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Web Server Listen Overflows Traced to a Linux Kernel Performance Issue

2025-02-14

Upgrading web servers from CentOS to Ubuntu led to listen overflow errors. Investigation revealed a system CPU spike on newly booted Ubuntu hosts within minutes of startup, causing slow web request processing and subsequent listen overflows. The culprit was inode cgroup switching in the Linux kernel; after writing many files, the kernel spent significant time moving inodes between cgroups. Disabling the io or memory controllers in systemd resolved the issue. CentOS was unaffected as it uses cgroups v1, unlike Ubuntu's cgroups v2. A minimal reproduction script was created to demonstrate the issue.

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(dasl.cc)
Development Performance Issue

Massive Fire at World's Largest Battery Plant Forces Evacuations in California

2025-01-17
Massive Fire at World's Largest Battery Plant Forces Evacuations in California

A massive fire erupted at one of the world's largest battery storage plants in Moss Landing, California, forcing hundreds to evacuate and prompting the closure of a section of Highway 1. The blaze, which started Thursday afternoon, sent plumes of black smoke into the air. While firefighters worked to contain the flames, the fire was still burning Friday morning. This is the third fire at the Vistra Energy plant in three years, raising concerns about the safety of large-scale battery storage.

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(www.gpb.org)
Tech battery storage fire

5MB in 1966: The Story of 62,500 Punched Cards

2025-02-19
5MB in 1966: The Story of 62,500 Punched Cards

In 1966, storing a mere 5MB of data required a staggering 62,500 punched cards—a stark contrast to today's instant access to vast information. Each card held a few hundred bytes, and loading 5MB took four days. This compares dramatically to modern flash drives and cloud computing. Giant mainframe computers, primarily used by governments and large corporations, relied on this system. The shift from punched cards to magnetic tape and hard drives marked a giant leap in computing technology, highlighting the incredible progress made in modern computing.

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(www.vintag.es)
Tech punched cards

Apple Q1 Earnings: Record Revenue, AI-Powered Future

2025-01-31
Apple Q1 Earnings: Record Revenue, AI-Powered Future

Apple announced its financial results for fiscal Q1 2025 (calendar Q4 2024), reporting record revenue of $124.3 billion, a 4% year-over-year increase. Earnings per share rose 10% to $2.40. Services, Mac, and iPad revenues saw significant growth, while iPhone and Wearables experienced slight declines. CEO Tim Cook highlighted this as Apple's best quarter ever, emphasizing the role of Apple Intelligence in enhancing user experience and driving future growth. Apple Intelligence will support more languages in April. The earnings call also provided guidance for the next quarter, projecting low-to-mid single-digit revenue growth.

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(www.macrumors.com)
Tech Apple Earnings Revenue Growth

NotaGen: An AI Composer Mastering Classical Music via Reinforcement Learning

2025-03-26
NotaGen: An AI Composer Mastering Classical Music via Reinforcement Learning

NotaGen, an AI music generation model, is pre-trained on 1.6 million pieces of music to learn fundamental musical structures. It's then fine-tuned on a curated dataset of 8,948 classical music scores, enhancing its musicality. To further refine both musicality and prompt control, the researchers employed CLaMP-DPO, a reinforcement learning method using Direct Preference Optimization and CLaMP 2 as an evaluator. Experiments showed CLaMP-DPO effectively improved both controllability and musicality across various music generation models, highlighting its broad applicability.

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(electricalexis.github.io)
AI classical music

Springer Book on Machine Learning Accused of Fabricated Citations

2025-07-07
Springer Book on Machine Learning Accused of Fabricated Citations

A $169 machine learning textbook, "Mastering Machine Learning," published by Springer Nature, has been accused of containing numerous fabricated citations. An investigation revealed that two-thirds of 18 checked citations either didn't exist or had significant errors. Several researchers cited confirmed the works were fake or the citations contained substantial inaccuracies. This raises concerns about the reliability of large language model (LLM)-generated content and the regulation of AI tools in academic publishing. The publisher is investigating, but the incident highlights the challenges to academic integrity posed by AI-assisted writing.

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(retractionwatch.com)
Development fabricated citations

JWST Detects Hydrogen Cyanide and Acetylene in Brown Dwarf Atmosphere – A First

2025-02-28
JWST Detects Hydrogen Cyanide and Acetylene in Brown Dwarf Atmosphere – A First

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made a groundbreaking discovery! An international team of astronomers, using JWST, has for the first time detected hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and acetylene (C2H2) in the atmosphere of a nearby brown dwarf binary system designated WISE J045853.90+643451.9. Published on the arXiv preprint server, the finding reveals a cloud-free, molecule-rich atmosphere. The discovery showcases the power of JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) Medium Resolution Spectrometer (MRS) in characterizing cool brown dwarfs. Future studies will investigate HCN and C2H2 in more detail and determine if these species are present in other similarly cool brown dwarfs.

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(phys.org)
Tech Brown Dwarf Atmospheric Detection

8-Dollar Smart Plug Turns into a Productivity Booster

2025-06-22

A simple script monitors an $8 smart plug's state. The plug has a physical switch and WiFi connectivity, allowing API access to its status. When the switch is on, the script modifies /etc/hosts to block distracting websites (Twitter, YouTube, etc.). Placed out of easy reach, this creates friction; accessing blocked sites requires physically turning off the plug, making mindless internet browsing less appealing. A surprisingly effective productivity hack!

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(www.neilchen.co)
Misc

arXivLabs: Community-Driven Experiments on arXiv

2025-06-10
arXivLabs: Community-Driven Experiments on arXiv

arXivLabs is a platform enabling collaborators to build and share new features directly on the arXiv website. Participants, both individuals and organizations, uphold arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these principles and only partners with those who share them. Got an idea to enhance the arXiv community? Explore arXivLabs.

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(arxiv.org)
Development

Decoding the Startup Software Engineer Interview Process

2025-02-13
Decoding the Startup Software Engineer Interview Process

This startup uses a two-step interview process: a phone screen and a two-day onsite interview. The phone screen assesses interest in startups and teamwork, along with basic web programming skills and project experience. The onsite interview delves deeper into technical abilities, product thinking, and team fit, emphasizing communication, ownership, and autonomy through a small project.

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(www.ycombinator.com)
Development Interview Process

Solarpunk: A Hopeful Vision for a Sustainable Future

2025-03-03
Solarpunk: A Hopeful Vision for a Sustainable Future

Solarpunk is more than a sci-fi subgenre; it's a socio-cultural movement encompassing literature, art, fashion, and activism. Central to solarpunk is the vision and pursuit of a sustainable future deeply intertwined with nature and community. Rejecting dystopian narratives, it embraces renewable energy, DIY ethics, and counter-cultural elements of punk like rebellion and post-capitalism. In stark contrast to cyberpunk's depiction of technological alienation and social injustice, solarpunk offers a hopeful vision of technology harmoniously integrated with nature. From literature and art to architecture and lifestyle, solarpunk is shaping a new cultural paradigm.

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(en.wikipedia.org)
Design Utopian Fiction

Breaking Change: List API Filter Overhaul with Nested Expressions

2025-05-25
Breaking Change: List API Filter Overhaul with Nested Expressions

The List API has undergone a significant update, now supporting nested and complex filter expressions. This is a breaking change requiring users to update their client libraries. All clients have been updated to support the new syntax and assist in constructing nested filters. For raw HTTP users, the filter format changed from col[ne]=val to filter[col][$ne]=val, following QS conventions. For example, excluding a value range [v_min, v_max]: ?filter[$or][0][col][$gt]=v_max&filter[$or][1][col][$lt]=v_min. A new Swift client implementation has been added. The release version is now shown in the admin dashboard with a link to the release page. Dependencies have also been updated.

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(github.com)
Development API Update Filters Nested Expressions

The Royal Navy's Century-Long Battle Against Lightning Rods

2025-03-07
The Royal Navy's Century-Long Battle Against Lightning Rods

In the mid-18th century, Benjamin Franklin elucidated the nature of lightning and advocated for lightning rods. Yet, a century later, the British Navy remained unconvinced. Dr. William Snow Harris invented a shipborne lightning rod system and demonstrated its principles through an ingenious booklet with interactive, gold-leafed illustrations. Despite his decades-long efforts, backed by data, experiments, and key lightning incidents, the Navy resisted. Only after political maneuvering was Harris finally successful in 1842, getting his lightning rods installed on all Royal Navy vessels. His victory was short-lived, however; the advent of ironclad ships rendered them obsolete. This story highlights the enduring struggle between scientific discovery and political decision-making.

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(spectrum.ieee.org)
Tech lightning rod Royal Navy

The Lies of Bestselling Business Books: Success Isn't About Feel-Good Mantras

2025-05-10
The Lies of Bestselling Business Books: Success Isn't About Feel-Good Mantras

This article critiques the majority of bestselling business books, arguing that they prioritize emotional appeal over intellectual rigor, turning simplified stories into generic advice and replacing complex market dynamics with motivational slogans. The author uses personal experience and counterexamples (e.g., Airbnb, Stripe, Amazon) to refute common claims found in books by Thiel, Ferriss, and Sinek, demonstrating that true success stems from focusing on reality, adaptable strategies, solid operational knowledge, sustained accumulation, and understanding complex systems, not simple "hacks" or motivational slogans. The author concludes by urging readers to focus on practical application and systemic thinking, rather than relying on the feel-good conclusions of business books.

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(theorthagonist.substack.com)
Startup business books

Zero-Cost Statics in C++: Exploiting Linker Features

2025-07-19

This article tackles the performance overhead of static variable initialization in C++. Block-scoped static variables typically incur runtime costs, such as synchronization using `__cxa_guard_acquire`. The author proposes an optimization leveraging UNIX linker features: pre-allocating space in a dedicated section and performing initialization during global initialization. This eliminates runtime overhead, making block-scoped statics as efficient as file-scoped ones. The article details the implementation, including handling section attribute conflicts from inline functions and template members, ultimately achieving zero-cost optimization.

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(cofault.com)
Development

Xerox's 50 Series: A Comeback Story

2025-09-17

In 1988, Xerox launched its 50 series copiers to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Chester Carlson's invention of the first xerographic image. Xerox touted the 50 series as its most significant product line since the 10 series in 1982. Featuring enhanced capabilities and a higher price point, the 50 series (models 5018, 5028, 5046, 5052, and 5090) helped Xerox reclaim market share lost to Japanese competitors.

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(xeroxnostalgia.com)
Tech Xerox Copiers

Interactive CSS Flexbox Learning Tool

2025-01-05

The CSS Flexbox Playground is an interactive online learning tool that lets users adjust various Flex properties to see layout changes in real-time and copy the generated CSS code. It covers key properties like flex-direction, justify-content, align-items, and flex-wrap, providing a visual understanding of Flexbox layout. Hands-on experimentation allows users to quickly master Flexbox and improve web development efficiency.

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(yoavsbg.github.io)
Development

Resurrecting a 25-Year-Old Tape Driver with AI

2025-09-08

The author enjoys recovering data from old QIC-80 tapes, a popular backup medium in the 1990s. These tapes require the outdated ftape driver, only compatible with very old Linux versions (CentOS 3.5). Using Claude Code, an AI model, the author modernized the ftape driver to compile and run on modern Linux kernels. Through iterations and minor manual adjustments, a loadable kernel module was created, successfully reading test tapes on Xubuntu 24.04. The author shares lessons learned collaborating with AI, emphasizing clear instructions, understanding AI limitations, and leveraging AI as a skill multiplier.

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(dmitrybrant.com)
Development

Calibre 8.0 Released: Enhanced Kobo Support and More

2025-03-21

Calibre 8.0 is here, boasting significantly improved Kobo support! It now natively edits, views, and converts KEPUB files, automatically converting EPUB to KEPUB when sending to Kobo devices (configurable via the Kobo icon). New features include connecting to folders (ideal for Chromebooks), a revamped ToC editor, updated macOS icons, and numerous bug fixes. Previous 7.x releases introduced exciting additions like an audio overlay tool, automatic PDF header/footer removal, drastically faster EPUB opening, and the new Piper neural network TTS engine, enhancing reading and editing workflows.

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(calibre-ebook.com)
Development e-book update

Developer's Block: Practical Strategies to Overcome Coding Impasse

2025-08-23

Developers often experience 'developer's block,' a frustrating inability to code. This article explores two common scenarios: the paralysis of starting a new project perfectly and the stagnation of working on existing projects. Perfectionism in new projects leads to over-engineering, while existing projects can suffer from a lack of understanding, burnout, or demotivation. The article offers practical solutions such as incremental learning, recognizing fatigue and taking breaks, incremental development, prototyping, drafting documentation first, avoiding premature optimization, and releasing early and often. These strategies help developers overcome coding blocks and boost productivity.

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(underlap.org)
Development

NoDB: Processing Payments Without a Database

2024-12-21
NoDB: Processing Payments Without a Database

Alvaro Duran's "The Payments Engineer Playbook" introduces a revolutionary approach to payment system design: processing payments without a database. He argues that the prevalence of asynchronous programming stems from the assumption of database necessity. Using event sourcing, each step in the payment process is recorded as an event, not as a persistent state. These events are temporarily stored in memory, and the system reconstructs the payment status from the event stream, eliminating the need for persistent storage. This high-performance, high-reliability approach, inspired by high-frequency trading, allows for quick recovery from outages through hot backups. The article details this concept using a payment flow example and looks toward future applications in payment systems.

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(news.alvaroduran.com)
Development Event Sourcing Databaseless Payments High-Frequency Trading

AGI Timelines: 2028 for Tax AI? 2032 for On-the-Job Learning?

2025-07-07
AGI Timelines: 2028 for Tax AI? 2032 for On-the-Job Learning?

Podcast host Dwarkesh discusses AGI timelines. He argues that while current LLMs are impressive, their lack of continuous learning severely limits their real-world applications. He uses the analogy of learning saxophone to illustrate how LLMs learn differently than humans, unable to accumulate experience and improve skills like humans do. This leads him to be cautious about AGI breakthroughs in the next few years but optimistic about the potential in the coming decades. He predicts 2028 for AI handling taxes as efficiently as a human manager (including chasing down receipts and invoices) and 2032 for AI capable of on-the-job learning as seamlessly as a human. He believes that once continuous learning is solved, AGI will lead to a massive leap, potentially resulting in something akin to an intelligence explosion.

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(www.dwarkesh.com)
AI Continuous Learning

Factorio Learning Environment: A New Benchmark for LLMs

2025-03-11

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly exceeding existing benchmarks, demanding new open-ended evaluations. The Factorio Learning Environment (FLE) is introduced, using the game Factorio to test agents on long-term planning, program synthesis, and resource optimization. FLE offers open-ended, exponentially scaling challenges—from basic automation to complex factories processing millions of resource units per second. Two settings are provided: lab-play with 24 structured tasks and fixed resources, and open-play, the unbounded task of building the largest factory from scratch on a procedurally generated map. Results show LLMs still lack strong spatial reasoning. In lab-play, LLMs show promise in short-term skills but fail in constrained environments, highlighting limitations in error analysis. In open-play, while LLMs discover automation strategies improving growth (e.g., electric drilling), they fail at complex automation (e.g., electronic circuit manufacturing).

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(jackhopkins.github.io)
AI

Linux 6.14 Adds Support for Microsoft Copilot Key

2025-01-24

The Linux 6.14 kernel introduces support for the Microsoft Copilot key found on new laptops pre-loaded with Windows. This key, used to launch Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant or similar chatbot software, was previously unmapped in Linux. The update modifies the atkbd keyboard driver, mapping the F23 key to the Copilot shortcut (Meta+Shift+F23). Additionally, Linux 6.14 boasts enhanced game controller support and other input subsystem improvements.

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(www.phoronix.com)
Development Hardware Support

Undercover DHS Agents Detain Tufts PhD Student in Somerville

2025-03-26
Undercover DHS Agents Detain Tufts PhD Student in Somerville

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University PhD student from Turkey, was unexpectedly arrested in Somerville by Department of Homeland Security agents. The agents, who did not identify themselves, masked their faces, and confiscated her phone before detaining her. A witness reported Ozturk was visibly distressed, crying and stating she was a student. Her lawyer has not yet been able to contact her or learn her location. The arrest appears connected to the Trump administration's campaign targeting pro-Palestinian campus activists.

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(www.bostonglobe.com)
Misc arrest student

Interstellar Navigation: New Horizons Uses Stellar Parallax

2025-07-07
Interstellar Navigation: New Horizons Uses Stellar Parallax

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, hurtling out of our solar system, offers a unique perspective on the Milky Way. The stars' positions appear significantly different from Earth's view. Scientists have leveraged this parallax effect to achieve the first-ever interstellar navigation using stellar positions. By comparing New Horizons' images of Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359 with data from the Gaia space telescope, researchers calculated the probe's galactic location. While less precise than the Deep Space Network, this method offers advantages at greater distances from Earth, enabling autonomous operation without relying on radio signals from our solar system. Future improvements could significantly enhance accuracy, paving the way for future interstellar missions.

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(www.newscientist.com)
Tech interstellar navigation stellar parallax

Open-Source WebGPU Ray Tracer: Real-time Rendering from glTF Scenes

2024-12-26
Open-Source WebGPU Ray Tracer: Real-time Rendering from glTF Scenes

The open-source project webgpu-raytracer is a software ray tracing engine built using the WebGPU API. It supports glTF scene files and renders materials with albedo, normal, and material maps. The engine utilizes BVH for accelerated ray-scene intersections and employs multiple importance sampling for efficiency. Currently, it supports environment maps and allows camera control via keyboard and mouse, but refraction is not yet supported.

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(github.com)
Development Ray Tracing

Fully Homomorphic Encryption: Towards a Truly Private Internet

2025-07-18
Fully Homomorphic Encryption: Towards a Truly Private Internet

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) allows arbitrary computations on ciphertext without decryption. This means data can remain encrypted across the internet, preventing breaches and enabling true privacy. While currently slow, FHE's speed is improving 8x yearly. In the future, FHE may power encrypted cloud computing, encrypted large language model inference, and confidential blockchain smart contracts, potentially disrupting data-harvesting business models and shifting the internet from 'spy by default' to 'privacy by default'.

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(bozmen.io)
Tech Fully Homomorphic Encryption
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