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Open Source: The Smallest 3D-Printed Telescope Kit

2025-06-19

A maker has open-sourced their design for a miniature 3D-printed telescope kit, "Smallest." The kit includes complete instructions and files for users to print and assemble themselves. For a flawless experience, a pre-assembled version is also available for purchase. Crucially, never point the telescope at the sun—it's extremely dangerous. Technical details include material recommendations (avoid PLA!), part quantities, glue suggestions, and assembly tips such as balancing the telescope tube.

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(www.printables.com)
Hardware

The Tedious Heroism of David Ruggles: A Story of the Underground Railroad

2025-01-10
The Tedious Heroism of David Ruggles: A Story of the Underground Railroad

This article recounts the largely unremarkable efforts of abolitionist David Ruggles in 1836 to free five enslaved men aboard the brig Brilliante. The narrative focuses on the tedious, often frustrating bureaucratic battles Ruggles faced, highlighting the unglamorous reality of much abolitionist work—the countless hours spent navigating legal processes, petitioning officials, and enduring setbacks. While only two men were ultimately freed, the article emphasizes the vital importance of this 'tedious heroism' in the broader struggle against slavery and its often-overlooked contribution to historical change.

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(commonplace.online)
Misc Underground Railroad Abolitionism David Ruggles

China Greenlights First Commercial Flying Taxis

2025-04-12
China Greenlights First Commercial Flying Taxis

China's Civil Aviation Administration (CAAC) has approved EHang Holdings and its subsidiary to operate commercial flying taxis in Guangdong and Hefei, marking a major leap forward in autonomous air transport. These two-seater electric vehicles, capable of speeds up to 130 km/h and a range of 35 km, utilize advanced AI flight control and redundant communication systems to alleviate traffic congestion and pollution. Initially deployed for tourism routes, they're slated to expand to urban and intercity travel, integrating with existing transportation networks. This move is expected to influence global UAM development, injecting billions into the sector and creating numerous jobs.

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(engineerine.com)
Tech flying taxis autonomous air transport urban mobility

Uber's H3: A Hexagonal Grid System for Geospatial Indexing

2025-03-09

H3, developed at Uber, is a discrete global grid system that indexes geographies into a hexagonal grid. Each hexagonal cell has a unique ID, allowing for fast joins across disparate datasets and aggregation at various levels of precision. H3 enables a range of grid-based algorithms and optimizations, including nearest neighbor search, shortest path calculations, gradient smoothing, and more, making it a powerful tool for geospatial data analysis.

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(h3geo.org)
Development geospatial indexing hexagonal grid spatial analysis

SpaceX's Insane Success: The Haywood Algorithm in Action

2025-01-10
SpaceX's Insane Success: The Haywood Algorithm in Action

This review of Eric Berger's new book, *Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age*, details SpaceX's extraordinary success story. The author attributes SpaceX's achievements to Elon Musk's extreme adherence to the 'Haywood Algorithm' – making a list of everything needed for success and then doing it all. SpaceX overcame countless technical and political hurdles, disrupting the aerospace industry with its bold innovations and near-insane execution, achieving reusable rockets and drastically lowering launch costs. The review uses anecdotes of SpaceX's daring feats – from rocket transport and launchpad construction to handling unexpected crises – to highlight its unique company culture and relentless pursuit of innovation despite setbacks. Ultimately, the author argues that SpaceX's triumph stems from its unwavering commitment to its goals, its tenacious execution, and Musk's unconventional leadership style.

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(www.thepsmiths.com)
Tech Rocketry

Gentoo's Ingenious Solution to Perl Versioning Chaos

2025-07-21

Gentoo's Perl package versions don't directly match upstream versions due to Perl's inconsistent versioning schemes. Upstream uses two incompatible methods: treating versions as floating points (making 1.1 and 1.10 equal) and using 'v' prefixes or multiple dots. Gentoo elegantly solves this with the `Gentoo::PerlMod::Version` module, which translates upstream versions into a consistent scheme, preserving sorting order and avoiding conflicts. The module converts floating-point versions into a 'v'-like format before comparison, ensuring compatibility while preventing version collisions and maintaining correspondence with upstream.

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(wiki.gentoo.org)
Development Versioning

Building a High-Performance Map with Go: A Vector Tile Implementation

2025-09-04
Building a High-Performance Map with Go: A Vector Tile Implementation

While building a website that maps live urban activity, the author sought a more efficient way to render the map, opting for vector tiles to optimize loading speed. The article details the process of generating Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT) from GeoJSON data, covering coordinate transformations, tile identification, geometry construction, and property addition. Implemented in Go, the resulting MVT tiles significantly reduced page size and improved map rendering speed and overall performance.

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(www.debuisne.com)
Development Map Optimization

LogLayer: Unify Your JavaScript Logging

2025-01-06
LogLayer: Unify Your JavaScript Logging

LogLayer is a unifying layer for JavaScript logging libraries, providing a consistent logging experience. It supports multiple logging libraries (like Pino, Bunyan) and cloud services (like Datadog, New Relic), and allows extending functionality with plugins for features such as data filtering and redaction. Developers can easily add tags, metadata, and errors, and switch logging providers on the fly without changing application code.

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(loglayer.dev)
Development

Apple's $95M Siri Settlement: More Misinformation Than Microphone Spying?

2025-01-03

Apple settled a lawsuit for $95 million over claims that Siri recordings were used for targeted advertising, despite denying wrongdoing. The author argues that the accuracy of ad targeting is more likely due to app data collection than microphone spying. However, anecdotal evidence of ads matching conversations will likely fuel conspiracy theories surrounding microphone surveillance, regardless of the truth.

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(simonwillison.net)
Tech apple targeted advertising

arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

2025-06-10
arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

arXivLabs is a platform enabling collaborators to build and share new arXiv features directly on the site. Participants, individuals and organizations alike, embrace arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and partners only with those 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

Reverse Engineering a BIOS Update Fix for an Old Dell XPS 15

2025-01-11
Reverse Engineering a BIOS Update Fix for an Old Dell XPS 15

Driven by nostalgia, the author attempted to update the BIOS of their old 2011 Dell XPS 15 L502X. Hardware issues and a dead battery resulted in a failed BIOS update. Using Ghidra, the author reverse-engineered the update program, pinpointing the faulty code. By modifying the code to bypass battery checks, the BIOS update was finally successful. This is a captivating tale of hardware repair and reverse engineering, showcasing the author's persistence and technical skills.

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(www.r9c.net)
Hardware BIOS update hardware repair

Nine-Day Milestone: Gene-Edited Pig Lung Transplanted into Human

2025-08-27
Nine-Day Milestone: Gene-Edited Pig Lung Transplanted into Human

A team from the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University achieved a groundbreaking feat: successfully transplanting a genetically modified pig lung into a brain-dead human, maintaining function for nine days. While the experiment was ultimately terminated due to organ rejection, it represents a significant advancement in xenotransplantation. The focus wasn't on immediate success, but on observing the human immune response. The pig lung underwent six gene edits to minimize immune and inflammatory responses. Results highlighted challenges such as pulmonary edema and antibody-mediated rejection. Future research will focus on optimizing immunosuppression, refining gene editing, and ultimately achieving clinical translation.

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(www.sciencealert.com)
Tech Xenotransplantation Organ Transplant

Quantum Teleportation Breakthrough: 70% Fidelity Achieved for Quantum Gate Operations

2025-02-08
Quantum Teleportation Breakthrough: 70% Fidelity Achieved for Quantum Gate Operations

Researchers successfully teleported quantum gates using photons, achieving a fidelity of 70%. The experiment relied on a controlled-Z gate operation, serving as a building block for other two-qubit gates. While fidelity was limited by local operations rather than the teleportation process itself, the researchers believe that using commercial hardware with lower error rates would dramatically improve performance. Furthermore, they successfully executed Grover's algorithm using this method, further validating the technology's potential. This research is hardware-agnostic and promises to advance the construction of large-scale fault-tolerant quantum networks.

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(arstechnica.com)
Tech quantum gates

The Monstrous Function That Broke Calculus

2025-01-24
The Monstrous Function That Broke Calculus

In the 19th century, Karl Weierstrass unveiled a function that sent shockwaves through the mathematical community. This function, continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere, resembled an infinitely jagged sawtooth, defying intuition and challenging the very foundations of calculus. Its seemingly paradoxical properties forced mathematicians to rigorously redefine continuity and differentiability, ultimately leading to the development of modern analysis. This 'mathematical monster' not only holds theoretical significance but also finds practical applications in fields like Brownian motion, showcasing the boundless possibilities within mathematics.

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(www.quantamagazine.org)
Math Weierstrass function mathematical analysis

Engelbart's Five-Key Keyset: The Mouse's Perfect Partner

2025-06-15
Engelbart's Five-Key Keyset: The Mouse's Perfect Partner

Concurrently with inventing the computer mouse, Doug Engelbart and his team at SRI created a one-handed input device called the "five-key keyset," designed for efficient single-handed text editing and command entry in conjunction with the mouse. Inspired by telegraph operators and stenographers, users combined presses of five keys to input letters and commands, while mouse buttons functioned as Shift and Ctrl keys. This groundbreaking interface, showcased in the 1968 "Mother of All Demos," offered a new approach to high-performance user interfaces, enabling fast and efficient text editing even while manipulating the mouse with one hand.

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(dougengelbart.org)
Tech mouse five-key keyset

Airborne DNA: Revolutionizing Wildlife Tracking and Disease Surveillance

2025-06-19
Airborne DNA: Revolutionizing Wildlife Tracking and Disease Surveillance

A groundbreaking study reveals the potential of environmental DNA (eDNA) extracted from air to track a vast range of species, from elusive bobcats to illicit drugs and even human pathogens. Researchers at the University of Florida developed a novel method using air filters to collect eDNA, successfully identifying hundreds of different pathogens, allergens, and wildlife species. This rapid and efficient technology promises to revolutionize disease surveillance, wildlife conservation, and environmental research, while also raising crucial ethical considerations regarding sensitive human genetic data.

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(www.sciencedaily.com)
Tech genetic sequencing disease surveillance

Netflix Launches ChatGPT-Powered Search: A Personalized Discovery Experience

2025-05-07
Netflix Launches ChatGPT-Powered Search: A Personalized Discovery Experience

Netflix unveiled a new AI-powered search experience leveraging OpenAI's ChatGPT. Users can describe their preferences using natural language, allowing for more nuanced searches like "something funny and upbeat" or even highly specific requests. Rolling out this week as an opt-in beta for iOS users, it follows a similar approach by Amazon's Fire TV and a now-discontinued Tubi feature. Netflix also announced plans to use generative AI for title card translations. The new search functionality will be a key test of how well AI-powered personalized recommendations can enhance user experience in a competitive streaming market.

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(techcrunch.com)
Tech

The User Isn't the Buyer: Cracking the B2B Sales Puzzle

2025-08-08
The User Isn't the Buyer: Cracking the B2B Sales Puzzle

This article tackles the common B2B SaaS problem of the 'user isn't the buyer'. The author argues that identifying the true decision-maker is key, and it's not always the person holding the credit card. In smaller companies, developers often wield significant influence due to direct product usage and time constraints, driving their need for efficient tools. Larger companies, however, typically place decision-making power with CTOs or leadership, prioritizing security and outcomes. The author suggests empowering developers by providing them with data and tools to convincingly demonstrate the product's value to leadership, indirectly leading to sales conversion.

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(writings.founderlabs.io)
Development SaaS sales user persona decision-makers

Bouncing Balls in a Spinning Hexagon: A Pygame Implementation

2025-05-12

This is a Pygame program simulating multiple balls bouncing inside a rotating hexagon. The program creates several balls with random initial velocities and positions, simulating gravity and friction. Balls bounce off the rotating hexagon using reflection laws. Vector calculations are used to handle collisions and reflections. The game updates and renders at 60 frames per second, resulting in a smooth visual experience.

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(andrewzh112.github.io)
Game Physics Simulation

2025 Predictions: Linux Kernel, Open Source, and the Uncertain Future

2025-01-17

LWN.net's 2025 predictions paint a picture of exciting advancements and looming challenges in the Linux kernel and open-source landscape. The article foresees transformative changes with the extensible scheduling class (sched-ext), increased adoption of Rust in the kernel, the discovery of new backdoor attempts, risks associated with single-maintainer projects, the potential fallout from AI-generated code, growing support for free generative AI and maintainers, persistent cloud product failures and data breaches, a surge in open hardware, a resurgence of mobile device distributions, and the impact of geopolitical factors. The year ahead promises both significant opportunities and considerable hurdles for the open-source community.

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(lwn.net)
Development

Microsoft's Security Scanners Break Single-Use Links: A Shifting Cyber Norm

2025-01-23
Microsoft's Security Scanners Break Single-Use Links: A Shifting Cyber Norm

Bert Hubert reveals that Microsoft and other email security scanners are visiting links in emails and executing JavaScript, including sending POST requests. This violates the long-standing norm that POST requests shouldn't have side effects, breaking single-use login links. The article discusses the impact on web development and calls for greater transparency from large tech companies when changing internet norms.

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(berthub.eu)
Development Single-use links

The Idea of Waste: A Deep Dive into Humanity's Relationship with Trash

2025-05-23
The Idea of Waste: A Deep Dive into Humanity's Relationship with Trash

John Scanlan's 'The Idea of Waste: On the Limits of Human Life' isn't just about garbage; it's a sweeping historical and philosophical exploration of how humanity has dealt with waste throughout history. From ancient Rome's Cloaca Maxima to modern-day data centers, Scanlan traces how our methods of waste disposal reflect our values and shape our cities, societies, and cultural imaginations. He argues that 'waste' is more than just discarded objects—it's a concept that shapes our perception of the world. Through insightful historical analysis and cultural commentary, the book challenges readers to rethink our relationship with the discarded and the implications for the future.

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(thebaffler.com)
Misc Waste

Deep Dive into GANs: The Math Behind Generative Adversarial Networks

2025-08-28

This post delves into the mathematical foundations of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Starting with the basic concepts, the author meticulously explains the loss functions of the generator and discriminator, deriving conditions for optimal discriminator and generator. Using mathematical tools like binary cross-entropy and JS divergence, the adversarial process between generator and discriminator during GAN training is clearly illustrated. The ultimate goal is to make the distribution of generated data as close as possible to that of real data. The post also briefly introduces GAN training methods and highlights subtle differences in formulas compared to Goodfellow's original paper.

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(jaketae.github.io)
AI Generative Adversarial Networks

HALO Deals: A New Acquisition Model in AI

2025-07-19
HALO Deals: A New Acquisition Model in AI

A novel deal structure has emerged in the AI industry: the HALO deal. Unlike traditional acquisitions or simple hiring, HALO deals involve a company hiring a startup's core team while simultaneously licensing its IP. The startup receives significant licensing fees distributed to investors and employees, and continues operating under new leadership. These deals are fast, expensive, and (currently) exclusive to AI. While sparking debate, HALOs attempt to preserve the social contract between founders, investors, and employees, offering a swift, certain way to acquire AI talent in an increasingly scrutinized M&A landscape.

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(kwokchain.com)
AI talent acquisition

HORNET: A Revolutionary RNA Structure Visualization Method

2025-01-05
HORNET: A Revolutionary RNA Structure Visualization Method

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute have developed HORNET, a novel method for characterizing the 3D topological structures of large and flexible RNA molecules. Combining atomic force microscopy (AFM), deep neural networks, and unsupervised machine learning, HORNET captures individual RNA conformers under physiological conditions. This overcomes limitations of traditional methods in analyzing large, flexible, heterogeneous RNAs, representing a breakthrough for RNA structural biology with profound implications for clinical, pharmaceutical, and biotechnological applications.

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(phys.org)
Biology RNA structure atomic force microscopy

Postgres 18 to Feature UUIDv7: No More ID Sorting Headaches in Tests

2025-01-02

PostgreSQL is set to include UUIDv7 support in version 18. This improved UUID generation method retains the randomness benefits of UUIDv4 while ensuring monotonically increasing IDs within a single Postgres backend. This is achieved by incorporating a timestamp and a 12-bit sub-millisecond counter. Testing is greatly simplified as test data is automatically ordered, eliminating the need for manual sorting and improving test efficiency and reliability. While monotonicity isn't guaranteed across backends, it's sufficient for most testing scenarios. This enhancement is slated for release in late 2025 with PostgreSQL 18.

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(brandur.org)
Development

Zen 5: AMD's Graceful Handling of AVX-512 at High Frequencies

2025-03-01
Zen 5: AMD's Graceful Handling of AVX-512 at High Frequencies

This article delves into the performance of AMD's Zen 5 architecture running AVX-512 instructions at high frequencies. Unlike Intel's Skylake-X, which suffered from fixed frequency offsets and lengthy transition periods, Zen 5 leverages improved on-die sensors and adaptive clocking to achieve full AVX-512 performance at its 5.7GHz peak frequency. Tests reveal that Zen 5 doesn't experience significant frequency drops when encountering AVX-512 workloads; instead, it employs fine-grained IPC (instructions per cycle) adjustments as needed to maintain high performance. This dynamic adjustment mechanism effectively avoids frequent frequency transitions, ensuring smooth performance transitions between high and low loads. While brief IPC drops might occur under extreme conditions, overall, Zen 5's AVX-512 support is impressive, significantly outperforming previous Intel architectures.

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(chipsandcheese.com)
Hardware

VW's Budget EV Offensive: ID.Polo Leads the Charge

2025-09-04
VW's Budget EV Offensive: ID.Polo Leads the Charge

Volkswagen is shaking up its EV strategy with a new family of affordable electric vehicles, starting with the ID.Polo. Based on the 2023 ID.2all concept, the €25,000 ($29,000) ID.Polo aims to make electric driving more accessible. Further affordable EVs are planned, including an electric T-Cross (ID.Cross), all part of VW's push for wider EV adoption. A sporty ID.Polo GTI variant is also in the works, launching alongside the standard model next year. The ID.Polo and ID.Polo GTI will debut at the Munich Motor Show on September 8th, with the ID.Cross concept revealed the day before.

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(electrek.co)
Tech

NASA Astronauts Safely Return After Unexpectedly Extended Space Mission

2025-03-18
NASA Astronauts Safely Return After Unexpectedly Extended Space Mission

NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, whose planned short space mission stretched to over nine months due to a Boeing Starliner malfunction, have safely returned to Earth. They landed with two other astronauts aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule after an extended stay aboard the International Space Station. The situation garnered significant attention, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claiming he offered a plan to return Williams and Wilmore sooner, but it was rejected. NASA denies receiving such a proposal. Despite speculation of the astronauts being 'abandoned', NASA maintains the decision was made to save costs and ensure continuous staffing of the space station. The astronauts themselves stated they were prepared for the extended mission and utilized the time for research and station maintenance.

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(www.cnn.com)
Tech space mission
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