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PayPal Launches Revolutionary Peer-to-Peer Payment Links

2025-09-16
PayPal Launches Revolutionary Peer-to-Peer Payment Links

PayPal has unveiled PayPal links, a new feature allowing users to send and receive money via personalized, one-time-use links shareable across various platforms. This simplifies P2P payments, making it as easy as sending a text. Initially launched in the US, it's expanding to the UK, Italy, and other markets. Furthermore, PayPal will soon integrate cryptocurrencies directly into its P2P flow, enabling users to send Bitcoin, Ethereum, PYUSD, and more. This innovation aims to enhance user experience, attract new customers, and solidify PayPal's position in the global payment landscape.

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(newsroom.paypal-corp.com)
Tech P2P Payments Crypto Integration

Running a Web Server on a Disposable Vape

2025-09-15
Running a Web Server on a Disposable Vape

The author collected a bunch of disposable vapes and discovered a programmable ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller inside. By cleverly leveraging semihosting, SLIP protocol, and the uIP protocol stack, the author successfully built a fully functional web server on this microcontroller, even including a JSON API endpoint. Despite limited resources, after optimization, the server's performance is surprisingly good, with a ping response time of only 20ms and significantly improved webpage loading speed. This is a highly creative project showcasing the endless possibilities of embedded systems development.

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(bogdanthegeek.github.io)
Tech web server

React's Default Dominance Stifles Frontend Innovation

2025-09-15
React's Default Dominance Stifles Frontend Innovation

React's dominance in the frontend landscape isn't due to technical superiority but rather a default preference, hindering innovation. Teams often default to React without considering project-specific needs, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. Frameworks like Svelte, Solid, and Qwik, offering superior compile-time optimizations, fine-grained reactivity, and resumability, struggle for adoption. The author argues that this default mindset prevents fair evaluation and urges a shift toward choosing frameworks based on merit, fostering diversity and ultimately, greater innovation in the frontend ecosystem.

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(www.lorenstew.art)
Development Frontend Frameworks

CubeSats: Democratizing Space Exploration with Tiny Satellites

2025-09-15

This article explores CubeSats, miniature satellites often powered by Raspberry Pis or microcontrollers. It delves into their construction, building methods, and showcases projects like the MySat kit and RASCube. The author interviews team members involved in the SilverSat CubeSat launch and a satellite tracking expert. CubeSats lower the barrier to entry for space exploration, offering valuable learning and hands-on opportunities for students and enthusiasts, highlighting the allure of technological innovation.

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(www.jeffgeerling.com)
Tech CubeSats

Air Pollution: The Silent Brain Thief

2025-09-15
Air Pollution: The Silent Brain Thief

While the detrimental effects of air pollution on lung and heart health have long been known, recent research highlights its significant impact on brain health. Studies show that air pollutants, such as PM2.5, can lead to abnormal fetal brain development and increase the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders like autism, ADHD, and schizophrenia, as well as neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Air pollutants affect brain structure and function through mechanisms like inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and glutamate dysregulation. While complete avoidance is difficult, reducing exposure, such as minimizing ventilation during poor air quality and using air purifiers, can mitigate risks.

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(neurofrontiers.blog)
Tech neurological disorders

Is the Culture a Utopia? A Critical Look at Iain M. Banks' Galactic Civilization

2025-09-15
Is the Culture a Utopia? A Critical Look at Iain M. Banks' Galactic Civilization

This article offers a critical analysis of the utopian superintelligence civilization depicted in Iain M. Banks' Culture series. The author argues that the seemingly utopian Culture maintains a seemingly harmonious yet fundamentally unfree society through subtle control mechanisms. The homogeneity of Culture citizens, strict birthrate control, and skepticism toward the 'Special Circumstances' program all point to underlying social manipulation. The seemingly benevolent superintelligent Minds maintain control through force and surveillance, and their motivations and actions contain many contradictions. Ultimately, the author contends that the Culture's 'utopia' is fundamentally built on material wealth and technological advancement, neglecting higher-level human needs for justice and self-determination. The author encourages more nuanced positive sci-fi that moves beyond simple promises of material abundance.

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(www.boristhebrave.com)
Misc

Mac App Store's AI Chat App Clone Frenzy

2025-09-15
Mac App Store's AI Chat App Clone Frenzy

Searching for "AI chat" on the Mac App Store reveals a comical abundance of ChatGPT lookalike app icons. These apps have nearly identical icons with subtle differences, and their names are equally creative, like "Al Chatbot." The irony? The official ChatGPT desktop app isn't even on the Mac App Store; it's only available from OpenAI's website. This highlights potential weaknesses in the App Store's review process and the opportunistic behavior of developers capitalizing on popular trends.

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(blog.jim-nielsen.com)
Development AI chat apps clone apps

London Suburb Dweller's Megawatt-Hour Battery Dream

2025-09-15
London Suburb Dweller's Megawatt-Hour Battery Dream

A London suburban resident attempts to calculate the battery size needed for complete home energy self-sufficiency. Using data from their solar panels (generating 3800 kWh annually, matching their consumption), and years of data analysis, they find a massive 1068 kWh (nearly a megawatt-hour) battery is required to store summer's excess energy for winter use. While currently unrealistic due to technology and cost, they remain optimistic about future battery technology advancements and price drops, envisioning a future where every home has such a battery, achieving complete solar self-sufficiency.

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(shkspr.mobi)
Tech batteries energy self-sufficiency

Seeking Light in the Darkness of Saskatchewan

2025-09-15
Seeking Light in the Darkness of Saskatchewan

While living in Regina, Saskatchewan, the author developed a fascination with the early morning darkness, intertwined with his unique appreciation for the city's emptiness and crime. A chance encounter with a dark-sky preserve in Ontario led him to Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan to experience true darkness. There, he witnessed a breathtaking starry sky and reflected on the ecological and cultural impacts of light pollution, and the significance of dark sky preservation for humanity's future.

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(harpers.org)
Misc dark-sky preserve

Stop AI-Shaming Em Dashes!

2025-09-15
Stop AI-Shaming Em Dashes!

This article vehemently refutes the notion that frequent use of em dashes signifies AI-generated text. The author argues that em dashes are an elegant and flexible punctuation mark reflecting the fluidity and complexity of human thought. Equating em dashes with AI writing not only misinterprets their function but also stifles the diversity and creativity of human writing. The author points out that the presence of em dashes in AI-generated text highlights AI's reliance on human writing. Protecting the use of em dashes is also about protecting the unique charm of human writing.

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(www.theringer.com)
Misc

The $10 Chargeback That Cost $43.95: A SaaS Nightmare

2025-09-15
The $10 Chargeback That Cost $43.95: A SaaS Nightmare

A SaaS company shares its frustrating experience with chargebacks. Despite proactive measures like pre-subscription notifications and easy cancellation options, customers still initiate disputes. The problem isn't just the lost revenue; even winning a dispute incurs fees, making small chargebacks disproportionately costly. The author details a $10 charge that resulted in a $43.95 loss, highlighting the unfairness of the system where banks often side with cardholders regardless of evidence. The company's efforts to fight disputes are questioned due to the lack of responsiveness and effectiveness from both banks and payment processors.

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(medium.com)
Startup chargebacks payment disputes

Goodbye Tedious `systemctl` Commands: fzf-Powered Shell Aliases and Functions

2025-09-15
Goodbye Tedious `systemctl` Commands: fzf-Powered Shell Aliases and Functions

Tired of typing lengthy `systemctl` commands? This post introduces a set of fzf-powered shell aliases and functions for efficient systemd service management. Leveraging fzf's fuzzy-finding capabilities, it simplifies `systemctl` and `journalctl` into short, memorable commands, automatically handles errors and logs, significantly boosting efficiency, especially on resource-constrained devices.

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(silverrainz.me)
Development

Giant Wind Turbine Blades: Airlifting the Future of Clean Energy

2025-09-15
Giant Wind Turbine Blades: Airlifting the Future of Clean Energy

The ever-growing demand for clean energy has led to the development of larger wind turbines, but transporting their massive blades has become a major hurdle. Radia, a Boulder, Colorado-based company, has a bold solution: building the world's largest airplane, WindRunner, dedicated to airlifting these gigantic components. Scheduled for delivery by 2030, WindRunner will boast a wingspan exceeding a football field's length, dwarfing a 747's cargo capacity by a factor of 12. Capable of carrying blades up to 105 meters long, it will land on makeshift runways near wind farms. This innovative approach aims to overcome infrastructural limitations, reduce the cost of large-scale wind energy, and significantly boost efficiency. While carbon emissions pose a challenge, Radia believes the increased clean energy generation will far outweigh its environmental footprint.

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(spectrum.ieee.org)
Tech air transportation

Amish Men Live Longer: A Study Reveals the Secret

2025-09-15

A study reveals that Amish men in Holmes County, Ohio, live an average of five years longer than white men in Ohio, with Amish farmers exhibiting even greater longevity. Researchers suggest this remarkable lifespan may be attributed to their high levels of physical activity associated with their farming lifestyle, offering a compelling case study on the link between physical labor and longevity.

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(plainanabaptistjournal.org)
Misc Amish physical activity

LLM in Pure Rust: RustGPT-demo-zoon

2025-09-15
LLM in Pure Rust: RustGPT-demo-zoon

RustGPT-demo-zoon demonstrates building a transformer-based language model entirely in Rust, using only ndarray for matrix operations. It features pre-training on factual statements and instruction tuning for conversational AI. The model boasts interactive chat capabilities, answering questions like "How do mountains form?" The modular codebase, comprehensive testing, and lack of external ML frameworks make it ideal for learning how modern LLMs work.

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(github.com)
Development

Liquid Uranium Rocket Engine Could Enable Year-Long Mars Trips

2025-09-15
Liquid Uranium Rocket Engine Could Enable Year-Long Mars Trips

Engineers at Ohio State University are developing a revolutionary nuclear thermal rocket engine using liquid uranium. This centrifugal nuclear thermal rocket (CNTR) promises significantly faster and more efficient space travel, potentially enabling round trips to Mars within a single year. By directly heating propellant with liquid uranium, the CNTR boasts higher specific impulse (potentially exceeding 900 seconds) than traditional chemical or other nuclear engines, allowing for longer distances with less fuel. While still in its early stages and facing engineering challenges, the CNTR represents a significant leap towards faster, more efficient deep space exploration.

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(gizmodo.com)
Tech nuclear propulsion

Zstandard's --long Mode: A Genome Compression Breakthrough

2025-09-15

Zstandard's --long range match finder significantly improves compression for large files by increasing the search window. Testing on a 2.6Tbp dataset of 661,405 bacterial genomes showed default Zstandard achieving a compression ratio of only 3. Enabling --long mode modestly improved this to 4. However, removing newlines from the FASTA files dramatically boosted the ratio to 31, approaching the performance of specialized DNA compressors, reducing the file size to 80GB. While compression time increased slightly, this efficiency gain represents a valuable optimization for handling large genomic datasets.

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(log.bede.im)
Tech genome compression

Pi is not Constant: Exploring π in Non-Euclidean Spaces

2025-09-15
Pi is not Constant: Exploring π in Non-Euclidean Spaces

This article explores the value of pi (π) in various metric spaces. By altering the distance formula in Euclidean geometry, a series of non-Euclidean spaces are constructed, and the ratio of circumference to diameter of 'circles' in these spaces is calculated. The results show that while in standard Euclidean space (n=2), π is approximately 3.14159, its value changes in other spaces. For instance, in taxicab geometry (n=1) and Chebyshev distance (n→∞), π equals 4. This demonstrates that π's value isn't constant but depends on the underlying geometry of the space.

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(lcamtuf.substack.com)
Misc Non-Euclidean Geometry

India's IT Sector: An AI-Driven Exodus

2025-09-15
India's IT Sector: An AI-Driven Exodus

India's $250 billion technology services industry, built on a foundation of low-cost engineering graduates, faces a structural crisis. AI is rapidly automating entry-level roles, the very training ground for generations of programmers. This impacts a sector employing 5.4 million, contributing 8% to India's GDP, and a crucial pillar of its middle class. Major IT firms are drastically reducing hiring and even laying off workers, contrasting sharply with an annual workforce increase of 8-9 million. While AI boosts productivity, profit margins remain stagnant due to price pressures and a shift towards higher-cost onshore consulting. India faces a challenge: pivot towards labor-intensive sectors and adapt education to AI-related skills, or risk massive youth unemployment.

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(indiadispatch.com)
Tech India IT

American Auto Loan Crisis: $1.66 Trillion in Debt and Rising Defaults

2025-09-15
American Auto Loan Crisis: $1.66 Trillion in Debt and Rising Defaults

US auto loan debt has reached a staggering $1.66 trillion, with delinquencies, defaults, and repossessions surging to levels surpassing even those seen before the 2008 financial crisis. High monthly payments (averaging $745, with 20% of buyers paying over $1000) and the impending expiration of the EV tax credit are straining borrowers, even those with good credit. The Consumer Federation of America warns this could signal a broader economic crisis. The article concludes by suggesting consumers make responsible financial choices to avoid such debt traps.

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(www.carscoops.com)
Tech auto loans

GUARDIAN: AI-Powered Tsunami Early Warning System

2025-09-15
GUARDIAN: AI-Powered Tsunami Early Warning System

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has developed GUARDIAN, an AI-powered system that uses data from over 350 continuously operating GNSS ground stations worldwide to provide early warnings for tsunamis. By identifying atmospheric distortions caused by tsunamis, GUARDIAN can, in ideal scenarios, give coastal communities up to 1 hour and 20 minutes of warning time, saving lives and property. GUARDIAN's advantage lies in its ability to detect tsunamis regardless of their cause, alerting authorities to dangerous waves generated by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, or other events.

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(www.jpl.nasa.gov)
AI Tsunami Warning

Coreboot on AMD Turin: A Firmware Showdown

2025-09-15

Running Coreboot on the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 motherboard with AMD's newest Turin server processor presented unexpected challenges. AMD's provided firmware blobs proved insufficient to release the CPU from a PSP reset. A workaround involving injecting Coreboot into the vendor firmware and flashing it back was implemented, but this wasn't ideal. The article delves into the AMD PSP firmware structure, including EFS, PSP, and BIOS directories, detailing how comparing vendor and Coreboot firmware differences, specifically fixing SPI speeds, eSPI configuration, and Multi Gen EFS values, led to successful booting. However, using public PSP blobs failed due to a differing root key. The authors discovered flawed firmware from AMD and have submitted a fix request. Finally, using official firmware from the Turin PI package achieved successful booting.

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(blog.3mdeb.com)
Development

Gentoo Bans AI-Generated Contributions

2025-09-15

The Gentoo Council voted on April 14th to prohibit contributions created using AI natural language processing tools. This policy addresses copyright, quality, and ethical concerns. While AI-related software packages are permitted, directly using AI-generated code is banned due to potential copyright infringement, the risk of low-quality or nonsensical output, and ethical issues surrounding AI model training (e.g., copyright violations, high energy consumption). The policy aims to maintain the quality and integrity of Gentoo projects.

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(wiki.gentoo.org)
Development

Learning Lens Blur Fields: Unveiling Subtle Optical Differences in Smartphones

2025-09-15

Researchers introduce a novel method for representing lens blur using a multilayer perceptron (MLP), accurately capturing variations in the 2D point spread function (PSF) across image-plane location, focus setting, and depth. By modeling smartphones and DSLRs, they've created the first dataset of 5D blur fields, revealing—for the first time—subtle optical differences between seemingly identical phone models. This technology enables differentiating phone optics, image deblurring, and rendering more realistic blur effects, opening exciting applications.

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(blur-fields.github.io)
AI

Page Objects: Making Your UI Tests Less Brittle

2025-09-15
Page Objects: Making Your UI Tests Less Brittle

Testing web pages requires interacting with elements, but directly manipulating HTML makes tests fragile. Page Objects solve this by encapsulating a page or fragment as an application-specific API. This allows interacting with elements without directly accessing HTML. The goal is to mimic user actions, providing a clean interface that hides underlying widgets. Text fields use string accessors, checkboxes booleans, and buttons action-oriented methods. Good Page Objects model the user's perspective, not the UI's internal structure, returning basic data types or other Page Objects. There's debate on including assertions within Page Objects. The author prefers keeping assertions in test scripts, avoiding bloated Page Objects and using assertion libraries to reduce redundancy. This pattern works across various UI technologies, useful not just for testing but also as a scripting interface for applications.

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(martinfowler.com)
Development Page Objects

Titania: A Teaching Language for Compiler Development

2025-09-15
Titania: A Teaching Language for Compiler Development

Titania, based on the Oberon-07 language by Niklaus Wirth, is designed as an educational tool for learning compiler development. Its clean syntax covers core concepts like modules, procedures, and data types, and it includes built-in functions for numerical operations, bit manipulation, and memory management. Learning Titania provides a deep understanding of compiler principles and language design.

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(github.com)
Development compiler development

Building a 1U Rackmount Trigger Crossbar: A Tale of Woes and Triumphs

2025-09-15

The author details the design and construction of a custom 1U rackmount trigger crossbar for synchronizing multiple instruments in their electronics lab. Built around an FPGA and MCU, the device boasts numerous trigger I/O ports and an Ethernet SCPI interface. The journey, however, was fraught with challenges: power supply issues, soldering mishaps, an FPGA flash pinout error, and even the need for mini-mill surgery on the PCB. Despite these hurdles, the device is now operational, controllable via SSH and SCPI, and serves as a valuable lesson in hardware development.

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(serd.es)
Hardware

The Secret Language of Movie Poster Colors: A Data-Driven Analysis

2025-09-15
The Secret Language of Movie Poster Colors: A Data-Driven Analysis

An analysis of nearly 60,000 movie posters reveals a fascinating correlation between film genre and color palette. Orange emerges as the most frequently used color, often paired with yellow in comedies, adventures, and family films to evoke warmth and fun. Action, sci-fi, and thrillers utilize the contrast between orange and blue to emphasize spectacle and conflict. Red is prevalent across horror, action, and romance, but its meaning shifts depending on context. Blue frequently represents oceanic or atmospheric settings, while green dominates in animation, family, and adventure films. Purple and pink often signal unconventional films, highlighting their unique style. This research provides data-backed insights for movie poster design, revealing the patterns of color usage across different genres.

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(stephenfollows.com)
Design movie posters color analysis film genre

Grapevine Canes: A Sustainable Solution to Plastic Pollution?

2025-09-15
Grapevine Canes: A Sustainable Solution to Plastic Pollution?

Researchers at South Dakota State University have developed a plastic-like material from grapevine canes that is stronger than traditional plastic and biodegrades in just 17 days. This breakthrough addresses the urgent need for biodegradable packaging, tackling the pervasive issue of plastic waste and microplastics in the environment. The resulting films, made from the cellulose in grapevine canes, are transparent, strong, and leave no harmful residue after decomposition, offering a promising sustainable alternative to conventional plastics.

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(www.sdstate.edu)
Tech biodegradable plastic
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