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Qualcomm Wins Arm Licensing Dispute

2024-12-21
Qualcomm Wins Arm Licensing Dispute

A Delaware jury ruled in favor of Qualcomm Inc. in its legal battle with Arm Holdings Plc, finding that Qualcomm did not breach a license agreement for chip technology acquired through its $1.4 billion purchase of Nuvia Inc. in 2021. Arm claimed Qualcomm used the technology without paying higher licensing fees. While the jury found Qualcomm didn't violate the agreement, they couldn't reach a verdict on whether Nuvia itself breached the license, leaving that question open for a later retrial. The ruling is significant for Qualcomm's position in the mobile chip market.

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(www.bloomberg.com)
Tech Chip Licensing

The Untold Toll: How Many Birds Die Hitting Buildings?

2024-12-21
The Untold Toll: How Many Birds Die Hitting Buildings?

A recent study reveals a shocking truth: we drastically underestimate the number of birds killed by colliding with buildings. Previous research relied on finding carcasses, but many birds don't die instantly, succumbing days or weeks later. By combining carcass data with rehabilitation center records, researchers estimate over a billion birds die annually in the US from building collisions. This highlights the challenges of accurately assessing bird mortality and the need for improved data collection and analysis to better protect avian populations.

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(robertvanwey.substack.com)
Misc bird conservation building collisions

SignWith: Pay-per-use E-signature Solution for Small Businesses

2024-12-21
SignWith: Pay-per-use E-signature Solution for Small Businesses

SignWith is a pay-per-use e-signature service designed for small businesses and freelancers, offering a compelling alternative to expensive monthly subscription models like DocuSign. It eliminates hidden fees and complex processes, allowing users to pay only for documents that are actually signed. With mobile-friendly functionality and reliable customer support, SignWith simplifies document signing for businesses of all sizes, from occasional use to frequent workflows.

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(signwith.co)
Startup e-signature pay-per-use small business

Lifelike Raven Animatronic: A Maker's Journey

2024-12-20
Lifelike Raven Animatronic: A Maker's Journey

This blog chronicles the creation of a highly realistic raven animatronic. The author details the process from initial design and construction to programming intricate movements like beak synchronization with sound and realistic eye blinking. Challenges encountered and solutions implemented are shared, offering valuable insights for aspiring roboticists and anyone interested in the intersection of technology and art. The blog showcases a fascinating blend of creativity and engineering.

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(theanimatronicmenagerie.wordpress.com)
Hardware animatronics

Litestack: All-in-One Data Infrastructure Gem for Ruby on Rails

2024-12-23
Litestack: All-in-One Data Infrastructure Gem for Ruby on Rails

Litestack is a Ruby gem offering a comprehensive data infrastructure solution for Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications. Leveraging SQLite's power, it integrates a full-fledged SQL database, a fast cache, a robust job queue, a reliable message broker, a full-text search engine, and a metrics platform—all in one package. Unlike traditional approaches requiring separate servers and databases, Litestack delivers superior performance, efficiency, ease of use, and cost savings. Its embedded database and cache reduce memory and CPU usage, while its streamlined interface simplifies development. It seamlessly integrates with ActiveRecord and Sequel and automatically optimizes for Fiber-based I/O frameworks.

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(github.com)
Development Data Infrastructure

Study: Critics, Not Fans, Perpetuate the 'Sophomore Slump' Myth

2024-12-23
Study: Critics, Not Fans, Perpetuate the 'Sophomore Slump' Myth

A new study challenges the common belief that bands' second albums are inherently worse than their debuts. Researchers analyzed thousands of album ratings from both professional critics and fans, finding that critics, not fans, consistently gave lower scores to second albums. This suggests a bias among critics, potentially driven by social conformity and the pre-existing notion of a 'sophomore slump,' rather than an objective decline in musical quality.

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(phys.org)
Misc music criticism album quality

Why Finding High-Quality Products Is So Difficult

2024-12-16

This article explores the pervasive challenge of finding high-quality products and services in the market. The author argues that markets aren't perfectly efficient, with inefficiencies in companies and products persisting for years. Consumers struggle to discern product quality, often swayed by marketing. Even expert advice proves unreliable. Businesses, prioritizing efficiency, outsource or buy off-the-shelf solutions, but these often lack quality and may have fundamental flaws. The author uses personal anecdotes and case studies to illustrate information asymmetry and trust deficits within and between companies, hindering the production and sale of high-quality goods. The conclusion highlights that building quality isn't easy, but reliable service often necessitates in-house development—a significant hurdle for smaller companies.

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(danluu.com)
Tech product quality market efficiency information asymmetry

Hacking Physics with a Napkin

2024-12-14

This article explores unconventional approaches to solving physics problems using simple estimation and dimensional analysis. The author demonstrates the power of these methods by calculating the speed of falling raindrops, the length of the E. coli genome, and the mass of a proton, among other examples. The article suggests this napkin-based approach can greatly enhance physics education and learning. Further techniques like Fermi estimation and random walks are introduced and applied to problems like estimating the E. coli genome length and determining the optimal speed for walking or running in the rain, showcasing their practicality.

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(hapax.github.io)
Misc dimensional analysis Fermi estimation

Fogus' 2024 Year in Review: Programming, Reading, and Life Reflections

2024-12-23

In his 2024 year-end blog post, Fogus reflects on his year in programming, reading, and life. He shares noteworthy articles and books he enjoyed, covering topics like the Elite game, amateur radio history, Japanese bathroom folklore, and the history of WordStar. He highlights favorite technical books like "And so FORTH" and non-technical books such as "Butcher's Crossing." Fogus details his experiences with the Clojure programming language and explorations into other languages like Joy and Forth. He concludes by outlining his plans for 2025, including the Clojure 1.13 release and continued work on his Juxt project.

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(blog.fogus.me)
Development year in review reading recommendations

Goodfire Releases Interpretability Tools for Llama 3.3 70B

2024-12-23

Goodfire has trained sparse autoencoders (SAEs) on Llama 3.3 70B and released the interpreted model via an API. This allows exploration of the model's latent space through an interactive feature map. The team demonstrates feature steering capabilities and introduces improvements for easier and more reliable SAE-based steering. While showcasing progress in steering, limitations are acknowledged, including tension between feature steering and classification, and potential factual recall degradation at higher steering strengths. Future work includes refining steering methodologies and developing safety evaluations for responsible scaling of interpretability efforts.

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(www.goodfire.ai)
AI Interpretability Sparse Autoencoders

Co-adapting Human Interfaces and Large Language Models

2024-12-23
Co-adapting Human Interfaces and Large Language Models

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) is changing how we access information. This article explores how the digital world is adapting to LLMs, blurring the lines between 'agent' and 'environment'. The author uses code autocomplete as an example, showing how humans adapt their behavior – for instance, using 'docstring-first programming' – to work better with LLMs. This leads to more heavily commented codebases, illustrating environmental adaptation to tools. To improve LLM efficiency, the article argues for 'agent-computer interfaces' that translate human interfaces into formats LLMs understand better. The future, the author suggests, lies in designing interfaces specifically for LLMs, rather than solely focusing on model improvements. This will ultimately alter human-computer interaction, fostering new applications and content.

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(jessylin.com)
AI

Genius and Rebellion: The Rise and Fall of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory

2024-12-24
Genius and Rebellion: The Rise and Fall of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory

William Shockley, a brilliant but irascible physicist, is renowned for his invention of the transistor. His Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory brought together many of Silicon Valley's early luminaries. However, Shockley's arrogance and poor management style led to the departure of the "traitorous eight," who founded Fairchild Semiconductor, marking the beginning of a Silicon Valley legend. While Shockley Semiconductor was eventually acquired, its historical significance remains undeniable; it not only nurtured transistor technology but also gave birth to the flourishing modern semiconductor industry.

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(www.abortretry.fail)
Tech transistor Silicon Valley Shockley

Hoarder: A Self-Hostable Bookmark Manager Powered by AI

2024-12-24
Hoarder: A Self-Hostable Bookmark Manager Powered by AI

Hoarder is a self-hostable bookmarking app that goes beyond simple link saving. It allows you to store links, notes, and images, and uses AI for automatic tagging and full-text search, supporting local models like ollama. Features include OCR, Chrome/Firefox extensions, iOS/Android apps, RSS feed support, a REST API, and full-page archiving to combat link rot. Designed for users who need a better way to manage and retrieve information across multiple platforms, Hoarder is under active development but a demo is available.

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(github.com)
Development Bookmark Manager

SQLite-Backed Key-Value Store with JS-Like Object Manipulation

2024-12-22
SQLite-Backed Key-Value Store with JS-Like Object Manipulation

A GitHub project introduces a key-value store built on SQLite, enabling JavaScript-like object manipulation with automatic JSON serialization. The `createDatabaseClient` function creates a parallel client with separate reader (`rdr`) and writer (`wtr`) components. The writer utilizes proxies for partial JSON updates, while the reader returns plain JavaScript objects. Comprehensive tests cover basic CRUD operations, nested updates, deletions, and array manipulations.

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(gist.github.com)
Development key-value store JSON serialization

TSMC Employees' Surprisingly High Fertility Rate: One in Fifty Taiwanese Babies is a 'TSMC Baby'

2024-12-17
TSMC Employees' Surprisingly High Fertility Rate: One in Fifty Taiwanese Babies is a 'TSMC Baby'

The surprisingly high fertility rate among employees of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's leading semiconductor manufacturer, has drawn significant attention. While TSMC employees constitute only 0.3% of Taiwan's population, they account for 1.8% of all babies born in Taiwan—meaning one in every fifty Taiwanese babies is a 'TSMC baby'. This phenomenon is attributed to TSMC's family-friendly policies, including childcare services from 7 am to 8 pm, flexible work arrangements, and generous maternity leave. The company's culture, fostering positive peer interactions and encouraging parenthood, also plays a vital role, creating a positive feedback loop that boosts birth rates.

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(www.boomcampaign.org)
Misc fertility rate family-friendly policies

The Subtleties of Memoization in Ruby: A Deep Dive

2024-12-23
The Subtleties of Memoization in Ruby: A Deep Dive

This article delves into the complexities of implementing memoization in Ruby. The author walks through various aspects, from simple local variables to sophisticated thread-safe implementations, covering limitations of the memoization operator, argument-aware memoization, building a memoization DSL, and challenges in handling frozen objects, memory management, and thread safety. Weak and soft references are explored, leading to an efficient and thread-safe memoization DSL. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of using battle-tested libraries and avoiding reinventing the wheel.

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(denisdefreyne.com)
Development Memoization

Link Rot Investigation: Personal Blogs Face High Risk

2024-12-24
Link Rot Investigation: Personal Blogs Face High Risk

Blogger Wouter Groeneveld conducted a link rot investigation on his blog, Brain Baking. He checked 3179 external links across 453 posts, discovering approximately 7% were broken, with 404 and 403 errors being the most prevalent. Broken links stemmed primarily from personal blogs, followed by corporate sites and other resources. The findings highlight the lower stability of links on personal websites and a high link rot rate in academic papers. The blogger recommends website builders use permalinks, linkers carefully choose their targets, and consider local storage for external resources.

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(brainbaking.com)
Misc link rot

The Enduring Legacy of NeXT in OS X and iOS

2024-12-22
The Enduring Legacy of NeXT in OS X and iOS

This article explores the profound impact of NeXT and its NeXTSTEP operating system on Apple's OS X and iOS. NeXTSTEP's UNIX foundation brought crucial features like protected memory, preemptive multitasking, and daemons, enhancing stability and efficiency. It also introduced the Objective-C programming language and Cocoa framework, simplifying software development and giving rise to powerful tools like Interface Builder. Furthermore, NeXTSTEP's Display PostScript technology laid the groundwork for OS X's Quartz graphics system. These technologies remain core to Apple devices today, highlighting NeXT's significant contribution to modern computing.

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(arstechnica.com)
Development

Bank of North Dakota: A Century of Success, Boosting State's Economy

2024-12-18
Bank of North Dakota: A Century of Success, Boosting State's Economy

The Bank of North Dakota (BND) is the only state-owned and -operated general-service bank in the United States, established in 1919 to foster agriculture, commerce, and industry. It leverages state funds to provide loans and financial services for infrastructure projects, agriculture, and small businesses, and acts as a wholesale bank for local institutions. BND played a crucial role during the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating its profitability and positive impact on the state's economy. Its unique model has made it a standout success story in the American financial system.

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(en.wikipedia.org)
Startup state-owned bank economic development financial services

Classical Sorting Algorithms Reveal Unexpected Competencies in a Minimal Model of Basal Intelligence

2024-12-19
Classical Sorting Algorithms Reveal Unexpected Competencies in a Minimal Model of Basal Intelligence

A new study uses classical sorting algorithms as a model of morphogenesis, challenging conventional wisdom about these algorithms. By breaking assumptions of top-down control and perfectly reliable hardware, researchers discovered that arrays of autonomous elements sort themselves more reliably and robustly than traditional implementations, even in the presence of errors. Surprisingly, these algorithms exhibit the ability to temporarily reduce progress to navigate around defects and unexpected clustering behavior among elements in chimeric arrays following different algorithms. This discovery provides a novel perspective on diverse intelligence, demonstrating how basal forms of intelligence can emerge in simple systems without explicit encoding in their underlying mechanics.

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(arxiv.org)
AI diverse intelligence morphogenesis sorting algorithms

The AI Backlash: A Necessary Correction for Practical Implementation

2024-12-24
The AI Backlash: A Necessary Correction for Practical Implementation

InfoWorld reports a growing developer frustration with the hype surrounding AI, emphasizing the need for practical and easily integrated tools. The article uses the RamaLama project as an example, showcasing how container technology simplifies AI model deployment and usage, and highlights the importance of smaller, more easily understood AI models. Developers want AI to seamlessly integrate into their workflows, not exist as a separate entity. This "AI backlash" presents an opportunity for effective AI implementation.

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(www.infoworld.com)
Development AI applications container technology model miniaturization

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.

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(modelica.org)
Development system modeling object-oriented

Classified Fighter Jet Specs Leaked on War Thunder Forums Again

2024-12-23
Classified Fighter Jet Specs Leaked on War Thunder Forums Again

The War Thunder online combat game forums are again embroiled in controversy after a leak of classified documents related to the Eurofighter Typhoon's CAPTOR radar system. A user shared restricted material to support a claim, prompting swift removal of the content and suspension of the user. This incident highlights recurring concerns about the platform's failure to prevent repeated leaks of sensitive information. Previous leaks have included details on the Challenger 2 tank, Leclerc main battle tank, and Chinese ammunition systems. Experts warn that such unauthorized disclosures carry significant legal risks and can compromise the operational security of military platforms.

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(ukdefencejournal.org.uk)
Tech classified leak War Thunder

W54: The Pocket-Sized Nuke of the Cold War

2024-12-18
W54: The Pocket-Sized Nuke of the Cold War

The W54, also known as the Mark 54 or B54, was the smallest nuclear weapon ever deployed by the United States. Its remarkably compact design, boasting a yield ranging from 10 to 1,000 tons of TNT, made it suitable for various applications, including the AIM-26 Falcon air-to-air missile, the Davy Crockett recoilless rifle, and the Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM) system. Developed in the late 1950s, the W54's creation presented significant engineering challenges, particularly concerning its environmental sensing device. A later variant, the W72, was integrated into the AGM-62 Walleye guided bomb and remained in service until 1979.

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(en.wikipedia.org)
Tech nuclear weapon cold war

Historic Dwingeloo Radio Telescope Receives Signals from Voyager 1

2024-12-19

The historic Dwingeloo radio telescope in the Netherlands, a national monument built in 1956, has successfully received faint signals from Voyager 1, nearly 25 billion kilometers from Earth. Despite the telescope's design frequency not matching Voyager 1's 8.4 GHz telemetry, researchers overcame this by mounting a new antenna and correcting for the Doppler shift. This achievement showcases the ingenuity of adapting older technology for remarkable feats and highlights humanity's enduring quest for space exploration.

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(www.camras.nl)
Tech Voyager 1 radio telescope

Google's New Load Balancer, PReQuaL: Beyond CPU Load Balancing

2024-12-16

Google Research presented PReQuaL (Probing to Reduce Queuing and Latency), a novel load balancer, at NSDI 2024. Unlike traditional CPU load balancing, PReQuaL actively probes server latency and active requests to select servers, dramatically reducing tail latency, error rates, and resource consumption in systems like YouTube. Deployed in YouTube for over a year, PReQuaL has significantly improved system utilization. This innovative approach challenges conventional wisdom and offers a new paradigm for high-performance distributed systems.

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(www.usenix.org)
Development load balancing

AMD MI300X vs. Nvidia H100/H200 Benchmark: CUDA Moat Remains

2024-12-22
AMD MI300X vs. Nvidia H100/H200 Benchmark: CUDA Moat Remains

SemiAnalysis conducted a five-month independent benchmark of AMD's MI300X against Nvidia's H100 and H200. While the MI300X boasts theoretical advantages in performance and TCO, real-world results fell significantly short due to flaws in AMD's public software stack and insufficient testing. AMD's software proved problematic, hindering usability and resulting in performance trailing Nvidia's offerings across most benchmarks. Despite improvements from AMD engineers, the software stack remains underdeveloped, leaving the CUDA moat intact. This in-depth analysis offers concrete recommendations for AMD to enhance its software and competitiveness.

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(semianalysis.com)
Hardware GPU Benchmark Nvidia H100/H200

Ente Photos: On-Device Machine Learning for Enhanced Privacy

2024-12-15
Ente Photos: On-Device Machine Learning for Enhanced Privacy

Ente Photos utilizes a unique on-device machine learning approach, running models locally instead of in the cloud to guarantee end-to-end encryption and user privacy. Overcoming challenges of limited compute, diverse platforms, and restricted access to ML libraries, Ente achieves features like image indexing, clustering, semantic search, and face recognition. While local processing presents technical hurdles, Ente addresses them through model optimization, algorithmic refinements, and meticulous image processing, leveraging open-source tools like ONNX Runtime. The result is a consistent and efficient cross-platform experience, allowing users to securely explore and manage their memories.

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(ente.io)
AI on-device machine learning
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