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Psychedelics and Breathwork: A New Dawn for Mental Health Treatment?

2025-04-17

Psychedelics and Breathwork: A New Dawn for Mental Health Treatment?

Recent studies have shown promising results for psychedelic-assisted therapies, such as psilocybin and MDMA, in treating treatment-resistant depression and PTSD. Multiple clinical trials indicate substantial and sustained improvements. Concurrently, breathwork therapies, including Holotropic Breathwork, are gaining traction, with research suggesting effectiveness in alleviating stress, anxiety, and depression. These therapies appear to work by altering brain activity and neurotransmitter levels, thus impacting mood and mental state. While further research is needed to confirm efficacy and safety, these findings offer new hope for mental health treatment and open exciting avenues for exploring the mysteries of the brain and consciousness.

(www.nature.com)

AI psychedelic therapy breathwork therapy mental health treatment

Securely Manage Environment Variables with GPG-Encrypted Files

2025-04-17

Securely Manage Environment Variables with GPG-Encrypted Files

This shell tool provides a secure way to manage environment variables using GPG-encrypted files. It addresses the common issue of command-line tools needing environment variables containing sensitive information stored in unencrypted shell files. The tool allows users to read secrets from encrypted files and easily switch between different accounts. It supports nested logins, updates the `SECRET_LOGIN` environment variable, and modifies the shell prompt to display the current login. Autocomplete for available filenames is also included.

(github.com)

Development Shell tool GPG encryption

After a Brain Aneurysm, My Inner Monologue Vanished

2025-04-17

After a Brain Aneurysm, My Inner Monologue Vanished

A mishap after a karaoke performance led to the author's brain aneurysm rupturing and bleeding. Upon waking, she discovered she'd lost her ability to read and developed aphasia. Surprisingly, however, she felt no pain or anxiety, instead entering a state of serenity she calls "the Quiet." This "Quiet" wasn't simply silence but a new way of perceiving the world; her perception of her surroundings sharpened, yet lacked specific categories and dimensions. With the help of a speech therapist, she gradually regained her language abilities, but also realized this experience transformed her understanding of herself and the world.

(nautil.us)

Misc brain injury aphasia altered consciousness

Google Found Guilty of Antitrust Violations Again: Ad Tech Empire Under Siege

2025-04-17

Google Found Guilty of Antitrust Violations Again: Ad Tech Empire Under Siege

A federal judge has ruled that Google illegally exploited its online marketing technology to boost profits, marking the second antitrust violation against the tech giant in less than a year. The ruling centers on Google's dominant position in ad tech, accusing the company of manipulating prices and harming competition. While Google plans to appeal, the decision could force the sale of parts of its advertising technology, significantly impacting its massive advertising empire. This case highlights the complexities of Google's advertising ecosystem built over a decade of acquisitions, with repercussions felt throughout the online advertising industry.

(apnews.com)

Tech Ad Tech

Mux: Democratizing Video for Developers

2025-04-17

Mux: Democratizing Video for Developers

Mux is building video infrastructure for developers, aiming to democratize video by tackling the hard problems of video encoding, streaming (Mux Video), and monitoring (Mux Data). Backed by top investors like Coatue and Accel, and boasting a team with experience from Google, YouTube, and Twitch, Mux serves a diverse clientele ranging from startups to established companies like Reddit and Vimeo. They also host Demuxed, the leading conference for video engineers.

(mux.com)

Development video development cloud video video infrastructure

Val: An Arbitrary-Precision Calculator Language

2025-04-17

Val: An Arbitrary-Precision Calculator Language

Val is a simple arbitrary-precision calculator language built on top of chumsky and ariadne. It runs on Linux, MacOS, BSDs, and Windows. Installation is easy via Cargo, or pre-built binaries are available. Val features a command-line interface and REPL with syntax highlighting, persistent history, and emacs-style editing. The language supports functions, loops, conditionals, and a rich set of built-in functions covering arithmetic, logical, comparison, and collection operations. Data types include numbers, booleans, strings, and lists.

(github.com)

Development

Meta's Antitrust Trial: Redacted Slides Spark Fury From Competitors

2025-04-17

Meta's Antitrust Trial: Redacted Slides Spark Fury From Competitors

Meta's antitrust trial took a turn today as Apple, Google, and Snap expressed outrage over easily removed redactions in slides presented by Meta. The tech giants accused Meta of negligence, jeopardizing confidential information and raising concerns about Meta's commitment to data security. While the revealed information itself wasn't particularly sensitive—internal assessments of user preferences and competitor success—the competitors focused on Meta's apparent carelessness and potential strategic implications. Snap's attorney even hinted at the possibility of Meta using the trial to gain intelligence on its rivals.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech

ChatGPT's New Image-Reasoning Models Raise Privacy Concerns

2025-04-17

ChatGPT's New Image-Reasoning Models Raise Privacy Concerns

OpenAI's latest AI models, o3 and o4-mini, can accurately pinpoint the location of photos based on visual clues, even identifying specific restaurants and bars. This capability, showcased on social media, has sparked concerns about privacy risks, as malicious actors could potentially use it for doxxing. Tests reveal that even older models like GPT-4o exhibit similar location-guessing abilities, although o3 sometimes surpasses it. While not flawless, with instances of incorrect guesses and system failures, o3's performance highlights the emerging risks of powerful AI reasoning models. OpenAI hasn't yet addressed these concerns in their safety report.

(techcrunch.com)

AI

Synology Locks Down Plus Series NAS to Proprietary Hard Drives

2025-04-17

Synology Locks Down Plus Series NAS to Proprietary Hard Drives

Synology's new Plus Series NAS systems, aimed at SMBs and advanced home users, now require the use of Synology-branded hard drives to access the full feature set. While non-Synology drives can be used for storage, crucial features like drive health monitoring, deduplication, lifespan analysis, and automatic firmware updates are disabled. This move, justified by Synology as improving performance and reliability and mitigating risks like recent Seagate fraudulent HDD issues, forces users to buy directly from Synology or certified suppliers. This limits choice and potentially increases costs for smaller businesses. A workaround exists by migrating drives from older systems, but this isn't practical for most users.

(www.tomshardware.com)

Hardware

Google Unveils Gemini 2.5 Flash: A Controllable Reasoning AI Model

2025-04-17

Google Unveils Gemini 2.5 Flash: A Controllable Reasoning AI Model

Google has released Gemini 2.5 Flash, a new large language model featuring controllable reasoning capabilities. Building upon the popular 2.0 Flash, it significantly improves reasoning while prioritizing speed and cost-effectiveness. Developers can adjust a 'thinking budget' to balance quality, cost, and latency. The model automatically adjusts its thinking process based on prompt complexity, offering modes ranging from no thinking to intensive reasoning. Gemini 2.5 Flash excels on LMArena's Hard Prompts, boasting a superior price-to-performance ratio, making it one of the most cost-effective thinking models available.

(developers.googleblog.com)

AI Controllable Reasoning

arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaboration

2025-04-17

arXivLabs is a framework enabling collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on the website. Individuals and organizations involved embrace arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only partners with those who share them. Have an idea to enhance the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

(arxiv.org)

Tech

AGI in 2045? Founders of Mechanize Bet on Explosive Economic Growth, Not an Intelligence Explosion

2025-04-17

AGI in 2045? Founders of Mechanize Bet on Explosive Economic Growth, Not an Intelligence Explosion

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu, co-founders of Mechanize, a startup focused on fully automating work. They offer a contrarian view on AI timelines, downplaying the likelihood of an 'intelligence explosion' and emphasizing instead the potential for explosive economic growth driven by AI. They argue that progress requires broad technological advancements across multiple sectors, not just increased computing power. While they predict full automation of remote work by 2045, they believe AI will fundamentally reshape the global economy and societal norms.

(www.dwarkesh.com)

Tech

UniK3D: Universal Camera Monocular 3D Estimation

2025-04-17

UniK3D revolutionizes monocular 3D reconstruction by accurately estimating metric 3D scenes from single images, regardless of camera type. Unlike previous methods reliant on simplified assumptions, UniK3D directly predicts 3D points without extra information. Its key innovation lies in a spherical 3D representation and a novel camera representation, overcoming limitations of traditional approaches in wide-angle and panoramic settings. Zero-shot evaluation across 13 diverse datasets demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in 3D, depth, and camera metrics, particularly excelling in challenging large field-of-view scenarios. Code and models are available on GitHub.

(lpiccinelli-eth.github.io)

AI

Reversing Biological Time: Shinya Yamanaka and iPS Cells

2025-04-17

Reversing Biological Time: Shinya Yamanaka and iPS Cells

This article recounts the journey of Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka, who, driven by his father's death from an incurable disease, transitioned from orthopedic surgery to medical research. Through ingenious experimentation and relentless perseverance, he successfully reprogrammed adult cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), a groundbreaking achievement that earned him the Nobel Prize and revolutionized disease research and treatment. The article details the scientific process, highlighting the challenges and rigorous validation required to establish the iPS cell's capabilities.

(nehalslearnings.substack.com)

Tech

Taming iCalendar Recurring Events with Distance Functions

2025-04-17

The author encountered a challenge in handling recurring events while implementing a library for processing iCalendar files. iCalendar uses complex rules to define recurring events, and traditional implementations typically involve writing a lot of specific logic for different frequencies and parameters. The author took a different approach, viewing recurrence rules as SQL queries and borrowing ideas from signed distance functions (SDFs) in computer graphics, representing event occurrences using distance functions. This method decomposes complex rules into simple distance functions, iteratively calculating event occurrence times to avoid numerous conditional judgments, resulting in cleaner and easier-to-maintain code. Although the initial implementation wasn't very efficient, the author optimized it to handle complex recurrence rules in milliseconds.

(pwy.io)

Development recurring events distance functions

Access Top AI Models from OpenAI, Google, and More

2025-04-17

Access Top AI Models from OpenAI, Google, and More

A new platform offers one-stop access to cutting-edge AI models from leading companies like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Mistral, and Meta. This includes models such as ChatGPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and Llama, allowing users to explore the unique capabilities of each. This signifies a major leap in accessibility to top-tier AI technology, opening up new possibilities for developers and researchers.

(zuni.app)

AI

TypeScript: Object Parameters vs. Individual Parameters

2025-04-17

When writing functions in TypeScript, you can pass arguments individually or group them into an object. This article argues that object parameters are superior. Individual parameters lead to ambiguity and maintainability issues as the number of parameters increases. Object parameters, like `{firstName: "John", lastName: "Doe", age: 28, isActive: true}`, offer clarity, self-documentation, and leverage TypeScript's autocompletion and type safety features.

(www.carlos-menezes.com)

Development function parameters

Dishwasher Wars: A Modern Domestic Conflict

2025-04-17

Dishwasher Wars: A Modern Domestic Conflict

This article explores the surprisingly contentious issue of dishwasher loading. The author recounts their personal struggles and the widespread anxiety surrounding proper technique, revealing it's not just about clean dishes, but also reflects deeper issues of efficiency, space optimization, cleanliness, and shared household responsibilities. Interviews with experts unpack the impact of technological changes on our expectations and offer practical tips for optimal loading. Ultimately, the piece advocates for understanding and respecting the labor involved in maintaining a home, rather than fixating on perfection.

(www.theatlantic.com)

Misc household conflict dishwasher technology and domesticity

Jane Jacobs: Rebellious Prophet of Urban Planning

2025-04-17

This article delves into the life and work of Jane Jacobs, a legendary figure whose book, *The Death and Life of Great American Cities*, revolutionized urban planning. Known for her insightful observations of traditional urban fabric and sharp critiques of modern urban renewal, Jacobs championed mixed-use zoning, short blocks, and other principles, successfully thwarting destructive projects in New York. However, the article also highlights limitations in Jacobs's thinking, such as an overemphasis on street layouts while neglecting socioeconomic factors. Ultimately, the piece argues that understanding the complexities of urban development requires considering diverse perspectives, including the contributions of Jacobs, Mumford, and even Moses.

(salmagundi.skidmore.edu)

Design

Milwaukee M18 Battery Teardown: A Battle with 0402 Components

2025-04-17

This detailed blog post documents a multi-month reverse engineering project of discarded Milwaukee M18 batteries. The author faced numerous challenges, from disassembling the battery casing and identifying tiny components like Texas Instruments MSP430G2744 microcontroller and BQ76925 battery monitor IC, to meticulously mapping the circuit board and deciphering the communication protocol between the battery and charger. The author shares their findings, including the surprising lack of cell balancing and details of the 2000 baud communication protocol. This is a fascinating deep dive into hardware reverse engineering, perfect for those interested in the intricacies of battery technology and electronics.

(quagmirerepair.com)

Hardware battery

Write and Transaction Support in SQLite Virtual Tables

2025-04-17

This post delves into the implementation details of write and transaction support in SQLite virtual tables. By implementing hooks like xUpdate, xBegin, xSync, xCommit, and xRollback, virtual tables can support write operations and ensure transactional integrity. The article explains how SQLite's rollback journal and super-journal mechanisms coordinate atomic commits in both single and multi-database scenarios, and how virtual tables participate in this two-phase commit protocol. The author emphasizes that durability must be handled in xSync, while xCommit and xRollback should only perform idempotent cleanup operations, avoiding any operations that could fail.

(misfra.me)

Development Virtual Tables Transactions

Redefining 'e' with Pre-Calculus: An Intuitive Approach

2025-04-17

This article elegantly redefines the natural logarithm base 'e' using pre-calculus, rather than calculus. It leverages geometric intuition, explaining that all exponential curves (with positive real bases) are horizontal stretches of a single curve. By calculating the slope of the tangent line at x=0, it approximates 'e' and further proves that the tangent slope of eˣ is always equal to its y-value, mirroring the derivative concept in calculus. Finally, it visually demonstrates the equivalence of this definition with the compound interest limit, providing a more intuitive and accessible understanding of 'e'.

(www.poshenloh.com)

Misc pre-calculus

Snapchat's Internal Emails Reveal 10,000+ Monthly Sextortion Reports

2025-04-17

Snapchat's Internal Emails Reveal 10,000+ Monthly Sextortion Reports

Internal Snap Inc. emails revealed that the company receives approximately 10,000 sextortion reports monthly—a figure likely representing only a fraction of the problem. This article investigates Snapchat's impact on teenagers, examining court cases and internal documents detailing widespread harm. These include addictive design, drug and gun sales, CSAM, sextortion, offline sexual assault, and cyberbullying. Snap insiders acknowledge these issues but demonstrate slow responses and ineffective mitigation. The article calls for Snap to implement design changes to protect its young users.

(www.afterbabel.com)

Tech sextortion teen safety

AgentAPI: A Unified HTTP API for Controlling Coding Agents

2025-04-17

AgentAPI: A Unified HTTP API for Controlling Coding Agents

AgentAPI is a powerful HTTP API designed to control coding AI agents like Claude Code, Goose, Aider, and Codex. It provides a unified chat interface, enabling interaction through simple API calls. Users can even build an MCP server where one agent controls another. AgentAPI automatically handles terminal output, removing clutter and parsing it into individual messages, simplifying interaction. While official SDKs from LLMs may emerge, AgentAPI aims to be a universal adapter, allowing developers to easily switch between coding AI agents.

(github.com)

Development

Ubuntu 25.04: Plucky Puffin Soars with Performance and Security Enhancements

2025-04-17

Ubuntu 25.04: Plucky Puffin Soars with Performance and Security Enhancements

Canonical has released Ubuntu 25.04, codenamed "Plucky Puffin," featuring GNOME 48, improved installation and boot experience, and a new "devpack" for the Spring framework. This release boasts performance improvements for AI workloads on Intel GPUs and support for confidential computing using AMD SEV-SNP. The Linux 6.14 kernel includes improved scheduling and a new NTSYNC driver for better Windows game performance on Wine and Proton. Ubuntu 25.04 also includes the latest toolchains, enhanced manageability and networking controls, and expanded support for Intel Core Ultra processors and ARM64 hardware.

(canonical.com)

Development

OpenAI's Top Safety Officer Steps Down Amidst Safety Concerns

2025-04-17

OpenAI's Top Safety Officer Steps Down Amidst Safety Concerns

OpenAI's head of preparedness, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, recently stepped down from his role and transitioned to an internal internship. This follows a series of high-profile departures from OpenAI's safety teams, restructuring of the safety organization, and reports of reduced safety testing times. The events raise concerns about OpenAI's commitment to AI safety, particularly given the company's recent release of GPT-4.1 without a safety report and reports of shortened safety testing periods. The situation highlights a potential prioritization of product release over safety considerations, contrasting with OpenAI's previous public commitments and sparking broader discussions about AI safety regulation.

(garrisonlovely.substack.com)

AI

Microsoft's Giant 1-Bit AI Model: Impressive Performance, Limited Compatibility

2025-04-17

Microsoft researchers unveiled BitNet b1.58 2B4T, a groundbreaking 2-billion parameter 1-bit AI model. Trained on a massive dataset, it outperforms comparable models from Meta, Google, and Alibaba on benchmarks like GSM8K and PIQA, boasting double the speed and significantly lower memory usage. Surprisingly, it runs on CPUs, including Apple's M2. However, its reliance on Microsoft's custom bitnet.cpp framework, currently incompatible with GPUs, limits its broad adoption. While promising for resource-constrained devices, compatibility remains a major hurdle.

(techcrunch.com)

AI 1-bit AI

Meta Blocks Apple Intelligence in its iOS Apps

2025-04-17

Meta Blocks Apple Intelligence in its iOS Apps

Apple's Apple Intelligence, introduced with iOS 18.1, is facing limitations due to Meta's refusal to integrate it into its apps. Features like Writing Tools and Genmoji are unavailable in Meta apps including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Threads. Speculation points to Meta promoting its own Meta AI as the reason. A previous partnership discussion between Apple and Meta to integrate Meta's Llama language model into Apple Intelligence failed due to disagreements over privacy policies. This leaves iOS users without access to Apple Intelligence's convenient features within Meta's popular apps.

(9to5mac.com)

Tech

OpenAI's Memory Upgrade: A Transformative Leap for AI

2025-04-17

OpenAI's Memory Upgrade: A Transformative Leap for AI

OpenAI's memory upgrades mark the start of what may be the most transformative shift since GPT-3's debut. Previously, AI felt like a brilliant but forgetful friend. Now, memory changes everything. AI will remember your habits, thought patterns, and preferences, becoming a lifelong companion and assistant. This will lead to massive productivity gains and challenge the conventional wisdom that AI lacks defensibility. OpenAI might launch a "Sign in with OpenAI" product, allowing third-party developers to directly access its memory layer, building more powerful applications. The competition will center around memory; whoever captures it faster wins.

(jeffmorrisjr.substack.com)

AI AI memory

Spice Up Your Slack Emojis with HDR

2025-04-17

Want to make your Slack reactions pop? Learn how to add HDR to your emojis! Using a simple ImageMagick script, you can transform standard emojis into HDR versions for eye-catching brightness on supporting hardware (like iPhones). Android support is currently lacking. You'll need to install ImageMagick and download the 2020_profile.icc profile. The `Multiply` value in the script adjusts brightness and color balance.

(sharpletters.net)

Misc

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