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Beancount Ledger Reconciliation with Vim Macros: A Hacker's Tale

2025-08-19

A seasoned Vim user tackles the challenge of managing personal finances with Beancount, a text-based ledger system. Facing a mess of CSV and PDF bank statements and numerous uncategorized internal transfers, the author ingeniously leverages Vim macros to automate the reconciliation process. The article details the macro creation process, highlighting problem-solving and showcasing impressive Vim skills. Through creative use of Vim, the author transforms chaotic financial data into a clear and efficient Beancount ledger, dramatically improving productivity.

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(tangled.sh)
Development

Microbial Minimalism: A Newly Discovered Archaeon Challenges the Definition of Life

2025-08-20
Microbial Minimalism: A Newly Discovered Archaeon Challenges the Definition of Life

Scientists have discovered Sukunaarchaeum mirabile, an archaeon with one of the smallest genomes on Earth. Surprisingly, this organism is almost entirely dependent on its host for survival, lacking genes for essential metabolic functions. This discovery challenges fundamental understandings of life and suggests a new archaeal lineage. The researchers believe many more such life-defying microbes may exist within the 'microbial dark matter', further highlighting the vast unknowns in the microbial world.

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(nautil.us)
Tech life definition

Positron: The Next-Gen Open Source IDE for Data Science

2025-08-19
Positron: The Next-Gen Open Source IDE for Data Science

Posit PBC has launched Positron, a free, next-generation Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for data science. It seamlessly integrates data exploration and production workflows, supporting both Python and R equally. Key features include interactive notebooks, plotting tools, integrated data app workflows, and a built-in AI assistant. Built on Code OSS, Positron supports VSIX extensions for enhanced customization.

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(posit.co)
Development

Learning GPU Architecture Through Memory Bandwidth Microbenchmarks

2025-08-21
Learning GPU Architecture Through Memory Bandwidth Microbenchmarks

Traverse Research delved deep into GPU architecture by measuring memory bandwidth across various GPUs using custom microbenchmarks. The article explores the complexities of GPU memory access, including descriptors, buffer types (byte address, structured, typed), and texture units. It also covers GPU memory hierarchy, cache policies (write-through, write-back, write-around), and latency hiding techniques. Experiments revealed significant differences in cache and VRAM bandwidth across architectures: the Meta Quest 3's Adreno 740 showed a dramatic bandwidth improvement using textures; the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT exhibited differences between floating-point and integer loads; the Intel Arc B580 displayed unique patterns with varying data types; and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti experienced bottlenecks with many writes to the same small memory area. These findings offer insights for optimizing GPU software performance, particularly in hardware-specific projects.

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(www.evolvebenchmark.com)
Tech Memory Bandwidth Microbenchmark

Safely Using snprintf: Avoid Buffer Overflows

2025-08-19
Safely Using snprintf: Avoid Buffer Overflows

This article highlights a lesser-known feature of the `snprintf` function: its ability to determine the required buffer size before formatting, thus preventing buffer overflows. By calling `snprintf` twice – once with `NULL` and 0 to get the size, and again with a properly allocated buffer – the need for manual buffer size calculations is eliminated. The author also recommends a lightweight header-only library for easier usage.

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(bernsteinbear.com)
Development buffer overflow

CSS Infinity: A Curious Journey Through Browser Interpretations

2025-08-21
CSS Infinity: A Curious Journey Through Browser Interpretations

This article explores the quirky behavior of the `infinity` keyword in CSS calculation functions. By applying `infinity` to properties like `text-indent`, `word-spacing`, and `letter-spacing`, the author discovers inconsistencies in how different browsers handle infinite values, although the visual results consistently lead to horizontal overflow. More intriguingly, when used with `z-index`, the computed value of `infinity` is capped at the maximum integer value across browsers, resulting in unexpected stacking order. Finally, the author experiments with `infinity` for animation duration, finding that it translates to extremely long times, even causing Safari to render the page unresponsive. In short, the experiment reveals the different strategies browsers employ in handling infinite values in CSS and some surprising side effects.

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(meyerweb.com)
Development

US Water Consumption: A Deep Dive

2025-08-22
US Water Consumption: A Deep Dive

While US water is abundant and cheap, rising demand in the arid Southwest and from water-intensive industries like data centers is shifting this reality. This article analyzes the US's daily water consumption of 322 billion gallons, covering power generation, irrigation, industry, and domestic use. While thermoelectric power plants consume vast amounts, most is non-consumptive; irrigation's consumptive use is significant and difficult to reuse; data center water use, though relatively small now, is rapidly growing. The key takeaway: Careful interpretation of water use data is crucial, distinguishing between consumptive and non-consumptive uses.

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(www.construction-physics.com)
Tech water consumption

Elegant Dependency Injection in OCaml: An Object-Oriented Approach

2025-08-21

This article explores different approaches to dependency injection in OCaml and proposes a novel object-oriented solution. The author contrasts the shortcomings of existing methods using user-defined effects and modules as first-class values, arguing they are overly verbose and prone to errors in real-world applications. The new approach leverages OCaml's powerful object model, utilizing features like structural object types and row variables to achieve type-safe dependency injection with easy composition and extension. The article demonstrates the elegance and maintainability of this method through simple and more complex examples, comparing it to other approaches and ultimately recommending the object-oriented method for straightforward dependency injection scenarios.

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(gr-im.github.io)
Development Object Model

An Infinitely High Stack of Blocks? Impossible!

2025-08-20

This paper explores a counter-intuitive physics problem: the stability of an infinitely extending stack of blocks. By analyzing torque and center of mass, the author demonstrates that finite-height stacks of blocks can remain stable even when their tops extend far beyond the edge of a table—a result that defies intuition. However, when attempting to extrapolate this to an infinitely high stack, the author finds that regardless of the limiting procedure used, the end result is either no stack at all or a stack that doesn't lean. This reveals the subtleties of limit operations when dealing with infinity and the limitations of intuition.

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(sites.pitt.edu)
Tech mechanics limits

Doctor Who Season Finale Twist: Rose Tyler Returns as the Doctor?!

2025-06-02
Doctor Who Season Finale Twist: Rose Tyler Returns as the Doctor?!

The Doctor Who season 2 finale, "The Reality War," delivered a shocking twist. Fifteenth Doctor Ncuti Gatwa sacrificed himself to save Poppy, his daughter from the 'Wish World', triggering a regeneration into a familiar face: Rose Tyler (Billie Piper)! Rose, the companion of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors, is now set to become the second (or third, depending on how you count Jo Martin's Fugitive Doctor) female Doctor. However, the ending leaves the how and why of Rose's transformation a complete mystery, setting up a huge cliffhanger for season 3 and igniting fan speculation.

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(www.space.com)
Game Doctor Who Billie Piper

The Fatal Flaw of "The Art of Multiprocessor Programming": Ignoring the futex

2025-08-19

This article critiques "The Art of Multiprocessor Programming," a well-regarded textbook, for its omission of the futex, a crucial modern concurrency technique. The author argues that the book's lack of coverage renders its content outdated and impractical. Futexes, enabling efficient mutex implementations, significantly improve concurrency performance and are widely used in operating systems like Linux, Windows, and macOS. The article details futex functionality and provides code examples demonstrating high-performance mutex construction using futexes, including spinlocks, non-recursive mutexes, and recursive mutexes. The author concludes that the book's failure to cover essential technologies like futexes makes it insufficient for modern concurrency programming needs.

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(h4x0r.org)
Development concurrency programming multiprocessor programming

Masimo Sues US Customs to Block Apple's Restored Blood Oxygen Feature on Apple Watch

2025-08-21
Masimo Sues US Customs to Block Apple's Restored Blood Oxygen Feature on Apple Watch

Following a patent infringement lawsuit by Masimo, Apple's blood oxygen feature on the Apple Watch was initially banned. While Apple disabled the feature via software, it recently re-enabled it, calling it a "redesigned" feature. Masimo now alleges that US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) overstepped its authority and violated due process by allowing Apple to restore the functionality. The lawsuit seeks to prevent CBP's decision and reinstate the original ban. The central issue is whether CBP violated due process and whether Apple's 'redesigned' feature still constitutes patent infringement.

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(9to5mac.com)
Tech Patent Lawsuit

UK Drops Demand for Apple iCloud Backdoor

2025-08-19
UK Drops Demand for Apple iCloud Backdoor

The UK will no longer compel Apple to provide backdoor access to its iCloud encryption, according to US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. This follows a January order demanding access to encrypted data globally. Apple challenged the order, citing the CLOUD Act, a bilateral agreement preventing such data demands between the US and UK. US pressure reportedly led the UK to withdraw its request. It remains unclear if Apple will reinstate its enhanced encryption service in the UK.

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(www.theverge.com)
Tech

Dating App TeaOnHer Exposed Thousands of User's Private Data Due to Critical Security Flaws

2025-08-18
Dating App TeaOnHer Exposed Thousands of User's Private Data Due to Critical Security Flaws

TeaOnHer, a dating gossip app designed for men to share information about women they claim to have dated, suffered a major security breach exposing thousands of users' personal information, including driver's license photos and other government-issued IDs. TechCrunch reporters discovered easily exploitable flaws, including exposed admin panel credentials and an API allowing unauthenticated access to user data. The app's developer, Xavier Lampkin, failed to respond to multiple requests for comment and didn't commit to notifying affected users or regulators. While the vulnerabilities have since been patched, the incident highlights the critical need for developers to prioritize user data security.

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(techcrunch.com)
Tech privacy risks app security vulnerabilities

Modern CI Systems Are Too Complex: Time to Merge Build and CI Systems?

2025-08-20

This article explores the complexity of modern continuous integration (CI) platforms. The author argues that current CI systems, such as GitHub Actions and GitLab CI, are overly powerful and have evolved into complex build systems, leading to fragmented build and CI system logic and low efficiency. The author proposes integrating CI functionality into build systems and uses Mozilla's Taskcluster as an example to illustrate a more powerful, task graph-based CI platform design. This design can unify build and CI processes, improve efficiency, and reduce complexity. However, the author also points out that this merger requires more advanced build systems and broader industry adoption, which may be difficult to achieve in the short term.

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(gregoryszorc.com)
Development

A 1Hz Clock from Three Candles: Reversing Millennia of Optimization

2025-08-19
A 1Hz Clock from Three Candles: Reversing Millennia of Optimization

For millennia, candlemakers have strived for flicker-free candles. However, when three candles are bundled together, they surprisingly begin to oscillate naturally at ~9.9Hz, a frequency primarily determined by gravity and flame diameter. The author ingeniously uses a wire suspended in the flame to sense capacitance changes caused by ionized gases, detecting this frequency and dividing it down to 1Hz. The result? A 1Hz clock built with a simple microcontroller and an LED, powered by the flickering of three candles.

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(cpldcpu.com)
Hardware Sensors

Clojure Flow: Building Highly Concurrent Dataflow Applications

2025-08-18

Clojure's Flow library offers a novel approach to building highly concurrent dataflow applications. It strictly separates application logic from deployment concerns such as topology, execution, communication, lifecycle management, monitoring, and error handling. Developers define processing logic using step-fn functions, while Flow manages process lifecycles and message passing. Step-fns have four arities: describe, init, transition, and transform, handling function description, initialization, lifecycle transitions, and message processing respectively. Flow also provides process monitoring and lifecycle management tools, supporting hot reloading and dynamic adjustments, simplifying the development of highly concurrent applications.

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(clojure.github.io)
Development Flow library dataflow processing

Building a Web Search Engine from Scratch: 3 Billion Embeddings and 2 Months of Hustle

2025-08-13

The author recounts their two-month journey building a web search engine from scratch, leveraging 3 billion SBERT embeddings. Motivated by the shortcomings of existing search engines – excessive SEO spam and insufficient high-quality content – the project aimed to improve search relevance and understanding of complex queries. The post details the process, covering data crawling, text normalization, chunking, semantic context handling, embedding generation, storage (using RocksDB and HNSW), and retrieval. The resulting engine boasts 500ms query latency and handles complex natural language queries, surfacing high-quality results.

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(blog.wilsonl.in)
Tech neural embeddings large-scale data processing

Microsoft Bets Big on AI Agents: The Demise of Traditional Business Apps?

2025-08-19
Microsoft Bets Big on AI Agents: The Demise of Traditional Business Apps?

Microsoft executives boldly predict that traditional business applications will be a relic of the past by 2030, replaced by AI-powered "business agents." These AI agents will leverage generative AI and vector databases to dynamically adapt to user needs and optimize workflows in a goal-oriented manner. This prediction has sparked industry debate, with some questioning its optimism and the feasibility of rapid enterprise transformation, while others see it as a major shift requiring businesses to embrace AI to avoid obsolescence. Microsoft plans to gradually transition customers to this new model by offering AI agents as add-on services for existing applications.

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(thenewstack.io)
Tech

Mindless Machines, Meaningless Myths: A Review of Robert Skidelsky's 'Mindless'

2025-08-18
Mindless Machines, Meaningless Myths: A Review of Robert Skidelsky's 'Mindless'

This review examines Robert Skidelsky's 'Mindless: The Human Condition in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,' which explores the philosophical implications of AI, automation, and the illusion of progress. The author argues that we inhabit a 'machine civilization' where technology shapes our thinking, work, and relationships, prompting fundamental questions about human meaning, purpose, and freedom. Skidelsky traces technological development from the Industrial Revolution to the digital age, showing that progress isn't always positive, potentially leading to meaningless work, over-reliance on technology, and threats to human well-being. He calls for deeper reflection on technological advancement, urging us to avoid the pitfalls of technological optimism.

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(lareviewofbooks.org)
AI Philosophy of Technology

SVG `<path>` Demystified: Mastering the Art of Curve Drawing

2025-08-22
SVG `<path>` Demystified: Mastering the Art of Curve Drawing

This blog post provides a comprehensive guide to the SVG `` element, a powerful tool for creating intricate curved shapes. It breaks down the commands – M, L, Q, C, and the notoriously tricky A (arc) – explaining their parameters and functionalities with clear examples and insightful analogies. The author tackles the complexities of the arc command, clarifying its often-confusing aspects. The post also covers the Z command, relative commands, and practical tips like smoothing chained Bézier curves. A must-read for web developers of all levels.

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(www.joshwcomeau.com)
Development curve drawing

MCP Tools with Dependent Types: A Defold Editor Experiment

2025-08-18

This post details an experiment using a Large Language Model (LLM) within the Defold game editor. The author initially attempted to use Claude to directly manipulate Lua code, but faced low accuracy. The proposed solution involved using JSON Schemas to define tool inputs, but this ran into a limitation: the inability to implement dependent types within the Model-Code-Prompt (MCP) framework. This means the structure of tool input depends on runtime information. For example, editing 3D models requires different properties depending on the chosen material. The solution is a two-step process: the LLM selects a resource, the program looks up its data structure and constructs a JSON Schema; then, the LLM uses this schema to generate edits. The author suggests MCP should support dependent types to handle complex data more effectively.

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(vlaaad.github.io)
Development

Your MCP Doesn't Need 30 Tools: Code Is Enough

2025-08-18
Your MCP Doesn't Need 30 Tools: Code Is Enough

This article explores a novel approach using a single-tool MCP server that accepts programming code as input. The author points out challenges with CLI tools, such as platform dependency, version dependency, and lack of documentation, making them difficult for agent tools to use. In contrast, an MCP server can maintain state and expose a single tool (e.g., a Python interpreter running eval()), allowing agent tools to better manage sessions and compose tools. The author demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach with pexpect-mcp, which transforms the MCP server into a stateful Python interpreter, simplifying debugging and improving efficiency. Furthermore, the author explores replacing Playwright's MCP with one exposing the Playwright API via JavaScript, reducing tool definitions and improving data transfer efficiency. While security concerns exist, the author argues this approach has significant potential and warrants further exploration.

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(lucumr.pocoo.org)
Development Agent Tools

Designing for User Agents: The Rise of the UAI

2025-08-11
Designing for User Agents: The Rise of the UAI

This article discusses the importance of designing for three distinct interfaces when building applications: User Interface (UI), Application Programming Interface (API), and User Agent Interface (UAI). With the rise of AI agents, the UAI becomes crucial. To ensure consistent functionality across all three, the author stresses the need to separate core business logic from interface-specific presentation and interaction patterns. Features should be defined in the underlying application logic and exposed through the interfaces, preventing unintentional degradation of any interface when adding new features.

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(www.joshbeckman.org)
Development

Moving Objects in 3D Space with Math

2025-08-20
Moving Objects in 3D Space with Math

This article explores moving objects in 3D space, specifically along a spherical helix path. Starting with simple circular motion, the author explains how sine and cosine functions can control an object's x, y, and z coordinates to create spirals and more complex trajectories. The core concept is using parametric equations, defining the object's 3D position as a function of time. What appears as complex dynamic effects are ultimately derived from simple mathematical functions.

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(visualrambling.space)
Development 3D graphics

Amazon Cloud Chief: Replacing Junior Workers with AI is 'One of the Dumbest Things'

2025-08-20
Amazon Cloud Chief: Replacing Junior Workers with AI is 'One of the Dumbest Things'

Amazon's cloud chief, Matt Garman, warns against replacing junior employees with AI, calling it "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard." He argues that junior employees are the most adept at utilizing AI tools and that cutting them would harm future talent pipelines. Garman advocates for continued hiring of graduates and training them in software development, problem-solving, and best practices. He emphasizes that critical thinking, creativity, and adaptability are more valuable than specialized skills in an AI-driven economy. This contrasts with some who believe AI can replace junior workers; data shows rising unemployment among 20-30 year olds in tech. However, others argue that young engineers offer fresh perspectives and quicker AI adoption.

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(finance.yahoo.com)
Tech

Zedless: A Privacy-Friendly, Local-First Fork of Zed

2025-08-21
Zedless: A Privacy-Friendly, Local-First Fork of Zed

Zedless is a work-in-progress fork of Zed designed to prioritize privacy and local-first principles. It removes reliance on proprietary cloud services, telemetry, and automatic crash reporting. It emphasizes bring-your-own-infrastructure, allowing users to configure providers for network services (with no defaults and disabled by default). Importantly, it avoids contributor license agreements and ensures proper licensing for all third-party dependencies.

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(github.com)
Development

Handwriting: More Important Than You Think

2025-08-20
Handwriting: More Important Than You Think

In the digital age, handwriting seems to be fading into obsolescence. But new research suggests that handwriting is crucial for children's cognitive development and literacy. While technology has made typing mainstream, practicing handwriting enhances fine motor skills and helps students better understand and retain information. Although not all experts agree on the necessity of learning cursive, there's a general consensus that handwriting skills significantly benefit cognitive development; it's not just nostalgia, but about children's learning and development.

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(www.wired.com)
Education cognitive development

Your ChatGPT Chats Might Be Indexable by Search Engines

2025-08-18
Your ChatGPT Chats Might Be Indexable by Search Engines

Recently, OpenAI ChatGPT users were shocked to find their search queries appearing in Google search results. OpenAI had disclosed this possibility, but most users overlooked it. More concerning, a court order compels OpenAI to retain all user conversation data, including deleted content, due to an ongoing copyright lawsuit. Google's Gemini AI also has a memory function, recording user chats by default. The article warns users to be cautious with AI chatbots, avoiding sensitive information, as all mainstream AI chatbots record user conversations by default.

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(www.theregister.com)
AI
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