Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

Popular：

Virtualization DNS security formal verification reachability analysis compiler errors macro conflict web extension development framework Bitmap Graphics API inconsistencies All Tags

GGML Training Advancement: A MNIST VAE Training Example

2024-12-22

GitHub user bssrdf shared an example of training a MNIST VAE using the GGML library. This example aims to use only the GGML pipeline and its ADAM optimizer implementation, filling a gap in available GGML training examples. Modifications were made to the ADAM and LBFGS optimizers for GPU backend compatibility, and several missing operators and optimizer hooks were added for testing and sampling. The results after 10 epochs were satisfactory.

(github.com)

AI

38th Chaos Communication Congress: Technology, Society, and Utopia Converge

2024-12-24

The 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3) will take place in Hamburg from December 27-30, 2024. This annual four-day conference, organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) and volunteers, explores the intersection of technology, society, and utopia. The event features lectures, workshops, and various events on topics including information technology and a critical-creative approach to technology's societal impact. Participation is encouraged through volunteering, organizing events, and presenting projects, fostering a collaborative exploration of technology's future.

(events.ccc.de)

Tech Chaos Communication Congress Technology Conference Volunteer

MacKenzie Scott Donates $2 Billion to Charity

2024-12-22

MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced a $2,004,400,000 donation to 199 organizations. These organizations primarily focus on improving economic security and opportunity for vulnerable populations, including affordable housing, job stability, child development, higher education, healthcare, and financial counseling. A portion of the funds also supports human rights and natural resource conservation. Scott stated her desire to further economic mobility and unlock innovation and social benefit by investing in mission-aligned ventures.

(yieldgiving.com)

Misc philanthropy economic aid social good

cURL and libcurl Drop Hyper Support

2024-12-22

After a four-year experiment, the cURL project has announced it's abandoning the use of the Rust-based Hyper library as an HTTP backend. Despite Hyper's memory safety advantages and support from Let's Encrypt, lack of user demand and developer involvement led to its termination. The cURL team cited the high cost of maintaining the Hyper code and a focus on improving and maintaining the existing codebase. While the experiment failed, cURL gained valuable experience and improved its HTTP handling capabilities.

(daniel.haxx.se)

Development

How an AI Code Review Bot Learned to Shut Up

2024-12-21

Greptile's AI code review bot initially faced criticism for generating excessive comments. To address this, they experimented with prompt engineering and having the LLM evaluate its own comments, but these methods proved ineffective. Their breakthrough came from vectorizing past comments, clustering them in a vector database, and filtering out new comments similar to those previously downvoted. This approach boosted the developer address rate from 19% to over 55%, significantly reducing LLM noise.

(www.greptile.com)

Development Code Review

Phrack Magazine's 40th Anniversary: Call for Papers

2024-12-23

Phrack Magazine, a platform for hackers to share knowledge, seek truth, and push the boundaries of systems, is celebrating its 40th anniversary. They've released a call for papers for issue 72, covering topics such as exploitation, persistence, fuzzing, code analysis, data obfuscation, anti-forensics, web application security, and cloud security. Phrack urges the hacker community to participate, continuing its valuable resources and culture, and contributing to its future development for the next 40 years.

(phrack.org)

Development hacker Phrack Magazine

AP5 Reference Manual: A Logic-Based Extension to Common Lisp

2024-12-21

AP5 is an extension to Common Lisp that allows users to "program" at a more "specitional" level, focusing on what the machine should do rather than how. It combines aspects of Lisp and the Gist specification language, incorporating compilable parts of Gist and offering annotation mechanisms for performance tuning. AP5 uses a relational model to represent data and supports a first-order logic language for data access and manipulation. Programmers define relations, rules, and constraints, optimizing performance through annotations. The manual details AP5's syntax, database operations, rules, types, equivalence, and implementation specifics, providing numerous examples and explanations.

(www.ap5.com)

Development Logic Programming Relational Database

Radxa Orion O6: World's First Open-Source Armv9 Motherboard Debuts

2024-12-20

Radxa, in collaboration with partners, has unveiled the Radxa Orion O6, claimed as the world's first open-source Armv9 motherboard—more accurately, a single-board computer (SBC). Powered by CIX's CD8180 SoC, it boasts 12 CPU cores (including four Cortex-A720 cores up to 2.8GHz) and an Arm Immortalis G720 GPU, offering impressive performance with 8K video decoding and encoding capabilities and a 30 TOPS NPU. RAM options range from 8GB to 64GB (soldered DDR5-5500). The board is packed with I/O, including multiple M.2 slots, a PCIe x16 slot, and multi-gigabit Ethernet. Currently supporting Debian and Fedora Linux, with Windows and Android support planned. Pricing starts at $200 for the 8GB model.

(www.tomshardware.com)

Hardware Single-Board Computer Open-Source Hardware

Does Language Shape Personality? A Fascinating Bilingual Study

2024-12-22

A friend, Victor, conducted a unique experiment exploring the impact of language on personality. Using a standardized personality test on English/German bilinguals, he found half showed significant personality shifts depending on the language used. This fascinating result sparked a discussion on coordinate and compound bilingualism, and touched upon linguistic relativity and determinism. While the data is limited, Victor's study hints at a subtle but intriguing link between language and personality.

(www.solipsys.co.uk)

Misc bilingualism personality linguistic relativity

Jujutsu: A Revolutionary Version Control System

2024-12-22

Jujutsu is a new version control system built on top of Git, offering a simplified approach to local file interaction through a unique conceptual model and command set. Unlike Git, Jujutsu always treats the working copy state as a commit, instantly reflecting any on-disk edits in the current commit. This streamlines many operations, including fixing typos in old commits, viewing diffs, and managing work in progress. The workflow is intuitive, easily accessible even without prior Git experience, and seamlessly integrates with the Git ecosystem. While some features like perfect VSCode integration are still missing, Jujutsu shows immense potential with its innovative design and user-friendly experience.

(neugierig.org)

Development

A Curious Case of Slow USD Import in Blender

2024-12-22

A developer encountered unexpectedly slow import times when importing USD scenes into Blender. Profiling revealed the bottleneck to be Blender's internal ID sorting function, `id_sort_by_name`. This function, expected to be O(N), degraded to O(N^2) due to the naming scheme in the USD files. By modifying the naming convention and optimizing the sorting algorithm, the developer reduced import times from 4 minutes 40 seconds to 8 seconds for smaller files. However, the underlying issue stems from Blender's requirement for sorted IDs, leading to suggestions for replacing the linked list with a Trie or hash table. This optimization highlights a common challenge in performance tuning: identifying and addressing unexpected complexity.

(gist.github.com)

Development

Manx: An Open Source Treasure Trove of Vintage Computer Manuals

2024-12-23

Manx is an open-source project dedicated to cataloging and preserving manuals for older computers. It currently boasts nearly 10,000 manuals from 61 websites, covering minicomputers, mainframes, and associated peripherals like terminals and printers. While many manuals are scanned images and not directly indexable by search engines, Manx adds metadata and information to compensate. Its search currently focuses on part numbers, titles, and keywords. For microcomputer manuals, Tiziano's 1000 BiT is a better resource.

(manx-docs.org)

Tech vintage computing manuals

twtxt: A Decentralized, Minimalist Microblogging Service

2024-12-22

twtxt is a decentralized, minimalist microblogging service designed for hackers. Its documentation covers installation, quick start, usage, configuration, and API details. Users can follow and unfollow sources, post status updates, view their timelines and feeds from specific sources, and interact with twtxt via the command-line interface (CLI). The source code is hosted on GitHub and contributions are welcome.

(twtxt.readthedocs.io)

Development decentralized

The AI Backlash: A Necessary Correction for Practical Implementation

2024-12-24

InfoWorld reports a growing developer frustration with the hype surrounding AI, emphasizing the need for practical and easily integrated tools. The article uses the RamaLama project as an example, showcasing how container technology simplifies AI model deployment and usage, and highlights the importance of smaller, more easily understood AI models. Developers want AI to seamlessly integrate into their workflows, not exist as a separate entity. This "AI backlash" presents an opportunity for effective AI implementation.

(www.infoworld.com)

Development AI applications container technology model miniaturization

JavaScript Benchmarking: A Mess of JIT Compilers, Engine Differences, and Timing Inaccuracies

2024-12-24

Benchmarking JavaScript performance is notoriously difficult. This article highlights the challenges: the JIT compiler's dynamic optimizations lead to wildly varying results across runs; different JavaScript engines (like V8 and JavaScriptCore) exhibit significant performance disparities, with identical code performing dramatically differently; and browsers intentionally reduce timing accuracy to mitigate timing attacks, making precise measurements difficult. The author suggests using tools like d8 on the server-side for greater control over optimization levels and garbage collection, while browser-side testing relies heavily on the limited information provided by developer tools. In short, JavaScript benchmarking requires careful consideration of JIT compilation, engine variations, and timing precision, making it significantly more complex than in other languages.

(byteofdev.com)

Development JavaScript benchmarking JIT compiler engine differences

Fogus' 2024 Year in Review: Programming, Reading, and Life Reflections

2024-12-23

In his 2024 year-end blog post, Fogus reflects on his year in programming, reading, and life. He shares noteworthy articles and books he enjoyed, covering topics like the Elite game, amateur radio history, Japanese bathroom folklore, and the history of WordStar. He highlights favorite technical books like "And so FORTH" and non-technical books such as "Butcher's Crossing." Fogus details his experiences with the Clojure programming language and explorations into other languages like Joy and Forth. He concludes by outlining his plans for 2025, including the Clojure 1.13 release and continued work on his Juxt project.

(blog.fogus.me)

Development year in review reading recommendations

KeyPub.sh: A Privacy-Focused SSH Key Verification Service

2024-12-23

KeyPub.sh is a free, publicly available service requiring no installation or configuration. It leverages your existing SSH public key as your identity, linking it to your email address for simplified authentication. Users register and manage their SSH keys via a simple email verification process, controlling the visibility of their email address. This provides a lightweight, privacy-respecting alternative to OAuth for CLI applications, eliminating the need for developers to build user verification systems while empowering users with control over their privacy.

(keypub.sh)

Development SSH key authentication

An Epitome of Electricity & Galvanism: A Journey Through Time

2024-12-22

This book chronicles the history of electricity and galvanism, starting from Thales's ancient observation of amber attracting light objects and progressing through key discoveries. It details the work of Gilbert, who systematically studied electrical phenomena; Grey, who differentiated conductors and non-conductors; and Du Fay, who discovered positive and negative electricity. The culmination is Franklin's proof of the identity of electricity and lightning. The text thoroughly describes various experiments and apparatus, including the Leyden jar, electrostatic generators, and lightning rods, while exploring different eras' electrical theories, offering a captivating journey through the science's evolution.

(gutenberg.org)

Tech History of Electricity Galvanism Franklin

Revolutionizing Workflow: The Power of a Public CHANGELOG

2024-12-22

AWS engineer Daniel Doubrovkine shares his experience with maintaining a public CHANGELOG of his work. By openly documenting his weekly tasks, he fosters transparency and collaboration. This practice has yielded significant benefits: more productive 1:1s, smoother onboarding for new engineers, easy access to past work, enhanced self-reflection, and increased trust among colleagues. He encourages others to adopt this approach and shares his simple logging method along with a Ruby script for generating a yearly table of contents.

(code.dblock.org)

Development work log

LLMs: Exploring Arithmetic Capabilities in the Pursuit of AGI

2024-12-24

This article explores why large language models (LLMs) are being used for calculation. While LLMs excel at natural language processing, researchers are attempting to make them perform mathematical operations, from simple addition to complex theorem proving. This isn't to replace calculators, but to explore the reasoning capabilities of LLMs and ultimately achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). The article points out that humans have always tried to use new technology for computation, and testing the mathematical abilities of LLMs is a way to test their reasoning abilities. However, the process of LLMs performing calculations is drastically different from that of calculators; the former relies on vast knowledge bases and probabilistic models, while the latter is based on deterministic algorithms. Therefore, LLM calculation results are not always accurate and reliable, highlighting the trade-off between practicality and research.

(vickiboykis.com)

AI Artificial General Intelligence Computational Ability

Perl Unveils New Camel Logo

2024-12-23

After years of discussion and design, Perl finally has a new official logo: a friendly camel. Designed by Zach Roszczewski and refined through feedback from numerous community members, the logo is released under a CC-BY license. It aims to represent the Perl language and its community, encouraging wider adoption. While not mandatory, the logo seeks to unify the community's image and is expected to be used on platforms like perl.com and metacpan.org in the future.

(perladvent.org)

Development

Retis: Tracing Packets in the Linux Networking Stack

2024-12-19

Retis is a powerful tool that uses eBPF probes to trace packets within the Linux networking stack. It interacts with control and data paths like Open vSwitch and Netfilter, making it invaluable for debugging network issues, exploring the Linux networking stack, or testing network features. Retis offers packet filtering and tracking, retrieving metadata and contextual information beyond the packet itself. No compilation on the target system is required, and post-processing capabilities, such as reconstructing a packet's journey, are included. User-friendly with pre-built profiles and support for custom probes and filters, Retis provides flexibility and ease of use.

(github.com)

Development network tracing Linux networking stack

Improving F# Error Handling: Introducing FaultReport

2024-12-22

This article critiques the shortcomings of F#'s Result type in error handling, highlighting inconsistencies in error types and the problems stemming from using strings as error types. The author proposes FaultReport as an alternative, using an IFault interface to standardize error types and a Report<'Pass', 'Fail> type to represent operation outcomes, where 'Fail must implement IFault. This ensures consistent and type-safe error handling, avoiding the inconveniences of string-based errors. FaultReport further provides Report.generalize for upcasting and a FailAs active pattern for downcasting, facilitating handling of diverse error types. While replacing FSharp.Core's Result is a significant undertaking, the author argues that FaultReport's design offers a valuable improvement to F#'s error handling.

(paul.blasuc.ci)

Development

Irish Rewilding: The Exotic Gardens of Rossdohan Island

2024-12-21

Rossdohan Island in Ireland tells a captivating story of an exotic garden created by a 19th-century surgeon returning from India. The island boasts a unique microclimate, thanks to plantings of Southern Hemisphere species. Despite house fires and changing ownership, these exotic plants persist, forming a unique ecosystem alongside native flora. Today, rewilding efforts face the challenge of preserving this historical legacy while restoring native biodiversity, requiring legislation, policy changes, and public participation.

(worldsensorium.com)

Misc rewilding exotic species

SignWith: Pay-per-use E-signature Solution for Small Businesses

2024-12-21

SignWith is a pay-per-use e-signature service designed for small businesses and freelancers, offering a compelling alternative to expensive monthly subscription models like DocuSign. It eliminates hidden fees and complex processes, allowing users to pay only for documents that are actually signed. With mobile-friendly functionality and reliable customer support, SignWith simplifies document signing for businesses of all sizes, from occasional use to frequent workflows.

(signwith.co)

Startup e-signature pay-per-use small business

California's Minimum Wage Hike: A Surprise Success

2024-12-22

California's September 2023 law raising the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 per hour faced immediate backlash, with predictions of widespread job losses and business closures. However, these predictions proved false. Since the law's April implementation, California's fast-food sector has seen job growth exceeding the national average. Economists' analyses revealed that increased wages didn't decrease employment; instead, reduced employee turnover and increased productivity lowered labor costs for employers. While prices rose, the increase was far less than anticipated, significantly outweighed by the wage increase for workers. This challenges assumptions about minimum wage impacts, highlighting biases in economic understanding and the role of media in disseminating misinformation.

(www.theatlantic.com)

Startup minimum wage employment

Meta Fights Spam at Scale with Haskell

2024-12-22

Meta's Sigma system, a crucial weapon in the fight against spam and malware, underwent a two-year overhaul. The system was rewritten in Haskell, a less common choice for large-scale production systems, achieving over one million requests per second. The shift to Haskell leveraged its pure functional and strongly typed nature, and the Haxl framework enabled automatic batching and concurrent data fetching. Performance improvements of 20-30% over the previous FXL-based system were observed. The project also involved significant contributions back to the GHC compiler, resolving several bugs.

(engineering.fb.com)

Development Spam Filtering

Offline Reinforcement Learning Boosts Multi-Step Reasoning in LLMs

2024-12-23

Researchers introduce OREO, an offline reinforcement learning method designed to enhance the multi-step reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Building upon maximum entropy reinforcement learning, OREO jointly learns a policy model and value function by optimizing the soft Bellman equation. This addresses limitations of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) in multi-step reasoning, specifically the need for extensive paired preference data and the challenge of effective credit assignment. Experiments demonstrate OREO's superiority over existing offline learning methods on benchmarks involving mathematical reasoning and embodied agent control.

(arxiv.org)

AI Multi-step Reasoning

Two Sean Carrolls Discuss the Universe: A Dialogue on Science and Faith

2024-12-24

Nautilus magazine brought together two scientists, both named Sean Carroll—one an evolutionary biologist, the other a physicist—for a fascinating conversation. From their respective fields, they tackled profound questions about the origin of life, extraterrestrial life, the tension between science and religion, Earth's fate, and their childhood fascinations with science. Their discussion blended rigorous scientific reasoning with humorous anecdotes, ultimately ending on a note of optimism about the universe's mysteries and humanity's future.

(nautil.us)

Misc Science Universe Origin of Life

cqd: A Colorful Python Utility for Inspecting Object Attributes

2024-12-22

cqd is a lightweight Python utility that provides a colorful visualization of object attributes, simplifying object inspection during development and debugging. It color-codes attributes: dunder methods (blue), protected attributes (yellow), and public attributes/methods (green). For example, it's useful for easily viewing attributes of a Hugging Face tokenizer. Installation is easy via `pip install cqd`. Usage involves importing the `cqd` function and calling `cqd(your_object).

(github.com)

Development debugging tool object attributes

← Previous 1 2 … 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 … 53 54 Next →