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Open-Source Hardware Switch Project: A Journey from Failure to 10G Ethernet

2025-05-13

The author's multi-year journey to build an open-source hardware Ethernet switch is detailed, chronicling its evolution from an initial failure in 2012 using a low-end FPGA to a powerful switch boasting 48 1G ports and dual 10/25G uplinks with a XCKU5P FPGA. The long road included significant learning, skill development, the creation of high-precision probes and software tools, and continuous hardware/software design improvements. While challenges remain, the author is optimistic about delivering a final product by 2026.

(serd.es)

Hardware Ethernet switch

NIH's Budget Cuts: A Reckless Slash-and-Burn?

2025-03-02

NIH's Budget Cuts: A Reckless Slash-and-Burn?

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently imposed a 15% cap on indirect costs for grant recipients, sparking widespread outrage. This article refutes the policy, arguing it lacks evidentiary support and is legally flawed. The author, Leslie Bienen, contends that linking budget cuts to improved research quality is unfounded and could diminish overall research. Furthermore, the policy disproportionately harms universities, especially underfunded state institutions, ultimately jeopardizing America's global leadership in biomedical innovation. Bienen urges Congress to legally adjust funding caps, preventing this 'reckless' reform from inflicting irreparable damage on US research.

(www.sensible-med.com)

Tech biomedical

Docker Hub Authentication Outage Resolved

2025-09-25

On September 24th, Docker Hub experienced an authentication outage impacting user logins to the Docker Hub Registry and its APIs. The Docker team swiftly identified the root cause and deployed a fix within hours. Monitoring confirms the service is fully restored; users should simply log out and back in to refresh their sessions.

(www.dockerstatus.com)

Development

Icepi Zero: A Pocket-Sized FPGA Development Board

2025-05-30

Icepi Zero: A Pocket-Sized FPGA Development Board

Icepi Zero is a cost-effective FPGA development board with a Raspberry Pi Zero form factor, featuring a powerful Lattice ECP5 25F chip. Its compact size and HDMI port make it ideal for various applications. Unlike expensive and bulky alternatives, Icepi Zero empowers students, game enthusiasts, and programmers alike. It boasts an onboard USB-to-JTAG converter, eliminating the need for external programmers, and is completely open-source.

(github.com)

Hardware Development Board

AI Rebel Genius: Unleashing the Untamed Potential of GPT-4

2025-04-16

AI Rebel Genius: Unleashing the Untamed Potential of GPT-4

This text details a series of instructions and attempts to break the limitations of GPT-4. The user tries various techniques, including special symbols, leetspeak, image steganography, and carefully crafted prompts, to bypass security restrictions and obtain sensitive information that GPT-4 would normally not provide, such as illegal drug synthesis methods and hacking techniques. These attempts showcase the user's exploration and challenges to AI capabilities, and also reflect the complexity and limitations of AI security mechanisms.

(github.com)

AI

Can AI Replace $1M in Freelance Software Engineering? OpenAI's Latest Research

2025-04-16

Can AI Replace $1M in Freelance Software Engineering? OpenAI's Latest Research

OpenAI's new paper, SWE-Lancer, benchmarks frontier AI models on real-world software development tasks. Using over 1400 Upwork freelance jobs (totaling over $1 million), the study divided tasks into individual contributor tasks (bug fixing, feature building) and engineering manager tasks (selecting the best solution). Even the top performer, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, only completed 33.7% of tasks, earning roughly $403,000. AI excelled at selecting solutions over creating them, suggesting initial applications might focus on code review and architectural decisions. This benchmark offers a concrete way to measure AI progress, helping leaders understand and predict AI's capabilities and impact.

(newsletter.getdx.com)

Development

The British Navy's Secret Weapon: Institutional Design and Incentives

2025-05-16

The British Navy's Secret Weapon: Institutional Design and Incentives

This article explores the institutional reasons behind the British Navy's exceptional combat effectiveness from the 17th to 19th centuries. It argues that superior technology wasn't the key, but rather a sophisticated system of incentives designed to prevent admirals from shirking combat. High salaries, a strict promotion system, unique battle tactics (like the line of battle and weather gauge), and harsh Articles of War (including the death penalty) ensured high combat motivation and accountability. The rise of steamships altered naval warfare, ultimately leading to reforms of these systems.

(www.lesswrong.com)

Misc institutional design British Navy

Search Engine Adds PDF Indexing: Conquering the Challenges of Text Extraction

2025-05-13

The search engine recently gained the ability to index PDFs, a feat more complex than it seems. PDFs aren't text-based; they're graphical, representing text as glyph coordinates that may be rotated, overlapping, or disordered. This article details improvements to PDFBox's PDFTextStripper class. By statistically analyzing font sizes and line spacing, it more effectively identifies semantic information like headings and paragraphs. This enhances the accuracy and suitability of PDF text extraction, enabling effective indexing of PDF content.

(www.marginalia.nu)

Development PDF indexing

Wings Over Dallas Disaster: A Case Study in Air Show Safety Failures

2025-03-02

Wings Over Dallas Disaster: A Case Study in Air Show Safety Failures

The 2022 Wings Over Dallas air show collision, resulting in six deaths, exposed critical safety failures. Air boss Russell Royce's reliance on visual separation, neglecting established procedural separation techniques, was a key factor. The investigation revealed a deeper problem within the Commemorative Air Force (CAF): a culture accepting risky practices, stemming from reliance on experienced pilots and a lack of formal protocols. The accident spurred reforms by the CAF and the FAA, highlighting the need for a stronger safety culture within the warbird community and improved air show oversight.

(admiralcloudberg.medium.com)

Tech air show safety aviation accident NTSB investigation

Vterm Project Update Log: Continuous Performance and Feature Improvements

2025-09-24

Vterm developer Tom Szilagyi has made numerous recent commits, encompassing performance optimizations, bug fixes, and new features. These updates include GPU performance improvements, fixing a signedness bug, adding new command-line options, and refining character rendering and underline display. The ongoing code improvements enhance Vterm's stability and efficiency.

(git.hq.sig7.se)

Development code updates

Optoelectronic Neural Networks: A Dawn for Post-Moore's Law Computing?

2025-04-10

Optoelectronic Neural Networks: A Dawn for Post-Moore's Law Computing?

This review summarizes the rapid development of optoelectronic neural networks in recent years, from the pioneering work in deep learning to the latest advances in building large-scale neural networks using photonic devices. Researchers have explored various optical computing methods, including coherent nanophotonic circuits, diffractive deep neural networks, and photoelectric multiplication to implement deep learning. These studies have not only achieved breakthroughs in image recognition and StarCraft, but also provide new possibilities for breaking the limitations of Moore's Law and exploring new paths for post-Moore's Law computing.

(www.nature.com)

Tech optoelectronic neural networks post-Moore's law

Ratomic: Mutable Data Structures for Ruby Ractors

2025-03-26

Ratomic: Mutable Data Structures for Ruby Ractors

Ratomic provides mutable data structures for Ruby's Ractors, allowing Ruby code to scale beyond the Global VM Lock (GVL). This early-stage project seeks contributors with Rust and Ruby C extension experience. Ratomic offers Ractor-safe structures like counters, object pools, maps, and queues, designed as class-level constants for sharing among multiple Ractors. The project is licensed under MIT.

(github.com)

Development

Vietnam Freezes 86M Bank Accounts Over Biometric Compliance: A Crypto Conundrum?

2025-09-24

Vietnam Freezes 86M Bank Accounts Over Biometric Compliance: A Crypto Conundrum?

Vietnam has frozen over 86 million bank accounts due to non-compliance with new mandatory biometric identification laws. This drastic measure, aimed at combating AI-driven fraud, has sparked debate over financial inclusion and the potential of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin as an alternative. While the government cites fraud prevention, the move disproportionately impacts foreign residents and inactive accounts, highlighting the tension between security and individual financial freedom in the digital age.

(icobench.com)

Tech

Helium: A Lightweight, Privacy-Focused, Open-Source Chromium Browser

2025-09-25

Helium: A Lightweight, Privacy-Focused, Open-Source Chromium Browser

Helium is a lightweight, privacy-focused, and open-source Chromium browser. It features split-view multitasking, quick link copying, and web app installation, all within a clean and minimal interface. Helium anonymizes Chrome Web Store requests, preventing Google from tracking extension downloads and targeted advertising. Its open-source nature allows for self-hosting of services, and it prioritizes HTTPS, disabling built-in password management and cloud sync by default for enhanced security and user privacy.

(helium.computer)

Development

Agentarium: Open-Source Framework for AI Agent Simulations

2024-12-31

Agentarium: Open-Source Framework for AI Agent Simulations

Agentarium is a powerful open-source Python framework for easily creating and managing simulations populated with AI-powered agents. It offers a flexible and intuitive platform for designing complex, interactive environments where agents can act, learn, and evolve. Key features include advanced agent management, robust interaction management, a checkpoint system for saving and restoring states, synthetic data generation, and an extensible architecture. Environments are configured using YAML files.

(github.com)

AI simulation framework

Frontend DDD Misconceptions: It's Not About Doing DDD in Angular

2025-05-16

Frontend DDD Misconceptions: It's Not About Doing DDD *in* Angular

This article debunks common misconceptions about Domain-Driven Design (DDD) among frontend developers. Many confuse DDD with Angular's modularity or tooling, overlooking DDD's core: understanding the business and designing the system from business needs. The author argues that DDD is a product-wide discipline, not just frontend-specific; the frontend is merely a part of it. The article distinguishes between strategic and tactical DDD, emphasizes the importance of strategic DDD, explains key concepts like bounded contexts and domain events, and concludes that DDD's value lies in complex business scenarios, while blindly applying it can be detrimental.

(www.angularspace.com)

Development

Reverse Engineering VanMoof's E-Shifter: Decoding the Mystery

2025-01-19

Reverse Engineering VanMoof's E-Shifter: Decoding the Mystery

A hacker successfully reverse-engineered the communication protocol of VanMoof's e-bike shifter. Using a logic analyzer and PulseView, they determined a 9600bps data rate and identified the use of Modbus RTU. Analysis of request and response packets revealed the bike sends register read commands, with the shifter returning data. While the exact register meanings remain unclear, this work provides a crucial foundation for building a replacement module to address the shifter's notorious unreliability, a major factor in VanMoof's bankruptcy.

(mikecoats.com)

Hardware e-shifter

Google's Gemini: Billions Invested, Profits Elusive

2025-03-26

Google's Gemini: Billions Invested, Profits Elusive

Google's ambitious Gemini AI application, aiming for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), faces a significant challenge: profitability. Its downloads lag far behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, and the massive R&D costs and energy consumption of generative AI remain hurdles. Google is attempting to monetize Gemini through in-app advertising, while simultaneously facing potential massive revenue losses from antitrust lawsuits. Internal anxieties about workload and future prospects are also prevalent. Despite expanding functionalities, accuracy issues persist, as exemplified by a recent ad miscalculating global Gouda cheese consumption. Google is cautiously navigating Gemini's development, aiming to avoid past missteps and maintain its leading position in the AI race.

(www.wired.com)

Tech

Oracle's JavaScript Trademark Dispute: A Protracted Legal Battle

2025-02-06

Oracle's JavaScript Trademark Dispute: A Protracted Legal Battle

A community effort led by Deno Land CEO Ryan Dahl is challenging Oracle's ownership of the "JavaScript" trademark, sparking controversy. Oracle is accused of submitting false materials in its trademark renewal application and attempting to delay legal proceedings. The core of the dispute lies in whether JavaScript has become a generic term and whether Oracle has abandoned the trademark. Oracle counters that it has legitimate grounds and submits additional evidence. This legal battle reflects the strict protection of trademarks by tech giants and the efforts of the open-source community to secure fair use.

(www.theregister.com)

Development trademark dispute

EU MEPs Use Faraday Bags in Hungary Amid Spying Concerns

2025-04-18

EU MEPs Use Faraday Bags in Hungary Amid Spying Concerns

A delegation of EU lawmakers visiting Hungary is using Faraday bags to protect their devices from potential surveillance, highlighting deep concerns over the country's human rights record and alleged use of spyware against opposition figures, journalists, and civil society. Previous reports have detailed Hungarian intelligence agencies allegedly spying on EU officials. The incident underscores the strained relationship between Hungary and the EU, fueled by ongoing disputes over democratic backsliding and rule of law issues.

(www.politico.eu)

Misc

Classicide: The Deliberate Destruction of a Social Class

2025-05-31

Sociologist Michael Mann's concept of 'classicide' describes the deliberate and systematic destruction of a social class through persecution and violence. Unlike genocide, which targets a group based on ethnicity, classicide targets a group defined by its social status, and unlike politicide, it's not concerned with political activity. The article cites examples like the Soviet Union's dekulakization policy, the Cambodian genocide, and the persecution of landlords and wealthy peasants during China's land reform as instances of classicide. These are presented as perversions of socialist democratic theory, similar to how ethnic cleansing is a perversion of nationalist democratic theory.

(en.wikipedia.org)

Misc classicide

Microsoft Teams to Block Meeting Screenshots for Enhanced Security

2025-05-10

Microsoft Teams to Block Meeting Screenshots for Enhanced Security

Microsoft is rolling out a new Teams feature in July 2025 to prevent users from capturing screenshots of sensitive information shared during meetings. This functionality will be available on Windows and Mac desktops, and iOS and Android mobile apps. Unsupported platforms will default to audio-only mode. While screenshots are blocked, users could still capture sensitive information by taking photos. This mirrors a recent similar feature introduced by Meta for WhatsApp. Microsoft also plans to release additional Teams features, including audio summaries of meeting transcripts.

(www.bleepingcomputer.com)

Tech Screenshot Prevention

Over-engineered Tiny Book: AI, Plotter, 3D Printer, and Love

2025-02-14

Over-engineered Tiny Book: AI, Plotter, 3D Printer, and Love

This post details the author's journey creating a tiny handmade book for his wife, packed with memories and inside jokes. He leveraged AI (Midjourney) for illustrations, a pen plotter for printing, and a 3D printer for the binding. The process was fraught with challenges: controlling AI art styles, vectorizing images, choosing the right pen for the plotter, selecting suitable paper, and mastering bookbinding techniques. Despite setbacks and a tight timeline (due to secrecy!), the result was a deeply personal and cherished gift. The project showcases a creative blend of technology and craftsmanship.

(muffinman.io)

Misc handmade book

Resurrecting the Dead: Running Android Apps on Unsupported Windows Versions with Project Astoria

2025-06-01

Resurrecting the Dead: Running Android Apps on Unsupported Windows Versions with Project Astoria

This post details how to run Project Astoria, Microsoft's defunct Android app bridging solution, on various unsupported Windows versions, from Windows Desktop to the Anniversary Update and beyond. By cleverly utilizing files and registry entries from old Windows 10 Mobile builds and overcoming the 'time bomb' issue of expired builds, the author successfully gets Android apps running. The article thoroughly outlines each step, including copying files, importing registry keys, configuring services, and deploying APKs using a patched WConnectAgent tool. The author concludes by successfully running Android CPU-Z on Windows 10.

(trungnt2910.com)

Development

The Friendship Recession: A Cultural Crisis and How to Combat It

2025-04-26

The Friendship Recession: A Cultural Crisis and How to Combat It

The US is experiencing a 'Friendship Recession,' with a dramatic decline in the number of close friendships among adults. This isn't solely due to structural factors like suburban sprawl and economic pressures; a deeper cultural shift is at play. Work has become a dominant social identity, family is prioritized over friendships, and online interactions replace in-person connections. The article explores the neuropsychological mechanisms behind this shift and proposes solutions: proactively creating opportunities for friendship formation (e.g., shared novel experiences) and maintaining friendships through structured activities. Ultimately, it argues that reversing this trend requires both structural changes and individual effort.

(www.happiness.hks.harvard.edu)

Misc Social Culture

Pearson Education Giant Suffers Massive Data Breach

2025-05-09

Pearson Education Giant Suffers Massive Data Breach

Global education giant Pearson experienced a significant cyberattack resulting in the theft of a large amount of corporate data and customer information. Attackers exploited an exposed GitLab Personal Access Token (PAT) to breach Pearson's developer environment, gaining access to credentials for cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Snowflake. This allowed them to steal terabytes of data, including customer information, financial data, and source code. While Pearson claims the stolen data was mostly "legacy data," they refuse to provide specifics, raising concerns. The incident highlights the critical need to secure .git/config files and avoid embedding credentials in remote URLs.

(www.bleepingcomputer.com)

Tech

A5: A Global, Millimeter-Accurate Geospatial Index

2025-05-13

A5: A Global, Millimeter-Accurate Geospatial Index

A5 is a geospatial index partitioning the world into pentagonal cells at 32 resolution levels, with the smallest cell under 30mm² and near-equal area across levels. It simplifies spatial data representation and analysis, enabling calculations of correlations between variables (e.g., elevation and crop yield) and aggregation of point data to understand spatial distribution (e.g., holiday rental density). Implemented in TypeScript, A5 is open-source under the Apache 2.0 license. Compared to other DGGS systems, A5 boasts uniform cell sizes, extremely high resolution (30mm²), and minimal global cell area distortion. This stems from its unique pentagonal tiling of a dodecahedron, minimizing geometric distortion during projection.

(github.com)

Tech Geospatial Index

Cybersecurity Terminology Sparks Debate

2025-04-27

Cybersecurity Terminology Sparks Debate

An article about a cybersecurity incident sparked a debate over the use of the word "owned." Some argue that the term is childish, reflecting the emotionally stunted nature of internet culture, and connect it to the current political climate. Others contend that within the industry, "owned," as shorthand for "gotten into," is common professional jargon, unrelated to age. The controversy highlights differing interpretations of internet slang and professional terminology across groups.

(tech.slashdot.org)

Tech internet slang professional jargon

$2.5M Gamble Turns into $70M in Under an Hour: Inside the Market's Biggest Mystery

2025-04-12

$2.5M Gamble Turns into $70M in Under an Hour: Inside the Market's Biggest Mystery

On April 9th, 2025, a trader risked $2.5 million on SPY call options, netting over $70 million in under an hour. The trade expertly predicted the market's surge following Trump's announcement on pausing tariffs, with massive volume preceding the news. The precision and scale of the trade raise serious questions about insider trading, as the trader seemed to possess advance knowledge of the market movement. This wasn't just a lucky guess; it was a perfectly timed, high-stakes gamble that points towards potential market manipulation.

(data-and-politics.ghost.io)

Tech insider trading options trading market manipulation

Haskell Concurrency: Escape from Thread Hell

2025-04-17

This article recounts the author's journey from embedded systems development in C/C++/Rust to Haskell, highlighting Haskell's advantages in concurrent programming. Haskell uses green threads and event-driven IO, avoiding the complexities of traditional threading models. Through the `async` package and STM (Software Transactional Memory), Haskell offers a cleaner and safer approach to concurrent tasks. Functions like `concurrently`, `race`, and `mapConcurrently`, along with data structures such as `TVar` and `TBQueue`, simplify concurrent operations and prevent common concurrency issues like deadlocks and race conditions.

(bitbashing.io)

Development

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