Janus-Pro-7B: A Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Model

2025-01-27
Janus-Pro-7B: A Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation Model

DeepSeek introduces Janus-Pro-7B, a novel autoregressive framework unifying multimodal understanding and generation. Unlike previous approaches, Janus-Pro cleverly decouples visual encoding, enabling efficient processing within a single transformer architecture. This decoupling not only resolves the conflict between the visual encoder's roles in understanding and generation but also enhances the framework's flexibility. Janus-Pro surpasses previous unified models and matches or exceeds the performance of task-specific models. Its simplicity, high flexibility, and effectiveness make it a strong contender for next-generation unified multimodal models.

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AI

A Java JIT Compiler and Runtime in Common Lisp: OpenLDK

2025-02-06
A Java JIT Compiler and Runtime in Common Lisp: OpenLDK

OpenLDK is a Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler and runtime environment for Java, implemented entirely in Common Lisp. It bridges the gap between Java and Common Lisp by incrementally translating Java bytecode into Lisp, then compiling it into native machine code. This unique approach allows seamless mapping of Java classes to Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) classes, enabling effortless integration between Java and Common Lisp codebases. While not designed for high performance, OpenLDK offers a practical solution for integrating Java libraries into a Lisp workflow. Currently, it primarily supports Linux and SBCL, and is a work in progress with many features yet to be implemented, such as support for class files beyond Java 8 and bytecode verification.

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Development

Italy's Privacy Regulator Targets DeepSeek's Data Practices

2025-01-29
Italy's Privacy Regulator Targets DeepSeek's Data Practices

Italy's data protection authority, the Garante, has formally requested information from Chinese AI startup DeepSeek regarding its handling of Italian user data. This follows DeepSeek's recent launch of a ChatGPT competitor, raising concerns about data security and privacy. The Garante demands details on data collection, usage, and storage, with a February 17th deadline. This action highlights Europe's stringent scrutiny of AI companies' data practices and the data privacy challenges in the global AI race.

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Tech

Catgrad: A Category-Theoretic Deep Learning Compiler

2025-02-05

Catgrad is a deep learning framework that leverages category theory to statically compile models into their forward and backward passes. This allows your training loop to run without needing any deep learning framework (not even catgrad itself!). Built upon research papers exploring categorical approaches to deep learning, it enables features like data-parallel algorithms and differentiable polynomial circuits. Installation is straightforward via `pip install catgrad`.

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Development

sixos: A Nixpkgs-based OS Replacing systemd with s6

2025-01-31
sixos: A Nixpkgs-based OS Replacing systemd with s6

Adam Joseph announced the release of sixos, a new operating system built on Nixpkgs and using s6 instead of systemd. Rejecting systemd's monolithic design, sixos employs the simpler infuse combinator for service management, mirroring Nixpkgs' package handling. It also integrates ownerboot for complete version control and secure management of firmware, eliminating the artificial distinction between firmware and software. Currently running on workstations, servers, routers, and more, sixos offers a lightweight and secure alternative.

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Development

llama.cpp WASM Gets 2x Speedup Thanks to Optimized SIMD

2025-01-28

Simon Willison's blog post highlights a significant performance improvement in llama.cpp: a 2x speed increase for the WASM version achieved by optimizing SIMD instructions. Surprisingly, 99% of the code was generated by the AI-assisted programming tool DeepSeek R1. DeepSeek R1 spent 3-5 minutes 'thinking' about each prompt, ultimately helping the developer improve the llm_groq.py plugin and elegantly eliminate the model_map, streamlining the code. This showcases the immense potential of AI in code optimization and refactoring.

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Tirreno: Open-Source Security User Analytics for Enhanced Platform Protection

2025-01-01
Tirreno: Open-Source Security User Analytics for Enhanced Platform Protection

Tirreno is open-source user analytics software designed to monitor various online platforms, including websites, applications, SaaS, communities, and IoT devices. It detects and defends against account takeovers, malicious bots, and common vulnerabilities stemming from user behavior. Built with PHP and PostgreSQL, Tirreno is easy to install and use, providing real-time analytics. A paid subscription enhances its anti-fraud capabilities by offering additional verification of IP addresses, emails, and phone numbers. Developed by Tirreno Technologies Sàrl, Tirreno prioritizes privacy and data security; its code is open-source, but the trademark is not.

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Development user analytics

DeepSeek's AI Breakthrough: Bypassing CUDA for 10x Efficiency

2025-01-29
DeepSeek's AI Breakthrough: Bypassing CUDA for 10x Efficiency

DeepSeek achieved a 10x efficiency boost in AI model training by bypassing the industry-standard CUDA and using Nvidia's PTX programming language instead. Employing 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs, they trained a 671-billion parameter MoE language model in just two months. This breakthrough stemmed from meticulous optimizations of Nvidia's PTX, including reconfiguring GPU resources and implementing advanced pipeline algorithms. While this approach has high maintenance costs, the drastic reduction in training expenses sent shockwaves through the market, even causing a significant drop in Nvidia's market capitalization.

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AI

Critical Apple Chip Flaws: FLOP and SLAP Attacks

2025-01-28
Critical Apple Chip Flaws: FLOP and SLAP Attacks

Researchers discovered two critical vulnerabilities, dubbed FLOP and SLAP, in Apple's M-series and A-series chips. FLOP exploits the chip's load value predictor (LVP) to steal sensitive data from Chrome and Safari browsers, including information from Gmail, iCloud, and Google Maps. SLAP, targeting primarily Safari, leverages the load address predictor (LAP) for similar data theft. Affected devices include iPhones, iPads, and Macs released since September 2021. While Apple claims to be assessing the risk, researchers have published mitigations and recommend users update their systems.

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56-Byte Assembly Snake Game

2025-01-12
56-Byte Assembly Snake Game

A developer on GitHub has open-sourced a remarkably compact Snake game written in assembly language, clocking in at a mere 56 bytes. This minimal game runs not only under DOS, but also without a BIOS, bootloader, or operating system. The developer compressed the code to this incredibly small size and provides both an online demo and a self-hosting version. The project has sparked discussions about code minimization and game development, with comparisons to other similar projects highlighting its significant advantage in code size.

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OpenAI Partners with US National Labs to Supercharge Scientific Research with AI

2025-01-30
OpenAI Partners with US National Labs to Supercharge Scientific Research with AI

OpenAI announced a partnership with US National Labs, leveraging AI to advance scientific research and serve national security and public good. Over 15,000 scientists will gain access to OpenAI's latest reasoning models, potentially leading to breakthroughs in materials science, renewable energy, astrophysics, and more. Key areas of focus include bolstering US global tech leadership, disease treatment and prevention, cybersecurity, power grid protection, threat detection, and furthering our understanding of the universe. The partnership aims to unlock the potential of natural resources and revolutionize the nation's energy infrastructure, while also significantly enhancing national security research.

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Keymapper: A Cross-Platform Context-Aware Key Remapper

2025-01-29
Keymapper: A Cross-Platform Context-Aware Key Remapper

Keymapper is a cross-platform, context-aware key remapper that lets you redefine your keyboard layout and shortcuts globally or per application. Supporting GNU/Linux, Windows, and macOS, it manages all your shortcuts in a single configuration file, even binding shortcuts to launch applications. Advanced features include using mouse buttons and the wheel in mappings, and activating different mappings based on context like window title, class, process path, or input device.

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Development key remapping shortcuts

My Biohacking Experience: Getting a Magnet Implant

2025-01-09

A biohacker recounts their experience getting a magnet implanted under their skin. Opting for the xG3 v2, they sought to experience both magnetic sensing and lifting capabilities. The procedure was straightforward, with healing involving minor swelling and bruising. Afterwards, they could sense magnetic fields, such as those from a laptop charger and microwave, and easily pick up small ferromagnetic objects like paperclips. They could also manipulate a virtual compass on their phone and even unlock their laptop. Despite some minor magnet migration, they're happy with the experience and plan future body modifications.

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Quantel's Paintbox: The Revolutionary Digital Painting System That Changed Television

2025-01-31

In the early 1980s, Quantel, a small company from Newbury, England, revolutionized television graphics with its Paintbox, a groundbreaking digital painting system. It solved the then-unsurmountable challenge of creating realistically rendered digital lines with the speed and subtlety of traditional painting, using a pressure-sensitive stylus for precise control. Despite hardware limitations (a massive 330MB hard drive and processing spread across 25 custom circuit boards), Paintbox delivered real-time performance and broadcast quality. Its user-friendly interface and powerful capabilities quickly made it an industry standard, adopted by major networks and production houses worldwide. Paintbox's impact on television commercials and music videos was undeniable, maintaining its dominance for nearly a decade before cheaper software alternatives emerged.

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Virtual Pipes: A Simple and Efficient Method for Simulating Water Over Terrain

2025-02-06
Virtual Pipes: A Simple and Efficient Method for Simulating Water Over Terrain

This article introduces a simple and efficient method for simulating water flow over terrain in games – the virtual pipes method. Based on shallow water equations and using a staggered grid, this method treats water flow as columns connected by imaginary pipes. Water flow is accelerated based on water level differences, and outflow scaling prevents negative water amounts. The author details the three steps: flow acceleration, outflow scaling, and water column updating, providing code examples. This method is easy to understand, computationally efficient, and suitable for games requiring terrain modification and water simulation, such as city builders. While it has limitations such as lacking inertia and velocity diffusion, it's practical for most game scenarios.

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Development water simulation

Go Error Handling Syntax Sugar Proposal: A Trade-off Between Brevity and Clarity

2025-01-28
Go Error Handling Syntax Sugar Proposal: A Trade-off Between Brevity and Clarity

The Go community is debating a new error handling syntax proposal aimed at reducing boilerplate code. The proposal introduces a new '?' operator to handle function return errors more concisely while preserving readability. The proposal has sparked extensive community discussion, primarily focusing on whether the new syntax is clear enough and if it might encourage developers to neglect error handling. Some argue it efficiently reduces boilerplate, improving readability; others worry the new syntax is too implicit, potentially leading to harder-to-debug errors.

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Development syntax sugar

FOSDEM 2025: A Glimpse into the Open Source Mobile Track

2025-01-31
FOSDEM 2025: A Glimpse into the Open Source Mobile Track

FOSDEM, a free software developer event in Brussels, Belgium (February 1st & 2nd, 2025), will feature a dedicated 'FOSS on Mobile' track. This half-day session (February 1st, 2:55 PM - 7:00 PM) will host numerous talks on open-source mobile development. Beyond the talks, numerous project booths offer opportunities for networking and collaboration. A casual meetup is planned for Sunday, February 2nd at 2:00 PM. Don't miss the chance to connect with fellow developers and grab some stickers!

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Development

Mirascope MCP Server: Securely Integrating LLMs with Local Services

2025-02-01
Mirascope MCP Server: Securely Integrating LLMs with Local Services

Mirascope's MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server lets you expose resources, tools, and prompts to LLM clients via a standardized protocol. This article demonstrates building a simple book recommendation server using MCP, showing how to register tools, resources, and prompts. It details two definition styles: decorator and function-first. MCP Server supports various features, including synchronous and asynchronous functions, flexible configuration options, and compatibility with standard Mirascope tools and prompts, enabling secure and reliable integration between LLM clients and local services.

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Development

Going Mouseless: Building a Productive Keyboard-Only Desktop

2025-02-01

Tired of your mouse? This author shares their journey to a mouse-free desktop. By leveraging tools like the PaperWM scrollable tiling window manager, Firefox bookmark keywords, the Vimium browser extension, and the terminal-based email client Aerc, along with GNOME's Quake Terminal extension and Input Remapper, the author dramatically increased productivity and improved ergonomics. The article details how to use and configure these tools, and shares their experience hiding Emacs's menus and toolbars to further reduce mouse reliance.

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SQLite Page Explorer: A GUI for Peeking Inside Your Databases

2025-02-06
SQLite Page Explorer: A GUI for Peeking Inside Your Databases

A small GUI application, built with redbean, lets you explore your SQLite databases page by page, just as SQLite sees them. It's a single 6.5MB executable running natively on Windows, Linux, macOS, and more, offering insights into how indexes are stored, data compactness, and B-tree structures. While potential virus warnings exist due to the use of a polyglot executable, the project is trustworthy and offers a unique perspective for developers. It's a fun project that may be slow with larger databases.

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Development

US Copyright Office: No New Laws Needed for AI-Assisted Works

2025-01-31
US Copyright Office: No New Laws Needed for AI-Assisted Works

The US Copyright Office declared this week that existing laws suffice to address copyright issues surrounding AI-assisted works, negating the need for new legislation. Over 10,000 comments urged stronger protections for artists in the age of AI. The office responded by referencing a 1965 precedent when similar authorship questions arose with the advent of advanced computer technology. Then, Register of Copyrights Abraham Kaminstein stated there's no one-size-fits-all solution. This remains the office's stance; only fully AI-generated content is ineligible for copyright protection. Works with human-authored expressive elements, even with AI assistance, retain copyrightability.

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Reimagining US County Maps with Hexagonal Tiling: A Novel Data Visualization Approach

2025-02-05

This article introduces an innovative data visualization technique: tiling all US counties into a uniform grid of hexagons. This approach overcomes the bias introduced by varying county areas in traditional maps, allowing for clearer representation of population density, socio-economic variables, and more. The unique gapless tiling property of hexagons avoids the "edge effect" of square grids, more accurately depicting county adjacency. Visual cues like color intensity or size adjustments highlight differences in population density, economic indicators, public health data, and other metrics across counties. Filtering by state or region allows for focused analysis, making this a versatile tool for policymaking and regional development.

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Design hexagons

The Graveyard of Game Assets: A Plea for Reuse

2025-01-29

Game developer Garry Newman recently posted about the wasted potential of assets from failed games. Many games, despite years of development, fail to achieve commercial success, leading to their abandonment. Newman highlights the significant amount of high-quality sound effects, models, and animations that are simply discarded. He proposes a solution: developers with unused assets from defunct projects should consider sharing them for reuse in platforms like Garry's Mod or S&box, giving these assets a new life and preventing waste.

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1024 Silicon Quantum Dots Integrated: A Quantum Leap

2025-01-29
1024 Silicon Quantum Dots Integrated: A Quantum Leap

Researchers at Quantum Motion in London have achieved a significant breakthrough, integrating 1,024 independent silicon quantum dots with on-chip digital and analog electronics to create a quantum computing system operating at ultra-low temperatures. Published in Nature Electronics, this research uses radio frequency reflectometry for rapid characterization and reveals that cryogenic parameters of silicon quantum dots can be predicted from room-temperature behavior. This paves the way for large-scale integration of silicon spin qubits and potentially reduces the cost of developing quantum technologies.

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SCQA: A Framework for Compelling Storytelling

2025-02-03
SCQA: A Framework for Compelling Storytelling

SCQA is a framework for structuring information using Situation, Complication, Question, and Answer to create clear, engaging narratives. The article uses gamification in physical therapy as an example, showing how SCQA transforms a mundane process into a compelling story, improving patient engagement. Applicable across various fields—business, policy, science—and media—emails, presentations, books, blogs—SCQA enhances communication and clarity.

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SteamOS Breaks Free from Steam Deck, Challenges Windows Gaming Hegemony?

2025-01-08
SteamOS Breaks Free from Steam Deck, Challenges Windows Gaming Hegemony?

Lenovo's Legion Go S is the first non-Valve hardware officially powered by SteamOS, marking SteamOS's expansion beyond the Steam Deck. This $500+ handheld will compete with a Windows 11 version, offering players more choice. Valve also announced a public beta of SteamOS to improve compatibility and plans to support more devices in the future. This move could challenge Windows' long-standing dominance in PC gaming, suggesting a flourishing Linux gaming ecosystem.

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Britain's First Internet Connection: The Untold Story of a Pioneer

2025-01-09
Britain's First Internet Connection: The Untold Story of a Pioneer

This article recounts the story of British computer scientist Peter Kirstein, who in the early 1970s, connected Britain to ARPANET, marking the beginning of the UK's internet era. Despite governmental hurdles and technical challenges, Kirstein's innovative approach and perseverance led to the successful connection of London computers to ARPANET, for which he created the internet's first password. The article provides a fascinating glimpse into the early days of the internet, from its Cold War origins to its global impact, showcasing the twists and turns of technological advancement and the contributions of its pioneers.

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Tech

Managing Multi-Account AWS Architectures with Terraform Workspaces

2025-02-05
Managing Multi-Account AWS Architectures with Terraform Workspaces

This article demonstrates managing multi-account AWS architectures using Terraform workspaces. The focus is on associating accounts with workspaces, without delving into modularity, security, or remote state storage. A local testing approach using Localstack is presented, leveraging OpenTofu as an open-source Terraform alternative. Different workspaces are created, dynamically loading variable files to manage configurations for different environments (e.g., development and UAT).

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FastAnime: Your Terminal-Based Anime Experience

2025-01-28
FastAnime: Your Terminal-Based Anime Experience

FastAnime is a command-line tool that lets you browse and watch anime directly from your terminal. It integrates with AniList for powerful searching and downloading capabilities, and offers extensive customization options. Users can browse anime, download videos, manage cache, and more, all through a well-designed CLI. It supports MPV player, provides desktop notifications, and offers convenient keybindings. FastAnime is easy to install with support for various package managers and operating systems, boasting a rich set of command-line options and customization features for a streamlined and powerful anime-watching experience.

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Development anime

Mistral Small 3: A Speed Demon 24B Parameter Open-Source Model

2025-01-30
Mistral Small 3: A Speed Demon 24B Parameter Open-Source Model

Mistral AI unveiled Mistral Small 3, a 24-billion parameter model optimized for speed and performance under the Apache 2.0 license. Outperforming larger models like Llama 3.3 70B and Qwen 32B by over 3x in speed, while achieving over 81% accuracy on MMLU, it's ideal for generative AI tasks demanding rapid response times. Runable on a single RTX 4090 or a 32GB Macbook, Mistral Small 3 is readily available on Hugging Face and other platforms, empowering developers with a powerful and accessible open-source tool.

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AI
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