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DSLRoot: A Ghostly Residential Proxy Network with Roots in Russia?

2025-08-26

A Reddit post exposed DSLRoot, a residential proxy network paying US users $250/month to host their equipment. Its history traces back to Russia and Eastern Europe, with its operators shrouded in mystery but linked to a BlackHatWorld user, USProxyKing, involved in malware distribution and robocalling services. DSLRoot claims transparency but its operations raise cybersecurity and privacy concerns, especially given the involvement of a US Air National Guard member with top-secret clearance. The network's size has shrunk recently, likely due to increased competition.

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(krebsonsecurity.com)
Tech

The Transformative Power of Enthusiasm: Building Community Through Belief

2025-04-25
The Transformative Power of Enthusiasm: Building Community Through Belief

Tina recounts her journey from a childhood fascination with enthusiasm to founding the successful CreativeMornings events. She shares key individuals who fueled her dreams with their passion, helping her overcome self-doubt and build a supportive community. This inspiring story highlights the power of enthusiasm, the importance of mutual support, and the creation of positive communities in a challenging world.

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(www.swiss-miss.com)
Startup Enthusiasm

AI Tools: Powerful, But Don't Forget the Human

2025-03-04
AI Tools: Powerful, But Don't Forget the Human

This article explores the risks of deploying AI tools in production environments. The author argues that current AI isn't Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), but rather charismatic technology that often underdelivers on its promises. Drawing on cognitive systems engineering and resilience engineering, the article poses key questions for evaluating AI solutions: Does the tool genuinely augment human capabilities? Does it turn humans into mere monitors? Does it introduce new cognitive biases? Does it create single points of failure? The author stresses the importance of responsible AI system design, emphasizing that blindly adopting AI won't replace human workers; instead, it transforms work and creates new weaknesses.

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(www.honeycomb.io)
AI

Optimizing a Matrix Multiply Kernel in CUDA with Tensor Cores

2025-04-19

This post details the author's journey to write an optimized matrix multiplication kernel in CUDA using tensor cores on an NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU. The goal was to compute D = α * A * B + β * C as fast as possible. Through iterative optimization of six kernels, the author achieved performance comparable to NVIDIA's cuBLAS hgemm, highlighting techniques such as hierarchical tiling, memory hierarchy exploitation, data reuse, overlapping computation with data movement, and efficient Tensor Core usage. The author shares insights gained from profiling and optimization, emphasizing the importance of arithmetic intensity and memory bandwidth.

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(alexarmbr.github.io)
Development Tensor Cores

From Leather to PCs: The Rise and Fall of Radio Shack

2025-06-23
From Leather to PCs: The Rise and Fall of Radio Shack

In 1919, a small leather company was founded, eventually evolving under Charles Tandy's leadership into a retail empire. In 1963, a struggling Radio Shack was acquired, and transformed into a powerhouse of consumer electronics, driven by the incredibly popular TRS-80 personal computer. This story recounts the dramatic journey of Radio Shack, from humble beginnings to market dominance, and ultimately, the surprising success of a seemingly unlikely venture into the burgeoning personal computer market, showcasing bold leadership, market savvy, and a bit of luck.

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(www.abortretry.fail)
Startup business history

Efficient Bit-Packed Integer Vectors in Rust: O(1) Random Access with Bit Compression

2025-09-25
Efficient Bit-Packed Integer Vectors in Rust: O(1) Random Access with Bit Compression

This article explores the engineering challenges of implementing an efficient vector-like data structure in Rust that stores integers in a compressed, bit-packed format while achieving O(1) random access performance and minimizing memory usage. The article details the implementation of bit packing and access, crossing word boundaries, unaligned access, iterators, and mutability, and demonstrates its performance advantages through benchmark results. Furthermore, the article discusses the architectural design of this data structure, including abstractions over the physical storage layer and logical type layer, and the use of a builder pattern, offering new ideas for building efficient and flexible data structures.

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(lukefleed.xyz)
Development Bit Packing

Go's Surprising Prowess: Simulating Millions of Particles on a Smart TV

2025-09-25
Go's Surprising Prowess: Simulating Millions of Particles on a Smart TV

The author tackles the challenge of simulating millions of particles in Go, a language not known for its computational power, for a multiplayer game running on a smart TV. By offloading all rendering to the server and sending only frame buffers to clients, performance bottlenecks are avoided. The article details technical solutions, including a G-buffer approach, frame compression techniques, and efficient client synchronization. Despite Go's lack of SIMD, the author achieves impressive results, running a million-particle simulation on a low-cost cloud server with hundreds of concurrent clients.

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(dgerrells.com)
Development

Infinity Nikki's 1.5 Update Sparks Player Backlash: Aggressive Monetization, Broken Gameplay

2025-05-12
Infinity Nikki's 1.5 Update Sparks Player Backlash: Aggressive Monetization, Broken Gameplay

Infinity Nikki's 1.5 update has sparked significant player backlash. While introducing multiplayer and customization options, the update also brought numerous bugs, instability, and baffling changes to the story and monetization. Players launched a "girlcott," refusing to play and spend money, flooding Steam with negative reviews. Infold Games' response failed to appease players, who cite increased costs for complete outfits, a new paid currency pushing heavier monetization, and a major story alteration as reasons for their anger. The incident highlights Infold Games' broken trust with its player base and missteps in its in-app purchase design.

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(aftermath.site)
Game player boycott gacha

A Hilarious Compendium of Absurd Open Source Licenses

2025-02-26
A Hilarious Compendium of Absurd Open Source Licenses

This article compiles a collection of ridiculous, funny, and downright bad open-source licenses. From licenses that allow copying but forbid running the software, to licenses restricting use based on race and sexual orientation, the absurdity knows no bounds. Some licenses require users to be gay and commit crimes, others prohibit use with NFTs or blockchain, and still others invoke biblical morality. The author's disclaimer: Don't use these licenses!

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(github.com)
Development open source licenses legal

Fixing 'No space left on device' Error on an Old Dell's EFI Variables

2025-02-24

While migrating boot drives and setting up GRUB on an old (2011) Dell, the author encountered a 'Could not prepare boot variable: No space left on device' error. The `efivars` partition was full according to `df -h`, despite having only a few boot entries. Suspecting fragmented or unusable space in NVRAM, the author booted to an EFI shell and used `dmpstore` commands (`dmpstore -s efi-vars`, `dmpstore -d`, `dmpstore -l efi-vars`) to clean up EFI variables. This freed up space and resolved the issue. Caution: This process might brick your system; check `dmpstore`'s help before using these commands.

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(artemis.sh)
Hardware EFI variables

Two Thumb Rules for Efficient Code

2025-05-17

This article presents two practical tips for improving code efficiency: moving `if` conditions upwards and `for` loops downwards. Moving `if` conditions to the caller function reduces branching, simplifies control flow, and improves readability. Moving `for` loops to where batch data is processed leverages batch processing advantages, improves performance, and potentially unlocks vectorization. These two tips complement each other, effectively enhancing code efficiency, especially when handling large amounts of data.

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(matklad.github.io)
Development

NordVPN's New Protocol Aims to Evade VPN Blockers

2025-01-29
NordVPN's New Protocol Aims to Evade VPN Blockers

NordVPN has unveiled NordWhisper, a new protocol designed to bypass VPN blocks prevalent in countries like Russia and India. By mimicking regular internet traffic, it aims to fool ISPs and websites into thinking the traffic isn't from a masked service. While not foolproof and potentially adding latency, NordWhisper offers a valuable tool for users seeking access to restricted content or enhanced privacy. It's currently rolling out for Windows, Linux, and Android, with support for other platforms planned.

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(gizmodo.com)
Tech

Pledge: A Lightweight Reactive Programming Framework for Swift

2025-04-10
Pledge: A Lightweight Reactive Programming Framework for Swift

Pledge is a lightweight, thread-safe reactive programming framework for Swift that simplifies state management and event propagation. Unlike other frameworks with steep learning curves, Pledge focuses on solving everyday problems faced by developers. It offers thread-safe implementation, priority-based notifications, customizable queues, batch updates, rate limiting, and common functional operators. Using `PLObservable` and `PLGlobalStore`, developers can easily implement the observer pattern and global state management, improving code efficiency and maintainability.

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(github.com)
Development Reactive Programming State Management

Chonkify: An Ultra-Lightweight Chunking Library

2025-06-03
Chonkify: An Ultra-Lightweight Chunking Library

Chonkify is an ultra-lightweight JavaScript library for splitting various iterables (arrays, strings, sets, maps, async iterables, etc.) into chunks of a specified size. It supports Unicode emojis and complex symbols, boasts a tiny footprint (core is just 870 bytes), has zero dependencies, is ESM-first and TypeScript-ready, and works in both browser and Node.js environments. Whether processing massive datasets or simple array splitting, chonkify handles it efficiently.

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(github.com)
Development chunking

AI Reimagines a Classic: The Wizard of Oz Hits the Sphere

2025-04-12
AI Reimagines a Classic: The Wizard of Oz Hits the Sphere

Google DeepMind, Google Cloud, and other companies have used AI to bring the 1939 classic film, The Wizard of Oz, to the colossal Sphere screen in Las Vegas in an unprecedented way. Utilizing AI models like Imagen, Veo, and Gemini, the team transformed the original black-and-white film into ultra-high-definition imagery, expanding scenes and creating an immersive experience. The project respected the original work, adding no new dialogue or music. This achievement showcases the advancements in AI technology while offering a fresh interpretation of a cinematic classic.

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(blog.google)
Tech

Faster Addition and Subtraction on Modern CPUs: Outsmarting Carry Propagation

2025-05-30

This article explores techniques to accelerate large integer addition and subtraction on modern CPUs. Traditional methods, similar to manual long addition, process digits from least to most significant, handling carries serially. This limits parallelism. The article proposes a clever approach: altering the number system to delay carry propagation, performing it all at once to exploit CPU parallelism, significantly boosting speed. The core idea involves splitting large integers into smaller parts, utilizing x86's `add` and `adc` instructions, and employing radix-251 representation to minimize carry operations, resulting in faster addition and subtraction than traditional methods.

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(www.chosenplaintext.ca)
Development CPU optimization large integer arithmetic carry propagation

Biofilm Geometry: How Local Interactions Shape Macroscopic Structures

2025-04-22
Biofilm Geometry: How Local Interactions Shape Macroscopic Structures

New research unveils the geometric secrets of bacterial biofilm growth. Researchers discovered that the contact angle of cells at the biofilm's edge dictates growth patterns, impacting overall fitness. A high contact angle leads to increased vertical growth, while a low contact angle promotes horizontal spread. These local cell-cell interactions ultimately shape the macroscopic structure of the entire biofilm, offering insights into how cell collectives form multicellular individuals.

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(www.quantamagazine.org)
Bio biofilm cell geometry bacterial growth

The College Tuition Myth: It's Cheaper Than You Think

2025-02-23
The College Tuition Myth: It's Cheaper Than You Think

Despite widespread belief that college tuition is skyrocketing, data reveals a different story. Since 2014, public four-year college tuition has actually fallen by 21% in real terms, while private college tuition is down 12% after adjusting for inflation. This is due to a peculiar pricing strategy: universities set a high sticker price, then offer substantial financial aid to low-income students, effectively subsidizing their education. This creates a huge gap between the published cost and the net price, with the public fixating on the inflated sticker price. While sticker prices continue to rise, net prices are falling, thanks to increased federal Pell Grants, rebounding state appropriations, and colleges offering more aid. With the number of 18-year-olds peaking this year before a long decline, competition for students will intensify, likely pushing net tuition further down. However, public perception remains skewed, leading many to miss out on higher education and eroding confidence in the system.

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(www.theatlantic.com)
Misc higher education tuition financial aid

Updated: Introduction to Programming Languages Textbook

2025-09-24

Professors Jaemin Hong and Sukyoung Ryu from KAIST have released an updated version of their textbook, "Introduction to Programming Languages." This introductory book covers fundamental programming language concepts, including syntax, semantics, type systems, and interpreter/type-checker implementations. The authors encourage its use by anyone learning or teaching these concepts and acknowledge the contributions of students and teaching assistants. The latest edition features typo corrections and reduced page margins.

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(hjaem.info)
Development

David Tong's Theoretical Physics Textbook Series: A Modern Classic?

2025-04-22

Professor David Tong's renowned lecture notes have been transformed into a comprehensive textbook series published by Cambridge University Press. These books expand upon the original notes, offering richer content, clearer explanations, and even correct spellings (Schwarzschild!). They're also affordably priced. Four volumes are currently available, covering a vast swathe of undergraduate and graduate curricula. The series has garnered rave reviews from leading physicists, praised as a modern equivalent to Landau and Lifshitz's classic work.

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(www.damtp.cam.ac.uk)
Development Theoretical Physics Textbook

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.

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(mikecoats.com)
Hardware e-shifter

iNaturalist Opensources Parts of its Computer Vision Models

2025-09-02
iNaturalist Opensources Parts of its Computer Vision Models

iNaturalist has open-sourced a subset of its machine learning models, including "small" models trained on approximately 500 taxa, along with taxonomy files and a geographic model, suitable for on-device testing and other applications. The full species classification models remain private due to intellectual property and organizational policy. The post details installation and running instructions for MacOS, covering dependency installation, environment setup, performance optimization suggestions (including compiling TensorFlow and using pillow-simd), and provides performance benchmarks.

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(github.com)
AI open-source models

DCHP-3 Update: A Deeper Dive into Canadian English

2025-07-10

The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP-3) has been significantly updated, offering a refined typology and frequency analysis of Canadian English vocabulary. It categorizes words based on origin, semantic shifts, and frequency, presenting six distinct types of Canadianisms. Each entry details meanings, citations, and frequency charts, providing a comprehensive resource for scholars and enthusiasts alike. This update adds numerous entries and expands on existing ones, enriching our understanding of the evolution of Canadian English.

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(dchp.arts.ubc.ca)
Misc Canadian English lexicography

Discord's Balancing Act: Monetization vs. User Experience

2025-06-05
Discord's Balancing Act: Monetization vs. User Experience

Discord co-founder and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy acknowledges the ever-present threat of platform 'enshittification.' With an upcoming IPO and the recent departure of co-founder Jason Citron, many users fear Discord's evolution will compromise its unique community feel. Vishnevskiy admits these concerns, stating that avoiding 'enshittification' – balancing profitability and user experience – is a constant internal discussion. Past ventures like a game store and Web3 integrations failed to meet user expectations. Discord now focuses on its Nitro subscription, exploring new revenue models with the Orbs currency system that rewards users. Simultaneously, the company prioritizes app performance and usability, approaching AI cautiously. Future plans involve supporting game developers and maintaining a long-term commitment to user experience and company values. The challenge lies in navigating these competing pressures while staying true to its identity.

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(www.engadget.com)
Game

Burning Visible Images onto CDs: A Retro Tech Project

2025-06-07
Burning Visible Images onto CDs: A Retro Tech Project

This project details a tool for burning visible images onto the surface of a compact disc. Inspired by similar projects from 15 years ago, the author revived and ported their 2008 code to Qt6. The tool requires the Qt6 library and a Windows binary is provided. Calibration is complex due to geometrical variations between CDs, making the process time-consuming. The author proposes using AI image recognition to improve calibration and welcomes suggestions for improvement.

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(github.com)
Development CD burning

Reverse Engineering Cursor's LLM Client: Peeking Under the Hood of an AI Coding Assistant

2025-06-07
Reverse Engineering Cursor's LLM Client: Peeking Under the Hood of an AI Coding Assistant

This post details how the authors used the open-source framework TensorZero to build a self-hosted proxy and successfully reverse-engineered the LLM client of the AI coding assistant Cursor. By routing communication between Cursor and LLM providers through TensorZero, they could observe, analyze, and even optimize the prompts and models Cursor uses. They overcame challenges related to Cursor's server-side preprocessing and CORS issues. Ultimately, they gained complete visibility into Cursor's LLM interactions, including prompts and responses, enabling A/B testing of different LLM models. This work provides valuable insights into understanding and optimizing AI coding assistants and reveals a potential hierarchy of LLMs within Cursor.

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(www.tensorzero.com)
Development

UK Government's Secret Backdoor Demand to Apple Exposed, Raising Privacy Concerns

2025-04-21
UK Government's Secret Backdoor Demand to Apple Exposed, Raising Privacy Concerns

The UK government's attempt to secretly demand a backdoor into Apple's end-to-end encryption was thwarted when the Home Office failed to keep it secret on national security grounds. This highlights the dangers of government abuse of security mechanisms and the inappropriateness of secret courts in a democracy. The article draws parallels between the UK government's actions and the Trump administration's misuse of security clearances, arguing both demonstrate abuse of power and security mechanisms, threatening individual liberties and freedom of speech. The author calls for stronger legal oversight of state abuse of security mechanisms to address new security challenges in the digital age.

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(www.theregister.com)
Tech

Blue Origin's NS-32 Mission: Six Passengers Experience Space

2025-06-01
Blue Origin's NS-32 Mission: Six Passengers Experience Space

On May 31, Blue Origin successfully launched its New Shepard rocket on the NS-32 mission, sending six passengers, including New Zealand's first space tourist, Mark Rocket, into space. The flight lasted approximately three minutes, during which passengers experienced weightlessness and breathtaking views of Earth. The diverse crew included a lawyer, entrepreneurs, educators, and an aerospace executive, all hailing from various countries and united by their passion for space. This flight marked Blue Origin's 12th human spaceflight and showcases the company's continued growth in the space tourism sector.

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(www.space.com)
Tech Human Spaceflight
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