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Reading Skills and Brain Structure: A Neuroimaging Study

2024-12-13

A new study reveals significant differences in brain structure between individuals with varying reading abilities. Analyzing open-source data from over 1,000 participants, researchers found correlations between reading proficiency and the structure of the left anterior temporal lobe and Heschl's gyrus. The left temporal pole integrates diverse information, while Heschl's gyrus, part of the auditory cortex, showed thickness correlated with reading ability. The study highlights brain plasticity, suggesting reading shapes brain structure, benefiting both individuals and humanity.

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(theconversation.com)
AI reading skills brain structure neuroimaging

White House Near Collapse: An Unprecedented Reconstruction

2024-12-14

In 1948, the White House, worn down by war damage and hasty renovations, faced imminent collapse due to structural decay and inadequate foundations. President Truman and his family were relocated, initiating a three-year comprehensive reconstruction. This project not only repaired the critical structural issues but also modernized the White House, adding basements, expanding utility spaces, and nearly doubling the number of rooms. A secret atomic bomb shelter was also constructed, reflecting the anxieties of the Cold War era. While the renovated White House was modernized, the removal of original interior elements altered its historical character.

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(en.wikipedia.org)
Misc White House Reconstruction Truman Historic Preservation

Mysterious Tablet with Unknown Script Unearthed in Georgia

2024-12-14

A basalt tablet inscribed with 60 enigmatic characters has been discovered near Lake Bashplemi in Georgia. The unique symbols, arranged in seven registers, bear partial resemblance to scripts from the Middle East, India, Egypt, and even West Iberia, but don't directly match any known writing system. Dating potentially to the Late Bronze or Early Iron Ages, its purpose remains a mystery, though theories include recording military spoils, construction projects, or religious offerings. The discovery suggests cultural exchange between the Caucasus and neighboring regions in antiquity.

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(languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu)
Misc ancient script archaeological discovery Georgia

CIA's Animal Spies: From Pigeons to Rats, Declassified Secrets of Nature's Arsenal

2024-12-13

The CIA's history of using animals in espionage is filled with creativity and challenges. From pigeons carrying miniature cameras, to the attempted use of a cat for eavesdropping in the 'Acoustikitty' program (ultimately failing due to the cat's independent nature), to robotic catfish 'Charlie' for underwater reconnaissance, and the dragonfly-mimicking miniature drone 'Insectothopter', the CIA showcased its imagination, leveraging animal characteristics for intelligence gathering. Additionally, they used animal remains as camouflaged dead drops, even employing rats soaked in cat repellent to deliver messages. These imaginative attempts highlight the CIA's innovative spirit in technology and intelligence, and also reflect the unique value of animals in special environments.

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(www.cia.gov)
Misc animal spies CIA technological innovation

uv: A Blazing-Fast Python Package and Project Manager

2024-12-14

uv, a lightning-fast Python package and project manager written in Rust, replaces pip, pip-tools, pipx, poetry, pyenv, twine, and virtualenv. Boasting a 10-100x speed improvement, uv offers project management, tool management, Python version management, script support, and a pip-compatible interface. Features like global caching and workspace support streamline workflows. From project creation and dependency management to running scripts and building distributables, uv provides efficient and convenient solutions for all your Python development needs.

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(docs.astral.sh)
Development package management project management

Quantus: Revolutionizing Fintech with a Cutting-Edge Quantitative Trading Platform

2024-12-12

Quantus is an advanced quantitative trading platform designed to provide professional traders and institutional investors with efficient and reliable trading solutions. It integrates powerful data analytics tools, flexible backtesting capabilities, and a low-latency execution system, enabling users to better capitalize on market opportunities and enhance investment returns. With its robust technology and user-friendly interface, Quantus is quickly becoming a rising star in the fintech landscape.

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(quantus.finance)
Tech quantitative trading fintech trading platform

LLVM C Library Speeds Up GPUs: Running C Code on GPUs

2024-12-14

The LLVM project has released an exciting GPU C library enabling developers to run libc and libm functions directly on the GPU within C/C++ code. The library supports two main modes: as a supplementary library for offloading languages like OpenMP, CUDA, or HIP; and by directly compiling C/C++ code for the GPU. The article details how to use both modes, including compilation options, linking, and specific builds for AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. This library allows developers to leverage the parallel processing power of GPUs, significantly improving performance without needing deep knowledge of complex GPU programming models.

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(libc.llvm.org)
Development GPU programming C library

WordPress Battles Private Equity: A Fight for the Future of Open Source

2024-12-12

WordPress, the world's leading content management system, is locked in a battle with private equity firm Silver Lake and its investment, WP Engine. After receiving massive investment, WP Engine, a for-profit company built on WordPress, has aggressively exploited the WordPress trademark while contributing minimally back to the open-source community. After repeated attempts at communication failed, Automattic CEO and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg took action, restricting WP Engine's access to WordPress.org resources to defend the open-source community and the future of WordPress. This conflict highlights the fundamental conflict between open-source communities and profit-maximizing private equity firms, serving as a cautionary tale about the long-term health of open-source projects.

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(automattic.com)
Development Private Equity

TeaVM 0.11.0 Released: New WebAssembly Backend

2024-12-15

TeaVM 0.11.0 has been released, featuring a brand new WebAssembly backend. The old WebAssembly backend, while functional, lacked adoption due to insignificant performance gains and a poor developer experience. The new backend, leveraging the WebAssembly GC proposal, addresses these issues, improving interaction with browser JS APIs and reducing binary file size. While currently slightly less feature-rich than the JS backend, it already supports JSO (Java-to-JS interaction API), aiming for parity in the next release. This release also includes bug fixes in BitSet implementation and adds support for various JS APIs, such as file reading, touch events, the Popover API, and Navigator.sendBeacon.

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(teavm.org)
Development

Python Dependency Management: A Raging Inferno

2024-12-15

This article delves into the complexities of Python dependency management, likening it to building a bonfire in a dry forest. The author argues that Python dependencies aren't simply a matter of `pip install`; they encompass project packages, system packages, the operating system, hardware, and the environment itself. Good dependency management is crucial for reproducibility—ensuring consistent results across different environments. The article details version control, environment isolation, definition files, lock files, and other key concepts. It then provides a comprehensive comparison of numerous tools, including pip, venv, virtualenv, pip-tools, Pipenv, Poetry, PDM, pyenv, pipx, uv, Conda, Mamba, conda-lock, and Pixi, analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and use cases. Finally, the author offers tool recommendations based on different scenarios (administrative privileges, dependency types, operating systems, etc.) and looks ahead to future trends in Python dependency management.

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(nielscautaerts.xyz)
Development Python dependency management reproducibility Python tools

The Illusion of Intelligence: AI, Interaction, and the Clever Hans Effect

2024-12-15

This paper explores the nature of intelligence in AI, particularly large language models (LLMs). It argues that the apparent intelligence of LLMs isn't due to independent reasoning but rather emerges from interaction with users. Drawing parallels between Socratic questioning, the Clever Hans effect, and iterative prompting of LLMs, the author demonstrates that intelligence is a relational phenomenon arising from collaboration, not isolated cognition. LLMs generate responses based on probabilistic relationships within their training data, responding to user prompts like Clever Hans responded to his handler's cues. The value of AI, therefore, lies not in its inherent 'knowledge' but in its ability to facilitate insightful questions and collaborative exploration, ultimately augmenting human creativity and problem-solving.

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(aalokbhattacharya.substack.com)
AI Emergent Intelligence

CCxTrust: A Confidential Computing Platform Leveraging Collaborative Trust from TEE and TPM

2024-12-12

CCxTrust is a novel confidential computing platform that cleverly combines the strengths of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) to establish a collaborative trust framework. By leveraging the black-box Root of Trust (RoT) embedded in CPU-TEEs and the flexible white-box RoT of TPMs, CCxTrust achieves end-to-end protection of sensitive data and models, overcoming the limitations of relying on a single hardware RoT. The platform implements independent Roots of Trust for Measurement (RTM) and a collaborative Root of Trust for Report (RTR), further enhanced by a composite attestation protocol for improved security and efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance advantages.

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(arxiv.org)
AI Confidential Computing Trusted Execution Environment Trusted Platform Module

Building a Simple Object System from Scratch in Ruby

2024-12-15

This blog post details building a basic object system in Ruby without using classes. The author cleverly uses anonymous functions and hash tables to implement core OOP concepts like method lookup, prototypal inheritance, mixins, and metaprogramming. Starting with a constructor function, the post demonstrates simulating private variables and public interfaces, effectively recreating class-like behavior and inheritance. Through clear code examples, readers learn to create objects, define methods, implement inheritance and mixins, and even build a rudimentary `attr_accessor`-like metaprogramming feature. It's a practical guide to understanding object system fundamentals.

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(metacircu1ar.github.io)
Development Object-Oriented Programming Metaprogramming

XFCE 4.20 Released: Experimental Wayland Support and Numerous Improvements

2024-12-15

After nearly two years of development, XFCE 4.20 has been officially released! This version focuses on preparing the codebase for Wayland, now offering experimental Wayland support for most components, though it's still in its early stages and recommended for advanced users. XFCE 4.20 also boasts numerous new features, bug fixes, and improvements, including improved icon scaling, a performance-enhanced icon view, and an upgraded Thunar file manager. Importantly, Wayland support is incomplete, with some components and features yet to be ported.

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(alexxcons.github.io)
Development Desktop Environment

Node.js EPUB Library @smoores/epub Released

2024-12-13

A new Node.js library, @smoores/epub, has been released. It allows developers to inspect, modify, and create EPUB 3 publications. The library offers high-level APIs that simplify interaction with the EPUB specification, such as setting the title and retrieving author information. Lower-level APIs provide granular control over the EPUB structure, enabling tasks like adding chapters and metadata. Built upon fast-xml-parser, @smoores/epub provides robust XML parsing and manipulation capabilities, facilitating efficient handling of EPUB file XML content.

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(www.npmjs.com)
Development Library

Mullvad VPN App's 2024 Security Audit Report Released

2024-12-12

Mullvad VPN has released the report for its 2024 third-party security audit of its VPN app. The audit uncovered six vulnerabilities, ranging in severity from low to high, all of which have been addressed. Three high-severity vulnerabilities involved signal handlers and a virtual IP address leak and have been fixed in the latest version. The audit also noted some non-security issues that Mullvad is actively working to resolve. Overall, the Mullvad VPN app is deemed highly secure, but users are still advised to upgrade to the latest version.

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(mullvad.net)
Tech VPN security security audit vulnerability fixes

Fei-Fei Li: The Future of AI Vision Lies in 3D

2024-12-12

AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li delivered a keynote at NeurIPS, outlining her vision for computer vision. She argues that true visual intelligence requires moving beyond 2D image processing to 3D spatial understanding. Her startup, World Labs, is focused on giving AI 'spatial intelligence' – the ability to generate, reason within, and interact with 3D worlds. This unlocks creativity and productivity, impacting robotics, VR/AR, and more. Li stresses the need for substantial computing power and data, advocating for increased public sector investment in AI research.

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(spectrum.ieee.org)
AI Computer Vision 3D Spatial Intelligence

AI Visualization: Similar City Road Networks

2024-12-15

The website similar-cities uses AI to visualize the relationships between cities by comparing the similarities of their road networks. It employs a unique 'drunkard's walk' algorithm, calculating the similarity of random paths within the road networks to assess structural similarity. Data is sourced from OpenStreetMap, encompassing roughly 2500 cities. The project is open-source, providing detailed algorithm explanations and code, and welcomes more city data for improved accuracy.

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(github.com)
AI Visualization Road Networks

Newton Public Schools' 'Equity' Experiment Fails

2024-12-14

In the fall of 2021, Newton Public Schools in Massachusetts implemented a complex initiative called "multilevel classrooms" aimed at improving educational equity. This model mixed students of varying academic abilities into single classrooms with one teacher. Three years later, the results are troubling. Teachers report the model fails to meet the needs of diverse learners; high-achieving students are stifled, while lower-achieving students are hesitant to ask questions. Lack of adequate training and support for teachers led to poor outcomes, with students in multilevel classes often underperforming their single-level counterparts. The school lacked metrics for success, and no data supported the model's efficacy. A teacher's council petitioned to roll back multilevel classes in STEM and world languages, urging the district to find better solutions for addressing educational equity. The failure highlights the need for data-driven approaches and a focus on student needs in educational reform.

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(www.thefp.com)
Misc educational equity multilevel classrooms teaching reform

Reflections on Building with the Model Context Protocol (MCP): A Mixed Bag

2024-12-15

Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) aims to connect LLMs with external tools and data, allowing apps like Claude Desktop to access databases, search engines, and more. While MCP offers exciting possibilities for expanding AI application functionality, its current implementation has shortcomings. Claude Desktop only supports local servers, lacks robust handling of complex inputs, and suffers from client-side timeouts. Furthermore, improvements are needed in documentation and configuration, such as an official registry, support for asynchronous task scheduling, and multi-client collaboration, to fully realize MCP's potential for users.

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(outlore.dev)
AI Model Context Protocol

Kowloon Walled City: A Cross-Section of Density and Decay

2024-12-13

In the 1990s, Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong was the world's most densely populated place, cramming roughly 50,000 people into just 2.6 hectares. After WWII, it became a refuge for refugees, its buildings growing organically into a labyrinthine structure. Crime and poor living conditions led to its demolition in 1994. Artist Hitomi Terasawa's cross-section illustration vividly captures this unique and ultimately tragic urban phenomenon, preserving its memory as a 'living organism'.

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(www.thisiscolossal.com)
Design Kowloon Walled City population density urban planning

Hacking Physics with a Napkin

2024-12-14

This article explores unconventional approaches to solving physics problems using simple estimation and dimensional analysis. The author demonstrates the power of these methods by calculating the speed of falling raindrops, the length of the E. coli genome, and the mass of a proton, among other examples. The article suggests this napkin-based approach can greatly enhance physics education and learning. Further techniques like Fermi estimation and random walks are introduced and applied to problems like estimating the E. coli genome length and determining the optimal speed for walking or running in the rain, showcasing their practicality.

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(hapax.github.io)
Misc dimensional analysis Fermi estimation

Blogger Resurfaces 2004 MIT Spam Conference Talk Intro Video

2024-12-13

Blogger John Graham-Cumming recently shared on his blog the intro video from his 2004 MIT Spam Conference talk. The video cleverly uses the "All your base are belong to us" meme, adapting it to discuss spam and machine learning, and paying homage to Paul Graham. It showcases early machine learning applications in anti-spam and the blogger's creative and humorous approach to tech communication.

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(blog.jgc.org)
AI machine learning anti-spam

HP 9845C: A Colorful Pioneer of 80s Computer Graphics

2024-12-13

In 1981, the HP 9845C, the top-of-the-line model in the 9845 series, emerged as the first HP computer to support color, stunning the world with its powerful graphics capabilities. Featuring hardware-accelerated vector drawing and polygon fill, and supporting fast matrix operations for 3D model rendering, this machine initially designed for scientific and engineering use quickly became a multipurpose system, even contributing to the graphic scenes in the 1983 film "WarGames." Its demo program was remarkable, boasting over 4000 lines of code and showcasing cutting-edge concepts like 3D shading, ordered dithering, wireframe rendering, interactive light pen control, and color infographics at a high resolution of up to 4913 colors.

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(socks-studio.com)
Tech computer graphics vintage computer

Bypassing Windows Kernel Mitigations: A Deep Dive into Violet Phosphorus

2024-12-13

This post delves into bypassing modern Windows 10 and 11 kernel mitigations like SMEP and VBS. The author details Violet Phosphorus, a universal VBS/SMEP bypass technique, providing PoC code and a ROP chain. It explains SMEP and VBS, demonstrating how to exploit a vulnerability in the HackSysExtremeVulnerableDriver to use ROP gadgets and the MiGetPteAddress function to modify page table entries for kernel code execution. The author also shows how to use Kristal-G's SYSRET shellcode to return to user mode. This is a valuable resource for kernel exploit development and security researchers, categorized as Development.

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(wetw0rk.github.io)
Development kernel exploit SMEP bypass VBS bypass

Unveiling the Deep Connection Between Maximum Likelihood Estimation and Loss Functions

2024-12-15

This article delves into the intrinsic relationship between Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) and commonly used loss functions. Starting with the fundamentals of MLE, the author meticulously explains its close connection to KL divergence. The article then uses Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Cross-Entropy as examples, demonstrating how these functions are naturally derived from MLE rather than being arbitrarily chosen. By assuming data distributions (e.g., Gaussian for linear regression, Bernoulli for logistic regression), maximizing the likelihood function via MLE directly leads to MSE and Cross-Entropy loss functions. This provides a clear path to understanding the theoretical underpinnings of loss functions, moving beyond mere intuition.

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(rish-01.github.io)
AI Maximum Likelihood Estimation Loss Functions

Cambridge Blockchain Network Sustainability Index: Bitcoin Mining Map Reveals Energy Consumption Patterns

2024-12-12

The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) released a mining map visualizing global Bitcoin mining energy consumption as part of the Cambridge Blockchain Network Sustainability Index. The map shows the share of Bitcoin mining hashrate by country and region, revealing a seasonal migration pattern of Chinese miners between ‘dry’ and ‘wet’ seasons to leverage cheaper hydropower. However, this migration pattern likely ended after the Chinese government crackdown on the mining industry in June 2021. The research is based on geolocation mining facility data collected in partnership with several Bitcoin mining pools and acknowledges contributions from BTC.com, Poolin, ViaBTC, and Foundry.

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(ccaf.io)
Tech Bitcoin mining energy consumption sustainability
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