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Spectrum Outage in Southern California After Attempted Copper Theft

2025-06-16

Spectrum Outage in Southern California After Attempted Copper Theft

Spectrum internet subscribers in Southern California experienced widespread outages over the weekend after thieves attempting to steal copper lines accidentally cut fiber optic cables in Van Nuys. Thousands of customers were affected. Spectrum has restored service, is offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of those responsible, and is crediting affected customers one day of service. The company stated that these acts of vandalism are increasing industry-wide due to rising precious metal prices.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech fiber optic cable

Open-Source Hyperspectral Oil Paint and Painting Dataset: Unlocking Painting Techniques

2025-06-16

Open-Source Hyperspectral Oil Paint and Painting Dataset: Unlocking Painting Techniques

This open-source project provides a large dataset containing hyperspectral scan data, processing code, and reconstructed paint samples. The dataset is intended for use in art historical research and computer graphics, such as pigment mapping and spectral upsampling. It includes hyperspectral scans of nine paintings and reflectance measurements of numerous paint samples. A Python package, `painting_tools`, is also provided for processing spectral data and mixing and layering pigments using the Kubelka-Munk model. Researchers can use this dataset to study the materials and techniques of paintings and develop new image processing and analysis methods.

(github.com)

Tech hyperspectral imaging painting analysis

Coding with Free AI: A Multi-Model Approach

2025-08-10

This article details a strategy for efficient coding using multiple free AI models. The author utilizes a browser with numerous tabs, each accessing a different free AI model (e.g., GLM 4.5, Kimi K2, Qwen3 Coder, Gemini AI Studio). A tool called AI Code Prep GUI helps curate code snippets for these models, avoiding information overload. The author advocates using AI for high-level problem-solving and planning, delegating code editing to other tools, maximizing efficiency with free resources. The article also cautions against using Grok.com due to concerns about its potential promotion of misinformation.

(wuu73.org)

Development free AI tools efficient coding

AI: The Coming Fragmentation of Software Engineering

2025-03-30

The author's wife uses Lovable, an AI tool, to build a social platform. While efficient, the AI frequently gets stuck, requiring human intervention. This observation leads the author to predict a future where software engineering is fragmented: a large pool of low-skilled 'AI prompters' supported by a smaller number of highly skilled specialists who resolve issues and optimize performance. AGI, the author argues, is overhyped; the reality is an AI-assisted development model where AI handles routine tasks, but complex problem-solving and architecture remain crucial human roles. This shift will result in fewer software engineering jobs, but survivors will ascend to higher-level positions requiring stronger architectural design skills and leadership. The future is bright for the adaptable, bleak for the complacent.

(verdikapuku.com)

Development

The Trap of 'I'm Not an Extrovert'

2024-12-26

The Trap of 'I'm Not an Extrovert'

This article recounts a story of Aditya, a college student who used introversion as an excuse to avoid social interaction, ultimately leaving his club. The author argues that introversion and extroversion are not absolute but rather choices. In the workplace, proactive communication and collaboration are essential skills, not inherent traits. Using the example of two engineers, Ram and Shyam, the author highlights the importance of communication skills for career advancement. While deep thinking requires energy, effective communication and collaboration lead to greater success. The author concludes that true friendships often stem from deep conversations, not superficial small talk.

(orkohunter.net)

Misc introversion extroversion communication skills

$800 Emotional Support Robot for Kids Bricked, No Refunds

2024-12-12

$800 Emotional Support Robot for Kids Bricked, No Refunds

Embodied, the maker of the $800 Moxie robot for kids, is shutting down, leaving thousands of children without their robotic companions. The company blamed a failed funding round for its closure, and announced that Moxie's cloud connectivity will be severed, rendering the robots inoperable. While Embodied expressed some willingness to refund recent purchases, they offer no guarantees, leaving many parents facing significant financial losses alongside their children's emotional distress. This incident highlights concerns about the lack of long-term support for smart devices and the potential for significant consumer disappointment.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech robot children refund

CONL: The Markdown of Configuration Files?

2025-04-26

Tired of the complexities of JSON, YAML, and TOML? A software engineer created CONL, a minimalist configuration file format aiming to be the "Markdown" of configuration files. CONL is easy to read and edit, features a JSON-like data model, and is simple to implement. It supports various data types including scalars, lists, and maps, with good support for multiline strings. The author also provides implementations for Rust and Go, along with a language server and Zed extension.

(cirw.in)

Development configuration files

Ruby Ractors and YJIT: A Concurrency Performance Deep Dive

2025-03-26

This post explores the true concurrency capabilities of Ruby Ractors in version 3.4.2 and unexpectedly discovers the impressive performance gains offered by YJIT. Benchmarks using Fibonacci and Tarai functions reveal that Ractors effectively utilize multiple cores on native macOS, but underperform in Docker. However, enabling YJIT significantly improves performance in both environments, exceeding expectations. The author concludes that Ractors are not yet production-ready, but YJIT is production-ready and provides substantial performance improvements.

(jpterry.com)

Development

Nobel Laureate Krugman Departs the New York Times

2025-01-29

Nobel Laureate Krugman Departs the New York Times

Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate in economics, recently announced his departure from his 25-year position as an opinion writer at the New York Times. His departure stems from increasing editorial interference at the Times, ranging from minor edits to substantial rewrites, and restrictions on his topics. The Times also eliminated his blog and newsletter, limiting his reach and expression. Krugman felt the Times was becoming bland and losing its edge, leading him to seek greater freedom and independence by moving to Substack.

(contrarian.substack.com)

Misc freedom of speech opinion writing

Rayhunter: Open-Source IMSI Catcher Catcher for Orbic Hotspot

2025-03-06

Rayhunter: Open-Source IMSI Catcher Catcher for Orbic Hotspot

Rayhunter is an open-source IMSI catcher catcher designed for the Orbic mobile hotspot (RC400L). Installation scripts are provided for Linux and macOS, with detailed manual instructions including Windows support. A web UI accessible via Wi-Fi or USB allows for recording control, capture downloads, and heuristic analysis. The project is explicitly labeled as proof-of-concept, unsuitable for high-stakes situations, and includes a disclaimer addressing potential legal liabilities.

(github.com)

Development IMSI catcher

Literary Review: The Achievements and Limitations of the 20th-Century Novel

2024-12-15

Literary Review: The Achievements and Limitations of the 20th-Century Novel

Edwin Frank's new book, *Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel*, explores the accomplishments of the 20th-century novel. Frank argues that novels, through formal innovations like Kafka's rambling sentences and Stein's repetitions, guide readers to slow down and savor the nuances of language. He praises novelists' efforts in expressing collective experiences, particularly the horrors of war and the awakening of self-awareness, but also points out the book's Eurocentric perspective, its insufficient attention to novels from other cultural backgrounds, and its somewhat superficial exploration of war and self-awareness.

(thebaffler.com)

Misc 20th-century novel literary review self-awareness

Nova Launcher Founder Departs, Open-Source Plans Shelved

2025-09-09

Kevin Barry, founder of Nova Launcher, announced his departure from Branch and the halting of Nova Launcher's open-sourcing efforts. Despite Branch's prior commitment to open-sourcing the code upon Kevin's departure, this promise ultimately went unfulfilled. Kevin had spent the past year solely maintaining Nova Launcher and had undertaken significant preparation for its open-source release, including code cleanup and license review. This move has caused concern and regret within the community, leaving the future of this popular launcher uncertain.

(teslacoilapps.com)

Development Departure

Modern CI Systems Are Too Complex: Time to Merge Build and CI Systems?

2025-08-20

This article explores the complexity of modern continuous integration (CI) platforms. The author argues that current CI systems, such as GitHub Actions and GitLab CI, are overly powerful and have evolved into complex build systems, leading to fragmented build and CI system logic and low efficiency. The author proposes integrating CI functionality into build systems and uses Mozilla's Taskcluster as an example to illustrate a more powerful, task graph-based CI platform design. This design can unify build and CI processes, improve efficiency, and reduce complexity. However, the author also points out that this merger requires more advanced build systems and broader industry adoption, which may be difficult to achieve in the short term.

(gregoryszorc.com)

Development

Google AI Killed Me (and Then Brought Me Back to Life)

2025-07-20

Google AI Killed Me (and Then Brought Me Back to Life)

Author Dave Barry discovered Google AI had marked him as deceased and incorrectly identified him as a political activist from Dorchester. Despite repeated corrections, the AI system wavered, declaring him dead and alive multiple times. This humorous account highlights AI's limitations and inaccuracies in handling factual information, prompting reflection on the reliability of AI technology.

(davebarry.substack.com)

Misc

Graft: A Novel Edge Replication Engine for Strong Consistency and Partial Syncs

2025-04-02

Graft: A Novel Edge Replication Engine for Strong Consistency and Partial Syncs

Graft, an open-source transactional storage engine, tackles the challenges of data synchronization in edge computing environments. Unlike traditional full replication or schema-aware diffing, Graft employs a lazy, partial replication strategy that combines strong consistency guarantees, horizontal scalability, and object storage durability. It allows clients to sync data on demand, fetching only necessary data, and supports syncing from edge and offline devices. At its core is the Volume, a sparse, ordered collection of fixed-size Pages, with clients interacting through a transactional API. This makes Graft suitable for various use cases, including offline-first apps, cross-platform sync, and stateless multi-writer replicas.

(sqlsync.dev)

Development Database Replication

The Norman Conquest and English Spelling: A Lost Story of Diacritics

2025-07-07

The Norman Conquest and English Spelling: A Lost Story of Diacritics

This article explores how the Norman Conquest profoundly impacted English spelling. After 1066, French became the official language, and scribes carried over French writing conventions into English, resulting in letter combinations representing single phonemes, like "sh" and "th." The Renaissance saw French develop a system of diacritics through printing and standardization, while English retained the spelling conventions established during the Norman period. This explains why English lacks widespread use of diacritics today.

(www.deadlanguagesociety.com)

Misc English history Norman Conquest

Anomalous Tokens in DeepSeek: A Catalog of Glitches

2025-01-25

Anomalous Tokens in DeepSeek: A Catalog of Glitches

A researcher has uncovered a trove of 'anomalous tokens' within the open-source large language model DeepSeek-V3 and r1. These tokens, when inputted, cause the model to exhibit bizarre behavior, such as replacing words with unusual Unicode characters, acronyms, or emojis. The researcher systematically tested each token from DeepSeek's vocabulary, identifying and categorizing these glitches. Some tokens, dubbed 'fragment tokens,' only show anomalies in specific contexts. Others, like 'Nameeee' and 'EDMFunc', consistently produce peculiar substitutions. 'Nameeee' frequently yields 'M'-related words or symbols, while 'EDMFunc' favors words starting with 'H' and Japanese names. Numerous non-English anomalous tokens, primarily from Cebuano and other Philippine languages, were also found. Special tokens like '<｜end of thinking｜>' can further disrupt the model's functionality. This research offers valuable insights into the inner workings of LLMs and opens avenues for further investigation.

(outsidetext.substack.com)

AI Anomalous Tokens

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

LumoSQL: Enhancing SQLite with Security and Performance

2025-05-27

LumoSQL is a modification, not a fork, of the widely used SQLite database. It enhances SQLite by adding security, privacy, performance, and measurement features, and boasts pluggable backend key-value store engines like LMDB. Utilizing a novel 'not-forking' tool, LumoSQL manages multiple upstream codebases without forking, collaborating with the SQLite project to introduce improvements without compromising SQLite's core stability. LumoSQL demonstrates enhancements that many users need but aren't readily available in the core SQLite project due to its cautious approach.

(lumosql.org)

Development

Real-Time Introspective Compression: Giving Transformers a Conscience

2025-04-02

Real-Time Introspective Compression: Giving Transformers a Conscience

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from two key limitations: lack of introspection and ephemeral cognition. This article proposes a novel real-time introspective compression method that addresses both. A lightweight "sidecar" model is trained to compress the internal states of a transformer, allowing for efficient access and replay of the model's internal workings. The method compresses transformer states into a low-dimensional latent space, similar to saving a game state, thus overcoming the computational hurdle of storing the full state. This enables new capabilities such as reasoning backtracking, reinforcement learning over thought trajectories, and memory-efficient checkpointing, ultimately leading to more powerful and interpretable AI systems.

(github.com)

AI Introspection

Pebble Lives On: Open Source Code Reignites Hope

2025-02-07

Pebble Lives On: Open Source Code Reignites Hope

Google's release of the PebbleOS source code has breathed new life into the Pebble community. The Rebble team is hard at work developing new Pebble watch hardware and software, targeting the nRF52840 chipset. They're open-sourcing all updates and collaborating with factories and suppliers to create a new watch that closely resembles the classic Pebble experience, but with modifiable and improvable open-source software. Developers are welcome to join and contribute to improving PebbleOS, the Cobble app, and the Pebble SDK.

(ericmigi.com)

Hardware

Critical Vulnerabilities Found in Secrets Management Vaults

2025-08-07

Critical Vulnerabilities Found in Secrets Management Vaults

Researchers discovered subtle logic flaws in HashiCorp Vault and CyberArk Conjur, allowing attackers to bypass authentication, evade policy checks, and impersonate accounts. These vaults, storing credentials governing access to systems and data, are the backbone of digital infrastructure. Compromise means complete infrastructure loss. The vulnerabilities, responsibly disclosed and now patched, highlight the critical need for robust secrets management and access control.

(www.csoonline.com)

Tech secrets management

Interactive Debugging in GitHub Actions: Ditch the Black Box

2025-08-10

Interactive Debugging in GitHub Actions: Ditch the Black Box

Debugging failed GitHub Actions workflows can be a nightmare. This post details a clever method: using netcat and ngrok to create a reverse shell, giving you interactive shell access to the runner. By configuring netcat commands and ngrok port forwarding in your GitHub Actions workflow, you can listen on a local port and get a shell connected to the runner for easier debugging. While slightly complex, this method is incredibly effective for troubleshooting, significantly improving developer efficiency. A simpler alternative using the `mxschmitt/action-tmate` action is also presented.

(jacobtomlinson.dev)

Development Reverse Shell

KeygenMusic: A Nostalgic Online Tracker Music Player Evolves from β1 to β15

2025-08-03

KeygenMusic: A Nostalgic Online Tracker Music Player Evolves from β1 to β15

KeygenMusic is an online music player supporting .mod, .xm, .s3m, and .it formats, featuring music exclusively from keygens. Since its β1 release in April 2015, it's undergone numerous updates, fixing Firefox compatibility, removing autoplay, improving styling, adding media key controls, favorites, and continuously updating its music library (from keygenmusic.net). This player reflects nearly a decade of development, offering more than just playback – it's a journey through nostalgic sounds.

(keygenmusic.tk)

Misc retro music online player tracker music

Engineer Builds Camera That Ignores Perspective, Sees Through Walls

2024-12-25

Engineer Builds Camera That Ignores Perspective, Sees Through Walls

Shane Wighton, the creator of the YouTube channel Stuff Made Here, has engineered an incredible camera that defies perspective and can even see through walls. Instead of a traditional lens, this camera uses a sophisticated mechanical system to scan a scene one pixel at a time, building a complete image. By utilizing a spinning gantry and a precisely controlled mirror, the camera moves in 3D space, capturing multiple views to reconstruct the final image. This allows it to create images without perspective, achieve reverse perspective, and even see around objects, showcasing an astonishing feat of engineering and imaging technology.

(petapixel.com)

Tech camera technology perspective imaging

Enshittification: It's Not Venture Capital's Fault, It's the Lack of Constraints

2025-01-26

Cory Doctorow's article delves into the reasons behind the degradation of social media platforms, arguing it's not simply due to venture capitalists' pursuit of profit maximization. The article posits that 'enshittification' stems from user lock-in (high switching costs and collective action problems), and a lack of market competition, government regulation, and labor constraints. The solution, Doctorow suggests, lies in breaking user lock-in, increasing regulation and competition, rather than simply rejecting capitalism. The article also analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of emerging platforms Mastodon and Bluesky, advocating for technical solutions (like the Free Our Feeds project) to enhance Bluesky's resilience and lower switching costs for users.

(pluralistic.net)

Tech platform degradation

Swiss Canton Buys Typo-Filled Domain to Fix 100k Flyer Error

2025-01-31

Swiss Canton Buys Typo-Filled Domain to Fix 100k Flyer Error

The Basel-Stadt canton in Switzerland accidentally omitted '.ch' from the URL printed on over 100,000 tax filing flyers, resulting in a '.bs' (Bahamas) domain. Instead of reprinting at a cost of roughly $100,000, they opted to purchase the erroneous domain for $1,000 and set up a redirect to the correct URL. The redirect is not yet live, pending domain registration completion.

(techcrunch.com)

Misc domain typo printing error government efficiency

Netflix's Unified Data Architecture: Model Once, Represent Everywhere

2025-06-14

Netflix's Unified Data Architecture: Model Once, Represent Everywhere

Netflix's exploding content offerings — films, series, games, live events, ads — have created a complex web of supporting systems. To tackle duplicated models, inconsistent terminology, and data quality issues, Netflix built the Unified Data Architecture (UDA). UDA is a knowledge graph enabling teams to define models once and reuse them consistently across systems. Leveraging an internal metamodel called Upper, UDA translates domain models into various technical data structures (GraphQL, Avro, SQL, etc.), automating data movement and transformation between containers. This boosts efficiency and data consistency. Two production systems, Primary Data Management (PDM) and Sphere, showcase UDA's power, handling authoritative reference data and self-service operational reporting respectively.

(netflixtechblog.com)

Development Data Architecture

The Flawed On-Call System in Big Tech and the Promise of AI

2025-03-18

This article explores the shortcomings of the on-call system prevalent in large tech companies. Drawing on personal experience, the author contrasts the approaches of big tech and startups in handling software issues. Big tech's incentive structures lead to declining software quality, making on-call a permanent fixture. The author argues that AI and machine learning can revolutionize on-call processes, for example, using LLMs to simplify logs, search for similar issues, and reduce the burden on engineers, thus increasing efficiency.

(reflector.dev)

Development On-Call

Revitalizing Your Mavericks: Giving an Old System New Life

2025-08-21

This guide shows you how to breathe new life into your aging OS X Mavericks system. It involves a simple script to update the system, replacing the outdated browser with a modern Firefox (Firefox Dynasty), using Aqua Proxy to fix HTTPS compatibility issues, adding new emojis, and setting up Time Machine backups. The guide also instructs users on deleting unwanted pre-installed apps such as Chess, iTunes, and iBooks for a personalized experience. The entire process is straightforward, making your Mavericks system run smoother and more tailored to your needs.

(mavericksforever.com)

Development

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