50-Year-Old Math Conjecture Finally Proven: The McKay Conjecture

2025-02-20
50-Year-Old Math Conjecture Finally Proven: The McKay Conjecture

The McKay Conjecture, a mathematical problem posed in the 1970s concerning finite groups and their Sylow normalizers, has finally been proven by Britta Späth and Michel Cabanes. The conjecture states that a crucial quantity for a finite group is equal to the same quantity for its Sylow normalizer (a much smaller subgroup). This proof, decades in the making, builds upon over a century of work classifying finite groups and involves deep insights into the representation theory of Lie-type groups. It's a monumental achievement in mathematics, simplifying group theory research and potentially leading to practical applications.

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Subsecond: Sub-Second Hot-Patching for Rust

2025-06-25

Subsecond is a Rust library enabling hot-patching, allowing code changes in a running application without restarts. This is invaluable for game engines, servers, and long-running apps where the edit-compile-run cycle is too slow. It also introduces 'ThinLinking', dramatically speeding up Rust compilation in development. Subsecond works by detouring function calls via a jump table, avoiding unsafe memory modification. An external tool compiles changed code, sends it to the application, and Subsecond applies the patch. Currently, it only patches the 'tip' crate and has limitations regarding globals, statics, thread-locals, and struct layouts. It supports major platforms, excluding iOS devices due to code signing.

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Little Snitch: Your macOS Network Security Guardian

2024-12-30
Little Snitch: Your macOS Network Security Guardian

Little Snitch is a network monitor and personal application firewall for macOS that gives you control over which apps connect to the internet. It alerts you to each connection attempt, letting you allow or deny access, ensuring your data remains secure. Features include silent mode, a visual traffic chart, flexible rule management, built-in DNS encryption, and cryptographic process identification to thwart malware. Monitor and manage your Mac's network activity with ease, protecting your privacy.

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Development firewall

Trump Admin's Signal Leak: Misunderstandings Around End-to-End Encryption

2025-03-25
Trump Admin's Signal Leak: Misunderstandings Around End-to-End Encryption

An article detailing the Trump administration accidentally adding a journalist to a Signal group chat discussing a military operation in Yemen sparked debate. Many wrongly attributed this to a failure of Signal's security, but the author clarifies that end-to-end encryption (E2EE) protects message confidentiality during transit, not user error. E2EE doesn't prevent adding unauthorized individuals to chats nor replace government-approved secure systems for classified communication. The article explains E2EE's mechanics, its strengths and weaknesses, and its suitability in different contexts, criticizing misconceptions and promotion of alternative technologies. Ultimately, the author argues this wasn't Signal's failure but a result of the government using an unauthorized tool, predicting those involved won't face accountability.

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Tech

Microsoft's Valentine's Day Surprise: Cortana Location History Axed, GDPR Compliance Efforts

2025-02-20
Microsoft's Valentine's Day Surprise:  Cortana Location History Axed, GDPR Compliance Efforts

Microsoft released Windows 11 24H2 preview build 26120.3281 to Dev and Beta channels, removing the Location History API for Cortana and making changes to address European privacy concerns. The API, previously deprecated, allowed Cortana to access 24 hours of location data. The update also disables account-based content in File Explorer for Entra IDs in the EEA, impacting Recent, Favorites, and Recommended features. Additionally, the update includes one-click OneDrive file resuming and an upcoming Recall update that will delete all existing snapshots. The rollout to the general release of Windows 11 remains uncertain.

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Tech

Efficient Rubik's Cube Solving via Learned Representations: No Hand-Crafted Heuristics Needed

2025-08-29

Classical AI separates perception (spatial representation learning) from planning (temporal reasoning via search). This work explores representations capturing both spatial and temporal structure. Standard temporal contrastive learning often fails due to spurious features. The authors introduce Contrastive Representations for Temporal Reasoning (CRTR), using negative sampling to remove these features and improve temporal reasoning. CRTR excels on complex temporal tasks like Sokoban and Rubik's Cube, solving the latter faster than BestFS (albeit with longer solutions). Remarkably, this is the first demonstration of efficiently solving arbitrary Rubik's Cube states using only learned representations, eliminating the need for hand-crafted search heuristics.

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Nix: Demonstrably Secure Software Supply Chains

2025-05-12
Nix:  Demonstrably Secure Software Supply Chains

Meeting stringent software supply chain security regulations often involves costly air-gapped environments and extensive vetting. This article introduces Nix, a powerful package manager, as a solution. Nix enables verifiable supply chain integrity without sacrificing development speed. It tracks the exact origin and integrity of software, producing auditable offline source packages. A bootable NixOS image example demonstrates how Nix extracts verifiable Fixed-Output Derivations (FODs) from the dependency tree, allowing for offline rebuilds to ensure complete traceability and integrity. This transforms compliance from a roadblock into a manageable post-development verification step, significantly reducing costs and enhancing developer efficiency.

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Development Verifiability

Marginalia Search: A Privacy-Focused Search Engine, Rejecting AI and Cloud Services

2025-01-27

Marginalia Search has unveiled a redesigned website, emphasizing its commitment to user privacy. Prioritizing non-commercial content, it offers tools for both search and discovery, aiming to unearth lost websites. Built with simple technology, it eschews AI and cloud services, operating under an AGPL open-source license. Privacy is paramount, filtering tracking and adtech, with no user or search data shared. Logs are retained for a maximum of 24 hours and anonymized.

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Tech

Oscars: Thanking God or Weinstein? Data Reveals the Truth

2025-02-27
Oscars: Thanking God or Weinstein? Data Reveals the Truth

This article analyzes 1,884 Oscar acceptance speeches to uncover the unspoken rules and relationships behind the Academy Awards. The data reveals a growing trend of winners thanking more people over time, with actresses thanking the most on average. While Harvey Weinstein was once perceived as having immense influence at the Oscars, the data shows that God was thanked far more often than Weinstein. However, Steven Spielberg even surpassed God in thanks during certain periods, reflecting his immense influence in Hollywood.

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Misc Oscars

Erlang-RED: Re-imagining Node-RED's Backend in Erlang

2025-05-16
Erlang-RED: Re-imagining Node-RED's Backend in Erlang

This project experiments with replacing Node-RED's existing Node.js backend with an Erlang equivalent. Leveraging Erlang's inherent concurrency, the goal is to boost Node-RED's performance. A significant portion of Node-RED nodes are already implemented, with a flow-based testing system ensuring functionality. Development is flow-driven, separating test flows and code for better maintainability and integration.

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Development

Fedora Aims for 99% Reproducible Builds in Fedora 43

2025-04-11

Fedora is striving for 99% reproducible builds in its upcoming Fedora 43 release. This means anyone, given the same source code, build environment, and instructions, can recreate bit-for-bit identical binaries. While Debian has made significant strides in reproducible builds, Fedora's approach focuses on the payload of RPM packages, leveraging infrastructure improvements and tools like add-determinism and rebuilderd. Although largely invisible to end-users, this effort is crucial for bolstering supply chain security against malicious attacks.

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Development

YC-backed Harper Seeks Founding AI Engineer to Disrupt the $100B+ Insurance Market

2024-12-27
YC-backed Harper Seeks Founding AI Engineer to Disrupt the $100B+ Insurance Market

Harper, a Y Combinator-backed AI-native commercial insurance brokerage, is seeking a Founding AI Engineer. The company aims to revolutionize the $100B+ Excess & Surplus (E&S) insurance market using AI, automating weeks-long processes into instant ones. The ideal candidate possesses deep experience with the modern AI/ML stack, thrives in rapid iteration, and understands AI safety and reliability. Harper offers competitive compensation and significant equity, targeting engineers eager to build and own a revolutionary product, not just maximize salary.

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Exploiting Dependabot: Bypassing GitHub's Merge Protection

2025-06-06
Exploiting Dependabot: Bypassing GitHub's Merge Protection

Researchers have discovered a novel attack leveraging the "Confused Deputy" vulnerability in GitHub's Dependabot (and similar bots). Attackers can trick Dependabot into merging malicious code by crafting branch names, potentially bypassing branch protection rules and leading to command injection. Two previously unknown attack techniques were also disclosed, enhancing the effectiveness of this exploit. This highlights the need for developers to carefully manage automated tools and enhance code security audits.

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Guile-powered Emacs: A Bold Rewrite Project

2024-12-16

Emacs, renowned for its extensibility, faces performance and expressiveness limitations with its core language, Emacs Lisp (Elisp). To address this, the Guile-Emacs project aims to replace Elisp in Emacs with Guile Lisp. After years of development and dormancy, Guile-Emacs has been revived by developers Robin Templeton and Larry Valkama. The project aims to leverage Guile's compiler and performance advantages to improve Emacs' speed and extensibility while maintaining Elisp compatibility. The ultimate goal is to rewrite a significant portion of Emacs's C code in Lisp, significantly enhancing its customizability. While facing technical and political challenges, the project presents exciting possibilities for the future of Emacs.

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Development

Astronomical Seeing: The Unsung Hero (and Villain) of Astrophotography

2025-06-03
Astronomical Seeing: The Unsung Hero (and Villain) of Astrophotography

Even with perfect equipment and clear skies, atmospheric seeing can ruin your astrophotography. This article recounts a frustrating experience with poor seeing, then delves into how seeing affects different types of astrophotography (planetary, deep-sky, lunar). It explains how to measure seeing, predict optimal imaging times, and cope with poor conditions using techniques like lucky imaging. The article differentiates seeing from transparency and concludes with strategies for maximizing results despite less-than-ideal seeing, emphasizing the importance of target selection and adaptive techniques for capturing stunning cosmic images.

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The Diffusion Deficit: Why Transformative Tech Takes So Long

2025-09-05
The Diffusion Deficit: Why Transformative Tech Takes So Long

This article explores the often-unexpectedly slow diffusion of transformative technologies, using the tractor as a prime example. It argues that technological success depends not only on inherent superiority but also on compatibility with existing social, economic, and industrial systems. The article examines cases like the telephone, electric motor, and IT, highlighting the need for complementary innovations, skills training, and industrial reorganization to unlock a technology's full potential. The current AI field faces similar challenges, with excessive focus on AGI overshadowing product development and practical application. Ultimately, technological success hinges on understanding and strategizing for diffusion—this is where the true 'technological dividend' lies.

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Snow: A Hardware-Level Macintosh Emulator in Rust

2025-06-26
Snow: A Hardware-Level Macintosh Emulator in Rust

Snow is an open-source Macintosh emulator written in Rust, aiming for hardware-level accuracy in emulating classic Motorola 680x0-based Macintosh computers. Unlike emulators that patch the ROM or intercept system calls, Snow focuses on low-level hardware emulation. Currently, it supports the Macintosh 128K, 512K, Plus, SE, Classic, and II. While under development, bleeding-edge builds and a limited online demo (emulated machine only) are available.

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Development Macintosh emulator

pipask: Secure Python Package Installation

2025-05-03
pipask: Secure Python Package Installation

pipask is a safer alternative to pip, adding security checks before installing Python packages. It prioritizes using PyPI metadata, avoiding downloading and executing code whenever possible. If third-party code execution is necessary, pipask asks for user consent. After performing checks, including repository popularity, package age, known vulnerabilities, PyPI download counts, and metadata verification, it presents a formatted report and requests approval. Upon approval, it hands off installation to standard pip.

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Development

Off-Grid Blogging: Running a Hugo Site on a Pixel 5 with Solar Power

2025-09-03

An Android enthusiast successfully deployed their Hugo blog to an old Google Pixel 5 phone, powered by solar energy. Leveraging the Termux terminal emulator, they installed Hugo, SSH, and other essential tools to run and maintain the blog. This eco-friendly setup is surprisingly stable and performs comparably to traditional servers, showcasing the potential of low-power devices.

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Development Off-grid blogging

Five Types of Nondeterminism: Practical Insights from Formal Methods

2025-02-20
Five Types of Nondeterminism: Practical Insights from Formal Methods

This article explores five types of nondeterminism in system modeling: true randomness, concurrency, user input, external forces, and abstraction. The author explains each type clearly with practical examples. True randomness, while often simulated with pseudorandom number generators, is usually treated as nondeterministic choice in modeling. Concurrency is a major source of nondeterminism, requiring special handling due to state space explosion. User input and external forces are treated as nondeterministic external influences. Critically, abstraction simplifies complex deterministic processes into nondeterministic choices, simplifying models and increasing sensitivity to potential errors. This provides valuable insights into understanding nondeterminism and its applications in software development.

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Your MCP Doesn't Need 30 Tools: Code Is Enough

2025-08-18
Your MCP Doesn't Need 30 Tools: Code Is Enough

This article explores a novel approach using a single-tool MCP server that accepts programming code as input. The author points out challenges with CLI tools, such as platform dependency, version dependency, and lack of documentation, making them difficult for agent tools to use. In contrast, an MCP server can maintain state and expose a single tool (e.g., a Python interpreter running eval()), allowing agent tools to better manage sessions and compose tools. The author demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach with pexpect-mcp, which transforms the MCP server into a stateful Python interpreter, simplifying debugging and improving efficiency. Furthermore, the author explores replacing Playwright's MCP with one exposing the Playwright API via JavaScript, reducing tool definitions and improving data transfer efficiency. While security concerns exist, the author argues this approach has significant potential and warrants further exploration.

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Development Agent Tools

Finding Meaning in a Classic Mac: A Personal Tech History

2025-07-08
Finding Meaning in a Classic Mac: A Personal Tech History

The author's father loves classic cars, seeing them as symbols of a bygone technological era. The author, mirroring this, bought a 1989 Macintosh SE/30, not out of nostalgia for the machine itself, but to explore a period of computing he missed. This Mac serves as both a tribute to a past era and a symbol of the progress that has since been made, much like his father's beloved classic cars. The author plans to restore and occasionally use the computer, much as his father takes occasional drives in his classic automobiles.

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DOJ's Antitrust Proposal Could Kill Browser Competition

2025-03-12
DOJ's Antitrust Proposal Could Kill Browser Competition

The Department of Justice's proposed remedies in the U.S. v. Google case could inadvertently kill browser competition. The plan to ban all search payments to browser developers would severely harm smaller, independent browsers like Firefox, crucial for maintaining an open, innovative, and free web. Losing search revenue would make survival difficult, potentially leaving Google's Chromium as the only cross-platform browser engine and exacerbating the dominance of tech giants. Mozilla argues this won't solve search monopolies but harms consumers by reducing choice and weakening the internet ecosystem.

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Tech google

Steam to Drop Support for 32-bit Windows in 2026

2025-09-19
Steam to Drop Support for 32-bit Windows in 2026

Valve announced that Steam will end support for 32-bit versions of Windows on January 1st, 2026. While only 0.01% of Steam users remain on 32-bit Windows, the move signals the end of an era for PC gaming. Valve cites incompatibility issues with drivers and libraries as the reason for dropping support. They urge users to upgrade to 64-bit Windows to continue receiving security updates and technical assistance.

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Game 32-bit

Training the Strongest Model on a MacBook Pro in 5 Minutes: A Challenge

2025-08-14

The author challenges himself to train the strongest possible language model on a MacBook Pro in just five minutes. Experiments culminated in a ~1.8M parameter GPT-style transformer trained on ~20M TinyStories tokens, achieving ~9.6 perplexity. Optimizations focused on maximizing tokens-per-second, favoring MPS and avoiding gradient accumulation. Dataset selection proved crucial, with TinyStories' coherent, simple language proving superior. Transformers outperformed LSTMs and diffusion models. The optimal model size for a five-minute training window was found to be around 2M parameters, aligning with Chinchilla scaling laws.

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AI

Quarkdown: A Powerful Markdown-Based Typesetting System

2025-06-03
Quarkdown: A Powerful Markdown-Based Typesetting System

Quarkdown is a modern Markdown-based typesetting system designed around versatility, seamlessly compiling projects into print-ready books or interactive presentations. Its powerful, Turing-complete Markdown extension ensures ideas flow effortlessly onto paper. Users can define custom functions and variables, even create libraries for others to use. Output formats include HTML and PDF.

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Development Typesetting

Cook's Endeavour Found: 250-Year-Old Wreck Discovered

2025-06-21
Cook's Endeavour Found: 250-Year-Old Wreck Discovered

The remains of Captain Cook's HMS Endeavour, lost for centuries, have been located off the US coast. The ship, the first European vessel to reach eastern Australia (1768-1771), sank in Newport Harbor, Rhode Island, during the American Revolutionary War. After 25 years of research, the Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM) identified the wreck (RI 2394) based on its unique timber construction and dimensions matching historical records. While valuable artifacts are unlikely to be found, the discovery confirms the location of this historically significant vessel. The finding initially sparked controversy, but the ANMM states that other potential sites are not ruled out.

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Bambu Lab Addresses Security Update Controversy: Third-Party Integration and Optional LAN Mode

2025-01-20
Bambu Lab Addresses Security Update Controversy: Third-Party Integration and Optional LAN Mode

Bambu Lab responded to the controversy surrounding its security update for X-series printers. The company denied online accusations of remotely disabling printers, restricting functionality, and including backdoors. To balance security and flexibility, they introduced an optional LAN mode with a standard mode (default, prioritizing security) and a developer mode (for advanced users to assume responsibility for their network security). Bambu Lab emphasizes that its Connect platform is designed to ensure continued third-party integration, and it's actively working with developers like Orca Slicer to maintain user experience and security.

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SpaceX Engineers Join FAA, Raising Safety Concerns

2025-02-21
SpaceX Engineers Join FAA, Raising Safety Concerns

WIRED reports that several SpaceX engineers have been appointed as senior advisors to the acting FAA administrator. This move follows the recent layoff of hundreds of FAA probationary employees and the deadliest month for US aviation accidents in over a decade. While the Department of Transportation Secretary claims it's a routine tour, sources say the SpaceX engineers were hired under a special authority and weren't fully vetted before starting. The four engineers have backgrounds in software and data engineering, but their appointment raises questions about safety and potential conflicts of interest.

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Tech

AI-Powered Animation Generator: Pro-Grade Game Animations on Demand

2025-06-06
AI-Powered Animation Generator: Pro-Grade Game Animations on Demand

This advanced AI tool generates smooth, professional animations from your images or text descriptions. It boasts a complete set of character actions (idle, walk, run, attack, jump, cast, and more), and provides transparent backgrounds, perfect center offset, and bounding boxes for seamless integration. Choose from retro pixel art to modern anime styles to perfectly match your game's aesthetic. Train custom actions to fit unique gameplay needs, creating personalized animations. Upload existing character art or describe your vision—both work flawlessly.

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