release is not guaranteed.
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This code snippet defines events for managing a todo list within the LiveStore framework. It includes four events: creating a todo item (todoCreated), marking it as complete (todoCompleted), marking it as incomplete (todoUncompleted), and deleting a todo item (todoDeleted). Each event uses Schema.Struct to define its data structure, ensuring data consistency and integrity. This showcases a concise and efficient todo list management system design, leveraging an event-driven architecture to track changes in todo item status.
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On May 19, 2022, astrophotographers captured an extraordinary display of over 100 red sprites above the Himalayas, including rare secondary jets and Asia's first recorded 'ghost sprites'. A study in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences reveals these sprites were triggered by powerful positive cloud-to-ground lightning within a massive storm system. This unprecedented event highlights the Himalayan region's capacity to generate intensely complex upper-atmospheric electrical discharges, rivaling those seen in the US Great Plains and offshore European storms. Innovative satellite and star field analysis was used to synchronize the video, enabling precise timing and linking sprites to their parent lightning strikes.
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India's booming electronics sector has fueled a $1.5 billion e-waste recycling industry, but 95% of its workforce consists of informal laborers facing dangerous and toxic conditions for meager pay. The article highlights Khatta, a Delhi dumpsite where a complex informal network operates, controlled by powerful families like the Maliks. While formal companies like Recyclekaro showcase a modern, regulated approach, the informal sector persists due to its profitability and resistance from large tech firms challenging new regulations. The story underscores the stark contrast between the formal and informal e-waste recycling industries in India, highlighting the environmental and social inequalities at play.
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Traditional transformers, while the backbone of power grids for over a century, are struggling to meet the demands of renewable energy, electric vehicles, and smarter grids. Solid-state transformers (SSTs) offer a compact, efficient, and intelligent solution, poised to revolutionize electricity distribution and management. Utilizing advanced power electronics and high-frequency transformers, SSTs achieve highly efficient voltage conversion and bidirectional power flow, offering features like voltage regulation, harmonic mitigation, and fault isolation. While currently more expensive, SSTs are showing promise in applications like EV charging and solar/wind integration, and are expected to become a crucial component of modern grids.
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An investigation into Colibri Hero's browser extension, refoorest, and its Impact Hero SDK reveals a deceptive affiliate marketing scheme disguised as a tree-planting initiative. The extension misrepresents the number of trees planted, exploits user data through incentivized reviews and sharing, and the SDK gains excessive user permissions without proper disclosure, violating Chrome Web Store policies. The article exposes a pattern of opaque practices, including fake testimonials, financial secrecy, and data security vulnerabilities, casting serious doubt on the company's claims of environmental responsibility.
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arXivLabs is a framework enabling collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on the website. Individuals and organizations involved embrace 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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Rye is a novel programming language that treats spreadsheets as first-class citizens, aligning more closely with human thinking. This article demonstrates how Rye creates, loads, and manipulates spreadsheets, supporting data import from CSV, SQL, and Excel files. It provides a rich set of functions for data manipulation, including filtering, sorting, and selection. By using spreadsheets as a fundamental data structure, Rye simplifies data operations and provides a more intuitive programming experience, especially when dealing with tabular data, resulting in concise and efficient code that outperforms other languages.
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An Air France flight made an unscheduled return after a passenger's lost phone caused safety concerns. Experts warn that a phone trapped in a seat could overheat and catch fire due to pressure. The incident highlights growing airline concerns about lithium batteries and electronics on board. Many airlines are tightening restrictions on electronic devices, urging passengers to keep batteries and power banks readily accessible and avoid potential damage.
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The Hokusai open-source project has received a major update, adding support for Windows! This update also includes improved documentation, fixed build scripts, and the move of clamping and text logic to C. The commit history shows an active project responsive to user feedback and continuously improving the user experience.
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This is the first in a series exploring decision trees in machine learning. Decision trees recursively partition data into regions based on a series of questions, ultimately leading to a prediction. The article clearly explains the mathematical definition of decision trees, the types of decision trees (classification and regression), common algorithms (ID3, C4.5, and CART), and objective functions (Gini impurity, entropy, and squared loss). It also delves into the pros and cons, bias-variance tradeoff, the "staircase effect," and the greedy algorithm used to build decision trees.
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India is poised to mass-produce EV batteries within 18 months, but the industry's structure raises concerns. Leading battery makers Amara Raja and Exide hold significantly fewer patents than Chinese and South Korean giants, highlighting a long-standing reliance on foreign technology. Many Indian firms opt for collaborations, relying on foreign tech and supply chains instead of independent R&D. While some companies like Ola Electric and Godi India are attempting independent innovation, Log9 Materials' near-bankruptcy highlights the risks. India's success hinges not just on battery production, but on mastering the underlying technology. Without a shift away from imported ideas, its ambitions may simply replace old dependencies with new ones.
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After seven years of development by volunteer developers, GIMP 3.0 is finally here! This major release boasts significant improvements, including non-destructive filter editing, enhanced file compatibility (BC7 DDS support and improved PSD export), automatic layer expansion, powerful text styling tools, improved layer and color management, and a modernized GTK3 interface. GIMP 3.0 offers easier use, faster performance, and enhanced image editing capabilities. Download it now and experience the difference!
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The US$810 million Vera C. Rubin Observatory, set to begin full operations in the coming months, boasts the world's largest digital camera, capturing 3200-megapixel images revealing unprecedented cosmic detail. It will map the entire southern sky every three to four nights, observing each spot around 800 times over its ten-year lifespan, capturing millions of transient and variable astronomical events. Data will be used to study the history of the universe, dark matter, and potentially hazardous solar system objects. While not the largest telescope in terms of aperture, its unparalleled speed and wide field of view promise a revolutionary leap in astronomical discovery.
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Construction of Hyundai's electric vehicle battery plant in Georgia has been delayed by at least two to three months following an ICE raid that detained 475 workers. The raid, which sparked outrage in South Korea, has prompted concerns about the impact on foreign investment in the US and the potential for further disruptions to other South Korean projects. The plant, a joint venture with LG Energy Solutions, is crucial for Hyundai's US vehicle production. The incident highlights the tension between immigration enforcement and attracting foreign investment for vital industries like electric vehicle manufacturing, potentially hindering the US's competitiveness in the global EV market.
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This article explores Melanie Mitchell's four foundational fallacies of artificial intelligence: equating narrow AI progress with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI); underestimating the difficulty of common-sense reasoning; using anthropomorphic language to mislead the public; and ignoring the importance of embodied cognition. The author argues these fallacies lead to hype cycles and dangerous trade-offs in the AI field, such as prioritizing short-term gains over long-term progress, sacrificing public trust for market excitement, and forgoing responsible validation for speed to market. Ultimately, the author advocates for a synthesis of the 'cognitive paradigm' and the 'computationalist paradigm', infusing current AI practices with scientific principles for safer and more responsible AI development.
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A website dedicated to the history of cycling maps has launched, featuring over a hundred carefully restored extracts from major map providers. It's not a blog; instead, it functions as an online 'coffee table' book, offering a curated collection of information for browsing and reference. Content is divided into sections covering an introduction, the development of cycling maps, publishers, sources, dating maps, and a 'Black Museum' showcasing map errors.
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Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, setting a new bar for coding, advanced reasoning, and AI agents. Opus 4 is touted as the world's best coding model, excelling in complex, long-running tasks and agent workflows. Sonnet 4 significantly improves upon its predecessor, offering superior coding and reasoning with more precise instruction following. The launch also includes extended thinking with tool use (beta), new model capabilities (parallel tool use, improved memory), the general availability of Claude Code (with GitHub Actions, VS Code, and JetBrains integrations), and four new Anthropic API features. Both models are available via the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud's Vertex AI.
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This study analyzes the power and energy consumption of a single Visual Look Up (VLU) on Apple silicon Macs using Powermetrics and LogUI. Results show that the CPU performs the vast majority of the work (93%), with the GPU and Neural Engine (ANE) contributing only 4.6% and 2.2% respectively. While the ANE contributes to performance improvements during model execution, its overall energy consumption is low. The conclusion is that VLU, despite its impressive functionality, is not particularly demanding on the hardware.
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A developer took on the challenge of implementing a Snake game using only four integers (uint32_t*2, uint64_t, int8_t), cleverly packing game map, snake body, apple position, and direction into them. Macros are used extensively for bitwise operations, resulting in concise but less readable code. This project showcases extreme memory optimization at the cost of maintainability and readability. The code is open-source, and interested developers can try compiling and running it to experience this unique programming art.
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This article delves into the complexities of comparing floating-point numbers. The author highlights the unreliability of simple equality checks due to inherent precision limitations and accumulated rounding errors. Two comparison methods are detailed: relative error (epsilon) and ULP (Units in the Last Place), along with their strengths and weaknesses. The article emphasizes the failure of relative error comparisons near zero, proposing a solution combining absolute error. A compelling example using `sin(π)` demonstrates catastrophic cancellation and how floating-point representation errors can improve π's accuracy.
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The author took the "Humanity's Last Exam," a test designed to assess AI intelligence, and failed miserably. This led him to reflect on how we evaluate AI intelligence: current tests overemphasize providing correct answers to complex questions, neglecting the importance of formulating meaningful questions. True historical research begins with unique, unexpected questions that reveal new perspectives. The author argues that AI progress may not lie in perfectly answering difficult questions, but in its ability to gather and interpret evidence during research and its potential to ask novel questions. This raises the question of whether AI can ever produce valuable historical questions.
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Over 300 years ago, Isaac Newton developed an algorithm for finding the minimum values of functions. Now, Amir Ali Ahmadi of Princeton University and his students have improved this algorithm to efficiently handle a broader class of functions. This breakthrough uses higher-order derivatives and cleverly transforms the Taylor expansion into a convex sum-of-squares form, achieving faster convergence than traditional gradient descent. While currently computationally expensive, future advancements in computing could allow this algorithm to surpass gradient descent in fields like machine learning, becoming a powerful tool for optimization problems.
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This article traces the surprisingly long history of the simple yet effective joke, "From here?" Initially appearing in the 1974 TV series *Porridge*, it later found its way into *Never Say Never Again*. The author meticulously investigates its appearances in other shows, including *Man About the House* and Tom O'Connor's album, ultimately tracing it back to a 1966 medical journal. This journey reveals the evolution and spread of jokes and the fascinating nature of cultural transmission.
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The internet perpetuates a myth about fitted sheets originating from just two patents. This article debunks that, showing fitted sheets existed long before 1992, and often without elastic. A deeper patent search reveals numerous earlier designs similar to modern fitted sheets, demonstrating a more complex evolutionary path. The author suggests the 'two-patent' narrative is a simplification, highlighting the importance of verifying online information and the nuances of historical narratives.
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The US State Department announced a campaign to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, particularly those in science and engineering fields deemed strategically important to China, and those with unspecified ties to the Communist Party. The impact on Chinese students considering US education is significant, casting doubt on America's appeal as a study destination.
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The initial excitement surrounding large language models (LLMs) is fading, with many companies yet to see a return on investment. The author argues that we've been fooled by LLMs' fluent language, mistaking it for genuine intelligence. The future, they suggest, lies in smaller, more distributed models, mirroring the evolution of dynamo technology. Small language models (SLMs) will focus on smaller, more specific language tasks, such as query rewriting, rather than attempting to mimic human intelligence. This will lower costs, increase efficiency, and reduce ethical concerns. Instead of pursuing 'intelligent' applications, the author advocates using LLMs for their strengths in low-level language processing, such as proofreading and text summarization. This, they argue, is the true path forward for LLMs.
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A San Francisco-based startup is hiring an experienced engineer to join its small, agile engineering team. The role involves diverse projects and large-scale data pipelines (100M+ data points monthly). Proficiency in Python, SQL, and Docker is required, with bonus points for web crawling, Kubernetes, and LLM pipeline experience. Excellent benefits include lunch, unlimited PTO, 401k, platinum health insurance, a $150k-$200k salary, and 0.5%-2% equity.
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protobuf-ts-types lets you define language-agnostic message types in proto format and infers TypeScript types directly without code generation. It cleverly leverages TypeScript's template literal types. While currently a proof-of-concept and lacking support for services, RPCs, oneof and map fields, and imports, it offers great potential for simplifying Protobuf integration with TypeScript.
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