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Kansas TB Outbreak: Largest in US History

2025-01-27
Kansas TB Outbreak: Largest in US History

Kansas is experiencing the largest tuberculosis (TB) outbreak in US history. As of January 17th, 66 active cases and 79 latent infections have been reported, primarily in the Kansas City metro area. While the outbreak is ongoing, health officials stress the risk to the general public is low. Active measures are underway to control the spread, including collaboration with the CDC and treatment for patients. After 10 days of medication and three negative sputum tests, active cases are generally no longer contagious.

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(www.cjonline.com)
Tech Tuberculosis Outbreak Kansas

Augmenting MIDI Hardware with Perl: Building Custom MIDI Filters

2025-02-01
Augmenting MIDI Hardware with Perl: Building Custom MIDI Filters

This article details building a custom MIDI filter using Perl and the RtMidi library to enhance the capabilities of an M-Audio Oxygen Pro 61 MIDI keyboard. Two key features are implemented: a software-generated pedal tone and fifth interval, transforming single-note plays into chords; and a bank-switcher using the controller's pads to select MIDI channels, acting like 'tracks'. Asynchronous event handling ensures minimal latency, and the filter is extensible to add features such as 'pickup' functionality and rhythmic strumming effects.

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(fuzzix.org)
Hardware Hardware Enhancement

dopy: Python Without Strict Indentation

2025-01-13
dopy: Python Without Strict Indentation

dopy is an experimental Python preprocessor that allows the use of do...end syntax instead of strict indentation. This improves code readability and flexibility, especially for developers familiar with languages like Ruby or Lua. It supports type hints and transpiles .dopy files into PEP 8 compliant .py files. The project is archived and no longer maintained by the original author, but the code remains open-source for learning and reference.

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(github.com)
Development Preprocessor Code Style

Refactoring Pitfalls: When Not to Refactor

2025-02-06
Refactoring Pitfalls: When Not to Refactor

This article explores the pitfalls of code refactoring, highlighting that not all code needs refactoring. The author presents several scenarios where refactoring is inappropriate, such as attempting to fix bugs or adapt to third-party changes through refactoring; introducing unnecessary abstraction leading to code complexity; tackling multiple code smells simultaneously; refactoring untested code; and refactoring unchanging code. The article emphasizes that refactoring should be incremental, behavior-preserving, and involve small, reversible changes with test coverage. It advocates for pausing refactoring when understanding is lacking or new requirements emerge. Refactoring frequently changing and complex code yields the best results.

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(thoughtbot.com)
Development best practices

MindsDB Hiring Office Manager in San Francisco

2025-02-01

Fast-growing AI startup MindsDB is hiring an Office Manager for its San Francisco office. The ideal candidate will have experience in office management, event coordination, and creating a safe and efficient workspace. Responsibilities include facilities management, vendor relations, event planning, and security. The company offers competitive compensation and benefits, including flexible hours, health insurance, and unlimited PTO.

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(grnh.se)
Startup Office Manager AI Startup

Alder Lake SHLX Instruction Anomaly: A 3x Performance Mystery

2025-01-02

Blogger Tavian Barnes uncovered a strange performance quirk in Intel's Alder Lake processors concerning the SHLX instruction. Under certain conditions, this instruction runs significantly slower—three times slower than expected. Benchmarking revealed that initializing the shift count register using a 64-bit immediate value causes the slowdown, while 32-bit instructions or other initialization methods do not. This discrepancy is puzzling since SHLX only uses the lower 6 bits of the shift count register. The root cause remains a mystery, but this finding highlights a potential optimization oversight in the Alder Lake microarchitecture.

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(tavianator.com)
Hardware instruction latency

Neovim's Complexity: Two Years Later, I Miss Vanilla Vim

2025-02-01
Neovim's Complexity: Two Years Later, I Miss Vanilla Vim

After nearly two years of using Neovim, the author finds its complexity overwhelming. While Neovim is faster and more powerful, its plugin management and configuration are far more intricate than the simplicity of vanilla Vim. Neovim's plugin ecosystem is rich, but requires extensive configuration and coordination to function correctly, a stark contrast to Vim's straightforwardness. The author hopes for a future Neovim that prioritizes user experience, reducing unnecessary configuration and offering more out-of-the-box functionality.

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(leblancfg.com)
Development Plugin Management

Uncrackable Encryption: AI-Powered Holographic Security System

2025-02-02

Researchers in Greece have developed a novel optical encryption system using holograms and artificial intelligence. Information is encoded as a hologram in a laser beam, which becomes completely and randomly scrambled when passing through a small container of ethanol. This scrambling is impossible to decrypt using traditional methods. A trained neural network acts as a decryption key, successfully decoding the chaotic light patterns with 90-95% accuracy. This technology promises to enhance security for applications like digital currencies, healthcare, and communications.

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(www.optica.org)
Tech optical encryption holography

Auto-Commit Bot: Automated Git Commits with Gemini AI

2025-02-01
Auto-Commit Bot: Automated Git Commits with Gemini AI

The Auto-Commit Bot is a Python tool automating Git workflows. It monitors a directory for changes, generates descriptive commit messages using Google Gemini's AI, and commits them. This eliminates repetitive tasks and ensures consistent messaging. Features include real-time file monitoring, auto-committing, AI-powered commit messages, and easy customization. Simply install dependencies, set your API key, and run the command.

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(github.com)
Development

Oracle's Java Pricing Changes Spark Mass Exodus

2025-01-29
Oracle's Java Pricing Changes Spark Mass Exodus

Oracle's January 2023 shift in Java SE licensing from per-user/processor to per-employee pricing has triggered a massive backlash, with costs skyrocketing. Dimensional Research reveals that 88% of Oracle Java users are considering switching to open-source alternatives, reaching 92% in France and 95% in Germany. This reflects a growing need for cost-effective Java solutions, forcing organizations to reassess their long-term Java licensing and support strategies.

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(www.theregister.com)
Development

Taylorator: Flooding the FM Band with Taylor Swift (and Some Legal Concerns)

2025-01-27
Taylorator: Flooding the FM Band with Taylor Swift (and Some Legal Concerns)

The Taylorator is a project that uses Software Defined Radio (SDR) to broadcast Taylor Swift's music across the FM radio band. The creator wrote software to simultaneously transmit 100 songs to different FM frequencies, effectively 'flooding' the airwaves. The project faced significant performance challenges, requiring powerful CPUs for real-time audio processing of multiple channels. While legal ramifications exist regarding unlicensed broadcasting, the Taylorator is an impressive feat of engineering with its source code publicly available.

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(www.scd31.com)
Tech Taylor Swift

Why I Ditched Chrome for Firefox and Never Looked Back

2025-01-14
Why I Ditched Chrome for Firefox and Never Looked Back

Frustrated with Chrome's performance on an older PC, the author switched to Firefox and was pleasantly surprised. Firefox not only matched Chrome's functionality but offered superior tab management (Firefox View), built-in Pocket for saving links, robust privacy features (Firefox Relay), a convenient screenshot tool, and AI chatbot integration. Additional thoughtful touches like picture-in-picture, customizable search engines, network settings, and auto-muting videos sealed the deal. The author recommends Firefox as a superior alternative.

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(www.howtogeek.com)
Tech

Eight Years at Palantir: Inside the Data Giant's Rise

2025-02-01
Eight Years at Palantir: Inside the Data Giant's Rise

A former Palantir engineer recounts their eight-year journey at the now near-$100 billion data analytics firm. The author details their reasons for joining—challenging industries, top-tier talent, and a unique corporate culture—and their experiences as a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), including working at an Airbus factory to improve aircraft manufacturing. They highlight Palantir's unique FDE model, where engineers embed themselves in client sites to understand business processes and develop solutions. The author also discusses the challenges and importance of data integration, Palantir's unique approach to data security and company culture, and finally explores Palantir's ethical considerations and future prospects.

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(nabeelqu.co)
Tech

Cruz Blocks Wi-Fi for Schoolkids: Censorship Concerns?

2025-01-29
Cruz Blocks Wi-Fi for Schoolkids: Censorship Concerns?

Senator Ted Cruz is attempting to block the FCC's plan to distribute Wi-Fi hotspots to students, citing concerns about unsupervised internet access, potential safety risks, and the possibility of limiting children's exposure to conservative viewpoints. Cruz argues the FCC's action violates federal law and harms parental rights. The FCC counters that the program, utilizing existing E-Rate funding, is necessary to bridge the homework gap for students lacking reliable internet. While a similar temporary program existed during the pandemic, Cruz claims the new plan lacks sufficient safeguards and could lead to censorship. The dispute involves the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn recent agency actions, and highlights ongoing debate about internet access and parental control.

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(arstechnica.com)
Tech internet access parental control political debate

First Fatal Crash Involving a Driverless Car

2025-01-26
First Fatal Crash Involving a Driverless Car

A multi-vehicle crash in San Francisco marks the first fatal collision in the U.S. involving a fully autonomous vehicle with no one behind the wheel. While a Waymo self-driving car was involved, it wasn't at fault; a speeding vehicle hit a line of stopped cars, resulting in one human fatality and the death of a dog. Despite Waymo's claim of superior safety records compared to human drivers, based on millions of miles driven, the incident raises serious questions about the safety of autonomous vehicles and will likely trigger further scrutiny of the technology.

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(www.nbcbayarea.com)
Tech fatal accident autonomous vehicle safety

Securely Disposing of Smart Devices: Factory Reset is Key

2025-01-10
Securely Disposing of Smart Devices: Factory Reset is Key

A Rapid7 blog post highlights the importance of securely disposing of old smart devices. The author's experiment of buying used Amazon Echo devices revealed many were not factory reset, retaining user data like WiFi passwords and home addresses. This underscores the need to factory reset devices before disposal or resale, even if seemingly broken. The article emphasizes this applies to businesses as well as consumers, recommending businesses establish comprehensive IoT lifecycle management processes to mitigate security risks.

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(www.rapid7.com)
Tech device disposal

Fintech's Failure to Disrupt Big Banks

2025-01-26
Fintech's Failure to Disrupt Big Banks

Despite years of effort, Fintech companies haven't significantly disrupted large banks. A look at 2024 Q4 results from major US banks reveals their continued strength. While Fintech has made inroads in areas like payments and small business lending, core banking functions (deposit-taking and loan issuance) remain largely untouched. Large banks have invested heavily in catching up technologically, maintaining high profitability, and even surpassing Fintech in mobile user numbers. The author questions whether this disruption will ever happen, suggesting it may require more time, generational shifts, or a co-existence model.

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(www.popularfintech.com)
Tech Banking Disruption

AI Models Are Now Surprisingly Good Historians

2025-01-26
AI Models Are Now Surprisingly Good Historians

Leading AI models are demonstrating remarkable capabilities in historical research. Three case studies showcase GPT-4o, o1, and Claude Sonnet 3.5's prowess in transcribing and translating early modern Italian texts, analyzing an 18th-century Mexican medical manuscript, and generating novel historical interpretations. While limitations remain, such as occasional factual inaccuracies, their potential in streamlining research, synthesizing information, and suggesting new research avenues is undeniable. This heralds a transformative shift in how historical research is conducted.

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(resobscura.substack.com)
AI historical research

Right-Nulled GLR Parsing: Gracefully Handling Context-Free Grammars

2025-01-15

This article delves into Generalized LR (GLR) parsing and its improvement, Right-Nulled GLR (RNGLR) parsing. GLR parsing can handle any context-free grammar without restrictions, making it a useful prototyping tool. However, traditional GLR parsing suffers from efficiency issues when dealing with hidden left and right recursion. RNGLR parsing elegantly addresses these issues by cleverly handling right-nulled rules, improving parsing efficiency. The article explains the principles of RNGLR parsing and demonstrates its advantages in handling conflicts and constructing Shared Packed Parse Forests (SPPFs) through examples.

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(blog.jeffsmits.net)
Development GLR parsing context-free grammar compiler theory

AI-Powered Nano-3D Printing Creates Super Strong, Lightweight Material

2025-01-28
AI-Powered Nano-3D Printing Creates Super Strong, Lightweight Material

Researchers at the University of Toronto have used machine learning to design nano-architected materials with the strength of carbon steel but the lightness of Styrofoam. By combining a machine learning algorithm with two-photon polymerization 3D printing, the team optimized the nanolattice structure, achieving a strength-to-weight ratio five times higher than titanium. This breakthrough holds potential for aerospace applications, reducing fuel consumption and carbon emissions.

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(news.engineering.utoronto.ca)
Tech

YC Announces Spring 2025 Batch: X25

2025-01-20
YC Announces Spring 2025 Batch: X25

Y Combinator is launching its first-ever spring batch, X25, bringing its total annual batches to four (Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall). The 'X' designation, chosen for its common use in programming, reflects YC's tech roots. This more frequent batch schedule aims to better accommodate founders' timelines and rapidly fund the surge of AI-driven startups. Applications are open until February 11th, 8 PM PT, with the program running April-June and culminating in an in-person Demo Day.

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(www.ycombinator.com)
Startup

Why I Hate Docker and Podman

2025-01-26

A seasoned developer voiced strong displeasure with Docker and Podman in a blog post. He cited multiple instances where Docker installation broke his network configuration, a poorly designed command-line interface, and difficult-to-learn usage. The Dockerfile language is considered ad-hoc and poorly designed, the documentation unhelpful and hard to navigate. Docker Hub suffers from malware and licensing issues, and container images are stored in a hidden location that consumes excessive disk space. While Podman offers some implementation improvements, its user experience remains as unpleasant as Docker's. The author ultimately prefers virtual machines, acknowledging their slower startup, but valuing their easier comprehension and better predictability and control.

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(blog.liw.fi)
Development containers

SmolGPT: A Minimal PyTorch Implementation for Training Small LLMs

2025-01-29
SmolGPT: A Minimal PyTorch Implementation for Training Small LLMs

SmolGPT is a minimal PyTorch project designed for educational purposes, allowing users to train their own small language models (LLMs) from scratch. It features a modern architecture incorporating Flash Attention, RMSNorm, and SwiGLU, along with efficient sampling techniques. The project provides a complete training pipeline, pre-trained model weights, and text generation examples, making it easy to learn about and experiment with LLM training.

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(github.com)
Development LLM training

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems and the Future of Computation: A Mathematical Western

2025-01-30
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems and the Future of Computation: A Mathematical Western

This poem, styled as a Western, narrates key events in mathematical history, from the paradoxes of set theory to the proof of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, the advent of Turing machines and von Neumann architecture, and finally the P vs NP problem. Using vivid metaphors and a highly narrative approach, it depicts the challenges and achievements of mathematicians in their quest for truth, and the impact of technological advancements on human society. Gödel's incompleteness theorems, like a landmine buried in the field of computation, hint at the limitations of computation and prompt reflection on the future direction of artificial intelligence.

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(taylor.town)
AI Gödel's incompleteness theorems computational theory

CMU's ML in Production Course: From Model to Product

2025-01-28

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) offers a course, "Machine Learning in Production/AI Engineering," covering the entire lifecycle of building machine-learned models into real-world products. It encompasses model building, deployment, assurance, maintenance, responsible AI (safety, security, fairness, explainability), and MLOps. Targeted at students with some data science and programming experience, it doesn't require a software engineering background. Through case studies and a large-scale project, students learn to translate models into deployable and maintainable products, fostering collaboration in interdisciplinary teams.

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(mlip-cmu.github.io)
Development AI Engineering

Big Tech's New Power: US Intel Agencies Embrace Corporate Partnerships

2025-01-27
Big Tech's New Power: US Intel Agencies Embrace Corporate Partnerships

A new directive from US intelligence agencies reveals a deepening partnership with major tech corporations, even at the risk of compromising security. This underscores the immense power wielded by tech giants, whose influence now surpasses many nation-states, forcing intelligence agencies to rely on them for information. The directive authorizes the sharing of classified information and streamlines cooperation, raising concerns about power imbalances and potential misuse of information by corporations. The article argues this marks a significant shift of power towards Big Tech.

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(www.kenklippenstein.com)
Tech Intelligence Cooperation

KV Cache Tricks for Faster Language Models

2025-01-28
KV Cache Tricks for Faster Language Models

The slow speed of large language models (LLMs) in text generation stems from the computational complexity of self-attention. This article explores KV caching and its optimization techniques. KV caching stores key-value pairs for each token to avoid redundant computation, reducing complexity from O(n³) to O(n²); however, memory consumption remains substantial. The article delves into 11 papers proposing optimizations: token selection and pruning based on attention scores, post-hoc compression techniques, and architectural redesigns such as Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA). These aim to balance memory usage and computational efficiency, ultimately making models like ChatGPT generate text faster and more efficiently.

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(www.pyspur.dev)
AI KV Cache Self-Attention

Turning Google Sheets into Handy Web Apps: A Programmer's Tale

2024-12-31
Turning Google Sheets into Handy Web Apps: A Programmer's Tale

An Ars Technica reporter shares his journey of transforming simple Google Sheets into phone-friendly web apps using Glide. Initially created to streamline takeout ordering, the app manages local restaurant information with efficient search and filtering. He expanded his approach to create apps for recipes and pantry items, improving daily life. The article showcases the power of no-code tools and how simple solutions can solve real-world problems, highlighting ingenuity and a quest for better living.

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(arstechnica.com)
Development

OAuth 2.0: Unlocking the World's Most Popular Authorization Framework

2025-01-28
OAuth 2.0: Unlocking the World's Most Popular Authorization Framework

This article provides a clear explanation of the OAuth 2.0 protocol. Using the example of building a code deployment platform, the author illustrates how OAuth 2.0 solves the security issues of sharing user credentials, comparing the advantages and disadvantages of using plain user credentials and Personal Access Tokens (PATs). The article details the three core roles in OAuth 2.0 (Resource Server, Resource Owner, and Authorization Server), and various authorization flows (Authorization Code, Implicit, Client Credentials, Resource Owner Credentials, and Device Code flows), analyzing the security and applicability of each. Key concepts such as access tokens, refresh tokens, scopes, and PKCE are also explored.

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(www.romaglushko.com)
Development Authorization Framework
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