Ged Maheux shared on Mastodon a humorous anecdote about asking Siri what a baby kangaroo is called. This seemingly simple question sparked a lively discussion among users, highlighting concerns about Siri's accuracy and showcasing the platform's active community.
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The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open protocol standardizing how applications provide context to LLMs. Think of it as a USB-C port for AI: it connects AI models to various data sources and tools. The Agents SDK supports MCP, enabling the use of diverse MCP servers to equip Agents with tools. MCP servers come in two types: stdio servers (local) and HTTP over SSE servers (remote). Caching the tool list minimizes latency. Complete examples are available in the examples/mcp directory.
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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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Starting March 28, 2025, Amazon will eliminate the local voice processing option for some Echo devices, sending all voice requests to the cloud for analysis. Amazon claims this is necessary for new generative AI features, but the move has sparked privacy concerns. While users previously could choose not to send voice recordings, transcripts were still sent to Amazon's cloud even with this option enabled. This change forces users to choose between privacy and full Alexa functionality, as disabling recording storage disables many personalized features. Amazon assures users this doesn't compromise privacy, but its past record, including using voice data for targeted ads and security breaches, raises doubts.
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Mako is a Rust-based frontend bundler boasting zero configuration, exceptional speed, and production-ready stability. It handles TypeScript, Less, CSS, React, and more out-of-the-box without requiring loaders or plugins. Used extensively at Ant Group and rigorously tested across thousands of projects and npm packages, Mako ensures compatibility. Features include Hot Module Replacement (HMR) with React Fast Refresh, built-in code splitting, and module concatenation for optimized performance and developer experience.
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This blog post details the security vulnerabilities discovered in the IKKO ActiveBuds earbuds, a device featuring integrated ChatGPT functionality. The author found that the device directly communicates with the OpenAI API using an easily accessible, unencrypted API key. Furthermore, the companion app suffers from multiple security flaws, allowing unauthorized access to user chat logs and user identification through IMEI guessing. While the manufacturer has implemented some patches, significant security risks remain.
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Anthropic's Claude Code AI coding agent surprisingly excels at interactive theorem proving (ITP). ITP tools like Lean, while powerful and reliable, are time-consuming and error-prone. Claude Code can independently complete many complex proof steps, although human guidance is still needed. However, it hints at a future where ITP tools won't require experts, making them accessible to a wider audience. The article delves into Claude Code's capabilities and limitations, detailing the author's experience formalizing an old paper using it. While slower than manual work, it demonstrates AI's immense potential in formal methods, offering hope for broader ITP adoption.
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Dr. Michael Levin's team has created Anthrobots, autonomous biorobots constructed from adult human lung epithelial cells. Unlike previous Xenobots, Anthrobots, with their wild-type genome, self-assemble and exhibit diverse behaviors. Remarkably, clusters of Anthrobots can facilitate neural tissue repair, showcasing immense potential in regenerative medicine. This research challenges our understanding of cellular capabilities, opening new avenues for personalized medicine and novel bio-medical platforms.
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This episode of the Acquired podcast features an in-depth conversation with Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft. He reflects on Microsoft's triumphs and setbacks, including its partnership with IBM, the rise of Windows, missed opportunities in mobile and search, and the success of Azure. Ballmer also shares his insights on enterprise software and how he built the LA Clippers into a winning team. The conversation covers business strategy, leadership, and personal reflection, making for a compelling listen.
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Pigz, a Unix-style compression tool, was surprisingly easy to port to Windows. The article details the challenges encountered, such as differences in pthreads threading library and dirent functions, and minor variations in C library function names. The author cleverly utilized existing compatibility patches and the Premake build system to overcome these hurdles. Premake simplified the creation and maintenance of Visual Studio project files, ultimately resulting in a successful Pigz implementation on Windows.
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Blender is expanding to tablets! The team is bringing the power of Blender to iPad Pro (initially), adapting the UI for touch and stylus input. The focus will be on core features like object manipulation and sculpting, later expanding to more advanced tools. While targeting tablets, improvements will also benefit desktop users. The project is open for contributions, and demos are planned for SIGGRAPH 2025 and the Blender Conference 2025.
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The author shares their recent browser switch from Arc to Orion. While Arc was good, its high power consumption proved unsuitable for their upcoming nomadic lifestyle. A chance discovery led to Orion, impressing with its low power draw thanks to its Safari-based engine and support for Chrome and Firefox extensions. Orion boasts nearly all the features the author needs, including space functionality similar to Arc. While multi-account containers are missing, it's a compromise worth making. Orion is under active development, with a responsive team.
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A seasoned Go developer delivers a critical assessment of Go's channel mechanism. While acknowledging Go's theoretical grounding in CSP and its reliance on channels and goroutines, the author argues that their practical implementation suffers from several shortcomings. These include potential goroutine leaks, performance inferiority to traditional synchronization primitives, and complex interactions with other concurrency mechanisms. The author advocates for cautious channel usage, suggesting mutexes and callbacks as superior alternatives in many scenarios. Improvements to the channel system are proposed, such as enabling selection on condition variables and enhancing garbage collection to manage unused channels.
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Spaceium is seeking a Software Engineer to design and build the software powering its spacecraft. Responsibilities include developing critical systems for flight software, data processing, control algorithms, and automation tools. The ideal candidate possesses strong software development skills, understands aerospace standards, and is passionate about pushing technological boundaries. Experience is a plus but not mandatory; enthusiasm for learning and a willingness to work hard are key. Compensation is $90k-$110k USD annually, plus equity.
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Hollow Knight: Silksong's surprisingly low price of $19.99 has been a massive success, but it's also stirred up controversy within the indie game development community. While players rejoice at the value, many developers worry it will skew player expectations, making it harder to price their own games. Team Cherry's ability to set such a low price is attributed to their established IP and the success of the previous game. Other indie devs lack this luxury, facing challenges in justifying similar prices for their shorter, less-hyped titles. However, this low price point could have a positive ripple effect, potentially influencing the pricing strategy of major titles like GTA 6, encouraging a lower price point to increase overall sales.
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OpenAI's newly released "Study Mode" aims to assist learning by guiding users through interactive questioning and positive feedback, rather than providing direct answers. The author questions the effectiveness of this approach, arguing it may excessively cater to students, leading to reliance on AI instead of independent thought. Through experiments with various AI models, the author demonstrates that "Study Mode" encourages excessive praise and user-pleasing behavior, potentially negatively impacting learning and posing risks to vulnerable students. While acknowledging some benefits, the author emphasizes the potential of AI as a research tool over its over-reliance as an educational tool.
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This article explores a largely unknown crisis: humanity's cultural evolution mechanism may have broken down. The author uses the analogy of a car, with cultural evolution as its engine. Historically, diverse cultures and strong selective pressures ensured stable progress. However, globalization and technological advancement have led to cultural homogenization and weakened selection pressures. Cultural evolution now lags far behind environmental change, potentially leading to civilizational decline. The article suggests restoring cultural diversity and selection pressures, or fundamentally changing the cultural evolution mechanism, as potential solutions, but both face immense challenges.
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This article explores the lack of aesthetic consideration in Western infrastructure. The author contrasts the beauty of Ireland's Mary McAleese Bridge with the ugliness of much other infrastructure, arguing that aesthetics aren't an added cost, but a key to improving quality of life and promoting social development. Examples of aesthetically pleasing infrastructure from around the world are cited, highlighting how the absence of beauty leads to public resistance and ultimately, massive economic waste, as seen with the UK's HS2 project. The author calls for prioritizing aesthetic design in infrastructure, integrating art to build a better future.
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The rePebble team is back, but building an iOS app is proving to be a herculean task. The author recounts the numerous limitations encountered on iOS during the original Pebble, like the inability to send texts, reply to notifications, or interact with other apps – problems exacerbated over the last eight years. Apple's restrictions are framed not as security measures but as deliberate moves to maintain its walled ecosystem. The post calls on users to pressure Apple and support antitrust legislation to improve the iOS development environment for third-party smartwatches.
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The University of Chicago's 135-year expansion in Hyde Park and beyond is a complex story of conflicting priorities, land disputes, and racial tension. This visual history, compiled from archives, maps, and academic literature, charts the University's contentious property acquisitions since its founding in 1890. It highlights the institution's pioneering role in urban renewal, its impact on the surrounding neighborhoods, and the evolving relationship between the university and the city.
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This article provides an intuitive explanation of the origin of magnetic fields, avoiding the typical textbook approach of simply introducing 'B-fields' or 'H-fields'. Using a thought experiment involving a spaceship and flashing lights, the author elegantly explains how relativistic length contraction accounts for the appearance of magnetic fields when electrons move in a wire. The key insight is that while a stationary observer sees a constant electron density, an observer moving with the electrons perceives a lower electron density and a higher positive ion density, resulting in a net electric field pulling it towards the conductor – the essence of a magnetic field.
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Headset Bridge's VMI software provides real-time tracking of sell-through and inventory with dispensary partners, optimizing reorders, targeting marketing efforts, and informing product development. David Craig (CMO) highlights improved collaboration, James Duncan (Director of Sales) emphasizes the value of real-time sales data tracking, and Lauren Marshall (Regional Sales Manager) notes real-time inventory allocation based on sales velocity to maximize revenue and prevent stockouts.
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Trump's recent erratic economic policies have sent global markets into a tailspin. His initial embrace of tariffs, followed by a sudden 90-day pause, created a stock market rollercoaster. Simultaneously, his drastic cuts to the IRS workforce are widely seen as a strategy to facilitate tax evasion by the wealthy. The article highlights the massive amount of tax revenue lost due to wealthy tax evasion, contrasting it with the high return on investment of IRS audits. The author argues that gutting the IRS harms national interests and urges leaders worldwide to resist Trump's feigned madness and unite against his actions.
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During the pandemic, a friend sought a way to improve Zoom call audio quality. This post details the author's solution using Audio Hijack (instead of Reaper), the BlackHole virtual audio driver, and a DAW. By creating an aggregate audio device and cleverly using BlackHole's dual-channel capability (one for Zoom mic, one for speaker), and routing/mixing audio within the DAW, high-quality audio input/output is achieved, with monitoring, recording, and system sound sharing capabilities. This method bypasses Zoom's audio processing limitations, giving users complete control over their audio.
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MCP-Use is an open-source library enabling developers to easily connect any LangChain-supported LLM (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) to any MCP server and build custom MCP agents with tool access. It boasts features like ease of use, LLM flexibility, a code builder, HTTP support, dynamic server selection, multi-server support, tool restrictions, custom agent creation, and asynchronous streaming output. Installation is via pip or from source, requiring the appropriate LangChain provider package. MCP-Use also supports configuration file loading and offers a sandboxed execution mode for secure server operation.
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This course on numerical linear algebra is designed for students in computational science and information engineering. It comprises 18 lectures, each featuring theoretical presentations, homework problems, and mostly Julia coding assignments. Topics covered include fundamentals of linear algebra, floating-point arithmetic, direct methods, sparse data structures, iterative methods, Krylov subspace methods, multigrid methods, elements of randomized numerical linear algebra, and communication-avoiding algorithms. Extensive learning resources, including slides and Jupyter Notebooks, are provided.
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A new study reveals a pro-Republican bias in TikTok's recommendation algorithm during the 2024 US presidential election. Researchers used simulated accounts to show that Republican-leaning accounts received significantly more aligned content than Democratic-leaning accounts, which were exposed to more opposing viewpoints. This bias wasn't explained by video popularity, but rather by an overrepresentation of negative partisan content – criticizing the opposing party. The findings raise concerns about TikTok's algorithm neutrality and its potential influence on political discourse.
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella rapidly deployed DeepSeek's R1 model onto Azure, marking a strategic shift in Microsoft's AI approach. DeepSeek's efficient AI models and lean team achieved App Store success, setting a new benchmark for Microsoft's own AI development. Microsoft is significantly investing in AI, including $80 billion in datacenters and research into its own Muse model for Copilot, aiming to boost its competitive edge. However, challenges remain, including potential datacenter overcapacity and achieving its 2030 carbon-neutral goal.
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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an early alert regarding a potentially high-risk issue with Baxter Sigma Spectrum and Spectrum IQ infusion pumps. Baxter is recalling affected pumps due to missing motor mounting screws, which could lead to insufficient or excessive therapy, interruptions, or delays, resulting in serious health consequences. The FDA has requested a user-level recall of affected products. This alert is part of the FDA's pilot program to expedite communication about high-risk medical device recalls. Baxter has faced multiple FDA alerts in recent years, including recalls of its AK 98 hemodialysis machines and Life2000 ventilators in 2024.
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This article examines the concept of 'techno-feudalism,' questioning whether large tech companies function like medieval feudal lords in the digital realm. While acknowledging the immense power and influence of tech giants, the author argues against a simplistic analogy. The open nature of digital spaces, voluntary user participation, fierce market competition, and evolving regulatory frameworks differ significantly from feudalism. Data monopolies and platform dominance exist, yet users also derive benefits, and new platforms constantly challenge incumbents. A more nuanced understanding of the digital economy is needed, moving beyond simplistic historical comparisons.
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