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Ryzen 7 9800X3D Teardown Reveals Mostly Dummy Silicon

2024-12-18
Ryzen 7 9800X3D Teardown Reveals Mostly Dummy Silicon

A teardown of AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor reveals a surprising finding: the majority of its volume is comprised of dummy silicon for structural integrity. While the SRAM cache die is significantly smaller than the compute die, AMD has added a substantial layer of dummy silicon above and below to protect the thin, fragile components. This results in a total package thickness of roughly 800µm, with dummy silicon accounting for a staggering 93%. Despite the seemingly wasteful design, it ensures stability and thermal performance. AMD is expected to announce 12-core and 16-core Ryzen 9 X3D processors soon.

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(www.tomshardware.com)
Hardware

Apollo Mission: An Astronaut's Urgent Bathroom Break Before Launch

2025-03-06

During a countdown for an Apollo mission, a rocket malfunction required repairs, leading astronaut Shepard to request a quick bathroom break. After some discussion, ground control allowed Shepard to relieve himself after shutting down relevant circuits, preventing a launch delay. This anecdote led to Shepard being jokingly referred to as the "world's first wetback in space," adding a humorous footnote to space exploration history.

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(idlewords.com)
Misc Apollo Mission Space Anecdote Astronaut Story

Kansas TB Outbreak: Largest in US History

2025-01-27
Kansas TB Outbreak: Largest in US History

Kansas is experiencing the largest tuberculosis (TB) outbreak in US history. As of January 17th, 66 active cases and 79 latent infections have been reported, primarily in the Kansas City metro area. While the outbreak is ongoing, health officials stress the risk to the general public is low. Active measures are underway to control the spread, including collaboration with the CDC and treatment for patients. After 10 days of medication and three negative sputum tests, active cases are generally no longer contagious.

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(www.cjonline.com)
Tech Tuberculosis Outbreak Kansas

Google DeepMind Forms 'World Modeling' AI Team to Push for AGI

2025-01-07
Google DeepMind Forms 'World Modeling' AI Team to Push for AGI

Google DeepMind is assembling a new AI research team focused on developing "world models" capable of simulating physical environments. Led by former OpenAI Sora co-lead Tim Brooks, the team aims to leverage massive pre-training on video and multimodal data to advance AGI development. This initiative will power applications in gaming, robot training, and beyond, including visual reasoning and simulation, planning for embodied agents, and real-time interactive entertainment. This signifies Google's intensified push in the AGI race, competing with rivals like OpenAI.

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(www.theverge.com)
AI world models

C++ Initialization Gotcha: The Subtleties of `=default`

2025-05-15

This article delves into the perplexing world of C++ initialization. A simple example reveals the significant impact of the placement of `=default` on the initialization of struct members: struct members with `=default` in the declaration are zero-initialized (value 0), while those with `=default` in the definition have indeterminate values, leading to undefined behavior if read. The article thoroughly explains the differences between default, value, and zero initialization, and emphasizes the importance of explicitly initializing variables to avoid potential bugs and security risks.

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(blog.tartanllama.xyz)
Development Initialization

Seasoned Developer Seeking New Opportunities: Job Hunting & Consulting

2025-04-27
Seasoned Developer Seeking New Opportunities: Job Hunting & Consulting

After four years at Oracle, the author finds himself job hunting and exploring new avenues. He's a seasoned developer proficient in Ruby/JavaScript, product documentation, and developer relations, actively seeking employment while offering consulting services, particularly in Mac/Unix automation. He plans to relaunch blog sponsorships, leveraging his established readership and strong Google ranking to find a suitable role or consulting project.

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(brettterpstra.com)
Development consulting

Newtonianism for Ladies: Science, Fashion, and a Dash of Controversy

2025-09-21

Algarotti's *Il Newtonianismo per le dame* uses a dialogue between a narrator and a Marchioness to explain Newtonian physics, cleverly blending scientific education with entertainment. Poems dedicated to prominent figures and a lighthearted approach to optics, rather than mechanics, characterize the text. While seemingly promoting female scientific literacy, the portrayal of the Marchioness's understanding sparks debate: some see her as a passive recipient of knowledge, while others highlight the book's depiction of a woman's curiosity about science alongside fashion.

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(www.whipplelib.hps.cam.ac.uk)
Tech science popularization gender studies

Turn Docstrings into LLM Functions: Introducing the smartfunc Library

2025-04-10
Turn Docstrings into LLM Functions: Introducing the smartfunc Library

The smartfunc library ingeniously transforms docstrings into LLM functions, simplifying interaction with large language models. Using decorators and Jinja2 templating, it converts docstring text into prompts, interacting with various LLM providers (like OpenAI) via the underlying llm library. smartfunc supports Pydantic models for defining response structures, asynchronous functions, system prompts, and a debug mode for easy troubleshooting, significantly boosting development efficiency. While its functionality is relatively streamlined, its simplicity and ease of use make it ideal for rapid prototyping.

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(github.com)
Development

AccessOwl (YC-backed) Hiring Senior TypeScript Engineer

2025-01-09
AccessOwl (YC-backed) Hiring Senior TypeScript Engineer

YC-backed startup AccessOwl is seeking a Senior Software Engineer specializing in TypeScript. They're revolutionizing SaaS application management, offering a solution that leverages RPA and AI workflows to replace tools like Okta. The role requires 5+ years of professional web development experience, proficiency with Playwright or Puppeteer, and experience building browser extensions. Competitive salary, remote work, and flexible hours are offered.

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(www.ycombinator.com)
Development Remote

Evals Are Not Enough: The Limitations of LLM Evaluation

2025-03-03

This article critiques the prevalent practice of relying on evaluations to guarantee the performance of Large Language Model (LLM) software. While acknowledging the role of evals in comparing different base models and unit testing, the author highlights several critical flaws in their real-world application: difficulty in creating comprehensive test datasets; limitations of automated scoring methods; the inadequacy of evaluating only the base model without considering the entire system's performance; and the masking of severe errors by averaging evaluation results. The author argues that evals fail to address the inherent "long tail problem" of LLMs, where unexpected situations always arise in production. Ultimately, the article calls for a change in LLM development practices, advocating for a shift away from solely relying on evals and towards prioritizing user testing and more comprehensive system testing.

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(www.marble.onl)
AI AI Evaluation

Implausibly High Publication Rates Among Top Scientists Raise Red Flags

2025-02-18
Implausibly High Publication Rates Among Top Scientists Raise Red Flags

Researchers at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals have found that approximately 10% of the world's most influential scientists exhibit implausibly high publication and co-authorship rates. Many produce hundreds of papers annually and gain thousands of new collaborators yearly. Analyzing Stanford's 'Top 2%' researcher list, they discovered around 20,000 scientists with anomalously high metrics, suggesting efforts to inflate publication records. This includes roughly 1000 early-career researchers, highlighting systemic incentives to inflate metrics. The researchers suggest that excessive publication rates likely stem from 'paper pumping' and unethical co-authorship practices. They propose renormalizing research metrics to discourage quantity over quality and unethical practices.

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(www.chemistryworld.com)
Tech research evaluation publication metrics

The Long Fight Against Non-Consensual Pornography: One Woman's Battle and the Tech Industry's Response

2025-02-21
The Long Fight Against Non-Consensual Pornography: One Woman's Battle and the Tech Industry's Response

A woman's struggle against the non-consensual distribution of her intimate images highlights the slow response and cumbersome processes of tech companies like Microsoft in removing such content. The victim faced a four-year ordeal, navigating bureaucratic hurdles and challenging relationships with victim support groups. She was forced to develop her own AI tool to detect and remove the images and push for US legislation requiring websites to remove non-consensual explicit images within 48 hours. While initially shelved, the bill finally passed the Senate, offering a glimmer of hope but also exposing the shortcomings of tech companies in addressing online sexual abuse.

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(www.wired.com)
AI Online Sexual Abuse

Quiver: A Modern Commutative Diagram Editor for the Web

2024-12-27
Quiver: A Modern Commutative Diagram Editor for the Web

Quiver is a modern web-based editor for creating commutative diagrams. It allows for rapid creation of complex diagrams, rendering them in high quality for screen viewing and exporting to LaTeX via tikz-cd. Features include intuitive interface, support for pullbacks, pushouts, adjunctions, and higher cells, multiple selection, history, custom macros, and HTML embedding for easy sharing. Creating diagrams is significantly faster than writing equivalent LaTeX by hand.

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(github.com)
Development commutative diagram web editor

Optical Architecture for Simulated Annealing: A Novel Approach

2025-09-08
Optical Architecture for Simulated Annealing: A Novel Approach

Researchers have devised an optical architecture for simulated annealing, employing microLED arrays, liquid-crystal spatial light modulators, and photodetector arrays to perform matrix-vector multiplication. This system efficiently handles machine learning and optimization problems, leveraging a simulated tanh nonlinearity for efficient solving. Experiments demonstrate high-accuracy classification on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets, and superior performance on various optimization problems, offering a novel hardware solution for large-scale simulated annealing computation.

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(www.nature.com)
AI simulated annealing

A 16-Year-Old's Transputer OS: A 1995 Retrocomputing Odyssey

2025-03-13
A 16-Year-Old's Transputer OS: A 1995 Retrocomputing Odyssey

In 1995, a 16-year-old author built a self-contained operating system for a Transputer using only 128KB of RAM. This ambitious project included a basic OS, text editor, Small-C compiler, and assembler. He painstakingly extended the compiler, eventually running complex programs like a chess program from the IOCCC and a ray tracer. A 3D polygonal modeler was also developed. Years later, the author revisited this project, detailing the challenges of restoring the OS, including byte order issues, memory management, and floating-point errors. The article culminates in a successful emulation of the OS and provides instructions to rebuild it. This story showcases impressive ingenuity and perseverance in the face of limited resources.

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(nanochess.org)
Development Operating System Development

Rest of World Photo Contest: Tech's Global Impact

2025-01-26
Rest of World Photo Contest: Tech's Global Impact

Rest of World's photography contest received 227 entries from over 45 countries, showcasing how technology transforms lives globally. Winning photos depicted diverse scenarios: biometric scans of migrants at the US-Mexico border, online learning in rural India, and solar-powered communities in Mongolia. The images highlight technology's integration into daily life, revealing both opportunities and challenges across various cultures and contexts. They tell compelling stories of tech's impact on local communities.

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(restofworld.org)
Tech technology photography global tech humanitarian tech

Is America in Decline? Or is it an Information Warfare?

2025-01-07
Is America in Decline? Or is it an Information Warfare?

This article examines the paradox of America's seemingly prosperous economy juxtaposed against widespread public anxiety, distrust in government, and pessimism about the future. The author argues this isn't a genuine decline, but rather the result of information warfare waged by external forces, linked to Russia. These forces utilize disinformation campaigns, social media manipulation, and other tactics to sow discord and instability. The article highlights the role of 'anti-cult' organizations employing information terrorism, demonizing groups through media, fostering division, and even contributing to extreme events like school shootings. The ultimate goal, the author claims, is to incite civil war. The article calls for vigilance against disinformation, exposure of anti-cult organizations, and measures to safeguard American stability.

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(actfiles.org)
Misc Information Warfare Social Anxiety Anti-Cult Organizations

Four Years After Texas Blackout: Grid Reliability Still Questioned

2025-02-16
Four Years After Texas Blackout: Grid Reliability Still Questioned

Four years after the deadly 2021 Texas blackout, doubts persist about the reliability of the state's power grid. While the state government has boosted natural gas power generation, Texas's isolation from neighboring grids leaves it entirely reliant on its own supply. A recent grid forecast even suggests demand could outstrip supply as early as 2026. Experts are skeptical, arguing the forecast overestimates demand growth, partly due to the inclusion of "speculative" demand projections in legislation. While Texas has made some progress in generating capacity and infrastructure, such as weatherizing power plants and developing solar power, a lack of energy efficiency improvements, inadequate oversight of natural gas supply, and refusal to interconnect with neighboring grids leave the reliability of the Texas grid facing long-term challenges. A resident who lost her mother in the 2021 blackout even chose to flee to Florida this February, highlighting the lingering anxieties about the grid's dependability.

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(www.npr.org)
Tech Texas power grid grid reliability

Razer Halts Blade 16 Preorders Amidst US Tariffs

2025-04-09
Razer Halts Blade 16 Preorders Amidst US Tariffs

Razer has pulled the Blade 16 and other laptops from its US website, halting preorders and purchases. This coincides with the recent announcement of US tariffs on countries including China and Taiwan, major sources of laptop components. While Razer hasn't publicly commented on the impact of tariffs, the Blade 16 configurator now returns a 404 error, and other products only offer a 'notify me' option. However, the Blade 16 remains available for preorder in other countries, suggesting US sales may have been paused due to the tariffs.

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(www.theverge.com)
Hardware

Sixth AI: Supercharge Your Coding Workflow with AI

2025-07-17
Sixth AI: Supercharge Your Coding Workflow with AI

Sixth AI is an AI-powered coding assistant for Visual Studio Code designed to boost developer productivity. It offers blazing-fast AI-powered code completion, a chat interface for generating, editing, and modifying multiple files simultaneously, codebase indexing for easy navigation, inline chat for direct code editing suggestions, terminal command generation, and smart code suggestions. Supporting a wide array of programming languages and frameworks, Sixth AI also features an active Discord community for support and feedback. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, Sixth AI promises to make your coding faster and smarter.

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(marketplace.visualstudio.com)
Development

Slave Ship Mutiny: The Amelia (1811)

2025-09-21

On January 20th, 1811, off the west coast of Africa, enslaved people aboard the illegal slave ship Amelia staged a successful mutiny. Armed with wooden planks, they overpowered the crew and forced the ship back to Africa. This event exposed a vast multinational criminal enterprise, with global repercussions. Unlike the infamous Zong massacre, the Amelia's attempted cover-up was foiled by the captives' rebellion.

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(www.historytoday.com)
Misc slave revolt slave trade historical event

Scaling RL: Next-Token Prediction on the Web

2025-07-13
Scaling RL: Next-Token Prediction on the Web

The author argues that reinforcement learning (RL) is the next frontier for training AI models. Current approaches of scaling many environments simultaneously are messy. Instead, the author proposes training models to reason by using RL for next-token prediction on web-scale data. This leverages the vast amount of readily available web data, moving beyond the limitations of current RL training datasets focused on math and code problems. By unifying RL with next-token prediction, the approach promises to create significantly more powerful reasoning models.

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(blog.jxmo.io)
AI

Nvidia Unveils RTX Pro Blackwell GPU Lineup for Professionals

2025-03-18
Nvidia Unveils RTX Pro Blackwell GPU Lineup for Professionals

Nvidia today announced its RTX Pro Blackwell series of GPUs, designed for professional designers, developers, data scientists, and creatives. The lineup includes a flagship RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPU for workstations, along with other desktop and laptop variants, and a datacenter version of the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell. The workstation RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell boasts 96GB of GDDR7 memory and a 600-watt power draw (slightly higher than the RTX 5090's 575 watts). It features PCIe Gen 5 support, DisplayPort 2.1, and the latest Blackwell generation RT and Tensor cores. This GPU targets professionals working on game development, AI workloads, and other demanding tasks requiring significant VRAM and processing power. Max-Q and server variants are also planned. Nvidia is replacing its previous RTX numbering scheme and Quadro branding with the new RTX Pro branding. Also launching are the RTX Pro 5000 and 4000 Blackwell for desktops and laptops, and the RTX Pro 4500 Blackwell for desktops. Laptop versions will include 3000, 2000, 1000, and 500 models, featuring up to 24GB of VRAM and Nvidia's latest Blackwell Max-Q technologies for AI-powered performance and power optimization. These laptops will compete with AMD's Strix Halo chips, which offer 128GB of unified memory. Pricing for the RTX Pro 6000 workstation variant hasn't been revealed, but availability begins in April from distributors like PNY and TD Synnex, with OEMs like Dell, HP, and Lenovo following in May. The server variant will be available from Cisco, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Supermicro soon, with cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and CoreWeave offering it later this year. The rest of the RTX Pro Blackwell workstation lineup arrives this summer from Boxx, Dell, HP, and Lenovo, with laptop variants shipping in Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Razer devices later this year.

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(www.theverge.com)
Hardware Professional GPUs

EU Sanctions Ineffective: Russian Cyberattack Actors Evade Sanctions

2025-09-12

In May 2025, the European Union sanctioned the owners of Stark Industries Solutions Ltd., a bulletproof hosting provider that facilitated Kremlin-linked cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. However, new findings reveal the sanctions had little impact. Stark cleverly rebranded and transferred assets to affiliated entities, continuing operations. The owners, tipped off before the sanctions, moved operations to PQ Hosting Plus S.R.L. and MIRhosting, using new brand names like the[.]hosting and WorkTitans BV. Investigations linked the Dutch company MIRhosting and its owner Andrey Nesterenko to Russian-backed cyberattacks, while Youssef Zinad, seemingly controlling WorkTitans BV, maintains close ties with MIRhosting. The operation appears to be a sophisticated scheme to evade sanctions, highlighting the complexities of combating cybercrime.

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(krebsonsecurity.com)
Tech russian cyberattacks

Racket Library for Elegant HTML5 Generation

2025-01-12

The `html-printer` library for Racket provides an elegant way to generate well-formatted HTML5 code. Its core function, `xexpr->html5`, converts X-expressions to HTML5 strings with automatic indentation and line wrapping, allowing customization of column width. It's Unicode-aware, correctly handling character lengths, and optionally adds line breaks between tags for improved readability and maintainability. Ideal for creating semantically clean and structurally sound HTML5.

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(joeldueck.com)
Development

Western Digital's Patent Infringement Damages Reduced to $1

2025-06-25
Western Digital's Patent Infringement Damages Reduced to $1

Western Digital has dramatically reduced its patent infringement payout to just $1. A California jury initially awarded SPEX Technologies $553 million for infringement related to Western Digital's self-encrypting hard drives. However, the judge overturned the damages due to SPEX shifting its damages theory during the trial and lacking sufficient evidence to support the original amount. While Western Digital lost on most other post-trial motions, its legal team considers this a significant victory.

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(www.theregister.com)
Tech patent infringement damages

VMware Axes Lowest Tier of Partner Program, Sparking Concerns

2025-06-03
VMware Axes Lowest Tier of Partner Program, Sparking Concerns

Broadcom's VMware unit is overhauling its channel partner program, eliminating the lowest tier and imposing stricter requirements on the remaining levels. This move aims to improve partner capabilities and better support customers' transition to VMware's private cloud. While VMware assures vSphere users won't be affected, analysts predict this could push partners towards competitors like Microsoft, Nutanix, and AWS, potentially leading to market share loss. Furthermore, the upcoming VMware Cloud Foundation 9 introduces new licensing demands and hardware compatibility limitations, potentially exacerbating market disruption. The changes have been described as a “pivotal moment” by VMware executives, indicating a significant shift in strategy.

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(www.theregister.com)
Tech Channel Program Private Cloud

Mozilla Launches Privacy-Focused AI Tool: Orbit

2024-12-31

Mozilla has released Orbit, a Firefox extension leveraging AI to summarize web content such as emails, documents, articles, and videos, while prioritizing user privacy. Orbit requires no account creation, doesn't store session data or personal information, and utilizes a Mistral 7B LLM model hosted by Mozilla. Users can easily summarize long documents and videos, quickly grasp the gist of emails and articles, and get specific information through questions.

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(orbitbymozilla.com)
Development Privacy Browser Extension

Global Exchanges Warn of Risks Posed by Tokenized Stocks

2025-08-26
Global Exchanges Warn of Risks Posed by Tokenized Stocks

The World Federation of Exchanges (WFE), representing the world's largest stock exchanges, has warned regulators about the risks of so-called tokenized stocks. These blockchain-based tokens mimic equities but lack the same rights and safeguards, potentially harming market integrity. The WFE, in a letter to the SEC, ESMA, and IOSCO, highlighted platforms like Coinbase and Robinhood's foray into this nascent sector, emphasizing that these 'tokenized stocks' are not equivalent to actual shares. The WFE urged regulators to apply securities rules to these assets, clarify legal frameworks, and prevent misleading marketing, citing potential investor losses and reputational damage to issuing companies.

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(ca.news.yahoo.com)
Tech tokenized stocks
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