Nvidia's ACE AI: Your New PUBG Teammate?

2025-01-07
Nvidia's ACE AI: Your New PUBG Teammate?

At CES 2025, Nvidia showcased a significant advancement in its AI character technology, ACE. No longer just chatbots, ACE characters are becoming autonomous in-game companions. In PUBG, the "PUBG Ally" will act as a teammate, communicating, strategizing, looting, driving, and fighting alongside players. Powered by small language models (SLMs) and multi-modal SLMs, ACE characters exhibit human-like decision-making and environmental awareness. This technology will expand to other games like Naraka: Bladepoint and inZOI, marking a significant leap in AI integration within gaming.

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Game

Jujutsu: A Game-Changing Version Control System

2024-12-12

The author daily drives Jujutsu, a Git-based version control system, and highly recommends it. Unlike other simplified Git alternatives, Jujutsu focuses on enhancing the workflow of power users, particularly in simplifying history editing. The author recounts a personal experience showcasing Jujutsu's ease in modifying past commits, eliminating complex Git commands. While Jujutsu has some shortcomings, like lacking support for git send-email and the Google CLA requirement, the author still uses it daily for personal projects.

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Development Version Control

Great Question is Hiring a Lead Product Designer

2025-01-30
Great Question is Hiring a Lead Product Designer

Great Question, a seed-stage startup backed by Y Combinator and Funders Club, is hiring a Lead Product Designer. They're building an all-in-one customer research platform used by companies like Gusto, Experian, Canva, and Brex. The role requires 7-12 years of experience in software product design, with a focus on B2B SaaS and enterprise clients. The ideal candidate will be a strong leader with excellent UX design skills, capable of independently leading the design of complex product areas from conception to launch.

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Savoy vs. Hollywood Swing: A Deep Dive into Style Myths

2025-01-03
Savoy vs. Hollywood Swing: A Deep Dive into Style Myths

This essay debunks common misconceptions surrounding the 'Savoy' and 'Hollywood' styles of Lindy Hop. Through meticulous analysis of vintage footage, the author reveals the diversity of styles among dancers of both regions, highlighting the influence of era, geography, and individual preferences. The article argues against simplistic labeling, emphasizing the unique qualities of each dancer and advocating for a deeper appreciation of stylistic diversity rather than rigid categorization.

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French Modernists and the Mass Media: A Love-Hate Relationship

2025-01-17
French Modernists and the Mass Media: A Love-Hate Relationship

This essay explores the complex relationship between 19th-century French modernist writers and the mass media, particularly newspapers. From Baudelaire to Proust, they both loathed the negative impacts of newspapers (e.g., inciting crime, suppressing literature) and were deeply influenced by them, utilizing their platforms for creation and promotion. Newspapers served as both a crucible of modernity and a laboratory for literary innovation. Writers struggled against them while actively integrating them into their work; Mallarmé's groundbreaking poem *A Throw of the Dice* was published in the commercial magazine *Cosmopolis*. Ultimately, the author argues that in the face of the internet's information deluge, we can learn from the French modernists' experience, maintaining artistic independence while skillfully leveraging new media.

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Librebooting a ThinkPad T480: A Challenging Open-Source Journey

2024-12-13

This blog post details the author's experience librebooting a ThinkPad T480, a process fraught with challenges. From updating the BIOS and backing up the original firmware, to using a Raspberry Pi Pico W and SOIC-8 clip to read and write the BIOS chip, and finally compiling the Libreboot firmware (encountering numerous compilation errors and seeking help from the IRC community), the author documents the entire process. The post also shares post-libreboot experiences, including performance improvements, hardware compatibility issues, and troubleshooting tips, along with recommendations for screen, RAM, and storage upgrades.

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uBlock Origin: A Highly Efficient Ad Blocker

2024-12-23
uBlock Origin: A Highly Efficient Ad Blocker

uBlock Origin (uBO) is a highly efficient and lightweight content blocker for Chromium and Firefox browsers. It blocks ads, trackers, coin miners, and malware by default using multiple filter lists like EasyList and EasyPrivacy. Users can customize blocking rules and choose between a simple or advanced interface. Crucially, uBO emphasizes that using an ad blocker is not theft, but a means of protecting user privacy. The project is open-source and relies on community-maintained filter lists.

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Development ad blocker

Failed Startups Leave Employees Vulnerable to Data Breaches via Google Logins

2025-01-20
Failed Startups Leave Employees Vulnerable to Data Breaches via Google Logins

A security researcher discovered a critical vulnerability exposing employees of defunct startups to significant data breaches. By acquiring expired domains, attackers can exploit "Sign in with Google" to access company cloud software, potentially stealing Slack messages, Social Security numbers, and bank account details. While Google's OAuth configuration includes safeguards, improper implementation by some SaaS providers leaves the vulnerability exploitable. Tens of thousands of former employees and millions of SaaS accounts are at risk. Google has updated its documentation, advising companies to properly shut down cloud services, but the issue remains unresolved.

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Tech startups

Infinigen: Infinite Photorealistic 3D Scene Generator

2025-01-22
Infinigen: Infinite Photorealistic 3D Scene Generator

Developed by the Princeton Vision & Learning Lab, Infinigen is a procedural generator of 3D scenes, built on Blender and freely available under the BSD 3-Clause License. It generates limitless variations of high-quality 3D scenes using randomized mathematical rules, controlling everything from macro structures to micro details. Infinigen automatically generates annotations for various computer vision tasks like optical flow and depth estimation, making it ideal for 3D vision research. Its focus on real geometry ensures accurate ground truth data.

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Cognitive Load: The Silent Killer in Software Development

2024-12-25

This article explores the importance of cognitive load in software development. Cognitive load refers to the amount of mental effort a developer needs to complete a task; high cognitive load leads to confusion, wasted time, and money. The article analyzes intrinsic and extraneous cognitive load, illustrating how to reduce extraneous load through code examples, such as using meaningful intermediate variables, avoiding nested if statements, and prioritizing composition over inheritance. It also stresses avoiding excessive microservices, choosing appropriate language features, and adhering to the Single Responsibility Principle, noting that excessive abstraction and layered architectures can increase cognitive load. Finally, the article advises developers to focus on code readability and collaborate with junior developers to identify and improve cognitive load issues.

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Adding Refinement Types to Rust: A Feasibility Study

2024-12-24

This article explores the feasibility of adding refinement types to the Rust programming language. Drawing on experience with YAIOUOM, a static analyzer that used refinement types to check units of measure, the author examines approaches to implementing refinement types within Rust's type system. Several options are proposed, including modifications to trait resolution, type variable unification, and the introduction of a pluggable keyword mechanism for post-compilation type checking. An optimistic approach—ignoring unit information early in compilation and checking later—is deemed more practical. API design and error message handling are discussed. Future work involves gathering feedback, writing a rustc driver supporting plugins, and implementing several refinement types, potentially including a new version of YAIOUOM and subsets of Flux or Liquid Haskell.

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Farewell to Endless Meetings: A New Approach to High-Velocity Software Development

2024-12-15

Tired of endless meetings and lengthy planning? This article introduces a high-efficiency software development method: code-centric, rapid iteration. The author uses baking as an example to illustrate the concept of achieving the optimal solution through rapid experimentation, frequent testing, and continuous improvement. This method emphasizes reducing documentation, expressing ideas directly in code, using mock data and hot-reloading tools to speed up development, and improving code readability through concise code style and naming conventions. The author advocates breaking down projects into independently executable files, minimizing restart time, and using default language tools for debugging. Although this method may seem like a "chaotic lab," it can efficiently complete projects and avoid the redundancy and inefficiency of traditional methods.

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Houseplant: Streamlining ClickHouse Database Migrations

2024-12-27

Houseplant is a command-line tool designed to simplify ClickHouse database migration management. It allows developers to write migrations in a user-friendly YAML format, making them easy to read and maintain. Simple commands like `houseplant init`, `houseplant generate`, and `houseplant migrate` enable initialization, migration generation, execution, and rollback. Houseplant supports various environment configurations and offers an intuitive command-line interface for seamless ClickHouse schema management.

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Development Database Migrations

Cloudflare Prevents DNS Conflicts with Formal Verification

2025-01-07
Cloudflare Prevents DNS Conflicts with Formal Verification

Cloudflare uses Topaz, a system that formally verifies the correctness of its internal DNS addressing behavior. Topaz encodes DNS business objectives as declarative programs, each with a match function, a response function, and a configuration. Before deployment, a custom model checker verifies these programs for conflicts and bugs, ensuring reliable and consistent DNS configuration. This improves internet reliability by preventing inconsistencies in IP address resolution.

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Auto-Saving Rails Forms with Turbo Streams: A Hotwire Approach

2025-01-09
Auto-Saving Rails Forms with Turbo Streams: A Hotwire Approach

This article demonstrates how to implement auto-saving for inline input fields in Rails applications using Turbo Streams, a component of the Hotwire framework. A Stimulus controller automatically submits the form on blur, leveraging Turbo Streams to update the UI without page reloads. The author highlights the importance of unique input IDs and using `title_previously_changed?` for efficient user feedback, creating a seamless autosave experience.

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Development

The Extraordinary Life of Potoooooooo: A Racing Legend

2025-01-16
The Extraordinary Life of Potoooooooo: A Racing Legend

Potoooooooo, a chestnut thoroughbred with a legendary status, is renowned for his unusual name and spectacular racing career. He won over 25 races, his name, a humorous misspelling of "Potatoes," adding to his colorful story. After retirement, Potoooooooo became a significant sire, his offspring including multiple Epsom Derby winners. His genetic legacy continues to shape thoroughbred racing to this day.

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GitHub Project ted: A Turing Machine-based File Editor

2024-12-18
GitHub Project ted: A Turing Machine-based File Editor

ted is a command-line tool written in Go that allows users to edit files according to the rules of a provided Turing machine. Inspired by the author's need to process log files, ted uses state machines to precisely extract the desired information. It supports various operations, including regular expression matching, sed command execution, variable assignment, capture and output control, and offers features such as multi-line capture, regex capture groups, and file head/tail movement.

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Eating Spaghetti by the Fistful: A Neapolitan Street Spectacle

2024-12-17
Eating Spaghetti by the Fistful: A Neapolitan Street Spectacle

In 19th-century Naples, eating spaghetti became a unique spectacle. People would grab handfuls of spaghetti and shove it into their mouths with surprising speed. This unusual custom attracted numerous tourists and became a Neapolitan specialty. The article traces the history of this practice, from the price drop of pasta in the 17th century, to its role as an important food source for the poor, and its eventual disappearance with societal changes.

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LA Wildfires Force Mass Evacuations, NASA JPL Shuts Down

2025-01-08
LA Wildfires Force Mass Evacuations, NASA JPL Shuts Down

Massive wildfires raging across Los Angeles County have forced tens of thousands to evacuate, leading to the closure of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Fueled by strong winds, the fires have consumed thousands of acres, resulting in casualties and widespread property damage. California's governor has declared a state of emergency. While JPL itself remains undamaged, many staff have evacuated their homes, with some reporting significant losses. The disaster highlights the severity of climate change and raises concerns about the safety of invaluable scientific data and equipment.

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Samsung to Mass Produce World's First Rollable OLED Laptop Screen

2025-01-10
Samsung to Mass Produce World's First Rollable OLED Laptop Screen

Samsung Display will begin mass production of the world's first rollable OLED screen for laptops in April 2025. This screen will be featured in Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus G6 Rollable laptop, launching globally in June. The screen expands from a 14-inch 5:4 aspect ratio to a 16.7-inch 8:9 aspect ratio, offering a unique mobile computing experience. Samsung also incorporates its unpolarized Eco² OLED™ technology for the first time in a laptop, reducing panel thickness and power consumption by 30%.

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Slow Deployments Breed Meetings: A Reverse Causality Argument

2024-12-22
Slow Deployments Breed Meetings: A Reverse Causality Argument

Programmers often complain about too many meetings hindering productivity. Kent Beck challenges this notion, suggesting that meetings are a consequence, not the cause, of slow deployments. Facebook's experience shows that increasing deployment frequency is key. When deployment speed lags behind code changes, organizations add meetings and reviews to mitigate risk, ultimately reducing efficiency. Instead of reducing meetings, focus on improving deployment capacity by shortening cycles or enhancing code quality. This essay offers a fresh perspective, exploring the counter-intuitive relationship between slow deployments and increased organizational overhead.

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Tenstorrent: An Analysis of the AI Hardware Startup Landscape

2024-12-15
Tenstorrent: An Analysis of the AI Hardware Startup Landscape

This article delves into a deep dive analysis of Tenstorrent, an AI hardware startup. Initially skeptical, the author, after meeting with the Tenstorrent team and gaining a thorough understanding of their architecture (a mesh topology featuring high-performance RISC-V CPU cores and AI cores) and software stack, revised their opinion. The article details Tenstorrent's technical specifications, including its unique Baby RISC-V cores and efforts to reduce latency. The author argues that Tenstorrent's open-source strategy, strong engineering team, and rational business model give it a unique advantage in the competitive AI hardware market, expressing optimism for its future.

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Decoding the Telephony Signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'

2024-12-22

A telecom hardware engineer decoded the telephony signals in a scene from Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'. The audio clip, featuring dial tones, rapid tone combinations, and an answer tone, was analyzed using spectrograms. By comparing the frequencies to known standards (DTMF, CAS R2, SS5), the engineer identified the signaling as SS5 and decoded the number as 044 1831. This analysis not only showcases the engineer's expertise but also reveals insights into the film's sound design and suggests a possible connection to a real-life London number.

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ISO 8583: The Secret Language of Credit Cards

2024-12-18
ISO 8583: The Secret Language of Credit Cards

Every time you tap your card or pay online, you're interacting with the ISO 8583 protocol. This 1987 standard defines the format of real-time transaction messages between banking networks. It includes core fields like message type indicators, bitmaps, and data elements, but networks vary in their extensions and serialization, leading to compatibility challenges. This article delves into the complexities of ISO 8583's structure, field encoding, nested message handling, and demonstrates building a robust ISO 8583 parser to handle network variations and error scenarios.

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Stanford Report Warns of Mirror Bacteria Feasibility and Risks

2024-12-17
Stanford Report Warns of Mirror Bacteria Feasibility and Risks

A Stanford University technical report details the feasibility of creating 'mirror bacteria' and their potential risks. Mirror bacteria, with all chiral molecules (proteins, nucleic acids, and metabolites) replaced by their mirror images, cannot evolve naturally but are becoming increasingly synthesizable. Immune systems and predation rely on chiral molecule interactions, meaning mirror bacteria could evade detection and control, potentially spreading unchecked and posing serious threats to humans, animals, plants, and the environment. The report comprehensively assesses synthesis, biosecurity, human health impacts, medical countermeasures, and ecological consequences, urging attention to this potential biosecurity risk.

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Complete Decompilation of LEGO Island (1997)

2024-12-23
Complete Decompilation of LEGO Island (1997)

The isle project has achieved a functionally complete decompilation of the classic game LEGO Island (Version 1.1, English) released in 1997. The goal is to create an accurate representation of the original game's code, matching recompiled instructions to the original machine code. Both ISLE.EXE and LEGO1.DLL are fully decompiled and functionally identical to the originals. Further work focuses on improving code accuracy, naming, documentation, and structure. While some bugs may remain, the game is playable. The project uses CMake and recommends Microsoft Visual C++ 4.2 for compiling for optimal accuracy.

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Training Large Diffusion Models on a Shoestring Budget: $1890

2025-01-16
Training Large Diffusion Models on a Shoestring Budget: $1890

Sony Research has open-sourced micro_diffusion, demonstrating how to train large-scale diffusion models on an extremely low budget ($1890). Using 37 million publicly available real and synthetic images, they trained a 1.16 billion parameter sparse transformer model, achieving an FID score of 12.7 on zero-shot generation on the COCO dataset. The project provides training code, dataset code, pre-trained model weights, and details a staged training process, including progressive training from low to high resolution and the use of patch masking to reduce training costs and improve efficiency.

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Unprecedented Drop in Teen Drug Use Continues to Surprise Experts

2024-12-20
Unprecedented Drop in Teen Drug Use Continues to Surprise Experts

A new study reveals a continued and unexpected drop in teen drug use in 2024, reaching historic lows. The decline, which began during the COVID-19 pandemic, has not reversed despite the lifting of restrictions. Rates of alcohol, marijuana, and nicotine use among 8th, 10th, and 12th graders have all plummeted. Researchers are now investigating the contributing factors to this unprecedented trend and planning interventions to maintain these low rates.

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