mbake: A Makefile Formatter and Linter After 50 Years!

2025-06-22
mbake: A Makefile Formatter and Linter After 50 Years!

After a 50-year wait (referencing the long history of Makefiles), mbake is finally here! This Makefile formatter and linter not only automatically fixes formatting issues such as indentation, spacing, and line breaks but also intelligently detects `.PHONY` targets and supports custom rules and plugin extensions. It offers a rich command-line interface for formatting, validation, and version management, seamlessly integrating into CI/CD workflows. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, mbake significantly improves Makefile writing efficiency and readability.

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Development linter

Simple Defer in C: Practical Implementations

2025-01-06
Simple Defer in C: Practical Implementations

This blog post explores practical ways to implement a `defer` keyword in C, enabling automatic cleanup actions (like memory deallocation or mutex unlocking) after a code block. The author first explains the purpose of `defer`, then demonstrates implementations using GCC extensions and C++ features. Finally, a new syntax proposal is presented to simplify `defer`'s implementation and usage, significantly improving C code readability and safety.

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Development

Meta's Fact-Checking Failure: The Limits of Truth in the Age of Disinformation 2.0

2025-01-14
Meta's Fact-Checking Failure:  The Limits of Truth in the Age of Disinformation 2.0

Meta's abandonment of its fact-checking initiative sparks debate. The author argues that fact-checking struggles against sophisticated disinformation 2.0, involving AI and algorithms. The LA wildfires serve as a case study: claims about budget cuts impacting the fire response are not simply true or false, but involve multiple assumptions and interpretations. Fact-checking, while valuable, isn't a silver bullet. We need to address deeper drivers like political biases and cognitive biases to effectively combat disinformation.

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One in Five Online Job Postings Are Fake or Unfilled: A 'Ghost Job' Epidemic

2025-01-14
One in Five Online Job Postings Are Fake or Unfilled: A 'Ghost Job' Epidemic

A new study reveals that a shocking one in five online job postings are either fake or never actually filled, leaving job seekers frustrated and wasting precious time. This 'ghost job' phenomenon, driven by companies potentially using inflated numbers to meet targets, is causing significant problems. To combat this, platforms like Greenhouse and LinkedIn are implementing job verification services to help identify legitimate opportunities amidst the deceptive postings.

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Say Goodbye to Cloud Services: A Local, Zero-Dependency Image Archiver

2025-03-19
Say Goodbye to Cloud Services: A Local, Zero-Dependency Image Archiver

Tired of complex cloud-based photo management? This project aims to simplify image archiving with a local, zero-dependency tool. It requires no server, database, or specific ecosystem—just files and folders. Think of it as a static site generator that lives within your image library. Built in Rust or Go, it will be a lightweight executable that automatically generates folder indices and thumbnails, with optional metadata (Markdown or plain text). Deleting the app leaves your images and structure untouched. It's a simple, powerful solution for local image management.

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AI Alignment: It's Not Just About the Tech

2025-05-22

This article argues that AI alignment is not solely a technical problem, but a significant societal selection problem. The author uses the analogy of pharmaceutical alignment – we don't just focus on lab work, but consider the entire medical-industrial complex. The author posits that how we, as a society, shape AI's development through purchasing decisions, regulation, and public discourse is paramount. Ignoring the societal aspect is a folly, and improving 'Selection' efficiency is the big work of AI alignment, not just the purely technical challenges.

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Where Does Developer Time Go? A 40-Year Study Reveals the Answer

2025-05-22

For decades, developers have spent most of their time figuring out systems. Research shows this remains consistently high, around 58% even when accounting for navigation time, from 1979 to 2018. The article argues that understanding a system is fundamentally a decision-making process, and reading code is merely a low-efficiency, non-scalable means of gathering information. The author introduces the concept of "Moldable Development," advocating for creating custom tools tailored to specific problems, reducing reliance on code reading, and thus boosting development efficiency. The article concludes by recommending Glamorous Toolkit, a moldable development environment designed to facilitate the "how not to read code" conversation.

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The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils: A Century-Long Rivalry

2025-03-03
The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils: A Century-Long Rivalry

In 1952, Tombow Pencil revolutionized the Japanese pencil industry with its HOMO pencil, featuring a homogenous core and high-quality incense cedar. Its significantly higher price point sparked a fierce competition with Mitsubishi Pencil, leading to a 'Golden Age' of innovation. Both companies released iconic pencils like Mitsubishi's Uni and Tombow's MONO, pushing the boundaries of pencil technology and design. This rivalry exemplifies the dedication to quality and innovation that defined Japanese manufacturing.

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The Time Wars: From Railroads to Daylight Saving Time

2025-03-08
The Time Wars: From Railroads to Daylight Saving Time

This article chronicles the evolution of human timekeeping, from subjective notions of time to the establishment of global standard time and the ongoing controversy surrounding daylight saving time. The rise of railroads spurred the creation of standard time zones, provoking strong resistance from the public who viewed it as a disruption of natural time and traditional lifestyles. Daylight saving time also faced similar controversies, adopted during the two World Wars and later abolished, remaining a contentious issue to this day. The article uses vivid stories and historical details to illustrate humanity's struggle for control over time and the interplay between different interest groups.

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arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

2025-02-06
arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

arXivLabs is a framework for collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on the website. Individuals and organizations working with arXivLabs embrace our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only partners with those who share them. Got an idea for a project that will benefit the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

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Development

Artificial Sweetener Erythritol May Impair Brain Blood Vessel Health

2025-06-13
Artificial Sweetener Erythritol May Impair Brain Blood Vessel Health

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have found that the artificial sweetener erythritol may harm essential cellular functions maintaining brain blood vessel health. Erythritol was shown to increase oxidative stress, disrupt nitric oxide signaling, increase vasoconstrictive peptide production, and decrease clot-dissolving capacity in human brain microvascular endothelial cells. While popular in low-calorie foods due to its sweetness and negligible impact on blood sugar, epidemiological studies have linked higher erythritol levels to increased cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events. This new in vitro study provides a cellular mechanism for this association, showing adverse effects on brain endothelial cell function and potentially increasing stroke risk. Further long-term and in vivo research is recommended to clarify the cerebrovascular consequences of repeated erythritol consumption.

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Cascading Spy Sheets: Exploiting Modern CSS for Fingerprinting

2025-01-10

Researchers discovered that modern CSS's dynamic features, even with JavaScript disabled, enable fingerprinting in both browsers and emails. Three techniques leveraging container queries, arithmetic functions, and complex selectors achieve high accuracy in inferring application, OS, and hardware configurations. This fingerprinting works even in the restrictive environment of HTML emails. The researchers propose two defenses: browser resource preloading and an email proxy service.

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Tech

Castle Game Engine Web Target: First 3 Demos!

2025-01-21
Castle Game Engine Web Target: First 3 Demos!

Castle Game Engine proudly announces the release of its first 3 working web applications! Experience 3D scenes and a 2D game directly in your browser (Firefox, Chrome, etc.)—no installation needed. Powered by WebAssembly and WebGL, the cross-platform code offers a glimpse into future features like data loading, currently under development. Comprehensive documentation is available, even though the web target is still on a development branch.

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Game

GlassFlow: Real-time Streaming ETL for ClickHouse

2025-05-11
GlassFlow: Real-time Streaming ETL for ClickHouse

GlassFlow is a real-time stream processor designed for data engineers to simplify creating and managing data pipelines between Kafka and ClickHouse. It boasts a user-friendly interface for building and managing real-time data pipelines, featuring built-in deduplication and temporal joins. Handling late-arriving events and ensuring exactly-once processing, GlassFlow scales to handle high-throughput data, delivering accurate, low-latency results without sacrificing simplicity or performance. The intuitive web interface simplifies pipeline configuration and monitoring, while its robust architecture guarantees reliable data processing. It supports local development and Docker deployment, and includes a comprehensive demo setup for quick onboarding.

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Development real-time processing

The Information Deluge: Coping with the News Overload

2025-02-12
The Information Deluge: Coping with the News Overload

Reflecting on a 45-year career in tech, the author laments the shift from singular news sources to highly personalized strategies in the age of information overload. From the initial era of TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines, to the explosion of USENET and the web, news sources have multiplied exponentially, exceeding human information processing capacity. Faced with a deluge of information that's often untrustworthy or irrelevant, people have developed coping mechanisms, including complete disconnection and digital sabbaths. The author argues we need a fundamental rethink of our relationship with information, cultivating better discernment skills and building psychological and cultural defenses to navigate the chaos. This isn't a problem solvable by technology or law; it requires individual effort to improve our capacity to manage information overload.

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Collatz's Ant: Visualizing Collatz Sequences with Langton's Ant

2024-12-23

Collatz's Ant visualizes Collatz sequences using Langton's Ant rules. Based on the Collatz function (even numbers halved, odd numbers multiplied by 3 and added to 1), the ant turns 90 degrees clockwise for even numbers and counter-clockwise for odd numbers. The cell's state flips with each move, repeating until n=1. Code and examples demonstrate consecutive trajectories from 10^30 to 10^30+20.

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Babylonian Eclipse Omens: Dark Predictions from Ancient Astronomy

2025-01-09
Babylonian Eclipse Omens: Dark Predictions from Ancient Astronomy

Newly deciphered Babylonian clay tablets from 1900-1600 BC reveal the earliest known records of lunar eclipse omens. These omens are overwhelmingly ominous, predicting everything from pestilence and famine to the death of kings. The Babylonians believed the sky mirrored the earth, making eclipses dire warnings of divine displeasure. While mostly foretelling doom, kings could attempt to avert fate through rituals and even using substitutes to bear the brunt of the ill omen. This discovery offers a fascinating glimpse into ancient worldviews and how celestial events were interpreted.

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Mullvad VPN App's 2024 Security Audit Report Released

2024-12-12
Mullvad VPN App's 2024 Security Audit Report Released

Mullvad VPN has released the report for its 2024 third-party security audit of its VPN app. The audit uncovered six vulnerabilities, ranging in severity from low to high, all of which have been addressed. Three high-severity vulnerabilities involved signal handlers and a virtual IP address leak and have been fixed in the latest version. The audit also noted some non-security issues that Mullvad is actively working to resolve. Overall, the Mullvad VPN app is deemed highly secure, but users are still advised to upgrade to the latest version.

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Sharing a ChatGPT Account: How AI Transformed Our Lives

2025-02-15
Sharing a ChatGPT Account: How AI Transformed Our Lives

The author and his wife share a ChatGPT Pro account and utilize AI in distinct ways. His wife, in education and social work, employs AI for drafting addiction prevention materials, writing yoga studio contracts, and researching health information. The author primarily uses it for coding, software development, market research, and task automation. They discovered AI's applications extend beyond technical tasks, serving as a tool to enhance efficiency, aiding in planning and executing tasks, ultimately freeing up more time for family.

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TikTok's Return to the App Store Imminent

2025-02-14
TikTok's Return to the App Store Imminent

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that a letter from Trump-era Attorney General Pam Bondi to Apple allows the restoration of TikTok on the App Store. Currently, iPhones with TikTok can continue using it, and a web version exists. However, updates and re-downloads are blocked, and transfer between iPhones (crucially impacting Apple's upcoming low-end launch) is impossible. Apple confirmed TikTok's return for Thursday evening. Previously, Apple and Google were legally obligated to remove TikTok due to ByteDance's failure to divest. Despite a bill passed and signed by President Biden, his administration delayed enforcement, leaving the decision to the Trump administration. Trump, after initially pushing for a ban, later supported TikTok's continued availability, granting ByteDance a 75-day extension to negotiate with US firms and potentially the government.

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Tech

Website Anti-Scraping Mechanism: Anubis Explained

2025-08-12

A website implemented Anubis, an anti-scraping mechanism, to combat aggressive data scraping by AI companies. Anubis resembles Hashcash, increasing computational load to deter scrapers. This approach has minimal impact on individual users but significantly raises the cost for large-scale scraping. Anubis is a temporary solution; the ultimate goal is to better differentiate legitimate users from bots by identifying headless browsers, thus avoiding inconveniencing ordinary users. Note that Anubis requires modern JavaScript features, so please disable plugins like JShelter.

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Tech

Lebanon's Forgotten Cold War Space Race

2025-04-30
Lebanon's Forgotten Cold War Space Race

During the Cold War, Lebanon, a small nation, defied expectations by launching rockets into low Earth orbit under the leadership of Manoug Manougian and his Lebanese Rocket Society. Operating with minimal resources and ingenuity, they achieved remarkable feats, only to be ultimately thwarted by geopolitical tensions, fears of militarization, and international pressure. Their story highlights the power of vision and determination in overcoming resource constraints and achieving seemingly impossible goals, a testament to human ingenuity in the face of adversity.

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Revolutionary Material Failure Theory: From Nano to Macro

2025-03-01

A groundbreaking paper presents a new theoretical framework for material failure, encompassing isotropic and anisotropic materials. It bridges the gap between nano-scale analysis, such as graphene, and macro-scale predictions for composite materials, creating a complete model from micro to macro. This theory overcomes limitations of traditional failure criteria, accurately distinguishing ductile from brittle failure and predicting fatigue and creep failure. It offers a revolutionary advancement for materials science and engineering applications.

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A Tiny CSS Animation Caused 60% CPU and 25% GPU Usage on My M2 MacBook

2025-07-23
A Tiny CSS Animation Caused 60% CPU and 25% GPU Usage on My M2 MacBook

A seemingly insignificant CSS animation was mysteriously consuming 60% CPU and 25% GPU on my M2 MacBook. This post details the debugging process using Chrome DevTools' performance profiling tools to pinpoint the culprit: animating the `height` property. The author explains the browser's rendering pipeline and demonstrates how switching to the cheaper `transform` property (using a clever workaround to avoid visual artifacts) dramatically reduced resource consumption to under 6% CPU and 1% GPU.

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Development browser rendering

1948: Speed Record, Swim Trunks, and a History-Making Pose

2025-04-08
1948: Speed Record, Swim Trunks, and a History-Making Pose

In 1948, 47-year-old Rollie Free employed an unconventional strategy to break the world motorcycle speed record: wearing only swim trunks, he lay horizontally on his Vincent HRD Black Shadow motorcycle to minimize wind resistance. This daring attempt succeeded on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, resulting in a record-breaking speed of 150.313 mph and an iconic photograph. While the record has since been broken, Free's image and approach remain legendary in motorcycle history.

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Misc Motorcycle

Why I Don't Use Domain-Driven Design

2024-12-29

Tony Marston, a seasoned software developer with four decades of experience building enterprise applications, explains why he doesn't use Domain-Driven Design (DDD). He argues that DDD overemphasizes object-oriented design theory at the expense of database design and code reusability in large systems. He prefers a layered architecture with a separate class for each database table, leveraging inheritance and the Template Method pattern for code reuse. Marston believes this approach better suits real-world projects and increases development efficiency.

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Russian Basketball Star Arrested for Alleged Involvement in Ransomware Attacks

2025-07-12
Russian Basketball Star Arrested for Alleged Involvement in Ransomware Attacks

Russian basketball player Daniil Kasatkin was arrested in France on a US request, accused of participating in a ransomware network that targeted over 900 companies, including two federal institutions. Kasatkin denies the accusations, claiming he's not tech-savvy, and his lawyer suggests his computer might have been hacked or pre-infected. Currently in custody, his basketball career is jeopardized.

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Enhanced Spin-Orbit Torque via Orbital Hall Effect for High-Density SOT-MRAM

2025-03-01
Enhanced Spin-Orbit Torque via Orbital Hall Effect for High-Density SOT-MRAM

Researchers significantly improved Spin-Orbit Torque (SOT) Magnetic Random-Access Memory (MRAM) device performance by leveraging the enhanced orbital Hall effect (OHE) of Ru, Nb, and Cr layers in combination with a perpendicularly magnetized [Co/Ni]3 ferromagnetic layer. Experiments showed a ~30% increase in damping-like torque efficiency with a positive sign for the Ru/Pt OHE layer compared to pure Pt. This resulted in a ~20% reduction in switching current across >250 devices and a >60% reduction in switching power. This work paves the way for next-generation SOT-MRAM devices with enhanced performance for high-density cache memory applications.

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Smalltalk MVC: Untangling the Misconceptions of Model-View-Controller

2025-09-07

This article delves into the Smalltalk MVC pattern, clarifying long-standing misconceptions surrounding MVC, particularly the deviations in Apple's Cocoa version. The author emphasizes the independence and reusability of the model in Smalltalk MVC, noting that the model interacts with the view and controller only indirectly through notifications. This contrasts with the Cocoa version of MVC, where controllers (and now view controllers) often become the least reusable components. The article further explains how to correctly identify models, ranging from simple observable booleans to complex models, and how to handle view models and function argument models to build cleaner, more maintainable application architectures.

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Development Design Pattern
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