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Building Reliable AI Agents: Six Hard-Won Lessons

2025-07-29
Building Reliable AI Agents: Six Hard-Won Lessons

This article shares six crucial lessons learned in building AI agents. The author emphasizes the importance of clear instructions, lean context management, robust tool interfaces, and automated validation loops. It highlights that modern LLMs need direct, detailed context, avoiding manipulative prompting. Powerful AI agents are built by combining LLMs with tools and basic control flow operators. A two-phase algorithm—one for generation, one for validation—is recommended, with iterative improvement and error analysis crucial for reliability and recoverability.

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(www.app.build)
Development

The Bloody Cane: Gutta-Percha, the Transatlantic Cable, and Environmental Destruction

2025-09-01
The Bloody Cane: Gutta-Percha, the Transatlantic Cable, and Environmental Destruction

The 1856 caning of Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks is a notorious event highlighting the fractured political climate before the American Civil War. Less known is the story of the cane itself, crafted from gutta-percha, a natural rubber from Southeast Asia. This seemingly innocuous material proved crucial to the 19th-century communications revolution, enabling the transatlantic telegraph cable. However, the insatiable demand led to widespread deforestation and environmental devastation, ultimately replaced by synthetic plastics. The story serves as a cautionary tale about the unforeseen consequences of technological advancement and the need for sustainable practices.

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(worldhistory.substack.com)
Misc

Oxford Falls Out of UK's Top 3 Universities

2025-09-21
Oxford Falls Out of UK's Top 3 Universities

In the 2026 Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide, Oxford University fell out of the top three UK universities for the first time, dropping to fourth place alongside Cambridge. Durham University claimed third place, while the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) retained its top spot for the second consecutive year. St Andrews University held second place. Durham's significant improvement in student teaching quality evaluations propelled its rise.

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(hotminute.co.uk)
Misc University Rankings Oxford University Durham University

arXivLabs: Community Collaboration on New arXiv Features

2025-06-02
arXivLabs: Community Collaboration on New arXiv Features

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

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(arxiv.org)
Development

Germany's Exit Tax: A Berlin Wall for Entrepreneurs?

2025-08-08

Germany's exit tax acts as a significant barrier for entrepreneurs, effectively trapping them in the country. If you own over 1% of any limited liability company (including foreign ones) and the company is profitable, you face a potentially crippling exit tax. This tax is calculated by multiplying the average earnings of the past three years by 13.75, then by 0.6, and finally applying your personal income tax rate. This article analyzes the tax burden in different scenarios, suggesting that entrepreneurs with moderately profitable businesses and plans to leave Germany should consider doing so before their company grows significantly to avoid a massive tax bill.

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(eidel.io)
Startup German exit tax

Solving Indoor Navigation: How Hyper Achieved 1-Meter Accurate Indoor GPS

2025-08-01
Solving Indoor Navigation: How Hyper Achieved 1-Meter Accurate Indoor GPS

A developer's journey, from viral AR navigation demos to tackling the indoor navigation challenge for a world-leading retailer, culminated in the founding of Hyper. This article details the three core challenges of indoor navigation: indoor maps, indoor navigation, and indoor location. The author explains how they overcame limitations of Bluetooth beacons, WiFi, magnetometers, and computer vision, ultimately achieving a breakthrough 1-meter accurate indoor GPS by combining WiFi and SLAM technology, and cleverly addressing SLAM drift and orientation challenges. Their future ambition is to scale this technology to a billion users.

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(andrewhart.me)
Tech indoor navigation GPS positioning SLAM technology

Snopes Fact-Checkers Unionize

2025-07-22
Snopes Fact-Checkers Unionize

The editorial staff of Snopes.com, a leading fact-checking website, has successfully formed a union, the Snopes Guild, with voluntary recognition from management. Representing approximately 10 eligible editorial employees, the Guild secured 80% support before recognition. Their collective bargaining will focus on job security, transparency, modern work practices, and fair compensation and benefits. Founded in 1994, Snopes has been a key player in combating online misinformation. This unionization represents a significant step towards improving workplace conditions and furthering their mission.

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(newsguild.org)
Startup

Conquering Steam Deck's Immutable Filesystem with Nix and Home Manager

2025-02-09
Conquering Steam Deck's Immutable Filesystem with Nix and Home Manager

The Steam Deck's immutable filesystem makes installing packages that persist across system upgrades tricky. This guide shows how to use Nix and Home Manager to elegantly solve this. Nix is a declarative package manager; simply list your desired packages in a configuration file, and it handles the installation. Home Manager simplifies using Nix. The guide details installing Nix and Home Manager on your Steam Deck, managing packages (installation, removal), and offers tips like creating desktop shortcuts and running garbage collection.

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(chrastecky.dev)
Development

Bookshop.org Launches E-book Platform to Support Local Bookstores

2025-02-15
Bookshop.org Launches E-book Platform to Support Local Bookstores

To combat Amazon's dominance in online book sales, Bookshop.org has launched its own e-book platform. This new platform allows independent bookstores to sell e-books directly to customers for the first time, offering nearly a million titles and features like annotation and social sharing. The initiative aims to help local bookstores thrive in the digital age by enabling them to directly profit from e-book sales and fostering community engagement through social media.

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(www.usatoday.com)
Startup e-books independent bookstores

Archimedes, Vitruvius, and Leonardo: The Odometer Connection

2024-12-27
Archimedes, Vitruvius, and Leonardo: The Odometer Connection

A 2019 multimedia exhibition in Fano, Italy, celebrated the strong links between Vitruvius and Leonardo on the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death. The authors created an interactive animation of several machines, providing visitors with an immersive experience of the studies of these great scholars. This also spurred a review of the odometer's history and an examination of Leonardo's redesign of Vitruvius' concept. While some questions remain, the research led them back to another great scientist of the past: Archimedes of Syracuse.

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(www.scirp.org)
Tech odometer Vitruvius Leonardo da Vinci

Statically Linking Go Executables with CGO and Zig

2025-03-28

This post demonstrates building a statically linked Go executable that utilizes CGO dependencies via Zig. The author creates a Zig static library, then writes a simple Go program to call a function within it. By employing specific `go build` flags and leveraging Zig's build system, a statically linked executable, free from dynamic library dependencies, is successfully created, enhancing portability and security.

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(calabro.io)
Development static linking

UK Reading Habits Revealed: A Third Read Zero Books a Year

2025-03-07
UK Reading Habits Revealed: A Third Read Zero Books a Year

A YouGov survey unveils the reading habits of Britons. The results show a generally low reading rate among British adults, with nearly 40% reading zero books in the past year. Women and older adults read more than men and younger people; middle-class individuals also read more frequently than working-class individuals. Most Brits read before bed or in their free time, preferring fiction, with physical books remaining the most common format, though e-books and audiobooks are gaining popularity. While many own extensive collections, few organize their books systematically.

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(yougov.co.uk)
Misc reading habits survey

J.M. Coetzee: A Nobel Laureate's Complex Relationship with English

2025-05-24
J.M. Coetzee: A Nobel Laureate's Complex Relationship with English

Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee recounts his intricate relationship with the English language. Growing up in South Africa as a non-native speaker, he mastered and wrote in English yet maintained a sense of detachment. He views English as a colonial language, a tool of global dominance, and through his writing, he attempts to subvert this power dynamic, exploring a rootless expression transcending cultural confines. His collaborations with Argentine writer Mariana Dimópulos, translating his English works into Spanish and publishing them first in the Southern Hemisphere, exemplify this endeavor, symbolizing a challenge to English's central position.

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(books.substack.com)
Misc

Rust In-Memory Filesystem Performance: Surprisingly, It Doesn't Matter

2025-08-25

While building a CLI tool in Rust, the author attempted to use an in-memory filesystem for faster file management tests. After exploring crates like `vfs` and `rsfs`, the surprising conclusion was that modern SSDs and OS filesystem caching are so efficient that there's virtually no performance gain from using an in-memory filesystem. Benchmarks consistently showed around 45ms for tests using in-memory filesystems, regular filesystems, and even a ramdisk—a stark contrast to expectations. The author invites readers to share examples where using an in-memory filesystem yields noticeable performance differences.

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(andre.arko.net)
Development in-memory filesystem

The Age of Cheap Stuff: Declining Quality or Inflated Expectations?

2025-07-20
The Age of Cheap Stuff: Declining Quality or Inflated Expectations?

Our world is awash in cheap, disposable goods, from fast fashion to short-lived appliances, leading to concerns about declining product quality. This article explores the underlying causes, arguing it's not simply corporate profit-maximization, but also shifting consumer values, socioeconomic inequality, and the downsides of technological advancements. The rise of fast fashion prioritizes novelty over durability, while automation and AI, while boosting efficiency, diminish service quality and the reliability of information. The piece concludes by urging a critical examination of consumption patterns and a shift towards more sustainable and responsible choices.

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(english.elpais.com)
Misc

Common Questions and Answers on AI Evaluation: Lessons from 700+ Engineers and PMs

2025-07-03
Common Questions and Answers on AI Evaluation: Lessons from 700+ Engineers and PMs

This post summarizes frequently asked questions encountered while teaching 700+ engineers and product managers an AI evaluation course. Topics covered include whether RAG is dead, model selection, annotation tools, evaluation methodologies, synthetic data generation, and gaps in existing evaluation tooling. The authors stress the importance of error analysis, advocating for binary evaluations over Likert scales, and sharing best practices for building custom annotation tools, choosing appropriate chunk sizes, and evaluating RAG systems. The post also discusses the differences between guardrails and evaluators, minimum viable evaluation setup, evaluating agentic workflows, and the different uses of evaluations in CI/CD versus production monitoring.

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(hamel.dev)
Development Error Analysis

Australia Mandates Age Verification for Logged-in Search Engine Users

2025-07-02
Australia Mandates Age Verification for Logged-in Search Engine Users

Australia's new online safety code requires search engines like Google and Bing to implement age verification for logged-in users within six months. For users deemed to be under 18, safety settings will be maximized to filter out pornography and graphic violence. This move is part of a broader effort to protect children online, also addressing concerns about the harmful use of AI chatbots by minors.

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(ia.acs.org.au)
Tech

ProtonMail Suspends Journalists' Accounts: Security or Censorship?

2025-09-13
ProtonMail Suspends Journalists' Accounts: Security or Censorship?

ProtonMail, known for its commitment to user data privacy, faced backlash after suspending the accounts of two journalists reporting on a sophisticated cyberattack against South Korean government systems. While the accounts were eventually reinstated, ProtonMail's explanation remains vague. They claim to have received a warning from a security agency but refuse to name it, raising concerns about overcompliance with government requests and chilling effects on journalists and whistleblowers who rely on their service for secure communication.

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(theintercept.com)
Tech

Apple and Meta Clash Over Interoperability and Privacy

2024-12-30
Apple and Meta Clash Over Interoperability and Privacy

Apple and Meta are locked in a battle in Europe over the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA). The DMA mandates interoperability, requiring designated gatekeepers like Apple and Meta to allow competitors access to core platform services. Meta has submitted 15 interoperability requests to Apple, prompting Apple to warn of significant privacy and security risks if granted, potentially exposing user data extensively. Meta counters that Apple's privacy concerns are unfounded and a pretext to stifle competition. This conflict highlights the tension between interoperability and user privacy, and the challenges faced by EU regulators in enforcing the DMA.

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(techcrunch.com)
Tech

Apple Seeks to Halt App Store Payment Control Transfer

2025-05-08
Apple Seeks to Halt App Store Payment Control Transfer

Apple is seeking to halt a court order forcing it to relinquish control over App Store payments. The company argues the order contains "extraordinary intrusions" that could cause "grave irreparable harm." A judge previously ruled Apple in violation of a 2021 injunction stemming from the Epic Games v. Apple case, ordering Apple to stop collecting up to a 27 percent commission on purchases outside the App Store and cease restricting how developers direct users to external purchases. While Apple has complied, it has appealed and now seeks to regain control of the App Store pending a final decision, arguing that depriving it of control over core App Store features would harm its iOS ecosystem and user trust.

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(www.theverge.com)
Tech

Bloxi: An AI Copilot for Simulink

2025-06-13
Bloxi: An AI Copilot for Simulink

A second-year aero-engineering student at Imperial College London built Bloxi, an AI copilot that translates plain-English prompts into working Simulink control-system models. Leveraging multimodal LLMs, Bloxi builds models step-by-step, allowing for real-time debugging and a more intuitive workflow. The student, who also shares his work to increase productivity for other engineers, released the code, hoping others will improve upon it.

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(github.com)
Development Model Building

US Air Force Grounds Sig Sauer M18 Pistol After Fatal Shooting

2025-07-24
US Air Force Grounds Sig Sauer M18 Pistol After Fatal Shooting

The US Air Force Global Strike Command has temporarily suspended the use of the Sig Sauer M18 pistol following a fatal shooting at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. A 21-year-old airman died in the incident. A full review of the weapon's safety is underway. The M18, and its civilian counterpart the P320, have faced previous allegations of unintentional discharges and lawsuits. While Sig Sauer denies safety concerns, this incident raises further questions about the pistol's reliability.

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(www.nhpr.org)
Tech Accidental Discharge Military Weapon

Twin: A Textmode Windowing Environment

2025-06-15
Twin: A Textmode Windowing Environment

Twin is a text-based windowing environment supporting mouse, a window manager, terminal emulation, networked clients, and the ability to attach/detach mode displays on-the-fly. It supports various display types including plain text terminals, X11, and itself. Currently tested on Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD across multiple architectures. This open-source project, licensed under GPL and LGPL, offers comprehensive tutorials and developer documentation and is available on GitHub.

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(github.com)
Development textmode windowing environment opensource

Hacker News Emoji Mystery: Length 36?

2025-08-29

A post on Hacker News sparked a discussion about the display of emojis. The author noticed that Hacker News seems to handle emojis in titles differently, replacing them with spaces or converting them into character encodings to fit the 80-column display limit. Tests revealed that a single emoji could have a length of 36, contrasting with its expected length. The post explores Hacker News's emoji handling mechanism and the variations in emoji display across different browsers and devices.

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(zaerl.com)
Misc

GPU Kill: Cross-Platform GPU Management CLI

2025-09-21
GPU Kill: Cross-Platform GPU Management CLI

GPU Kill is a command-line tool for managing GPUs across NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Apple Silicon systems. Easily monitor, control, and secure your GPU infrastructure. Features include real-time GPU usage monitoring, killing stuck processes, detecting crypto miners and suspicious activity, enforcing policies to prevent resource abuse, a web dashboard for cluster monitoring, remote management of GPUs across multiple servers, and AI assistant integration. Supports Linux, macOS, and Windows. Simple command-line interface and a web dashboard provide user-friendly management.

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(github.com)
Development GPU management

Loader's Number: A Programming Challenge on a Theoretical Infinite-Memory Machine

2025-04-05
Loader's Number: A Programming Challenge on a Theoretical Infinite-Memory Machine

Loader's Number is the output of loader.c, a C program by Ralph Loader that won the Bignum Bakeoff contest. The goal was to write a C program (under 512 characters) generating the largest possible output on a theoretical machine with infinite memory. The calculation relies on the Huet-Coquand Calculus of Constructions, resulting in an unimaginably large number far exceeding other known large numbers like the output of Marxen.c. While lacking formal proof, estimates place it beyond certain values in fast-growing hierarchies. Calculating Loader's Number is computationally intensive and its sheer scale represents a fascinating exploration of computational limits in computer science.

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(googology.fandom.com)
Development large numbers

ICEBlock App Explodes in Popularity After Attorney General Criticism

2025-07-03
ICEBlock App Explodes in Popularity After Attorney General Criticism

ICEBlock, an iPhone app allowing anonymous reporting of ICE agent sightings, has skyrocketed in Apple's US App Store rankings. Ironically, criticism from Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi fueled its viral ascent. The app, primarily used in Los Angeles where ICE raids are frequent, saw a massive surge in downloads following Bondi's comments. Users can report ICE sightings within a 5-mile radius; the app sends notifications and, importantly, doesn't collect user data, a fact confirmed by TechCrunch's network traffic analysis.

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(techcrunch.com)
Tech anonymous reporting app store ranking

FBI, Scrapers, and a Weird Fediverse Encounter

2025-06-09

A Fediverse instance admin recounts a bizarre tale: the FBI pays shady companies to scrape data, which is used to monitor online threats. The twist? A forum search engine, BoardReader, was scraping his instance and feeding data to Facebook, leading to FBI contact. The admin thwarted the scraping, only to discover the FBI's target wasn't his instance, but a user, WitchKingOfAngmar, whose threatening posts were indirectly obtained via BoardReader. This user turned out to be a perpetrator of bomb threats. The story highlights the challenges law enforcement faces with decentralized networks, and the issues of data scraping and privacy.

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(blog.freespeechextremist.com)
Tech

Building a Cross-Platform Encrypted Search Engine: Tackling Browser Storage

2025-03-29
Building a Cross-Platform Encrypted Search Engine: Tackling Browser Storage

This article tackles the initial hurdle in building a cross-platform encrypted search engine: secure and efficient browser-side data storage. The author compares LocalStorage, IndexedDB, and the FileSystem API, ultimately choosing the FileSystem API for its file-system-like interface, better performance, and consistency with other platforms. The article details using Rust and web-sys to interact with the FileSystem API and implements an AES-GCM encryption layer for security. Finally, a unified `File` trait is created for managing both encrypted and unencrypted files.

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(jdrouet.github.io)
Development encrypted storage
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