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Physicists Discover Particle with Mass Only When Moving in One Direction

2024-12-19

Physicists Discover Particle with Mass Only When Moving in One Direction

Scientists have discovered a peculiar quasiparticle, the semi-Dirac fermion, which only exhibits effective mass when moving in one direction. Predicted in 2008, this phenomenon has now been confirmed in a ZrSiS semi-metal crystal at extremely low temperatures (-269°C). Its energy properties differ drastically in perpendicular directions, akin to a train experiencing resistance when switching tracks, thus gaining mass. This discovery could have profound implications for quantum physics and electronic sensors, but further research is needed to explore its applications.

(www.sciencealert.com)

Physics

Google Pays $1.4B to Settle Texas Data Privacy Lawsuit

2025-05-10

Google Pays $1.4B to Settle Texas Data Privacy Lawsuit

Google will pay $1.4 billion to settle claims by Texas that it collected user data without permission, the state's attorney general announced. This is the largest amount any state has won in a settlement with Google over data privacy violations. The settlement covers geolocation, incognito searches, and biometric data, reflecting Texas's tough stance against tech companies exploiting user data. Google stated the settlement addresses older claims and won't require new product changes.

(apnews.com)

Tech settlement

GenAI-Accelerated TLA+ Challenge: A Race to the Future of Formal Verification

2025-05-06

The TLA+ Foundation and NVIDIA have launched a challenge encouraging the use of generative AI to improve the TLA+ specification language. Participants can use AI for code refactoring, creating development tools, generating visualizations, and even synthesizing specifications. The judging panel will evaluate submissions based on functionality, relevance to the TLA+ ecosystem, and innovative use of AI. All submissions must be open-source, reproducible, and a prototype is sufficient. This challenge aims to explore the potential of generative AI within TLA+ and invigorate the community.

(foundation.tlapl.us)

Development

OpenTelemetry Integration Hell: A Tale of Observability Woes

2025-01-10

OpenTelemetry Integration Hell: A Tale of Observability Woes

A payments company's attempt to integrate OpenTelemetry into their Spring and Akka-based system turned into an unexpected challenge. While OpenTelemetry aims to standardize observability tooling, legacy OpenTracing libraries and conflicting APIs across frameworks made the integration process surprisingly complex. The author details the integration of logs, metrics, and traces, highlighting the struggles with context propagation, API clashes, and debugging Java Agents. The solution involved manually converting contexts to bridge the gap between OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing. This story vividly illustrates how seemingly standardized tools can become complex in real-world applications and reflects the challenges of integrating different libraries and frameworks in software development.

(iconsolutions.com)

Development Monitoring Distributed Tracing

Royal Society's 1958 Southern Chile Expedition: Darwin's Legacy and an Antarctic Frontier

2025-05-09

Royal Society's 1958 Southern Chile Expedition: Darwin's Legacy and an Antarctic Frontier

In 1958-59, to commemorate the centenary of Darwin's *On the Origin of Species*, the Royal Society mounted an expedition to Southern Chile. A team of scientists from Britain and New Zealand retraced Darwin's steps and explored the islands of southern Chile, including Chiloé and Wellington Island. Their research, focusing on the similarities of species across the southern temperate zone, contributed to our understanding of plate tectonics. The expedition, documented through photographs and diaries, offers a fascinating glimpse into the challenges and discoveries of the journey, showcasing the unique landscapes and indigenous cultures of 65 years ago.

(royalsociety.org)

Tech scientific expedition South America

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.

(miguelcarranza.es)

Startup

KDE Plasma Tightens Wayland Focus Management to Prevent Focus Stealing

2025-08-04

KDE Plasma Tightens Wayland Focus Management to Prevent Focus Stealing

KDE Plasma's window manager, KWin, is enhancing Wayland's window focus management. Previously, focus stealing in X11 was frustrating and even a security risk. Wayland uses the XDG Activation protocol to mitigate this, but some applications still violate it. KWin's new "Extreme" focus stealing prevention setting will enforce the use of valid tokens for window activation, eliminating focus stealing and improving user experience. This update fixes focus issues in applications like Dolphin and KRunner and improves backend DBusRunner activation token management.

(www.neowin.net)

Development

Microsoft's Phi-3-Mini: A Lightweight LLM for Enhanced Development

2024-12-28

Microsoft's Phi-3-Mini: A Lightweight LLM for Enhanced Development

Microsoft unveiled Phi-3-Mini, a lightweight language model offering GPT-3.5-level performance on resource-constrained devices. This article explores its strengths, including robust reasoning and coding capabilities, and seamless integration with tools like Ollama and Pieces. Running Phi-3-Mini locally via Ollama, combined with Pieces for code snippet management, streamlines code generation and refactoring, boosting developer productivity. While context overflow remains an issue with long texts, Phi-3-Mini's lightweight nature and powerful features make it a valuable asset in AI development.

(pieces.app)

Development developer tools

Microsoft Leverages LLMs to Boost Low-Level Programming Safety: Checked C and RustAssistant

2025-05-02

Researchers at Microsoft Research presented two projects leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance low-level programming safety. One project uses LLMs to assist with Checked C, automatically adding memory safety annotations to legacy C code, improving safety and reducing the burden of manual annotation. The second, RustAssistant, uses LLMs to automatically fix Rust compilation errors, significantly lowering the learning curve for Rust. Both projects demonstrate the immense potential of LLMs in improving code safety and developer efficiency, opening new possibilities for software engineering.

(www.microsoft.com)

Development Code Safety

Kentucky 'Crypto King' Arrested for Alleged Kidnapping and Torture

2025-05-25

Kentucky 'Crypto King' Arrested for Alleged Kidnapping and Torture

John Woeltz, a 37-year-old Kentucky man known as the "crypto king of Kentucky," was arrested and charged with kidnapping, torture, and assault of an Italian man held captive for weeks in a Manhattan townhouse. The victim, a 28-year-old, was allegedly tortured for his Bitcoin password, enduring pistol-whippings, chainsaw injuries, and other brutal acts. Police recovered evidence including photos and torture devices from the luxury residence. Woeltz is being held without bail.

(www.nbcnewyork.com)

Misc

Mysterious Zen 5 CPU Failures: GMP Tests and Hardware Woes

2025-08-28

The author reports two instances of Ryzen 9950X CPUs failing after running GMP tests. Both incidents occurred in different environments but resulted in discolored areas on the CPU's pin side. Despite using Noctua coolers, the author suspects improper thermal paste application (due to Noctua's recommended offset mounting), leading to poor heat transfer, and that GMP tests might draw power beyond the CPU's specifications. While CPUs have temperature protection, sustained high loads could lead to gradual damage. The cause remains unknown but highlights the importance of high-performance CPU cooling and potential hardware flaws.

(gmplib.org)

Hardware CPU failure GMP tests

Solving the CVE Crisis: Professional Certification and Mandatory Vulnerability Reporting

2025-04-16

The impending expiration of MITRE's CVE contract sparked controversy, prompting a proposal for software security improvement. The current CVE system is plagued by inaccurate reports, diminishing its value. The author suggests a system based on vulnerability attributes instead of scores, along with professional Software Engineer (PSWE) certification. Failure to accurately report vulnerabilities within a timeframe would result in license revocation, incentivizing reporting. The proposal includes funding and training for future PSWEs, addressing accessibility concerns, ultimately creating a win-win scenario for software security and FOSS project sustainability.

(gavinhoward.com)

Development vulnerability reporting professional certification

Predicting the Next Pope: A Network Analysis of Vatican Power

2025-05-09

Predicting the Next Pope: A Network Analysis of Vatican Power

Bocconi University scholars used social network analysis to create the first map of the Vatican's cardinal network, aiming to predict the next Pope. The research, based on cardinals' official roles, consecration lines, and informal relationships, defined three key metrics: 'status,' 'information control,' and 'coalition-building capacity,' also incorporating age. The analysis reveals central figures within the network, with 'soft liberal' cardinals showing significant prominence. Geographically, Europe and South America remain influential, but Asia and Africa are increasingly strategic. This study offers a novel perspective on the complex power dynamics behind papal elections, showcasing the potential of social science methods in seemingly opaque religious contexts.

(www.unibocconi.it)

Misc social network analysis papal election power network

23andMe Bankruptcy: Your Genetic Data is For Sale – Delete It Now!

2025-03-26

23andMe Bankruptcy: Your Genetic Data is For Sale – Delete It Now!

Genetic testing company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy, putting the genetic data of millions of users up for sale. To protect your privacy, users are urged to immediately download and delete their data from 23andMe. The article provides a step-by-step guide on how to download your data and delete your account, emphasizing the critical need to protect this sensitive information. The incident highlights the importance of genetic data privacy, and other companies in the field should take note and improve their data security practices.

(www.eff.org)

Tech genetic data privacy

Sudoku: An Elegant Interplay of Graph Theory and Abstract Algebra

2025-04-13

Sudoku: An Elegant Interplay of Graph Theory and Abstract Algebra

The seemingly simple game of Sudoku hides deep mathematical principles. This article explores two approaches to solving Sudoku puzzles: graph theory and abstract algebra. The graph theory approach transforms the Sudoku grid into a graph, using vertex coloring algorithms to find solutions. The algebraic approach converts Sudoku rules into a system of polynomial equations, using Gröbner bases to find solutions. Both methods showcase the beauty of mathematics and offer novel approaches to solving Sudoku.

(chalkdustmagazine.com)

Misc

Roame is Hiring a Lead Full-Stack Engineer to Revolutionize Points-Based Travel with AI

2025-06-12

Roame is Hiring a Lead Full-Stack Engineer to Revolutionize Points-Based Travel with AI

Roame, a flight search engine leveraging credit card points and miles, backed by Y Combinator and other top investors, seeks a Lead Full-Stack Engineer. This hands-on role requires experience with Next.js, Firebase, and Go, and involves building the entire frontend and contributing to the backend. The ideal candidate is passionate about travel, points optimization, and AI, thriving in a fast-paced startup environment. The position offers competitive salary, equity, and benefits, including free lunches and company offsites.

(www.ycombinator.com)

Development Travel Points

Automattic Reverses Course, Re-engages with WordPress Development

2025-05-30

Automattic Reverses Course, Re-engages with WordPress Development

Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, has surprisingly reversed its decision to pause contributions to the WordPress project. This follows last month's announcement that 2025 would only see the release of version 6.8. Internal communications reveal CEO Matt Mullenweg's desire for a 6.9 release this year, incorporating an admin refresh and AI features. Speculation abounds regarding the motives behind this U-turn, with some suggesting pressure, reputational concerns, or a direct link to Automattic's ongoing legal battle with WP Engine. Automattic accuses WP Engine of profiting from WordPress without contributing back, while WP Engine counters that Automattic misunderstands trademark law. The reasons remain unclear, but Automattic's renewed commitment adds a significant twist to the WordPress narrative.

(techcrunch.com)

Development

Guix's G-Expressions: Embedding Lower-Level Code in Higher-Level Code

2025-08-03

Guix uses Scheme for both high-level actions (like defining packages) and low-level actions (like building derivations). To embed lower-level code within higher-level code, it employs G-expressions. For example, in the `start` field of `wesnoth-shepherd-service`, `#~(...)` passes lower-level code, while `#$(...)` escapes higher-level code, which the compiler lowers to lower-level code. The `make-forkexec-constructor` function creates and executes child processes, offering features like setting user, group, umask, and environment variables.

(tannerhoelzel.com)

Development G-expressions

Scottish Police Face Data Sovereignty Showdown with Microsoft

2025-08-29

Scottish police are grappling with significant data security and sovereignty challenges in their adoption of Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft's refusal to disclose data processing locations and methods, citing "commercial confidentiality," prevents the police from meeting the stringent data transfer restrictions of the UK's 2018 Data Protection Act. This raises concerns about data potentially being processed in countries lacking adequate data protection, including China and India, and highlights the risks of relying on cloud services without sovereign cloud capabilities. While aware of the risks, the police are constrained by the UK National Enabling Programme and existing contracts with Microsoft, making a swift change of supplier difficult.

(www.computerweekly.com)

Tech

AI-First? Tech CEOs' Groupthink and the Illusion of Productivity

2025-04-30

AI-First? Tech CEOs' Groupthink and the Illusion of Productivity

A recent trend among tech CEOs is the demand for an "AI-first" approach to work, mandating the use of AI tools across the board. The author challenges this, arguing that forcing AI adoption on employees already proficient in their tasks may hinder productivity. Using personal anecdotes, the author illustrates how AI is best suited to assist those lacking specific skills, not replace experts. The author suggests this "AI-first" push is more of a performative act among tech leaders, a way to signal belonging to a particular group, rather than a genuine productivity enhancer. A more effective approach, argues the author, would involve employee choice and a focus on the actual utility of AI tools.

(www.anildash.com)

Tech AI adoption

Microsoft Copilot Vulnerability: Audit Logs are Broken

2025-08-20

Microsoft Copilot Vulnerability: Audit Logs are Broken

A security researcher discovered a critical vulnerability in Microsoft Copilot: it sometimes accesses files and returns information without logging the action in audit logs. Worse, users can instruct Copilot to access files without leaving a trace. While Microsoft has fixed the vulnerability, their decision not to notify customers raises serious concerns about transparency and customer responsibility. This flaw poses a significant threat to organizations relying on audit logs for security and compliance, particularly in highly regulated industries like healthcare and finance.

(pistachioapp.com)

Tech Audit Logs

Boox Mira Pro Color: An E Ink Desktop Monitor That's Easy on the Eyes (But Expensive)

2025-04-30

Boox Mira Pro Color: An E Ink Desktop Monitor That's Easy on the Eyes (But Expensive)

Boox has unveiled the Mira Pro Color, its first desktop monitor with a color E Ink screen. Building on the 2023 black-and-white model, it uses the same color E Ink technology found in Kindles. While E Ink is known for being easy on the eyes, large color panels are pricey; the 25.3-inch Mira Pro Color costs $1,899.99, with potential import tariffs adding to the cost. While its refresh rate can't match LCDs or OLEDs, Boox offers four display modes balancing quality and speed for tasks like video playback. Ideal for text editing, writing, or spreadsheets in bright environments, it's not suited for gamers or video editors.

(www.theverge.com)

Hardware E Ink display

Open Source Font for Cockpit Displays: PolarSys B612

2025-09-03

Open Source Font for Cockpit Displays: PolarSys B612

PolarSys B612 is a highly legible open-source font family designed and tested for use on aircraft cockpit screens. Developed through a collaboration between Airbus, ENAC, and Université de Toulouse III, it aims to improve the display of information, focusing on readability and comfort. Key features include maximizing character spacing, respecting letter primitives, and harmonizing forms and spacing. Intactile DESIGN created eight variants in 2012, with complete hinting applied to all characters.

(github.com)

Design open source font

Mecha Comet: A Modular, Open-Source Linux Handheld

2025-01-08

The Mecha Comet is a highly extensible handheld Linux computer, boasting modular hardware and software adaptable to diverse needs. Its open-source design empowers users to create custom extensions, leveraging interfaces like Raspberry Pi HATs and Mikrobus Click boards. Running Mechanix OS (based on Debian), the Comet packs a 1.8GHz quad-core ARM processor, 4GB RAM, and 32GB storage. Designed for ambitious projects ranging from DIY phones and AI assistants to even nanosatellite deployment, the Comet launches on Kickstarter in early Q1 2025.

(mecha.so)

Hardware Handheld Computer Open Source Hardware

Oracle Lands $30 Billion Cloud Deal, Sends Shares Soaring

2025-07-01

Oracle Lands $30 Billion Cloud Deal, Sends Shares Soaring

Oracle Corp. announced a massive cloud computing deal worth $30 billion in annual revenue, more than double the size of its current cloud infrastructure business. The deal, expected to begin generating revenue in fiscal year 2028, is one of the largest cloud contracts ever recorded and hasn't yet named the client. This significant win positions Oracle for substantial growth in the cloud market, driving a surge in its stock price. The deal highlights the booming demand for cloud services and AI, with Oracle strategically expanding its market share.

(finance.yahoo.com)

Tech

Kafka's Genesis: A Data Integration Saga

2025-08-24

Kafka's Genesis: A Data Integration Saga

In 2012, LinkedIn faced a massive data integration challenge. Their existing data pipelines were inefficient, unscalable, and suffered from data silos. To solve this, they created Apache Kafka. This article delves into Kafka's origins, revealing its design was driven by the need for robustness, scalability, real-time capabilities, and seamless data integration. It explores how LinkedIn cleverly utilized Avro schemas and a schema registry to ensure data consistency and compatibility, ultimately achieving efficient data management. The article also reflects on Kafka's lack of first-class schema support and contrasts it with newer approaches like Buf's schema-first philosophy.

(bigdata.2minutestreaming.com)

Development Data Integration

Escaping Digital Feudalism: Self-Hosting, and the Future of the Cloud

2025-07-26

Escaping Digital Feudalism: Self-Hosting, and the Future of the Cloud

The author details their journey into self-hosting, prompted by Amazon's decision to remove local backups for Kindle books. They describe their hardware setup (Lenovo P520, Proxmox, Docker, etc.) and software choices (Immich, Calibre-web, Audiobookshelf, Jellyfin), ultimately concluding that while self-hosting offers control, its complexity and limitations make it impractical for most. The article advocates for a shift towards publicly accessible, cost-based cloud services, akin to libraries providing books and media, offering everyone data storage, collaboration tools, and streaming – a vision for escaping 'digital feudalism' and achieving true digital freedom.

(www.drewlyton.com)

Tech digital freedom shared cloud

PATH Should Be a System Call

2025-04-25

Emacs and bash, when starting up, inefficiently search for configuration files by iterating through each directory in the PATH environment variable, checking for the target file's existence one by one. This article explores this inefficient search mechanism, using the strace tool to trace the system calls of Emacs and bash, demonstrating numerous fstatat calls. The author argues that this search should be optimized by the operating system or file system, using a database-like query to directly return matching files instead of iterative attempts. Python's implementation, while relatively more efficient, is also shown to have shortcomings. The author proposes an improved solution: provide the OS with a list of all possible filenames and directories, reducing system calls and network roundtrips.

(simonsafar.com)

Development system call file search

Simulating and Visualizing the Central Limit Theorem: A Practical Exploration

2025-08-15

This post explores the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) through simulation and visualization. The author, having previously avoided statistics, uses R to generate samples from various distributions (uniform, normal, binomial, beta, exponential, chi-squared) and calculates sample means. The results visually demonstrate how the distribution of sample means approaches a normal distribution as sample size increases, confirming the CLT. The post further investigates the practical implications of using the t-distribution instead of the normal distribution for confidence interval calculations when dealing with limited sample sizes and unknown population variance. Simulations highlight the difference in confidence interval coverage across various sample sizes. Finally, an animation showcases how the distribution of sample means converges to a normal distribution as the sample size grows, offering a compelling visual understanding of this fundamental statistical concept.

(blog.foletta.net)

Development Central Limit Theorem Statistical Simulation

T2 SDE: A Low-Code Cross-Compilation System Development Environment

2024-12-26

T2 SDE is a low-code, ultra-portable package manager and Linux distribution that enables fully automated, reproducible, cross-compilation of custom operating systems using up-to-date packages. It supports nearly all major CPU architectures, C libraries, GUI systems, and desktop environments, plus countless special-purpose and embedded firmware packages. The latest release, T2 24.12, boasts expanded architecture support, including LibreOffice, OpenJDK, Qemu, and even a new Rust-based desktop environment, Cosmic Desktop. T2's commitment to supporting a wide range of architectures, including legacy and niche ones like IA-64 Itanium, is complemented by ongoing improvements, including full-disk encryption and LVM support for enhanced user experience.

(t2sde.org)

Development system development environment cross-compilation

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