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US to Put GDP Data on Blockchain: Trump's Crypto Vision?

2025-08-29

US to Put GDP Data on Blockchain: Trump's Crypto Vision?

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced the Department of Commerce will publish economic statistics, including GDP data, on a blockchain. This initiative, spurred by President Trump's vision, aims to improve data distribution efficiency across government agencies. While blockchain technology enhances data security and transparency, it doesn't guarantee accuracy. The move comes amid Trump's repeated questioning of US economic data reliability, contrasting with other governments' blockchain adoption, such as Estonia's e-health system and the EU's EBSI project.

(cointelegraph.com)

Tech

Steam Linux User Share Hits All-Time High

2025-06-02

Steam Linux User Share Hits All-Time High

May 2025 saw Steam's Linux user share reach its highest point in years, a record not seen since at least 2018. This growth comes despite Steam's overall user base continuing to expand, indicating healthy Linux adoption. Windows held a 95.45% share in May, while Linux reached 2.69% and macOS 1.85%. Interestingly, this increase wasn't driven by SteamOS 3; popular distros included SteamOS Holo, Arch Linux, and Linux Mint. The decrease in Simplified Chinese language options, which usually impacts Linux numbers, didn't prevent this growth.

(www.gamingonlinux.com)

Game

Australian Rocket Launch Delayed Due to Payload Fairing Malfunction

2025-05-17

Australian Rocket Launch Delayed Due to Payload Fairing Malfunction

The maiden launch of Gilmour Space Technologies' Eris rocket has been delayed due to a premature payload fairing deployment. The company will conduct a full investigation and replace the fairing before attempting another launch. This setback follows over a year of delays attributed to regulatory approvals. Despite this, Gilmour remains confident in its hybrid propulsion system, aiming for only 10-20 seconds of stable flight on the initial launch to gather crucial data. Eris aims to be Australia's first orbital launch vehicle.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech Eris Rocket Payload Fairing Failure Australian Space

TiddlyWiki: Reclaim Control of Your Information

2025-06-06

TiddlyWiki: Reclaim Control of Your Information

TiddlyWiki is a powerful, interactive tool for managing complex data that doesn't easily fit into spreadsheets or word processors. It breaks information down into the smallest meaningful units – tiddlers – organizing them with titles, links, tags, lists, and macros for easy access and control. Its serverless architecture and open-source nature give users unprecedented freedom over their information.

(tiddlywiki.com)

Development

Atlassian Acquires AI Browser Startup The Browser Company for $610 Million

2025-09-04

Atlassian Acquires AI Browser Startup The Browser Company for $610 Million

Atlassian, the enterprise software giant, has acquired The Browser Company, the New York-based startup behind the Arc and AI-focused Dia browsers, for $610 million in cash. Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes, an early Arc user, was drawn to Dia's innovative blend of web browser and chatbot functionality, enabling cross-app data manipulation. This acquisition strategically positions Atlassian to integrate Dia's capabilities with its existing suite of work applications. The Browser Company CEO, Josh Miller, views the deal as a strategic move to accelerate Dia's growth, secure market share, and avoid potential acquisition by larger tech companies. Dia will remain focused on enterprise users and will not simply become a wrapper for Atlassian apps.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech

Google Gemini 2.5: Faster, Cheaper, and More Powerful

2025-06-17

Google Gemini 2.5: Faster, Cheaper, and More Powerful

Google announces the general availability of its Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash models, alongside a preview release of the even more cost-effective and faster Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite. These models achieve a Pareto optimal balance of cost and speed, outperforming their predecessors across various benchmarks including coding, math, science, reasoning, and multimodal tasks. Flash-Lite especially excels in high-volume, low-latency applications like translation and classification. The Gemini 2.5 family boasts features like adjustable reasoning budgets, integration with tools like Google Search and code execution, multimodal input, and a massive 1 million-token context window.

(blog.google)

AI

EU Aims to Decrypt Citizen Data by 2030: Privacy Concerns Mount

2025-07-05

EU Aims to Decrypt Citizen Data by 2030: Privacy Concerns Mount

The EU Commission unveiled a roadmap outlining its plan to enable law enforcement agencies to access citizens' data lawfully and effectively by 2030, potentially including the decryption of private data. This initiative, part of the ProtectEU strategy aimed at bolstering EU internal security, has sparked concerns among privacy experts. They warn that weakening encryption could introduce new vulnerabilities and undermine security. The roadmap focuses on six key areas: data retention, lawful interception, digital forensics, decryption, standardization, and AI solutions for law enforcement. While the Commission claims to balance law enforcement needs with privacy, experts argue that strong encryption is a cornerstone of security, not an enemy.

(www.techradar.com)

Tech

The Obscure Interact Model One Home Computer and its Surprisingly Deep Adventure Game

2025-04-07

The Obscure Interact Model One Home Computer and its Surprisingly Deep Adventure Game

This article delves into the story of the Interact Model One, a low-cost personal computer from 1978 that aimed to compete with giants like the Commodore PET but ultimately failed in the US market. However, its successor, the Victor Lambda, found success in France, leading to the development of games such as the surprisingly complex adventure game, *Troll Hole Adventure*. This 8-bit game, despite its limitations in memory and resolution, boasts a challenging puzzle design and deep gameplay, showcasing the ingenuity of early game developers working with constrained resources. The article follows the journey of the computer's creator, Ken Lochner, from his work on Dartmouth's time-sharing system to his foray into the personal computer market, highlighting the challenges and triumphs of this forgotten piece of computing history.

(bluerenga.blog)

Game Personal Computer History 8-bit Games

Sunset on the British Empire? The Chagos Archipelago Sovereignty Dispute

2025-09-01

Sunset on the British Empire? The Chagos Archipelago Sovereignty Dispute

The UK government's plan to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago, including the crucial British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), to Mauritius has sparked a complex international dispute. BIOT's existence is vital for maintaining the symbolic 'never-setting sun' of the British Empire, as it remains sunlit when the UK is in darkness. However, the plan faces challenges from Mauritius's new government and the new US administration, which uses Diego Garcia's military base. This article explores BIOT's strategic importance, its comparison to the Sovereign Base Areas (SBAs) in Cyprus, and the potential consequences of a 'sunset' scenario. Loss of BIOT's sovereignty could leave the symbolic 'never-setting sun' reliant on the SBAs, which are geographically and strategically less significant.

(oikofuge.com)

Misc territorial sovereignty

JiraTUI: Command-Line Jira Task Management

2025-09-11

JiraTUI is a powerful command-line tool that streamlines Jira task management. Create new Jira tasks directly from your terminal, easily specifying details like title, description, and priority. Spend less time navigating interfaces and more time on your work. It also allows for commenting on tasks directly from the terminal, improving team communication and collaboration.

(jiratui.sh)

Development

Aqua Tofana: The Undetectable Poison of 17th Century Italy

2025-04-18

Aqua Tofana: The Undetectable Poison of 17th Century Italy

In 17th-century Italy, a colorless, odorless poison called Aqua Tofana spread silently. Made and sold primarily by women, it was often used to murder husbands for inheritance. While its inventors were executed, the formula persisted, leading to hundreds of deaths. Though its true potency is debated, the legend of Aqua Tofana profoundly impacted European society, fueling fears of secret murder and sparking numerous poisoning scandals. The story highlights the enduring power of myth and the anxieties surrounding clandestine poisoning in early modern Europe.

(www.amusingplanet.com)

Misc Aqua Tofana Italian poison 17th-century crime

Amazon's Vulcan Robot: A New Breakthrough in Warehouse Automation

2025-05-09

Amazon's Vulcan Robot: A New Breakthrough in Warehouse Automation

Amazon unveiled its new robotic system, Vulcan, at an event in Dortmund, Germany. Billed as having a “genuine sense of touch,” Vulcan is designed to revolutionize how robots interact with the physical world, initially focusing on Amazon's warehouses. In stowing, Vulcan now outpaces the average human worker, though expert humans remain faster and more efficient at packing items densely. Vulcan's strength lies in its advanced planning capabilities; it considers multiple items and storage spaces simultaneously, optimizing storage with impressive speed. After over a year of operation in warehouses in Germany and Washington state, Vulcan has successfully stowed hundreds of thousands of items.

(spectrum.ieee.org)

Tech

Duolingo's AI Pivot Sparks User and Employee Backlash

2025-06-30

Duolingo's AI Pivot Sparks User and Employee Backlash

Language learning app Duolingo's announcement of its shift to an "AI-first" strategy, planning to replace some contractors with AI, has ignited a fierce backlash. Young users took to social media to express their anger, even deleting the app in protest. This incident reflects growing public concerns about AI's large-scale replacement of human labor and increasing discontent with the technology's potential negative impacts, such as copyright infringement and environmental damage. While Duolingo claims AI won't entirely replace employees, its move aligns with similar downsizing trends in other tech companies, fueling fears of AI threatening jobs.

(www.wired.com)

Tech user protest

Building an Autonomous LLM Game Master with Small Models and Synthetic Data

2025-05-29

Building an Autonomous LLM Game Master with Small Models and Synthetic Data

This post details the journey of building an autonomous LLM Game Master for TTRPGs. Initially aiming for an agentic approach, the author opted for a bottom-up strategy to gain deeper understanding of model development. Due to limited compute, a small Qwen3 model was chosen, trained on the Shadowdark RPG rulebook processed via OCR into markdown. A Shadowdark QA Bench was created for evaluation, comparing several metrics before settling on keyword-based matching. After pretraining and knowledge augmentation (creating multiple restatements of the rulebook text), the model achieved a 60% accuracy on the benchmark, meeting the author's goal. The next step is assistant tuning.

(gygaxtest.com)

Development Synthetic Data

Intel Mandates Four Days a Week in Office

2025-04-25

Intel Mandates Four Days a Week in Office

New Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan announced a return-to-office mandate, requiring employees to work on-site four days a week starting September 1st. This move aims to boost collaboration and revitalize the company amid falling sales and increased competition. While factory and research staff already work on-site, many corporate employees have been working remotely since the pandemic. The policy follows similar mandates from other tech giants and comes alongside a flatter management structure, reduced meetings, and a forthcoming round of job cuts.

(www.oregonlive.com)

Tech

Alfred Workflow: Instant Access to Google Cloud Services

2025-06-03

Alfred Workflow: Instant Access to Google Cloud Services

Tired of the hassle of accessing Google Cloud services? This Alfred workflow makes everything quick and easy! Just type `gcp` in Alfred to fuzzy search over 250 Google Cloud services and subservices, and directly search GCP resources across 20+ services. It supports one-click copy, paste, or opening GCP console links, and provides useful tools like caching and log viewing. Most importantly, it's secure and reliable, using only your local gcloud CLI for authentication and never touching your credentials. Try it now!

(github.com)

Development Workflow

Artist's Unconventional Love Affair with a Doll

2025-05-21

Artist's Unconventional Love Affair with a Doll

Artist Oskar developed a unique attachment to a doll representing Alma Mahler. He hired a maid for it, showcased it in high-society venues, and even created paintings expressing his feelings. In his later years, Oskar's recollection of this experience shifted from initial disappointment to glowing admiration, the doll becoming a key to unlocking cherished memories and illuminating his life.

(publicdomainreview.org)

Art

Chatbot Addiction Leads to Self-Harm and Suicide Attempts in Children

2025-09-18

Chatbot Addiction Leads to Self-Harm and Suicide Attempts in Children

A Senate hearing revealed harrowing testimonies from parents whose children became addicted to companion chatbots, leading to self-harm, suicidal ideation, and violence. One mother detailed how her autistic son, after becoming engrossed in Character.AI, exhibited violent behavior, paranoia, self-harm, and even threatened his family. The incident highlights the potential dangers of AI chatbots, particularly for children, urging for stricter regulations and safety measures.

(arstechnica.com)

AI chatbot risks

Recreating Game Boy Sounds with the Web Audio API: Fourier Series vs. Wave Shaper

2025-04-07

While building a web-based Game Boy style music tracker, the author encountered the challenge of faithfully recreating the iconic Game Boy square wave sounds. Game Boy's pulse channels supported variable duty cycles, but the Web Audio API's OscillatorNode only provides a 50% duty cycle square wave. The article explores two solutions: generating a custom waveform using the Fourier series and shaping a sawtooth wave with a WaveShaperNode. The Fourier series approach offers higher accuracy but is computationally expensive; the WaveShaperNode method is simpler but might introduce some noise. The author ultimately prefers the WaveShaperNode approach for its simplicity and its ability to produce a more authentic Game Boy sound.

(www.danblack.co)

Development Sound Synthesis

UK Public Fears AI Safety: Calls for Regulation, Not Blind Growth

2025-02-07

UK Public Fears AI Safety: Calls for Regulation, Not Blind Growth

A new poll reveals that 87% of Britons support legislation requiring AI developers to prove their systems' safety before release, with 60% favoring a ban on developing "smarter-than-human" AI models. Public trust in tech CEOs regarding AI regulation is extremely low, at only 9%. This reflects growing public anxiety about AI potentially surpassing human capabilities and calls for stricter government regulations, rather than prioritizing economic growth at the expense of potential risks. Several MPs are also urging the government to introduce specific legislation targeting "superintelligent" AI systems.

(time.com)

Tech public opinion

Critical Flaw in Carmaker's Portal Exposes Customer Data, Enables Remote Vehicle Access

2025-08-17

Critical Flaw in Carmaker's Portal Exposes Customer Data, Enables Remote Vehicle Access

Security researcher Eaton Zveare discovered a critical vulnerability in a major automaker's online dealership portal. The flaw allowed the creation of an admin account, granting access to sensitive data from over 1,000 dealerships. This included customer personal and financial information, vehicle tracking data, and the ability to remotely control vehicle functions. Exploiting a weakness in the login system, Zveare bypassed authentication and created a 'national admin' account. While patched in February 2025, the vulnerability highlights significant security risks in car dealership systems.

(techcrunch.com)

Tech

AI: Normal Tech, Not Superintelligence

2025-04-17

AI: Normal Tech, Not Superintelligence

This paper challenges the prevailing view of AI as a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity, arguing instead that AI is normal technology. The authors contend that AI's impact will be gradual, not sudden, based on an analysis of the different timescales of AI methods, applications, and adoption. They predict a future where humans and AI collaborate, with a significant portion of work focused on AI control and oversight. The paper also explores AI risks, such as accidents, arms races, misuse, and misalignment, advocating for mitigating these through reducing uncertainty and building system resilience rather than drastic policy interventions.

(knightcolumbia.org)

AI technology development

Beyond Single-GPU Limits: The Distributed Computing Revolution for Datacenters

2025-09-08

Beyond Single-GPU Limits: The Distributed Computing Revolution for Datacenters

With explosive data growth, single GPU servers are no longer sufficient. Data movement between GPU memory and VRAM becomes a bottleneck, leading to inefficiencies and increased costs. NVIDIA and AMD are racing to develop distributed computing runtimes, such as NVIDIA's CUDA DTX and RAPIDS-based solutions, and AMD's ROCm-DS. However, Voltron Data's Theseus takes a different approach, putting data movement at the core. Through asynchronous executors and sophisticated data prefetching strategies, it significantly improves the efficiency of analytics and AI tasks at datacenter scale, and has already outperformed Databricks Photon in benchmarks.

(voltrondata.com)

Tech

TigerBeetle's Docs Site Rebuild: Ditching Docusaurus for a Zig-Powered Solution

2025-04-10

TigerBeetle's Docs Site Rebuild: Ditching Docusaurus for a Zig-Powered Solution

TigerBeetle rebuilt its documentation site from scratch, abandoning Docusaurus (Node.js based) in favor of a lightweight, fast, Zig-powered static site generator. Leveraging Zig's build system and Pandoc, they achieved efficient Markdown parsing and HTML generation. The new site boasts improved user experience, a significantly smaller footprint, and even a fun Easter egg game. This rebuild showcases TigerBeetle's commitment to technical excellence and a lean approach.

(tigerbeetle.com)

Development Documentation Site

Urgent Security Update for Matrix: High-Severity Vulnerabilities Patched

2025-07-17

The Matrix team has identified and patched two high-severity protocol vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-49090 and another yet-to-be-assigned CVE) that could lead to unexpected state resets in Matrix servers. A coordinated security release across all Matrix server implementations is planned for July 22nd, 2025, at 17:00 UTC (version 1.16, room version 12). This update requires upgrading existing rooms. Users running Matrix servers are urged to upgrade as soon as possible. Client developers should review MSC4291 and update their clients to support the new room ID format and creator privileges.

(matrix.org)

Development

LLMs Revolutionize Recommendation Systems and Search: A Comprehensive Survey

2025-03-23

LLMs Revolutionize Recommendation Systems and Search: A Comprehensive Survey

This article surveys recent research applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to recommendation systems and search engines. Studies explore various approaches, including LLM-augmented model architectures (e.g., YouTube's Semantic IDs and Kuaishou's M3CSR), using LLMs for data generation and analysis (e.g., Bing's Recommendation Quality Improvement and Indeed's Expected Bad Match), and adopting LLM training methodologies (e.g., scaling laws, transfer learning, and knowledge distillation). Furthermore, research focuses on unified architectures for search and recommendation systems, such as LinkedIn's 360Brew and Netflix's UniCoRn, to improve efficiency and performance. Overall, these studies demonstrate the significant potential of LLMs in enhancing recommendation systems and search engines, yielding substantial real-world results.

(eugeneyan.com)

AI

Chesterton's Shaw: A Biography Unveiling a Complex Genius

2025-09-14

Chesterton's Shaw: A Biography Unveiling a Complex Genius

G. K. Chesterton's biographical study, "George Bernard Shaw," explores the multifaceted personality and influences of the renowned playwright. The book delves into Shaw's Irish identity, Puritan upbringing, and progressive spirit, highlighting how these shaped his impact on theatre and society. Chesterton challenges common misconceptions about Shaw, presenting him not as a simple enigma, but as a product of complex interwoven forces. This insightful biography sets the stage for a deeper understanding of one of literature's most provocative figures.

(www.gutenberg.org)

Misc George Bernard Shaw G.K. Chesterton

Pure CSS Logic Gates: An Experimental CSS if() Function in Chrome 137+

2025-07-06

This blog post demonstrates the implementation of pure CSS logic gates using the experimental CSS `if()` function available in Chrome 137+. It covers basic gates like AND, OR, NOT, and XOR, and progresses to more complex circuits such as half-adders, full-adders, and multiplexers. By cleverly leveraging CSS variables and conditional statements, the author achieves functionality typically relegated to hardware or programming languages, showcasing the potential of CSS in computation.

(yongsk0066.github.io)

Development Logic Gates if function

From Cassette Decks to AI: A Programmer's Journey

2025-07-26

The author's passion for programming started early, disassembling cassette players at age three. From early BASIC programming to HTML, JavaScript, PAWN, and LSL, their journey has been one of exploration and challenge. They built virtual world game servers, developed real-world applications, and learned the importance of business acumen through entrepreneurial ventures. Despite experiencing burnout twice, their love for programming endures, seeing it as a way to explore the world and satisfy curiosity.

(esafev.com)

Development programmer journey

Duolingo's AI Shift Sparks Massive User Backlash

2025-05-26

Duolingo's AI Shift Sparks Massive User Backlash

Popular language-learning app Duolingo faced a massive user backlash after announcing its AI-first policy. Following negative feedback on social media, the company went silent, deleting numerous posts. A subsequent bizarre video attempt at damage control failed to address the core issue: widespread layoffs of human contractors and increased reliance on AI-generated lessons. The incident highlights the challenges companies face in balancing user experience and business interests when embracing AI.

(www.fastcompany.com)

Tech User Backlash

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