A classic TRON-inspired light cycle game built using Rust and the ggez game framework. Features single-player and two-player modes, adjustable AI difficulty, a boost mechanic for strategic gameplay, and impressive visual effects. The game boasts a retro 8-bit aesthetic and includes a pause menu. The open-source project is available under the MIT license.
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Onyx, a generative AI platform connecting to your company's docs, apps, and people, is hiring its first Account Executive. Backed by $10M in seed funding from top-tier VCs and boasting clients like Netflix and Ramp, Onyx is seeking a seasoned sales professional (5+ years experience in mid-market or enterprise software sales) to spearhead its GTM strategy. This high-impact role involves managing the full sales cycle, pipeline generation, and collaborating across functions to build and refine sales processes. A unique opportunity for those wanting to shape sales at a rapidly growing startup.
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Google Cloud announced significant software upgrades to its AI Hypercomputer, dramatically improving AI model training and inference efficiency. Pathways on Cloud, a distributed runtime, is now available on Google Cloud, enabling elastic training and high-throughput inference. Cluster Director adds Slurm support and 360° observability features for high performance and reliability. GKE integrates Inference Gateway and Inference Quickstart, slashing inference costs and boosting throughput. vLLM now supports TPUs, further accelerating inference. Dynamic Workload Scheduler expands accelerator support, optimizing resource utilization. These upgrades empower developers to build and deploy AI applications faster and more cost-effectively.
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Large language models (LLMs) excel at code generation, but their limited context windows hinder work with large codebases. This article explores the 'power' of LLM-assisted programming: how many tokens does it take to express a program? The author argues Python outperforms Go for LLMs due to its conciseness, allowing more features within token limits. Further, Ruby, known for elegance and brevity, is posited as an ideal LLM language due to its efficient token usage. While challenges like type checking remain, Ruby's human-centric design ironically makes it a potential frontrunner for LLMs.
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aiopandas is a lightweight library that adds async support to Pandas' core functions like `map`, `apply`, and `applymap` via monkey patching. This allows seamless integration of async functions, enabling controlled parallel execution with `max_parallel` for dramatically faster processing of I/O-bound tasks such as API calls, web scraping, and database queries. It also integrates with tqdm for progress tracking. Simply replace `.map()` with `.amap()` (and similar for other functions) for a near drop-in replacement.
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This post recounts the author's experience with a year of Amazon sponsorship via GitHub Sponsors for FreeBSD release engineering and FreeBSD/EC2 development. Over the year, four FreeBSD releases were managed, and several key issues on the FreeBSD/EC2 platform were resolved, including power drivers for Graviton instances and device hotplug support. Boot times for FreeBSD/EC2 instances were significantly improved, and new AMI flavors were added. However, with the sponsorship ending, several planned feature improvements will be delayed.
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Snowflake's growth in the large enterprise market is hampered by the renewal cycles of older, on-premises data warehouse and analytics technology, according to its VP of Finance, Jimmy Sexton. While Snowflake's Q1 revenue hit nearly $1 billion, up 26 percent year-over-year, and they secured two deals exceeding $100 million in the financial services sector, growth is constrained by the lengthy migration process from on-prem systems. Customers typically only initiate migrations near contract renewals, limiting Snowflake's ability to rapidly expand in this market segment. This reliance on renewal cycles applies to various legacy systems, not just Teradata, hindering faster adoption.
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Microsoft announced it will end support for Microsoft 365 apps on Windows 10 on October 14th, 2025. This means users will no longer receive updates or support and will need to upgrade to Windows 11 to continue using Office apps. While apps will initially continue functioning, Microsoft warns of potential performance and reliability issues. This move aims to push Windows 11 adoption, but the higher hardware requirements of Windows 11 pose a significant hurdle for many users. To mitigate this, Microsoft is offering paid extended security updates for consumers for the first time.
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The Framework Laptop 12 shines with its modular design and easy repairability. Users can easily swap out components like RAM and SSDs with just a screwdriver. However, to achieve a smaller form factor, the Laptop 12 makes compromises, such as omitting a backlit keyboard and fingerprint sensor, and only supporting a single stick of DDR5 RAM, limiting memory capacity. While it uses smaller M.2 2230 SSDs, these are now more readily available. Overall, the Laptop 12 balances ease of use and upgradeability but requires users to weigh some functional limitations.
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The author, diagnosed with narcolepsy in their twenties, describes a unique experience. Instead of the typical daytime sleep attacks, their primary symptom is cataplexy – sudden muscle weakness rendering them immobile while fully conscious. Remarkably, at age forty, they discovered they routinely dream while awake and enter REM sleep immediately upon falling asleep. The author details the bizarre sensation of cataplexy, differentiating it from paralysis, fatigue, and depression, and shares a self-discovered technique to alleviate attacks, offering a compelling insight into the unusual realities of living with narcolepsy.
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WebR compiles the statistical language R to WebAssembly, enabling it to run directly in browsers and Node.js without needing an R server. This allows users to execute R code locally, with support for several ported R packages. While the API is under active development and mobile browsers may impose memory limitations, WebR offers a convenient way to perform data analysis directly within the browser.
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A now-deleted GitHub blog post accidentally revealed details about OpenAI's upcoming GPT-5 models. The four variants boast major improvements in reasoning, code quality, and user experience, featuring enhanced agentic capabilities and handling complex coding tasks with minimal prompting. This leak comes ahead of OpenAI's official announcement of a “LIVE5TREAM” event later today, further solidifying earlier rumors of the imminent GPT-5 launch.
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Thomson Reuters has won a landmark AI copyright lawsuit against Ross Intelligence, a legal AI startup. The court rejected Ross's fair use defense, finding its intent was to compete with Westlaw. This ruling is a significant setback for generative AI companies, potentially impacting future cases. Many AI tools were trained on copyrighted material, and this decision suggests that the common fair use arguments may not hold up. While Ross Intelligence shut down in 2021 due to litigation costs, financially strong companies like OpenAI and Google are better positioned to withstand prolonged legal battles.
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Evidence is a robust framework for building data visualization applications. It boasts a rich library of components, including various chart types (line, bar, scatter, heatmaps, etc.), maps, input components, and UI elements. It supports multiple data sources, including SQL queries, and offers diverse deployment options such as cloud services (AWS Amplify, Azure Static Apps, etc.) and self-hosting. Developers can easily create interactive data visualization apps and extend functionality with custom components and plugins.
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Rustls, a memory-safe TLS implementation prioritizing performance, has released significant performance improvements. By optimizing session resumption mechanisms—specifically, replacing mutexes to reduce contention in concurrent server connection handshakes and decreasing the number of stateless resumption tickets sent by default—Rustls 0.23.17 demonstrates dramatically improved performance on multi-core servers, achieving near-linear scalability. Server latency for core TLS handshake handling is roughly 2x lower than OpenSSL in benchmarks. This makes Rustls a highly competitive TLS solution, bringing safer and more efficient connections to the internet.
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Years of interviewing software engineers reveals that building and maintaining clear mental models is key. While LLMs are good at generating and modifying code, they lack the crucial ability to maintain these models. They easily get confused, suffer from context omission and recency bias, and hallucinate details, preventing iterative problem-solving for complex tasks. The author concludes that LLMs are helpful tools for software engineers but cannot yet replace them for anything beyond simple projects.
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While updating his blog, the author discovered that using multiple small HTML pages instead of complex JS interactions significantly simplifies the development process. Seamless transitions between pages are achieved using CSS transitions, making features like navigation menus and search functions incredibly easy to implement. This approach reduces complexity and improves maintainability. The author believes this is an effective way to leverage the strengths of the web.
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This article demonstrates how to leverage Java's Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation to significantly improve the startup time of Apache Kafka 4.0. By creating an AOT cache file, the author successfully reduced Kafka's startup time from 690 milliseconds to 285 milliseconds, a remarkable 59% improvement. The process involved overcoming a JMX conflict, ultimately leading to the successful creation and application of the AOT cache, resulting in substantial performance gains.
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This post presents three equivalent algorithms for computing the edges of a polygonal mesh, representing progressive optimization steps to achieve the same result with increasing efficiency. Starting with a description of mesh topology representation and edge concepts, it details three approaches: a map-based algorithm (O(n log n) complexity), a sort-based algorithm (O(n log n) complexity), and a novel minor valence algorithm (O(n) complexity). The author compares their performance, highlighting the innovative nature and potential game development applications of the minor valence algorithm.
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Hertz, a global car rental giant, has confirmed a data breach affecting thousands of customers. Personal information and driver's licenses were stolen due to a cyberattack on its vendor, Cleo, between October and December 2024. Stolen data includes names, birthdates, contact information, driver's licenses, payment card details, and workers' compensation claims. Some customers also had their Social Security numbers and other government-issued IDs compromised. Hertz notified affected customers in Australia, Canada, the EU, New Zealand, and the UK, and also reported the breach to several US states. While Hertz denies its own network was compromised, it confirms data was stolen by a third party exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in Cleo's platform. This highlights the importance of data security and underscores the significant risk of supply chain vulnerabilities.
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Linux Secure Boot systems rely on a Microsoft key set to expire in September. This key signs the shim, the first-stage UEFI bootloader used to boot the Linux kernel. While a replacement key has been available since 2023, many systems may lack it, potentially requiring hardware vendor firmware updates. This poses extra work for Linux distributions and users. Updating firmware via LVFS and fwupd might be necessary, but isn't guaranteed to succeed; older BIOS systems may face space constraints, even requiring a BIOS reset. Vendor updates may also be problematic, with some manufacturers having lost access to their platform keys. Ultimately, disabling Secure Boot might be the only option in some cases.
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Post-war Europe saw the rise of 'junk playgrounds,' unconventional spaces built from discarded materials. These weren't your typical swings and slides; they encouraged child-led construction, exploration, and even risky play like handling fire. Emdrup playground in Denmark, a prime example, boasted a 50-foot tower built by children. However, safety concerns and aesthetic criticisms led to their decline, replaced by more 'sanitized' adventure playgrounds. While games like Minecraft offer a digital echo of this creative freedom, they lack the physical and social richness of the originals. The article explores the history and value of these experimental playgrounds, urging a renewed focus on imaginative, co-created play spaces in modern cities.
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Svelte5's release touted its reactive state system, "runes," as a major improvement. However, this author found several limitations in real-world projects. Runes are restricted to Svelte components or .svelte.ts files, requiring state wrapping in functions for reactivity and offering incomplete class support. Svelte's template features lack JavaScript equivalents, making testing bindable props cumbersome. Form components are uncontrolled by default, leading to potential issues. While Svelte5 attempts to mimic React/Vue, it falls short in usability and feature completeness, leading the author to consider SolidJS as a superior alternative.
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A multinational team of scientists has created a detailed timeline of bacterial evolution, revealing that some bacteria utilized oxygen nearly a billion years before the Great Oxidation Event (GOE), which made Earth's atmosphere breathable. By combining genomic data, fossil evidence, and geochemical records, and employing machine learning to predict ancestral bacterial function, the researchers found evidence of aerobic metabolism predating the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis. This groundbreaking research not only reshapes our understanding of bacterial evolution but also opens avenues for predicting other bacterial traits, such as antibiotic resistance.
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Following the US government's second withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, Michael Bloomberg's Bloomberg Philanthropies announced it will fill the funding gap left by the federal government and ensure the US meets its reporting obligations under the UNFCCC. This isn't the first time: Bloomberg took similar action in 2017 after the Trump administration's withdrawal, working with states, cities, and businesses to maintain US emission reduction commitments. This action again highlights the crucial role of local governments, businesses, and philanthropy in addressing climate change in the absence of federal leadership.
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This article delivers a scathing critique of the current AI industry, arguing that it's a bubble fueled by massive capital expenditures on GPUs, primarily benefiting NVIDIA. The author contends that most AI companies are unprofitable, with hyped applications failing to deliver significant revenue growth or practical business value. He points to the deceptive marketing around 'AI agents' and the media's complicity in perpetuating the illusion of a thriving AI market. This fragile ecosystem, reliant on continued GPU purchases by a handful of tech giants, is poised for a significant collapse, potentially impacting the entire tech sector.
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This editor, named "edit", is a modern take on the classic MS-DOS Editor, featuring a contemporary interface and VS Code-like input controls. Designed for accessibility, it's easy to use even for those unfamiliar with terminals. Install the latest version via WinGet or download binaries from the Releases page. Note that the ICU library's version and naming conventions need attention for search and replace functionality.
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A Reuters photographer captured a photo of former National Security Advisor Mike Waltz checking his Signal messages during a Trump cabinet meeting. He wasn't using the official Signal app, but a modified version called TM SGNL, which automatically archives plaintext messages. Developed by TeleMessage, a company with executives linked to the Israeli Defense Forces' intelligence unit, TM SGNL likely violates Signal's open-source license. The app is primarily distributed through enterprise mobile device management (MDM) services, suggesting the Trump administration may have used it for classified discussions and centralized device management. The article also uncovered detailed documentation and a video revealing potential storage locations for chat logs, including Microsoft 365, SMTP, and SFTP. This raises significant security concerns.
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This essay explores the concept of "malleable software," a software ecosystem where users can easily adapt tools to their needs. The authors argue that the rigidity of current software hinders user agency and creativity, illustrating the negative impact with examples from the medical profession. They contrast the malleability of physical environments with the inflexibility of digital ones, proposing three design patterns for achieving malleable software: a gentle slope of customizability, composable tools, and community creation. The authors detail several prototype systems their team has built, showcasing the potential of malleable software while acknowledging the challenges ahead, such as privacy, security, and business models. Ultimately, the essay calls for a more user-centric computing ecosystem.
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New research reveals that the introduction of rice farming to Japan 3,000 years ago, while transformative, didn't immediately overhaul Japanese cuisine. Despite the simultaneous arrival of millet, a staple in Korean cooking, analysis of pottery residues and plant remains shows it failed to gain traction in Japanese diets. Fish remained a primary food source, highlighting the resilience of culinary traditions in the face of significant technological shifts. This suggests that cultural practices can persist even with major agricultural changes.
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