AWS at 20: Under-the-Hood Improvements You Might Have Missed

2025-08-20
AWS at 20:  Under-the-Hood Improvements You Might Have Missed

AWS is nearly two decades old, and its foundational services have evolved significantly. Many older blog posts are outdated. This post highlights key improvements: EC2 instances now allow hot modification of security groups and IAM roles, resizing, and EBS volume changes; S3 offers read-after-write consistency, eliminates ACLs, defaults to block public access and encryption; networking improvements include Transit Gateway and faster CloudFront updates; Lambda boasts extended runtime, container image support, and performance enhancements; EFS and EBS performance is dramatically better; DynamoDB supports empty fields and offers more reliable performance; cost optimization involves Savings Plans replacing Reserved Instances, per-second billing, and robust cost monitoring tools; authentication relies on IAM roles over users, with IAM Identity Center replacing SSO; overall reliability has drastically increased.

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Sony Raises PS5 Prices in the US

2025-08-20
Sony Raises PS5 Prices in the US

Due to the challenging global economic climate, Sony has announced a price increase for PlayStation 5 consoles in the US, effective August 21st. The new recommended retail prices are: PS5 - $549.99, PS5 Digital Edition - $499.99, and PS5 Pro - $749.99. Accessory prices remain unchanged, and no other price adjustments have been announced for other regions.

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Game

Goodbye Playwright, Hello CDP: A New Era in AI Browser Automation

2025-08-20

In the realm of AI browser automation, developers have long relied on adapter libraries like Playwright. However, these libraries' abstraction layers obscure the underlying complexities of browsers, leading to performance bottlenecks and difficult-to-solve edge cases. This article details how a team abandoned Playwright and directly used the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) to build a faster and more reliable AI browser automation system. They developed a new Python CDP client library, `cdp-use`, and adopted an event-driven architecture, achieving cross-origin iframe support and significantly improving element extraction and screenshot speeds. This transition, while challenging, ultimately resulted in finer-grained control over the browser and more robust error handling, ushering in a new chapter for AI browser automation.

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AI

Rotten Tomatoes Inflation: A Hollywood Secret?

2025-08-20
Rotten Tomatoes Inflation: A Hollywood Secret?

A recent observation of nearly every film on Rotten Tomatoes being labeled "Certified Fresh" sparked suspicion. Data analysis reveals a significant rise in Rotten Tomatoes' average score over the past decade, coinciding with Fandango's acquisition. The author suggests Rotten Tomatoes may be manipulating scores by expanding its reviewer pool to include those giving more favorable reviews. While this might boost box office numbers short-term, it's detrimental to the long-term health of the film industry.

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Zed IDE Raises $32M Series B to Revolutionize Code Collaboration

2025-08-20
Zed IDE Raises $32M Series B to Revolutionize Code Collaboration

Zed, a blazing-fast IDE, announced a $32M Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital, bringing its total funding to over $42M. Zed's vision is to fundamentally change how software is built by connecting conversations about code directly to the code itself, moving beyond outdated snapshots and scattered tools. They're building DeltaDB, a new operation-based version control system that incrementally tracks code evolution with edit-level granularity, integrating it into Zed for seamless human-AI collaboration. This investment will fuel Zed's mission to create a collaborative workspace where code, discussions, and AI assistance converge, reshaping the future of software development.

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Development

typed-arrow: Zero-Runtime-Overhead Arrow Schemas in Rust

2025-08-20
typed-arrow: Zero-Runtime-Overhead Arrow Schemas in Rust

typed-arrow is a Rust library providing a strongly typed, fully compile-time way to declare Arrow schemas. It maps Rust types directly to arrow-rs typed builders/arrays and arrow_schema::DataType, eliminating runtime DataType switching. This results in zero runtime overhead, monomorphized column construction, and ergonomic ORM-like APIs. The library supports a wide range of data types, including nested structs, lists, dictionaries, and timestamps, offering flexible building methods for efficient and safe Arrow data manipulation.

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Development

Graphene Capacitors Achieve Rapid, High-Depth Modulation of Terahertz Waves

2025-08-20
Graphene Capacitors Achieve Rapid, High-Depth Modulation of Terahertz Waves

Researchers at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory have developed a terahertz wave modulator using graphene as a tunable capacitor, achieving unprecedented dynamic range and speed. By embedding nanoscale graphene patches within metamaterial resonators, the device effectively controls terahertz waves, boasting a modulation depth exceeding 99.99% and a speed of 30 MHz. This breakthrough promises to advance technologies in terahertz communication, imaging, and sensing, paving the way for next-generation communication systems beyond 5G and 6G.

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Moving Objects in 3D Space with Math

2025-08-20
Moving Objects in 3D Space with Math

This article explores moving objects in 3D space, specifically along a spherical helix path. Starting with simple circular motion, the author explains how sine and cosine functions can control an object's x, y, and z coordinates to create spirals and more complex trajectories. The core concept is using parametric equations, defining the object's 3D position as a function of time. What appears as complex dynamic effects are ultimately derived from simple mathematical functions.

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Development 3D graphics

OCaml Editor Gets a Major Boost: Powerful Refactoring Capabilities

2025-08-20
OCaml Editor Gets a Major Boost: Powerful Refactoring Capabilities

During my internship, I added powerful refactoring capabilities to OCaml's Merlin compiler, starting with an "extract toplevel expression" feature. This feature extracts selected expressions into new `let` bindings, supporting constants and expressions (including those using variables), and cleverly handling OCaml's purity issues. Implemented via the Language Server Protocol (LSP) with both code action and custom request interaction methods, the feature is in PRs and nearing merge. This marks a significant step towards an IntelliJ-like editor experience for OCaml, with plans for more refactoring tools in the future.

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Development

Rails in 2025: Lago's Case for Sticking with the Familiar

2025-08-20
Rails in 2025: Lago's Case for Sticking with the Familiar

Lago shares its experience building its API with Ruby on Rails. Despite the rise of Python, Go, and JS, they've stuck with Rails, prioritizing its speed in delivering a product. They address scalability concerns, arguing it's an architectural and operational issue, not a framework limitation. With proper design and optimization, Rails handles millions of API requests. The article also acknowledges Rails' weaknesses—performance, concurrency, and 'magic'—and how they use Go and Rust to compensate. Ultimately, they argue that language choice depends on quickly delivering a great product, and Rails fits the bill for their team.

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Development

arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

2025-08-20
arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

arXivLabs is a framework for collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on the site. 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

Online Edition of Cyberpunk Anthology 'Mirrorshades' Launches

2025-08-20

A free online edition of Bruce Sterling's seminal cyberpunk anthology, *Mirrorshades*, has been released. The website, converted and posted by Rudy Rucker in September 2022 and updated in November 2023, features stories by prominent cyberpunk authors such as William Gibson, Tom Maddox, and Pat Cadigan. It showcases the early cyberpunk movement, highlighting its themes of high tech, low life, body invasion, mind invasion, and its unique reflection of 1980s culture and technological advancements.

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Ship Faster, Better: Parallel AI-Assisted Development with Claude Code

2025-08-20
Ship Faster, Better: Parallel AI-Assisted Development with Claude Code

Claude Code PM revolutionizes software development by combining spec-driven development, GitHub Issues, Git worktrees, and multiple parallel AI agents. It tackles common team collaboration woes: context switching, merge conflicts, requirements drift, and invisible progress. The system transforms PRDs into epics, epics into GitHub issues, and issues into production code with full traceability. Multiple Claude instances work concurrently, enabling true team collaboration and seamless human-AI handoffs. The result? Increased speed, fewer bugs, and a dramatically improved workflow.

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Mini SSD Card: A Potential Solution for Portable Gaming Storage Bottlenecks

2025-08-20
Mini SSD Card: A Potential Solution for Portable Gaming Storage Bottlenecks

Games are getting increasingly large, often exceeding 100GB, due to factors like high-resolution textures, detailed graphics, extensive audio files, and support for multiple languages. To address the slow storage speeds in portable gaming devices, the Mini SSD card has emerged as a potential solution. It aims to deliver speeds comparable to internal SSDs without requiring users to disassemble their devices for upgrades. While not yet a formally ratified standard, it offers a convenient storage upgrade option for gamers.

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An Infinitely High Stack of Blocks? Impossible!

2025-08-20

This paper explores a counter-intuitive physics problem: the stability of an infinitely extending stack of blocks. By analyzing torque and center of mass, the author demonstrates that finite-height stacks of blocks can remain stable even when their tops extend far beyond the edge of a table—a result that defies intuition. However, when attempting to extrapolate this to an infinitely high stack, the author finds that regardless of the limiting procedure used, the end result is either no stack at all or a stack that doesn't lean. This reveals the subtleties of limit operations when dealing with infinity and the limitations of intuition.

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Handwriting: More Important Than You Think

2025-08-20
Handwriting: More Important Than You Think

In the digital age, handwriting seems to be fading into obsolescence. But new research suggests that handwriting is crucial for children's cognitive development and literacy. While technology has made typing mainstream, practicing handwriting enhances fine motor skills and helps students better understand and retain information. Although not all experts agree on the necessity of learning cursive, there's a general consensus that handwriting skills significantly benefit cognitive development; it's not just nostalgia, but about children's learning and development.

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Tidewave Web: In-Browser AI Coding Agent for Rails & Phoenix

2025-08-20

Dashbit introduces Tidewave Web, an AI coding agent running directly in the browser alongside your Rails and Phoenix web applications. It boasts full page and code context awareness, eliminating the constant switching between tools. Tidewave directly accesses your UI state, executes code, queries databases, monitors logs, and more. Users suggest improvements via a point-and-click inspector, and Tidewave automatically builds features and tests them in the browser. Currently supporting Rails and Phoenix, future support for React, Django, and other frameworks is planned. Tidewave changes the traditional AI coding paradigm by creating a shared context between the developer, agent, and web app, boosting development efficiency.

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Development Web development

Against Custom Lisp REPLs: Embrace Native REPLs and Practical Tools

2025-08-20

The author lambasts custom Lisp REPLs (like CIEL), arguing they sacrifice the power and customizability of native REPLs, such as REPL-native commands, implementation debuggers, and the ability to customize using implementation APIs. The article details enhancing native REPLs with tools like the Trivial Toplevel library and rlwrap, covering custom prompts, commands, reader macros, and dependency management with ASDF. The author advocates using native REPLs coupled with practical tools for a highly efficient and personalized Lisp development environment, rather than relying on "batteries-included" custom REPLs.

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Development

BusyBee: Blazing-Fast Background Job Processing for .NET

2025-08-20
BusyBee: Blazing-Fast Background Job Processing for .NET

BusyBee is a high-performance .NET background job processing library built on native channels. It offers a simple, configurable, and observable solution for handling background tasks, boasting built-in OpenTelemetry support and flexible queue management. Features include unbounded or bounded queues with various overflow strategies, configurable timeouts, parallel processing, comprehensive logging, and rich job context information. OpenTelemetry integration allows for robust monitoring and analysis. Error and timeout handling is also supported via custom handlers.

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Development background processing

Google's AI Overviews Lead Users into Scams

2025-08-20
Google's AI Overviews Lead Users into Scams

Multiple users have reported falling victim to scams after being directed to fraudulent phone numbers provided by Google's AI Overviews. Scammers impersonated customer service, tricking users into sharing their screens and sending money. Google acknowledges the issue and is working on improvements, but users are urged to remain vigilant. This highlights the limitations of AI in verifying information and the prevalence of misinformation online.

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Tech

Building the Simplest Semantic Layer with YAML and Python

2025-08-20
Building the Simplest Semantic Layer with YAML and Python

This article demonstrates building a minimal semantic layer using a YAML file and a Python script, querying 20 million NYC taxi records to illustrate its value. It clarifies when a semantic layer is truly beneficial and when it's overkill. The piece contrasts semantic layers with traditional databases, highlighting advantages in data governance, caching, secure access control, and LLM integration.

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Development semantic layer

Amazon Cloud Chief: Replacing Junior Workers with AI is 'One of the Dumbest Things'

2025-08-20
Amazon Cloud Chief: Replacing Junior Workers with AI is 'One of the Dumbest Things'

Amazon's cloud chief, Matt Garman, warns against replacing junior employees with AI, calling it "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard." He argues that junior employees are the most adept at utilizing AI tools and that cutting them would harm future talent pipelines. Garman advocates for continued hiring of graduates and training them in software development, problem-solving, and best practices. He emphasizes that critical thinking, creativity, and adaptability are more valuable than specialized skills in an AI-driven economy. This contrasts with some who believe AI can replace junior workers; data shows rising unemployment among 20-30 year olds in tech. However, others argue that young engineers offer fresh perspectives and quicker AI adoption.

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Tech

Major Internet Outage Hits Pakistan

2025-08-20
Major Internet Outage Hits Pakistan

A significant internet disruption hit Pakistan on Tuesday evening, reducing connectivity to a mere 20% of normal levels, according to NetBlocks, a global internet observatory. The outage, starting late in the evening, affected multiple regions, cutting off millions from online services. NetBlocks reported a major disruption impacting the backbone operator PTCL, significantly reducing national connectivity. As of late Tuesday night, neither PTCL nor the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) had offered an official explanation or restoration timeline. The outage disrupted businesses, banking, and communication, causing widespread frustration and concern on social media.

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Apple Shifts More iPhone 17 Production to India

2025-08-20
Apple Shifts More iPhone 17 Production to India

Bloomberg reports that Apple is increasingly shifting iPhone 17 production for the US market from China to India. For the first time, the entire iPhone 17 lineup will ship from India at launch. Apple is also working on an Indian-made successor to the iPhone 16E. This move aims to reduce reliance on Chinese manufacturing, though current exports to the US from India are tariff-exempt. However, iPhone sub-assemblies are largely still produced in China. Despite this, Apple announced a massive investment in US manufacturing. Conversely, the US administration plans to raise tariffs on India due to its purchase and sale of Russian oil.

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Tech

India's Demographic Time Advantage

2025-08-20
India's Demographic Time Advantage

Unlike China, which is rapidly aging, India boasts a decades-long demographic dividend. This gives it a significant time advantage in economic development. While India needs sustained high growth, it faces a less compressed timeline than China. The article highlights the need to boost female labor participation, higher education completion, and urban job creation to fully leverage this demographic dividend. Despite its reliance on Chinese technology in electronics manufacturing, India's time advantage allows it to absorb expertise and build indigenous capabilities.

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The Arrogant Ape: Rethinking Human Exceptionalism

2025-08-20
The Arrogant Ape: Rethinking Human Exceptionalism

This article challenges the limitations of anthropocentrism and its negative impacts on science, the environment, and animal welfare. The author uses numerous scientific examples to expose humanity's underestimation of animal capabilities and misjudgment of animal cognition and emotions, highlighting how humans often use themselves as a benchmark to measure other species, ignoring the diversity and unique abilities of different species. The author calls for abandoning the arrogance of anthropocentrism, viewing nature with awe, and adopting a more just and respectful attitude towards animals.

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Constant-Time Sliding Window Aggregation: A Refined FIFO

2025-08-20

This post presents a refined FIFO data structure enabling constant-time sliding window aggregation. Traditional approaches using dual-stack structures prove inefficient. The author introduces a novel method, cleverly managing 'ingestion' and 'excretion' lists with their running and suffix products, to achieve aggregation over arbitrary monoids with worst-case constant-time complexity. This avoids the extensive copying and redundancy of prior methods, offering significant practical advantages. Python code is included for implementation.

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(pvk.ca)
Development

Efficient Collaborative Text Editing: A CRDT Implementation

2025-08-20

This article presents a collaborative text editing algorithm based on CRDTs, similar to approaches used in popular libraries like Yjs and Automerge. Each character is assigned a unique identifier (site ID and clock), and a tree-based index with counters orders characters. Deletion involves adding the character's identifier to a deleted set (tombstones). Efficiency is boosted by optimizations such as merging successive inserts, storing blocks contiguously, and using a range-based representation for the deleted set. This ensures efficient handling of large text pastes and simultaneous edits.

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Development

Modern CI Systems Are Too Complex: Time to Merge Build and CI Systems?

2025-08-20

This article explores the complexity of modern continuous integration (CI) platforms. The author argues that current CI systems, such as GitHub Actions and GitLab CI, are overly powerful and have evolved into complex build systems, leading to fragmented build and CI system logic and low efficiency. The author proposes integrating CI functionality into build systems and uses Mozilla's Taskcluster as an example to illustrate a more powerful, task graph-based CI platform design. This design can unify build and CI processes, improve efficiency, and reduce complexity. However, the author also points out that this merger requires more advanced build systems and broader industry adoption, which may be difficult to achieve in the short term.

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Development

Intel's 18A Arm SoC: A Hail Mary to Attract Foundry Customers?

2025-08-20
Intel's 18A Arm SoC: A Hail Mary to Attract Foundry Customers?

Intel showcased a reference Arm-based SoC, "Deer Creek Falls," built on its 18A process. This chip features a tiered CPU core configuration similar to Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips, aiming to attract external customers, particularly within the Arm ecosystem. Intel Foundry is reportedly struggling to secure clients and may halt development of its 14A and future nodes without more. The video also revealed performance optimization tools, countering previous rumors of their absence. While 18A is closed to external customers, this SoC might demonstrate Intel's 14A readiness, potentially luring major players like Apple and NVIDIA.

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Hardware 18A process
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