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Touching Time: Stones, Wood, and the Enduring Power of Intention

2025-09-21

Touching Time: Stones, Wood, and the Enduring Power of Intention

The author's experiences living in Rome and Japan led him on a quest to understand what evokes a feeling of connection across time. Initially, he believed it was ancient stone structures, like Roman ruins. However, in Japan, he discovered that even repeatedly rebuilt wooden buildings, like Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion), could inspire the same feeling. Ultimately, he realized it wasn't the materials themselves, but the enduring intention, tradition, and continued practice behind the structures—like the centuries-old fire watch patrol in a Tokyo neighborhood—that forms the crucial link to the past.

(aethermug.com)

Misc cultural experience sense of time traditional architecture

AMA with AI Expert William J. Rapaport: The Future of AI and the Turing Test

2025-03-06

AMA with AI Expert William J. Rapaport: The Future of AI and the Turing Test

On March 27th, we'll be hosting a discussion with Professor William J. Rapaport, a renowned AI expert from the University at Buffalo, with appointments across CS, Engineering, Philosophy, and Linguistics. Professor Rapaport, author of the seminal book "Philosophy of Computer Science," and several key papers including recent work on AI's success and Large Language Models in relation to the Turing Test, will be available to answer your questions. Submit your questions via this form! This is a rare opportunity to engage directly with a leading AI researcher.

(docs.google.com)

AI Expert Q&A

PyTorch Model with Metal Acceleration: Performance and Correctness

2025-09-04

This article presents a PyTorch-based model that attempts to leverage Metal for accelerated computation while providing pure PyTorch fallbacks to guarantee correctness. The model's core involves complex calculations including matrix multiplications, cumulative sums, and exponentiation. To enhance performance, the authors attempt to use Metal for custom kernels, but fall back to a pure PyTorch implementation if the Metal extension isn't available. This design ensures compatibility and reliability across different hardware platforms, offering developers a solution that balances performance and correctness.

(gimletlabs.ai)

Development Model Acceleration

How Ideas Shape Historical Change: A Century-Spanning Ideological Struggle

2025-03-13

How Ideas Shape Historical Change: A Century-Spanning Ideological Struggle

This essay explores the role of ideas in major historical transformations. From religion to the Enlightenment and neoliberalism, the author analyzes how different ideologies have emerged, evolved, and impacted historical processes. Some ideologies, like Marxism, have exerted immense mobilizing power due to their rigorous theoretical frameworks during specific historical periods; others, such as neoliberalism, have achieved global influence through their control over economic foundations. The author argues that the Left needs to develop a systematic and uncompromising ideology capable of challenging the existing order to effectively participate in future historical changes.

(newleftreview.org)

Misc historical change political thought

Problem Sharks: Are Some Individuals More Likely to Attack Humans?

2025-02-02

Problem Sharks: Are Some Individuals More Likely to Attack Humans?

The common belief that shark attacks are accidental encounters is challenged by shark expert Eric Clua's research. By investigating multiple attacks, Clua found evidence of 'problem sharks' – individuals that actively target humans, not through mistaken identity, but as a bold exploration of novel prey. A recent study provides the first concrete evidence for this theory, showing that these sharks aren't bloodthirsty, but rather naturally bold risk-takers. This discovery shifts our understanding of shark behavior and suggests new strategies for preventing attacks.

(nautil.us)

Tech shark attacks problem sharks

UK Secretly Demands Apple iCloud Backdoor Access

2025-02-07

UK Secretly Demands Apple iCloud Backdoor Access

The UK government secretly demanded Apple provide backdoor access to all encrypted user data on iCloud, according to The Washington Post. This unprecedented demand, delivered via a technical capability notice, requires Apple to bypass its own encryption, granting UK security officials unfettered access globally. Apple may choose to cease offering encrypted iCloud storage in the UK rather than comply, a move consistent with CEO Tim Cook's long-held stance against backdoors. The revelation highlights the ongoing tension between government surveillance and user privacy.

(www.macrumors.com)

Tech UK government

Apple iMessage: Encryption Isn't Enough

2025-03-06

Apple iMessage: Encryption Isn't Enough

While Apple iMessage boasts end-to-end encryption since 2011, its messages are permanently stored on devices and default to iCloud backups, creating a privacy vulnerability. Despite strong encryption, including post-quantum security, the lack of features like disappearing messages puts it behind other messengers in protecting user privacy. The article urges Apple to improve and add a disappearing messages feature to better safeguard user data.

(blog.cryptographyengineering.com)

Tech

400 Years of Zildjian: The Secret Behind the Cymbal Dynasty

2025-01-02

400 Years of Zildjian: The Secret Behind the Cymbal Dynasty

For over 400 years, the Zildjian family in Massachusetts has guarded a secret: the recipe for their world-renowned cymbals. From its origins in 17th-century Constantinople, where Avedis I accidentally created a unique copper-tin alloy while attempting to make gold, the family's legacy continues. Collaborations with legendary musicians like Gene Krupa and Ringo Starr propelled Zildjian to global fame. Today, while embracing innovation with electronic drums, the company fiercely protects its core secret, ensuring the distinctive Zildjian sound resonates for generations to come.

(www.wbur.org)

Misc cymbals

daily-notes.nvim: A Powerful Periodic Note Plugin for Neovim

2025-02-09

daily-notes.nvim: A Powerful Periodic Note Plugin for Neovim

daily-notes.nvim is a Neovim plugin for creating periodic notes for journaling and planning, inspired by Obsidian's similar feature and Journal.nvim. It allows for custom date formats, multiple date parsing strategies, and provides the :DailyNote and :FuzzyTime commands for easy note creation and management. Supports daily and weekly notes, handling ambiguous date expressions like "next Tuesday", "two weeks ago", etc. Currently primarily tested on Arch Linux, but should work on other UNIX systems.

(github.com)

Development Notes

Myanmar Earthquake: Devastating Quake Strikes Tectonically Active Region

2025-04-02

Myanmar Earthquake: Devastating Quake Strikes Tectonically Active Region

A powerful 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck central Myanmar, causing widespread devastation with hundreds dead, thousands injured, and significant infrastructure damage. The quake's tremors reached Bangkok, Thailand, toppling a skyscraper under construction. The earthquake occurred in the seismically active Alpide Belt, a complex zone where the Indian and Sunda plates collide, forming a strike-slip fault. Experts describe the quake as similar to an 1839 magnitude 8.0 event in the same region, a predictable occurrence within the expected timeframe, with significant aftershocks likely in the coming weeks and months.

(nautil.us)

Tech tectonic plates

Six Design Patterns to Secure LLM Agents Against Prompt Injection

2025-06-13

Six Design Patterns to Secure LLM Agents Against Prompt Injection

A new paper from researchers at IBM, Invariant Labs, and other institutions introduces six design patterns to mitigate the risk of prompt injection attacks against large language model (LLM) agents. These patterns constrain agent actions, preventing arbitrary task execution. Examples include the Action-Selector pattern, which prevents tool feedback from influencing the agent; the Plan-Then-Execute pattern, which pre-plans tool calls; and the Dual LLM pattern, which uses a privileged LLM to coordinate an isolated LLM, avoiding exposure to untrusted content. The paper also features ten case studies across various applications, offering practical guidance for building secure and reliable LLM agents.

(simonwillison.net)

AI prompt injection

Bioengineered Teeth: A Breakthrough in Tooth Repair?

2025-02-06

Bioengineered Teeth: A Breakthrough in Tooth Repair?

Scientists have grown bioengineered teeth in the lab using cells from pig teeth, offering a revolutionary approach to tooth repair. Traditional fillings and implants have limitations such as limited lifespan and infection risks. This bioengineered tooth aims to overcome these drawbacks, providing a more durable and natural tooth replacement. Researchers cultured tens of millions of cells from pig jawbones and seeded them onto biodegradable tooth-shaped scaffolds, which were then implanted into rats. This research opens up new avenues for repairing damaged teeth and has the potential to revolutionize the field of dentistry.

(www.technologyreview.com)

Tech bioengineering tooth repair

AT&T Promises Bill Credits After Massive Outage

2025-01-08

Following a major network outage last year caused by a botched update, AT&T is now promising full-day bill credits for future outages. The credits apply to wireless outages lasting at least 60 minutes affecting 10 or more cell towers, and fiber outages lasting at least 20 minutes (using an AT&T-provided gateway). However, the promise has caveats, excluding events like natural disasters or third-party issues. AT&T retains sole discretion on credit eligibility, raising concerns about service reliability and transparency in handling such incidents.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech outage bill credits

Trump Admin's EV Reversal: A $1 Billion Mistake?

2025-03-01

Trump Admin's EV Reversal: A $1 Billion Mistake?

The Trump administration's reversal of Biden-era policies on electric vehicles is proving far more expensive than anticipated. The order to dismantle 654 EV charging stations and sell off over 25,000 government EVs, while intending to save $300 million, is projected to cost taxpayers an additional $1 billion. This includes the cost of decommissioning chargers, losses from selling the EVs below market value, and the expense of replacing them with gasoline-powered vehicles. The move not only incurs significant financial losses but also inconveniences EV drivers.

(www.thedrive.com)

Tech financial loss

The Grifter Equilibrium: How CPA Advertising Broke Quality Signaling

2025-07-19

The Grifter Equilibrium: How CPA Advertising Broke Quality Signaling

This paper explores how the internet, and specifically Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) advertising, has broken the traditional quality signaling mechanism in advertising. Historically, high-quality sellers were more willing to invest heavily in advertising due to higher long-term returns. CPA advertising, however, allows low-quality sellers to fund ads from day-one revenue, undermining this signal. Factors like easy brand creation, light penalties for returns, rating compression, and consumer reliance on price heuristics contribute to a "grifter equilibrium" where low-quality products dominate. The paper presents an economic model illustrating this and proposes solutions such as persistent manufacturer IDs and return-adjusted CPA surcharges to deter low-quality sellers.

(www.gojiberries.io)

Tech CPA advertising quality signaling online marketplaces

Hash Collision Probability: From the Birthday Paradox to Approximations

2025-06-25

Hash Collision Probability: From the Birthday Paradox to Approximations

This article delves into the probability of hash collisions. Hash functions map arbitrarily complex inputs to single numbers, but there's a risk of hash collisions (different inputs mapping to the same number). Starting with the Birthday Paradox, the article explains the exact formula for calculating hash collision probability and three approximation methods: exponential approximation, simplified approximation, and a further simplified approximation. Through comparison, the exponential approximation performs best in most cases, while the other two are more suitable for quick estimations. The article also provides mathematical proofs supporting the approximation methods.

(kevingal.com)

Development birthday paradox

Autonomous Penetration Tester XBOW Tops HackerOne US Leaderboard

2025-06-25

Autonomous Penetration Tester XBOW Tops HackerOne US Leaderboard

For the first time, an autonomous AI penetration tester, XBOW, has reached the top spot on the HackerOne US leaderboard. XBOW initially benchmarked itself against CTF challenges and open-source projects, uncovering and reporting numerous zero-day vulnerabilities. It then participated in HackerOne's bug bounty programs, conducting black-box testing on thousands of targets. XBOW's nearly 1060 validated vulnerability reports, including an unknown vulnerability in Palo Alto's GlobalProtect VPN, propelled it to the top ranking. This demonstrates the significant potential of AI in cybersecurity.

(xbow.com)

Tech Penetration Testing

Gmail's New Easy Encryption: Secure Emails with a Single Click

2025-04-01

Gmail's New Easy Encryption: Secure Emails with a Single Click

Google is updating Gmail to allow enterprise users to send encrypted emails to any inbox with just a few clicks. A new encryption model eliminates the need for custom software or certificate exchanges. Initially rolling out in beta for internal enterprise emails, the feature will expand to any Gmail inbox in the coming weeks and other providers later this year. Users simply toggle 'additional encryption' to send a secured message. Non-Gmail recipients receive a link to a guest Workspace account to view and reply securely. While offering stronger encryption than TLS, it's not true end-to-end encryption as Google retains control over encryption keys.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech Email Encryption

Language Skills, Not Math, Are Key to Learning to Code

2025-05-02

Language Skills, Not Math, Are Key to Learning to Code

A University of Washington study challenges conventional wisdom about learning to program. Researchers found that the speed and proficiency of learning Python are more strongly correlated with language aptitude and problem-solving skills than with mathematical ability. Using behavioral tests and EEG data, the study demonstrated that language skills significantly impact learning speed, surpassing the influence of math skills. This has crucial implications for programming education and talent recruitment, challenging the traditional view of programming as a purely math-intensive field and suggesting that women may be underestimated in the field.

(massivesci.com)

Development language skills

Nvidia's GTC Reveal: Will DGX Spark and Station Disrupt the PC Market?

2025-03-31

Nvidia's GTC Reveal: Will DGX Spark and Station Disrupt the PC Market?

Nvidia unveiled two new workstations at its GTC event, the DGX Spark and DGX Station, aimed at AI developers. DGX Spark is a compact desktop, while DGX Station is a more powerful workstation-class machine, both offering significant AI compute power. While analysts believe Nvidia is attempting to expand its enterprise footprint, the high price point and niche market focus raise questions about their potential to truly "disrupt" the broader PC market. Nvidia's strategy appears more focused on empowering developers with powerful AI tools than targeting the general consumer market. Concurrently, Nvidia is aggressively expanding into software and networking infrastructure, aiming to build a complete enterprise-grade AI ecosystem.

(www.theregister.com)

Tech

KDE Linux: An Immutable Arch-Based Distro Aims for Bulletproof Stability

2025-08-10

KDE Linux: An Immutable Arch-Based Distro Aims for Bulletproof Stability

KDE has unveiled KDE Linux, a brand-new, ambitious Linux distribution built on Arch Linux – not a replacement for KDE Neon. This immutable distro features dual read-only Btrfs root partitions, updating like a smartphone OS with whole-system image replacements. Designed for superior stability and security, it's currently pre-alpha, with limitations including a lack of Secure Boot support and Nvidia driver compatibility issues. While early testing reveals bugs (like desktop crashes on login), its radical design and commitment to robustness make it a promising project.

(www.theregister.com)

Development

The Chrome-Tastic Airbrush Art of the 80s: A Nostalgic Look Back

2025-08-15

The 80s saw airbrush art explode in popularity. The author recounts their teenage yearning for an airbrush, dreaming of painting band logos and making money. While computer design eventually took over, the author fondly remembers the unique chrome effects, gradients, and speed lines of 80s airbrush art. Digital art today perfectly replicates the style, but lacks the organic imperfections of the original. The author hopes to one day rediscover their old airbrush and revisit this iconic art form.

(www.coolandcollected.com)

Design 80s art airbrush art

Ne Zha 2 Shatters Box Office Records, Ushering in a New Era for Chinese Animation

2025-02-12

Ne Zha 2 Shatters Box Office Records, Ushering in a New Era for Chinese Animation

The Chinese animated film "Ne Zha 2" has taken the Chinese box office by storm, becoming the first film to surpass $1 billion in a single market and the first non-Hollywood title to join the coveted billion-dollar club. In just eight days and five hours, it shattered the box office record previously held by "The Battle at Lake Changjin," becoming China's highest-grossing film of all time. The next day, it surpassed "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" to become the highest-grossing film ever in a single market. Its success stems from its stunning visuals, captivating storytelling, and deep cultural resonance, resonating with audiences on a profound level. This triumph injects a much-needed boost into the Chinese film industry and sets a new benchmark for Chinese animation on the global stage.

(www.globaltimes.cn)

Game Ne Zha 2 Chinese Animation Box Office Chinese animation Box Office Record

How Many More UBI Trials Until We Get It?

2025-06-17

How Many More UBI Trials Until We Get It?

Universal Basic Income (UBI), the idea of regular, unconditional cash payments from the government, remains controversial. Fears abound that it would kill work ethic and cripple society. However, mounting evidence, including a recent large-scale German trial, suggests these fears may be misplaced. Results indicate UBI didn't cause widespread laziness, even showing some positive impacts. This begs the question: how many more UBI trials until its viability is widely accepted?

(medium.com)

Misc

Browser Databases: The Future of Frontend Sync?

2025-03-21

Browser Databases: The Future of Frontend Sync?

Niki explores the challenges of data synchronization in modern web applications. Traditional tools like XHR, fetch, REST, and GraphQL only solve the problem of getting data once, failing to address the complexities of continuous changes, request failures, and data conflicts. The article argues that building a browser-based database offers a more effective solution to data synchronization. This not only simplifies the development process and improves efficiency but also provides more reliable and efficient data management, ultimately allowing developers to focus on business logic rather than low-level data synchronization details. Using Roam Research as an example, the author demonstrates the feasibility of a serverless architecture and believes that sync engines have the potential to simplify the tech stack, consolidating databases and servers, and fundamentally changing frontend development.

(www.instantdb.com)

Development frontend database data synchronization

Agentless System Monitoring for Opsmaru: An Elegant Solution with Elixir and Broadway

2025-02-20

Agentless System Monitoring for Opsmaru: An Elegant Solution with Elixir and Broadway

Opsmaru developed an agentless system monitoring solution leveraging its in-house Uplink module and the LXD API. Using Elixir and the Broadway library, Opsmaru directly retrieves container CPU, memory, disk, and network metrics from LXD, converts them to Prometheus format, and utilizes the Elastic Stack for storage and analysis. This approach avoids the maintenance overhead of installing agents and supports customizable monitoring intervals and data processing, providing users with deeper system insights.

(opsmaru.com)

Development

Taiwan's Nuclear Phaseout Fuels Energy Anxiety and Geopolitical Risks

2025-05-19

Taiwan's Nuclear Phaseout Fuels Energy Anxiety and Geopolitical Risks

With its last nuclear plant shut down, Taiwan is heavily reliant on imported natural gas, raising concerns about energy security. This move, aimed at achieving a 'nuclear-free' Taiwan, increases dependence on fossil fuels and exposes the island to volatile gas prices. To power its booming semiconductor industry, Taiwan is adding 5 gigawatts of gas power this year, but with only 11 days of gas storage, it's vulnerable to potential blockades by China. A simulated attack on a Taiwanese gas import terminal during April's military exercises highlights the geopolitical risks, while also jeopardizing Taiwan's climate goals.

(e360.yale.edu)

Tech Taiwan energy transition

Making Unsafe Rust Safer: Verification Tools for Unsafe Code

2024-12-17

Making Unsafe Rust Safer: Verification Tools for Unsafe Code

Rust's popularity stems from its ability to eliminate memory and concurrency errors at compile time, but its `unsafe` code blocks can bypass these checks. This article explores tools for verifying unsafe Rust code, including code called from C or C++ libraries. It introduces runtime error detection tools—sanitizers—and Miri, an interpreter that deterministically finds undefined behavior. Sanitizers detect out-of-bounds memory access, data races, and more, while Miri provides more precise error reporting with code snippets. However, Miri currently doesn't support code called via FFI from C/C++, necessitating the use of C/C++ compiler sanitizers in such cases. These tools enhance the safety and reliability of Rust code, even when dealing with `unsafe` code or interacting with C/C++ libraries.

(blog.colinbreck.com)

Development Safety Memory Errors

Spatially Enabling a Millennial Global City Population Dataset

2025-06-18

Spatially Enabling a Millennial Global City Population Dataset

This paper details the creation of a massive global city population dataset integrating the work of Chandler and Modelski, spanning 3700 BC to 2000 AD. The original data, residing in print books and disparate digital formats, presented significant digitization and spatialization (geocoding) challenges. OCR attempts failed due to font and page quality issues, necessitating manual transcription. Geocoding leveraged CartoDB, GeoNames, the Ancient Locations database, and the Getty Thesaurus, with manual verification crucial for accuracy. The final dataset contains 1599 city locations, offering broad global and temporal coverage, yet limitations remain: data sparsity, ambiguous city definitions, and uncertainties in ancient city locations. Despite these, the digitized and spatialized dataset offers readily accessible data for researchers (historians, geographers, ecologists, etc.) to analyze global urbanization trends.

(www.nature.com)

Misc historical population data data digitization

Elegant UI Undo Stack Algorithm: Avoiding Indexing Errors

2025-03-26

This article presents a clever implementation of a UI undo stack algorithm. Instead of the traditional index-based approach, it uses two stacks (undoStack and redoStack) to manage undo and redo operations, neatly avoiding common indexing errors and off-by-one issues. The code is concise and easy to understand. The author addresses the pass-by-reference problem in JavaScript using `structuredClone()`, ensuring idempotency. A complete code example is provided.

(blog.julik.nl)

Development UI Development Undo Redo

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