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NearlyFreeSpeech.NET: A DIY Hosting Service for Geeks

2025-01-11

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is a do-it-yourself web hosting service designed for experienced webmasters and highly self-motivated individuals. It operates on a pay-for-what-you-use model, meaning you only pay for the resources you consume. While lacking in personal technical support, it offers extensive documentation and community support, making it a cost-effective option for those comfortable managing their own websites. Services include web hosting, DNS hosting, and domain registration, with support for various programming languages and databases.

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(www.nearlyfreespeech.net)
Development web hosting pay-for-what-you-use

8-Pin Linux: A Surprisingly Powerful Single-Board Computer

2025-04-04
8-Pin Linux: A Surprisingly Powerful Single-Board Computer

This article details the creation of a remarkably compact Linux computer built using only three 8-pin chips. The author cleverly overcomes the limitations of the minimal pin count by creatively sharing pins between the SPI RAM and SD card, and implementing USB-to-serial communication and SD card access in software. The resulting miniature computer successfully runs Debian Linux, supporting tools like vi and gcc, showcasing ingenious design and surprising capabilities.

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(dmitry.gr)
Hardware minimal hardware

Basecamp Ditches AWS S3, Builds 18PB Private Storage

2025-03-30
Basecamp Ditches AWS S3, Builds 18PB Private Storage

Basecamp, the company behind HEY and Basecamp, is leaving AWS S3 after a four-year contract expires on June 30th. They've built a private storage solution using Pure Storage, boasting 18PB of NVMe storage. An S3-compatible API simplifies the transition, although migrating 6PB of data will take roughly three weeks. This move avoids hefty S3 renewal fees, saving nearly $5 million over five years.

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(world.hey.com)
Tech

Tesla's Reign in China: Power, Lawsuits, and Silence

2025-02-12
Tesla's Reign in China: Power, Lawsuits, and Silence

Tesla's success in the Chinese market is inextricably linked to its aggressive suppression of critics. This article exposes numerous instances where Tesla sued car owners and media outlets in China, almost always winning. It details how Tesla's connections with high-ranking Chinese officials secured preferential treatment and policies. The case of Zhang Yazhou, a car owner sued and defeated for publicly questioning Tesla's brake system, highlights concerns about Tesla using legal means to silence critics and harm consumer rights. This underscores Tesla's unique business model in China and the intertwined relationship between power and capital in influencing business operations and public opinion.

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(apnews.com)
Tech Legal Battles

BreakerMachines: Shield Your Microservices from Cascading Failures

2025-07-06
BreakerMachines: Shield Your Microservices from Cascading Failures

In the world of microservices, cascading failures and retry storms are nightmares for developers. BreakerMachines, a Ruby library, acts as a guardian, protecting your system from these disasters using a sophisticated circuit breaker mechanism. Built on the battle-tested state_machines gem, it offers classic and Fiber modes, supports asynchronous operations, and provides flexible configuration options to adjust thresholds and timeouts based on service criticality and traffic. BreakerMachines effectively prevents cascading failures and helps quickly locate problems through visual dashboards and smart alerts, thus improving system stability and reliability.

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(github.com)
Development circuit breaker failure protection

NYU 2024 Admissions Data Leak: Analysis of Admission Standards Post-Affirmative Action Ban

2025-03-22

A top-secret leak of New York University (NYU) 2024 admissions data reveals that NYU may have continued using race-based admissions criteria after the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action in college admissions illegal. The leaked data, including average SAT, ACT, and GPA scores for different racial groups, raises questions about the fairness of college admissions. The data has been mirrored on Proton and MEGA.

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(web.archive.org)
Misc data leak college admissions affirmative action

Keystone Molecules: The Silent Architects of Ecosystems

2025-03-06
Keystone Molecules: The Silent Architects of Ecosystems

A study published in Science Advances provides compelling evidence for the concept of 'keystone molecules'. These rare chemicals, analogous to keystone species in ecology, exert disproportionately large effects on ecosystem structure and species interactions despite their low abundance. Researchers focused on Alderia sea slugs, isolating novel molecules called alderenes from their slime. Introduction of these alderenes into the mudflat ecosystem dramatically altered the behavior of other species and the overall habitat. This research highlights the often-overlooked role of chemical interactions in food webs and opens new avenues for exploring the influence of chemical signaling in ecosystems.

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(www.quantamagazine.org)
Tech keystone molecules chemical ecology

Arbital Shuts Down: The End of an AI Safety Research Organization

2024-12-27

Arbital, an organization focused on AI safety research, recently announced its closure. This news sent shockwaves through the AI safety community. Known for its rigorous research and forward-thinking perspectives, Arbital's closure represents a significant loss to the field. While Arbital hasn't publicly disclosed the reasons for its closure, industry insiders speculate it may be related to funding issues or a shift in research direction. Arbital's closure serves as a reminder of the many challenges facing AI safety research, requiring more resources and sustained effort.

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(arbital.com)
AI Artificial intelligence research

America's Democratic Peril: The Dangerous Embrace of Authoritarianism

2025-02-28
America's Democratic Peril: The Dangerous Embrace of Authoritarianism

This podcast episode explores the growing ties between the United States and authoritarian regimes and the potential threat to American democracy. Through interviews with former National Security Advisor John Bolton, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and analysis of cases in Venezuela and Ukraine, the show reveals how money politics, secret deals, and corruption are eroding democratic institutions. The authors warn that if America continues its drift toward authoritarianism, it risks democratic backsliding with severe consequences for global democratic stability.

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(www.theatlantic.com)
Misc American Democracy Authoritarianism Corruption

Open-Source 16mm Film Projector: LaborBerlin's Journey

2025-06-21

The LaborBerlin team is developing a state-of-the-art, open-source 16mm film projector to address the challenges of aging equipment, limited flexibility, and archival projection needs. Their approach leverages readily available projector mechanisms and lenses, incorporating a modular design, open-source technologies, and commonly available parts. After disassembling and analyzing various vintage projectors, the team successfully tested an 800W high-brightness LED light source with a water-cooling system, overcoming a major hurdle in lamp upgrades. Following feedback at the ALUD festival, they resolved flickering issues. The resulting prototype boasts superior brightness and clarity compared to traditional xenon lamp projectors.

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(www.filmlabs.org)
Hardware film projector LED projection

White House Hints at Using Gold Reserves to Buy Bitcoin

2025-03-25
White House Hints at Using Gold Reserves to Buy Bitcoin

A senior White House official hinted at the possibility of the U.S. using its gold reserves to acquire more Bitcoin. Bo Hines, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets, suggested this could be a budget-neutral way to increase Bitcoin reserves. He referenced the Bitcoin Act of 2025, proposing the US acquire 1 million Bitcoin over five years, funded by selling Federal Reserve gold certificates. President Trump also voiced his commitment to making the US a leading Bitcoin power.

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(finance.yahoo.com)
Tech Gold Reserves

GitHub Code Suggestion Application Restrictions

2025-08-16
GitHub Code Suggestion Application Restrictions

Applying code suggestions in GitHub code review has several limitations. These include: only single-line suggestions can be applied, suggestions cannot be applied to deleted lines, they cannot be applied to closed pull requests, or when viewing a subset of changes, and several other temporary limitations are also noted. These limitations highlight the complexity and thoroughness of GitHub's code review mechanism to ensure accuracy and security of code changes.

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(github.com)
Development

VirtualBox VM Escape Vulnerability: Integer Overflow Leads to Host Compromise

2025-05-17
VirtualBox VM Escape Vulnerability: Integer Overflow Leads to Host Compromise

A high-severity integer overflow vulnerability in VirtualBox's vmsvga3dSurfaceMipBufferSize function allows attackers to manipulate a malloc call, allocating 0 bytes while VirtualBox tracks a larger buffer size. This leads to linear read/write primitives, escalating to arbitrary read/write access of host memory. A proof-of-concept demonstrates complete virtual machine escape. Exploitation involves triggering a buggy surface allocation, exploiting out-of-bounds read/write, arbitrary heap allocation, and finally gaining RIP control for arbitrary code execution. A patch is available; users should update immediately.

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(github.com)
Tech VM escape

The Frankfurt Kitchen: A Modernist Icon and its Controversies

2025-06-11
The Frankfurt Kitchen: A Modernist Icon and its Controversies

Designed in 1926 by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the Frankfurt Kitchen served as a standard prototype, widely implemented in the "New Frankfurt" housing project of the 1920s. Inspired by industrial efficiency and assembly-line production, it prioritized functionality and minimized space, its layout resembling a railway dining car kitchen. This aimed to 'industrialize' housework. However, the design also sparked controversy; while improving hygiene, it didn't challenge gender roles and was later criticized for neglecting individual needs. Today, the Frankfurt Kitchen stands as a significant chapter in modern design history, displayed in museums, showcasing both the brilliance and limitations of modernist ideals.

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(museumderdinge.org)
Design Frankfurt School

The Exploration Bottleneck in LLMs: The Next Frontier of Experience Collection

2025-07-07

The success of large language models (LLMs) relies on massive pre-training on vast text data, a resource that will eventually be depleted. The future of AI will shift towards an "Era of Experience," where efficient collection of the right kind of experience beneficial to learning will be crucial, rather than simply stacking parameters. This article explores how pre-training implicitly solves part of the exploration problem and how better exploration leads to better generalization. The author proposes that exploration consists of two axes: "world sampling" (choosing learning environments) and "path sampling" (gathering data within environments). Future AI scaling should optimize the information density on these two axes, efficiently allocating computational resources instead of simply pursuing parameter scale or data volume.

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(yidingjiang.github.io)
AI

Beam: SSH-based File and Pipe Transfer Tool

2025-01-04
Beam: SSH-based File and Pipe Transfer Tool

Beam is a tool for transferring files and pipes over SSH, requiring only an SSH client; no binary installation is needed. It supports pipe transfer, offers high security with public key authentication, and uses simple SSH commands for sending and receiving data. Random channel names can enhance security. While the Beam server is located in Germany, transfer speeds might be limited, and end-to-end encryption isn't supported (data is briefly decrypted on the server), its lightweight nature and simple self-hosting make it a convenient file transfer solution.

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(github.com)
Development file transfer pipe transfer

Smartest Kid: A Python-based Windows Desktop AI Assistant

2025-03-03
Smartest Kid: A Python-based Windows Desktop AI Assistant

Meet Smartest Kid, a Windows desktop AI assistant built in Python! Inspired by SmarterChild, it boasts a clean, simple chat UI and uses Windows COM automation to interact with Microsoft Office (Word, Excel), images, and your file system. Perfect for Windows users exploring AI-powered desktop automation. The project is open-source and welcomes contributions to expand its functionality and personality.

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(github.com)
Development Windows automation

Study: Critics, Not Fans, Perpetuate the 'Sophomore Slump' Myth

2024-12-23
Study: Critics, Not Fans, Perpetuate the 'Sophomore Slump' Myth

A new study challenges the common belief that bands' second albums are inherently worse than their debuts. Researchers analyzed thousands of album ratings from both professional critics and fans, finding that critics, not fans, consistently gave lower scores to second albums. This suggests a bias among critics, potentially driven by social conformity and the pre-existing notion of a 'sophomore slump,' rather than an objective decline in musical quality.

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(phys.org)
Misc music criticism album quality

Infinite Memory: A Theoretical Proof Using Spaced Repetition

2025-02-02

This paper proves that using spaced repetition, an infinitely-lived but forgetful person can recall an infinite number of facts. By establishing a power-law relationship between forgetting and the number of reviews, and considering a finite daily study time, the author derives a model showing that with careful curation of review schedules, knowledge can accumulate indefinitely, ultimately leading to infinite memory. While the daily review load is finite, the cumulative knowledge grows without bound over time.

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(www.efavdb.com)
Misc mathematical model

Don't Let Your Brilliance Go to Waste: The Importance of Selling Your Work

2025-03-25

Technically brilliant individuals often focus solely on the technical aspects of their work, neglecting the crucial step of dissemination. This article highlights the importance of 'selling' one's work, using the insights of Richard Hamming. No matter how exceptional your work is, its value remains unrealized if it's not understood and utilized by others. This applies not just to researchers but also entrepreneurs, who must effectively market their products or services for success. The article encourages technical professionals to communicate clearly and proactively promote their accomplishments, benefiting both the world and their own careers.

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(www.solipsys.co.uk)
Development impact

Aeron: Blazing Fast Messaging for High-Performance Systems

2025-07-13
Aeron: Blazing Fast Messaging for High-Performance Systems

Aeron is a high-performance, low-latency messaging system supporting UDP unicast, multicast, and IPC. It offers Java, C, C++, and .NET clients, enabling efficient message exchange across machines or via IPC. Aeron boasts exceptional throughput and predictable low latency, leveraging Simple Binary Encoding (SBE) for optimized message handling. Features include Aeron Archive for persistent message storage and Aeron Cluster for fault-tolerant services. Owned and operated by Adaptive Financial Consulting, Aeron also provides premium services including training, consulting, and performance enhancements like kernel bypass and high-speed encryption. Ideal for building high-frequency trading systems and other demanding applications.

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(github.com)
Development low-latency messaging

AI Mistakes: Unlike Human Errors, Harder to Predict

2025-01-23

Unlike human errors, Large Language Model (LLM) mistakes are random, unclustered, and made with high confidence. This article explores the unique characteristics of LLM errors and proposes two strategies: engineering more human-like LLMs and building new error-correction systems. Current research focuses on techniques like reinforcement learning with human feedback and methods like repeated questioning to improve AI reliability. While some quirks of LLMs mirror human behavior, their frequency and severity far exceed human error rates, demanding cautious use of AI decision-making systems and confining their application to suitable domains.

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(www.schneier.com)
AI AI errors

The Surprising Origins of Map Tiles: It Wasn't Just Google

2025-06-15
The Surprising Origins of Map Tiles: It Wasn't Just Google

Web map tiles, the seemingly simple method of storing geospatial data in indexed squares for efficient map display, are a pivotal development in GIS history. While Google Maps gets much of the credit for popularizing them, the technology's origins are surprisingly murky. This article traces the history of map tiling, revealing that the concept existed long before Google, appearing in early systems like Roger Tomlinson's Canadian Geographic Information System (CGIS). Later, quadtrees and other data structures further refined the approach. The article concludes that the innovation wasn't a single invention but a culmination of research and development by numerous individuals and organizations, ultimately culminating in the ubiquitous experience we enjoy today.

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(placing.technology)
Tech map tiles geographic information system

lsr: Blazing Fast File Listing with io_uring

2025-07-18

lsr is a lightning-fast file listing utility leveraging io_uring, significantly outperforming the traditional `ls` command. Benchmarks demonstrate dramatic speed improvements and reduced syscall counts when handling numerous files. It offers a rich set of options including showing hidden files, sorting by time, and colored output, along with straightforward installation and usage instructions. The project is hosted on GitHub and supports cloning via HTTP or SSH.

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(tangled.sh)
Development

Near-Catastrophic OpenZFS Bug Highlights the Power of Rust's Type System

2025-07-11
Near-Catastrophic OpenZFS Bug Highlights the Power of Rust's Type System

A subtle yet devastating bug in OpenZFS's core disk allocation function was recently discovered. The bug, a simple type error resulting in the wrong size being returned, could silently overwrite data. It took nearly two days to track down. While the bug wasn't present in any released version, it spurred reflection on the limitations of static analysis in C and the advantages of Rust's type system. Rust's ability to define custom types (like `PhysicalSize` and `AllocatedSize`) would have prevented this. The author argues that relying solely on programmer perfection is flawed; leveraging tools and language features to improve code quality and mitigate hard-to-detect, high-impact bugs is key.

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(despairlabs.com)
Development

Coding with Free AI: A Multi-Model Approach

2025-08-10

This article details a strategy for efficient coding using multiple free AI models. The author utilizes a browser with numerous tabs, each accessing a different free AI model (e.g., GLM 4.5, Kimi K2, Qwen3 Coder, Gemini AI Studio). A tool called AI Code Prep GUI helps curate code snippets for these models, avoiding information overload. The author advocates using AI for high-level problem-solving and planning, delegating code editing to other tools, maximizing efficiency with free resources. The article also cautions against using Grok.com due to concerns about its potential promotion of misinformation.

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(wuu73.org)
Development free AI tools efficient coding

Building an LLM from Scratch: A Deep Dive into Self-Attention

2025-03-05
Building an LLM from Scratch: A Deep Dive into Self-Attention

This blog post, the eighth in a series documenting the author's journey through Sebastian Raschka's "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)", focuses on implementing self-attention with trainable weights. It begins by reviewing the steps involved in GPT-style decoder-only transformer LLMs, including token and positional embeddings, self-attention, normalization of attention scores, and context vector generation. The core of the post delves into scaled dot-product attention, explaining how trainable weight matrices project input embeddings into different spaces (query, key, value). Matrix multiplication is leveraged for efficient computation. The author provides a clear, mechanistic explanation of the process, concluding with a preview of upcoming topics: causal self-attention and multi-head attention.

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(www.gilesthomas.com)
AI

Google Stifles Competition: Nextcloud Android App Upload Restrictions

2025-05-14
Google Stifles Competition: Nextcloud Android App Upload Restrictions

Nextcloud's Android app upload functionality is severely limited by Google, allowing only photo and video uploads. Google revoked a critical permission, citing security concerns, but Nextcloud believes this is a deliberate attempt to stifle competition. Despite appeals, Google refuses to reinstate the permission, impacting millions of users. Nextcloud argues this exemplifies Big Tech's abuse of platform power to suppress competitors and calls for stronger regulation.

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(nextcloud.com)
Tech

Weird: Own Your Digital Home

2025-01-04
Weird: Own Your Digital Home

In the digital age, we often rent virtual space on giant platforms like Facebook and GitHub, losing true digital sovereignty. Weird aims to change that by offering free website hosting, allowing you to own your domain and website, building a safe and personalized digital home. With simple link lists, you can participate in the social knowledge graph and establish your digital identity. While still in early testing, Weird is steadily improving and will eventually support features like Web Passports and ATProto logins.

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(blog.muni.town)
Development digital homeownership domain
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