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Google Improves Widget Discoverability on Google Play

2025-03-04

Google Improves Widget Discoverability on Google Play

Google is updating Google Play to improve the discoverability of app widgets. The update includes a new widget search filter, widget badges on app detail pages, and a curated editorial page showcasing excellent widgets. Product manager Yinka Taiwo-Peters notes this addresses challenges with widget discoverability and user understanding, emphasizing the importance of user adoption for developers. These improvements are "coming soon."

(www.theverge.com)

Development App Widgets

GNU Free Documentation License Explained: A License for Free Documents

2025-05-18

The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) ensures the freedom to copy, distribute, and modify documents, commercially or non-commercially. Employing a 'copyleft' approach, it guarantees derivative works remain free. The GFDL details copyright notices, invariant sections, cover texts, and more, balancing author rights with free document distribution. It covers bulk copying, modifications, combining documents, translation, and violation handling. While designed for free software documentation, the GFDL applies to any textual work.

(dezyne.org)

Development Free Documentation License

Utah Bill Demands Transparency for AI-Generated Police Reports

2025-02-22

Utah Bill Demands Transparency for AI-Generated Police Reports

A Utah Senate bill (S.B. 180) would mandate disclosure when police reports are generated by AI. The bill requires police departments to establish AI usage policies, including disclaimers on AI-generated content and officer certification of accuracy. This follows the rapid spread of Axon's Draft One, which uses bodycam audio to create reports. Critics warn of AI's potential to misinterpret language, provide plausible deniability for officers, and compromise justice. King County, Washington prosecutors have already instructed officers to avoid using the technology. While a step towards regulation, stronger oversight is needed to address the concerns surrounding AI in law enforcement.

(www.eff.org)

Tech AI in law enforcement police reports

TubePen: Streamlining Video Highlighting and Annotation

2025-01-10

Tired of hunting for key information in lengthy videos? TubePen simplifies the process! This tool lets you easily highlight and annotate important segments of videos and share them with others. Think of it as a dedicated notepad for your videos, streamlining your learning, work, or entertainment. No more struggling with screenshots or timestamp notes; TubePen offers a clean interface and powerful features, letting you focus on the video content itself.

(www.tubepen.com)

Development

CES 2025 TVs: More AI Gimmicks Than Real Improvements

2025-01-10

CES 2025 TVs: More AI Gimmicks Than Real Improvements

At CES 2025, TV manufacturers showcased AI-powered smart TVs, but Ars Technica's author expresses disappointment. Many touted AI features, such as LG's AI remote lacking a direct input switching button and Samsung's AI food recognition, prioritize corporate interests over user needs. Google TV's Gemini-enhanced Assistant also raises questions about practicality and potential subscription fees. The author argues that the industry's focus on software and data collection overshadows hardware improvements and user experience, forcing consumers to pay for largely useless features. Ultimately, many consumers simply desire TVs with superior picture and sound quality, a goal increasingly difficult to achieve without navigating through excessive gimmicks.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech Smart TVs

US and Canada Video Game Workers Form Industry-Wide Union

2025-03-19

US and Canada Video Game Workers Form Industry-Wide Union

A landmark industry-wide union for video game workers in the US and Canada, the United Videogame Workers-CWA (UVW-CWA), has officially launched. Aiming to unite artists, writers, designers, QA testers, programmers, freelancers, and more, the union seeks to empower workers regardless of studio or employment status. Debuting at GDC's "Video Game Labor at a Crossroads" panel, the UVW-CWA will circulate a petition to garner support and highlight the recent wave of industry layoffs—a significant issue, given that 10% of developers lost their jobs in 2024. The union operates on a direct-join model, allowing workers to bypass traditional unionization processes. While its industry-wide adoption and recognition by major publishers remain uncertain, it represents a significant step in the ongoing struggle between game industry workers and corporate entities.

(www.engadget.com)

Game union

Level Up Your Digital Hygiene: A Practical Guide to Online Security

2025-03-19

Level Up Your Digital Hygiene: A Practical Guide to Online Security

This comprehensive guide outlines practical steps to enhance your digital security, covering everything from essential password managers and hardware security keys to more advanced techniques like disk encryption, VPNs, and network monitoring. The author stresses the importance of avoiding 'smart' devices, utilizing privacy-focused browsers and search engines, and protecting personal information. They share their preferred tools and strategies, including 1Password, YubiKey, Signal, and Brave browser, aiming to empower readers to build a more secure digital life and mitigate risks of data breaches and cyberattacks.

(karpathy.bearblog.dev)

Tech security tools

arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaboration

2025-02-20

arXivLabs is a framework enabling collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on the website. Individuals and organizations involved embrace arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only partners with those who share them. Got an idea for a project that will benefit the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

(arxiv.org)

Development

Building the World's Best Product Engineering Org: Six Key Elements

2025-01-12

This article is a transcript of James Shore's keynote presentation at the Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo conference, exploring how to build a world-class product engineering organization. He proposes six key elements: People, Internal Quality, Lovability, Visibility, Agility, and Profitability. The article details how to achieve these goals through improved hiring strategies, enhanced code quality, fast feedback loops, agile methodologies, and collaboration with other departments, emphasizing the importance of continuous improvement. Through case studies and practical experience, the author shares valuable insights, providing guidance for building efficient and excellent product engineering teams.

(www.jamesshore.com)

Development product engineering

AI Inference Costs: Not as Expensive as You Think

2025-08-28

AI Inference Costs: Not as Expensive as You Think

This article challenges the narrative that AI inference is prohibitively expensive and unsustainable. By calculating the costs of running AI inference on H100 GPUs, the author demonstrates that input processing is incredibly cheap (fractions of a cent per million tokens), while output generation is significantly more expensive (dollars per million tokens). This cost asymmetry explains the profitability of some applications (like coding assistants) and the high cost of others (like video generation). The author argues that this cost disparity is often overlooked, leading to an overestimation of AI inference costs, which may benefit incumbents and stifle competition and innovation.

(martinalderson.com)

AI AI inference cost model economics

Improving Sega CD PCM Audio Quality with Low-Pass Filtering

2025-02-17

This article delves into the reasons behind the poor audio quality of the Sega CD's PCM sound chip and proposes a solution: using low-pass filters to enhance audio quality. It explores differences in audio hardware across various Genesis models and the role of low-pass filters in audio processing. Through experiments, the author compares the effectiveness of different types of low-pass filters (Butterworth IIR filters) and provides code examples. Ultimately, the author successfully improves the sound quality of Sega CD PCM audio and summarizes important considerations when implementing IIR filters in software.

(jsgroth.dev)

Game Sega CD Low-Pass Filter

Silicon Valley Execs Become US Army Lieutenant Colonels: The Rise of the Tech-Military Complex

2025-06-20

Silicon Valley Execs Become US Army Lieutenant Colonels: The Rise of the Tech-Military Complex

Four senior executives from Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI have been appointed lieutenant colonels in a newly formed US Army unit, the "Executive Innovation Corps." This initiative aims to integrate cutting-edge tech expertise into military operations. The move highlights the increasingly close relationship between Big Tech and the military, raising questions about the implications for warfare and society. Palantir's significant government contracts and dominance in data analytics are particularly noteworthy in this context.

(thegrayzone.com)

Tech

Arcan OS: A Revolutionary Approach to Operating System Design

2024-12-27

Arcan OS: A Revolutionary Approach to Operating System Design

Arcan is a single-user, user-facing, networked overlay operating system designed to provide users with complete autonomy over their computing devices. Independent of Linux or BSD kernels, it operates as a 'vagabond' across various ecosystems. Arcan utilizes a shared memory interface (SHMIF) and the A12 network protocol for efficient inter-process communication, employing 'frameservers' to isolate security-sensitive tasks. Its programmable interface ALT, Appl application model, and diverse user interfaces (Console, Durden, Safespaces) create a flexible and powerful system. Arcan aims to counter the network lock-in and security threats posed by large platforms, enhancing user autonomy and security.

(arcan-fe.com)

Development autonomy

Jiga: Remote-First Full-Stack Engineer Wanted (Build the 'npm' for Mechanical Engineers)

2025-02-18

Jiga: Remote-First Full-Stack Engineer Wanted (Build the 'npm' for Mechanical Engineers)

Jiga, a fully remote company, is on a mission to accelerate physical product development. They're looking for a full-stack engineer with 3+ years of experience building web applications using React, NodeJS, and MongoDB, along with AWS/EC2/ECS experience. Jiga boasts a no-BS culture focused on performance, trust, and minimal meetings. Benefits include flexible remote work, stock options, and annual team offsites. If you're passionate about building both UIs and APIs, thrive in a fast-paced environment, and own your work, apply!

(www.ycombinator.com)

Development Remote work Full-stack engineer Physical product development

Founders Over 40: Redefining Success

2024-12-15

Founders Over 40: Redefining Success

This article explores the experiences of founders over 40, highlighting a shift in their definition of success compared to their younger counterparts. With increased family responsibilities and a longer life perspective, these founders prioritize work-life balance, seeking more stable and predictable income. Their accumulated wisdom allows for quicker pattern recognition, more pragmatic decision-making, and a willingness to explore alternative paths like acquisitions or joining larger organizations. This doesn't signify a lack of ambition, but rather a clearer understanding of the costs (time, energy, personal life) associated with different paths, and a more effective leveraging of their accumulated skills and experience.

(justinjackson.ca)

Startup founders over 40 redefining success

Jupyter Notebooks: E2E Testing and Documentation in One

2024-12-18

While developing a quantum computing library, the author leveraged Jupyter Notebooks as both user guides and end-to-end tests. By reading environment variables (like SERVER_URL) within the notebooks, they achieved parameterization, allowing execution by users and automated CI/CD pipelines. Two methods for running notebooks were explored: nbclient for simplicity, and nbconvert/jq for more control but increased complexity. The author opted for nbclient's ease of use, effectively integrating documentation maintenance and code testing, ensuring the integrity of both with every merge request.

(rakhim.exotext.com)

Development E2E testing

macOS Tahoe's Reversed Finder Icon Sparks Debate

2025-06-10

macOS Tahoe's Reversed Finder Icon Sparks Debate

The macOS Tahoe update, unveiled at WWDC2024, features a reversed Finder icon, sparking controversy. The author argues this breaks with long-standing design tradition, appearing jarring and unnecessary. They point out the Finder icon's dark side has consistently been on the left since System 7.5.3 in 1996. While Apple likely aimed for consistency with the new Liquid Glass interface, the author believes it disrupts a classic design, filing feedback accordingly. They even redesigned the icon using Apple's Icon Composer app, demonstrating its compatibility with Liquid Glass while maintaining the traditional layout.

(512pixels.net)

Design

AI-Powered Tool Revolutionizes Protein Design

2024-12-31

AI-Powered Tool Revolutionizes Protein Design

Scientists have developed an AI-powered tool for designing novel proteins. This tool can predict protein 3D structures and design proteins with desired functions, promising to accelerate drug discovery, biomaterial development, and sustainable agricultural technologies. Researchers trained machine learning algorithms to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences. The tool's accuracy and efficiency surpass traditional methods, offering revolutionary possibilities for biomedicine and materials science.

(dogagingproject.org)

AI

Nintendo's Virtual Game Cards: Sharing Digital Switch Games Made Easy

2025-03-27

Nintendo's Virtual Game Cards: Sharing Digital Switch Games Made Easy

Nintendo unveiled Virtual Game Cards for the Nintendo Switch, launching late April. This new feature allows sharing digital games across multiple Switch consoles. Purchased digital games are stored as Virtual Game Cards, virtually loaded and ejected like physical cartridges. A single game can be played on up to two Switches simultaneously, and family sharing is enabled via local wireless, with a two-week lending period. This enhances digital game flexibility and convenience.

(venturebeat.com)

Game Nintendo Switch Virtual Game Cards Digital Game Sharing

A 50-Year-Old Bug in C's File I/O: Unraveling a Legacy Mystery

2024-12-26

While improving a DOS emulator, a developer stumbled upon a seemingly trivial bug in file I/O: appending text to a file using the `echo` command produced unexpected results. Debugging revealed a flaw in how C runtime libraries handle switching between reading and writing, a flaw tracing back to the 1970s and even earlier UNIX systems. The article delves into the historical context, from early K&R C to modern C standards, exploring implementation differences across various UNIX versions and C compilers. The root cause is identified as limitations in early C libraries' handling of update mode, with variations in how different operating systems and compilers addressed these limitations. The author concludes that even today, for portable C code, an explicit `fseek` call is necessary when switching between reading and writing a file.

(www.os2museum.com)

Development file I/O legacy bug

Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering on a Playdate: A Tale of Optimization

2025-02-22

This post details the author's attempt to implement surface-stable fractal dithering on the Playdate handheld, a device with a 1-bit monochrome screen. The process proved challenging due to the limited hardware capabilities. The author meticulously documents the journey, including implementing perspective-correct texture mapping, displaying brightness on a 1-bit screen, and optimizing the fractal dithering algorithm itself. Through numerous optimizations, including algorithmic simplification and switching from a half-space rasterizer to a scanline rasterizer, the author achieves a frame rate of 20-22 FPS, but acknowledges further improvements are possible.

(aras-p.info)

Game Rasterization

Scale Beats All: AI Agent Achieves SOTA on swebench-verified

2025-01-08

Scale Beats All: AI Agent Achieves SOTA on swebench-verified

CodeStory achieved state-of-the-art results on the swebench-verified benchmark, resolving 62.2% of issues by leveraging massive test-time inference. They used Sonnet 3.5 LLM and a simple toolset, abandoning an initial MCTS framework in favor of scaling. By running numerous agents across multiple VMs and Anthropic accounts, they demonstrated the power of scale in solving complex software engineering problems, even for small teams. This reinforces the 'bitter lesson' that scale trumps all, offering a new paradigm for AI in software engineering.

(aide.dev)

Development

Retro PC Emulation on Raspberry Pi Pico: Pico-286

2025-08-19

Retro PC Emulation on Raspberry Pi Pico: Pico-286

The Pico-286 project is a remarkable feat of emulation, bringing the classic PC experience of the late 80s and early 90s to the Raspberry Pi Pico. This lightweight project offers a fun way to explore retro computing and learn about low-level system emulation. It supports various Intel CPUs (up to 286), a range of classic peripherals (sound cards, graphics cards), and various graphics and text modes. Pico-286 even emulates the artifact colors produced by early displays! This open-source project is cross-platform and runs on Raspberry Pi Pico, Windows, and Linux.

(github.com)

Development

Evil Combinatorialist and 16 Wines: An Information Theory Puzzle

2025-08-21

Trapped in an evil combinatorialist's wine cellar, you're presented with 16 unlabeled bottles of wine, each from a different year between 0 and 15, and four binary measuring devices. Each device measures one bottle, outputting 0 or 1. The goal is to identify the year of each wine with 50 or fewer measurements. While it seems to require 64 measurements, exploiting the uniqueness of the years, a divide-and-conquer approach, starting by measuring most bottles with one device, dividing them into groups based on the result, and recursively applying the method, can solve it within 49 measurements. This puzzle cleverly combines information theory and combinatorics, showcasing how to leverage information asymmetry to reduce computational effort.

(chriskw.xyz)

Misc Combinatorics Puzzle

Tesla's European Sales Plummet Amidst Competition and Musk's Political Controversies

2025-03-02

Tesla's European Sales Plummet Amidst Competition and Musk's Political Controversies

Tesla's European sales plummeted by 45% year-over-year in January 2025, while overall EV sales in the region increased by 37%. Several factors contributed to this decline: the delayed launch of a cheaper Tesla model, an upcoming Model Y refresh causing buyer hesitation, intensifying competition from Chinese automakers like SAIC Motor (whose sales surpassed Tesla's by a factor of two), and significant public backlash against Elon Musk's controversial political activities. While the impact of public opinion on purchasing decisions is debated, Musk's actions undoubtedly exacerbated Tesla's sales slump in Europe.

(www.npr.org)

Tech European Market

Improved Meetings, Lost Job: A Tale of Office Politics

2025-02-17

Improved Meetings, Lost Job: A Tale of Office Politics

Palmer, an IT engineer, couldn't stand his team's inefficient weekly meetings. He bravely suggested improvements: shortening the meeting to 30 minutes, limiting speaking time to two minutes, and adding one-on-one meetings. While his suggestions were well-received by the team and improved the meetings, he was subsequently rated 'Needs Improvement' in his annual review and accused of lacking teamwork. Palmer leveraged his skills to secure three job offers, and the team he left was reorganized a year later due to poor performance. This story highlights the complexities of office politics, where even doing the right thing can have unforeseen consequences.

(www.theregister.com)

Misc office politics meeting efficiency

TikTok Sidesteps US Ban: Encourages Android Users to Sideload APK

2025-02-11

TikTok Sidesteps US Ban: Encourages Android Users to Sideload APK

Facing potential US bans, TikTok has implemented a workaround. While President Trump's executive order temporarily halted a ban, TikTok is encouraging Android users to download the app directly from its website as an APK file, bypassing the Google Play Store. This allows TikTok to temporarily circumvent app store bans, though a similar option isn't yet available for iOS users.

(techcrunch.com)

Tech APK Sideloading

Tencent's Hunyuan3D 2.0: High-Resolution 3D Asset Generation

2025-01-21

Tencent's Hunyuan3D 2.0: High-Resolution 3D Asset Generation

Tencent unveils Hunyuan3D 2.0, a cutting-edge large-scale 3D synthesis system generating high-resolution textured 3D assets. Comprising two core components – the Hunyuan3D-DiT shape generation model and the Hunyuan3D-Paint texture synthesis model – it surpasses existing state-of-the-art models in geometry detail, condition alignment, and texture quality. A user-friendly platform, Hunyuan3D-Studio, simplifies manipulation and animation. Inference code and pre-trained models are now open-sourced, accessible via Hugging Face and the official website.

(github.com)

AI 3D generation diffusion models

It's Time to Abandon Chat Interfaces for Human-AI Interaction

2025-03-27

This article critiques the anti-pattern design of chat interfaces in human-AI interaction. The author uses their experience building a chat-based calendar agent as an example, highlighting its inefficiency compared to traditional graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The author argues that for most transactional tasks, the information abstraction layer of a GUI is far more effective, saving time and effort. Chat interfaces are better suited for social interaction, not tasks requiring precise instructions. The future of human-AI interaction should move towards hybrid interfaces, integrating the intelligence of LLMs into GUIs to avoid cumbersome prompt engineering and enhance user experience.

(hello-jp.net)

AI human-AI interaction AI anti-patterns hybrid interfaces

mbake: A Makefile Formatter and Linter After 50 Years!

2025-06-22

mbake: A Makefile Formatter and Linter After 50 Years!

After a 50-year wait (referencing the long history of Makefiles), mbake is finally here! This Makefile formatter and linter not only automatically fixes formatting issues such as indentation, spacing, and line breaks but also intelligently detects `.PHONY` targets and supports custom rules and plugin extensions. It offers a rich command-line interface for formatting, validation, and version management, seamlessly integrating into CI/CD workflows. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, mbake significantly improves Makefile writing efficiency and readability.

(github.com)

Development linter

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