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Universities Must Resist the AI Onslaught

2025-06-23

A seminar at Goldsmiths Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought explored AI's impact on higher education. The speaker argued that AI isn't futuristic sci-fi, but a product of neoliberal education systems. AI's operation relies on massive data and computing power, its inner workings opaque and unpredictable. The speaker called for universities to resist AI's overreach, impacting not just academic integrity but critical thinking and social equity. He advocated using Ivan Illich's concept of 'convivial tools' to critically examine AI and establish workers'/people's councils to ensure technological social determination, preventing AI from becoming a tool of control and oppression.

(danmcquillan.org)

Tech

Erythritol: The Sweetener That Might Increase Your Stroke Risk?

2025-07-20

Erythritol: The Sweetener That Might Increase Your Stroke Risk?

Erythritol, a sugar alcohol found in many low-carb and sugar-free products, has been linked to an increased risk of heart attack and stroke in recent studies. New research from the University of Colorado Boulder delves into the cellular mechanisms, revealing how erythritol impacts brain blood vessels. In lab experiments, erythritol reduced nitric oxide (vasodilator), increased endothelin-1 (vasoconstrictor), and impaired the production of t-PA (clot-buster), leading to constricted blood vessels and increased clot formation. It also increased the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), damaging cells and causing inflammation. While this study was in vitro, researchers urge consumers to monitor their erythritol intake and consider the potential risks associated with this widely used sweetener.

(www.sciencedaily.com)

Tech sugar substitute

Open-Source Oasis Smart Terrarium: A 3D-Printed Paradise for Plants

2025-06-24

Open-Source Oasis Smart Terrarium: A 3D-Printed Paradise for Plants

Oasis is a fully open-source, mostly 3D-printed smart terrarium designed for humidity-loving plants like mosses, ferns, and orchids. It features high-power LED lighting, a mister for humidity control, fans for airflow, and a temperature/humidity sensor. WiFi connectivity allows control via a phone or computer. The project includes CAD models, electronics designs (KiCad), and software (Rust). While the electronics assembly might be challenging for beginners, the project is largely accessible to DIYers with a 3D printer. Pre-assembled electronics can be ordered, though potentially expensively. The creator plans to eventually offer assembled electronics kits.

(github.com)

Hardware smart terrarium

WordPress Crisis: Mullenweg's Actions and the Future of the Community

2025-01-13

A series of controversial actions by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has triggered a community crisis. His legal battle with WP Engine led to the shutdown of WordPress.org and a drastic reduction in contributions to the open-source project. He subsequently shut down the WordPress Sustainability Committee and deactivated accounts of users discussing a potential fork. These actions have sparked widespread discontent within the community and raised concerns about the future direction of WordPress, prompting some developers to explore alternatives. This crisis highlights the reliance of open-source projects on strong leadership and community engagement, and the risks of concentrated power in a single individual.

(anderegg.ca)

Development Community Crisis

The Curious History of JavaScript Comments: Why `` Work

2025-03-12

This article unravels the curious history behind the use of `` as comment characters in JavaScript. Initially, to ensure compatibility with older browsers, developers would wrap their JavaScript code within HTML comments inside `` tags. Surprisingly, modern browsers still support this syntax due to historical browser compatibility burdens and the standardization committee's commitment to 'not breaking the web'. The article explains how this syntax works and why `-->` must appear at the beginning of a line.

(www.hillelwayne.com)

Development

Microsoft Open-Sources MarkItDown: A File-to-Markdown Conversion Tool

2024-12-13

Microsoft Open-Sources MarkItDown: A File-to-Markdown Conversion Tool

Microsoft has open-sourced MarkItDown, a Python tool that converts various files (including PDF, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, images, audio, and HTML) into Markdown format. The tool boasts a simple API, supports a wide range of file types, and incorporates OCR and speech transcription for enhanced functionality, making it ideal for text analysis or indexing. Contributions are welcome, and the project adheres to the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct.

(github.com)

Development Markdown conversion file conversion Python tool

From Automated Screencasts to Motion Comics: A Programmer's Creative Journey

2025-02-06

To streamline video content creation for the Web Origami project, a programmer experimented with automating audio and video generation. Facing challenges like tedious macro scripting and cumbersome video editing, he shifted to creating motion comics. He built a system using HTML/CSS and minimal JavaScript animation, generating both audio and video from a screenplay. Origami's features facilitated testing and updates. This approach allowed him to focus on storytelling, increasing efficiency and eliminating the hassle of video updates.

(jan.miksovsky.com)

Development Motion Comics

Nintendo Switch 2 Unveiled: Beefed-Up Hardware and a Killer Game Lineup

2025-04-02

Nintendo Switch 2 Unveiled: Beefed-Up Hardware and a Killer Game Lineup

Nintendo has officially revealed the Switch 2, boasting larger Joy-Cons with enhanced shoulder buttons, a sturdier adjustable stand, and an extra USB-C port. A slew of third-party AAA titles are coming, including Cyberpunk 2077, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Elden Ring, and more. FromSoftware showcased The Duskbloods, a Switch 2 exclusive vampire-themed action RPG. Switch 2 Online subscribers will gain access to a library of upscaled GameCube classics like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. New Kirby and Donkey Kong titles were also teased. The highly anticipated Donkey Kong Bonanza launches July 17th. Priority purchasing invitations for the Switch 2 will be sent to eligible Switch Online members starting May 8th.

(arstechnica.com)

Game Games Hardware Upgrade

Database Mocks: More Trouble Than They're Worth?

2024-12-30

Database Mocks: More Trouble Than They're Worth?

While tempting for their speed and simplicity, the author argues that using database mocks for testing ultimately causes more problems than they solve. A user creation example highlights the differences between mocking and testing against a real database. Real database testing reveals potential issues early on, such as unique constraint violations, default value handling, and performance bottlenecks, saving debugging time and reducing production risks. As applications evolve and schemas change, real database tests better handle new validations, data type modifications, and timestamp precision changes, ensuring code aligns with the actual database. The author suggests prioritizing real database testing for data access layers, while using it at the service layer to expose business logic interactions with data. Controllers, however, can mock service calls effectively. Balancing real database tests and mocks is key to building robust applications.

(www.shayon.dev)

Development database testing mocking software testing

Intel 8080: The Microprocessor That Changed the World

2024-12-29

Intel 8080: The Microprocessor That Changed the World

Fifty years ago, the Intel 8080 microprocessor launched, marking a pivotal moment in computing history. Unlike its predecessors designed for specific clients, the 8080 was the first truly general-purpose microprocessor. Its efficiency, power, and flexible 40-pin configuration made it easier to connect to other components and integrated functions previously requiring multiple chips. Priced at just $360, the 8080 democratized computing, making it accessible to businesses and individuals alike. This spurred the mass adoption of personal computers, created new categories of silicon-powered devices, and boosted programming as a crucial skill. Its legacy continues today; the 8080 directly inspired the x86 architecture, now the world's most widely used computing architecture.

(www.intel.com)

Tech Microprocessor x86 architecture

Servo's Resurrection: Two Years of Progress at Igalia

2025-01-08

Two years after Igalia took over maintenance of the Servo project, significant progress has been made. They've addressed numerous bugs, improved stability, and added support for Android and OpenHarmony. Active community building and collaborations have led to a substantial increase in contributors and code activity. While still experimental, Servo's performance and security advantages position it for significant future growth, potentially becoming the ideal web engine for embedded systems and Rust applications.

(blogs.igalia.com)

Development Web Engine

From Rejection to Acceptance: The Power of Page One

2025-05-22

From Rejection to Acceptance: The Power of Page One

A paper initially rejected was dramatically revised, resulting in acceptance. The author meticulously details the changes, focusing on the crucial first page (title, abstract, Figure 1, introduction). By making the title specific and memorable, Figure 1 visually compelling, and the abstract and introduction concise and engaging, the author improved the paper's impact. Further revisions included adding baselines, ablations, and ensuring statistical significance, addressing potential reasons for rejection. The author concludes that improving communication significantly enhances scientific impact.

(maxwellforbes.com)

Development paper writing research tips

ICONIC: Sleek Skill Icons for GitHub READMEs

2025-06-15

ICONIC: Sleek Skill Icons for GitHub READMEs

ICONIC is a developer-focused library of stylish, bubble-shaped skill icons designed for GitHub READMEs, portfolios, and resumes. Featuring clear and aesthetically pleasing bubble icons, light and dark theme variants, and easy Markdown/HTML embedding, ICONIC also offers an HTML preview API (Django backend) and downloadable SVGs for effortless skill showcasing.

(github.com)

Development icon library

Y2K Scare: The Millennium Bug That Never Bit

2024-12-30

Y2K Scare: The Millennium Bug That Never Bit

In 1999, the Y2K problem, or millennium bug, sparked global panic. Older computer systems used only two digits to represent the year, leading to fears that at the turn of the millennium, systems would misinterpret '00' as 1900, causing widespread chaos. The Clinton administration called Y2K preparations 'the single largest technology management challenge in history.' Citizens stockpiled food, generators, and even weapons, fearing blackouts, medical equipment failures, and societal breakdown. Ultimately, the world transitioned to 2000 without major incident, highlighting the anxieties surrounding the unknown and the extensive preparations undertaken. The event served as a reminder of the interdependence of technology and societal stability.

(www.npr.org)

Tech Millennium Bug Doomsday Prophecy

Veo Gen 3: Generalizing Video Generation

2025-05-16

Veo Gen 3: Generalizing Video Generation

Google's latest breakthrough in video generation, Veo, now boasts a third generation capable of generalizing across diverse tasks. Trained on millions of high-quality 3D synthetic assets, Veo excels at novel view synthesis, transforming product images into consistent 360° videos. Importantly, this approach generalizes effectively across furniture, apparel, electronics, and more, accurately capturing complex lighting and material interactions—a significant improvement over previous generations.

(research.google)

AI

Google's Pixel Battery Troubles: Two Incidents, One Poor Solution

2025-07-12

Google's Pixel Battery Troubles: Two Incidents, One Poor Solution

Google's Pixel 4a and Pixel 6a phones have both experienced battery issues. The Pixel 4a, using batteries from Lishen, suffered from degradation in some units, prompting Google to reduce battery capacity and charging speed via a software update. The Pixel 6a saw more serious incidents of phones catching fire, leading Google to again limit battery performance through software. While Google's actions prioritized user safety, the solutions negatively impacted user experience, highlighting the challenges of non-removable batteries in an era of longer phone lifespans.

(arstechnica.com)

Hardware Pixel phones battery issues

The Open Source Dilemma: Balancing Free and Sustainable

2025-03-12

The open-source world faces a dilemma: high-quality end-user software, like office suites and video conferencing tools, often struggles to thrive under a purely open-source model, hindering its development. The article uses the 'lumber and chairs' analogy to illustrate the difference between open-source software (lumber) and commercial software (chairs), highlighting that maintaining open-source software requires continuous investment, which a purely free model struggles to support. It also touches on the issue of European software sovereignty, emphasizing the importance of reducing dependence on American tech giants, and calls for a new model that balances open-source freedoms with commercial sustainability to ensure the long-term development of high-quality open-source software.

(mill.plainopen.com)

Development software sovereignty

US Credit Card Debt Hits Record High, Bill Proposed to Cap Interest Rates

2025-04-02

US Credit Card Debt Hits Record High, Bill Proposed to Cap Interest Rates

US credit card debt has reached an all-time high, with soaring interest rates and economic factors exacerbating the problem. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Anna Paulina Luna introduced a bipartisan bill to cap annual credit card interest rates at 10%, aiming to help struggling Americans escape a cycle of debt. The average APR has nearly doubled in a decade, reaching 21%, leading to increased consumer debt and delinquencies. The bill's future remains uncertain.

(www.businessinsider.com)

Tech interest rate cap economic

Variational Lossy Autoencoders: When RNNs Ignore Latent Variables

2025-03-09

Variational Lossy Autoencoders: When RNNs Ignore Latent Variables

This paper tackles the challenge of combining Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). While VAEs use latent variables to learn data representations, RNNs as decoders often ignore these latents, directly learning the data distribution. The authors propose Variational Lossy Autoencoders (VLAEs), which restrict the RNN's access to information, forcing it to leverage latent variables for encoding global structure. Experiments demonstrate VLAEs learn compressed and semantically rich latent representations.

(theahura.substack.com)

AI representation learning

RRRA: Online Talks and Website Update

2025-07-20

The Roman Roads Research Association (RRRA) has announced a series of online talks for the 2024/25 season focusing on Roman roads. Lectures cover various aspects of Roman road archaeology in Scotland, England, and Wales. A new website is also under development, promising a modern design and improved functionality.

(www.romanroads.org)

Misc online talks

Conquering the StarCraft: Brood War Translation Barrier with LLMs and Open Source

2025-01-17

Conquering the StarCraft: Brood War Translation Barrier with LLMs and Open Source

A StarCraft: Brood War (BW) player tackled a long-standing community problem: translating Korean-language strategic analyses and commentary videos. BW's culture is heavily rooted in Korea, creating a significant barrier for non-Korean speakers. The author cleverly combined Whisper for transcription, Google Colab's free GPU resources, and ChatGPT for translation, alongside a custom userscript. This dramatically improved translation speed and accuracy, solving the 'Foreigner Knowledge' problem and making Korean-language BW insights accessible to a wider audience.

(blog.sourcedive.net)

Game StarCraft Game Translation

GitHub Code Suggestion Application Limitations

2025-07-20

GitHub Code Suggestion Application Limitations

Applying code suggestions in bulk on GitHub has several limitations. Suggestions require code changes, cannot be applied to closed pull requests, subsets of changes, single lines with multiple suggestions, already applied or resolved suggestions, pending reviews, multi-line comments, or pull requests queued to merge. Additionally, some suggestions may be temporarily unavailable for application.

(github.com)

Development

Kissing Number Breakthrough: A New Approach to an Old Problem

2025-01-16

Kissing Number Breakthrough: A New Approach to an Old Problem

For over three centuries, mathematicians have grappled with the kissing number problem: how many identical spheres can touch a central sphere without overlapping? While the answer is 12 in three dimensions, higher dimensions remain a mystery. Recently, MIT undergraduate Anqi Li and Professor Henry Cohn devised a novel approach, abandoning traditional symmetry assumptions. Their unconventional, asymmetric strategy improved estimates for the kissing number in dimensions 17 through 21, marking the first progress in these dimensions since the 1960s. This breakthrough challenges established methods based on information theory and error-correcting codes, opening new avenues for solving this enduring mathematical puzzle.

(www.quantamagazine.org)

Mathematics Geometry Higher Dimensions

Onit: Your Local AI Chat Assistant

2025-01-24

Onit: Your Local AI Chat Assistant

Onit is an open-source AI chat assistant that lives on your desktop! It's like ChatGPT Desktop, but with local mode and support for multiple model providers (Anthropic, Google AI, xAI, etc.). Think of it as Cursor Chat, but available everywhere on your computer, not just in your IDE. Key features include local mode (via Ollama), multi-provider support (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, etc.), file uploads, chat history, and customizable shortcuts. Future plans include autocontext, local RAG, and local typeahead. Onit prioritizes universal access, provider freedom, a local-first approach, customizability, and extensibility.

(github.com)

AI AI assistant local mode multi-model support

CDC Halts Collaboration with WHO, Immediately

2025-01-27

CDC Halts Collaboration with WHO, Immediately

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has abruptly ordered an immediate end to all collaborations with the World Health Organization (WHO), sending shockwaves through the global public health community. This isn't a phased withdrawal; it's an immediate and complete cessation of all interactions, including work with technical working groups, coordinating centers, and advisory boards. Experts express deep concern, warning that this will severely hamper efforts to investigate and control outbreaks like the Marburg virus and mpox, potentially jeopardizing global health security. While President Trump had previously issued an executive order to begin the U.S. withdrawal from WHO, this sudden action is far more drastic and unexpected, sparking widespread worry and criticism.

(apnews.com)

Tech Global Public Health

Algebraic Effects: From Research to Real-World Software Development

2025-09-07

Algebraic Effects: From Research to Real-World Software Development

Algebraic effects are no longer a purely academic concept; they're a powerful tool for real-world software development. This article explores their key advantages: improved code testability, enhanced visibility into code behavior, and the ability to create custom control flow abstractions. Unlike monads, algebraic effects offer a more intuitive approach to managing side effects, yielding immediate benefits. Using Flix, a language with built-in support for algebraic effects, the article demonstrates practical applications, including handling exceptions, asynchronous operations, coroutines, generators, and backtracking search, culminating in a real-world AI movie recommendation app.

(www.relax.software)

Development

15-Year-Old Discovers Zero-Click Deanonymization Exploit Leveraging Cloudflare Cache

2025-01-21

15-Year-Old Discovers Zero-Click Deanonymization Exploit Leveraging Cloudflare Cache

A 15-year-old high school student, Daniel, discovered a critical zero-click deanonymization attack exploiting Cloudflare's caching mechanism. This vulnerability allows attackers to pinpoint the location of users within a 250-mile radius by sending a malicious payload to vulnerable applications like Signal, Discord, and hundreds of others. The attack requires no user interaction and can even be achieved via push notifications. Daniel developed a tool, Cloudflare Teleport, to demonstrate the exploit. While he responsibly disclosed the vulnerability, responses from affected companies were largely unsatisfactory. This highlights the potential security risks inherent in CDN caching and underscores the importance of user privacy awareness.

(gist.github.com)

Tech vulnerability

Chips from Supernovae: Solving Microchip Manufacturing Challenges with Astrophysics

2025-03-05

Chips from Supernovae: Solving Microchip Manufacturing Challenges with Astrophysics

This article recounts how the author and their team leveraged their understanding of supernova explosions to solve a long-standing tin debris problem in extreme ultraviolet lithography. By drawing an analogy between the shockwaves and plasma debris from supernovae and their EUV light source, they ingeniously used a hydrogen gas flow to clear away tin debris, thus improving the stability and reliability of the EUV source and making a significant contribution to advanced chip manufacturing. This story showcases the magic of interdisciplinary knowledge and the driving force of basic scientific research on practical applications.

(spectrum.ieee.org)

Tech extreme ultraviolet lithography supernova

146,000-Year-Old Harbin Skull Identified as Denisovan

2025-06-22

146,000-Year-Old Harbin Skull Identified as Denisovan

A 146,000-year-old skull unearthed in Harbin, China, has been confirmed as belonging to a Denisovan through protein analysis. Initially classified as a new species, *Homo longi*, the remarkably well-preserved skull yielded enough ancient proteins to match those of known Denisovans. This discovery not only reveals what Denisovans looked like but also unveils a fascinating story of the skull's secret preservation for nearly a century following its discovery during the Japanese occupation.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech Denisovan

Trump Admin Slashes NASA Workforce: Significant Cuts Hit Space Agency

2025-02-18

Trump Admin Slashes NASA Workforce: Significant Cuts Hit Space Agency

In just four weeks, the Trump administration has cut NASA's workforce by approximately 10%, impacting nearly 1800 employees. Around 750 accepted a deferred resignation offer, while roughly 1000 probationary employees were terminated. However, further significant cuts are anticipated. NASA field center directors have been instructed to prepare for substantial reductions in force in the coming months. This casts a pall of uncertainty over already demoralized staff and signals the Trump administration's intention to implement deeper budget cuts, potentially jeopardizing the future of American space exploration.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech job cuts

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