A proposed standard, `/llms.txt`, aims to simplify the interaction between large language models (LLMs) and websites. This directory curates companies and products leading the adoption of this standard, spanning AI developer tools, financial products, websites, and more. The goal is to improve the efficiency and accuracy of LLMs interacting with diverse websites.
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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.
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SiYuan is a privacy-first, self-hosted, fully open-source personal knowledge management software written in TypeScript and Go. It boasts features like fine-grained block-level referencing, Markdown WYSIWYG editing, custom attributes, SQL query embedding, web clipping, and PDF annotation link export. Available via app stores (App Store, Google Play, F-Droid) and Docker, SiYuan offers a powerful yet user-friendly experience. Most features are free for both personal and commercial use.
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This essay reflects on a decade of dating in the Bay Area, challenging the notion that polyamory is inherently liberating or monogamy inherently protective. Drawing on personal experiences and anecdotes from friends, the author argues that neither relationship style guarantees emotional fulfillment or prevents heartbreak. Statistical data on polyamory is analyzed, revealing complexities and contradictions. The author concludes that the key to successful relationships lies in self-awareness, communication, and addressing personal attachment issues, rather than solely relying on a specific relationship structure.
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This article provides an accessible introduction to Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). It begins by explaining graph data and its real-world applications, such as social networks, molecular structures, and text. The article then delves into the core components of GNNs, including message passing, pooling operations, and various types of graph data. By building a modern GNN model step-by-step, it clarifies the role and motivation behind each component's design. Finally, it offers an interactive GNN playground, allowing readers to experience firsthand the construction and prediction process of a GNN model, deepening their understanding.
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A 2012 outbreak of conversion disorder at a New York high school saw numerous adolescent girls develop facial tics, muscle spasms, and speech problems. The diagnosis sparked controversy, with parents challenging the psychogenic explanation and suggesting environmental causes. This article analyzes the two types of mass psychogenic illness (MPI), its economic impact, and the shift in its spread in the social media age. The authors posit that social media may accelerate MPI transmission and amplify challenges to diagnoses, creating new public health hurdles. The Leroy case highlights the complexity of managing MPI in the digital age, suggesting traditional isolation strategies may be insufficient.
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The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, a $92 million project near Los Angeles, is the world's largest wildlife crossing of its kind. This article delves into the engineering behind these vital structures, addressing the challenges of habitat fragmentation, noise pollution, and wildlife-vehicle collisions caused by roads. It explores various design aspects, including site selection, crossing types (underpasses, overpasses, culverts), fencing strategies, and attracting animals to use the crossings. The article highlights the different crossing behaviors of various species and corresponding engineering solutions, such as elevated bridges for large animals and culverts for smaller ones. Design considerations include animal behavior, topography, vegetation, and ensuring the crossings blend seamlessly into the landscape, minimizing human-wildlife conflict.
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SeleniumBase is a robust Python framework for web automation, testing, and bypassing bot detection. Built on Selenium WebDriver and integrating with test runners like pytest, it offers a clean syntax and extensive features such as automatic waits for page elements, test report generation, a dashboard, and support for multiple browsers and operating systems. SeleniumBase also includes modes like UC Mode and CDP Mode for enhanced stealth and reliability, along with comprehensive examples and documentation for quick adoption.
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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.
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The Castle Game Engine team announced updates including a web target (using JS+WebAssembly for browser-based game execution), support for the IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) format, and collaborative editing using mORMot2. The web target currently handles basic functions and is improving WebGL support. IFC support allows loading, modifying, and saving models, with future enhancements planned. Collaborative editing is still under development but already enables 3D world modification and server synchronization.
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Hooklistener is an online tool for visualizing, debugging, and testing webhooks. It offers real-time payload inspection, local testing capabilities, custom scheduling, actionable alerts, and team collaboration features. Users can easily set up endpoints, receive and analyze webhooks, and automate workflows with scheduled tasks. Hooklistener provides free and paid plans to cater to various needs, empowering developers to manage and debug webhooks more efficiently.
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Researchers from the University of Helsinki and Cambridge have rewritten SQLite in Rust, creating Limbo, a project leveraging asynchronous I/O and io_uring to drastically improve performance. By utilizing asynchronous I/O and storage disaggregation, Limbo achieves up to a 100x reduction in tail latency, particularly beneficial in multi-tenant serverless environments. The key improvement comes from replacing synchronous bytecode instructions with asynchronous counterparts, eliminating blocking and enhancing concurrency. While improvements are most pronounced at high percentiles, this makes Limbo ideal for applications demanding high reliability.
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As humanity ascends the Kardashev Scale, a paradox emerges: increased energy access correlates with decreased physical labor. The author outlines three biomechanical stages: pre-industrial, where physical exertion was essential; industrial-modern, where machines reduced manual labor; and post-biological, where humans might remotely control robots via brain-computer interfaces, rendering physical bodies obsolete. This raises questions about the future of humanity's physical form and the complex relationship between technological advancement and human evolution.
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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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PuzzleZilla is a new online platform allowing users to create custom jigsaw puzzles from any image uploaded from their device or the internet. The site offers a wide variety of pre-categorized puzzles, including cars, babies, cities, animals, flowers, nature, girls, landscapes, dinosaurs, castles, movies, anime, cats, dogs, paintings, food, and fantasy themes. Users can easily create and play their puzzles online.
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Simon Willison created a unique LLM benchmark: generating an SVG image of a pelican riding a bicycle. This unusual prompt aimed to test the models' creative abilities without relying on pre-existing training data. He tested 16 models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and Meta (Llama on Cerebras), revealing significant variations in the quality of generated SVGs. Some models produced surprisingly good results, while others struggled.
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This article explores the evolution and symbolism of maps in fantasy literature. From Tolkien's "The Hobbit" to "Game of Thrones," maps are more than just geographical guides; they are essential tools for constructing worldviews and shaping cultural identities. The author analyzes common features of fantasy maps, such as vast western oceans and mysterious eastern lands, exploring the cultural and psychological factors behind these features and their relationship to real-world geography, colonial history, and cultural biases. Ultimately, the author argues that the appeal of fantasy maps lies in their unknown aspects and the possibilities they represent beyond reality.
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This article summarizes the author's 20 years of experience with terminal programs, distilling common, albeit unofficial, 'rules' of behavior. These rules cover program responses to Ctrl-C, Ctrl-D, and the 'q' key, color usage, readline keybinding support, and pipe output. The author notes that while not mandatory standards, understanding these rules helps predict terminal program behavior and reduces the learning curve. The article uses examples to analyze the applicability and exceptions to these rules, emphasizing the importance of distinguishing between a program's own responsibility and default OS behavior.
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Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute have developed a plant-based protein foam made from legumes like peas and lentils. This foam can be used in baking to create light and airy baked goods, offering a healthy vegan alternative to egg whites. The process involves extracting pea protein and optimizing its foaming properties using high-pressure homogenization. The resulting foam closely matches the quality of animal-derived protein foams. While discerning palates might detect subtle differences, this innovation represents a significant breakthrough for plant-based baking, reflecting the growing demand for healthy and sustainable food options.
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This article takes a captivating journey through the intricacies of the Moon's motion, the Earth-Moon system, and the dynamics of a three-body system within our solar system. Using interactive demonstrations, the author explains phenomena like lunar orbits, tides, solar and lunar eclipses, and reveals the formation of lunar surface features and the reasons behind the Moon's brightness. Covering concepts such as gravity and the conservation of angular momentum, the article explains complex astronomical phenomena in an accessible way, making it a scientifically engaging and entertaining read.
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The article visualizes the spherical harmonic function Y₄₂. Spherical harmonics are special functions defined on the sphere and are widely used in fields such as computer graphics and quantum mechanics. Visualization helps to better understand their complex mathematical properties and spatial distribution.
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This article delves into Schrödinger's cat thought experiment and its impact on popular culture. Schrödinger proposed this experiment to highlight the absurdity of superposition in quantum mechanics, not to suggest a cat is simultaneously alive and dead. The article further explains Heisenberg's cut—the boundary between quantum mechanics and classical physics—and how different interpretations (like the Copenhagen interpretation) address this cut. The author ultimately argues that quantum mechanics is a powerful probabilistic calculation framework, but its applicability to the macroscopic world requires further investigation.
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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.
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Railway shares its journey of shifting from traditional sales to automated revenue growth. Initial attempts at traditional sales proved ineffective. They pivoted to a product-led growth (PLG) model and developed a regression model to predict customer upgrades or churn. This model uses factors like successful/failed builds, configured regions, support requests, and feature adoption to score customers, identifying those needing assistance. Proactive support and this targeted approach boosted revenue and customer satisfaction, leading to sustainable business growth.
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Programmer Joflof has finally completed a remake of the classic 1983 game 'Alley Cat' after many years of work. This remake not only retains the original pixel graphics and sound effects but also adds five new levels and multiplayer modes for up to four kittens to play simultaneously. Additionally, Joflof has included special arcade mode configuration options for arcade enthusiasts. Currently, the game is only available for Windows, but the author hopes that enthusiasts will help port it to Linux and Mac systems.
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Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre is a community-driven operating system project aiming to provide a fully free, stable, secure, simple, and lightweight long-term support distribution. It leverages Arch Linux's package management and Debian's security patches, adhering to the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines. Supporting i686 and x86_64 architectures, Hyperbola plans to release a BSD-based system, HyperbolaBSD. Recent news includes continued support for 32-bit systems, discontinuation of Debian patchsets beyond version 12, and concerns expressed regarding the Free Software Foundation's statement on machine learning.
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This post summarizes three key ideas from the book "A Philosophy of Software Design": zero tolerance for complexity, the misconception that smaller components always equate to better modularity, and the complexities inherent in exception handling. The author argues that complexity isn't caused by single errors but accumulates over time. Examples of an order processing system and user registration illustrate how to avoid duplicated code and find the right balance between component size and modularity. Furthermore, the post details three techniques to reduce exception handling complexity: eliminating errors, masking exceptions, and exception aggregation, with file processing serving as an example. The book ultimately emphasizes the importance of consistently simplifying complexity in software design.
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Scientists have discovered a new large predatory amphipod, *Dulcibella camanchaca*, in the Atacama Trench at depths exceeding 8,000 meters. This is the first large, active predatory amphipod found in this extreme environment. The nearly 4-centimeter-long crustacean uses specialized appendages to hunt smaller amphipods. The discovery highlights the Atacama Trench as a biodiversity hotspot and underscores the importance of continued deep-sea exploration.
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GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered pair programmer that provides real-time code suggestions based on your code and natural language prompts. It supports multiple programming languages and IDEs, offering free and paid plans to suit various needs. Copilot boasts powerful debugging and security vulnerability fixing capabilities, along with multi-file editing and cross-platform support. While trained on public code repositories, it doesn't copy-paste code but generates suggestions probabilistically, offering an optional code referencing filter to mitigate copyright concerns.
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This article explores the phenomenon of prime numbers plotted on polar coordinates exhibiting spiral or linear patterns. The author uses Python code, employing SymPy to generate prime numbers and Matplotlib for visualization. Results show that as the number of primes increases, the pattern transitions from spirals to straight lines. This isn't unique to primes; it's related to rational approximations of $2pi$. The article explains the underlying mathematics and explores the connection between prime distribution and pattern sparsity.
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