AOHell: The Teen Hacker Who Inadvertently Pioneered Phishing

2025-07-27
AOHell: The Teen Hacker Who Inadvertently Pioneered Phishing

In the mid-90s, 17-year-old Koceilah Rekouche (aka Da Chronic) created AOHell, a program that unleashed a massive attack on AOL. Driven by outrage at AOL's inaction against child predators and the inability to afford online access, AOHell's impact transcended its initial purpose. It inadvertently pioneered automated phishing, becoming a foundational technique in modern cybercrime. While Da Chronic gained notoriety as AOL's most famous hacker, AOHell also served as a free and creative outlet for countless young programmers, shaping a generation of technologists. Years later, Rekouche reflects on the complex legacy of his creation, acknowledging both its damaging consequences and surprising influence on the digital world.

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Tech

The End of Moore's Law and the Growing Heat Problem in Chips

2025-04-16
The End of Moore's Law and the Growing Heat Problem in Chips

The slowdown of Moore's Law has led to increasing power density in chips, making heat dissipation a critical bottleneck affecting performance and lifespan. Traditional cooling methods are insufficient for future high-performance chips, such as the upcoming CFET transistors. Researchers have developed a new simulation framework to predict how new semiconductor technologies affect heat dissipation and explored advanced cooling techniques, including microfluidic cooling, jet impingement cooling, and immersion cooling. System-level solutions, such as dynamically adjusting voltage and frequency, and thermal sprinting, also aim to balance performance and heat. Future backside functionalization technologies (CMOS 2.0) like backside power delivery networks, backside capacitors, and backside integrated voltage regulators, promise to reduce heat by lowering voltage but may introduce new thermal challenges. Ultimately, solving the chip heat problem requires a multidisciplinary effort, with system technology co-optimization (STCO) aiming to integrate systems, physical design, and process technology for optimal performance and cooling.

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Framework Desktop: A Tiny, Powerful Linux Beast

2025-08-10
Framework Desktop: A Tiny, Powerful Linux Beast

The Framework Desktop is a surprisingly powerful machine. Its small size belies its impressive performance, thanks to the AMD Ryzen AI Max 395+. Benchmarks show it significantly outperforming competitors in multi-core tasks, especially relevant for developers using Docker. While pricier than some alternatives, it offers exceptional value, particularly when compared to the Mac Studio, delivering superior performance at a lower cost. Its quiet operation, customizable aesthetics, and strong gaming capabilities make it a compelling option for Linux developers and gamers alike.

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Development

Agentic: An Extensible Agent Platform with Structured Outputs

2025-03-16
Agentic: An Extensible Agent Platform with Structured Outputs

Agentic is a platform allowing users to define extensions and output schemas using Pydantic data models. This enables structured outputs from chatbots, as demonstrated by the example code defining a time output model for date and time information. This provides increased flexibility and control for building AI applications.

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Development

gkrellm: A Robust Linux System Monitor

2025-05-16

gkrellm is a powerful system monitoring tool for Linux, displaying hostname, CPU usage, temperature, fan speed, voltage, disk usage, network connections, memory usage, and much more. It offers customizable alarms and warnings, and boasts plugin capabilities for extended monitoring. gkrellm also supports remote system monitoring via client/server mode, providing various charts and display modes for intuitive system status understanding.

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Development

Nova Launcher's Uncertain Future: Open Source Promise in Jeopardy?

2025-09-09
Nova Launcher's Uncertain Future: Open Source Promise in Jeopardy?

Following last year's layoffs of nearly the entire Nova Launcher team, founder Kevin Barry has left the company after being asked to cease development and open-sourcing efforts. Nova's website is down, and the future of the popular Android launcher is uncertain. Branch Metrics, which acquired Nova, previously stated that open-sourcing was a contractual obligation if Barry left. However, with both Barry and the former CEO gone, this promise remains unfulfilled, prompting a community petition demanding open-sourcing.

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Development Android Launcher

Nvidia Open-Sources Run:ai After $700M Acquisition

2024-12-30
Nvidia Open-Sources Run:ai After $700M Acquisition

Nvidia completed its $700 million acquisition of Run:ai, a software company simplifying GPU cloud orchestration for AI, and immediately open-sourced the software. This move is likely a strategic response to antitrust concerns, allowing wider access to the technology and mitigating potential regulatory issues stemming from Nvidia's market dominance. Run:ai's software will help companies efficiently manage GPU resources for AI development, fostering growth within the broader AI ecosystem.

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AI

arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaboration

2025-04-14
arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaboration

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

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Development

F-Stack: A High-Performance Open-Source Network Framework Based on DPDK

2025-08-30

The rapid advancement of Network Interface Cards (NICs) has exposed the performance bottleneck of Linux kernel data packet processing. To meet the internet's demand for high-performance network processing, kernel bypass technologies like DPDK, NETMAP, and PF_RING have gained prominence. F-Stack is a high-performance open-source network framework built on DPDK. It utilizes the Linux kernel only for control flow, processing all data streams in user space. This avoids performance bottlenecks caused by kernel packet copying, thread scheduling, system calls, and interrupts. F-Stack includes a user-space TCP/IP stack (based on FreeBSD 11.0 stable), POSIX APIs (Socket, Epoll, Kqueue), a programming SDK (Coroutine), and interfaces for applications like Nginx and Redis, aiming for superior network processing performance.

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Development Kernel Bypass

Rotten Tomatoes Inflation: A Hollywood Secret?

2025-08-20
Rotten Tomatoes Inflation: A Hollywood Secret?

A recent observation of nearly every film on Rotten Tomatoes being labeled "Certified Fresh" sparked suspicion. Data analysis reveals a significant rise in Rotten Tomatoes' average score over the past decade, coinciding with Fandango's acquisition. The author suggests Rotten Tomatoes may be manipulating scores by expanding its reviewer pool to include those giving more favorable reviews. While this might boost box office numbers short-term, it's detrimental to the long-term health of the film industry.

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French Court Orders VPN Providers to Block Pirate Sports Streaming Sites

2025-06-06

A French court ruled that several VPN providers, including NordVPN, CyberGhost, and ExpressVPN, must take measures to prevent users from accessing specific pirate sports streaming websites. Copyright holders like Canal+ sued, alleging these VPNs allowed users to bypass geo-restrictions and watch illegal streams. The court dismissed the VPN providers' objections, finding that Article L. 333-10 of the French Sports Code applies to VPN providers and ordered the blocking of listed website domains within three business days. This marks a new milestone in France's fight against online piracy but also raises concerns about internet censorship and user privacy.

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Tech

The Rise and Fall (and Rise?) of Literary Criticism

2025-05-29
The Rise and Fall (and Rise?) of Literary Criticism

This essay explores the current state of literary criticism, tracing its lineage back to Henry James's sharp critiques of authors like Dickens. James believed that good criticism stems from a deep understanding and unique perspective on the work, not from superficial praise. The article points out that today's book reviews often lack depth and critical thinking, which not only harms the literary works themselves but also hinders further literary development. The author calls for a return to the Jamesian critical spirit: to examine works with professionalism and a unique perspective, thereby promoting literary prosperity.

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Misc novel art

Secret Mall Apartment: 4 Years Undetected in a Shopping Mall

2025-05-22
Secret Mall Apartment: 4 Years Undetected in a Shopping Mall

In 2003, a group of Rhode Island artists secretly built and lived in a hidden apartment within a bustling shopping mall for four years, undetected. The documentary "Secret Mall Apartment" chronicles their unusual endeavor, highlighting their artistic spirit and quiet rebellion against soulless consumerism and urban development. Their actions serve as a unique protest against the impersonal nature of modern city planning and the erasure of local character, culminating in a surprising discovery and a thought-provoking narrative.

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Microsoft Shuts Down Bing Search API, Reshaping the Search Landscape

2025-05-15
Microsoft Shuts Down Bing Search API, Reshaping the Search Landscape

Microsoft's decision to shut down its Bing search API is sending ripples through the search engine ecosystem. For years, the affordable and convenient Bing API powered search engines like DuckDuckGo and Brave. However, the advent of ChatGPT and a tenfold price increase prompted many to build their own indexes. While Microsoft claims its new AI-powered system is superior, developers report reduced flexibility. This move could force Google to open its search data, potentially reshaping the competitive landscape.

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Tech

The Exploding Cucumber: A Botanical Curiosity

2025-08-13
The Exploding Cucumber: A Botanical Curiosity

Cyclanthera brachystachya, also known as the exploding cucumber (though not to be confused with Ecballium elaterium), is a fascinating vine native to Central and South America. This unusual plant, reaching up to 3 meters in length, produces spiky, 2-4cm fruits that explode when ripe, scattering their seeds. While the small, immature fruits can be eaten raw in salads, the larger, mature ones are typically cooked. Growing it is similar to other cucurbits, thriving in warm, humid climates. Its unique properties make it a curious and edible addition to any garden.

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Is Dark Energy Weakening? 2087 'Vampire' Stars Offer New Clues

2025-07-25
Is Dark Energy Weakening? 2087 'Vampire' Stars Offer New Clues

A study using 2,087 Type Ia supernovae ('vampire' stars) provides new evidence that dark energy, the mysterious force accelerating the universe's expansion, is weakening. This contradicts the standard cosmological model, which predicts dark energy should remain constant. Using a supernova dataset called Union3, the study corroborates, through two independent lines of investigation, that dark energy may be weakening over time, which would have implications for the ultimate fate of the universe. Future data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will further test this finding.

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Tech

The Sickest Amiga Setup at GERP 2025

2025-02-08

At GERP 2025, a modified Amiga 1200 stole the show. This wasn't just any Amiga; it served as the competition hub, running entries and connected to a VCR, CRT TV, and genlock for multi-source video output to a large screen. Boasting a 68060 accelerator, ample RAM, and a network card, it even leveraged a Raspberry Pi for modern connectivity. More than a retro machine, this Amiga 1200 was a demoscene powerhouse, highlighting the enduring appeal and expandability of the Amiga platform.

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Game demoparty

Dusk OS: A Minimalist OS for the Post-Collapse World

2025-05-13

Dusk OS is a 32-bit Forth-based operating system designed for survival in a post-civilizational collapse scenario. It aggressively prioritizes simplicity, sacrificing some features for extreme efficiency and ease of operation. Using an 'almost C' compiler, Dusk OS easily ports existing UNIX C code and boasts an incredibly small footprint (a complete system is under 6000 lines of code). It's fully self-hosting, runs smoothly on older hardware, and possesses a remarkably high "power density," challenging conventional software culture.

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Development

Microsoft Store Package for Windows LTSC

2025-05-13
Microsoft Store Package for Windows LTSC

This project provides a Microsoft Store package for Windows 10 LTSC 2019, 2021, and Windows 11 LTSC 2024. Note that recent LTSC 2019 versions no longer support this store; a system update might be required after installation. Simply download and double-click to install; however, for optimal performance, update to the latest version within the Store settings after installation.

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A Decade Review: Diving Deep into Time-Series Anomaly Detection

2025-01-06
A Decade Review: Diving Deep into Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Advances in data collection and the explosion of streaming data highlight the crucial need for time-series analytics. This paper provides a decade-long review of time-series anomaly detection, encompassing methods from traditional statistical measures to the surge of machine learning algorithms. It presents a process-centric taxonomy to categorize and summarize existing solutions, offering a meta-analysis of the literature and outlining general trends in the field. This comprehensive survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers.

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LLaMA-Factory: A Unified Framework for Efficient Fine-tuning of 100+ LLMs

2025-09-19
LLaMA-Factory: A Unified Framework for Efficient Fine-tuning of 100+ LLMs

LLaMA-Factory is an open-source framework that enables efficient fine-tuning of over 100 large language models (LLMs), including LLaMA, LLaVA, and Mistral. It integrates various fine-tuning methods (like LoRA, QLoRA, and OFT), offers scalable resources and advanced algorithms, and covers a wide range of tasks such as multi-turn dialogue and image understanding. LLaMA-Factory also supports various inference acceleration techniques and provides a user-friendly interface and API. Constantly updated with support for the latest models and techniques, LLaMA-Factory aims to provide developers with a convenient and efficient tool for LLM fine-tuning.

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Development Open-source Framework

Lidar Can Fry Your Phone's Camera

2025-05-23
Lidar Can Fry Your Phone's Camera

A Reddit user recently discovered that car-mounted lidar sensors can permanently damage a phone's camera under certain conditions. While filming a Volvo EX90 with an iPhone 16 Pro Max, the lidar's near-infrared light fried pixels in the camera lens. Volvo has warned against pointing cameras directly at lidar sensors, highlighting the potential risks of increasingly prevalent lidar technology in autonomous vehicles. The incident underscores the growing concerns about the interaction between lidar and consumer electronics.

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A Masochist's Guide to WebAssembly: A C/C++ Dev's Web App Odyssey

2025-06-06

An experienced C developer documents their journey of porting a complex Rubik's Cube solver to WebAssembly using Emscripten. The post details the challenges encountered, from simple 'Hello World' programs to multithreading, persistent storage, and the intricacies of Web Workers and IndexedDB. It highlights the realities of leaky abstractions in web development, showcasing the unexpected complexities that arise when bridging the gap between C/C++ and the browser environment. Despite the difficulties, the project culminates in a successful web application deployment, offering valuable lessons learned along the way.

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Development

Soft Neural Renderer with Learnable Triangles

2025-05-30

This research introduces a novel neural rendering method using learnable 3D triangles as primitives. Unlike traditional binary masks, it employs a smooth window function derived from the triangle's 2D signed distance field (SDF) to softly modulate the triangle's influence on pixels. A smoothness parameter, σ, controls the sharpness of this window function, allowing a smooth transition from a binary mask to an approximation of a delta function. The final image is generated by alpha blending the contributions of all projected triangles. The entire process is differentiable, enabling gradient-based learning to optimize triangle parameters.

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Graphical Debugging of the Hilbert Curve: A Visual Programming Journey

2025-05-22

The author advocates for a minimalist programming style and uses Lua and LÖVE to graphically debug a recursive function for computing the Hilbert curve. Through iterative visualization improvements, including a text log, replay log, surface drawing, and an 'exploding view' drawing, the author clarifies the algorithm's complexities. The process culminates in a sophisticated debugging UI, offering valuable insights and reusable patterns for future debugging tasks.

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Development graphical debugging

US Regulator Moves to Protect In-Game Currencies

2025-01-11
US Regulator Moves to Protect In-Game Currencies

The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed a rule to extend protections similar to those for real-world bank accounts to virtual in-game currencies. This move addresses the rise of in-game currency transactions and fraud. The proposal aims to safeguard players from unauthorized transactions, scams, and account theft, holding game companies accountable for financial issues reported by customers. Platforms like Roblox, with its Robux currency, are highlighted due to past complaints. The rule interpretation expands the Electronic Fund Transfer Act's coverage, providing greater legal recourse for gamers.

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The Forecasting Company: Seeking Founding Software Engineer

2025-08-28
The Forecasting Company: Seeking Founding Software Engineer

A startup building the ultimate forecasting foundation model is seeking a founding software engineer. This full-stack role involves developing customer-facing APIs, robust data pipelines, and a web application. Ideal candidates will be proficient in Python and TypeScript, comfortable with React, and have experience building projects from scratch. Benefits include generous equity, daily lunch vouchers, an on-site gym, a mobility pass, full health insurance, and more.

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Development Forecasting Model

2PB of Traffic: The Cost of a Simple Auto-Updater Bug

2025-04-29
2PB of Traffic: The Cost of a Simple Auto-Updater Bug

A simple bug in the auto-updater of the screen recording app Screen Studio caused it to repeatedly download a 250MB update file every 5 minutes for a month, resulting in 9 million downloads and over 2 petabytes of Google Cloud traffic. Thousands of users had the app running in the background, leading to massive bills and internet service disruptions for some users. This incident highlights the importance of setting cloud cost alerts, writing code carefully, and regularly checking cloud resources.

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Bolt Graphics' Zeus GPU: A RISC-V Challenger to Nvidia

2025-03-16
Bolt Graphics' Zeus GPU: A RISC-V Challenger to Nvidia

Bolt Graphics, a California startup, unveiled its Zeus GPU platform based on the open-source RISC-V architecture. In path tracing workloads, Zeus significantly outperforms Nvidia's RTX 5090, boasting up to 10x the speed. However, its performance in traditional rendering and AI tasks remains unclear, and a mature software ecosystem is lacking. Zeus uses a multi-chiplet design, offering various configurations with up to 2TB of memory and built-in high-speed networking, targeting high-performance computing and scientific simulations. Developer kits are slated for late 2025, with mass production in late 2026. Despite significant challenges, Zeus's emergence injects new dynamism into the GPU market.

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Hardware

Microsoft's Hidden Easter Egg: A Retro Tech War Story

2025-04-26

This article unravels the story behind a hidden "MICROSOFT!" Easter egg embedded in early versions of Microsoft's BASIC interpreters. From the 1975 Altair BASIC to Commodore PET's Commodore BASIC V2, Microsoft cleverly concealed this message to assert code ownership. The egg resurfaced across various platforms, even leading to a second, more overt Easter egg in the TRS-80 Color Computer. The article delves into authorship, removal reasons, and its intriguing place in computer history, showcasing the competition and technical details of early tech companies.

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Tech Easter Egg
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