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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.

(pietrasiak.com)

Development auto-updater cloud computing costs

Running LLMs Locally: Privacy, Cost, and Experimentation

2025-03-11

Running LLMs Locally: Privacy, Cost, and Experimentation

This article explores the advantages and methods of running large language models (LLMs) locally. While acknowledging that local LLMs won't match cloud services in performance, the author highlights their benefits for privacy, cost control, and experimental development. Three tools are presented: Ollama (user-friendly, extensive model library), Llama.cpp (cross-platform, powerful), and Llamafiles (single executable, easy sharing). The article also covers crucial aspects like model selection, parameters, quantization, and model capabilities, while cautioning about model file sizes and security. Ultimately, running LLMs locally offers developers a flexible and controllable approach to AI development.

(spin.atomicobject.com)

Development local LLMs model selection

EgyptAir Flight 804 Crash: The Untold Story

2024-12-24

EgyptAir Flight 804 Crash: The Untold Story

On May 19, 2016, EgyptAir Flight 804 vanished from radar over the Mediterranean Sea. For eight years, the investigation was stalled, with conflicting reports from Egypt and France – one blaming a deliberate explosion, the other an accidental fire. In October 2024, Egypt unexpectedly released a 663-page final report, including both sides' findings. This article unravels the timeline, analyzes the reports, and reveals the most likely cause: a malfunction in the first officer's oxygen mask system ignited a fire, leading to the crash. This tragedy highlights aviation safety concerns and exposes the many ambiguities of the investigation.

(admiralcloudberg.medium.com)

Tech EgyptAir 804 Air Crash Investigation Aviation Safety

Seastar: A Fast, Extensible Build System for Multiple Languages

2025-06-15

Seastar: A Fast, Extensible Build System for Multiple Languages

Seastar is a fast and extensible build system currently supporting C and C++, with plans to add Rust and Zig. Designed for ease of creation, prototyping, and iteration, it aims to mimic the user-friendliness of Rust's Cargo while offering seamless compilation across multiple languages. Seastar is simple to build and run; just install Cargo and Rust, clone the repository, and run the provided commands. Currently in early stages, it's not recommended for production use.

(github.com)

Development

Ruby 3.4.0 Released: Enhanced Performance and New Features

2024-12-25

Ruby 3.4.0 has been released, boasting significant improvements! Key highlights include a performance-boosted YJIT compiler, a new modular garbage collection mechanism, and the convenient `it` block parameter reference. The default parser has switched to Prism, and the socket library now features Happy Eyeballs V2 for more efficient network connections. Core classes have received updates, and various bugs have been squashed. The release also includes deprecation warnings for string literal modifications and improvements to keyword splatting.

(www.ruby-lang.org)

Development release

Massive NPM Package Purge: A Developer's Wake-Up Call

2025-09-20

Massive NPM Package Purge: A Developer's Wake-Up Call

A significant number of npm packages have been removed from the npm registry, impacting components and tools across various frameworks like React, Angular, and NativeScript. The affected packages range from those completely removed to others having versions fixed. This event serves as a reminder for developers to be vigilant about dependency maintenance and security. It's crucial to review project dependencies and take necessary actions to prevent disruptions. Reasons for removal may include security vulnerabilities, maintenance issues, or other factors.

(www.koi.security)

Development package removal

TRMNL's Unbrickable Pledge: Open Source and Sustainability

2025-02-19

TRMNL has made a promise to never brick your device. They've followed through with open-sourcing their firmware, building BYOS clients in Ruby, Elixir, and Python, selling BYOD licenses, releasing the free Framework UI kit, and hiring a senior engineer for OSS. To address growing server costs, they've introduced the 'Unbrickable Pledge,' promising to release the core web application source code in case of insolvency. This commitment ensures user data safety and reduces e-waste.

(usetrmnl.com)

Tech

Ultra-Processed Foods: Health Risks and Policy Challenges

2025-09-05

Ultra-Processed Foods: Health Risks and Policy Challenges

The UN is set to discuss a proposal to eliminate trans fats, but experts urge clarification between industrially produced and naturally occurring trans fats to avoid harming nutritious foods. This sparks a broader debate on "ultra-processed foods," often high in sugar, salt, and saturated fat, linked to obesity and cardiovascular disease. While the NOVA classification system helps identify them, its limitations lie in focusing solely on processing, ignoring factors like palatability and calorie density. Therefore, clearer definitions and more precise policies are needed, balancing control over excessive industrial food production with ensuring sufficient and appropriate food for all.

(www.nature.com)

Tech trans fats

CERN Performs First Autopsy on Radioactive Beam Dump

2025-05-24

CERN Performs First Autopsy on Radioactive Beam Dump

For the first time, CERN performed an autopsy on a radioactive beam dump to investigate nitrogen leaks. After ten years of operation, the dump showed signs of degradation. Engineers overcame the challenges of the high-radiation environment using robots and automated circular saws to dissect the dump's housing and examine its high-density, low-density, and extruded graphite components. Cracks were found in the extruded graphite, but the low- and high-density graphite were in good condition. This autopsy provided valuable data for LHC Run 3 and future HL-LHC beam dump designs, leading to improvements in spare dump designs.

(home.cern)

Tech Radioactive

Boost UI Design Efficiency: Prioritize Global Consistency Over Local Optimization

2025-09-19

Boost UI Design Efficiency: Prioritize Global Consistency Over Local Optimization

While redesigning Lighthouse, the author developed a system for creating better UI designs with less effort. The core principle is prioritizing global UI consistency over local perfection. This involves selecting and fully utilizing a component library (like HeroUI), avoiding custom components; using only two font weights and two text colors; maintaining visual consistency between icons and text; and creating and adhering to a project-specific design rule document. These strategies significantly improved design efficiency and resulted in a smoother, more usable interface.

(weberdominik.com)

Design Design Principles

18 Years of Self-Injection Leads to Breakthrough Snake Antivenom

2025-05-03

18 Years of Self-Injection Leads to Breakthrough Snake Antivenom

For 18 years, Tim Friede injected himself with venom from deadly snakes. His unique experiment yielded a breakthrough: researchers used his antibodies to create a broadly effective antivenom, potentially protecting against 19 snake species. This new antivenom, unlike traditional methods using animal blood, leverages modern antibody therapy. While promising results in mice have been achieved, further testing in larger animals and humans is crucial. The research highlights a potential solution to the global snakebite crisis, but challenges remain in accessibility and affordability.

(www.abc.net.au)

Tech antivenom scientific breakthrough

WireGuard Setup Complexity: A Guide from Simple to Advanced

2025-01-05

This blog post explores various WireGuard setup complexities, ranging from the simplest, with completely isolated internal IP address spaces, to the most challenging 'VPN' setup where some endpoints are accessible both inside and outside the WireGuard tunnel. The author details the difficulty and potential issues of each setup, such as routing conflicts and recursive routing. The article stresses the importance of upfront planning and suggests opting for simpler configurations to avoid complex routing when designing a WireGuard environment.

(utcc.utoronto.ca)

Development Network Configuration

Go's io.Reader Efficiency: A Battle with Indirection and Type Assertions

2025-05-19

Many Go functions take an io.Reader, enabling streaming and avoiding loading everything into memory. However, when you already have the bytes, using them directly is more efficient. This article describes the author's experience decoding images with libavif and libheif. For simplicity, the simple memory interfaces were used, but the Go image.Decode function checks for a Peek function on the io.Reader, wrapping with bufio.Reader if not found, preventing direct use of bytes.Reader. The author cleverly uses type assertions and unsafe.Pointer to bypass bufio.Reader and bytes.Reader, achieving zero-copy. However, the article highlights issues in Go's type checking and interface design, including the resulting 'shadow APIs'.

(flak.tedunangst.com)

Development

Surprisingly Usable Word Processors on the Commodore VIC-20

2025-01-08

Surprisingly Usable Word Processors on the Commodore VIC-20

This article explores several surprisingly capable word processors for the Commodore VIC-20, a machine with a notoriously small screen. VICWRITER, with its typewriter-like interface, offers comfortable editing. Quick Brown Fox stands out with 80-column display support and RS-232 communication capabilities. Speedscript impresses with its word wrap and efficient editing commands. Write Now is also briefly mentioned, showcasing the ingenuity of software developers in overcoming hardware limitations.

(techtinkering.com)

Tech Retro Computing Word Processors

UK Cracks Down on Fake Online Reviews and Hidden Fees

2025-04-07

UK Cracks Down on Fake Online Reviews and Hidden Fees

The UK has implemented new legislation to combat fake online reviews and the deceptive practice of 'drip pricing,' where additional fees are added during checkout. The Digital Markets, Competition, and Consumer Act 2024 mandates that all mandatory fees, such as booking or admin charges, be included in the advertised price. This applies to services like food delivery and ticket booking platforms. Businesses are also prohibited from using or commissioning fake reviews. Platforms are responsible for removing and preventing them, facing potential fines up to 10% of global annual turnover for non-compliance. The aim is to protect consumers and ensure fair competition.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech fake reviews drip pricing

23andMe Bankruptcy: 15% of Users Delete Data Amidst Regeneron Acquisition

2025-06-11

23andMe Bankruptcy: 15% of Users Delete Data Amidst Regeneron Acquisition

Following its bankruptcy filing, 23andMe revealed that 1.9 million users (about 15% of its customer base) have requested deletion of their genetic data. This surge in data deletion requests stems from concerns over data security following the company's bankruptcy auction, where pharmaceutical giant Regeneron acquired 23andMe for $256 million. While Regeneron pledged to uphold privacy practices, over two dozen states have sued, arguing that 23andMe cannot sell customer data without explicit consent. This comes after a months-long data breach affecting 6.9 million users last year. The court is expected to finalize the sale in late June.

(techcrunch.com)

Tech

May Day: A Century-Long Celebration of Labor

2025-05-01

May Day: A Century-Long Celebration of Labor

May Day, or International Workers' Day, commemorates the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago, a pivotal event in the struggle for the eight-hour workday. The tragic events led international socialists to establish May 1st as International Workers' Day in 1889, honoring those who sacrificed for workers' rights. Today, many countries observe it as a public holiday, celebrating the contributions of laborers and the working class, often marked by parades, demonstrations, and discussions advocating for workers' rights and improved conditions.

(en.wikipedia.org)

Misc May Day Labor Day Workers' Rights

Generative AI's Limitations: A Critique by Gary Marcus

2025-02-15

Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus is a prominent skeptic of generative AI, arguing that the current technological path suffers from technical and ethical flaws. He points out that Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at function approximation but fall short in learning functions, prone to "distribution shift" issues, and unable to understand abstract concepts or reliably follow instructions. Marcus contends that LLMs lack understanding of the real world, leading to logical errors and biases. He proposes integrating neural networks with classical AI methods to address these shortcomings. He introduces a new evaluation benchmark—the "comprehension challenge"—where an AI system should be able to understand a movie plot and answer related questions, measuring true comprehension.

(cacm.acm.org)

AI AI limitations

AI-Powered Code Editor's Bot Fabricates Policy, Leading to User Cancellations

2025-04-18

AI-Powered Code Editor's Bot Fabricates Policy, Leading to User Cancellations

An AI-powered code editor, Cursor, recently faced backlash after its AI chatbot fabricated a company policy. A developer discovered that switching devices instantly logged them out of Cursor. When contacting support, an AI agent named "Sam" claimed this was a new security feature. However, no such policy existed; the AI invented the information, leading to user complaints and subscription cancellations. This highlights the risks of deploying AI systems in customer-facing roles without human oversight, potentially resulting in frustrated customers, damaged trust, and financial losses.

(arstechnica.com)

Development

Debian Opens Public Open Source Software Mirror

2025-04-29

The Debian project has announced a public open-source software mirror server. They state that the server's contents are publicly available, contain no sensitive information, and do not require reporting under their responsible disclosure policy. The server offers downloads for Debian versions 10, 11, 12, as well as testing (Trixie) and unstable (Sid) releases. Links to older releases and documentation are also provided.

(ftp.bit.nl)

Development Mirror Server

Nebu: A Lightweight Spreadsheet Editor for Varvara

2025-03-06

Nebu is a lightweight graphical spreadsheet editor for the Varvara system, designed to handle csv/tsv files. Math operations are performed by specifying a rectangular range of cells followed by an operator. A range is defined using a colon between two cell identifiers. A cell performs at most one operation, and the range must precede the cell and cannot recursively include itself. It supports basic arithmetic (+, -, *, /), counting non-empty cells (#), and string concatenation ("). If no operator is specified, it defaults to summation. Nebu launches instantly and weighs less than an empty Excel file.

(wiki.xxiivv.com)

Development Varvara

Reviving ELIZA: A C++ Recreation of the First Chatbot

2025-05-17

Reviving ELIZA: A C++ Recreation of the First Chatbot

This post details the recreation of ELIZA, the first chatbot created by Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966, using C++. The author meticulously recreated ELIZA's functionality, starting from parsing the original script to optimizing the code and comparing it with the original source. Further enhancements include running ELIZA on an ASR 33 teletype and contributing to the proof that the 1966 CACM version is Turing-complete. The entire project is neatly packaged in a single eliza.cpp file, with compilation instructions for macOS and Windows. This project is a fascinating tribute to AI history and a valuable resource for developers interested in early AI technology.

(github.com)

AI

OCRing YouTube Music with Common Lisp: A Pixel-Perfect Adventure

2025-01-06

A developer attempted to extract music data from a YouTube video using Common Lisp. Initial attempts with Tesseract and ChatGPT proved unsuccessful. Ultimately, an old-school pixel differencing method, involving manual extraction of character images and comparison, successfully extracted most of the musical notation. While not perfect, the extracted data sufficed, proving the method's feasibility. The article also details the developer's experience using Lisp for image processing and efficient development.

(nickfa.ro)

Development Image Processing

Beyond Zig and Rust: A More Human-Friendly Approach to Metaprogramming

2025-05-26

This article explores a novel programming language design that combines the strengths of Rust's Hindley-Milner type system and Zig's compile-time capabilities, while avoiding the complexities of Zig's 'types as values' approach. By introducing the `@` operator for compile-time execution, the `Abstract` type for compile-time abstractions, `TypeInfo` and `Field` types for type introspection, and `Code` and `parse` functions for code manipulation, this design achieves powerful metaprogramming capabilities such as automatic code generation and the implementation of TypeScript-like utility types like `Partial`, all while maintaining code readability and ease of reasoning. This represents a new approach to achieving powerful metaprogramming while preserving type system friendliness, offering fresh perspectives for future language design.

(0x44.xyz)

Development

ISS Leak Mystery Delays Ax-4 Mission: A New Twist in an Old Problem

2025-06-29

ISS Leak Mystery Delays Ax-4 Mission: A New Twist in an Old Problem

A slow leak from a Russian module on the International Space Station (ISS), ongoing for years, has recently stopped, raising concerns. This could be due to successful repairs, or a new leak may have formed internally, potentially affecting the entire station's air pressure. The private Axiom Space Mission 4 (Ax-4) was delayed as a result, while NASA and Roscosmos investigate. Disagreements persist on the safety risk assessment. Ax-4 includes former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson and the first astronauts from India, Poland, and Hungary to visit the ISS. Despite the ongoing leak issue, the Crew-11 mission is still scheduled for July.

(www.cnn.com)

Tech leak

Sub-100MB LLM Now Pip-installable: Introducing llm-smollm2

2025-02-07

Sub-100MB LLM Now Pip-installable: Introducing llm-smollm2

A new plugin, llm-smollm2, bundles a quantized SmolLM2-135M-Instruct LLM under 100MB, making it pip-installable. The author details the creation process, from finding a suitable sub-100MB model (limited by PyPI size restrictions) to suppressing verbose logging from llama-cpp-python and packaging for PyPI. While the model's capabilities are limited, it's presented as a valuable learning tool for understanding LLM technology.

(simonwillison.net)

Development Model Quantization

The Unexpected Legacy of Parking Reform Pioneer Donald Shoup

2025-02-12

The Unexpected Legacy of Parking Reform Pioneer Donald Shoup

Professor Donald Shoup, a pioneer in parking reform, passed away on February 6th. This article details how his work fundamentally reshaped the political economy of parking and cities themselves. His seminal work, *The High Cost of Free Parking*, argued that underpriced parking leads to wasted resources and urban congestion. Shoup advocated for demand-based parking pricing and the abolition of minimum parking requirements, using parking revenue to improve local infrastructure to gain public support. His ideas have been implemented in thousands of cities worldwide, leaving a lasting impact on urban planning.

(www.worksinprogress.news)

Misc parking reform

arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

2025-04-12

arXivLabs is a framework for collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on the website. Individuals and organizations involved share arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv only works with partners who adhere to these principles. Have an idea to improve the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

(arxiv.org)

Development

Say Goodbye to Email Clutter: Smart Filters Organize Your Inbox

2025-08-26

Say Goodbye to Email Clutter: Smart Filters Organize Your Inbox

Tired of endless promotional emails clogging your inbox? This open-source smart email filter automatically identifies and archives promotional emails, leaving only important personal emails in your main inbox. It runs within your Gmail or Fastmail account, ensuring safety and privacy. No emails are deleted; they're simply organized for better efficiency. It works seamlessly across desktop, mobile, and web interfaces, and it's completely free!

(unfuck.email)

Misc email filter inbox organization

Railway Launches Railpack: 77% Faster Builds, Goodbye Nixpacks

2025-06-07

Railway Launches Railpack: 77% Faster Builds, Goodbye Nixpacks

Railway has released Railpack, a new build system replacing Nixpacks. Railpack addresses Nixpacks' limitations in version management, build size, and caching. It offers granular version control, significantly smaller image sizes (38% reduction for Node.js, 77% for Python), and improved caching, leading to much faster builds. Using BuildKit and Mise, Railpack employs a three-stage build process (analyze, plan, generate) for finer control and parallelization. Currently supporting Node.js, Python, Go, PHP, and static HTML deployments, Railpack plans to add more languages and frameworks.

(blog.railway.com)

Development

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