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Notion's Seamless Database Cluster Expansion: Horizontally Scaling from 32 to 96 Databases

2025-02-28

Notion's Seamless Database Cluster Expansion: Horizontally Scaling from 32 to 96 Databases

To handle rapid user growth, Notion horizontally scaled its database cluster from 32 to 96 databases. The post details the process, including choosing a data migration strategy, horizontally sharding both the databases and the connection pool (PgBouncer), data replication and validation, and the final seamless switchover. Through careful planning and execution, Notion successfully expanded its database cluster, increasing capacity and performance without any downtime, leaving ample room for future growth.

(www.notion.com)

Development database scaling horizontal sharding seamless switchover

Blogger's Retrospective: The Value of Deep Dive Learning Posts

2025-02-24

Blogger's Retrospective: The Value of Deep Dive Learning Posts

A blogger, while recovering from a minor illness, reviewed their past blog posts and discovered that the most popular ones followed a pattern: learning a new skill and summarizing it into a tutorial. They believe this writing style not only solidifies their own knowledge but also helps others. These tutorial-style blog posts serve as the very resources the author wished existed when they were learning, offering readers clear and in-depth learning guides. Going forward, the author plans to create more of these "TIL deep dives", sharing their learning journey.

(www.gilesthomas.com)

Misc

Create React App Deprecated: Embrace React Frameworks

2025-02-15

Create React App Deprecated: Embrace React Frameworks

The React team announced that Create React App (CRA) is entering maintenance mode and is no longer recommended for new projects. While CRA simplified React app creation, it has limitations in building high-performance production apps, lacking built-in solutions for routing, data fetching, and code splitting. The team recommends migrating to established React frameworks like Next.js or Remix, offering better performance and developer experience, addressing CRA's shortcomings. Migration guides are available for existing CRA projects. Documentation for building custom setups with Vite or Parcel is also provided for those with unique needs.

(react.dev)

Development Frameworks

California's Net Neutrality Law Survives Federal Ruling

2025-01-06

California's Net Neutrality Law Survives Federal Ruling

Despite the overturning of the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) attempt to regulate broadband internet service, state laws in California, New York, and elsewhere remain intact. This week's ruling by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals striking down the FCC's open internet rules has little bearing on state laws enacted during the years-long tug-of-war over the government's power to regulate internet service providers. Experts suggest this ruling, along with other decisions and the Supreme Court's stance on a separate New York case, has effectively solidified state regulators' efforts to fill the void. California boasts one of the nation's strongest net neutrality laws, signed into law in 2018, preventing anti-competitive practices deemed harmful to consumers. The law has survived legal challenges and prompted changes in how internet service providers offer plans and services.

(www.yahoo.com)

Tech Net Neutrality State Laws

Salmon's Amazing Adaptation: Thriving in Both Fresh and Salt Water

2025-05-31

Salmon face a remarkable physiological challenge: they mature in the ocean but spawn in freshwater streams. This means adapting to drastic environmental changes between saltwater and freshwater. To cope, salmon have evolved impressive physiological mechanisms. In saltwater, they drink copiously to replace lost water, their kidneys produce concentrated urine to excrete excess salt, and gill Na+-Cl- ATPases pump salt out of their bodies. In freshwater, they stop drinking, their kidneys produce large volumes of dilute urine, and the gill pumps reverse, absorbing salt from the water. This adaptation isn't instantaneous; salmon require days or weeks to transition between environments.

(www.unm.edu)

Tech Physiological Adaptation Osmoregulation Salmon

FFmpeg 8.0: Vulkan-Accelerated Encoding and Auto-Subtitling

2025-08-29

FFmpeg 8.0: Vulkan-Accelerated Encoding and Auto-Subtitling

FFmpeg 8.0, codenamed "Huffman," is here with significant updates. A standout feature is the integration of the Whisper speech recognition model, enabling automatic video subtitling. It leverages the Vulkan API for hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding of various formats, including AV1, FFv1, VP9, and ProRes RAW, and supports VVC (H.266) encoding, boosting efficiency. This release also enhances compatibility with older formats like RealVideo 6.0 and niche audio codecs, solidifying its indispensable role in video processing.

(www.theregister.com)

Development Video Encoding

arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaborators

2025-08-31

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 project that will benefit the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs!

(arxiv.org)

Development

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

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: From Forgotten Star to Disney Icon

2025-06-17

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: From Forgotten Star to Disney Icon

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, an early Disney creation, was a forgotten star for many years. Created in 1927 by Disney and Iwerks for Universal Pictures, his early cartoons were lauded for their unique personality animation and innovative use of cinematic techniques. However, a contract dispute led to Disney losing the rights to Oswald. In a surprising turn of events in 2006, Disney reacquired the rights through a clever trade. Since then, Oswald has enjoyed a resurgence, appearing in video games like *Disney Speedstorm*, theme parks, and merchandise, becoming once again a significant Disney character, even set to star in a horror film in 2024. This incredible journey showcases early Disney animation innovation, the complexities of intellectual property, and the enduring appeal of classic characters.

(en.wikipedia.org)

Game Oswald

VMware's Partner Purge: Broadcom Shakes Up the Cloud Again

2025-07-17

VMware's Partner Purge: Broadcom Shakes Up the Cloud Again

Broadcom, VMware's parent company, is once again drastically reshaping its partner program, leaving many smaller players out in the cold. The changes, effective October 31st, 2025, will sunset the white label program and prevent uninvited partners from signing new contracts. This has sparked outrage among partners and customers who face challenges renewing licenses, potential service quality drops, and increased migration costs. This isn't Broadcom's first major partner shakeup; a previous cull caused significant instability. While Broadcom claims these moves optimize its private cloud strategy, its erratic approach has eroded trust.

(www.theregister.com)

Tech Partner Program

arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

2025-07-15

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 partners only with those who share them. Got an idea for a project that will benefit the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

(arxiv.org)

Development

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

America's Massive Trade Deficit: A Consumption Spree Fueled by Debt

2025-04-14

America's Massive Trade Deficit: A Consumption Spree Fueled by Debt

This article delves into the root causes of America's massive trade deficit, arguing it's not simply a matter of trade protectionism but a deeper imbalance of savings, investment, and government debt. Using the Greek debt crisis as a cautionary tale, it highlights a similar risk for the US: heavy reliance on foreign funding channeled into consumption rather than investment, coupled with ballooning government debt. The author posits that the solution lies in reforming tax policies to encourage savings and investment, reducing government deficits, and lowering investment costs, rather than resorting to trade protectionist measures.

(www.grumpy-economist.com)

Tech government debt

2024: A Breakthrough Year for Windows on Arm

2024-12-30

2024: A Breakthrough Year for Windows on Arm

2024 marked a significant milestone for Windows on Arm. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite processors delivered exceptional performance and battery life, enabling Copilot Plus PCs to challenge Apple's MacBook Air. While gaming compatibility remains an area for improvement, the collaboration between Microsoft and Qualcomm, along with developers embracing native Arm64 apps, has significantly matured the Windows on Arm ecosystem. Intel and AMD countered with Lunar Lake and Ryzen AI chips, respectively, intensifying the competition and setting the stage for a fierce battle between Arm and x86 in 2025.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech Qualcomm Snapdragon

Google Drops Pixel Hardware Repos from Android 16: AOSP's Future Uncertain?

2025-06-12

Google Drops Pixel Hardware Repos from Android 16: AOSP's Future Uncertain?

Google's release of Android 16 omitted the Pixel hardware repositories and device trees crucial for custom ROM developers, sparking speculation about AOSP's future. While Google denies discontinuation, the change appears deliberate. The absence of these repos significantly hinders custom ROM updates and may impact security research. Google assures continued AOSP commitment but shifts towards a hardware-independent reference target, suggesting an end to Pixel device tree releases. Custom ROM users face a more challenging path ahead.

(9to5google.com)

Development

Danish Citizens Petition to Buy California

2025-02-11

Danish Citizens Petition to Buy California

In response to President Trump's repeated suggestions of the U.S. acquiring Greenland, Danish citizens have launched a satirical petition to purchase California. The online petition, aiming for the 'Denmarkification' of California, has garnered nearly 200,000 signatures. The humorous proposal highlights California's sunshine, tech industry dominance, and Disneyland (to be renamed after Hans Christian Andersen) as enticements. This lighthearted counter-move underscores the tension between California and the Trump administration, mirroring Trump's pursuit of Greenland.

(ktla.com)

Misc international politics online petition

Dynamo AI: Product Manager for Trustworthy AI – Shaping the Future of Enterprise AI

2025-09-03

Dynamo AI: Product Manager for Trustworthy AI – Shaping the Future of Enterprise AI

Dynamo AI, a rapidly growing startup building a platform for trustworthy AI in the enterprise, is seeking a Product Manager with 1+ years of experience. This role involves defining and executing the product strategy for their redteaming, guardrails, and observability solutions. You'll collaborate with founders, engineers, and enterprise clients in regulated industries (finance, insurance, etc.), shaping product roadmaps and delivering cutting-edge solutions. A passion for AI safety and compliance is essential, along with strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.

(www.ycombinator.com)

AI AI Product Manager

WattWise: Command-Line Power Monitoring and Optimization

2025-04-03

WattWise: Command-Line Power Monitoring and Optimization

A robotics and machine learning engineer has created WattWise, a command-line tool that monitors power usage from a smart plug and adjusts system performance based on electricity pricing. Initially built to manage the power consumption of a high-power EPYC workstation, the monitoring component is now open-source. WattWise uses Home Assistant to display real-time power usage, historical charts, and automatically throttles CPU and GPU performance to reduce costs during peak pricing periods. The power optimization features will be released later.

(www.tomshardware.com)

Tech power monitoring system optimization

Albania's AI Minister: Sun-Powered Anti-Corruption?

2025-09-12

Albania's AI Minister: Sun-Powered Anti-Corruption?

Albania's new government is employing an AI-powered virtual minister named Diella (“sun” in Albanian) to oversee public procurement, aiming to combat widespread corruption. Previously a virtual assistant on the e-Albania platform, Diella will now manage government contracts with private companies. While intended to increase transparency and reduce graft, skepticism remains, with some fearing manipulation. Albania's EU accession bid is hampered by corruption, making the success of this AI initiative uncertain.

(www.straitstimes.com)

Tech anti-corruption public procurement

Building a Web Search Engine from Scratch: 3 Billion Embeddings and 2 Months of Hustle

2025-08-13

The author recounts their two-month journey building a web search engine from scratch, leveraging 3 billion SBERT embeddings. Motivated by the shortcomings of existing search engines – excessive SEO spam and insufficient high-quality content – the project aimed to improve search relevance and understanding of complex queries. The post details the process, covering data crawling, text normalization, chunking, semantic context handling, embedding generation, storage (using RocksDB and HNSW), and retrieval. The resulting engine boasts 500ms query latency and handles complex natural language queries, surfacing high-quality results.

(blog.wilsonl.in)

Tech neural embeddings large-scale data processing

Neanderthal 'Fat Factory' Rewrites Understanding of Ancient Resource Management

2025-07-07

Neanderthal 'Fat Factory' Rewrites Understanding of Ancient Resource Management

A groundbreaking study published in Science Advances reveals that Neanderthals in central Germany 125,000 years ago employed sophisticated techniques to extract bone grease from large animals using water and heat. Discovered at the Neumark-Nord 2 site, this 'fat factory' demonstrates a level of nutritional planning and resource management previously unseen in Neanderthals. The findings challenge the stereotypical image of brutish cavemen, portraying Neanderthals as capable of complex social organization and advanced survival strategies with long-term environmental impacts.

(archaeologymag.com)

Tech

Apple Officially Ends the Intel Mac Era: The End of an Epoch

2025-06-10

Apple Officially Ends the Intel Mac Era: The End of an Epoch

Apple announced that macOS Tahoe will be the final release supporting Intel processors, marking the end of a 20-year run of Intel-based Macs. While Apple is giving users a one-year grace period and promising security updates, the decision has sparked some controversy. The article revisits the history of Intel Macs and discusses the impact of this transition on users and developers, along with the advantages of a cheaper Mac Mini and the end of the Hackintosh culture. The author expresses nostalgia for the flexibility of Intel Macs and argues that Apple lacks user choice.

(tedium.co)

Tech

Native HMR in Node.js: A Technical Deep Dive

2025-06-04

This article details how to implement native Hot Module Replacement (HMR) in Node.js. Traditional approaches using `--watch` flags or virtual module systems like Vite are inefficient and suffer from module isolation. The author leverages Node.js's built-in `node:module` module hooks to create an incremental update mechanism based on file version numbers. The core is the `FileTree` class, which loads and monitors the file tree, and the `useTree` hook intercepts the module loading process, adding a version number to URLs for cache invalidation. The construction of a dependency tree ensures that when a dependent module changes, the parent module is also updated, resulting in efficient HMR and avoiding reevaluation of the entire module tree.

(immaculata.dev)

Development Module Loading

Webb Telescope Captures Gigantic Galaxy Cluster

2025-05-04

Webb Telescope Captures Gigantic Galaxy Cluster

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a breathtaking image of thousands of galaxies, focusing on a massive galaxy cluster. This cluster, located in the COSMOS-Web field, is incredibly large and detailed. Combining Webb's infrared imagery with data from Hubble, XMM-Newton, and Chandra X-ray Observatory reveals the presence of hot gas within the cluster and the complexities of galaxy evolution. The image not only showcases the beauty of the cosmos but also provides invaluable data for studying the formation and evolution of galaxy clusters.

(www.esa.int)

Tech James Webb Telescope Galaxy Cluster

The AI Hype in CS Education: A Cautious Approach Needed

2025-09-22

A computer science professor with 30 years of experience cautions against the uncritical adoption of AI in CS education. She argues that the current AI craze, particularly generative AI, overlooks significant downsides such as environmental impact, data theft, and exploitation of data workers. Blindly incorporating AI tools risks stifling critical thinking and creativity, hindering well-rounded student development. The professor calls for a cautious and balanced approach, prioritizing the cultivation of comprehensive skills over simply following technological trends.

(cacm.acm.org)

Development

Meta's AI Copyright Battle: Did Using Pirated Books to Train AI Cross the Line?

2025-05-05

Meta's AI Copyright Battle: Did Using Pirated Books to Train AI Cross the Line?

Meta faces a copyright lawsuit from authors including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates over its AI tools. The judge is questioning whether Meta illegally used their books, obtained through 'shadow libraries,' to train its AI and whether this harms the authors' sales. Meta claims 'fair use,' but the judge suggests that significantly impacting or destroying the market for their work might invalidate this defense. This case will set a precedent for future AI copyright cases, hinging on proving actual harm to the authors' commercial prospects.

(www.wired.com)

Tech

Mystical: A Magical Circle Visualization of PostScript

2025-05-17

Mystical is a novel programming language that visualizes PostScript code as magical-circle-like ring structures. Programs are organized in rings, encompassing executable arrays, non-executable arrays, and dictionaries, each with a unique visual representation. Operators, variables, and keywords are represented by sigils (symbols) combined with text within the rings. Mystical currently lacks a dedicated interpreter; visualization needs manual translation into PostScript for execution.

(suberic.net)

Development magical circles

Giant Lunar Canyons Deeper Than the Grand Canyon Formed in Minutes

2025-02-06

Giant Lunar Canyons Deeper Than the Grand Canyon Formed in Minutes

A new study reveals two gigantic canyons on the moon, both exceeding the Grand Canyon in depth, were carved in under 10 minutes by rock floods traveling at bullet speeds. Vallis Schrödinger and Vallis Planck measure 270 km and 280 km long, and 2.7 km and 3.5 km deep respectively, dwarfing the Grand Canyon's 446 km length and 1.9 km depth. Analysis of NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images shows these canyons resulted from a massive impact 3.81 billion years ago, with debris hurtling at 3,420-4,600 km/h – over 130 times the energy of the world's nuclear arsenal. This discovery offers crucial insights for future lunar missions, particularly in understanding the Moon's early geological history.

(www.space.com)

Tech lunar canyons

Waymo Expands Autonomous Vehicle Testing to Denver and Seattle

2025-09-03

Waymo Expands Autonomous Vehicle Testing to Denver and Seattle

Waymo announced it's bringing its Jaguar I-Pace SUVs and Zeekr vans to Denver and Seattle this week, initially for manual driving before autonomous testing begins. The company aims to launch robotaxi services in Denver next year and Seattle as soon as permits are granted. This expansion tests Waymo's technology in challenging weather conditions. Waymo currently operates over 2,000 robotaxis nationwide and plans to launch commercial services in Dallas, Miami, and Washington D.C. next year.

(techcrunch.com)

Tech expansion

Microsoft Employee Protests: AI Tech Used in Palestine Conflict

2025-04-04

Microsoft Employee Protests: AI Tech Used in Palestine Conflict

Ibtihal, a software engineer at Microsoft's AI Platform, disrupted a speech at Microsoft's 50th-anniversary celebration to protest the use of the company's AI technology in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She alleges Microsoft's AI is aiding the Israeli military in surveillance and attacks on civilians, and that internal dissent has been suppressed, with some employees fired for raising concerns. Ibtihal calls on Microsoft to cut ties with the Israeli military to avoid complicity in war crimes.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech tech responsibility Israeli-Palestinian conflict

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