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GM Banned from Selling Driver Data for Five Years

2025-01-17

GM Banned from Selling Driver Data for Five Years

General Motors and its subsidiary OnStar are banned from selling customer geolocation and driving behavior data for five years following an FTC settlement. A New York Times investigation revealed GM collected detailed driving data, including acceleration, braking, and trip length, and sold it to insurers and third-party brokers without consent. The FTC accused GM of a misleading enrollment process for its OnStar service, failing to disclose data collection and sale to third parties. The settlement requires GM to obtain consent before collecting driving data and allow data deletion upon request.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech General Motors

Unsolved Mystery: The 1970 Bombing of Portland's Liberty Bell Replica

2025-02-07

Unsolved Mystery: The 1970 Bombing of Portland's Liberty Bell Replica

In 1970s Portland, a chilling event unfolded: the bombing of a Liberty Bell replica in City Hall. The investigation was a tangled web of suspects, from hippies to organized crime, even raising questions about potential internal police corruption. Despite extensive efforts, the case remains unsolved, leaving a lingering mystery and a stark reflection of the era's complex social dynamics and investigative limitations.

(tomlovesthelibertybell.com)

Misc Unsolved Mystery Bombing 1970s

Single Atom Quantum Logic Gate Breakthrough

2025-08-22

Single Atom Quantum Logic Gate Breakthrough

University of Sydney researchers have achieved a breakthrough by implementing an error-corrected quantum logic gate on a single ytterbium ion using the 'Rosetta Stone' code (GKP code). This innovative approach leverages the ion's natural vibrations to encode and manipulate logical qubits, dramatically reducing the number of physical qubits needed for quantum computing. Published in Nature Physics, this milestone significantly improves quantum computing hardware efficiency and paves the way for large-scale quantum information processing.

(phys.org)

Tech quantum logic gate GKP code

The Millennial Barnacle Goose Myth: From Ancient Legends to Scientific Explanation

2025-03-23

The Millennial Barnacle Goose Myth: From Ancient Legends to Scientific Explanation

This article delves into the enduring myth of the barnacle goose, a belief that certain geese originated from barnacles. The myth, rooted in a lack of understanding of bird migration patterns, spread widely through monastic manuscripts and bestiaries in the Middle Ages. The article traces the myth's origins, from an 11th-century riddle to a misattributed reference in Pliny the Elder's Natural History, and examines Emperor Frederick II's skepticism and the (debated) involvement of the medieval Church. The Renaissance saw the myth persist in Scottish and Irish writings, until 19th-century zoological advancements, particularly Darwin's research on barnacles, provided a scientific refutation. The article also explores the myth's presence in Jewish literature.

(en.wikipedia.org)

Misc Myth Ornithology

The Clever XOR Trick: Solving Tricky Interview Questions

2025-07-03

This post unveils a clever trick using the XOR bitwise operator to solve several common interview problems. XOR possesses unique properties: identical numbers XOR to 0, different numbers XOR to a non-zero value, and the order of operations doesn't affect the outcome. Leveraging these properties, you can elegantly find missing or duplicate numbers in an array, even two missing/duplicate numbers, without resorting to complex algorithms or data structures. The post progressively explains applications of the XOR trick with code examples, offering an efficient and concise problem-solving approach.

(florian.github.io)

Development

Trump Tariffs Cause a Dramatic Drop in US Port Imports

2025-05-10

Trump Tariffs Cause a Dramatic Drop in US Port Imports

President Trump's tariffs have led to a drastic decline in US port imports, with Seattle's port experiencing an unusual lack of container ships. This has raised concerns about supply chain disruptions, rising prices, and job losses. The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are facing similar issues, with imports down 35% year-on-year. Experts warn that the impact will ripple across the nation, starting with West Coast ports and spreading to other regions. While the administration is negotiating with China to potentially reduce tariffs, the outcome remains uncertain.

(www.newsweek.com)

Tech ports

Revontuli Theme Update Log: Brighter Blues!

2025-07-30

Revontuli Theme Update Log: Brighter Blues!

The Revontuli theme has undergone numerous updates, most notably a significant brightening of its blue hues. From June 2023 to July 2025, updates spanned various applications, including code editors (VSCode, Vim, Sublime Text, etc.), terminals (Konsole), and even wallpapers. Beyond the improved blues, updates included adding new themes (like the Eve Online theme), bug fixes, and the addition of test files. This demonstrates a commitment to detail and continuous improvement.

(codeberg.org)

Development theme updates color adjustments

AMD MI300X: A Potential Game Changer in the AI Hardware Landscape?

2025-03-07

A small company received two AMD MI300X servers and plans to use them for AI computation. The author believes AMD has made significant strides in software, potentially undermining NVIDIA's CUDA advantage. They've built a fully sovereign stack from hardware to PyTorch, soon to be ported to the MI300X. The author is bullish on AMD's MI300X, predicting it could outperform NVIDIA's H100, and anticipating massive future AI market growth. A quarter-million-dollar investment signals long-term confidence.

(geohot.github.io)

Tech

TinyStories: Can Small Language Models Still Tell Coherent English Stories?

2025-01-02

Researchers introduce TinyStories, a synthetic dataset of short stories using only vocabulary understood by typical 3-4 year olds, generated by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. They demonstrate that LMs trained on TinyStories, even those with fewer than 10 million parameters and simple architectures (a single transformer block), can generate fluent, coherent multi-paragraph stories exhibiting surprisingly good grammar and reasoning. This challenges the notion that coherent text generation requires massive models and complex architectures, and introduces a novel evaluation paradigm using GPT-4 to grade generated stories like a human teacher, overcoming limitations of standard benchmarks.

(arxiv.org)

AI language models few-shot learning

Veteran Forensics Expert's Credentials Under FBI Scrutiny, Cases Reopened

2025-04-04

Mark Lanterman, a cybersecurity and computer forensics expert with a 30-year career and thousands of courtroom testimonies, is facing an FBI investigation into his credentials. Questions arose after attorney Sean Harrington challenged Lanterman's claims of degrees from Upsala College and Harvard University, which proved unsubstantiated. The investigation revealed falsified testimony and accusations of extorting clients with their own data. Lanterman has since ceased operations, prompting the reopening of numerous cases and raising serious concerns about the validity of his past testimony and potential miscarriages of justice.

(krebsonsecurity.com)

Tech forensics investigation

Arial: How a Cheap Helvetica Substitute Conquered the World

2025-07-14

Arial is ubiquitous, yet its success isn't due to inherent beauty but rather its status as a cheap Helvetica substitute, riding the coattails of Microsoft Windows. The article details Arial's history, revealing it as not an original design, but a near-identical font created by Monotype to circumvent Helvetica's licensing. Bundled with Windows, Arial proliferated, becoming a standard for the masses, despite being viewed by professional designers as a low-quality imitation.

(www.marksimonson.com)

Design

Taiwan's Nuclear Phaseout Fuels Energy Anxiety and Geopolitical Risks

2025-05-19

Taiwan's Nuclear Phaseout Fuels Energy Anxiety and Geopolitical Risks

With its last nuclear plant shut down, Taiwan is heavily reliant on imported natural gas, raising concerns about energy security. This move, aimed at achieving a 'nuclear-free' Taiwan, increases dependence on fossil fuels and exposes the island to volatile gas prices. To power its booming semiconductor industry, Taiwan is adding 5 gigawatts of gas power this year, but with only 11 days of gas storage, it's vulnerable to potential blockades by China. A simulated attack on a Taiwanese gas import terminal during April's military exercises highlights the geopolitical risks, while also jeopardizing Taiwan's climate goals.

(e360.yale.edu)

Tech Taiwan energy transition

Blast from the Past: Classic CDE Desktop Environment Added to OpenBSD Ports

2025-07-31

The classic Unix desktop environment, CDE (Common Desktop Environment), is making a comeback! OpenBSD developers have imported CDE 2.5.2 into their ports collection. While not yet directly installable as a package (it needs some fixes and improvements), nostalgic developers can compile it locally and experience the classic Unix desktop. A warning: the code is old and insecure, not recommended as a daily driver, but fun for a trip down memory lane.

(undeadly.org)

Development Unix Desktop Environment

Nine Months Stranded: Space Rescue Mission a Success

2025-03-15

Nine Months Stranded: Space Rescue Mission a Success

After nine months stranded on the International Space Station due to malfunctioning spacecraft, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were finally rescued. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched a Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying four astronauts, paving the way for the stranded duo's return. The rescue mission was fraught with challenges, including helium leaks, thruster failures, and battery repairs, even involving political elements. The astronauts will return to Earth after a crew handover, concluding an unexpectedly long mission that set a new record for female spacewalking time and highlighted the complexities of space exploration.

(apnews.com)

Tech

Global Population Count May Be Severely Underestimated: Shocking Rural Data Gaps

2025-03-21

Global Population Count May Be Severely Underestimated: Shocking Rural Data Gaps

A new study suggests the global population may be significantly underestimated, particularly in rural areas. Researchers from Aalto University in Finland, by analyzing data from 300 rural dam projects across 35 countries, found discrepancies between these independent population counts and other population data gathered between 1975 and 2010, indicating a potential underestimation of rural populations by 53% to 84%. This finding could have major implications for resource allocation, but other experts remain skeptical, arguing that decades of population data collection are unlikely to be off by such a wide margin.

(www.popularmechanics.com)

Tech population statistics rural areas data discrepancies

Pico-8 Fantasy Console Demo: Multi-Cartridge Game Shown at Revision

2025-04-19

A Pico-8 demo, utilizing multi-cartridge technology, was showcased at this year's Revision demoparty's "fantasy console" competition. Currently only viewable online, the full source code is available for download on Pouet. Accompanying YouTube videos showcase the game and its music creation process. The demo runs within Pico-8, downloading necessary data carts from the BBS. Some effects have also been released as standalone files.

(www.lexaloffle.com)

Game demo

Open-Source LLMs: A Cost-Privacy-Performance Tradeoff for Enterprises

2025-05-17

Open-Source LLMs: A Cost-Privacy-Performance Tradeoff for Enterprises

This article benchmarks several open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) for enterprise applications, focusing on cost, privacy, and performance. Using the BASIC benchmark, models were evaluated on accuracy, speed, cost-effectiveness, completeness, and boundedness. Llama 3.2 offered a good balance of accuracy and cost; Qwen 2.5 excelled in cost-effectiveness; and Gemma 2 was the fastest, though slightly less accurate. While open-source LLMs still lag behind proprietary models like GPT-4o in performance, they offer significant advantages in data privacy and cost control, and are increasingly viable for critical enterprise tasks as they continue to improve.

(www.enterprisebot.ai)

AI Enterprise Applications

Prompt Rewrite Boosts Small LLM Performance by 20%+

2025-09-17

Prompt Rewrite Boosts Small LLM Performance by 20%+

Recent research demonstrates that a simple prompt rewrite can significantly boost the performance of smaller language models. Researchers used the Tau² benchmark framework to test the GPT-5-mini model, finding that rewriting prompts into clearer, more structured instructions increased the model's success rate by over 20%. This is primarily because smaller models struggle with verbose or ambiguous instructions, while clear, step-by-step instructions better guide the model's reasoning. This research shows that even smaller language models can achieve significant performance improvements through clever prompt engineering, offering new avenues for cost-effective and efficient AI applications.

(quesma.com)

AI

Mastering TestFlight: A Guide to Beta App Installation and Testing

2025-05-09

Mastering TestFlight: A Guide to Beta App Installation and Testing

This comprehensive guide details how to install and test beta apps using TestFlight. It covers everything from accepting email or public link invitations to install the app, to managing automatic updates, testing previous builds and build groups, and handling iMessage app and App Clip testing across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and visionOS. Key considerations include in-app purchases not carrying over to the App Store version and accelerated subscription renewal rates during beta testing.

(testflight.apple.com)

Development Beta Testing App Installation

LaLiga's Reckless Blockade: The High Cost of Internet Censorship

2025-05-26

LaLiga's aggressive anti-piracy campaign, sanctioned by a court order, has resulted in the mass blocking of Cloudflare IP addresses, impacting millions of innocent websites and potentially jeopardizing access to critical emergency services in Spain. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has strongly condemned this “bonkers” strategy, warning of potential fatalities. While LaLiga claims legal compliance, Prince insists Cloudflare has always been willing to cooperate, offering a clear process that LaLiga refuses to use. The controversy, dubbed #laligagate, sparks intense debate over internet censorship and copyright protection, highlighting the significant risks and potentially deadly consequences of large-scale blocking.

(torrentfreak.com)

Tech

Meta's $100M+ Poaching Attempt on OpenAI: Altman Fires Back

2025-08-13

Meta's $100M+ Poaching Attempt on OpenAI: Altman Fires Back

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman accused Meta of attempting to lure away his developers with signing bonuses exceeding $100 million and significantly higher compensation packages. This aggressive recruiting drive comes as Meta tries to catch up in the AI race. Altman claims Meta, with its $1.8 trillion market cap, initiated these offers after falling behind in AI development. He stated on the Uncapped podcast that he believes Meta views OpenAI as its biggest competitor. Despite the substantial offers, Altman reports that none of his top talent accepted. Meta is building a new "superintelligence" team focused on AGI, but has faced setbacks this year with criticism surrounding its Llama 4 model and delays to its flagship "Behemoth" AI model.

(tech.slashdot.org)

AI

Finland's Near-Zero Homelessness: A Housing First Success Story

2025-01-10

Finland's Near-Zero Homelessness: A Housing First Success Story

Finland's remarkable reduction in homelessness over three decades, from over 16,000 in 1989 to around 4,000 in 2020, stems from a sustained national strategy centered on a "Housing First" approach. This prioritizes providing immediate, independent, permanent housing, coupled with integrated social support services and financial assistance through the social benefits system. Unlike temporary solutions, this strategy ensures a stable foundation for addressing other needs like employment and healthcare. The success highlights the importance of a balanced approach combining financial aid, comprehensive support, and increased housing supply, proving far more effective than relying on a single lever. The Finnish model offers valuable lessons for other OECD countries seeking to address homelessness effectively.

(oecdecoscope.blog)

Misc housing policy social welfare

North America is Dripping Away From Below: A New Discovery

2025-04-05

North America is Dripping Away From Below: A New Discovery

A groundbreaking study published in Nature Geoscience reveals that the underside of the North American continent is literally dripping away in blobs of rock. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin used a new full-waveform seismic tomography model to identify this 'cratonic thinning,' hypothesizing that remnants of the subducting Farallon plate are responsible. This ancient plate, while separated by hundreds of kilometers, is believed to be redirecting mantle flow, weakening the craton's base, and causing this slow dripping process. While not an immediate threat, this discovery offers profound insights into continental evolution and the long-term dynamics of plate tectonics.

(www.jsg.utexas.edu)

Tech plate tectonics continental evolution

Improving Knowledge Base Quality for RAG Systems: Best Practices for AI and Humans

2025-06-18

Improving Knowledge Base Quality for RAG Systems: Best Practices for AI and Humans

This guide outlines best practices for creating documentation that effectively serves both human readers and AI/LLMs in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. High-quality documentation improves AI responses and user experience, creating a positive feedback loop. The article details how AI systems process documentation (retrieval, vector database, generation), highlighting the importance of clear, concise, and contextually complete content. Recommendations include using semantic HTML, avoiding PDFs, creating crawler-friendly content, ensuring semantic clarity, providing text equivalents for visuals, and maintaining simple layouts. The guide also addresses common content design challenges like contextual dependencies, semantic discoverability gaps, implicit knowledge assumptions, and visual information dependencies. It advocates for a hierarchical information architecture, self-contained sections, and providing error context with solutions. Ultimately, the goal is documentation that is both human-readable and AI-friendly.

(docs.kapa.ai)

Development AI documentation

AI Avatar of Parkland Shooting Victim Speaks Out on Gun Control

2025-08-06

The parents of Joaquin Oliver, a victim of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, created an AI avatar of their son. Former CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta conducted the first interview with the AI, where Oliver advocated for stronger gun control, mental health support, and community engagement. Oliver's father, Manuel, explained that the AI is intended to amplify his son's voice in the ongoing gun control debate and allow the family to hear his voice again. This initiative follows a previous AI-driven campaign using the voices of Parkland victims to contact lawmakers.

(variety.com)

Tech Gun Control Parkland Shooting

CSS Zen Garden: Unleashing the Power of CSS

2025-04-27

The CSS Zen Garden is a project showcasing the power of CSS. By keeping the HTML static and only modifying the CSS stylesheet, it demonstrates the complete control CSS offers over web page styling. The project encourages designers and developers to participate, submitting original CSS designs to explore the limitless possibilities of CSS and learn how to create stunning visual effects. Submissions should primarily use CSS1 & 2 and be compatible with major browsers.

(csszengarden.com)

Design CSS Zen Garden

The Surprisingly Simple Power of LLM Agent Loops with Tool Use

2025-05-15

The author and their team built an AI programming assistant called Sketch, whose core is a surprisingly simple loop: the LLM receives user input, performs actions (potentially involving tool calls like bash), and outputs results. This simple loop, combined with powerful LLMs like Claude 3.7 Sonnet, allows Sketch to efficiently handle many programming tasks such as git operations, code modifications, and error handling. The author believes this LLM agent loop approach will find widespread use in everyday automation, drastically improving efficiency.

(sketch.dev)

Development AI programming assistant LLM agent loop tool use

Microsoft SAM TTS: The Iconic Windows XP Voice Returns

2025-05-14

Remember the iconic robotic voice from Windows XP? Microsoft SAM Text-to-Speech is back, now as a JavaScript implementation for your browser! This modern version faithfully recreates the classic Windows XP voice, running entirely client-side for privacy and offline use. Customize pitch, speed, and other parameters to create variations, from tiny elves to giant robots. Relive the nostalgia of early 2000s computing!

(samtts.com)

Development

Bloom Filters: A Probabilistic Data Structure for Efficient Set Membership

2025-06-29

Bloom filters are probabilistic data structures designed for rapid and memory-efficient set membership testing. They use multiple hash functions to map elements to bits in a bit vector. If all corresponding bits are 1, the element *may* be present; otherwise, it's definitely absent. While prone to false positives, their speed and space efficiency make them ideal for large datasets. This article details Bloom filter principles, hash function selection, sizing, applications, and implementation examples across various systems.

(llimllib.github.io)

Development

Steam PayPal Payments Disrupted: Valve Explains Why

2025-08-15

Steam PayPal Payments Disrupted: Valve Explains Why

Steam users in certain regions have experienced disruptions to PayPal payments. Valve has attributed this to a payment processing bank abruptly terminating support for Steam transactions, affecting users paying in currencies other than EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD, and USD. Valve is working on a solution and suggests alternative payment methods. The issue may be linked to Valve's recent adult content policy changes, though a direct connection remains unconfirmed.

(www.rockpapershotgun.com)

Game Payment Disruption

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