Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

Popular：

Virtualization DNS security formal verification reachability analysis compiler errors macro conflict web extension development framework Bitmap Graphics API inconsistencies All Tags

UK's Illegal Cybertruck Faces Uphill Battle for Legalization

2024-12-15

UK's Illegal Cybertruck Faces Uphill Battle for Legalization

Yianni Charalambous, a UK car customizer, is attempting to register a Tesla Cybertruck for road use in the UK, following a similar success in the Czech Republic. However, the Cybertruck's sharp design clashes with UK and EU pedestrian safety regulations, posing significant challenges. Its unique steer-by-wire system, reliance on OTA updates unavailable in the UK, and incompatibility with EU recall systems further complicate matters. Experts deem its chances of passing the UK's IVA test extremely slim.

(www.wired.com)

Tech Tesla Cybertruck Car Modification Safety Regulations

S2: Revolutionizing Stream Data Storage in the Cloud

2024-12-21

Bandar Systems introduces S2, a novel stream data storage service designed to revolutionize data processing in the cloud era. Unlike traditional object-based storage, S2 centers around streams, offering efficient, scalable, and cost-effective real-time data ingestion and processing. It supports high-throughput, low-latency read and write operations and provides multiple storage classes to meet varying performance and cost requirements. S2 aims to replace systems like Kafka and Kinesis, providing users with a more powerful and flexible stream data management solution.

(s2.dev)

Development stream data storage cloud native serverless

38th Chaos Communication Congress: Technology, Society, and Utopia Converge

2024-12-24

The 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3) will take place in Hamburg from December 27-30, 2024. This annual four-day conference, organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) and volunteers, explores the intersection of technology, society, and utopia. The event features lectures, workshops, and various events on topics including information technology and a critical-creative approach to technology's societal impact. Participation is encouraged through volunteering, organizing events, and presenting projects, fostering a collaborative exploration of technology's future.

(events.ccc.de)

Tech Chaos Communication Congress Technology Conference Volunteer

Mysterious Tablet with Unknown Script Unearthed in Georgia

2024-12-14

Mysterious Tablet with Unknown Script Unearthed in Georgia

A basalt tablet inscribed with an enigmatic language has been discovered near Lake Bashplemi in Georgia's Dmanisi region. The 24.1 x 20.1 cm tablet, featuring 60 characters (39 unique), has baffled researchers. Its symbols, possibly related to military spoils, construction, or religious offerings, bear partial resemblance to scripts from the Middle East, India, Egypt, and West Iberia, yet are distinct. Dating potentially to the Late Bronze or Early Iron Ages, the tablet adds a layer of complexity to the cultural history of the Caucasus, hinting at possible ancient cultural exchange between diverse regions.

(archaeologymag.com)

Misc unknown script

Optimizing Ruby's JSON: Part 1

2024-12-18

This blog post details how the author optimized Ruby's `json` gem to become one of the fastest JSON parsers and generators. Instead of complex techniques, simple optimizations were applied based on profiling, such as avoiding redundant checks, prioritizing cheaper conditions, reducing setup costs, and using lookup tables. These improvements apply to both C and Ruby code. The optimizations significantly boosted the `json` gem's performance, making it competitive with alternatives like `oj`, reducing the need for monkey patching, and addressing stability and compatibility issues associated with `oj`.

(byroot.github.io)

Development Performance Optimization

Canva Engineering Cuts CI Build Times from Hours to Under 30 Minutes

2024-12-18

Canva Engineering Cuts CI Build Times from Hours to Under 30 Minutes

Canva's engineering team dramatically reduced their continuous integration (CI) build times, from an average of 80 minutes to under 30 minutes, sometimes as low as 15. This was achieved through a multifaceted approach. They identified and resolved Bazel caching issues, optimized pipeline structures, improved Git repository checkouts and caching, and leveraged Bazel Remote Build Execution (RBE). Extensive experimentation, including testing different instance types and adjusting Bazel configurations, played a crucial role. A series of incremental improvements significantly increased CI efficiency, reduced costs, and enhanced the developer experience.

(www.canva.dev)

Development Continuous Integration CI Optimization

Recursion Pharmaceuticals Ditches Cell Painting for Brightfield Imaging

2024-12-15

Recursion Pharmaceuticals Ditches Cell Painting for Brightfield Imaging

Recursion Pharmaceuticals, a biotech leveraging machine learning for drug discovery, recently announced a surprising shift: abandoning its signature cell painting technique in favor of traditional brightfield imaging. This article delves into the reasons behind this change. Advances in deep learning allow models to effectively process raw images, diminishing the value of cell painting's fluorescent dyes for contrast enhancement. Brightfield imaging offers advantages in cost, ease of implementation, and compatibility with live-cell time-lapse microscopy, opening up possibilities for studying cellular dynamics. Despite the seemingly risky move, internal testing at Recursion shows brightfield imaging yielding comparable or even superior results in predicting drug perturbations.

(www.owlposting.com)

Tech cell imaging drug development

Homescreen App: Redefining Your Home Screen Experience

2024-12-18

Homescreen is an app designed to revolutionize the home screen experience on your phone. Breaking free from the limitations of traditional phone desktops, it offers users a more personalized, efficient, and convenient way to interact with their devices. Users can customize widgets, themes, and layouts to create a unique home screen, boosting productivity and enjoyment. Homescreen isn't just a simple desktop replacement; it's a refreshing approach to how we use our phones.

(homescreen.app)

Development phone home screen customization productivity

Swift's New Forked Framework Simplifies Shared Data Management

2024-12-17

Swift's New Forked Framework Simplifies Shared Data Management

Developer Drew McCormack launched Forked, a new Swift framework for simplifying shared data management across single and multiple devices. Inspired by Git's merge mechanism, Forked supports branching and merging within a single file, achieving eventual consistency. It doesn't require a complete change history, only enough versions for three-way merging. Forked uses structs instead of classes, supports Codable, and seamlessly integrates with cloud services like iCloud. It even tackles race conditions from concurrent access and supports custom merge logic or built-in CRDT algorithms. CloudKit sync is achieved with just a few lines of code.

(appdecentral.com)

Development Data Synchronization Distributed Systems

Negotiating with Infringers: A Better Option for Creative Professionals

2024-12-16

Negotiating with Infringers: A Better Option for Creative Professionals

When a creative professional's copyright is infringed, litigation isn't the only option. This article's author, a lawyer, suggests considering negotiation with the infringer. Negotiation is quicker and cheaper than litigation and may yield benefits beyond monetary compensation, such as promotion and collaboration opportunities. The author points out that most infringements are not malicious but due to negligence. Through negotiation, adversaries can be transformed into collaborators, leading to long-term success. Of course, if negotiations fail, litigation remains a last resort.

(www.thelegalartist.com)

Startup intellectual property copyright infringement negotiation

Making Unsafe Rust Safer: Verification Tools for Unsafe Code

2024-12-17

Making Unsafe Rust Safer: Verification Tools for Unsafe Code

Rust's popularity stems from its ability to eliminate memory and concurrency errors at compile time, but its `unsafe` code blocks can bypass these checks. This article explores tools for verifying unsafe Rust code, including code called from C or C++ libraries. It introduces runtime error detection tools—sanitizers—and Miri, an interpreter that deterministically finds undefined behavior. Sanitizers detect out-of-bounds memory access, data races, and more, while Miri provides more precise error reporting with code snippets. However, Miri currently doesn't support code called via FFI from C/C++, necessitating the use of C/C++ compiler sanitizers in such cases. These tools enhance the safety and reliability of Rust code, even when dealing with `unsafe` code or interacting with C/C++ libraries.

(blog.colinbreck.com)

Development Safety Memory Errors

Northern Giant Hornet Eradicated from the United States

2024-12-23

The Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced the eradication of the northern giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) from Washington state and the US after three years without confirmed detections. This success is attributed to a multi-year collaborative effort involving state and federal agencies, community members, and the public, who played a crucial role in reporting sightings. The hornets posed a significant threat to honeybees, other pollinators, and agriculture, and their eradication protects the US ecosystem and agricultural industry. While eradicated, vigilance continues to prevent reintroduction.

(agr.wa.gov)

Misc Northern Giant Hornet invasive species eradication

Bizarre Particle's Mass Depends on Travel Direction

2024-12-12

Bizarre Particle's Mass Depends on Travel Direction

Scientists have unexpectedly discovered a strange quasiparticle, a semi-Dirac fermion, in a ZrSiS material. This particle exhibits a peculiar behavior: it's massless when moving along a specific direction but gains mass when traveling in other directions. This discovery, stemming from research into the properties of quasiparticles within ZrSiS, relates to Einstein's mass-energy equivalence, E=mc². When moving at light speed in a specific direction, the quasiparticle is massless; changing direction and slowing down causes it to gain mass. The finding could potentially lead to novel applications for ZrSiS, similar to those of graphene.

(newatlas.com)

Physics semi-Dirac fermion quasiparticle mass-energy equivalence

Zipshare: Effortless Android Screen Sharing for Support

2024-12-18

Zipshare offers seamless Android screen sharing, perfect for internal help desks supporting retail staff or field employees. No signup or meeting IDs are needed for the screen sharer – just instant sharing, with the option to add your own voice or video chat. Created by Miso Software, Zipshare is a simple yet powerful tool for team collaboration.

(www.getzipshare.com)

Development screen sharing Android app remote support

Disruptive Country Ranking: The Baby Money Index (BMI) Emerges

2024-12-15

Disruptive Country Ranking: The Baby Money Index (BMI) Emerges

An economics article introduces a new country ranking metric—the Baby Money Index (BMI), which multiplies per capita Gross National Income by the square of the fertility rate. Unlike the traditional Human Development Index (HDI), the BMI focuses more on the long-term impact of population growth on the economy. The article points out that high income and high fertility are difficult to achieve simultaneously; many oil-rich or tax-haven countries top the list, while some developed countries rank lower due to low fertility rates. The United States outperforms any country with a population over 40 million, including the entire G12, due to its high BMI.

(www.atvbt.com)

Misc country ranking baby money index economics

Zaymo, YC-backed Startup, Seeks Founding Engineer

2024-12-17

Zaymo, YC-backed Startup, Seeks Founding Engineer

Zaymo, a Y Combinator-backed e-commerce email marketing startup, is hiring a Founding Engineer. Zaymo transforms e-commerce emails into shoppable landing pages, allowing purchases without leaving the inbox. The company is experiencing hyper-growth and seeks an experienced full-stack engineer to help build the future of email marketing. The ideal candidate has 2+ years of startup engineering experience, proficiency in TypeScript, Remix, and AWS, and a positive, fast-moving, collaborative attitude. Zaymo offers competitive salary, equity, and relocation assistance.

(www.ycombinator.com)

Startup Engineer

OCR Challenge: Digitizing Saint-Simon's Memoirs

2024-12-17

The author spent several weeks using OCR to digitize a late 19th-century edition of the 18th-century French memoirs, *Les Mémoires de Saint-Simon*. This 45-volume behemoth, containing over 3 million words, is available online as images, but is difficult to read. The goal was to create a readable, searchable, and copyable text version. Challenges included poor image quality and parsing different page zones (headers, main text, margin comments, footnotes, etc.). Google Vision API was used for OCR, with a Python program processing the results to identify and separate text from different areas. While LLMs failed to reliably handle footnote references, the author improved the program and incorporated manual review, resulting in the release of the first volume.

(blog.medusis.com)

Development Text Processing Digital Humanities

Grammarly Acquires Coda to Usher in a New Era of AI-Native Productivity

2024-12-21

Grammarly Acquires Coda to Usher in a New Era of AI-Native Productivity

Grammarly has announced its acquisition of Coda, aiming to build the future's AI-native productivity suite. Coda is a popular collaborative workspace tool loved by teams, while Grammarly is renowned for its AI-powered writing assistance. This acquisition will combine the strengths of both companies, leveraging Coda's document collaboration capabilities and Grammarly's AI prowess to provide users with smarter and more efficient productivity tools. The future will see a deep integration of the Grammarly assistant with Coda Brain, resulting in powerful AI-native document collaboration features.

(coda.io)

AI Productivity Acquisition

Stanford Report Warns of Mirror Bacteria Feasibility and Risks

2024-12-17

Stanford Report Warns of Mirror Bacteria Feasibility and Risks

A Stanford University technical report details the feasibility of creating 'mirror bacteria' and their potential risks. Mirror bacteria, with all chiral molecules (proteins, nucleic acids, and metabolites) replaced by their mirror images, cannot evolve naturally but are becoming increasingly synthesizable. Immune systems and predation rely on chiral molecule interactions, meaning mirror bacteria could evade detection and control, potentially spreading unchecked and posing serious threats to humans, animals, plants, and the environment. The report comprehensively assesses synthesis, biosecurity, human health impacts, medical countermeasures, and ecological consequences, urging attention to this potential biosecurity risk.

(purl.stanford.edu)

AI biosecurity

New Underwater Footage Raises Sabotage Suspicions Against Yi Peng 3

2024-12-19

New Underwater Footage Raises Sabotage Suspicions Against Yi Peng 3

New underwater footage obtained by TV2 reveals drag marks on the seabed near Læsø, Denmark, coinciding with the unusual maneuvers of the Chinese vessel Yi Peng 3 ten days before the Baltic Sea cable breaks. The footage shows a distinct mark aligning with the Yi Peng 3's path on November 7th, when the ship inexplicably slowed down significantly while passing over the cables. Experts are questioning this unusual behavior for a commercial vessel, citing suspicions of sabotage against three Danish-Swedish underwater cables. The ongoing investigation involves Danish, Swedish, and German naval vessels monitoring the Yi Peng 3, which remains anchored in the Kattegat. Authorities remain tight-lipped, prompting independent investigations by TV2 and its partners.

(scandasia.com)

Tech Underwater Cable Sabotage Yi Peng 3 China

Modelica Association: Efficiently Modeling Complex Systems

2024-12-16

The Modelica Association promotes the Modelica language and its associated tools. Modelica is an object-oriented language for modeling and simulating complex cyber-physical systems, particularly adept at acausal modeling of reusable components governed by mathematical equations. The association provides language specifications, tools, libraries, and community support to enable users to efficiently model systems.

(modelica.org)

Development system modeling object-oriented

Grug's Guide to Sound: A Caveman's Approach to High Fidelity

2024-12-17

Grug's Guide to Sound: A Caveman's Approach to High Fidelity

Grug, a seasoned (though slightly confused) sound engineer, penned this guide to help young Grugs build the perfect cave sound system. The guide covers every component in the signal chain, from streamers to speakers, explaining key parameters like impedance, sensitivity, and distortion. Grug emphasizes low noise and low distortion, advising prioritization of high-quality speakers. Ultimately, Grug recommends a budget-friendly entry-level system, allowing young Grugs to enjoy high-fidelity music in their caves.

(petrustheron.com)

Misc audio hi-fi

NY Governor Signs Law Criminalizing Restaurant Reservation Black Market

2024-12-21

NY Governor Signs Law Criminalizing Restaurant Reservation Black Market

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed the Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act, cracking down on the black market for restaurant reservations. This first-of-its-kind legislation targets individuals and groups using bots or manual methods to hoard and resell reservations at inflated prices. The law protects both consumers and businesses by ensuring a fairer reservation system, while acknowledging some legitimate reasons for reservation trading, such as handling non-refundable bookings in emergencies. However, the prevalent scalping and cancellations negatively impact restaurants and diners.

(ny.eater.com)

Misc Restaurant Reservations Black Market New York Legislation

Web Origami: A New Programming Language for Simplified Website Building

2024-12-13

Web Origami is a new programming language designed to simplify the creation of small- to medium-sized websites. Using a concise syntax that complements HTML and CSS, users can describe website structure using formulas similar to spreadsheets, transforming data and files into HTML and other website resources through simple programs. Even without JavaScript knowledge, features like full-text search and RSS feeds can be created. Origami provides a command-line interface, built-in functions, and an async-tree library, with support for JavaScript extensions. Its core concept is to abstract website building as data transformation, making site creation and deployment efficient, low-cost, and easy to understand.

(weborigami.org)

Development programming language website development

Doomsday Predictions: Why People Always Feel the End is Nigh

2024-12-18

Doomsday Predictions: Why People Always Feel the End is Nigh

From Columbus's time onward, doomsday predictions have accompanied humanity. The author argues that people believe in them not for comfort, but because they seem logical. A 'Good Cup Bad Cup' theory is introduced: people pay more attention to bad things, and negative memories fade faster, leading to a perception that bad things are increasing and the world is deteriorating. Historical examples, from ancient Egyptian prophecies to the Millerite movement, support this: people always feel the present is worse than the past. The author calls for a rational perspective, urging readers to avoid biases and recognize positive changes.

(www.experimental-history.com)

Misc doomsday prophecies cognitive biases historical analysis

uBlock Origin: A Highly Efficient Ad Blocker

2024-12-23

uBlock Origin: A Highly Efficient Ad Blocker

uBlock Origin (uBO) is a highly efficient and lightweight content blocker for Chromium and Firefox browsers. It blocks ads, trackers, coin miners, and malware by default using multiple filter lists like EasyList and EasyPrivacy. Users can customize blocking rules and choose between a simple or advanced interface. Crucially, uBO emphasizes that using an ad blocker is not theft, but a means of protecting user privacy. The project is open-source and relies on community-maintained filter lists.

(github.com)

Development ad blocker

K8s Cleaner: Optimize Your Kubernetes Clusters

2024-12-18

K8s Cleaner is a Kubernetes cluster cleanup tool designed for administrators. It efficiently identifies and removes unused resources to boost cluster performance and reduce operational costs. Supporting all resource types, including CRDs, it offers pre-defined rules and customizable options (time-based, label-based, or custom Lua scripts). Notifications are sent via Slack, Email, and more, while a dry-run mode prevents accidental changes. K8s Cleaner streamlines Kubernetes resource management.

(sveltos.projectsveltos.io)

Development Cluster Cleanup Resource Management

The Red Beads Experiment: Systems, Not People, Are the Problem

2024-12-17

The Red Beads Experiment: Systems, Not People, Are the Problem

Dr. W. Edwards Deming's 'Red Beads Experiment' vividly illustrates the impact of systems on individual performance. Employees pick beads from a mix containing mostly red beads, with performance measured by the number of red beads. Results show that despite employee effort, system flaws (high proportion of red beads) lead to huge performance differences, with management wrongly blaming individuals. The experiment highlights the importance of systemic issues, emphasizing management's focus on system improvement, not individual assessment, for true efficiency gains.

(medium.com)

Misc Deming Red Beads Experiment Systems Thinking

CCxTrust: A Confidential Computing Platform Leveraging Collaborative Trust from TEE and TPM

2024-12-12

CCxTrust is a novel confidential computing platform that cleverly combines the strengths of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) to establish a collaborative trust framework. By leveraging the black-box Root of Trust (RoT) embedded in CPU-TEEs and the flexible white-box RoT of TPMs, CCxTrust achieves end-to-end protection of sensitive data and models, overcoming the limitations of relying on a single hardware RoT. The platform implements independent Roots of Trust for Measurement (RTM) and a collaborative Root of Trust for Report (RTR), further enhanced by a composite attestation protocol for improved security and efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance advantages.

(arxiv.org)

AI Confidential Computing Trusted Execution Environment Trusted Platform Module

Klarna Halts Hiring, CEO Claims AI Can Do All Jobs

2024-12-17

Klarna Halts Hiring, CEO Claims AI Can Do All Jobs

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has claimed that AI can already perform all jobs currently done by humans, leading the fintech company to halt hiring a year ago. The company's workforce has shrunk from 4,500 to 3,500 employees through attrition. While Klarna's website still advertises open positions, a spokesperson clarified that the company is not actively recruiting to expand but filling essential roles, mainly in engineering. This announcement has fueled concerns about AI's impact on the job market.

(www.businessinsider.com)

Tech Employment

← Previous 1 2 … 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 … 245 246 Next →