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FLOAD: Facebook Video Downloader & Converter - No Signup Required!

2025-04-06

FLOAD: Facebook Video Downloader & Converter - No Signup Required!

FLOAD is a powerful Facebook video downloader and converter that requires no registration. It offers unlimited downloads and converts videos to various formats including MP3, MKV, and FLV, supporting up to 4K resolution. Utilizing multi-regional servers and CDN acceleration, FLOAD boasts fast download speeds and a user-friendly interface, compatible with popular browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Edge, as well as Windows, MacOS, Android, and iOS.

(fload.app)

Misc video converter facebook

AI Calorie Counting: More Hype Than Help?

2025-06-09

AI Calorie Counting: More Hype Than Help?

Apps promising to count calories from photos using AI are all the rage. But do they deliver? A writer tested Cal AI, SnapCalorie, and Calorie Mama, finding significant inaccuracies in both food identification and portion estimation. Even with manual corrections, the apps proved time-consuming and unreliable. The conclusion? These apps offer more hassle than help, raising questions about the necessity of precise calorie tracking and advocating for a healthier approach to eating.

(lifehacker.com)

Tech Diet

Human Body Exhibit May Feature Executed Chinese Political Prisoners

2025-07-10

Human Body Exhibit May Feature Executed Chinese Political Prisoners

A touring exhibition of plastinated human bodies, 'Real Bodies,' displayed in Birmingham, UK, is suspected of using corpses of executed Chinese political prisoners. British parliamentarians raised concerns, citing evidence that the bodies originated from a Dalian, China firm previously investigated for using bodies obtained from Chinese police. The exhibition's organizer, Imagine Exhibitions, failed to provide documentation proving consent or origin of the cadavers. This raises serious ethical concerns and echoes findings of the China Tribunal's investigation into forced organ harvesting. The incident highlights the need for international cooperation to address such atrocities.

(www.theartnewspaper.com)

Misc Body Exhibit Organ Harvesting

Petrichor: A macOS Offline Music Player Built with Swift and SwiftUI

2025-07-10

Petrichor: A macOS Offline Music Player Built with Swift and SwiftUI

Petrichor is a powerful offline music player for macOS offering all the features you'd expect: organized library browsing, interactive playlist and queue management, folder view browsing, quick access to favorites in the sidebar, easy navigation, native macOS integration (menubar and dock controls, dark mode support), powerful search, and smart playlists. Created by a developer who missed the features of Swinsian and wanted to learn Swift and macOS app development, it's built entirely with Swift and SwiftUI and uses a SQLite database to manage music file information.

(github.com)

Development

Say Goodbye to Confusing Data Viz Color Schemes: Introducing a New Palette Generator

2025-09-25

Say Goodbye to Confusing Data Viz Color Schemes: Introducing a New Palette Generator

Tired of struggling with data visualization color schemes? This new palette generator lets you easily create a series of visually equidistant colors, eliminating those confusing and hard-to-distinguish color palettes. It supports custom endpoint colors and can even incorporate your brand colors, making your charts both beautiful and professional. Whether it's pie charts, grouped bar charts, or maps, it handles them all with ease. No more dealing with frustrating color schemes like those in Google Analytics!

(www.learnui.design)

Design color schemes palette generator

The Space Economy in 2025: Beyond the Hype Cycle

2025-04-21

The Space Economy in 2025: Beyond the Hype Cycle

The early months of 2025 reveal a maturing commercial space sector, moving beyond its honeymoon phase. Investment is becoming more selective, government involvement is increasing, and competitive advantages are eroding. While space remains a powerful platform for economic and technological transformation, geopolitical realities and macroeconomic constraints are increasingly influential. This analysis examines the space economy's three-layered architecture: infrastructure, distribution, and applications, highlighting the significance of software-defined layers. Macroeconomic headwinds and technological tailwinds coexist, with increased opportunities in defense-related sectors, but challenges persist in commercial applications. Competition is intensifying, with SpaceX facing challenges from Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and others. GeoAI emerges as a new growth area, while distribution-layer companies are achieving more with less funding. Future investments should focus on AI's strategic importance, the driving force of defense spending, and the resetting of infrastructure.

(finance.yahoo.com)

Tech

How AWS Uses Formal Methods to Build Reliable Services

2025-05-30

Amazon Web Services (AWS) employs a multi-pronged approach to building reliable services, leveraging formal methods from TLA+ to the newer P language, alongside lightweight techniques like property-based testing, fuzzing, and fault injection. These methods not only help AWS identify and eliminate subtle bugs early in development, boosting developer velocity and efficiency, but also provide a robust foundation for performance optimization. The article also explores challenges like metastability and future opportunities using LLMs and AI assistants to lower the barrier to entry for formal methods.

(cacm.acm.org)

Tech

Open Source Firewalls Need Open Source Firmware: A Coreboot Upgrade Story

2025-05-20

Open Source Firewalls Need Open Source Firmware: A Coreboot Upgrade Story

A computer security enthusiast and open-source advocate details their journey upgrading their firewall's firmware to Coreboot. Starting with a cheap Chinese firewall running pfSense, they realized the underlying proprietary BIOS presented a significant security vulnerability. Despite reinstalling the OS, the BIOS remained a potential attack vector. The author upgraded to a ProtectLI firewall with pre-installed Coreboot and even successfully flashed a more recent Coreboot version (A12) onto an older appliance originally running A02, significantly improving its security. The author strongly advocates for Coreboot on all firewall appliances for enhanced security, acknowledging the difficulty of installation for less technically proficient users.

(hagensieker.com)

Tech

World's First Drone-Triggered Lightning Successfully Guided

2025-04-23

World's First Drone-Triggered Lightning Successfully Guided

NTT Corporation has achieved a world first: successfully triggering and guiding lightning using a drone. The experiment, conducted under natural lightning conditions, validated both the drone's innovative lightning protection cage – capable of withstanding direct strikes – and the electric field-based triggering method. This breakthrough opens doors to significantly reducing lightning damage to cities and infrastructure, with future plans focusing on deploying 'lightning drones' for widespread protection and even harnessing lightning's energy. The success builds on years of research and addresses the limitations of traditional lightning rods.

(group.ntt)

Tech lightning protection

AI-Powered Lawmaking: A Shift in the Balance of Power

2025-01-26

AI-Powered Lawmaking: A Shift in the Balance of Power

Artificial intelligence is increasingly involved in the legislative process, subtly altering the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches. The rising complexity of laws is driving legislators to utilize AI for tasks ranging from bill drafting to policy analysis, boosting efficiency. However, potential risks exist, including the manipulation of AI to favor specific interests. The article explores AI's impact on legislative efficiency and power dynamics, highlighting the ensuing challenges and opportunities.

(www.lawfaremedia.org)

Tech Legislation Power Balance

Hainan Island Pilots Global Internet Access, Bypassing the Great Firewall

2025-06-05

Hainan Island Pilots Global Internet Access, Bypassing the Great Firewall

China's Hainan province is piloting a program granting select corporate users broad access to the global internet, a rare move given China's strict online censorship. This initiative aims to attract international businesses as Hainan develops into a global free-trade port. Employees of registered Hainan companies can apply for the "Global Connect" mobile service through the Hainan International Data Comprehensive Service Centre, bypassing the Great Firewall to access sites like Google and Wikipedia. Applicants need a 5G plan with a major carrier and must submit company information; approval can take up to five months. Approved users get global internet access at no extra cost. Currently, there are no restrictions on company size or business scope, and the program has generated significant interest.

(www.scmp.com)

Tech global internet access Hainan free trade port

OpenTPU: An Open-Source Reimplementation of Google's TPU

2025-05-28

OpenTPU: An Open-Source Reimplementation of Google's TPU

UC Santa Barbara's ArchLab has released OpenTPU, an open-source re-implementation of Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). Based on details from Google's research paper, but lacking a formal specification, OpenTPU differs in several implementation details from Google's design. Currently supporting matrix multiplication and ReLU/sigmoid activation functions, OpenTPU is missing features like convolution and pooling. Implemented using PyRTL, the project includes hardware and functional simulators, along with a checker for verifying results. While lacking hard synthesis figures for a full 256x256 OpenTPU at this alpha release, its open-source nature offers valuable learning and improvement opportunities for researchers.

(github.com)

Hardware

Meta's Llama and the EU AI Act: A Convenient Coincidence?

2025-04-20

Meta's Llama and the EU AI Act: A Convenient Coincidence?

Meta's labeling of its Llama models as "open source" is questionable, as its license doesn't fully comply with the Open Source Definition. A theory suggests this is due to the EU AI Act's special rules for open-source models, bypassing OSI compliance. Analyzing the Act with Gemini 2.5 Flash, the author found exemptions for models allowing users to run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve software and data, even with attribution requirements. This supports the theory that Meta strategically uses the "open source" label, although this practice predates the EU AI Act.

(simonwillison.net)

AI

yt-dlp Requires Deno for YouTube Downloads

2025-09-24

yt-dlp Requires Deno for YouTube Downloads

Popular YouTube downloader yt-dlp will soon require the Deno JavaScript runtime to function correctly due to changes on YouTube's side. Previously, yt-dlp used a built-in JavaScript interpreter, but this is now insufficient to overcome YouTube's updated anti-scraping measures. Users will need to install Deno and take additional steps depending on their installation method (e.g., using pip or official executables) to update yt-dlp and ensure continued YouTube video downloading capabilities.

(github.com)

Development YouTube downloads

Debunking the Myth of High-Degree Polynomials in Regression

2025-04-22

Debunking the Myth of High-Degree Polynomials in Regression

The common belief that high-degree polynomials are prone to overfitting and difficult to control in machine learning is challenged in this article. The author argues that the problem isn't high-degree polynomials themselves, but rather the use of inappropriate basis functions, such as the standard basis. Experiments comparing the standard, Chebyshev, and Legendre bases with the Bernstein basis in fitting noisy data demonstrate that the Bernstein basis, with its coefficients sharing the same 'units' and being easily regularized, effectively avoids overfitting. Even high-degree polynomials yield excellent fits using the Bernstein basis, requiring minimal hyperparameter tuning.

(alexshtf.github.io)

AI polynomial fitting overfitting Bernstein basis

Anthropic Unveils Claude Gov: AI for US National Security

2025-06-05

Anthropic Unveils Claude Gov: AI for US National Security

Anthropic has launched Claude Gov, a suite of AI models exclusively for US national security customers. Already deployed at the highest levels of government, access is restricted to classified environments. Built with direct feedback from government agencies, these models underwent rigorous safety testing and are designed to handle classified information, understand intelligence and defense contexts, excel in critical languages, and improve cybersecurity data analysis. They offer enhanced performance for strategic planning, operational support, intelligence analysis, and threat assessment.

(www.anthropic.com)

AI

The Tumultuous Life of Controversial Author MacLane

2025-04-25

The Tumultuous Life of Controversial Author MacLane

Following the uproar surrounding her debut novel, MacLane published a second book the following year, 'My Friend Annabel Lee,' a proto-surrealist tale about her friendship with a Japanese porcelain doll. It was met with critical indifference. Her subsequent life was a whirlwind of journalistic pursuits, financial woes (including arrest for debt), and a long-term relationship with Caroline M. Branson, 44 years her senior. MacLane continued to write, expressing her unconventional views on marriage, family, sex, religion, and more, leaving behind a legacy as controversial as it is enigmatic.

(publicdomainreview.org)

Misc

Kermit: An Animated Font Designed for Dyslexic Children

2025-04-16

Kermit: An Animated Font Designed for Dyslexic Children

Kermit is an innovative animated font designed to aid children with dyslexia. Research suggests dyslexia may stem from issues in the brain's visuospatial processing, hindering the ability to perceive letter order. Kermit, by animating letters to 'draw' themselves, enhances visual motion signals, potentially improving focus and reading comprehension in dyslexic children. This showcases the potential of technology in special education, offering a new approach to enhancing the learning experience for dyslexic children.

(microsoft.design)

Tech dyslexia animated font visuospatial processing

UK Government Goes Passwordless: Passkeys Arrive on GOV.UK

2025-05-08

UK Government Goes Passwordless: Passkeys Arrive on GOV.UK

The UK government is rolling out passkey technology across its digital services later this year, replacing the current SMS-based verification system. This move is projected to save millions of pounds annually while significantly enhancing security, aligning with the government's broader digital transformation strategy. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which has joined the FIDO Alliance, supports the initiative. Passkeys offer faster, more secure logins and robust protection against phishing attacks. Major corporations like Microsoft and Amazon are also adopting passkeys, signaling a global shift towards passwordless authentication.

(www.biometricupdate.com)

Tech

Go Iterators: A Tale of Purity and Impurity

2025-05-31

Go 1.23 standardized iterators, powerful functions that can be closures. However, the official documentation's classification of iterators is ambiguous. The author proposes a clearer distinction between 'pure' and 'impure' iterators: 'pure' iterators restart each time, while 'impure' iterators may retain state. The article explores various iterator types and the trade-offs between performance and consistency, concluding that Go's iterator landscape is still evolving, with conventions and terminology needing further refinement.

(jub0bs.com)

Development

snapDOM: Blazing Fast, High-Fidelity DOM Capture

2025-04-27

snapDOM: Blazing Fast, High-Fidelity DOM Capture

snapDOM is a high-fidelity DOM capture tool developed for Zumly, a framework for smooth zoom-based view transitions. It converts any HTML element into a scalable SVG image, preserving styles, fonts, backgrounds, shadow DOM, and pseudo-elements. Benchmarks show snapDOM dramatically outperforms competitors like modern-screenshot and html2canvas, especially with larger DOM structures. It's lightweight, dependency-free, and offers exports to SVG, PNG, JPG, WebP, and canvas. Ideal for capturing full-page views, modals, and complex layouts.

(github.com)

Development DOM capture

Send Your Photo to Space!

2025-05-27

Send Your Photo to Space!

Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer, is launching a satellite called SAT GUS to take the most epic selfies from space! Simply upload your photo, it'll be displayed on a phone, and the satellite will snap a picture with Earth in the background. The satellite's name, a playful nod to Crunchlab's squirrel mascot, Phat Gus, adds to the fun and ingenuity of this project.

(space.crunchlabs.com)

Tech space selfie satellite

Vanguard's No-Go on Bitcoin ETFs: A Long-Term Investor's Perspective

2025-01-26

Vanguard's No-Go on Bitcoin ETFs: A Long-Term Investor's Perspective

Vanguard recently announced it won't be launching a Bitcoin ETF or other crypto products. Their reasoning centers on Bitcoin's immaturity as an asset class, extreme volatility, and lack of inherent economic value. Vanguard views Bitcoin as speculation, not investment, unsuitable for long-term, buy-and-hold investors. They emphasize their investor-first philosophy, citing past decisions to reject leveraged/inverse funds and over-the-counter stocks as examples of prioritizing client protection.

(corporate.vanguard.com)

Tech Bitcoin ETF Long-term investing

16 Billion Passwords Exposed: Largest Data Breach Ever?

2025-06-19

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a record-breaking data breach exposing 16 billion passwords—the largest confirmed dump of stolen access data ever. These credentials are not recycled from old hacks; they're new, undocumented, and highly dangerous, impacting major platforms like Apple, Google, Facebook, and more. The data's structured format suggests active exfiltration, likely via infostealer malware, optimized for sale or deployment. Researchers warn of imminent large-scale phishing, credential stuffing, and account hijacking. The breach highlights ongoing vulnerabilities in corporate data security, including misconfigured cloud setups and poor password management practices.

(cryptorank.io)

Tech

The Dot-Com Bubble: A 20-Year Retrospective

2025-03-16

The Dot-Com Bubble: A 20-Year Retrospective

March 10, 2000 marked the peak of the dot-com bubble, with the NASDAQ hitting 5048.62 before a dramatic crash. Investors were frenzied, chasing the next Microsoft, often ignoring profitability. While companies like Amazon and Google eventually thrived, their success wasn't guaranteed in 2000. The burst led to widespread failures, impacting the tech industry deeply. Recovery was slow, with the NASDAQ only surpassing its 2000 peak in 2015, serving as a cautionary tale in tech history.

(dfarq.homeip.net)

Tech dot-com bubble investment

MinC 6.1: A Lightweight Unix Environment

2025-04-23

MinC 6.1 is a lightweight Unix environment emulator now featuring a simplified installation wizard. It bundles a rich set of common Unix commands, encompassing file management, compression, networking tools, and development utilities. While some services and daemons are not yet supported, the developer promises their imminent release. Users can support the project through donations and suggest software for future inclusions. Post-installation, antivirus adjustments might be necessary for proper functionality, and integration with VS Code as a terminal is possible.

(minc.commandlinerevolution.nl)

Development

Silicon Valley Prank: Zuckerberg and Musk Voices Hack Crosswalk Buttons

2025-04-19

Silicon Valley Prank: Zuckerberg and Musk Voices Hack Crosswalk Buttons

Over the weekend, crosswalk buttons in several Silicon Valley cities were hacked to play audio messages mimicking the voices of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. The messages contained bizarre and often offensive statements, with Zuckerberg's voice claiming that 'it's normal to feel uncomfortable or even violated as we forcefully insert AI into every facet of your conscious experience,' and Musk offering a Cybertruck to anyone who becomes his friend. Affected traffic signals in cities like Palo Alto and Redwood City have been repaired, and authorities are investigating and strengthening system protections. The incident highlights vulnerabilities in city infrastructure and raises ethical concerns about AI.

(www.paloaltoonline.com)

Tech city security

World's Smallest Injectable, Light-Controlled Pacemaker Developed

2025-04-08

World's Smallest Injectable, Light-Controlled Pacemaker Developed

Scientists have developed the world's tiniest temporary pacemaker—smaller than a grain of rice, injectable, light-controlled, and bioresorbable. This breakthrough aims to help children with congenital heart defects and adults recovering from heart surgery. Unlike traditional pacemakers, it eliminates the need for invasive implantation and removal, avoiding risks like the internal bleeding that contributed to Neil Armstrong's death in 2012. Successfully tested in animals and human tissue, human trials are expected in 2-3 years. Future applications could extend to nerve regeneration, wound healing, and smart implants.

(www.sciencealert.com)

Tech implantable devices pacemaker

SQL-Powered Doom Clone: Abusing DuckDB-WASM for 3D Rendering

2025-04-22

SQL-Powered Doom Clone: Abusing DuckDB-WASM for 3D Rendering

This project explores the unconventional use of DuckDB-WASM, a browser-based analytical database, to build a rudimentary 3D game engine. The author built a text-based Doom clone where game state, including map, player position, and enemies, is stored in DuckDB tables. Game logic and rendering are handled using SQL queries, surprisingly achieving raycasting and 3D scene rendering via recursive CTEs. JavaScript acts as an orchestrator, managing input, the game loop, and sprite rendering. The process involved overcoming challenges with WASM loading, SQL dialect nuances, query planner issues, and asynchronous race conditions. The resulting game achieves 6-7 FPS, demonstrating the surprising power of SQL for unconventional tasks and the impressive performance of DuckDB-WASM.

(www.hey.earth)

Development SQL game engine

From Online Extremist Philosophy to Real-World Terror: Efilism and the Palm Springs Bombing

2025-05-18

From Online Extremist Philosophy to Real-World Terror: Efilism and the Palm Springs Bombing

This article examines the Palm Springs fertility clinic bombing, where the perpetrator, Guy Edward Bartkus, was influenced by the extremist philosophy of Efilism. Efilism posits that all life is suffering and should be ended. The article traces Efilism's online origins, from Benatar's antinatalism to Mosher's Efilism, and its connection to Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza. Bartkus's actions weren't solely driven by ideology; his friend's suicide deeply impacted him, and Efilism served more as a vocabulary for his despair. The article explores the spread of online extremist ideologies and the complex causes of individual extremism, prompting reflection on the responsibilities of online platforms.

(default.blog)

Misc extremism terrorism

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