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EndBOX: A Retro-Inspired Minimalist Programming Computer

2025-06-12

EndBOX: A Retro-Inspired Minimalist Programming Computer

ReadyRUN has unveiled EndBOX prototypes, a miniature computer designed to recapture the essence of programming. Booting instantly into a retro-styled EndBASIC environment, it offers a bare-bones, command-line experience with no bloat. Targeted at developers and educators, EndBOX prioritizes hardware accessibility and learning. Two prototypes exist: a standard model with a 7-inch touchscreen, and a micro model with a 128x128 LCD. Both feature Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, running a NetBSD-based OS. The author is seeking community support to guide EndBOX's future, including hardware configurations and software features.

(www.endbasic.dev)

Development retro computer embedded system

A Whirlwind Tour of the J Programming Language

2025-05-03

A Whirlwind Tour of the J Programming Language

This concise introduction to the J programming language is geared towards programmers with some experience. It covers core concepts such as data types, functions, modifiers, arrays, control structures, and error handling, all while emphasizing practical application. Readers are encouraged to run the provided examples and read the comments. Essential links and resources are included to aid in rapid learning.

(github.com)

Development J array programming

Shrek on Xbox: The Untold Story of the First Deferred Shaded Game

2025-03-12

Shrek on Xbox: The Untold Story of the First Deferred Shaded Game

This article recounts the development of Shrek on Xbox, revealing it as the pioneering game to utilize deferred shading. The team faced immense challenges in implementing omnidirectional lighting on the limited hardware of the original Xbox. Through ingenious algorithms and a deep understanding of the hardware, they overcame numerous obstacles, achieving stunning visuals and making significant contributions to real-time rendering. The article highlights the crucial roles of Atman Binstock's mathematical expertise and the author's tireless efforts, including the development of a custom real-time profiler to optimize performance.

(sites.google.com)

Game Deferred Shading

Therac-25: A Software Bug That Killed

2025-08-27

Therac-25: A Software Bug That Killed

In the 1980s, the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine killed and maimed several patients due to a software bug. A race condition in the software allowed for the machine to incorrectly deliver massive overdoses of radiation if data was entered quickly. The incident highlighted the severe consequences of neglecting software testing and process management in safety-critical systems. The lack of robust safety mechanisms proved fatal. This case serves as a stark warning in software engineering, emphasizing the importance of thorough software development processes, rigorous testing, and organizational accountability, especially when dealing with life-or-death situations.

(thedailywtf.com)

Tech software safety medical accident

Give Your Old Printer New Life: UoWPrint Wireless Print Server Review

2025-05-04

Give Your Old Printer New Life: UoWPrint Wireless Print Server Review

UoWPrint is a modern print server designed to add wireless capabilities to older USB printers, scanners, and multi-function printers (MFPs). It's easy to use and requires no printer-specific drivers, working seamlessly with Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS via AirPrint and Mopria. Built on an Orange Pi Zero 3, it's compact yet powerful, supporting a wide range of printers (HP, Samsung, Xerox, Canon, etc.), though compatibility varies. The project aims to reduce e-waste and provides a convenient printing solution through open-source software and free tech support.

(printserver.ink)

Hardware wireless printing old device upgrade

Controlling Adobe Creative Apps with AI: Introducing adb-mcp

2025-06-06

An Adobe community member open-sourced adb-mcp, enabling AI control over Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and InDesign via MCP servers. A Python MCP server, Node command proxy, and UXP plugins allow AI to send commands, automating tasks like layer renaming, resizing, and watermarking. While a proof-of-concept with a complex setup, it showcases AI's potential in creative workflows, automating tedious tasks and assisting creative processes. Future improvements in user experience, API optimization, and integration with other MCPs promise to make adb-mcp a key component in AI-first workflows.

(www.mikechambers.com)

Development

TikTok Ban Looms, US Users Flock to Xiaohongshu

2025-01-15

TikTok Ban Looms, US Users Flock to Xiaohongshu

With a potential TikTok ban looming in the US, users are migrating en masse to the Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu, propelling it to the top of the US app download charts. Calling themselves "TikTok refugees," some users are joining Xiaohongshu as an act of protest against the impending ban. The US Supreme Court is set to rule on a law mandating TikTok divest from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, by January 19th or face a US ban over national security concerns. After hints the court may uphold the law, a wave of TikTok users created Xiaohongshu accounts, using hashtags like #tiktokrefugee. Xiaohongshu, meaning "Little Red Book," combines e-commerce, short videos, and social media features. Popular in China and among Chinese diaspora communities, it boasts 300 million monthly active users, mainly young women using it as a search engine for product, travel, and restaurant recommendations, as well as beauty tutorials. Many American users openly stated their move to Xiaohongshu was a protest against the potential TikTok ban. Chinese users have generally welcomed the influx of Americans, offering help and advice. Despite Xiaohongshu's surge in popularity, it remains uncertain if it can fully replace TikTok's established ecosystem of e-commerce and advertising.

(apnews.com)

Tech Xiaohongshu US-China Tech

Meta's Data Center Secrets: Scaling to the Extreme

2025-02-11

This collection of papers unveils Meta's cutting-edge research in building and operating hyperscale data centers. From BGP routing to distributed storage (TAO), real-time data processing, cluster management (Twine), global capacity management (Flux), and power management (Dynamo), the papers detail the technologies enabling Meta to handle massive data, global user traffic, and high concurrency. Innovations like MAST for global ML training and RAS for continuous resource optimization highlight Meta's approach to building highly reliable, performant, and efficient data centers. These findings offer invaluable insights for anyone tackling the challenges of hyperscale infrastructure.

(cacm.acm.org)

Tech hyperscale

Seven Deadly Sins of Annoying Senior Engineers

2025-02-23

Seven Deadly Sins of Annoying Senior Engineers

This article outlines seven common behaviors that irritate senior engineers: escalating issues without basic troubleshooting, vaguely requesting urgent tasks, providing rough estimates treated as deadlines, scheduling unclear meetings, unexpectedly scheduling brief meetings, using 'quick hacks' without cleanup plans, and frequently changing priorities. The author explains how these actions waste time, reduce efficiency, and damage team morale. The article suggests providing sufficient information when seeking help, discerning urgency levels, carefully handling estimations, planning meetings in advance, respecting engineers' focus time, planning for temporary fixes, and maintaining stable priorities to build a positive and efficient engineering team.

(www.thecaringtechie.com)

Development Engineer Collaboration

Under the Hood of ChatGPT: A Programmer's Perspective

2025-01-04

Under the Hood of ChatGPT: A Programmer's Perspective

This article provides a deep dive into how ChatGPT works, specifically geared towards programmers. Skipping over general AI/ML concepts, it focuses on OpenAI's ChatGPT model, explaining its architecture, the use of Transformer networks, and how Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) fine-tunes it for conversational tasks. The article also details tokenization, model training, response generation, and the role of RLHF in ensuring accurate and contextually relevant responses.

(codedoodles.substack.com)

Development

Athena Moon Lander's Demise and the Lessons Learned

2025-03-15

Athena Moon Lander's Demise and the Lessons Learned

Intuitive Machines' second lunar lander, Athena, tipped over during its March 6th landing near the moon's south pole, prematurely ending its mission. Despite the setback, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured images of Athena and its landing site, providing valuable data for future missions. While the mission was unsuccessful in its primary goals, the attempt in the harsh polar environment offers insights paving the way for future exploration of the region, particularly in the search for water ice.

(www.space.com)

Tech lander

The Subway Game: A 70s NYC Urban Adventure

2025-08-03

In the labyrinthine New York City subway system of the 1970s, a unique game called "The Subway Game" emerged. The game involves two players: a contestant and a monitor. The contestant must navigate from one subway station to a designated one, without asking for directions or leaving the subway system, relying solely on station signage and maps. The article details the challenges of a classic route, highlighting potential errors and obstacles, such as missed transfers and incorrect route choices. It concludes by describing variations of the game and exploring why the NYC subway system is uniquely suited for such an adventure.

(www.gricer.com)

Game 70s

ICE Erroneously Deports Protected Immigrant to Notorious Salvadoran Prison

2025-04-01

ICE Erroneously Deports Protected Immigrant to Notorious Salvadoran Prison

ICE mistakenly deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant with protected status in the U.S., to El Salvador's brutal CECOT prison due to an administrative error. Garcia had been granted protection from removal due to persecution in El Salvador. His family is suing the U.S. government to secure his return. This incident highlights serious flaws in U.S. immigration enforcement and raises human rights concerns.

(www.independent.co.uk)

Misc administrative error

Intel's Lion Cove: A Deep Dive into Gaming Performance

2025-07-07

Intel's Lion Cove: A Deep Dive into Gaming Performance

Intel's latest high-performance CPU architecture, Lion Cove, excels in SPEC CPU2017 benchmarks and even rivals AMD's Zen 5. However, gaming workloads differ significantly from productivity tasks. This article provides a deep dive into Lion Cove's gaming performance, analyzing detailed data on cache hierarchy, instruction execution latency, branch prediction, and more. It reveals Lion Cove's strengths and weaknesses in gaming scenarios and compares it to Zen 4. Results show a strong frontend but bottleneck in backend memory latency, leaving room for improvement in gaming performance.

(chipsandcheese.com)

Hardware

RDNA 4's Dynamic VGPR Allocation: A Ray Tracing Bottleneck Breaker

2025-04-05

RDNA 4's Dynamic VGPR Allocation: A Ray Tracing Bottleneck Breaker

AMD's RDNA 4 architecture introduces a novel dynamic VGPR (vector general-purpose register) allocation mode to address the trade-off between register count and occupancy in ray tracing. Traditional GPUs face limitations in ray tracing where fixed register allocation per thread restricts thread parallelism in stages with high register demands. RDNA 4's dynamic allocation allows threads to adjust register counts at runtime, increasing occupancy without enlarging the register file, thus reducing latency and boosting ray tracing performance. While this mode can lead to deadlocks, AMD mitigates this with a deadlock avoidance mode. This isn't a universal solution, limited to wave32 compute shaders, but significantly advances AMD's ray tracing capabilities.

(chipsandcheese.com)

Hardware Dynamic VGPR Allocation

M4 Mac Mini: Surprisingly Playable AAA Titles via Crossover

2025-04-27

M4 Mac Mini: Surprisingly Playable AAA Titles via Crossover

The entry-level M4 Mac Mini, surprisingly, runs multiple Windows games smoothly after installing CrossOver. Titles like Black Myth: Wukong, Counter-Strike 2, and Assetto Corsa were tested, showing decent performance despite some tweaking and compatibility issues. While input lag exists and some high-refresh-rate mice are unsupported, the overall experience is impressive, hinting at a brighter future for Mac gaming.

(www.andrewethanzeng.com)

Game Mac Gaming

Trump Admin Dismantles US Defenses Against Foreign Interference

2025-02-21

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has rapidly dismantled a decade-long effort by US government agencies, tech companies, and civil society organizations to build a comprehensive shield against foreign interference in American politics. Driven by transparently political motives, the move offers little justification beyond a desire for retribution. This not only weakens America's defenses but also signals to adversaries that the current leadership prioritizes appeasing a political base over national security. Key agencies like the State Department's Global Engagement Center, the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, and elements of CISA have been gutted or sidelined. This represents a significant blow to American democracy and could have profound implications for future elections.

(www.lawfaremedia.org)

Tech foreign interference

Cogent Core: Write Once, Run Everywhere

2025-05-09

Cogent Core: Write Once, Run Everywhere

Cogent Core is a free and open-source framework for building powerful, fast, and elegant 2D and 3D applications that run on macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and the web from a single Go codebase. This 'write once, run everywhere' framework boasts extensive documentation and interactive examples directly editable and runnable on its website, which is itself a Cogent Core app running on wasm. Installation instructions must be followed before development.

(github.com)

Development

Reviving LISP 1.5: A C and Odin Implementation

2025-09-03

Reviving LISP 1.5: A C and Odin Implementation

This project recreates the core functionality of the 1962 LISP 1.5 interpreter in both C and Odin, boasting less than 500 lines of code (around 600 for the Odin version). It features a semi-space copying garbage collector based on Cheney's algorithm and limited tail-call optimization. While simplifying error handling and thread safety, the project successfully executes test programs, demonstrating the elegance and conciseness of LISP.

(github.com)

Development

Beyond RAG: A Knowledge Management System That Enhances, Not Replaces, Thought

2025-01-02

Beyond RAG: A Knowledge Management System That Enhances, Not Replaces, Thought

This article explores the design philosophy behind Zettelgarden, a knowledge management system aiming to enhance, not replace, human thought. The author recounts the evolution from paper cards to digital notes, highlighting how digital systems, while offering convenient search and linking, lose the serendipitous connections fostered by physical proximity. The author critiques the current over-reliance on automation and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) models in AI-assisted knowledge management, arguing their limitations in handling massive datasets and their neglect of personal understanding and knowledge processing. Zettelgarden emphasizes the importance of personal notes, encouraging users to add commentary and insights, facilitating connections between ideas through a unique card structure. The author believes the future of knowledge management lies in human-computer collaboration, with computers handling organization and humans focusing on thinking and understanding.

(nsavage.substack.com)

Development

Aussie Engineer's Take on Working for US Tech Firms: Time Zones, Culture, and Stability

2025-01-12

An Australian engineer shares his decade-long experience working for American tech companies. He details the challenges of cross-timezone collaboration: mornings are spent catching up on overnight work, but afternoons offer invaluable focused time. While loneliness can be an issue, strong teamwork and documentation culture mitigate this. He also notes the inherent instability of working for a US company from abroad, but highlights the larger scale, better compensation, and higher brand recognition as key motivators. Finally, he discusses cultural differences between Australia and the US, where Americans are more enthusiastic and Australians more understated, requiring adaptation to the American work culture.

(www.seangoedecke.com)

Development cross-cultural work

AccessOwl Hiring: Senior Elixir Engineer (Remote, AI-Driven SaaS)

2025-06-26

AccessOwl Hiring: Senior Elixir Engineer (Remote, AI-Driven SaaS)

AccessOwl, a profitable, Y Combinator-backed SaaS startup, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer specializing in Elixir. This fully remote role requires a location within ±3 hours of Berlin. You'll collaborate with a small, close-knit team to revolutionize how companies manage their SaaS tools using AI. The ideal candidate has 5+ years of web software development experience, is proficient in Elixir, and thrives on solving real-world problems. Competitive salary, stock options, and flexible hours are offered.

(www.ycombinator.com)

Development

Retro Tech: Tektronix's Vintage Soldering Training Videos

2025-01-09

Retro Tech: Tektronix's Vintage Soldering Training Videos

This article highlights two vintage soldering training videos produced by Tektronix in the 1970s and 80s. The first video, aimed at assembly line workers, focuses on practical PCB soldering techniques. The second, geared towards repair technicians, delves into more advanced skills like desoldering and PCB repair. Both videos blend practical demonstrations with theoretical knowledge of soldering chemistry and tool usage, showcasing Tektronix's dedication to high-quality soldering.

(hackaday.com)

Hardware retro tech soldering techniques electronics repair

Deep Code Bench: A New Benchmark Dataset for Code Retrieval

2025-09-11

Deep Code Bench: A New Benchmark Dataset for Code Retrieval

Qodo has released Deep Code Bench, a novel benchmark dataset of real-world questions derived from large, complex code repositories. Unlike existing benchmarks, these questions require retrieval across multiple files, mirroring real-world developer scenarios. The dataset, generated using LLMs from pull request data, provides a robust evaluation of code retrieval systems. Qodo's deep research agent outperforms others in fact recall, achieving ~76% accuracy.

(www.qodo.ai)

Development benchmark dataset

Ashet Home Computer: A Hackable Retro-Inspired Home PC

2025-08-13

Ashet Home Computer: A Hackable Retro-Inspired Home PC

The Ashet Home Computer is a highly expandable and hackable computer inspired by the home computers of the 80s. Easy to understand yet powerful enough for a graphical desktop OS, it bridges the gap between Arduino and Raspberry Pi. The design phase is complete, and a functional prototype validating key features (PSRAM support, DVI video, etc.) has been built. The next stage involves engineering, schematics, PCB layout, and a crowdfunding campaign to fund production. The final design will be open-source and freely available.

(ashet.computer)

Hardware expandable

IoT Device Signals Meeting Status to Family

2025-05-14

Annoyed by interruptions during work-from-home meetings? This simple IoT device, 'Tabajara,' uses an ESP32 and Arduino framework to signal meeting status. When the webcam is on, it changes the color of an LED panel at the office door (red for meeting, blue for not). A Python daemon queries Apple's API to check webcam usage and sends updates to the ESP32. A neat solution for avoiding family interruptions!

(nullonerror.org)

Development Home Automation

Commodore 64 Returns: Retro-Futurism Rebooted

2025-07-12

Commodore 64 Returns: Retro-Futurism Rebooted

After over 30 years, the Commodore 64 is back! This isn't just an emulator; it's a brand new C64 with a transparent case, color-changing LEDs, Wi-Fi game transfer, and more. Compatible with thousands of original games and peripherals, it offers a retro-futuristic blend of classic gaming and modern tech. The focus is on a simpler, distraction-free computing experience, making it an inviting introduction to coding for kids. It's tech that invites you in, not controls you.

(www.commodore.net)

Game Retro Gaming Console Retro-Futurism

PL/Rust: Native Performance for PostgreSQL Functions in Rust

2025-02-02

PL/Rust: Native Performance for PostgreSQL Functions in Rust

PL/Rust is a loadable procedural language enabling PostgreSQL function development in Rust, compiling to native machine code for optimal performance. Unlike interpreted alternatives, it leverages Rust's ecosystem and compile-time safety. It provides access to Postgres' SPI (including dynamic queries and prepared statements), safe Rust types for most Postgres data types, and support for trigger functions. On x86_64 and aarch64 Linux, it operates as a 'trusted' language, offering enhanced security guarantees; elsewhere, it functions as 'untrusted'. Comprehensive documentation, installation instructions, and cross-compilation support are available.

(github.com)

Development

Tesla Cybertruck Deliveries Halted Due to Falling Trims

2025-03-14

Tesla Cybertruck deliveries are on hold due to reports of trims falling off the vehicles. Many owners are reporting issues on forums and social media, prompting a "containment hold" by Tesla. The problem centers around the Cybertruck's flimsy cantrail trim, a decorative piece along the roofline. This isn't the first time; Tesla recalled 11,000 Cybertrucks last June for similar trim issues. The hold appears to have started last weekend, with delivery appointments canceled. Tesla hasn't issued a public service bulletin, but internal information suggests battery pack issues may also be a concern.

(electrek.co)

Tech Delivery Issues

XMonad Seeks Wayland Port Developer

2025-09-20

The XMonad development team has been collecting contributions for two years to fund a developer to port XMonad to Wayland. They now have sufficient funds but lack a suitable developer. The existing port is badly rotted, using an outdated and buggy version of wlroots. A key challenge is that Wayland programs lack unique identifiers for window management hooks. The team is seeking help on their Discourse forum, welcoming proposals from interested developers.

(xmonad.org)

Development

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