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R0ML's Ratio: Avoid the Bozo Trap in Enterprise Software Licensing

2025-08-10

This article introduces a clever methodology for evaluating volume purchases: R0ML's Ratio. Using the example of buying thousands of clown noses, it explains how to calculate the ratio: divide the total purchase price by the full retail price of all units. A ratio under 1 indicates a good deal; above 1 means you've been had. This is especially crucial for software and SaaS licensing, where accurately estimating usage is key to avoiding losses from underutilization. The author suggests empowering employees with corporate cards for individual software purchases as a safer alternative.

(blog.glyph.im)

Development procurement strategy software licensing

Hacking Your Starlink Mini: Removing the Internal WiFi Router

2025-06-15

This guide details how to remove the integrated Wi-Fi router from a Starlink Mini 1 terminal, enabling Ethernet-only operation. This modification unlocks greater flexibility for advanced users with custom networking needs, embedded installations, or power-constrained environments. The guide provides a step-by-step disassembly process, PCB connector pinouts, a direct Ethernet connection schematic, network configuration instructions, and explanations of gRPC status codes for troubleshooting. Caution: This modification is only for the Starlink Mini 1, and removing the metal plate is strongly discouraged due to potential cooling and EMI issues.

(olegkutkov.me)

Hardware

Info Warfare: Truth and Digital Risks in the Next Conflict

2025-03-09

Info Warfare: Truth and Digital Risks in the Next Conflict

In war, truth is often the first casualty. In the next major conflict, virtually all information could be a victim. Over-reliance on digital communication exposes Western societies to significant risks, as seen in Ukraine's experience with Russia. Hacker groups (both military and criminal) have infiltrated television, the internet, and streaming radio, spreading disinformation, launching denial-of-service attacks, and jamming GPS signals, posing a serious challenge to societal narratives and stability.

(www.spectator.co.uk)

Tech information warfare digital risks

The Sackler Brothers and LSD: A Tale of Ideals and Profits

2025-01-30

The Sackler Brothers and LSD: A Tale of Ideals and Profits

This article unveils the little-known story of the Sackler brothers' involvement in early LSD research during the 1950s. Initially driven by the idealistic goal of curing mental illness, they actively participated in early LSD trials, attempting to link LSD research to their own hormonal imbalance theories. However, over time, their focus shifted to the commercial potential of pharmaceuticals, ultimately leading to infamy for developing and marketing OxyContin. The article highlights the conflict between idealism and profit motives, and the ethical and commercial considerations in technological advancement.

(resobscura.substack.com)

Tech Sackler Brothers Pharmaceutical Research

C++-style OOP in C: Kernel Services via Function Pointers

2025-08-27

C++-style OOP in C: Kernel Services via Function Pointers

This article details how the author implemented a virtual table (vtable) mechanism in their operating system kernel using C's function pointers and structs, mimicking object-oriented programming. This approach enables unified management of kernel services like starting, stopping, and restarting, and allows for flexible scheduling policy changes without extensive code modification. The author explains the implementation and application of vtables with examples of device drivers and service management, discussing the advantages and disadvantages. While the C syntax leads to slightly verbose code, this method enhances readability and maintainability, improving kernel flexibility and extensibility.

(oshub.org)

Development

Are Americans' Perceptions of the Economy and Crime Broken?

2025-01-26

Are Americans' Perceptions of the Economy and Crime Broken?

Americans' views on the economy and crime are increasingly partisan, creating a disconnect between perception and reality. Despite positive economic indicators, many believe the economy is failing; similarly, despite a decades-long decline in crime, most believe it's rising. This is especially pronounced in the 2024 election cycle. The article introduces the Real-Time Crime Index, a project aiming for a more accurate, near real-time picture of crime trends by aggregating data from hundreds of police agencies. While acknowledging data imperfections, the index reveals declines in murders and violent crime, contradicting public perception. The author argues that media plays a crucial role in shaping public opinion and should strive for more objective, transparent reporting to mitigate partisan biases.

(www.niemanlab.org)

Tech media crime rate economy

London Police Storm Quaker Meeting House, Arresting Climate Activists

2025-03-30

London Police Storm Quaker Meeting House, Arresting Climate Activists

Over 20 Metropolitan Police officers forcibly entered a Quaker meeting house, arresting six women who were discussing climate change and Gaza. This is believed to be the first time in the history of the pacifist Quakers that police have breached one of their places of worship. The women, attending a welcome meeting for a non-violent protest group, were handcuffed, their belongings confiscated, and their student accommodation subsequently raided. The police action has drawn widespread criticism.

(www.thetimes.com)

Misc climate activism Quakers

JavaScript: The Progress That Broke the Web

2025-06-20

JavaScript: The Progress That Broke the Web

This article critiques the overuse of JavaScript frameworks in modern web development. The author argues that the pursuit of app-like experiences has led developers to employ overly complex frameworks and tools, resulting in slow loading times, difficult maintenance, and impaired user experience and SEO. Many website functionalities, the article claims, could be achieved with simpler code, while overly complex architectures reduce efficiency. The author calls for a return to simplicity, prioritizing user experience and performance over technical showmanship.

(www.jonoalderson.com)

Development

Tesla Paid Zero Federal Taxes in 2024 Despite $2.3 Billion in Income

2025-01-31

Tesla Paid Zero Federal Taxes in 2024 Despite $2.3 Billion in Income

Despite earning $2.3 billion in 2024 and being the world's most valuable car company, Tesla paid zero federal income taxes, according to new reports. Over the past three years, Tesla's average tax rate was a mere 0.4%, significantly lower than the statutory 21% corporate tax rate. This is attributed to tax avoidance strategies like accelerated depreciation and unspecified US tax credits. The revelation sparks debate about the US tax system's favoritism towards corporations and the wealthy, and the ease with which billionaires can avoid paying their fair share.

(truthout.org)

Tech Tax Avoidance Tax System

Nvidia Delays RTX 5070, Setting the Stage for AMD's Radeon RX 9070 Showdown

2025-02-14

Nvidia Delays RTX 5070, Setting the Stage for AMD's Radeon RX 9070 Showdown

Nvidia's RTX 5070, boasting RTX 4090-level performance at $549, has been delayed from February to March 5th. This sets the stage for AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT launch on February 28th. AMD's strategy appears to focus on price competitiveness against Nvidia's RTX 4070 Ti and 4070 Super, rather than directly challenging the top-tier cards. However, Nvidia's substantial profits give it considerable leeway to respond. Rumors persist of a more powerful AMD card with 32GB of RAM, though this remains unconfirmed. The GPU battle heats up!

(www.theverge.com)

Hardware

Missile Strike Confirmed as Cause of Azerbaijan E190 Crash

2024-12-28

Missile Strike Confirmed as Cause of Azerbaijan E190 Crash

An Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer E190 passenger plane crashed on Christmas Day, killing 38 people. The Azerbaijani government confirmed that a Russian Pantir-S1 surface-to-air missile caused the crash. The aircraft was attempting an emergency landing when it went down. Russian air defense forces were engaged in shooting down Ukrainian drones in the area, but civilian airspace wasn't closed. Despite pilot requests for an emergency landing, the plane was denied access to Russian airports and crashed near Aktau, Kazakhstan.

(aeroxplorer.com)

Misc missile strike international incident

Minimizing Wifi Battery Drain in IoT Projects

2024-12-22

Minimizing Wifi Battery Drain in IoT Projects

In the early development of PetDrifts, an IoT device using an ESP32 C3, battery life was a major challenge, lasting only a day. The culprit was identified as high power consumption during HTTP POST requests every 15 minutes. To address this, the team explored two solutions: switching from TCP to UDP to reduce network overhead, and adopting MQTT for persistent connections and lower power usage. While improvements were observed, the battery life wasn't sufficient. Ultimately, they opted for a Bluetooth MCU to achieve significantly longer battery life.

(khalsalabs.com)

Development IoT Power Optimization

Litestack: All-in-One Data Infrastructure Gem for Ruby on Rails

2024-12-23

Litestack: All-in-One Data Infrastructure Gem for Ruby on Rails

Litestack is a Ruby gem offering a comprehensive data infrastructure solution for Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications. Leveraging SQLite's power, it integrates a full-fledged SQL database, a fast cache, a robust job queue, a reliable message broker, a full-text search engine, and a metrics platform—all in one package. Unlike traditional approaches requiring separate servers and databases, Litestack delivers superior performance, efficiency, ease of use, and cost savings. Its embedded database and cache reduce memory and CPU usage, while its streamlined interface simplifies development. It seamlessly integrates with ActiveRecord and Sequel and automatically optimizes for Fiber-based I/O frameworks.

(github.com)

Development Data Infrastructure

AGI Attempt on the Tokio Runtime: A Failed Biologically-Inspired AI Experiment

2024-12-26

AGI Attempt on the Tokio Runtime: A Failed Biologically-Inspired AI Experiment

A developer attempted to build an AGI system based on a biological neural network on the Tokio runtime. He built an asynchronous neural network and trained it using genetic algorithms, but the experiment ultimately failed, achieving a maximum score of only 3. The author suggests that Tokio's inability to efficiently handle the massive number of neural impulses, and the optimization strategy of the genetic algorithm, might be responsible for the failure.

(www.christo.sh)

AI biological neural network

Mozilla Add-on Policy Update: Streamlining Development

2025-06-24

Mozilla has updated its Add-on policies for addons.mozilla.org (AMO) to simplify the development process. Key changes include: lifting the ban on "closed group" extensions, allowing developers more flexibility; clarifying data transmission policies with updated terminology around data consent and control; no longer requiring privacy policies to be hosted on AMO, instead encouraging self-hosted links; adding a user scripts API policy specifying its use only within user script manager extensions; and updating source code submission guidelines to clarify dependency inclusion. These updates take effect August 4, 2025.

(blog.mozilla.org)

Development Add-ons Policy Update

Warm Nights: The Silent Killer of Plant Growth

2025-08-23

This article explores the impact of warm nights on plant growth. Plants, like animals, respire, burning sugars for energy. When the sugars produced through photosynthesis are insufficient to meet the demands of respiration, the plant will eventually die. Warm nights accelerate respiration, causing plants to consume more energy, ultimately leading to poor growth and even death. This is particularly detrimental to plants from cool climates. The article uses tomatoes as an example to illustrate the negative effects of warm nights on plant growth and explains the differences in efficiency of various photosynthetic types (C3, C4, CAM) at different temperatures.

(www.crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt.com)

Misc photosynthesis

Make Your QEMU 10 Times Faster: A Weird Trick

2024-12-17

While debugging NixOS tests, Linus Heckemann discovered painfully slow data copying times (over 2 hours) in a QEMU virtual machine. Performance analysis with `perf` revealed that QEMU's 9p server used an inefficient linked list (O(n) complexity) for file lookups. By switching to a hash table provided by glib (O(1) complexity), he reduced the test time to 7 minutes and successfully contributed the optimization to the QEMU project.

(linus.schreibt.jetzt)

Development 9p protocol

SepLLM: Inference Acceleration for LLMs by Compressing Meaningless Tokens

2025-03-06

SepLLM: Inference Acceleration for LLMs by Compressing Meaningless Tokens

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges due to their massive computational demands. Researchers discovered that certain meaningless special tokens contribute disproportionately to attention scores. Based on this, they propose SepLLM, a framework that accelerates inference by compressing segments between these tokens and dropping redundant ones. Experiments show SepLLM achieves over 50% reduction in KV cache on the GSM8K-CoT benchmark with negligible performance loss using Llama-3-8B. In streaming settings, SepLLM effectively handles language modeling with up to 4 million tokens or more.

(sepllm.github.io)

AI Inference Acceleration Model Compression

Vim: A Programming Language Beyond an Editor

2024-12-15

Vim is more than just a text editor; it's a language for interacting with your computer. Its concise and efficient command structure is easy to learn and remember, and also easy for a computer to interpret. While Vim itself is powerful, its core strength lies in the fact that its mode has been integrated into almost every mainstream code editor, allowing developers to flexibly choose their preferred editor interface while retaining Vim's efficient command language. Therefore, NeoVim, as the most complete and consistent implementation of the Vim language, is valuable for providing this efficient editing language, not just the editor itself.

(blog.jonas.foo)

Development editor

NoteUX: A Beautifully Designed Note-Taking App

2025-03-31

NoteUX is a beautifully designed note-taking app that helps you quickly capture, organize, and optimize your thoughts effortlessly. Its clean interface features multiple scratch pads, dark mode, fullscreen mode, auto-save, word count, and the ability to download notes as .txt files. Perfect for writers, students, and professionals alike, NoteUX enhances productivity and creativity.

(www.noteux.com)

Development

Stelvio: Streamlined AWS Management for Python Devs

2025-03-20

Stelvio: Streamlined AWS Management for Python Devs

Stelvio is a Python library simplifying AWS cloud infrastructure management and deployment. It uses pure Python, offering smart defaults for complex configurations. Developers define cloud resources with familiar Python code, cleanly separating infrastructure from application code. Currently supporting Lambda, DynamoDB, and API Gateway (with more AWS services planned), Stelvio prioritizes developer productivity over infrastructure complexity, offering a more streamlined approach than Terraform, Pulumi, or AWS CDK. Note: Stelvio is in early alpha, ideal for experimentation.

(github.com)

Development Cloud Infrastructure

One Million Chessboards: A Single-Process Server Handling Millions of Concurrent Chess Games

2025-07-16

One Million Chessboards: A Single-Process Server Handling Millions of Concurrent Chess Games

The author built "One Million Chessboards," an online multiplayer chess game where a 1000x1000 grid of chessboards forms a single global game. Every move instantly affects the entire board, with no turns and inter-board movement allowed. Running on a single Go process, the game attracted over 150,000 players in 10 days, processing over 15,000,000 moves and hundreds of millions of queries. The article details the game's system design, data distribution, protocol optimizations, optimistic locking, and rollback mechanisms. The author shares lessons learned, including performance optimization, architectural choices, and balancing game scale with player experience. The post concludes with reflections on design flaws, such as the lack of an awe-inspiring scale, and future game development plans.

(eieio.games)

Game High Concurrency System Design

You Suck At CSS: A Book Review

2025-03-10

Rex Riepe's 'You Suck At CSS' isn't about avoiding CSS; it's about mastering it efficiently. The book targets both beginners and experts, aiming to help developers quickly complete frontend tasks while emphasizing team efficiency. It supports the California Stylesheets framework and focuses on rapid web development using modern technologies. It provides context on why CSS and its ecosystem are the way they are.

(rexriepe.com)

Development Front-end Development

The Humble Beginnings of the PC: From Radio Hobbyists to Altair

2025-03-05

The Humble Beginnings of the PC: From Radio Hobbyists to Altair

This article traces the early development of the personal computer, showing it wasn't born in a corporate lab, but rather from the American radio hobbyist culture of the early 20th century. The efforts of figures like Hugo Gernsback fostered a culture of hands-on tinkering and futurism, laying the groundwork for the PC. Early amateur computer enthusiasts, such as Stephen Gray, attempted to build PCs but were hampered by the lack of key components like microprocessors. As integrated circuit technology improved, the first rudimentary home computer kits appeared, but their limited functionality prevented widespread success. It wasn't until MITS' Altair 8800, with its powerful Intel 8080 processor and expandability, ignited the PC market and marked the true birth of the personal computer industry.

(technicshistory.com)

Tech PC history

ROCm Device Support Wishlist: Community Input Sought for Future GPU Compatibility

2025-01-20

ROCm Device Support Wishlist: Community Input Sought for Future GPU Compatibility

The AMD ROCm open-source compute platform is seeking community input to determine which GPUs will receive driver support in the future. Currently, ROCm supports select AMD Instinct and Radeon cards, but many users are requesting support for more models, particularly those with 16GB or more VRAM, and reinstatement of support for older AMD GPUs that have lost ROCm compatibility. A GitHub discussion thread has generated significant community engagement, with users actively voting on their desired GPU support.

(github.com)

Hardware Open-Source Compute

arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaborators

2025-03-01

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 works with partners who adhere to them. Have an idea to enhance the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

(arxiv.org)

Development

Control Your iTerm from LLMs with iterm-mcp

2025-01-30

Control Your iTerm from LLMs with iterm-mcp

iterm-mcp is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server providing LLM access to your iTerm session. It features efficient token usage by only reading the output the model needs; natural integration allowing LLMs to interact with iTerm, answering questions or performing tasks; and full terminal control with REPL support. Easy to install via npx and integrate with clients like Claude Desktop, it prioritizes simplicity. However, it lacks built-in safety restrictions, requiring users to monitor model activity and exercise caution.

(github.com)

Development

Close Call: Cold War Nuke Nearly Goes Off, Expert Disarms It by Hand

2025-05-30

Close Call: Cold War Nuke Nearly Goes Off, Expert Disarms It by Hand

During Operation Tumbler-Snapper in 1952 at the Nevada Proving Ground, a 15-kiloton nuclear bomb codenamed "Fox" malfunctioned atop its 300-foot tower. Facing potential catastrophe, Dr. John C. Clark of the Atomic Energy Commission led a team on a harrowing climb to disarm the device. Without an elevator, they manually deactivated the bomb's firing system, showcasing the risks and bravery of Cold War nuclear testing and the expertise of those involved.

(daxe.substack.com)

Tech disarming

Formalizing a Linear Algebra Proof with Lean

2025-01-24

This article details the author's experience formalizing a simple theorem about the linear independence of eigenvectors in linear algebra using the Lean proof assistant. The article explains Lean's syntax, the use of the Mathlib library, and how automation tools simplify the proving process. The authors explore improving and generalizing the theorem and introduce Mathlib's version control and community collaboration. Finally, the article looks ahead to the role of proof assistants and AI in future mathematical research.

(www.ams.org)

Development Lean proof assistant

Reflections from a Former OpenAI Employee: Culture and Challenges in Hypergrowth

2025-07-16

Reflections from a Former OpenAI Employee: Culture and Challenges in Hypergrowth

A former OpenAI employee shares their reflections after a year at the company. They describe the cultural impact of OpenAI's rapid expansion from 1000 to 3000 employees, highlighting challenges in communication, organizational structure, and product launches. Internal communication relies entirely on Slack, management is flat, and the company values action and results. Their involvement in the Codex launch showcased the thrill of building a product from scratch in a 7-week sprint, but also revealed codebase and infrastructure issues arising from rapid growth. The author concludes by summarizing their OpenAI learnings and suggesting that joining a large AI lab is a viable option for founders, as the AGI race intensifies with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google leading the pack.

(calv.info)

AI Company Culture

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