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Engelbart's Five-Key Keyset: The Mouse's Perfect Partner

2025-06-15

Engelbart's Five-Key Keyset: The Mouse's Perfect Partner

Concurrently with inventing the computer mouse, Doug Engelbart and his team at SRI created a one-handed input device called the "five-key keyset," designed for efficient single-handed text editing and command entry in conjunction with the mouse. Inspired by telegraph operators and stenographers, users combined presses of five keys to input letters and commands, while mouse buttons functioned as Shift and Ctrl keys. This groundbreaking interface, showcased in the 1968 "Mother of All Demos," offered a new approach to high-performance user interfaces, enabling fast and efficient text editing even while manipulating the mouse with one hand.

(dougengelbart.org)

Tech mouse five-key keyset

The Scalability Challenge of Reinforcement Learning: Can Q-Learning Handle Long Horizons?

2025-06-15

Recent years have witnessed the scalability of many machine learning objectives, such as next-token prediction, denoising diffusion, and contrastive learning. However, reinforcement learning (RL), particularly off-policy RL based on Q-learning, faces challenges in scaling to complex, long-horizon problems. This article argues that existing Q-learning algorithms struggle with problems requiring more than 100 semantic decision steps due to accumulating bias in prediction targets. Experiments show that even with abundant data and controlled variables, standard off-policy RL algorithms fail to solve complex tasks. However, horizon reduction significantly improves scalability, suggesting the need for better algorithms that directly address the horizon problem rather than solely relying on increased data and compute.

(seohong.me)

AI Q-learning Scalability

Lisp: A Creative Medium for Programmers

2025-06-15

This essay argues that Lisp is not just a programming language, but a creative medium for programmers, akin to writing or art. The author contends that good programming, like writing, involves exploration and discovery, followed by refinement of the presentation. Lisp's dynamic nature makes it ideal for experimentation and iteration, allowing programmers to adjust and improve their code much like a writer revises a manuscript. Using examples like mapmaking and writing, the author illustrates the interplay between discovery and refinement, criticizing the performance-first approach to programming language design as hindering creativity and flexibility. The author advocates for a more flexible and exploratory approach to software development, echoing the spirit of Agile methodologies.

(www.dreamsongs.com)

Development Programming Paradigm

SSHTron: A Multiplayer Lightcycle Game Over SSH

2025-06-14

SSHTron: A Multiplayer Lightcycle Game Over SSH

SSHTron is a multiplayer lightcycle game playable via SSH. Simply connect to sshtron.zachlatta.com and start playing. Use WASD or vim keys to control your cycle. Seven colors are available. Built in ~20 hours at BrickHack 2, the code quality is a work in progress. The project is open-source and supports Docker and Raspberry Pi deployments. A security warning notes potential vulnerabilities (CVE-2016-0777) related to SSH clients; updating your client is recommended.

(github.com)

Game

Kremlin-Backed Disinfo Bypasses Social Media Moderation via Malicious Ad Tech

2025-06-12

A new report exposes a sprawling ecosystem of malicious ad tech used not only by online scammers and hackers but also by Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns to bypass social media moderation. The investigation focuses on the “Doppelganger” disinformation network, which uses sophisticated domain cloaking to spread pro-Russian narratives and infiltrate European media. This cloaking service shares infrastructure with VexTrio, arguably the oldest malicious traffic distribution system (TDS), and is linked to affiliate marketing services LosPollos and TacoLoco. These services employ deceptive tactics to trick users into enabling push notifications, which are then used to disseminate malware and scams. Researchers tied these services to Adspro Group, registered in the Czech Republic and Russia, with infrastructure in Switzerland. Despite Adspro's denial of ties to VexTrio, actions like LosPollos suspending its push monetization service and Adspro rebranding to Aimed Global suggest a connection to malicious activity. The report highlights the significant cybersecurity threat posed by this malicious ad tech ecosystem and advises users to be cautious about browser notification requests.

(krebsonsecurity.com)

Tech malicious ad tech

Linux Kernel Word Frequency Analyzer

2025-06-16

A website uses a powerful search engine to analyze the frequency of words, names, and functions in the Linux kernel source code. Users can input keywords (supporting wildcards and regular expressions) to view the results. The website also provides interactive charts (requires enabling JavaScript) for a visual representation of the analysis results. This is very helpful for researching the Linux kernel or understanding its code structure.

(www.vidarholen.net)

Development Kernel Analysis Word Frequency

The Mystery of Bob Ross's Missing Masterpieces

2025-06-15

The Mystery of Bob Ross's Missing Masterpieces

Bob Ross, the beloved painter known for his soothing voice and happy little trees, created nearly 30,000 paintings during his lifetime—far more than Picasso. Yet, his artwork rarely appears on the open market. This article investigates, revealing that a large portion is held by Bob Ross Inc., which prioritizes its IP rights over the paintings themselves. Others are privately owned, while some fetch high prices at auctions and in the secondary market. Bob Ross's own focus on the painting process rather than the finished product likely contributes to the scarcity of his works.

(thehustle.co)

Misc Art Market IP Value

Childhood Leukemia: From Death Sentence to Treatable Disease

2025-06-15

Childhood Leukemia: From Death Sentence to Treatable Disease

Before the 1970s, childhood leukemia was a death sentence, with less than 10% of diagnosed children surviving five years. Today, in North America and Europe, that survival rate has soared to around 85%! This dramatic turnaround is due to a series of breakthroughs: collaborative research leading to more effective chemotherapy regimens, personalized treatments based on risk stratification, the development of targeted drugs and immunotherapies fueled by molecular research, and improved supportive care. This is a testament to the power of scientific collaboration and a model for what medical research can achieve.

(ourworldindata.org)

Tech childhood leukemia medical progress

Global Google Cloud Outage Highlights Multi-Cloud Strategy Importance

2025-06-15

Global Google Cloud Outage Highlights Multi-Cloud Strategy Importance

A global Google Cloud Platform (GCP) outage on Thursday afternoon impacted multiple products due to an invalid automated quota update to its API management system. While Google engineers quickly identified and resolved the root cause—an erroneous quota update causing external API request rejections—recovery time varied across regions. The incident underscores the risks of relying on a single cloud provider and emphasizes the need for robust disaster recovery plans, including multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategies and automated failover mechanisms.

(www.zdnet.com)

Tech multi-cloud

AI-Powered Art Restoration: 600-Year-Old Painting Restored in 3.5 Hours

2025-06-15

AI-Powered Art Restoration: 600-Year-Old Painting Restored in 3.5 Hours

MIT researchers have developed a new method using AI and 3D printing to apply digital restorations directly to original paintings. This method automatically identifies and repairs thousands of damaged areas, 66 times faster than traditional methods. A 15th-century painting, traditionally requiring years to restore, was completed in 3.5 hours. While ethical considerations exist, this technology promises to accelerate the restoration of numerous damaged artworks, bringing more art to the public eye.

(news.mit.edu)

Tech Art Restoration

Hidden Gems and Humor in the Android API

2025-06-16

Hidden Gems and Humor in the Android API

This article unveils hidden easter eggs and humorous elements within the public Android API. Examples include `isUserAMonkey()`, detecting if the UI is being tested by a tool; `isUserAGoat()`, once used to detect the Goat Simulator game; and `DISALLOW_FUN`, a device policy to restrict user fun. Other quirky additions include `Chronometer.isTheFinalCountdown()`, launching Europe's 'The Final Countdown' on YouTube; and constants like `SENSOR_TRICORDER` and `GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I`. There's even an undocumented `` tag for making views blink. These fun additions lighten the developer experience and showcase the Android team's sense of humor.

(voxelmanip.se)

Development Easter Eggs

SumatraPDF Dev Ditches std::function After 16 Years, Rolls His Own

2025-06-15

SumatraPDF Dev Ditches std::function After 16 Years, Rolls His Own

After 16 years of C++ development on SumatraPDF, the author abandoned `std::function` and lambdas due to debugging difficulties. Crash reports were hard to decipher because of the auto-generated names of compiler-generated lambda functions. He created simpler, custom callback functions `Func0` and `Func1`. While less feature-rich than `std::function`, they offer significant advantages in memory footprint and compilation speed, and are easier to debug. This post details the design and implementation of `Func0` and `Func1`, and explains why this approach better suits SumatraPDF's needs.

(blog.kowalczyk.info)

Development callbacks

Restore Oddly Shaped App Icons in macOS 26 Tahoe

2025-06-15

Restore Oddly Shaped App Icons in macOS 26 Tahoe

macOS 26 Tahoe replaces the unique, oddly shaped app icons in the Dock with iOS-style squarcles, a change many users dislike. This article provides a solution for both users and developers to restore custom icon shapes. Users can replace the .icns file within the application package; developers can use NSApplication.shared.dockTile.contentView to change the icon at runtime. Get your Dock back to its former glory!

(simonbs.dev)

Development App Icons

Ethanol Expansion: Hidden Costs and Growing Inequality

2025-06-14

Ethanol Expansion: Hidden Costs and Growing Inequality

A new report concludes that expanding ethanol production not only increases greenhouse gas emissions but also fails to deliver promised social and economic benefits to Midwestern communities. Subsidies primarily benefit large agribusinesses, leading to land consolidation and hindering smaller farmers. Proposed policies could exacerbate these issues, increasing land conversion and emissions. Trump's tax cuts further complicate the problem by excluding land conversion emissions from low-emission fuel calculations. Biofuel industry groups haven't responded, but some argue the report overstates carbon emissions and highlight the economic contributions and job creation from soy-based fuels.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech ethanol greenhouse gas emissions

Amazon's Return-to-Office Policy for Disabled Employees Sparks Backlash

2025-06-16

Amazon's Return-to-Office Policy for Disabled Employees Sparks Backlash

Amazon's strict return-to-office policy for disabled employees has ignited a significant backlash, with workers alleging violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and collective bargaining rights. At least two employees have filed complaints with the EEOC and NLRB, citing Amazon's use of AI in processing disability accommodation requests. The AI system is accused of bias and overlooking crucial nuances. Employees report Amazon deleting internal posts advocating for their rights and even terminating those who spoke out. Amazon maintains it respects employee rights and is committed to providing accommodations, but a survey reveals over 71% of disabled employees felt their requests were unmet. The incident highlights the legal and ethical risks of using AI to handle sensitive personnel matters in tech companies.

(finance.yahoo.com)

Tech Disability Rights

Knowing Within a Week: A Senior Engineer's Career Reflections

2025-06-12

Knowing Within a Week: A Senior Engineer's Career Reflections

A seasoned engineer shares her years of experience: within the first week of every new job, she intuitively knows whether it's the right fit. This intuition isn't always accurate, but proves remarkably reliable in the long run. She illustrates this with several examples, highlighting the importance of value alignment for managers, who must invest themselves fully, not just their output. Finally, she uses the 'chicken and pig' analogy to differentiate managers from engineers: engineers are 'involved', managers are 'committed'.

(charity.wtf)

Development professional development

AI Coding Agents: From Helpful Assistants to Essential Partners

2025-06-16

The author recounts a transformative shift in their workflow due to autonomous AI coding agents. Initially viewed as a neat curiosity, these agents have become indispensable, dramatically changing how software is shipped. The author details using tools like Claude and Codex to complete tasks ranging from bug fixes to code generation, resulting in significant productivity gains. While acknowledging limitations, such as the potential for getting stuck in local optima, the author believes AI coding agents represent a new era in software development, augmenting rather than replacing developers.

(blog.singleton.io)

Development

HP Archive: A Digital Museum for Vintage HP Collectors

2025-06-16

HP Archive: A Digital Museum for Vintage HP Collectors

The HP Archive website is dedicated to collectors and curators of vintage Hewlett-Packard equipment, catalogs, HP Journals, and other periodicals. The site is publishing some of the oldest HP literature online, creating a comprehensive reference source. Currently, catalogs, price lists, parts lists, and advertising materials are available, with plans to add Bench Briefs, early product manuals, and service notes with the help of volunteers. The site is undergoing a migration to WordPress and welcomes volunteers to contribute.

(hparchive.com)

Tech vintage tech

Minimal PyTorch Probabilistic Diffusion Model: 2D Dataset Experiments

2025-06-15

Minimal PyTorch Probabilistic Diffusion Model: 2D Dataset Experiments

This post details a minimal PyTorch implementation of a probabilistic diffusion model for 2D datasets. The author explores hyperparameters like learning rate, model size, diffusion process length, and timestep encoding through various experiments. Results show that a suitable learning rate is crucial, longer diffusion processes generate more complete samples, and model capacity isn't the primary bottleneck. Using sinusoidal embeddings for input encoding aids in learning high-frequency functions in low-dimensional domains.

(github.com)

Development Probabilistic Diffusion Model 2D Dataset

Free Cruise Ship Wi-Fi: A High Schooler's Python Script

2025-06-16

Free Cruise Ship Wi-Fi: A High Schooler's Python Script

Facing exorbitant cruise ship internet costs, a teenager on a Princess Cruises voyage cleverly exploited a loophole in the company's 15-minute free Wi-Fi offer for app downloads. He wrote a Python script to automate the process of changing MAC addresses, logging into the ship's network, and requesting the free internet session. This yielded unrestricted, high-speed internet (7+ Mbps) for hours. The script, aided by an OpenWRT router and LLMs for coding assistance, overcame challenges like request repetition and error handling, ultimately achieving free internet access.

(angad.me)

Development Free Wi-Fi

Monolithic Deployment of Rust/Axum and Svelte/SvelteKit: An Elegant Solution?

2025-05-30

This article presents an unconventional approach to deploying SPAs in web development: embedding the built SPA directly into the backend binary. This simplifies deployment (single binary) and code (no CORS handling), but increases binary size, memory usage, and slightly reduces developer experience (no hot reloading). The author uses Rust/Axum and Svelte/SvelteKit to demonstrate, detailing a monorepo setup with the Moon build tool and using the rust-embed library to embed the frontend build artifacts. The result is a simple SPA fetching data from and navigating within the backend.

(nguyenhuythanh.com)

Development

Lisp Truth Oracle: A Curious Tale of Type Theory, Curry-Howard Isomorphism, and call/cc

2025-06-14

This post attempts to write a "truth oracle" in Lisp—a program that determines the truth or falsehood of arbitrary mathematical statements. The author introduces the Curry-Howard isomorphism, explaining how logical proofs correspond to expressions in typed functional programming. Using Racket's call/cc function (isomorphic to Peirce's law), an attempt is made to implement a program isomorphic to the law of the excluded middle. Unexpectedly, the oracle always returns false until attempting to access an impossible type value, revealing the differences between classical and constructive logic, and the non-standard control flow of call/cc. Finally, the author uses a metaphor of a "devil's bargain" to explain this strange behavior, showcasing the time-travel-like mechanism behind call/cc.

(lambda-cove.net)

Development type theory

The Surprising Origins of Map Tiles: It Wasn't Just Google

2025-06-15

The Surprising Origins of Map Tiles: It Wasn't Just Google

Web map tiles, the seemingly simple method of storing geospatial data in indexed squares for efficient map display, are a pivotal development in GIS history. While Google Maps gets much of the credit for popularizing them, the technology's origins are surprisingly murky. This article traces the history of map tiling, revealing that the concept existed long before Google, appearing in early systems like Roger Tomlinson's Canadian Geographic Information System (CGIS). Later, quadtrees and other data structures further refined the approach. The article concludes that the innovation wasn't a single invention but a culmination of research and development by numerous individuals and organizations, ultimately culminating in the ubiquitous experience we enjoy today.

(placing.technology)

Tech map tiles geographic information system

Apple Paper Exposes Limits of Scaling in Large Language Models

2025-06-14

Apple Paper Exposes Limits of Scaling in Large Language Models

An Apple paper highlighting limitations in the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) has sparked a heated debate in the AI community. The paper demonstrates that even massive models struggle with seemingly simple reasoning tasks, challenging the prevalent 'scaling solves all' hypothesis for achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). While some attempted rebuttals emerged, none proved compelling. The core issue, the article argues, is LLMs' unreliability in executing complex algorithms due to output length limitations and over-reliance on training data. True AGI, the author suggests, requires superior models and a hybrid approach combining neural networks with symbolic algorithms. The paper's significance lies in its prompting a critical reassessment of AGI's development path, revealing that scaling alone is insufficient.

(garymarcus.substack.com)

AI

A New Golden Age of Antibiotics? Genomics, AI, and Synthetic Biology Power the Hunt

2025-06-15

A New Golden Age of Antibiotics? Genomics, AI, and Synthetic Biology Power the Hunt

The discovery of penicillin kicked off a century-long gold rush for new antimicrobials. But progress slowed. Now, genomics, synthetic biology, and AI are enabling researchers to delve deeper than ever before into microbial diversity, unearthing novel compounds like mandimycin and lariocidin. This suggests a potential new golden age of antibiotics. However, significant hurdles remain, including the lengthy drug approval process and the pharmaceutical industry's challenges in profiting from antimicrobials.

(cen.acs.org)

Tech

Ireland's Economic Miracle: Half of the EU's Q1 GDP Growth Came from Ireland

2025-06-15

Ireland's Economic Miracle: Half of the EU's Q1 GDP Growth Came from Ireland

On June 6th, Europe received unexpected good news: its economy grew twice as fast as previously thought in Q1, a modest 0.6% increase. However, a closer look reveals a surprising statistic: Ireland's GDP surged by 9.7%, contributing over half of the entire EU's growth. This small country, with a population representing only about one-hundredth of the EU's, has sparked speculation about an Irish economic miracle.

(www.economist.com)

Tech Irish Economy EU GDP

Rails Security Audit Reveals Improvements, Highlights Future Work

2025-06-15

The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF) released a security audit of Ruby on Rails, conducted by X41 D-Sec with support from GitLab and the Sovereign Tech Agency. The four-month audit uncovered 7 security findings and provided 6 recommendations for improvement. The report highlights the maturation of Rails' security over recent years while also outlining areas for future enhancement. OSTIF also celebrated its 10th anniversary and invited participation in upcoming meetups.

(ostif.org)

Development

Darklang: From Funding Drought to Open Source Rebirth

2025-06-16

Darklang: From Funding Drought to Open Source Rebirth

Dark Inc, the company behind the statically-typed functional programming language Darklang, has run out of money and officially shut down. However, Darklang lives on. Its assets – the language, blog, hosted service, etc. – have been acquired by Darklang Inc, a new company founded by former Dark Inc employees. The new company plans to open-source Darklang, enabling it to run anywhere. Dark Inc's failure stemmed from early aggressive growth, rapid cash burn, and a failure to adapt to the rise of code-generating tools in the age of ChatGPT. However, Darklang's core strength – immutability – has become even more crucial in the LLM era, making code easier to understand and safer to run. The founder is now focused on Tech for Palestine, an organization addressing issues related to Palestine.

(blog.darklang.com)

Development

libc-less Programming: Mastering Linux Syscalls with strace

2025-06-14

The author recently embarked on building software without libc to gain a deeper understanding of Linux syscalls and internals. This involved creating a minimal shell, a Snake game, a pure ARM64 assembly HTTP server, and a threads implementation. Debugging heavily relied on strace, and the article details numerous useful strace options and flags. These range from tracing child processes and printing verbose struct information to selectively tracing syscalls and even injecting syscall errors for debugging purposes. This provides valuable insights into advanced Linux system programming and debugging techniques.

(rrampage.github.io)

Development Syscalls

Nanonets-OCR-s: Beyond Traditional OCR with Intelligent Document Processing

2025-06-16

Nanonets-OCR-s: Beyond Traditional OCR with Intelligent Document Processing

Nanonets-OCR-s is a state-of-the-art image-to-markdown OCR model that surpasses traditional text extraction. It transforms documents into structured markdown with intelligent content recognition and semantic tagging, ideal for downstream processing by Large Language Models (LLMs). Key features include LaTeX equation recognition, intelligent image description, signature detection, watermark extraction, smart checkbox handling, and complex table extraction. The model can be used via transformers, vLLM, or docext.

(huggingface.co)

AI

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