A user reports Backblaze continuously re-uploading a 1TB+ file, with log errors suggesting a 100,000 chunk limit (10MB each). This contradicts Backblaze's advertised unlimited storage. The user suspects a newly implemented limit, possibly even leading to deletion of existing backups. Support's response has been unhelpful, offering only standard troubleshooting steps.
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SQLFlow is a stream processing engine powered by DuckDB, enabling SQL-based operations on real-time data from sources like Kafka and webhooks. It supports data transformations, enrichment, aggregation, tumbling window aggregations, and outputs to destinations such as Kafka, databases, or local files. SQLFlow boasts high throughput, handling tens of thousands of messages per second, and supports custom serialization and encoding. Docker deployment is readily available for easy setup.
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This comprehensive textbook provides a thorough introduction to digital filters and their applications in audio processing. Starting with the simplest lowpass filter, it progressively covers the theoretical foundations, design methods, and implementation techniques of various filter types, including linear time-invariant (LTI) filters, finite impulse response (FIR) filters, infinite impulse response (IIR) filters, and diverse filter structures and implementations. The book includes numerous Matlab and Faust code examples, along with rich audio application case studies, making it ideal for students and researchers in digital signal processing and audio engineering.
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PRINT magazine interviewed Marlene Weisman, a designer who worked for seven seasons on Saturday Night Live (SNL) in the 1980s. She recounts her incredible journey creating graphics for iconic sketches in a pre-computer era, relying on hand-lettering, Letraset, phototypesetting, and paste-up. Weisman details collaborations with stars like Mike Myers and the frenetic pace of SNL production. The article offers a behind-the-scenes look at SNL and a fascinating glimpse into a designer's creative journey amidst technological shifts.
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Halliday's AR glasses, showcased at CES, boast a novel optical design that deviates from conventional waveguide-based approaches. Employing a monocular projector to directly project images onto the eye via a mirror optical system, they offer advantages in brightness and efficiency, and compatibility with standard prescription lenses. However, users must look upward to view the image, leading to discomfort and social awkwardness. Stray light also results in a halo effect, diminishing contrast. Despite successful marketing, the design may hinder resolution and image quality improvements, and the lack of a camera limits its AI potential. While innovative, its drawbacks significantly outweigh the benefits.
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This article explains why cryptography doesn't rely on NP-complete problems. While NP-complete problems are hard to solve quickly, cryptography needs problems that are hard on average, meaning a randomly selected instance is difficult to crack. RSA is an example; it relies on the difficulty of factoring large numbers, which is hard on average. NP-complete problems only guarantee hardness in the worst case, not average-case hardness, making them unsuitable for cryptography.
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Tired of clunky comment systems? This author cleverly leverages the decentralized social platform Bluesky's AT Protocol to build a lightweight, backend-less blog comment system. By publishing blog posts to Bluesky and using its post URI to fetch comments via the API, the author achieves rich text support, identity verification, and cross-platform conversations. No database or user account management is required, effectively solving the pain points of traditional comment systems. This enhances user experience and increases the scalability and independence of the blog.
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Piano Trainer is a free and open-source piano practice application offering various practice modes: scales, chords, fifths, and interactive quizzes. It's MIDI compatible, cross-platform, and supports home-row keyboard input. Future updates include more scales, settings, togglable quiz questions, and customizable keyboard sounds. Download it for free on itch.io or build from source on GitHub.
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The name Mitsubishi might bring cars to mind first, but it hides three distinct companies. The first is the Mitsubishi Group, a massive conglomerate spanning finance, nuclear technology, automobiles, and more, whose iconic three-diamond logo dates back to 1913. Second is Mitsubishi Pencil Co., founded in 1887, focused on writing instruments and also using the three-diamond logo, but unrelated to the Mitsubishi Group. Third is Konyusha, a Kumamoto-based company producing Mitsubishi cider, also using the three-diamond logo, founded in 1883. These three companies sharing a name and logo caused trademark confusion, necessitating the creation of the Mitsubishi Corporate Name and Trademark Committee for oversight.
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Poland, a key US ally, is furious over US restrictions on the export of AI chips. This move threatens Poland's ambitious military expansion and technological development. The Polish government considers the decision incomprehensible and is seeking redress from both the US and the EU to protect its technological and defense interests.
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This blog post delves into the eBPF trampoline mechanism, a key performance optimization. With eBPF's increasing use in system monitoring and other areas, efficient program execution is critical. The trampoline avoids the overhead of exception handling in traditional kprobe methods by directly calling eBPF programs. The article details the trampoline's inner workings, covering advanced use cases like handling function entry and exit points, multi-argument passing, and implementation optimizations on ARM64.
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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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Driven by a passion for data security and automation, the author spent three years developing BeanHub, an accounting software built on the open-source Beancount. Central to its design is the "file-over-app" philosophy, performing all operations on text files instead of a database, ensuring data openness and long-term accessibility. This journey involved open-sourcing 15 projects and overcoming challenges such as building a large-scale auditable Git repository and securely handling user-uploaded files. Despite sales and competitive pressures, the author prioritized quality, building a community and tutorials to enhance user experience, ultimately attracting paying customers and proving the long-term value of the 'file-over-app' approach.
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The author contrasts the luxurious setting of a New Year's Eve party with his unique attitude towards suffering. Instead of avoiding pain, he views it as a medium for artistic creation, examining and experiencing it with heightened sensitivity and poetic perspective, transforming it into a richer, more authentic life experience. This is a philosophy of 'love of fate' (Amor fati), rejecting mediocrity and embracing the extreme tension of life, a stark contrast to the prevalent ideas of 'self-management' and 'seeking tranquility'.
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A controversy is brewing around Brother laser printers and their compatibility with third-party cartridges. YouTube videos and Reddit posts claim that firmware updates render key features, like color registration, non-functional when non-Brother cartridges are used. While Brother denies intentionally crippling functionality, users report degraded print quality and complete failure. The lack of older firmware versions and automatic updates adds fuel to the fire, raising concerns about anti-consumer practices in the printer industry.
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This article delves into the challenges and solutions for achieving high-quality font rendering in WebGPU. Addressing shortcomings in existing Signed Distance Fields (SDFs) generation methods, the author presents a novel sub-pixel accurate distance transform algorithm (ESDT). ESDT cleverly combines CPU and GPU strengths, employing an improved Euclidean Distance Transform to effectively solve the deviations encountered in traditional methods when handling sub-pixel accuracy and grayscale pixels. The result is precise rendering of various fonts, including emojis, significantly enhancing font rendering quality.
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Researchers at Kobe University discovered that the orchid Oreorchis patens, when near decaying wood, shifts its symbiotic relationship with fungi, absorbing more nutrients from wood-decomposing fungi while continuing photosynthesis. This behavior results in larger plants with more flowers. The study shows this 'theft' isn't compensating for insufficient photosynthesis, but boosting overall nutrient intake, providing an ecological explanation for why a photosynthetic plant might choose this parasitic path. However, less than 10% of these orchids exhibit this behavior, likely because suitable fungi are only found near decaying wood. This research enhances our understanding of orchids' balancing act between photosynthesis and complete parasitism.
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In March 2024, a backdoor was discovered in xz, a widely used compression software. A malicious maintainer, using the pseudonym Jia Tan, secretly inserted this backdoor over three years. The backdoor enabled remote code execution on machines with ssh installed. Its discovery was accidental, by a Postgres developer investigating unrelated performance issues. This article details the backdoor's mechanics and proposes using build reproducibility for detection. The backdoor involved modifying the xz build process to inject a malicious object file and leveraging glibc's ifunc mechanism to hook ssh's RSA_public_decrypt function. The author advocates building software from trusted sources and leveraging build reproducibility to enhance software supply chain security, such as comparing GitHub releases with maintainer-provided tarballs and checking binary consistency across build sources.
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Bitnami is migrating its public Docker image repository to a new Bitnami Legacy repository and gradually rolling out the more secure Bitnami Secure Images (BSI). The migration will be phased, with temporary image service interruptions. Users can choose to migrate to BSI (partially free, but full functionality requires a paid subscription) or the Bitnami Legacy repository (temporary solution, with security risks). Bitnami explains this move as an effort to improve security and address the growing threat of open-source software vulnerabilities and new regulations. However, this move has also sparked controversy, with some arguing it's a strategy to shift from free to paid services.
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Caudena introduces CashflowD (CFD), a cryptocurrency analytics engine built with a modern C++ in-memory database and JIT-compiling query engine. CFD boasts a 200-400X reduction in infrastructure costs and sub-millisecond query times, delivering court-admissible evidence. Its core technology includes an in-memory C++ core, JIT compilation, intelligent clustering and reclustering, and robust risk scoring. Handling petabyte-scale data, CFD overcomes the limitations of traditional blockchain analytics platforms—slow speed, high cost, and shallow analysis—providing unparalleled real-time, in-depth, and reliable blockchain intelligence for financial institutions and law enforcement.
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Maria Montessori, an Italian physician and educator, revolutionized education with her unique method. Initially pursuing engineering, she defied societal norms to become one of Italy's first female medical doctors. Her Montessori method, emphasizing self-directed learning and child-led exploration through specially designed materials and environments, gained global recognition. From its humble beginnings in a Roman classroom, the Montessori approach continues to shape education worldwide, impacting countless children and leaving a lasting legacy on pedagogical practices.
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In recent years, anecdotal evidence suggests a decline in air travel reliability. This analysis uses US Department of Transportation data to reveal a complex picture. While air accidents are declining, significant flight delays are increasingly common, with 3+ hour delays four times more likely in 2024 than in 1990. Airlines are masking this by artificially inflating scheduled flight times. Airfare has become cheaper over the past decade, but this comes at the cost of reliability. Contributing factors may include changes in airline financial models, airport infrastructure saturation, and understaffing of air traffic control.
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This article explores immutable Linux distributions, which enhance stability and security by locking down the core system as read-only. It explains the concept, advantages, and selection criteria for immutable distros, recommending several desktop and server options like Fedora Silverblue, Vanilla OS, and openSUSE Aeon. The author shares personal experiences and discusses the differences between immutable distros and traditional ones, along with snapshot tools like Timeshift and Btrfs. In essence, immutable Linux distros offer a compelling alternative for users prioritizing stability and security, trading some flexibility for a more maintenance-free experience.
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Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has updated its business registration, signaling a shift towards monetizing its cost-efficient large language models (LLMs). The updated scope includes "internet information services," indicating a move away from pure R&D and towards a business model. This follows the release of their open-source LLMs, previously developed with a research-focused approach. The company, spun out of hedge fund High-Flyer, has yet to comment on this strategic change.
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This OpenSSF guide details compiler and linker options to enhance the security and reliability of C/C++ code. It recommends flags for compile-time vulnerability detection and runtime protection against buffer overflows and control-flow hijacking. The guide analyzes performance trade-offs and use cases for each option, stressing the importance of secure coding practices.
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Alibaba released a major update to its open-source large language model, Qwen 2.5, boasting a staggering 1 million token context window! This is achieved through a new technique called Dual Chunk Attention. Two models are available on Hugging Face: 7B and 14B parameter versions, both requiring significant VRAM – at least 120GB for the 7B and 320GB for the 14B model. While usable for shorter tasks, Alibaba recommends using their custom vLLM framework. GGUF quantized versions are emerging, offering smaller sizes, but compatibility issues with full context lengths might exist. A blogger attempted running the GGUF version on a Mac using Ollama, encountering some challenges and promising a future update.
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This post delves into the importance of precise semantics for compiler intermediate representations (IRs), especially for languages like C, C++, and Rust that allow unsafe pointer manipulation. The author demonstrates how a sequence of three seemingly correct LLVM compiler optimizations can lead to incorrect program behavior. The root cause is pointer provenance – the extra information embedded in a pointer beyond its memory address, detailing how it was computed. This necessitates a more precise LLVM IR specification, including a precise definition of undefined behavior (UB). Treating compiler IRs as standalone programming languages with rigorous specifications is key to resolving such issues.
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A flexible authorization library combining role-based (RBAC), attribute-based (ABAC), and relationship-based (ReBAC) access control policies. It supports policy composition (AND, OR, NOT), detailed evaluation tracing, and a fluent builder API, with type safety and async support. Easily add multiple policies like RBAC and ABAC, and create custom policies using PolicyBuilder. Examples demonstrate RBAC, ReBAC, and policy combinators.
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This article explores the phenomenon of prime numbers plotted on polar coordinates exhibiting spiral or linear patterns. The author uses Python code, employing SymPy to generate prime numbers and Matplotlib for visualization. Results show that as the number of primes increases, the pattern transitions from spirals to straight lines. This isn't unique to primes; it's related to rational approximations of $2pi$. The article explains the underlying mathematics and explores the connection between prime distribution and pattern sparsity.
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This article explores the crucial role of working memory in thinking and learning. Working memory acts like a 'scratchpad' in the brain, holding the information we're currently processing. Studies show that conscious thought is more effective for simple decisions, but unconscious thought often wins out for complex ones. Furthermore, working memory capacity can be improved through training, potentially boosting IQ. The article also suggests strategies to reduce the load on working memory, thus enhancing thinking and learning efficiency.
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