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Guile Hoot 0.2.0: Building Interactive Web Pages in Scheme

2025-05-28

Guile Hoot 0.2.0, a Scheme to WebAssembly GC compiler, has been released. This release introduces a Foreign Function Interface (FFI), enabling developers to write the majority of web application code directly in Scheme, minimizing reliance on JavaScript. The article demonstrates building interactive web pages using Scheme and the FFI, progressing from a simple "Hello, world!" to an interactive counter and finally a to-do list application. Leveraging Scheme's symbolic manipulation capabilities and SXML, it builds an efficient virtual DOM with a React-like diffing algorithm for updates.

(spritely.institute)

Development

LIGO Detects Most Massive Black Hole Merger Ever, Defying Existing Models

2025-07-14

LIGO Detects Most Massive Black Hole Merger Ever, Defying Existing Models

The LIGO Collaboration announced the detection of GW231123, the most massive black hole merger ever observed. The merger resulted in a black hole over 225 times the mass of our Sun, a finding that challenges existing stellar evolution models. The two progenitor black holes, weighing 137 and 103 solar masses respectively, defied expectations of a stable merger. Scientists hypothesize that these black holes may have formed through prior mergers of smaller black holes. This discovery presents a significant challenge to our understanding of black hole formation and offers invaluable data for future research.

(gizmodo.com)

Tech black hole merger

JWST Captures a Stunning Einstein Ring

2025-04-02

JWST Captures a Stunning Einstein Ring

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a breathtaking image: a nearly perfect 'Einstein Ring'. This ring-like structure is caused by the gravitational lensing effect of a closer elliptical galaxy on a more distant spiral galaxy. Light from the farther galaxy is bent by the gravity of the nearer galaxy, creating an almost perfect circle. This phenomenon verifies Einstein's prediction of general relativity and showcases the power of modern telescopes, allowing us to peer into the depths of the universe and appreciate this cosmic artwork.

(phys.org)

Tech

Explaining Large Language Model Decisions Using Shapley Values

2024-12-28

Large language models (LLMs) offer exciting possibilities for simulating human behavior, but their decision-making processes lack transparency. This paper introduces a novel approach based on Shapley values to interpret LLM behavior and quantify the contribution of each prompt component to the model's output. Through two applications, the study reveals that LLM decisions are susceptible to "token noise," where the model disproportionately reacts to tokens with minimal informative content. This raises concerns about the robustness and generalizability of insights from LLMs in simulating human behavior, highlighting the need for careful prompt engineering and a nuanced understanding of their limitations when used in research.

(arxiv.org)

AI Shapley Values Explainability

Pennybase: A Minimalist Go BaaS Under 1000 Lines

2025-07-04

Pennybase: A Minimalist Go BaaS Under 1000 Lines

Pennybase is a lightweight Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) solution implemented in under 1000 lines of Go code, offering a simplified alternative to Firebase, Supabase, and Pocketbase. It relies solely on the Go standard library, requiring no external dependencies. Core features include file storage (versioned CSV), a REST API (JSON responses), session cookie and Basic Auth authentication, RBAC & ownership-based permissions, real-time updates via SSE, schema validation, and Go template rendering. Data is stored in human-readable CSVs, with updates creating new record versions. A clever in-memory index allows for fast lookups and updates. Permission control uses a simple RBAC model, and custom functionality is possible via hook functions.

(github.com)

Development minimalist backend

Visualizing Wealth: From a Penny to a Nation's GDP

2025-03-21

This article creatively quantifies different wealth levels using everyday items and resource quantities. From a small paperclip to a nation's GDP, each level is vividly described with concrete examples, helping readers intuitively understand the vast differences in wealth. For instance, level 0 corresponds to dollar store items, while level 10 represents the scale of giant tech companies like Meta and Tesla. This article is not only entertaining but also highly educational, providing a deeper understanding of wealth accumulation and distribution.

(taylor.town)

Misc wealth

Nostalgic Internet: We Never Lost the Toxicity, We Just Forgot It

2025-01-12

Nostalgic Internet: We Never Lost the Toxicity, We Just Forgot It

A wave of nostalgia has recently swept the internet, with many yearning for a friendlier, simpler online world of 20 years ago. However, this article argues that this nostalgia overlooks the inherent toxicity and problems that existed even then. It explores the evolution of the internet, how platforms became dominated by large corporations, and the proliferation of hate speech and data extraction. Some view the internet as a failed utopia, while others remain hopeful, advocating for solutions such as reclaiming digital sovereignty and supporting self-organized projects to rebuild a kinder, fairer online space.

(english.elpais.com)

Tech internet nostalgia online culture tech commentary

Lightpanda: A Lightweight Headless Browser for AI and Automation

2025-01-24

Lightpanda: A Lightweight Headless Browser for AI and Automation

Lightpanda is an open-source headless browser designed for AI and automation tasks. Written in Zig, it boasts ultra-low memory footprint and exceptionally fast execution—11x faster and 9x less memory than Chrome. Supporting Javascript execution and partial Web APIs, it's compatible with Playwright and Puppeteer, ideal for AI agents, LLM training, scraping, and testing. Currently in Beta, it already features an HTTP loader, HTML parser, DOM tree, Javascript support (v8), basic DOM APIs, Ajax, XHR API, Fetch API, and DOM dumping.

(github.com)

Development headless browser

Zstandard's --long Mode: A Genome Compression Breakthrough

2025-09-15

Zstandard's --long range match finder significantly improves compression for large files by increasing the search window. Testing on a 2.6Tbp dataset of 661,405 bacterial genomes showed default Zstandard achieving a compression ratio of only 3. Enabling --long mode modestly improved this to 4. However, removing newlines from the FASTA files dramatically boosted the ratio to 31, approaching the performance of specialized DNA compressors, reducing the file size to 80GB. While compression time increased slightly, this efficiency gain represents a valuable optimization for handling large genomic datasets.

(log.bede.im)

Tech genome compression

Google's AI Summaries: A Publisher's Nightmare?

2025-08-30

Google's AI Summaries: A Publisher's Nightmare?

Google's new AI-generated summaries in search results often pull content, diverting traffic away from websites. Publishers face a dilemma: blocking summaries reduces visibility, while allowing them means surrendering content control. While EU and UK investigations are underway, effective workarounds remain scarce. The article outlines several options, including the `max-snippet:0` and `nosnippet` meta tags, and the `data-nosnippet` attribute, but none are perfect. Ultimately, it labels this a classic 'dark pattern' design, heavily disadvantaging publishers, and calls for regulatory intervention.

(www.teruza.com)

Tech dark pattern

Google Cloud's Massive API Outage: A Null Pointer Exception's Ripple Effect

2025-06-14

On June 12th, Google Cloud and Google Workspace products suffered a widespread outage due to a surge of 503 errors in external API requests. The root cause was a new feature in the Service Control system lacking proper error handling and feature flag protection, leading to a null pointer exception that triggered a cascading failure. A policy change containing invalid fields activated this flaw, resulting in a global service disruption. Google swiftly mitigated the issue, but some regions (like us-central-1) experienced prolonged recovery due to infrastructure overload. The incident highlighted issues in Google's error handling, feature flag usage, system architecture modularity, and monitoring and communication, prompting a commitment to implement comprehensive improvements to prevent recurrence.

(status.cloud.google.com)

Tech API Outage Service Disruption

IBM & Family Keyboard Timeline: 111 Key Events

2025-03-30

IBM & Family Keyboard Timeline: 111 Key Events

This illustrated timeline charts key events in the history of IBM, Lexmark, Unicomp, Lenovo, and Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions keyboards. It covers significant releases and discontinuations, corporate history (founding, divestitures, OEM changes), and patents. Host devices like PCs, terminals, consoles, and typewriters are also included due to their impact on keyboard development. The full timeline details 111 events.

(sharktastica.co.uk)

Hardware IBM keyboards keyboard history

Train Photography with Line Scan Cameras: A Deep Dive into Image Processing

2025-08-24

Train Photography with Line Scan Cameras: A Deep Dive into Image Processing

This article details the image processing pipeline used by the author to capture stunning train photographs with a line scan camera. Starting with the principle of operation, the author meticulously walks through each step: region of interest detection, speed estimation, resampling, demosaicing, vertical stripe removal, denoising, and skew correction. The author also shares their experiences using AI for coding, comparing the strengths and weaknesses, and showcases the work of other line scan photographers. This is a fascinating technical journey showcasing perseverance and creativity in the world of technology and image processing.

(daniel.lawrence.lu)

Tech line scan camera AI assisted coding

Rust Foundation's 2025 Tech Report: Security, Scalability, and Developer Friendliness

2025-08-11

Rust Foundation's 2025 Tech Report: Security, Scalability, and Developer Friendliness

The Rust Foundation released its 2025 Technology Report, summarizing a year of significant advancements in supporting the Rust programming language and ecosystem. The report highlights the Foundation's focused work on securing the Rust supply chain, improving critical infrastructure, enhancing Rust's readiness for safety-critical use, and fostering interoperability with C++. Key achievements include: the full launch of Trusted Publishing on crates.io; major progress on TUF-based crate signing infrastructure; integration of the Ferrocene Language Specification into the Rust Project; a 75% reduction in CI infrastructure costs; expansion of the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium; and direct engagement with ISO C++ standards bodies. These efforts ensure Rust remains secure, reliable, and ready for the demands of modern software development.

(rustfoundation.org)

Development Technology Report

CedarDB: How B-Trees Still Shine in Modern Hardware with Optimistic Lock Coupling

2025-03-07

CedarDB: How B-Trees Still Shine in Modern Hardware with Optimistic Lock Coupling

B-trees, a data structure over 50 years old, are surprisingly efficient in modern hardware. CedarDB leverages B-trees for its data storage, showcasing their excellent cache efficiency and scalability in highly parallel environments. With a high fan-out, even a massive dataset like ClickBench (100M rows) requires only three levels of access, perfectly utilizing CPU cache hierarchies. Optimistic lock coupling minimizes contention, resulting in near lock-free read and write operations, performing almost as well as unsynchronized lookups. This article demonstrates how B-trees, through adaptation and optimization, remain a powerful and relevant data structure in modern databases.

(cedardb.com)

Development B-trees concurrency control

Rao: AI-Powered Code Editor for RStudio

2025-07-22

Rao is an AI-powered code editor designed to accelerate your RStudio workflow. It reads and analyzes your project files to understand your data before generating targeted code that integrates seamlessly with your existing project structure. Rao generates and runs R scripts and R Markdown files, edits existing code to fix errors and improve analysis, and interprets various code outputs (from console results to data visualizations and error messages), suggesting next steps and helping you understand the implications of your code's results. A free 7-day trial (no credit card required) is available.

(www.lotas.ai)

Development

A 16th-Century Anamorphosis: 3D Simulation of Mary Queen of Scots' Ominous Portrait

2025-05-20

A 16th-Century Anamorphosis: 3D Simulation of Mary Queen of Scots' Ominous Portrait

While researching logarithms, the author stumbled upon a 1580 anamorphosis portrait of Mary Queen of Scots. The painting uses perspective trickery; viewing it from different angles transforms the image from Mary's face into a skull. Using WebGL, the author reconstructed the painting in 3D from two differently-angled images, creating an interactive simulation that showcases this visual transformation. Created years before her execution, the painting's symbolism is intriguing.

(www.charlespetzold.com)

Misc Anamorphosis Historical Image

Citizen Scientists Unearth Thousands of New Eclipsing Binary Stars

2025-07-07

Citizen Scientists Unearth Thousands of New Eclipsing Binary Stars

NASA announced that citizen scientists, participating in the Eclipsing Binary Patrol project, have discovered thousands of previously unknown eclipsing binary star systems using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). These systems, consisting of two stars orbiting each other and periodically blocking each other's light, are crucial for studying star formation and evolution and may aid in the search for exoplanets orbiting them. The project, combining machine learning with human verification, demonstrates the immense potential of human-computer collaboration in astronomical research.

(www.spokesman.com)

Tech eclipsing binaries

The Ephemeral Web: Preserving Your Digital Legacy

2025-02-25

The Ephemeral Web: Preserving Your Digital Legacy

Online content is fleeting. This article highlights the importance of preserving digital information and advocates for using plain text Markdown files as a robust solution. Markdown's readability, cross-platform compatibility, and long-term accessibility are key advantages. The author shares personal strategies, including using Obsidian for note-taking, static site generators for blogging, and automated Python scripts for content conversion. Regular backups and data downloads are emphasized, alongside a call for better social media data export tools.

(p.migdal.pl)

Misc

Boeing 737 MAX: A Cost-Cutting Catastrophe

2025-05-13

Boeing 737 MAX: A Cost-Cutting Catastrophe

The Boeing 737 MAX's disastrous saga stems from cost-cutting decisions that prioritized profits over safety. To save money, Boeing reused an old airframe and fitted larger engines, creating an imbalance. A flawed automated system designed to correct this imbalance led to two fatal crashes, grounding the entire fleet. Subsequent safety issues and legal battles, including massive fines and a guilty plea to criminal fraud, ensued. Even after recertification, new problems continue to emerge, benefiting rival Airbus whose A320 series is poised to surpass the 737 as the best-selling plane ever. The 737 MAX's struggles serve as a cautionary tale of corporate greed and negligence.

(www.jalopnik.com)

Tech Boeing 737 MAX Corporate Responsibility

Dillo Browser: 25 Years of History, a Resurrection Story

2024-12-16

The Dillo web browser, born in 1999, has weathered 25 years of development. It has stalled several times but persevered. Initially led by Jorge Arellano Cid, it went through major GTK and FLTK phases, with key developers changing hands and the project experiencing ups and downs. In 2024, Rodrigo Arias Mallo took over, and with community help, released version 3.1.1, bringing this veteran browser back into the spotlight. Dillo's story exemplifies the spirit of open source and is a legendary tale of technological legacy and innovation.

(dillo-browser.github.io)

Development open-source browser

Gaussian Quadrature: A Powerful Numerical Integration Technique

2025-06-08

This blog post explores Gaussian quadrature, a powerful numerical integration technique, specifically Chebyshev-Gauss quadrature. It approximates definite integrals by evaluating the function at specific nodes and summing the weighted values. Compared to traditional methods, it achieves higher accuracy with fewer nodes, particularly for integrals over the interval [-1,1]. The post explains how to adapt general intervals and function forms to fit the Chebyshev-Gauss quadrature, demonstrating its application and advantages with an example. The technique found application in estimating sea level change rates.

(rohangautam.github.io)

Development numerical integration Gaussian quadrature Chebyshev polynomials

Web Design: From Templates to Expression

2025-01-31

Web Design: From Templates to Expression

In 2010, a custom website was a designer's digital calling card. Developers harnessed HTML5's capabilities to create imaginative websites. But the rise of templates and automation led to homogenization. Today, browser technology has advanced significantly, yet many designers remain stuck in old paradigms. This article calls on designers to utilize new CSS features like HSL and OKLCH color spaces, and container queries, to break free from template limitations and create more expressive websites. Websites should be more than just information containers; they're a space for creative expression.

(www.figma.com)

Design front-end development creative expression

GPT-5's Shockingly Good Search Capabilities: Meet My Research Goblin

2025-09-08

GPT-5's Shockingly Good Search Capabilities: Meet My Research Goblin

The author discovered OpenAI's GPT-5, combined with Bing's search capabilities, possesses surprisingly powerful search functionalities. It tackles complex tasks, performs in-depth internet searches, and provides answers, earning the nickname "Research Goblin." Multiple examples demonstrate GPT-5's prowess: identifying buildings, investigating Starbucks cake pop availability, finding Cambridge University's official name, and more. GPT-5 even autonomously performs multi-step searches, analyzes results, and suggests follow-up actions, such as generating emails to request information. The author concludes that GPT-5's search capabilities surpass manual searches in efficiency, particularly on mobile devices.

(simonwillison.net)

AI

Meta Fights Spam at Scale with Haskell

2024-12-22

Meta Fights Spam at Scale with Haskell

Meta's Sigma system, a crucial weapon in the fight against spam and malware, underwent a two-year overhaul. The system was rewritten in Haskell, a less common choice for large-scale production systems, achieving over one million requests per second. The shift to Haskell leveraged its pure functional and strongly typed nature, and the Haxl framework enabled automatic batching and concurrent data fetching. Performance improvements of 20-30% over the previous FXL-based system were observed. The project also involved significant contributions back to the GHC compiler, resolving several bugs.

(engineering.fb.com)

Development Spam Filtering

The Fatal Flaw of "The Art of Multiprocessor Programming": Ignoring the futex

2025-08-19

This article critiques "The Art of Multiprocessor Programming," a well-regarded textbook, for its omission of the futex, a crucial modern concurrency technique. The author argues that the book's lack of coverage renders its content outdated and impractical. Futexes, enabling efficient mutex implementations, significantly improve concurrency performance and are widely used in operating systems like Linux, Windows, and macOS. The article details futex functionality and provides code examples demonstrating high-performance mutex construction using futexes, including spinlocks, non-recursive mutexes, and recursive mutexes. The author concludes that the book's failure to cover essential technologies like futexes makes it insufficient for modern concurrency programming needs.

(h4x0r.org)

Development concurrency programming multiprocessor programming

NASA Visualizes Global Internal Ocean Tides

2024-12-13

NASA Visualizes Global Internal Ocean Tides

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has released a stunning visualization of global internal ocean tides, created using satellite altimetry data and simulations. The animation showcases how internal tidal waves, generated by the interaction of underwater topography, such as the Hawaiian Ridge, and tidal energy, propagate across the ocean. While these waves have a subtle surface expression, they play a significant role in ocean mixing and circulation. The visualization also highlights other regions with strong internal tidal activity, including Tahiti, the Southwest Indian Ocean, and the Luzon Strait, offering new insights into ocean dynamics.

(svs.gsfc.nasa.gov)

Tech ocean tides data visualization

Trump Admin Layoffs Devastate US Forest Service

2025-02-27

Trump Admin Layoffs Devastate US Forest Service

The US Forest Service suffered massive layoffs under the Trump administration, with approximately 3,400 employees let go, including many professionals crucial to climate change and disaster response. This has sparked concerns about public lands management and environmental protection, highlighting the agency's long-standing funding shortages and understaffing. The loss of experienced personnel severely impacts forest maintenance, wildfire prevention, and community recovery efforts. Unions have filed lawsuits challenging the legality of the layoffs.

(grist.org)

Tech US Forest Service

Training AI Might Not Need Massive Data Centers

2025-01-14

Training AI Might Not Need Massive Data Centers

Tech giants are vying to build massive data centers with tens or even hundreds of thousands of GPUs to train AI models. However, an article in *The Economist* suggests this trend may soon change. Future AI model training might not require massive hardware infrastructure, potentially eliminating the need for dedicated hardware altogether. Advances in distributed computing and new algorithms will allow training complex AI models on regular computer networks, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for AI research and promoting wider adoption of AI technology.

(www.economist.com)

AI AI training distributed computing

UK Creative Industry Fights Back Against AI Copyright Loopholes

2025-05-12

UK Creative Industry Fights Back Against AI Copyright Loopholes

Over 400 leading UK media and arts professionals have penned a letter to the Prime Minister opposing an amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill. This amendment would allow AI models to use copyrighted works, causing concerns about widespread copyright infringement. While an opt-out is proposed, the group, including Paul McCartney, Elton John, Coldplay, and numerous media organizations, argues it's insufficient. They demand transparency, forcing AI companies to disclose copyrighted works used in training, protecting creators and fostering a vibrant UK creative industry. The letter highlights the economic impact and the need to prevent years of potential copyright theft.

(www.theregister.com)

Tech Data Bill UK Creative Industries

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