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Mid-80s MacPaint Art Still Looks Amazing

2025-07-12
Mid-80s MacPaint Art Still Looks Amazing

Browsing a BMUG CD-ROM unearthed a trove of early 80s MacPaint art. The author discovered over 18,000 images on Discmaster and shared some highlights, saving many more for future posts. The impressive quality of the art, created on small, low-resolution screens, sparks interest in finding the original artists and seeing their current work. The Amiga's similar capabilities are also noted as a future area of exploration.

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(blog.decryption.net.au)
Design Retro Art Computer Art

macOS Tahoe 26: A Stunning New Mac Experience

2025-06-10
macOS Tahoe 26: A Stunning New Mac Experience

Apple unveiled macOS Tahoe 26, featuring a redesigned interface and powerful new capabilities. The update boasts a more expressive design with extensive customization options for the desktop, Dock, in-app navigation, and toolbars. Continuity features are enhanced with the addition of the Phone app to the Mac. Spotlight receives its biggest update ever, enabling direct execution of hundreds of actions. Apple Intelligence expands with Live Translation, Genmoji, and Image Playground, along with powerful Shortcuts improvements. Gamers will appreciate the new Apple Games app and Game Overlay, plus support for Metal 4. Safari gets a speed and battery life boost, and features a refreshed design.

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(www.apple.com)
Tech macOS update

Pebble Time 2 Reborn: Final Design and Specs Revealed

2025-08-14
Pebble Time 2 Reborn: Final Design and Specs Revealed

The Pebble Time 2, once envisioned as Pebble's flagship smartwatch, is back. The revived version boasts a refined design with added curves, color accents, knurled buttons, and a premium stainless steel build, similar to the original Pebble Steel. Unlike the earlier prototype, the final design features a flat glass panel to minimize reflections and an advanced RGB backlight allowing for customizable color temperature. Available in black and silver with additional color accents, it also includes a built-in compass, a feature absent in the initial plans. Pre-orders are open at $225, with final pricing subject to regional variations.

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(9to5google.com)
Hardware

Luck be a Landlord Faces Potential Google Play Ban

2025-01-13
Luck be a Landlord Faces Potential Google Play Ban

On New Year's Day, the developer of Luck be a Landlord received an email from Google Play stating that the game "contains gambling" and may be removed from the store. Despite no changes to the game's content in months, Google Play deemed it a policy violation, causing significant concern for the developer. The developer has previously battled with Google Play over the game's ban in 13 countries, with no resolution. Reluctantly, the developer chose to agree that the game "contains gambling" in the age rating questionnaire to prevent a global ban. The developer hopes players can continue playing on Android and encourages subscribing to the newsletter for updates on their next game.

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(blog.trampolinetales.com)
Game game removal Google Play policies gambling elements

Website Cookie Policy Explained

2025-09-18
Website Cookie Policy Explained

This website uses two types of cookies: essential cookies for basic website functionality, and comment cookies to track user activity across multiple sessions, including username, email, and URL. Essential cookies store user cookie consent preferences for 30 days; comment cookies are session cookies that expire at the end of the session.

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(9to5linux.com)
Development User Tracking

Orange Pi RV2: A $40 RISC-V SBC That Redefines Affordability

2025-09-18

The Orange Pi RV2 is a $40 single-board computer (SBC) featuring an 8-core RISC-V processor, offering a budget-friendly entry point into the world of RISC-V computing. Packed with connectivity options, it excels in IoT and lightweight AI applications. However, it's not a desktop replacement, showing limitations in software support and desktop performance. Despite this, the RV2 strikes a compelling balance between affordability and innovation, making it a viable option for cost-effective specialized projects.

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(riscv.org)
Hardware

Firefox Privacy Checklist: Enhance Your Privacy

2025-08-30
Firefox Privacy Checklist: Enhance Your Privacy

This checklist guides you through optimizing Firefox's privacy settings. The author prefers Firefox over Chromium-based browsers like Brave due to Mozilla's non-profit nature and commitment to open source. It details how to improve privacy via settings and extensions, including accessing settings and using about:config (with a cautionary note). The author welcomes suggestions for improvement.

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(andrewmarder.net)
Development

The Humble Programmer: Reflections on Software Crisis and the Future of Programming

2025-06-17

This essay is a transcript of Edsger W. Dijkstra's renowned 1972 lecture, exploring the early days of programming and the escalating software crisis. Dijkstra recounts the initial lack of recognition for programming as a profession, and how the exponential increase in computer power led to a corresponding explosion in software complexity, culminating in the software crisis. He argues that the solution lies in a paradigm shift in programming methodologies, advocating for 'intellectually manageable programs' and stressing the importance of program correctness proofs, while warning against overly complex programming languages. He expresses confidence that improved languages, more structured programming approaches, and a focus on correctness will dramatically enhance software quality and development efficiency.

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(www.cs.utexas.edu)
Development Software Crisis Program Design Programming Methodology

toyDB: A Distributed SQL Database in Rust for Educational Purposes

2025-05-11
toyDB: A Distributed SQL Database in Rust for Educational Purposes

toyDB is a distributed SQL database built from scratch in Rust as an educational project. It aims to illustrate the architecture and concepts behind distributed SQL databases in a simple and understandable way, supporting most common SQL features including joins, aggregates, and transactions. While performance and scalability aren't primary goals, a benchmark tool is included to evaluate performance under various workloads. toyDB uses Raft for consensus to manage a transactional key/value store, with a SQL query engine built on top.

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(github.com)
Development Distributed Database

The Socratic Journal Method: Unlock Self-Discovery Through Questioning

2025-09-14
The Socratic Journal Method: Unlock Self-Discovery Through Questioning

This article introduces the 'Socratic Journal Method,' a novel approach to journaling. The author shares their personal journey, highlighting the common pitfalls of traditional journaling and how the Socratic method, based on self-questioning and answering, transforms the process into a self-dialogue. Simple and effective, it involves asking one question daily, answering honestly, and tracking a single metric. This method not only aids stress reduction and self-awareness but also fosters consistency, leading to self-discovery and personal growth.

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(mindthenerd.com)
Misc journaling method

Babylon's Rebirth: Ancient City Rises From the Ashes

2025-09-14
Babylon's Rebirth: Ancient City Rises From the Ashes

The ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon, mentioned in the sacred texts of all three Abrahamic faiths, is experiencing a remarkable revival. Two World Monuments Fund (WMF) projects, the restoration of the Temple of Ninmakh and the mitigation of groundwater damage to the Ishtar Gate's retaining wall, are nearing completion. This resurgence coincides with a boom in tourism, with record visitor numbers. Despite years of war, looting, and environmental challenges, Babylon is reclaiming its place as a cultural hub, showcasing the resilience of the Iraqi people and their rich heritage. The successful use of traditional mud-brick techniques in the temple restoration highlights a commitment to preserving authentic methods.

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(www.theartnewspaper.com)
Misc Cultural Heritage Iraq

Government's Energy Gamble: Lessons from the Failed Ivanpah Solar Project

2025-02-01
Government's Energy Gamble: Lessons from the Failed Ivanpah Solar Project

The Ivanpah solar project, a massive concentrated solar power plant, ultimately ended in failure. Despite significant government investment, it proved unprofitable due to technological flaws and high costs, even causing numerous bird deaths. This raises questions about the government's continued investment in high-risk clean energy technologies. While Ivanpah failed, overall government investment in renewable energy has been successful, driving progress in solar photovoltaic technology and fostering the growth of the clean energy industry. However, government investments carry risks, requiring careful project selection and rigorous evaluation to prevent similar failures.

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(www.latimes.com)
Tech government investment

Play Brick Breaker with Your Hands!

2025-01-20
Play Brick Breaker with Your Hands!

Forget controllers! 'Manual Brick Breaker' lets you play the classic game using only your hands. The game uses your webcam to track your palm movements, controlling the paddle to break bricks. Difficulty increases with each level, speeding up the ball and shrinking the paddle, testing your reflexes. All processing happens directly in your browser, ensuring privacy. The game's code is open-source, built with JavaScript, HTML canvas, and MediaPipe hand tracking. The creator also offers other fun open-source projects, such as video-to-ASCII art converters.

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(collidingscopes.github.io)
Game hand tracking web game

Symbolic Differentiation in Prolog: Elegant DCGs and Efficient Tabling

2025-03-12

This article demonstrates symbolic differentiation using Prolog and its powerful definite clause grammars (DCGs). It begins by explaining fundamental calculus concepts, particularly the definition and rules of differentiation. A mathematical expression parser is then constructed using DCGs, transforming string-based expressions into abstract syntax trees (ASTs). To address left recursion, tabling is employed for efficiency. Finally, simplification rules refine the derivative results. The process highlights Prolog's strengths in symbolic computation, showcasing its elegance and efficiency.

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(bitsandtheorems.com)
Development Symbolic Differentiation

WMI Virus: Diskless Execution Achieved

2025-01-29
WMI Virus: Diskless Execution Achieved

A proof-of-concept project, Stuxnet, demonstrates a novel virus that hides its malicious code within the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), achieving diskless execution. The virus uses WMI as a filesystem, leveraging a PowerShell script at boot to extract and load the payload into memory. The project includes a novel privilege escalation technique and advanced anti-AV evasion techniques, such as on-demand system library loading and dynamic function offset finding, allowing it to evade detection by major antivirus software and sandboxes. The author also hints at potential kernel-space exploit possibilities within WMI.

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(github.com)
Development antivirus evasion

Page Objects: Making Your UI Tests Less Brittle

2025-09-15
Page Objects: Making Your UI Tests Less Brittle

Testing web pages requires interacting with elements, but directly manipulating HTML makes tests fragile. Page Objects solve this by encapsulating a page or fragment as an application-specific API. This allows interacting with elements without directly accessing HTML. The goal is to mimic user actions, providing a clean interface that hides underlying widgets. Text fields use string accessors, checkboxes booleans, and buttons action-oriented methods. Good Page Objects model the user's perspective, not the UI's internal structure, returning basic data types or other Page Objects. There's debate on including assertions within Page Objects. The author prefers keeping assertions in test scripts, avoiding bloated Page Objects and using assertion libraries to reduce redundancy. This pattern works across various UI technologies, useful not just for testing but also as a scripting interface for applications.

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(martinfowler.com)
Development Page Objects

Appeals Court Strikes Down FCC's Net Neutrality Rules

2025-01-02
Appeals Court Strikes Down FCC's Net Neutrality Rules

A US appeals court overturned the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) net neutrality rules. These rules mandated equal treatment of all internet traffic by broadband providers, prohibiting preferential treatment. The court's decision partly relied on last year's Supreme Court ruling in Loper Bright, which limited regulatory agency power by overturning the Chevron Doctrine. The FCC chair called for Congressional action to enshrine net neutrality in federal law, while another commissioner lauded the decision as a reversal of the Biden administration's regulatory overreach.

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(www.tvtechnology.com)
Tech

How Doom Didn't Kill the Amiga (But Maybe Commodore Did)

2025-07-03

This is a nostalgic account of an Amiga enthusiast's journey, exploring the rise and fall of the Amiga platform. The author, captivated by the Amiga 500 since 1988, remained loyal despite the PC's rise, upgrading their Amiga over the years. The article argues that Doom wasn't the killer app that brought down the Amiga, but rather the PC's economies of scale and standardization, coupled with Commodore's strategic missteps. While the Amiga boasted superior graphics and multitasking, it ultimately lost out to cheaper, more powerful PC hardware and a larger software ecosystem. The author's personal experience highlights the Amiga's strengths and the challenges Commodore faced in competing with the PC's dominance.

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(www.datagubbe.se)
Game

Telegram's Security Flaw: A Russian Network Engineer's Secret Ties to the Kremlin

2025-06-10
Telegram's Security Flaw: A Russian Network Engineer's Secret Ties to the Kremlin

A new investigation reveals a critical vulnerability in Telegram, the wildly popular messaging app. It finds that the maintenance of Telegram's networking equipment and assignment of its IP addresses are controlled by a virtually unknown Russian network engineer, Vladimir Vedeneev. Vedeneev's companies have close ties to Russian security services, having served clients including the FSB. While there's no evidence of direct government data sharing, it raises serious questions about Telegram's claims of security and privacy, especially given its default lack of end-to-end encryption. This discovery highlights how even seemingly secure messaging apps can be vulnerable to exploitation.

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(istories.media)
Tech

Microrim's Rapid Port of R:BASE System V to OS/2

2025-08-11

In late 1986, Microrim, a database software company, faced a monumental task: porting their flagship product, R:BASE System V, to IBM's newly emerging OS/2 before its official launch. Leveraging their modular software design and expertise, they systematically converted the largely FORTRAN-based application to C using a translation tool, then efficiently ported it to OS/2 by isolating OS-specific calls. This feat, accomplished in a remarkably short timeframe, showcased Microrim's prowess and offered valuable lessons for other developers facing similar challenges. The resulting OS/2 version benefited from OS/2's expanded memory and multitasking capabilities, enhancing performance and user experience.

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(gitpi.us)
Development Software Porting

CodeRabbit RCE: 1M Repositories Compromised

2025-08-19
CodeRabbit RCE: 1M Repositories Compromised

Security researchers discovered a critical vulnerability in CodeRabbit, a popular AI code review tool, leading to remote code execution (RCE). By exploiting a flaw in Rubocop's configuration, attackers executed malicious code, stealing sensitive information including Anthropic and OpenAI API keys, GitHub App private keys, and gaining read/write access to 1 million code repositories (including private ones). This highlights the critical need for integrating security into the development lifecycle of AI-powered products.

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(research.kudelskisecurity.com)
Tech RCE Vulnerability

Dynamic UIs Powered by LLMs: Revolutionizing AI Interaction

2025-05-16
Dynamic UIs Powered by LLMs: Revolutionizing AI Interaction

Traditional text-based AI interactions suffer from limitations like cognitive overload, ambiguity, and inefficiency. This post introduces a novel approach using Large Language Models (LLMs) to dynamically generate interactive UI components. These components, such as forms, buttons, and data visualizations, are created on-the-fly based on conversational context, significantly improving user experience. Integration with MCP services further streamlines complex tasks, offering a more efficient solution for enterprise applications, customer service, and complex workflows. The core mechanism involves the LLM generating JSON specifications for UI components, which are then rendered and interacted with by the client application.

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(blog.fka.dev)
AI dynamic UI

Parkinson's Law: Set Deadlines, Boost Efficiency

2024-12-12
Parkinson's Law: Set Deadlines, Boost Efficiency

Parkinson's Law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. James Stanier, writing from an engineering management perspective, argues for the importance of setting challenging yet achievable deadlines. Using the 'Iron Triangle' (scope, resources, time), he demonstrates how deadlines prevent scope creep, improve efficiency, and spark innovation. He also highlights the implementation of weekly reporting to encourage proactive task completion, ultimately leading to higher efficiency.

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(theengineeringmanager.substack.com)
Development Parkinson's Law Project Management Deadlines

Cogency: 3-Line AI Agents That Just Work

2025-07-15
Cogency: 3-Line AI Agents That Just Work

Cogency is a multi-step reasoning framework that simplifies AI agent creation. It auto-detects providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, intelligently routes tools, and streams transparent reasoning. With just three lines of code, you can build a functional agent. Cogency boasts built-in tools such as a calculator, weather checker, timezone tool, and web search, along with detailed execution traces for debugging. Extendable with custom tools and LLMs.

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(github.com)
AI multi-step reasoning

NVIDIA Meshtron: High-Fidelity 3D Mesh Generation at Scale

2024-12-16
NVIDIA Meshtron: High-Fidelity 3D Mesh Generation at Scale

NVIDIA researchers have developed Meshtron, a novel model capable of generating high-quality 3D meshes at unprecedented scale and fidelity. Employing an autoregressive architecture and sliding window attention, Meshtron represents meshes as a sequence of tokens and utilizes an Hourglass Transformer architecture to efficiently address the scalability and efficiency challenges of existing methods in generating complex 3D models. Generating meshes with artist-like detail, Meshtron offers strong controllability with inputs such as point clouds, face count, and creativity level, paving the way for more realistic 3D asset generation in animation, gaming, and virtual environments.

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(developer.nvidia.com)
AI

Nine Zero-Days in HashiCorp Vault: The Trust Model Broken

2025-08-07
Nine Zero-Days in HashiCorp Vault: The Trust Model Broken

Cyata's research team uncovered nine previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities in HashiCorp Vault, bypassing lockouts, evading policy checks, and enabling impersonation. One vulnerability allows root privilege escalation, and another—perhaps most concerning—leads to the first publicly reported remote code execution (RCE) in Vault, enabling complete system takeover. These flaws weren't memory corruption or race conditions, but subtle logic flaws buried in Vault's authentication, identity, and policy enforcement layers; some existed for nearly a decade. Researchers found them by meticulously examining Vault's core request flow, specifically the request_handling.go file. These vulnerabilities impact both open-source and enterprise Vault versions, allowing attackers to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA), impersonate entities, and achieve RCE. The research highlights the potential impact of subtle logic flaws in software critical to infrastructure security.

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(cyata.ai)
Tech

CedarDB: How B-Trees Still Shine in Modern Hardware with Optimistic Lock Coupling

2025-03-07
CedarDB: How B-Trees Still Shine in Modern Hardware with Optimistic Lock Coupling

B-trees, a data structure over 50 years old, are surprisingly efficient in modern hardware. CedarDB leverages B-trees for its data storage, showcasing their excellent cache efficiency and scalability in highly parallel environments. With a high fan-out, even a massive dataset like ClickBench (100M rows) requires only three levels of access, perfectly utilizing CPU cache hierarchies. Optimistic lock coupling minimizes contention, resulting in near lock-free read and write operations, performing almost as well as unsynchronized lookups. This article demonstrates how B-trees, through adaptation and optimization, remain a powerful and relevant data structure in modern databases.

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(cedardb.com)
Development B-trees concurrency control

Resurrecting a ZX Spectrum 128K+ "Toastrack": A Retro Computing Restoration

2025-07-01
Resurrecting a ZX Spectrum 128K+

The author reminisces about his childhood with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K and details the restoration of a rare ZX Spectrum 128K+ "Toastrack". This vintage machine suffered from various issues, including unreliable power, poor video quality, and a failing keyboard. The author meticulously addressed these problems by replacing the 7805 voltage regulator with a more efficient DC-DC Buck converter, cleaning the edge connector, adding video filters, and replacing the worn-out keyboard membrane. Audio improvements were also made. Finally, using an RGB2HDMI converter, the author achieved crisp HDMI output, breathing new life into the old machine and allowing him to play classic games once more.

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(celso.io)
Hardware

From 'Magic' to 'Duh': A Developer's Journey

2025-03-01

The author shares their programming journey, comparing the initial bewilderment of facing complex technologies to the helplessness of staring at a grand building. Initially, compilers and operating systems seemed mystical, but with accumulated experience, the author gradually understood the underlying principles, such as the implementation of compile-time computation in Go. By exploring Go's compile-time computation feature, the author understood its ingenious implementation mechanism and even contributed to it, although they later discovered some features were unnecessary. The article encourages developers to delve deeper, unveil the mystique of technology, and continuously improve their abilities.

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(pthorpe92.dev)
Development technical understanding developer advancement
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