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Digital Propaganda: How Governments Weaponize Ads on Google and Facebook

2025-09-09
Digital Propaganda: How Governments Weaponize Ads on Google and Facebook

In late 2024, a disturbing discovery was made: a paid ad by the Israeli government, mimicking a UN website but linking to a page accusing UNRWA of supporting terrorists, topped Google search results for UNRWA. This highlights a troubling trend: digital advertising platforms have become battlegrounds for influence, with governments using paid ads to sway public opinion during wars and crises. The article examines how Google Ads and Facebook Ads are weaponized, focusing on Israel's extensive campaign during the 2023-2025 Gaza war, targeting UNRWA and other organizations. It explores the platforms' responses, policy gaps, and ethical dilemmas, including the lack of proactive fact-checking and inconsistent enforcement of rules against misinformation.

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(medium.com)
Tech Digital Propaganda Advertising Platforms

The Optimal Egg-Drop Orientation: Science Cracks the Case

2025-05-29
The Optimal Egg-Drop Orientation: Science Cracks the Case

Contrary to intuition, a new study reveals that the best way to drop an egg isn't necessarily on its end. While vertically oriented eggs exhibit greater stiffness under static compression, horizontal eggs are tougher when subjected to dynamic impact. The key difference lies in toughness—the ability to absorb energy—versus stiffness—resistance to deformation. Horizontal orientation allows for better kinetic energy dissipation during a fall, minimizing the risk of breakage. This research highlights the importance of toughness over stiffness in impact scenarios, analogous to bending your knees when landing a jump.

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(arstechnica.com)
Misc egg toughness

arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaborators

2025-05-06
arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework enabling collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on the arXiv website. Individuals and organizations working with arXivLabs embrace our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners who adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will benefit the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

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(arxiv.org)
Development

Blue Pig Meat: A Warning of Rodenticide Contamination in California

2025-08-10
Blue Pig Meat: A Warning of Rodenticide Contamination in California

A trapper in Salinas, California, discovered blue-tinged meat in wild pigs he'd caught, raising concerns about rodenticide contamination. Investigation revealed the pigs had ingested diphacinone, an anticoagulant rodenticide often dyed blue. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife warns against consuming meat from animals exhibiting blue discoloration, as the poison can cause secondary poisoning, even after cooking. This incident highlights the dangers of rodenticide to wildlife and underscores the need for stricter regulations.

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(www.yahoo.com)
Tech Rodenticide Contamination Wildlife Poisoning

KickSmash32: Open-Source Amiga ROM Replacement Module

2025-04-12
KickSmash32: Open-Source Amiga ROM Replacement Module

KickSmash32 is an open-source Kickstart ROM replacement module for Amiga 3000 and 4000 systems. Supporting up to 8 independent flash banks, it allows ROM programming and switching via Amiga command-line utilities or a Linux host utility (USB-C). Optional host file services enable easy file transfers between the Amiga and host PC. Comprehensive documentation and build instructions are provided. Note that due to inconsistent ROM socket layouts across Amiga models, KickSmash32 is only compatible with Amiga 3000 and the original Amiga 4000.

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(github.com)
Hardware ROM replacement

CVE-2025-21756: Exploiting a Linux Kernel Vulnerability via vsock

2025-04-30

A researcher discovered a simple Linux kernel vulnerability, CVE-2025-21756, in a KernelCTF submission, allowing privilege escalation via vsock. The exploit centers on a Use After Free (UAF) issue, fixed with only a few lines of code. The researcher analyzed the patch, identified the vulnerability, and attempted a cross-cache attack. However, AppArmor prevented direct exploitation. They cleverly used vsock_diag_dump as a side channel to bypass kASLR and leak kernel addresses. Finally, a carefully crafted ROP chain was used to call `commit_creds` and gain root privileges. The journey was challenging, providing valuable kernel security knowledge.

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(hoefler.dev)
Development

Searchception: How Big Tech Hijacked Your Browsing

2025-04-10
Searchception: How Big Tech Hijacked Your Browsing

Remember when browsers and search engines were distinct? No longer. This article details how Google, Microsoft, and others blurred the lines, merging address and search bars. This 'searchception' subtly steers users towards their default search engine, even when the URL is known, maximizing data collection and ad revenue. The omnibox, predictive search, deep OS integration, and even visual mimicry in search results all contribute to this insidious effect. The author advocates for reclaiming agency by using browsers with separate search and address bars, typing full URLs, and being mindful of the hidden manipulation.

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(blog.mojeek.com)
Tech

Low-Cost 24-Channel Brain-Computer Interface: PiEEG-24

2025-06-11
Low-Cost 24-Channel Brain-Computer Interface: PiEEG-24

PiEEG-24 is a low-cost, open-source 24-channel brain-computer interface based on the Raspberry Pi. It measures EEG, EMG, EKG, and EOG data, offering improved spatial resolution, signal quality, and source localization compared to systems with fewer channels. Its advantages include flexibility in electrode placement, manageable computational complexity, cost-effectiveness, and compatibility with various electrode types. An easy-to-use Python SDK is provided. This represents a significant advancement in accessible, high-performance brain-computer interface technology.

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(pieeg.com)
Hardware

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.

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(oikofuge.com)
Misc territorial sovereignty

NYC Street Diaries: A Photographer's Chronicle of Lockdown

2025-06-12
NYC Street Diaries: A Photographer's Chronicle of Lockdown

The photographer's new work, "New York Street Diaries," captures the stark reality of New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic, a stark contrast to his previous work, "Street." While "Street" showcases a decade of celebrity photography capturing the vibrancy of NYC, "New York Street Diaries" is edgier and emotionally heavier. It depicts empty streets, sirens, and daily death tolls, portraying a heartbreaking city ravaged by the pandemic, including looting and vandalism. The author strives to offer an accurate portrayal of life during this time.

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(aboutphotography.blog)
Design

RevenueCat CTO's Year Seven: Triumphs and Tribulations of Hypergrowth

2025-01-09
RevenueCat CTO's Year Seven: Triumphs and Tribulations of Hypergrowth

RevenueCat co-founder and CTO Miguel Carranza reflects on his seventh year at the helm. 2024 was a banner year, marked by achieving C10 revenue targets, a first acquisition, multi-million dollar contracts, becoming the #1 iOS payments SDK, and expanding into Japan. However, this success wasn't without its challenges: personnel changes, strategic pivots, and personal emergencies impacting the team. Carranza shares his experiences balancing work and life, maintaining team cohesion during rapid expansion. He highlights the importance of teamwork, customer interaction, efficient execution, and continuous learning, while outlining ambitious goals for the coming years.

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(miguelcarranza.es)
Startup

China's Solar Industry Meltdown: Mass Layoffs and Overcapacity

2025-08-08

China's solar industry is facing a brutal downturn, with leading companies laying off nearly a third of their workforce last year. This reveals a crisis of overcapacity and vicious price wars, fueled by previous government-led expansion. While the government is attempting intervention, local resistance and corporate foot-dragging hinder solutions. This highlights the risks of central planning and foreshadows potential issues in other Chinese industries.

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(www.zerohedge.com)
Tech solar industry overcapacity price war

Differential Code Coverage for Debugging: A Powerful Technique

2025-04-25

This article introduces a powerful debugging technique: differential code coverage analysis. By comparing the code coverage of passing and failing tests, you can quickly pinpoint buggy code. The author uses Go's `math/big` library as an example, demonstrating how to use `go test` and `go tool cover` to generate coverage reports and `diff` to compare the differences. This efficiently identifies the code snippet causing the test failure, significantly reducing debugging time compared to traditional methods. The technique is illustrated by finding a bug in a few lines of code out of over 15,000.

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(research.swtch.com)
Development code coverage

Can LLMs Save Niche Programming Languages? Elixir's Strategy

2025-06-05
Can LLMs Save Niche Programming Languages? Elixir's Strategy

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked concerns among developers about their impact on niche programming languages. This article uses Elixir as a case study to explore how LLMs affect programming languages and how to leverage LLMs to enhance the competitiveness of niche languages. The author argues that LLM biases might lead to a preference for mainstream tech stacks, but by improving the interaction between LLMs and niche languages—such as providing better documentation and LLM-optimized code examples—LLMs can better understand and utilize niche languages. Furthermore, building evaluation datasets for niche languages can improve LLM proficiency, leading to recommendations for niche languages in suitable scenarios. Ultimately, the author suggests that actively embracing and utilizing LLMs, rather than passively resisting them, is key to the survival of niche programming languages in the AI era.

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(www.zachdaniel.dev)
Development

Mystery of a Retrograde Exoplanet: Stellar Cannibalism and Orbital Migration

2025-05-24
Mystery of a Retrograde Exoplanet: Stellar Cannibalism and Orbital Migration

The exoplanet ν Octantis b, orbiting a tight binary star system in a retrograde orbit, defies established planetary formation theories. Researchers suggest its unusual orbit may stem from mass transfer between the stars. Slow mass transfer could have created a temporary protoplanetary disk, giving birth to ν Octantis b. Alternatively, the changed mass distribution within the system destabilized outer planets, causing one to spiral inwards and be captured in its current stable retrograde orbit. Such a scenario is exceptionally rare, and further data is needed to confirm its formation mechanism.

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(arstechnica.com)
Tech binary star system

The Pains and Pleasures of Typeface Licensing: A Designer's Perspective

2025-08-14
The Pains and Pleasures of Typeface Licensing: A Designer's Perspective

A designer shares their experiences navigating typeface licensing across numerous projects. High-quality commercial fonts and supporting independent foundries are key considerations. However, varying licensing terms from different foundries create complexities. The article explores ideal licensing features: clear and easily accessible terms, shareable shopping carts, straightforward payment options, flexible pricing models, and the ability to subset fonts. The author highlights the need for a balance between foundry needs and client usability for a smoother workflow.

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(davesmyth.com)
Design Typeface Licensing Commercial Fonts

Linear Regression and Gradient Descent: From House Pricing to Deep Learning

2025-05-08
Linear Regression and Gradient Descent: From House Pricing to Deep Learning

This article uses house pricing as an example to explain linear regression and gradient descent algorithms in a clear and concise way. Linear regression predicts house prices by finding the best-fitting line, while gradient descent is an iterative algorithm used to find the optimal parameters that minimize the error function. The article compares absolute error and squared error, explaining why squared error is more effective in gradient descent because it ensures the smoothness of the error function, thus avoiding local optima. Finally, the article connects these concepts to deep learning, pointing out that the essence of deep learning is also to minimize error by adjusting parameters.

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(briefer.cloud)
AI linear regression

jjui: A Terminal UI for Jujutsu Version Control

2025-05-26
jjui: A Terminal UI for Jujutsu Version Control

jjui is a terminal user interface for the Jujutsu version control system. It offers a range of features including: changing revsets with autocomplete; rebasing revisions or branches; squashing revisions; viewing and comparing file diffs; moving bookmarks; viewing the op log; and previewing details of revisions, files, and operations. jjui supports various installation methods, including Homebrew, AUR, Nix, and Go. Minimum supported jj version is v0.21+.

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(github.com)
Development

The PS3's Failure: A Licked Many-Core Cookie

2025-04-11

This post analyzes the failure of the PlayStation 3 from the perspective of a AAA game developer. The Cell processor, while boasting multiple SPE cores, suffered from limitations in usable cores and weak SPE performance compared to the GPU. The SPE's limited local memory, the heterogeneous CPU/GPU architecture, and complex synchronization mechanisms significantly increased development difficulty, hindering developers from fully utilizing the PS3's potential. The author argues that the PS3's many-core architecture ultimately failed, becoming a 'licked cookie' – a concept with great potential but ultimately under-delivered.

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(darkcephas.github.io)
Game Many-Core Architecture

Neurox: Streamlining AI Workload Monitoring with a Helm Chart

2025-04-29
Neurox: Streamlining AI Workload Monitoring with a Helm Chart

Neurox simplifies monitoring AI workloads on your Kubernetes GPU cluster. Its Helm chart automates installation, provisioning a subdomain, image registry credentials, IdP, and TLS certificates. Purpose-built dashboards and reports combine metrics and live Kubernetes runtime data for admins, developers, researchers, and auditors. Free for up to 64 GPUs (NVIDIA GPUs only), with enterprise licensing available. Prerequisites include a Kubernetes cluster, cert-manager, ingress-nginx, the NVIDIA GPU Operator, and the Kube Prometheus Stack.

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(github.com)
AI AI Monitoring Helm Chart

Space Data Centers: The Dream of a Single Launch vs. Harsh Reality

2025-06-27
Space Data Centers: The Dream of a Single Launch vs. Harsh Reality

Starcloud claims a single 100-ton Starship launch could build a 40 MW space data center (SDC) for $8.2M. This analysis reveals this is infeasible, requiring up to 22 launches. Solar arrays need 4 launches, thermal management 13, and server racks 5. Starcloud drastically underestimates launch costs, rendering their economic comparison to terrestrial data centers unrealistic. This highlights the immense engineering challenges and high costs of space data centers, urging a more realistic techno-economic analysis.

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(angadh.com)
Tech Space Data Center Launch Costs

FiveThirtyEight's Demise and the Rise of Silver Bulletin

2025-03-06
FiveThirtyEight's Demise and the Rise of Silver Bulletin

Following Disney's layoffs impacting FiveThirtyEight, the author reflects on the site's history and challenges. While acknowledging FiveThirtyEight's success in data journalism, the author points to a lack of business strategy and sufficient personnel as contributing factors to its struggles. The author's new venture, Silver Bulletin, aims to continue some of FiveThirtyEight's work, particularly in publicly releasing polling data and enhancing data analysis and forecasting models. Silver Bulletin will adopt a subscription model for sustainability and plans to expand its data analysis scope, including launching a Trump approval rating dashboard and college basketball predictions.

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(www.natesilver.net)
Startup data journalism polling analysis media business

Go's New `slog`: A High-Performance Structured Logger for Observability

2025-09-12
Go's New `slog`: A High-Performance Structured Logger for Observability

Go 1.21 introduces `slog`, a native, high-performance, structured logging solution designed to be the new standard. Built around `Logger`, `Handler`, and `Record`, `slog` offers a flexible and efficient logging approach. The article details `slog` usage, covering log levels, context-aware logging, attribute handling, level control, and custom handler creation, emphasizing the use of `slog.Attr` to prevent malformed log entries. Performance considerations, OpenTelemetry integration for enhanced observability, and best practices like global loggers and dependency injection are also discussed. `slog` aims to transform logging from an afterthought to a crucial observability signal.

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(www.dash0.com)
Development structured logging

Giant Log Viewer: Instantly Browse 4TB Text Files

2025-04-15
Giant Log Viewer: Instantly Browse 4TB Text Files

Tired of waiting to open massive log files? `giant-log-viewer` instantly loads text files up to 4TB with a tiny memory footprint, using only ~80MB of JVM heap memory. It supports UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, but has limitations: it doesn't handle lines longer than 1MB, emojis, or systems without a GUI; it currently only runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. While not as feature-rich as `less`, it's perfect for quickly browsing giant logs via drag-and-drop or keyboard shortcuts. The project is open-source on GitHub, and donations are welcome to help the developer sign the executables.

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(github.com)
Development large files

Catgrad: A Category-Theoretic Deep Learning Compiler

2025-02-05

Catgrad is a deep learning framework that leverages category theory to statically compile models into their forward and backward passes. This allows your training loop to run without needing any deep learning framework (not even catgrad itself!). Built upon research papers exploring categorical approaches to deep learning, it enables features like data-parallel algorithms and differentiable polynomial circuits. Installation is straightforward via `pip install catgrad`.

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(catgrad.com)
Development

LoopMix128: Blazing Fast and Robust 2^128 Period PRNG

2025-05-10
LoopMix128: Blazing Fast and Robust 2^128 Period PRNG

LoopMix128 is an extremely fast pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) with a guaranteed period of 2^128, proven injectivity, and clean passes in both BigCrush and PractRand (32TB). Designed for non-cryptographic applications where speed and statistical quality are paramount, it significantly outperforms standard library generators and rivals or surpasses modern high-speed PRNGs like wyrand and xoroshiro128++. Its performance is backed by rigorous testing, passing BigCrush and PractRand with zero anomalies, and boasting a proven 192-bit injective state enabling parallel streams.

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(github.com)
Development Pseudo-random Number Generator

MIT Professor Unravels the Brain's Language Processing Mechanisms

2025-04-03
MIT Professor Unravels the Brain's Language Processing Mechanisms

From learning multiple languages in the former Soviet Union to becoming an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, Dr. Evelina Fedorenko dedicates her research to understanding the brain's language processing regions. Her work utilizes fMRI to precisely locate these areas, revealing their high selectivity for language and lack of overlap with other cognitive functions like music processing or code reading. Furthermore, she explores the temporal differences in processing across different brain regions, the development of language processing areas in young children, and uses large language models to investigate the plasticity and redundancy of the brain's language capabilities.

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(news.mit.edu)
AI Brain Language Processing Cognitive Neuroscience

Prompt Engineering for AI Coding Assistants: A Developer's Playbook

2025-06-04
Prompt Engineering for AI Coding Assistants: A Developer's Playbook

Developers are increasingly using AI coding assistants to boost productivity. These tools can autocomplete code, suggest bug fixes, and even generate entire modules. However, the quality of the AI's output hinges on the quality of the prompt. This article provides a practical guide to prompt engineering for common development tasks, covering debugging, refactoring, and new feature implementation. It details best practices, including providing rich context, specifying goals, breaking down complex tasks, and iterating on responses. Common pitfalls like vague prompts and overloaded requests are also discussed, offering solutions to maximize the effectiveness of AI coding assistants.

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(addyo.substack.com)
Development
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