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sectorlisp: A 512-Byte LISP Implementation

2025-05-08

sectorlisp: A 512-Byte LISP Implementation

sectorlisp is a groundbreaking 512-byte implementation of LISP capable of bootstrapping John McCarthy's meta-circular evaluator on bare metal. Stripping LISP down to its essentials, this project offers implementations in LISP, C, and i8086 assembly, the latter even booting from BIOS. This makes it arguably the smallest true LISP implementation to date.

(github.com)

Development Metacircular Evaluator

Self-Experiment: Magnesium Supplementation Yields Unexpected Negative Results

2025-03-09

A blogger conducted a months-long self-experiment with magnesium supplementation to improve mood and sleep quality. Initially using Solgar magnesium citrate, he ingested 800mg daily (approximately 136mg elemental magnesium). However, the results were unexpected: instead of improvement, mood significantly decreased. Data analysis and visualizations revealed potential negative effects from magnesium overdose. The blogger initially misinterpreted the supplement label, assuming 800mg referred to elemental magnesium, not citrate. The experiment highlights the importance of proper dosage and suggests that even seemingly safe supplements can have unintended negative consequences if taken in excess.

(gwern.net)

Misc self-experiment magnesium supplementation

Eleventy Ditches Luxon, Builds Custom RFC 9557 Date Parser

2025-07-26

Eleventy Ditches Luxon, Builds Custom RFC 9557 Date Parser

To reduce Eleventy's client-side bundle size and prepare for native Temporal API support, the team decided to replace the Luxon date parsing library with a custom RFC 9557-compliant solution. The new library is smaller, more accurate, and its output matches both the upcoming Temporal API and Luxon, although some breaking changes exist. This ultimately simplifies maintenance and improves performance.

(www.zachleat.com)

Development date parsing

Hollywood's Silent Deal: AI-Generated Fake Movie Trailers Flood YouTube

2025-03-28

Hollywood's Silent Deal: AI-Generated Fake Movie Trailers Flood YouTube

AI-generated fake movie trailers are flooding YouTube, so realistic they've even fooled French national television. Created for fun or profit, these trailers garner billions of views. Hollywood studios' response is baffling: instead of enforcing copyright, some are sharing ad revenue with creators. This has drawn criticism from SAG-AFTRA, who see it as disregard for actors' rights. The article explores the impact of AI on movie marketing and copyright, and Hollywood's ambiguous stance on this emerging challenge.

(deadline.com)

Tech

OpenRA December 2024 Update: Classic RTS Reborn

2025-01-25

OpenRA December 2024 Update: Classic RTS Reborn

OpenRA, the open-source reimagining of classic RTS games like Red Alert, Command & Conquer, and Dune 2000, has released a major December 2024 update. This update boasts numerous bug fixes and new features, including an improved map editor, enhanced unit descriptions, support for high-definition assets, and progress towards better multilingual support. A Tiberian Dawn HD playtest is also included. Players across Windows, macOS, and Linux can enjoy modernized gameplay featuring attack-move, unit veterancy, and fog of war.

(www.openra.net)

Game

OSS Rebuild: Rebuilding Trust in Open Source Package Ecosystems

2025-07-22

OSS Rebuild: Rebuilding Trust in Open Source Package Ecosystems

Google's new OSS Rebuild project aims to strengthen trust in open-source package ecosystems by reproducing upstream artifacts. Responding to the rise of supply chain attacks, OSS Rebuild automates the creation of declarative build definitions for PyPI, npm, and Crates.io, providing SLSA provenance meeting SLSA Build Level 3 requirements without publisher intervention. It offers build observability and verification tools, along with infrastructure definitions for organizations to run their own instances. By rebuilding, generating, signing, and distributing provenance, OSS Rebuild helps detect various supply chain compromises like unsubmitted source code, compromised build environments, and stealthy backdoors, enhancing package trust and accelerating vulnerability response.

(security.googleblog.com)

Development

Netflix's Movie Paradox: Billions Spent, Mediocrity Delivered

2025-09-10

Netflix's Movie Paradox: Billions Spent, Mediocrity Delivered

Netflix's massive spending on original films has yielded a surprising number of critical and commercial flops, exemplified by the $320 million bomb, *The Electric State*. This article explores Netflix's filmmaking challenges: high salaries attract journeyman directors prioritizing timely delivery over artistic vision; A-list stars boost visibility but not quality; Netflix's business model prioritizes content quantity over quality, turning films into disposable filler. The fundamental incompatibility between directors' artistic ambitions and Netflix's volume-driven approach results in a shortage of high-quality movies.

(www.statsignificant.com)

Tech

NSF Lays Off 168 Employees, Raising Concerns About US Tech Competitiveness

2025-02-19

NSF Lays Off 168 Employees, Raising Concerns About US Tech Competitiveness

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently laid off 168 employees, sparking concerns within the scientific community. The layoffs, ostensibly to comply with President Trump's executive order aiming for a smaller federal workforce, have targeted many program officers responsible for evaluating grant applications and managing research programs. This threatens to slow down research, delay scientific breakthroughs, and potentially harm US competitiveness in science and technology. The firings have also raised controversy, with allegations of improperly dismissed high-performing employees and questionable justifications. The move wastes resources, demoralizes scientists, and casts a shadow over the future of US scientific advancement.

(www.npr.org)

Tech NSF layoffs tech competitiveness

Dotless Domains: A DNS Oddity

2025-05-11

This article explores the phenomenon of "dotless domains," which are top-level domains (TLDs) like .com or .org that are directly accessible without a second-level domain. While ICANN and the IAB discourage this practice, some country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) still exist due to national jurisdiction. The article lists current and historical examples of dotless domains and analyzes their technical limitations in email delivery and website access. Furthermore, it delves into the structure of the DNS tree and the theoretical possibility of the root domain (.) having A, AAAA, and MX records, although this is practically nonexistent.

(lab.avl.la)

Tech Top-Level Domains ccTLDs

Lisp Interpreter in 99 Lines of C

2025-08-17

Lisp Interpreter in 99 Lines of C

This article presents Tinylisp, a Lisp interpreter implemented in a mere 99 lines of C code. Leveraging NaN boxing and clever C programming techniques, it boasts 21 built-in Lisp primitives, simple garbage collection, and a REPL. The author details its design, implementation, and extension possibilities, even providing examples of running it on a vintage Sharp PC-G850 pocket computer. Tinylisp's concise code is readily understandable and extensible, making it an excellent learning resource for both Lisp and C.

(github.com)

Development

Hadrius Hiring Founding UI/UX Designer, Up to $150K

2024-12-18

Hadrius Hiring Founding UI/UX Designer, Up to $150K

Hadrius, a Y Combinator-backed fintech startup, is hiring a Founding UI/UX Designer. They're using AI to automate the back office for financial firms, preventing future financial crises. The role is full-time in New York City, offering $80K-$150K salary and 0.01%-0.15% equity. The ideal candidate is a highly skilled designer with experience at a design-focused tech company, proficient in Figma, and passionate about Hadrius's mission. The team boasts engineers from Google, Chime, and other top companies, and the company is experiencing hyper-growth, doubling revenue every three months.

(www.ycombinator.com)

Development UI/UX Design

Xbox Security: A Case Study in Epic Failure

2025-07-17

This article dissects the catastrophic failures in the design and implementation of the Xbox gaming console's security system. Microsoft, in an attempt to prevent game copying and unauthorized software, designed a trust-chain based system riddled with design and implementation flaws. From using the vulnerable RC4 algorithm as a hash function, to overlooking the Intel CPU's address space wrap-around behavior and underestimating RAM initialization complexities, Microsoft made a series of elementary mistakes, ultimately leading to the easy circumvention of the Xbox's security. Hackers exploited these vulnerabilities to successfully run Linux and homebrew software, even enabling game copying. This case serves as a stark reminder of the need for thorough security system design, cautioning against compromising security for cost savings.

(xboxdevwiki.net)

Tech security flaws

Hong Kong Bans Taiwan-Made Game for Alleged Promotion of 'Secessionist Agendas'

2025-06-11

Hong Kong Bans Taiwan-Made Game for Alleged Promotion of 'Secessionist Agendas'

Hong Kong authorities have banned the Taiwan-made game Reversed Front: Bonfire, citing national security concerns. This marks the first time the region has used national security laws to ban a video game. The game, which lets players fight against the Chinese Communist Party, has been accused of promoting secessionist agendas and inciting armed revolution. The game was removed from the Hong Kong App Store, with the developers stating it highlights censorship in mainland China.

(www.engadget.com)

Game game censorship national security law

SiFive P550 Microarchitecture Deep Dive: RISC-V's Ambitious Step

2025-01-27

SiFive P550 Microarchitecture Deep Dive: RISC-V's Ambitious Step

This article delves into SiFive's P550 microarchitecture, a RISC-V processor core targeting high-performance applications. The P550 employs a three-wide out-of-order execution architecture with a 13-stage pipeline, aiming for 30% higher performance in less than half the area of a comparable Arm Cortex A75. The analysis compares P550 to the Cortex A75, examining branch prediction, instruction fetch and decode, out-of-order execution, and the memory subsystem. While the P550 shows weaknesses in areas like unaligned memory access, it represents a significant step forward for RISC-V. Though needing further refinement, the P550 demonstrates SiFive's progress towards high-performance general-purpose CPUs.

(chipsandcheese.com)

Hardware Microarchitecture

Anthropic's Claude: The Dropbox of Generative AI?

2025-07-16

This post examines Anthropic's Claude platform and its Artifacts feature, which lets users create AI-powered web apps without coding. The author likens Claude to the Dropbox of the generative AI era because it solves the problems of API keys, deployments, and authentication for users creating and sharing AI apps. Cleverly, monetization happens through users' existing Claude subscriptions, with no cost to the app creators. The author argues this model is highly valuable and envisions future monetization through simple payment options.

(ben-mini.com)

AI

Cursor Apologizes for Pro Plan Pricing Changes, Offers Refunds

2025-07-05

Cursor Apologizes for Pro Plan Pricing Changes, Offers Refunds

Cursor is apologizing for its recent pricing changes to its Pro plan, admitting poor communication led to unexpected charges for users. They're issuing full refunds for any unexpected usage between June 16th and July 4th. The new Pro plan offers unlimited usage of Tab and models in Auto mode, $20 of frontier model usage per month (at API pricing), with the option to purchase more. This change reflects the varying costs of different models across various tasks. Cursor promises improved communication for future pricing updates, including advance notice, clearer documentation, and better support.

(cursor.com)

Development pricing change

Zig's Comptime: Bonkers Good

2025-01-07

This article dives deep into Zig's compile-time metaprogramming (comptime) capabilities. Initially finding comptime challenging, the author ultimately marvels at its power. Six different perspectives on comptime are presented, including ignoring it, viewing it as generics, standard code run at compile time, partial evaluation, compile-time evaluation with runtime code emission, and textual code generation. Through examples, the author demonstrates how comptime improves code efficiency, simplifies reading and debugging, and enables advanced features like code generation. Zig's comptime allows for extensive computation and code generation at compile time, boosting performance and simplifying code writing.

(www.scottredig.com)

Development compile-time metaprogramming

Unlock Exclusive Canadian News: Subscription Guide

2025-02-13

Unlock Exclusive Canadian News: Subscription Guide

This is an advertisement for a Canadian news website subscription. It highlights exclusive content available to subscribers, including articles from renowned authors like Barbara Shecter and Joe O'Connor, daily content from the Financial Times, and unlimited access to 15 Canadian news sites. Additional benefits include the National Post ePaper, daily puzzles (including the New York Times Crossword), and more. The ad encourages readers to register or sign in to unlock more articles.

(financialpost.com)

Misc news subscription paywall Canadian news

MiceWine: Running Windows Apps and Games on Android

2024-12-30

MiceWine: Running Windows Apps and Games on Android

MiceWine aims to run Windows applications and games on Android smartphones. It uses a customized Wine build compiled for Android and Box64 for optimal performance. Currently under active development, it utilizes a Termux-X11 based XServer. Supports Android 10 and above. Adreno 7xx and 6xx GPUs are supported with Turnip/Zink, while others have partial support with native/Zink (experimental). Native Vulkan on non-Adreno GPUs is experimental and requires testing.

(github.com)

Development Windows applications

Portable Pi-Powered Tactical SDR System Jams Drones

2025-02-16

Portable Pi-Powered Tactical SDR System Jams Drones

Maker Media-Grizzly created a portable Raspberry Pi-based software-defined radio (SDR) system called D.E.S.E.R.T. This handy device functions as a mobile SDR and, with the flip of a switch, can disable nearby drones. Powered by a Raspberry Pi 4B (though compatible with other models), it features a keyboard, power LED, USB port, LCD display, and a prominent 'DE-AUTH' switch for drone jamming (legality varies by location). The system's source code is not yet public but is planned for release on GitHub.

(www.tomshardware.com)

Hardware Drone Jammer

Toyota's Woven City: A Real-Life Smart City Experiment

2025-01-06

Toyota's Woven City: A Real-Life Smart City Experiment

Toyota's ambitious $10 billion Woven City, a futuristic city built on the site of a former car factory in Japan, is nearing completion. Starting this summer, 100 Toyota employees will become the first residents of this “living laboratory,” testing autonomous vehicles, smart home technology, and various innovative projects. The city, designed by Bjarke Ingels, aims to eventually house 2,000 residents, powered by Toyota's hydrogen fuel cell technology. While innovative, the project faces challenges similar to Google's Sidewalk Labs, needing to balance technological advancements with resident privacy concerns. Initial residents, dubbed “Weavers,” will contribute to developing and testing new concepts, including futuristic cafe experiences, high-powered wheelchairs, and pet robots.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech Smart City Toyota Future of Mobility

Serverless DNS Resolver: serverless-dns Takes Flight

2025-05-03

Serverless DNS Resolver: serverless-dns Takes Flight

serverless-dns is a Pi-Hole-esque serverless stub DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT) resolver. It runs on Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy, Fastly Compute@Edge, and Fly.io, leveraging free tiers for low-traffic use cases. Boasting sub-millisecond response times, it efficiently manages ~13M entries from 190+ blocklists using a succinct radix trie. The open-source project allows for custom configurations, log uploading, and offers a lightweight, high-performance DNS solution.

(github.com)

Development DNS resolver content blocking

OpenAI's Ex-CTO Launches New AI Startup Focused on User-Friendly AI

2025-02-19

OpenAI's Ex-CTO Launches New AI Startup Focused on User-Friendly AI

Mira Murati, OpenAI's former CTO, has launched a new AI startup called Thinking Machines Lab. The company aims to make AI systems more understandable, customizable, and generally capable, promising transparency through regular publication of research and code. Instead of fully autonomous systems, they're focusing on tools to help humans work with AI. Murati has assembled a star team, including OpenAI co-founder John Schulman as head of research and other top talent poached from OpenAI, Character.AI, and Google DeepMind.

(www.theverge.com)

AI

Moonshot AI Unveils Kimi K2: A 32B Parameter MoE Language Model with Powerful Agentic Capabilities

2025-07-13

Moonshot AI Unveils Kimi K2: A 32B Parameter MoE Language Model with Powerful Agentic Capabilities

Moonshot AI has released Kimi K2, a state-of-the-art 32 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model boasting a total of 1 trillion parameters. Trained using the Muon optimizer, Kimi K2 excels in frontier knowledge, reasoning, and coding tasks, and is meticulously optimized for agentic capabilities. It comes in two versions: Kimi-K2-Base, a foundation model for researchers, and Kimi-K2-Instruct, a ready-to-use instruction-following model with robust tool-calling capabilities, autonomously deciding when and how to use tools. The model and its weights are open-sourced, and an API is available.

(github.com)

AI Tool Calling

Espanso: A Cross-Platform Text Expander in Rust

2025-05-17

Espanso: A Cross-Platform Text Expander in Rust

Espanso is a cross-platform text expander written in Rust. It detects keywords and replaces them with predefined text, boosting productivity. Features include saving typing time, creating system-wide code snippets, executing custom scripts, easy emoji use, and broad compatibility (Windows, macOS, Linux, most applications). It supports images, a powerful search bar, date expansion, custom scripts, shell commands, app-specific configurations, forms, package expansion, a built-in package manager, file-based configuration, regex triggers, and experimental Wayland support. This free, open-source project, created by Federico Terzi, is licensed under GPL-3.0.

(github.com)

Development text expansion

PgDog: A Clever Postgres Proxy for Sharding

2025-04-15

PgDog is a network proxy that intercepts all communication between Postgres clients and servers, understands SQL to infer query destinations, and requires no application code changes. It parses SQL queries, extracts sharding keys, uses Postgres's built-in partitioning hash function, and routes queries to the correct database shard. The article details how PgDog handles simple and extended protocols, cross-shard queries, and distributed COPY operations, ultimately enabling Postgres sharding and linearly scaling data ingestion speed.

(pgdog.dev)

Development

Amtrak's Rail Revolution: A Once-in-a-Lifetime Transformation

2025-08-08

Amtrak's Rail Revolution: A Once-in-a-Lifetime Transformation

Amtrak is capitalizing on a unique opportunity to revolutionize rail travel in the US. By modernizing, upgrading, and expanding its trains, stations, and infrastructure, Amtrak is responding to the growing demand for rail journeys. Offering unforgettable experiences to over 500 destinations across 46 states and parts of Canada, Amtrak invites you to learn more at Amtrak.com, download the app, connect on X, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and join Amtrak Guest Rewards for free points towards reward travel, upgrades, lounge access, and more.

(media.amtrak.com)

Misc Rail Travel

Retry Algorithm Showdown: Linear, Exponential, and Capped Exponential Backoff

2025-01-05

This article compares three common retry algorithms: linear backoff, exponential backoff, and capped exponential backoff. Linear backoff increases the wait time by a fixed amount with each retry; exponential backoff doubles (or multiplies) the wait time with each retry; capped exponential backoff is similar to exponential backoff but with a maximum delay. The article also discusses adding random jitter to prevent "thundering herd" problems when multiple clients retry simultaneously.

(www.compareretries.com)

Development retry algorithm exponential backoff jitter

Security Expert Troy Hunt Falls Victim to Mailchimp Phishing Attack

2025-03-25

Security Expert Troy Hunt Falls Victim to Mailchimp Phishing Attack

Security expert Troy Hunt fell victim to a sophisticated phishing attack targeting his Mailchimp account. The attacker successfully gained access, exporting approximately 16,000 subscriber records containing email addresses, subscription details, IP addresses, and geolocation data. Despite immediately changing his password and contacting Mailchimp, Hunt expressed frustration at his own lapse in judgment and apologized to affected subscribers. The incident serves as a stark reminder that even security experts are vulnerable to phishing, highlighting the importance of robust multi-factor authentication and heightened security awareness.

(www.troyhunt.com)

Tech

Apple's $500 Billion US Investment: 20,000 Jobs and AI Server Production

2025-02-24

Apple's $500 Billion US Investment: 20,000 Jobs and AI Server Production

In response to President Trump's tariffs on goods imported from China, Apple announced a $500 billion investment in the US over the next four years, creating 20,000 new jobs and bringing AI server production to the country. This includes a new server manufacturing facility in Houston, a supplier academy in Michigan, and increased spending with existing US suppliers. While Apple didn't explicitly link the investment to Trump's policies, the timing and scale suggest a strategic move to avoid tariffs and align with the administration's goals of boosting domestic manufacturing.

(finance.yahoo.com)

Tech

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