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Ring's Return to Surveillance-First Approach Sparks Privacy Concerns

2025-07-20

Ring's Return to Surveillance-First Approach Sparks Privacy Concerns

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff's return to the helm signals a return to the company's controversial 'surveillance-first, privacy-second' approach. This includes reinstating features allowing police direct access to user footage and introducing a new feature granting live-stream access to home security devices. This raises serious privacy concerns, particularly given past instances of police using Ring footage to surveil protestors without warrants or consent. Ring's proclaimed shift to an 'AI-first' company suggests the potential integration of video analytics or facial recognition into its already problematic devices. Critics argue this poses a grave threat to civil liberties and could facilitate tracking of individuals for reasons such as abortion or immigration enforcement.

(www.eff.org)

Tech

Local LLMs vs. Offline Wikipedia: A Size Comparison

2025-07-20

An article in MIT Technology Review sparked a discussion about using offline LLMs in an apocalyptic scenario. This prompted the author to compare the sizes of local LLMs and offline Wikipedia downloads. The results showed that smaller local LLMs (like Llama 3.2 3B) are roughly comparable in size to a selection of 50,000 Wikipedia articles, while the full Wikipedia is much larger than even the largest LLMs. Although their purposes differ, this comparison reveals an interesting contrast in storage space between local LLMs and offline knowledge bases.

(evanhahn.com)

AI

10x Database Throughput with io_uring and a Dual WAL

2025-07-20

10x Database Throughput with io_uring and a Dual WAL

Building a complex database, the author experimented with io_uring and a dual WAL design to boost performance. Traditional WAL approaches (write-then-apply) bottleneck performance. By separating "intent to write" and "completion of write" into two WALs, and leveraging io_uring asynchronous I/O, a 10x throughput improvement was achieved. This design asynchronously writes intent, then completion records; recovery only applies operations with both intent and completion, ensuring data consistency. The author used Zig and the Poro project (an experimental key-value database) to validate this approach, highlighting the importance of hardware parallelism, batching, and flexible consistency models.

(blog.canoozie.net)

Development asynchronous I/O

Zuckerberg's $100M AI Talent Grab from OpenAI Fails

2025-07-20

Zuckerberg's $100M AI Talent Grab from OpenAI Fails

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted to lure ChatGPT employees to his AI team with offers of up to $100 million in compensation, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Despite these exorbitant offers, the recruitment drive largely failed. Altman revealed on a podcast that OpenAI employees prioritized the company's leading role in developing superintelligence. The incident highlights the fierce competition for AI talent and the allure of the superintelligence field.

(www.the-independent.com)

AI

Air India Ahmedabad Crash: Software Glitch or Pilot Error?

2025-07-20

Air India Ahmedabad Crash: Software Glitch or Pilot Error?

The preliminary report on the Air India flight 171 crash in Ahmedabad focuses on the fuel switch, which inexplicably transitioned from 'Run' to 'Cutoff' but was found in the 'Run' position at the crash site. Pilot conversations suggest neither pilot intentionally cut the fuel supply. US aviation expert Mary Schiavo points to a potential Boeing 787 software glitch, citing a similar incident in 2019 involving an ANA 787. She suggests investigating a possible Thrust Control Malfunction Accommodation (TCMA) system failure, which might have caused the plane to mistakenly believe it was on the ground and automatically shut down the engines. While the preliminary report offers no recommendations for Boeing, Schiavo warns that a clean chit for Boeing's software would be a serious breach of aviation accident investigation protocol.

(www.financialexpress.com)

Tech

On-Chip Integration of Quantum Light Sources and Control Electronics: A Breakthrough

2025-07-20

Scientists from Boston University, UC Berkeley, and Northwestern University have achieved a major breakthrough in scalable quantum technologies. Their research, published in Nature Electronics, details the world's first electronic-photonic-quantum system on a chip. This system integrates quantum light sources and stabilizing electronics using a standard 45-nanometer semiconductor manufacturing process, producing reliable streams of correlated photon pairs—a crucial resource for quantum computing, communication, and sensing. This advance paves the way for mass-producible 'quantum light factory' chips and large-scale quantum systems built from many such chips.

(www.bu.edu)

Tech quantum optics silicon photonics

Coldplay Kiss Cam Leads to CEO's Resignation

2025-07-20

Coldplay Kiss Cam Leads to CEO's Resignation

A couple's intimate moment on a Coldplay concert's jumbotron went viral, leading to the resignation of Astronomer CEO Andy Byron. Footage of Byron and his company's chief people officer, Kristin Cabot, cuddling sparked a meme frenzy and online investigation. Byron, who is married, resigned after the company launched an inquiry. The incident also inspired a retro-style video game, "Coldplay Canoodlers," quickly created by musician Jonathan Mann using ChatGPT and a novel coding technique called "vibe coding." The speed at which the event unfolded and a game was created highlights the internet's capacity for rapid-fire spectacle.

(www.forbes.com)

Tech viral event

Eight Healthy Babies Born Using DNA from Three People

2025-07-20

Eight Healthy Babies Born Using DNA from Three People

Researchers in Britain have reported the birth of eight healthy babies using a groundbreaking technique involving DNA from three individuals. The method, which is approved in the UK and Australia but not the US, avoids passing on devastating mitochondrial diseases from mother to child. Scientists transfer the mother's nuclear DNA into a donor egg with healthy mitochondria, effectively circumventing the harmful mutations. While one baby showed slightly higher-than-expected levels of abnormal mitochondria, it's not considered disease-causing. This represents a significant advancement for families affected by mitochondrial diseases.

(phys.org)

Tech Mitochondrial Disease Gene Editing Assisted Reproduction

TSMC to Build Four New 1.4nm Fab Plants in Taiwan

2025-07-20

TSMC to Build Four New 1.4nm Fab Plants in Taiwan

TSMC plans to commence construction of four new 1.4-nanometer wafer fabrication plants (Fab 25) in Central Taiwan Science Park later this year, aiming for 2-nanometer chip mass production by late 2028. This significant investment underscores TSMC's commitment to advanced process technology and its response to growing customer demand for high-performance chips. The project solidifies Taiwan's leading role in the global semiconductor industry. Alongside this Taiwanese investment, TSMC's $165 billion investment in Arizona, building advanced fabs and packaging facilities, diversifies its global manufacturing capacity.

(www.taipeitimes.com)

Tech Advanced Process

Exploiting Coprocessors to Achieve Deterministic Kernel Exploitation on A9/A11 Devices

2025-07-20

An updated version of the Trigon kernel exploit has been released, expanding support to A9(X) and A11 devices. This blog post details the challenging techniques used to overcome KTRR limitations and find the kernel base address across different devices. The new approach leverages the IORVBAR register and coprocessors (specifically the Always-On Processor), manipulating coprocessor firmware to achieve arbitrary kernel read/write, ultimately bypassing kernel protections for successful exploitation on A9 and A11 devices.

(alfiecg.uk)

Development coprocessor

Go 1.24 Memory Leak Investigation: An Unexpected Discovery and the Swiss Tables Surprise

2025-07-20

Go 1.24 Memory Leak Investigation: An Unexpected Discovery and the Swiss Tables Surprise

After the release of Go 1.24, an unexpected memory usage increase was observed in a data processing service. Investigation revealed that a refactoring of a memory allocation function in the Go runtime inadvertently removed an optimization, causing unnecessary zeroing of memory during large object allocation, thereby increasing Resident Set Size (RSS). While Go runtime internal metrics showed no change, system-level metrics revealed a significant increase in memory usage. Collaboration with the Go community helped pinpoint and fix the issue. Surprisingly, Go 1.24's new "Swiss Tables" feature significantly reduced memory usage in high-traffic environments, offsetting the previous regression and even yielding additional memory savings.

(www.datadoghq.com)

Development

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

Supersonic Passenger Travel: A Risky Bet with Huge Potential?

2025-07-20

Supersonic Passenger Travel: A Risky Bet with Huge Potential?

The dream of supersonic passenger travel is back, but unlike Concorde, today's startups and giants aim to overcome the challenges that led to Concorde's failure—high operating costs and poor fuel efficiency—through new materials, advanced propulsion, and sustainable fuels. However, supersonic and hypersonic flight inherently require more fuel and have greater environmental impact. The initial market will focus on high-value business and luxury travelers, offering massive potential, but commercialization is at least a decade away, and investment risks remain high.

(spaceambition.substack.com)

Tech aviation investment sustainable aviation fuel

Rust's Borrow Checker: More Curse Than Blessing?

2025-07-20

Rust, lauded for its blend of speed and safety thanks to its borrow checker, faces criticism in this post. The author argues the borrow checker creates significant ergonomic problems, rejecting perfectly valid code due to overly conservative rules. Multiple examples demonstrate the unnecessary refactoring required. The post questions the overstated role of the borrow checker in Rust's safety, comparing it to garbage-collected languages like Python and Julia. While acknowledging the borrow checker's benefits in concurrent programming, the author contends its overhead in single-threaded contexts outweighs the advantages. Rust's strengths, such as its strong type system and rich standard library, are highlighted as the true reasons for its success.

(viralinstruction.com)

Development

NYC Subway Bill Threatens to Lock Transit in the Past

2025-07-20

NYC Subway Bill Threatens to Lock Transit in the Past

A new bill passed by the New York State Legislature mandates two-person train operation (TPTO) for NYC subways, a move critics say would reverse decades of progress. The bill, requiring conductors on all trains regardless of automation capabilities, is seen as an outdated practice, hindering modernization and increasing costs. While proponents claim it improves safety, the article argues that this is a thinly veiled attempt to protect jobs, ignoring advancements in technology and safety features on modern trains. The author urges Governor Hochul to veto the bill, preventing a costly and inefficient setback for the city's transit system.

(www.etany.org)

Tech NYC Subway TPTO

The Curious Case of the Converging UNIX Workstation

2025-07-20

The author, having amassed a collection of 1990s RISC/UNIX workstations from SGI, HP, and DEC, noticed a peculiar trend in their internal layouts after watching a video on PC case history. Early models adhered to traditional VME bus designs. However, later models surprisingly adopted a layout reminiscent of the LPX standard – a flat motherboard with rear I/O and a left-side expansion slot. This bears a striking resemblance to contemporary PC designs. The author speculates on whether this was independent convergence or a collaborative effort, leaving the question of coincidence versus design trend unanswered, but prompting intriguing questions about the evolution of hardware design.

(thejpster.org.uk)

Hardware UNIX workstations

The Piano Key Width Conundrum: A Linear Programming Puzzle

2025-07-20

Have you ever noticed that the widths of the white keys on a piano aren't all the same? This isn't an accident, but rather an interesting linear programming problem. The article explores how to minimize the variation in the widths of the back ends of the white keys, given that the black keys have uniform width and the front ends of the white keys are all the same width. Several common piano key designs are analyzed, culminating in an optimized solution that divides the octave into 878472 units, achieving remarkably small discrepancies in both white and black key widths.

(www.mathpages.com)

Misc piano design

LA Sues Airbnb Over Price Gouging and Unverified Listings After Wildfires

2025-07-20

LA Sues Airbnb Over Price Gouging and Unverified Listings After Wildfires

The Los Angeles city attorney's office filed a lawsuit against Airbnb, alleging price gouging and unverified hosts and addresses at over 2,000 rentals following January's wildfires. The lawsuit seeks to prevent price hikes during the emergency and compensate affected consumers. Airbnb disputes the claims, highlighting its $30 million in aid to fire victims. However, the lawsuit also alleges inadequate verification processes, leaving users vulnerable to crime. The case involves fake hosts and addresses, and locations miles from advertised ones. If price gouging is proven, Airbnb faces up to $7.5 million in fines.

(www.latimes.com)

Tech

Bypassing Specialization in Rust: A Clever Use of Function Pointers

2025-07-20

While developing a Rust FAT driver, the author encountered a roadblock: specialization, currently unavailable in stable Rust. After unsuccessful attempts using macros and generic enums, a clever solution emerged: leveraging function pointers to emulate specialization. While this approach introduces some performance and memory overhead, it offers a viable workaround for specific scenarios, avoiding reliance on unstable features. The author concludes by advocating for the stabilization of specialization, as it promises a more efficient and cleaner solution.

(oakchris1955.eu)

Development function pointers

The Surprising Truth About Ancient Law Codes: Hammurabi Wasn't First

2025-07-20

The Surprising Truth About Ancient Law Codes: Hammurabi Wasn't First

We often think of Hammurabi's Code as the world's first, but the truth is more complex. This article reveals earlier legal systems, like Ur-Nammu's Code and the pro-people reforms under Urukagina. Hammurabi's Code, famous for its "eye for an eye" retributive justice, contrasts with Ur-Nammu's focus on fines. Even earlier, Urukagina prioritized easing the burdens on his people, eliminating debt and protecting the vulnerable, showcasing a different leadership model focused on service rather than self-aggrandizement. The article prompts reflection on ancient leaders and modern politics, reminding us that leadership focused on serving the people has ancient roots.

(worldhistory.substack.com)

Misc ancient history mesopotamia

Augmenting CLIs and APIs for LLM Agents

2025-07-20

Augmenting CLIs and APIs for LLM Agents

The author encountered limitations in existing command-line tools and APIs when using Large Language Model (LLM) agents for reverse engineering automation, especially with the small context windows of local models. APIs need to balance providing enough information to reduce tool calls while avoiding context window overflow. Solutions explored include improved docstrings, helper functions, and pre-commit hooks. Further improvements suggested involve wrappers that cache output, structure it, and report remaining lines, as well as shell hooks providing directory information. The author concludes that existing CLIs need LLM enhancements; perhaps even a whole set of LLM-enhanced CLIs or a custom LLM shell is needed to improve the user experience for LLM agents.

(www.notcheckmark.com)

Development CLI Tools

Beyond Meat: Is the Plant-Based Meat Giant Falling?

2025-07-20

Beyond Meat: Is the Plant-Based Meat Giant Falling?

Beyond Meat, once a promising plant-based meat company, is now facing a severe financial crisis. Revenue growth is sluggish, profitability is elusive, massive debt is maturing, and the stock price has plummeted 98%. While the company is attempting a turnaround through cost-cutting, improving its brand image, and seeking debt restructuring, time is running out, and bankruptcy remains a significant risk. This is not only a crisis for Beyond Meat itself but also reflects the challenges facing the plant-based meat industry as a whole.

(foodinstitute.com)

Startup plant-based meat

BorgBackup: Efficient and Secure Deduplicating Archiver

2025-07-20

BorgBackup (Borg) is an open-source deduplicating archiver combining compression and authenticated encryption for space-efficient storage and robust security. It supports various compression algorithms (lz4, zstd, zlib, lzma) and offers easy installation across multiple platforms (Linux, macOS, BSD, etc.). Backed by a large and active community, Borg provides mountable backups for convenient access and, crucially, remember to always check your backups!

(www.borgbackup.org)

Development

Fungus-Controlled Robot: A Glimpse into the Future of Agriculture?

2025-07-20

Fungus-Controlled Robot: A Glimpse into the Future of Agriculture?

Researchers from Cornell University and the University of Florence have developed a novel biohybrid robot controlled by a living edible mushroom, the king trumpet. The robot uses the mushroom's electrical signals for movement and environmental sensing. This use of a living organism allows the robot to respond to light, heat, and other stimuli, making it more adaptable to unpredictable environments. The researchers envision future applications in agriculture, such as sensing soil chemistry to optimize fertilizer application, potentially mitigating harmful environmental impacts. This groundbreaking research, published in Science Robotics, represents a significant advancement in biohybrid robotics.

(www.the-independent.com)

Tech biohybrid robot agricultural technology

Google AI Killed Me (and Then Brought Me Back to Life)

2025-07-20

Google AI Killed Me (and Then Brought Me Back to Life)

Author Dave Barry discovered Google AI had marked him as deceased and incorrectly identified him as a political activist from Dorchester. Despite repeated corrections, the AI system wavered, declaring him dead and alive multiple times. This humorous account highlights AI's limitations and inaccuracies in handling factual information, prompting reflection on the reliability of AI technology.

(davebarry.substack.com)

Misc

Ultra-Low Power Arduino System: 2-Year Battery Life?

2025-07-20

This article details an ultra-low-power Arduino system based on the ATmega328. By minimizing hardware and utilizing the sleep functionality of the JeeLib library, the author reduces the system power consumption from 6.7mA to 43μA, significantly extending battery life. The article thoroughly explains the hardware connections, software programming, and power consumption test results, and uses a temperature sensor as an example to calculate the system's battery life in a real-world application, estimating it at up to two years.

(makecademy.com)

Hardware low power

Backup: Beyond a Simple Copy

2025-07-20

Backup: Beyond a Simple Copy

The importance of data backup is often underestimated. This article, based on the author's experiences, recounts various data loss scenarios, emphasizing that backup is more than just a simple copy; it requires a comprehensive plan and strategy. It explores the pros and cons of full disk versus individual file backups and the crucial role of snapshots in ensuring data consistency. The author also shares their preference for a centralized backup server architecture and guiding principles for an efficient backup system, previewing subsequent articles detailing their FreeBSD-powered backup server setup.

(it-notes.dragas.net)

Development

Ancient Books Under Siege: A Millennium-Old Library Fights Back Against Beetles

2025-07-20

Ancient Books Under Siege: A Millennium-Old Library Fights Back Against Beetles

The 1000-year-old Pannonhalma Archabbey library in Hungary, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is battling a devastating beetle infestation threatening its 400,000-volume collection. Around 100,000 books, many centuries old, are being painstakingly removed and placed in oxygen-free environments to kill the drugstore beetles that have burrowed into their pages. This herculean effort underscores the importance of preserving cultural heritage and highlights the growing threat posed by climate change, as warmer temperatures accelerate insect lifecycles.

(www.npr.org)

Misc pest infestation

Oldest North American Pterosaur Fossil Unearthed

2025-07-19

A Smithsonian-led team has discovered North America's oldest known pterosaur fossil in Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park. Dating back 209 million years to the late Triassic period, this seagull-sized pterosaur, along with hundreds of other fossils including one of the world's oldest turtles, reveals a vibrant ecosystem existing just before the end-Triassic extinction event. The discovery fills a crucial gap in the fossil record, showcasing a unique blend of ancient and modern vertebrate groups coexisting. The pterosaur's worn teeth suggest a diet of armored fish found in the area's braided river system.

(www.si.edu)

Tech pterosaur Triassic

Warning: Several Email Clients with Critical Privacy Flaws

2025-07-19

A blog post highlights several email clients with serious privacy vulnerabilities, including Evolution Mail, Balsa, and Geary. These clients suffer from linkPreConnect and dnsLink vulnerabilities, with developers showing a lack of response and even refusing to warn users. The author urges developers to prioritize user privacy, promptly fix these issues, and advises against using these clients until the problems are resolved.

(www.emailprivacytester.com)

Tech email clients privacy vulnerabilities

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