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Subverting Tradition: A South-Up Map Challenges Geographic Conventions

2025-09-18

Subverting Tradition: A South-Up Map Challenges Geographic Conventions

A south-up map challenges the established norms of mapmaking, prompting reflection on geographical conventions. Unlike traditional north-up maps, this map places the South Pole at the top, altering our perception of geographical orientation. The article explores the cultural and historical context of map orientation choices and their impact on how we understand the world, highlighting that map orientation is not fixed but rather a product of human choice.

(www.maps.com)

Misc

Preschoolers' Reasoning Skills Surprise Researchers

2025-03-28

Preschoolers' Reasoning Skills Surprise Researchers

A University of Montreal study reveals that preschoolers (ages 3-5) demonstrate surprisingly sophisticated reasoning skills when categorizing toys. They go beyond simple binary classification, creating multiple categories based on various criteria and even adjusting their criteria mid-task, showcasing complex mathematical reasoning. This challenges previous understandings of child cognitive development and offers new insights for early childhood education.

(phys.org)

Development mathematical reasoning

Blacksmith: How a Serverless CI Platform Achieves Profitability Through Multitenancy

2025-05-14

Blacksmith: How a Serverless CI Platform Achieves Profitability Through Multitenancy

Blacksmith, a YC startup, built a serverless cloud platform for CI workloads. Initially relying on simulations to project margins, they discovered the economic benefits of multitenancy. By leveraging the spiky nature of CI workloads – short-lived jobs (5-40 minutes) and geographically diverse customers – Blacksmith efficiently utilizes its server resources. Their fleet of hundreds of bare-metal gaming CPUs, virtualized with Firecracker, creates and destroys microVMs on demand. More customers mean more random activity, smoothing overall operation, lowering the cost to serve each job, and boosting profit margins. The article details profitability at various utilization levels, and the impact of time zones and geography on resource utilization, ultimately demonstrating the economic power of their multitenant model.

(www.blacksmith.sh)

Development multitenancy

Microsoft's Silent Driver Purge: Breaking Your Old Hardware?

2025-06-20

Microsoft's Silent Driver Purge: Breaking Your Old Hardware?

Microsoft is quietly removing outdated drivers from Windows Update, citing security and reliability. However, this could break hardware for users relying on legacy devices. Without individual warnings, drivers simply disappear from Windows Update. Only the original hardware partner can restore them, but Microsoft might require business justification, and drivers are permanently deleted after six months of inactivity. This is a nightmare for users of older hardware, potentially impacting even enterprise environments. Microsoft plans to continue this purge regularly.

(nerds.xyz)

Hardware Drivers

arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

2025-07-07

arXivLabs is a framework for developing and sharing new arXiv features directly on the website, collaboratively. Participants must embrace arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. Got an idea to improve the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs!

(arxiv.org)

Development

WebAuthn: The Future of Passwordless Authentication

2024-12-26

This book delves into WebAuthn, a public key cryptography-based authentication system designed to replace vulnerable password systems. Starting with the shortcomings of passwords, it progressively introduces core WebAuthn concepts, including U2F, FIDO2, passkeys, and the WebAuthn API's usage. It details public key signature schemes, RP IDs, the CTAP2 protocol, attestation, and various extensions. Server-side implementation, platform APIs (iOS, Android, Windows), and public key formats are also covered. WebAuthn combines security keys and platform authenticators, utilizing random challenges and multiple security mechanisms to effectively address phishing attacks and database leaks, providing users with a more secure and reliable authentication experience.

(www.imperialviolet.org)

AI password security Authentication Password Security

Disruptive Country Ranking: The Baby Money Index (BMI) Emerges

2024-12-15

Disruptive Country Ranking: The Baby Money Index (BMI) Emerges

An economics article introduces a new country ranking metric—the Baby Money Index (BMI), which multiplies per capita Gross National Income by the square of the fertility rate. Unlike the traditional Human Development Index (HDI), the BMI focuses more on the long-term impact of population growth on the economy. The article points out that high income and high fertility are difficult to achieve simultaneously; many oil-rich or tax-haven countries top the list, while some developed countries rank lower due to low fertility rates. The United States outperforms any country with a population over 40 million, including the entire G12, due to its high BMI.

(www.atvbt.com)

Misc country ranking baby money index economics

Clearview AI: A Tech Company Fueled by the Far Right, Weaponizing Surveillance

2025-04-07

Clearview AI: A Tech Company Fueled by the Far Right, Weaponizing Surveillance

Clearview AI, a powerful facial recognition technology company, was founded by Hoan Ton-That, a figure with strong far-right ties and close connections to neoreactionaries and white nationalists. The company built a massive biometric database using billions of images scraped from the internet, offering facial recognition services to law enforcement and corporations, raising enormous privacy concerns. Clearview AI actively pursued partnerships with border patrol and is accused of using its technology to surveil protesters and political opponents. Despite facing multiple lawsuits and hefty fines, Clearview AI thrived under the Trump administration, forging close relationships with agencies like ICE, raising the specter of its technology being used for mass surveillance and deportation. The company's new leadership, openly embracing a MAGA agenda, suggests a continued threat to privacy and democratic institutions.

(www.motherjones.com)

Tech far-right

42 Open Source Projects Awarded Funding to Reclaim the Public Internet

2025-04-23

The NGI Zero Commons Fund announced its largest-ever funding round, awarding grants to 42 open-source projects focused on reclaiming the public nature of the internet. Projects span hardware (like the open-hardware tablet MNT Reform Touch and the solar-powered Solar FemtoTX motherboard), operating systems (including the next-generation bcachefs filesystem for Linux and KDE Plasma gestures), and data & AI (such as LLM2FPGA, enabling local open-source LLM inference on FPGAs). This initiative champions open, secure, and accessible internet technologies, fostering a more democratic and equitable digital landscape.

(nlnet.nl)

Tech

Munal OS: An Experimental Unikernel OS in Rust

2025-06-09

Munal OS: An Experimental Unikernel OS in Rust

Munal OS is an experimental operating system written entirely in Rust, featuring a unikernel design, cooperative scheduling, and a security model based on WASM sandboxing. It forgoes traditional components like a bootloader, page mapping, virtual address space, and interrupts. Instead, the entire OS is compiled into a single EFI binary, embedding the kernel, WASM engine, and all applications. Communication with QEMU is handled via VirtIO drivers, enabling a graphical interface, network driver, and TCP stack. While currently limited to QEMU and lacking multi-core support and interrupts, its minimalist design and WASM-based sandboxing offer a fresh perspective on OS design.

(github.com)

Development

EU Data Act Kills Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in SaaS

2025-09-19

EU Data Act Kills Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in SaaS

The EU Data Act, effective September 2025, dramatically alters the SaaS landscape in Europe. It mandates that all SaaS contracts with EU customers become “cancel anytime” subscriptions, requiring only two months' notice. This effectively ends the reliance on Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) as a predictable metric. SaaS companies must adapt, focusing on pricing models, customer retention strategies, and mitigating involuntary churn due to customer oversight. Success will hinge on robust customer relationship management and operational resilience, not contract terms.

(paid.ai)

Development EU Data Act

AWS S3 Vectors: The Rise of Tiered Storage for Vector Databases?

2025-09-08

AWS S3 Vectors: The Rise of Tiered Storage for Vector Databases?

AWS recently launched S3 Vectors, a vector database built on top of its S3 object storage. This has sparked debate about whether it will replace existing vector databases like Milvus, Pinecone, etc. The author, a engineering architect at Milvus, argues that S3 Vectors is not a replacement but a complement, particularly suitable for low-cost, low-query frequency cold data storage scenarios. He analyzes S3 Vectors' technical architecture, highlighting its advantages in cost and scalability, but also its limitations in high query latency, low precision, and limited functionality. The author further elaborates on the evolution of vector databases: from in-memory storage to disk storage, and now to object storage, ultimately leading to a tiered storage architecture (hot, warm, and cold data layers) to balance performance, cost, and scalability. Milvus is also moving in this direction, with the upcoming 3.0 release featuring a vector data lake for unified management of hot and cold data. The emergence of S3 Vectors proves the maturity and growth of the vector database market, rather than disruption.

(zilliz.com)

AI tiered storage

Google's Systematic Approach to Tackling Technical Debt

2025-05-08

Google's Systematic Approach to Tackling Technical Debt

Google engineers faced the challenge of technical debt slowing down development. They systematically defined ten categories of technical debt through surveys, data analysis, and cross-functional team collaboration. A maturity model was developed to assess teams' debt management capabilities. Through education, tooling, and process improvements, Google significantly reduced the impact of technical debt on engineer productivity, highlighting the importance of systematic management rather than aiming for zero debt.

(newsletter.techworld-with-milan.com)

Development

Linux Kernel 6.16 Patches Core Dump Vulnerabilities: Saying Goodbye to a 'Stupid' API

2025-06-14

The Linux kernel 6.16 release significantly improves core dump handling, addressing long-standing security vulnerabilities. Previous API designs had flaws, such as core dump handlers running with root privileges, making them attractive attack targets, and race conditions leading to vulnerabilities. The new improvements introduce pidfd to ensure handlers operate on the correct crashed process and allow handlers to bind to a socket for receiving core dumps, reducing privilege escalation risks and effectively preventing attacks.

(lwn.net)

Development core dump

Real-time Home Occupancy Detection with S2

2025-03-06

Real-time Home Occupancy Detection with S2

This article details a real-time home occupancy detection system built using an AMG8833 infrared thermal imaging sensor, a Raspberry Pi, and the S2 streaming data platform. The system streams sensor data to S2, which is then used by a Next.js frontend to display a live heatmap. Simple image processing determines occupancy. S2's low cost and ease of use make this a budget-friendly solution, costing around $2 per month.

(s2.dev)

Hardware

20-Year-Old Builds Nuclear Fusor with AI: The Dawn of AI Natives?

2025-01-30

20-Year-Old Builds Nuclear Fusor with AI: The Dawn of AI Natives?

A 20-year-old math student, Hudhayfa Nazoordeen, built a nuclear fusor in his home using Anthropic's Claude AI and online resources. Despite lacking a physics background, he achieved this feat with the AI's assistance, sparking reflection on the rapid advancement of AI and its implications. The author's visit revealed a stark contrast between 'AI natives' like Hudhayfa and traditional tech users, highlighting the transformative power of AI. The experience led the author to believe new computing devices will integrate AI at their core, predicting those failing to adapt will be left behind.

(www.corememory.com)

Tech

Firefox Finally Adds (Experimental) Web App Support

2025-03-26

After years of user requests, Firefox is finally adding experimental support for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in its Nightly builds. Unlike Chrome, Firefox's approach aims for an app-like experience while retaining core browser features like the address bar and extensions. Users can transition any tab to web app mode, and link association will allow clicking a link to directly open the corresponding web app. While currently in early stages, this marks a significant step towards improving web app experiences in Firefox.

(www.omgubuntu.co.uk)

Development Web Apps

86-DOS: The Untold Story Behind the PC Revolution

2025-08-28

86-DOS: The Untold Story Behind the PC Revolution

In April 1980, a young programmer at Seattle Computer Products (SCP), Tim Paterson, began developing a small disk operating system, codenamed QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), for the new Intel 8086-based board. This project, initially designed as a quick fix for SCP's 8086 computer, unexpectedly evolved into Microsoft's MS-DOS, dominating the PC industry for over a decade. The article details QDOS's development, including the controversy surrounding its compatibility with CP/M's API, and Microsoft's acquisition of QDOS and its renaming to MS-DOS. The simplicity and CP/M-inspired API of QDOS, despite the resulting controversy, allowed for a quick release and made it a cornerstone of the PC era.

(nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com)

Tech

The Shocking Secret Speech: Khrushchev's Denunciation of Stalin and its Global Impact

2025-06-21

In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev delivered a secret report, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences," at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, launching a scathing critique of Stalin's totalitarian rule and purges. The speech, leaked to the West, revealed the extent of Stalin's brutality, triggering upheaval within the Soviet Union and profoundly impacting the communist world. It sparked de-Stalinization, contributed to the Sino-Soviet split, and, through a dramatic chain of events involving Polish journalists and Israeli intelligence, ushered in a period of brief liberalization known as the Khrushchev Thaw.

(en.wikipedia.org)

Tech Stalin Khrushchev De-Stalinization

WWII's Ramree Island: A Nightmarish Crocodile Massacre

2025-03-11

WWII's Ramree Island: A Nightmarish Crocodile Massacre

Following a battle on Ramree Island during WWII, nearly 1,000 Japanese soldiers fled into a dense mangrove swamp. Little did they know, this refuge was home to a massive population of saltwater crocodiles. These apex predators, some reaching over 20 feet in length, ambushed the terrified soldiers. Survivors recounted horrific tales of nightmarish attacks, screams, gunfire, and the sounds of flesh being torn. Hundreds perished in what Guinness World Records dubbed the "most fatalities in a crocodile attack."

(www.atlasobscura.com)

Misc Ramree Island Saltwater Crocodiles

Databricks Acquires Neon: Serverless Postgres for the AI Era

2025-05-14

Databricks Acquires Neon: Serverless Postgres for the AI Era

Databricks announced the acquisition of Neon, a developer-first serverless Postgres company. Neon's team, renowned for their Postgres expertise, built a database platform known for its speed, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, particularly appealing to AI agents. This acquisition strengthens Databricks' position in AI-native databases, offering developers and AI systems a powerful database solution.

(www.databricks.com)

Tech

AccessOwl Hiring: Senior Software Engineer (TypeScript, AI, Remote)

2025-05-31

AccessOwl Hiring: Senior Software Engineer (TypeScript, AI, Remote)

AccessOwl, a profitable Y Combinator-backed startup, seeks a Senior Software Engineer to build and maintain its SaaS tool management platform's integration layer. Ideal candidates are fluent in TypeScript and AI-native, experienced with Playwright or Puppeteer, familiar with IaC, and passionate about solving real-world problems. The role offers a competitive salary, fully remote work, and flexible hours.

(www.ycombinator.com)

Development

AMD Q4 2024 Earnings: Datacenter Dominance, but Gaming Slumps

2025-02-06

AMD Q4 2024 Earnings: Datacenter Dominance, but Gaming Slumps

AMD reported impressive Q4 2024 and full-year results, with total revenue reaching $7.658 billion, a 24% year-over-year increase. The datacenter business was a standout performer, achieving record revenue of $3.86 billion, surpassing Intel for the first time and establishing AMD as the leading datacenter CPU vendor. However, sales of Instinct MI300-series GPUs fell slightly short of expectations. The client business saw strong growth, with revenue up 58% year-over-year. Conversely, the gaming segment experienced a significant downturn, with revenue plummeting 59% year-over-year. The embedded segment also saw a moderate decline. Overall, 2024 was a record year for AMD, but the weakness in the gaming sector is a concern.

(www.tomshardware.com)

Tech earnings report

Open Source Advanced Data Protection: OpenADP Needs Your Help!

2025-05-31

Open Source Advanced Data Protection: OpenADP Needs Your Help!

OpenADP is an ambitious open-source project aiming to provide advanced data protection for everyone, resisting nation-state attacks and mass surveillance. It uses a distributed trust system, splitting a user's encryption key into shares stored across multiple protection servers. Recovery requires obtaining shares from a sufficient number of servers. The project urgently needs help with Android and iOS client development, and individuals willing to run protection servers. This is a chance to significantly improve user privacy and data security – join the effort!

(github.com)

Development

Microsoft Responds to CrowdStrike Meltdown: Enhanced Windows Security, Goodbye Blue Screen?

2025-06-27

Microsoft Responds to CrowdStrike Meltdown: Enhanced Windows Security, Goodbye Blue Screen?

Last summer's CrowdStrike meltdown caused widespread network outages and billions of dollars in damage. To prevent similar incidents, Microsoft convened a security summit and launched the Windows Resiliency Initiative. A core change involves moving third-party security drivers out of the kernel to user space, reducing the risk of system crashes. A preview of this new Windows security platform is coming soon. While companies like Bitdefender and CrowdStrike support the initiative, others like Sophos express concerns about losing kernel access. Additionally, Windows 11 24H2 will improve crash reporting, simplify the Blue Screen of Death, and introduce Quick Machine Recovery for faster system restoration.

(www.zdnet.com)

Tech

World3 Model Update: Resource Depletion Signals Imminent Global Collapse?

2025-05-30

World3 Model Update: Resource Depletion Signals Imminent Global Collapse?

A recent recalibration of the 'Limits to Growth' World3 model paints a stark picture. Even accounting for technological advancements, the study suggests resource depletion will lead to peaking and subsequent sharp declines in global industrial output and food production within the next decade. This aligns alarmingly with 1970s predictions, forecasting a potential drop in the global Human Development Index back to 1900 levels by the end of the century. The research highlights resource constraints, not pollution, as the primary driver of the impending systemic collapse, urging proactive responses to the coming era of 'degrowth'.

(thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com)

Tech Limits to Growth Resource Depletion World3 Model

Relational Quantum Mechanics: A Revolutionary Interpretation

2025-02-11

Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) offers a radical departure from traditional quantum interpretations. Instead of focusing on wave functions or quantum states, RQM centers on the values of physical variables, which are inherently relational and only actualized during interactions between systems. This challenges classical assumptions of absolute, always-defined variable values. RQM reinterprets quantum superposition, not as a 'half-alive, half-dead cat,' but as probability distributions influenced by interference effects. It differs from interpretations like Many-Worlds and Bohmian mechanics by emphasizing the relativity of all physical variables and avoiding the measurement problem. While RQM faces criticism, such as potential solipsism arising from its relative perspectives, it provides a novel and thought-provoking approach to understanding quantum mechanics.

(plato.stanford.edu)

Tech interpretation

OpenAI Admits: AI Hallucinations Stem from Fundamental Training Flaws

2025-09-18

OpenAI Admits: AI Hallucinations Stem from Fundamental Training Flaws

OpenAI has published a paper revealing that the 'hallucinations' in its large language models aren't accidental; they're a consequence of fundamental flaws in the training methodology. Models are trained to prioritize guessing over admitting ignorance, as this yields higher scores in current evaluation systems. The paper uses the example of finding a researcher's birthday to demonstrate how the training mechanism leads to incorrect answers. OpenAI acknowledges that mainstream evaluation methods reward this 'hallucinatory' behavior and states it's improving training mechanisms, such as prompting models to more frequently respond with 'I don't know,' but completely resolving the issue remains a challenge.

(www.theregister.com)

AI

arXivLabs: Community Collaboration on arXiv Feature Development

2025-08-26

arXivLabs is a new collaborative framework enabling developers to build and share new arXiv features directly on the arXiv website. Individuals and organizations participating in arXivLabs embrace arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners who share them. Got an idea for a project that will benefit the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs!

(arxiv.org)

Development

Tackling High Memory Consumption When Parsing Large JSON Files with Pydantic

2025-05-22

Tackling High Memory Consumption When Parsing Large JSON Files with Pydantic

High memory consumption is a common problem when using Pydantic to process large JSON files. This article analyzes the reasons for high memory usage with Pydantic's default JSON loading and proposes two solutions: using the ijson library for incremental JSON parsing to reduce memory usage during parsing, and converting Pydantic models to dataclasses with `slots` to reduce object memory consumption. Experimental results show that combining these two methods can reduce memory usage to one-fourth of the original, effectively solving the memory bottleneck of processing large JSON files.

(pythonspeed.com)

Development JSON parsing Memory optimization

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