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Qubes OS Templates: Secure, Efficient VM Management

2025-01-13

Qubes OS utilizes a template system for managing virtual machines, enhancing security, storage efficiency, and boot speed. Each template shares its root filesystem, with applications running and storing data within qubes. Updating a template automatically updates all qubes based on it after a restart. Software should be installed in templates, not app qubes. Qubes offers templates based on Fedora, Debian, and more, plus community templates. Users can install, update, uninstall, or switch templates via command-line or GUI tools. Uninstall warnings are normal. Switching templates requires updating all qubes based on the old template. Template security is crucial; install software only from trusted sources.

(www.qubes-os.org)

Development Template System VM Security

Swift's New Forked Framework Simplifies Shared Data Management

2024-12-17

Swift's New Forked Framework Simplifies Shared Data Management

Developer Drew McCormack launched Forked, a new Swift framework for simplifying shared data management across single and multiple devices. Inspired by Git's merge mechanism, Forked supports branching and merging within a single file, achieving eventual consistency. It doesn't require a complete change history, only enough versions for three-way merging. Forked uses structs instead of classes, supports Codable, and seamlessly integrates with cloud services like iCloud. It even tackles race conditions from concurrent access and supports custom merge logic or built-in CRDT algorithms. CloudKit sync is achieved with just a few lines of code.

(appdecentral.com)

Development Data Synchronization Distributed Systems

KOReader: A Powerful Cross-Platform E-reader

2025-04-01

KOReader: A Powerful Cross-Platform E-reader

KOReader is a document viewer primarily designed for e-ink readers, supporting numerous formats (PDF, EPUB, MOBI, etc.) and devices (Kindle, Kobo, etc.). It boasts a highly customizable reading view, multilingual support, integration with tools like Calibre, and e-ink optimizations for fast page turns. Extensible via plugins, KOReader is developed and maintained by a global community of volunteers.

(github.com)

Development e-reader

Lucy: A Concise DSL for Finite State Machines

2025-01-01

Lucy is a concise language for describing Finite State Machines (FSMs). It allows complex events, guards, actions, and destination states to be expressed in a single line. Nesting machines enables hierarchical FSMs. Lucy compiles to XState, a leading JavaScript FSM library, supporting all its core features. Written in C and compiled to WebAssembly, Lucy boasts a significant speed advantage (15x faster than its previous JavaScript-based compiler), making it ideal for JavaScript projects.

(pkg.spooky.click)

Development Finite State Machine

Unlocking Infantile Amnesia: A Year-Old's Hippocampus Lights Up

2025-03-25

Unlocking Infantile Amnesia: A Year-Old's Hippocampus Lights Up

A new study using fMRI scanned the brains of 26 infants aged 4 to 25 months, attempting to solve the century-old mystery of infantile amnesia. The research found that around the age of one, the hippocampus, responsible for memory formation, becomes active, generating neural signals related to things the infants remembered from tests. This suggests that babies begin encoding memories around the age of one, even as their hippocampus is still developing. The study provides valuable clues to understanding early brain development and memory formation, hinting that we may one day be able to retrieve lost memories from our infancy.

(singularityhub.com)

AI infantile amnesia hippocampus memory formation

Android SMS Gateway with MQTT: Turn Your Phone into an SMS Hub

2025-01-25

Android SMS Gateway with MQTT: Turn Your Phone into an SMS Hub

This project transforms your Android phone into a powerful SMS gateway using the MQTT protocol. It allows sending and receiving SMS messages, forwarding them to a server, and sending sent/delivered notifications. Features include USSD request support, multiple SIM card support, and retry mechanisms for failed SMS delivery. While compatibility for some features (like USSD and multiple SIM cards) depends on your phone and carrier, the project provides the full source code, enabling developers to compile and modify it to suit their needs.

(github.com)

Development SMS Gateway

Rejection Sampling's Unexpected Triumph: A Deep Dive into Performance Testing

2025-01-31

While optimizing his ray tracer, PSRayTracing, the author delved into performance testing for algorithms generating random vectors within a unit circle/sphere. Initially, he believed an analytical solution would be more efficient than rejection sampling. However, benchmarks in Python and C++, across various compilers and hardware platforms, yielded surprising results: with compiler optimizations enabled, rejection sampling often outperformed the analytical approach. The author concludes that practical performance testing is crucial when optimizing code, avoiding reliance on theoretical assumptions, as compiler optimization strategies and hardware variations significantly impact final performance.

(16bpp.net)

Development performance testing

Pentester Bypasses Security with Null Byte Injection

2025-01-27

Pentester Bypasses Security with Null Byte Injection

0xold, a seasoned penetration tester, shares two vulnerabilities discovered using null byte injection. The first involved a password reset callback URL parsing issue; injecting the Unicode null byte character `\u0000` bypassed restrictions, allowing partial control of the callback URL. The second was a path traversal to XSS. Fuzzing revealed a `templatename` parameter; null byte injection and a custom wordlist led to successful XSS exploitation. Furthermore, null byte injection bypassed an internal WAF, enabling SQL injection.

(medium.com)

Development null byte injection penetration testing vulnerability exploitation

WoW's Toxicity: Anonymity, Avatars, and the Perception of Negativity

2025-05-08

This paper builds on Rubin and Camm's (2013) heuristic on online griefing and trolling, exploring how anonymity, avatar creation, and online identity shape perceptions of negative behavior in World of Warcraft. Ten WoW players (five men, five women) with extensive playtime were interviewed to understand what in-game behaviors, interactions, and social elements contribute to negativity. The study reveals that real-life aggression significantly impacts players' perception of in-game negative events, highlighting the subjective nature of perception and gender differences.

(tcjournal.org)

Game online griefing player behavior

Klarna Halts Hiring, CEO Claims AI Can Do All Jobs

2024-12-17

Klarna Halts Hiring, CEO Claims AI Can Do All Jobs

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has claimed that AI can already perform all jobs currently done by humans, leading the fintech company to halt hiring a year ago. The company's workforce has shrunk from 4,500 to 3,500 employees through attrition. While Klarna's website still advertises open positions, a spokesperson clarified that the company is not actively recruiting to expand but filling essential roles, mainly in engineering. This announcement has fueled concerns about AI's impact on the job market.

(www.businessinsider.com)

Tech Employment

A Plea for a Paid Version of Firefox

2025-07-13

A Plea for a Paid Version of Firefox

A longtime Mozilla supporter urges the creation of a paid version of Firefox. They argue that the current ad-supported model ultimately leads to product degradation and compromised user experience. A paid version would allow users to directly fund Firefox development, receiving an ad-free, privacy-focused experience. A free and open-source version would remain available, ensuring accessibility. The author believes this model could attract more users and prevent Mozilla from following Facebook's path to 'enshittification'.

(discourse.mozilla.org)

Development Paid Model

An Evidence-Based Approach to Goal Setting and Behavior Change

2024-12-27

An Evidence-Based Approach to Goal Setting and Behavior Change

New Year's resolutions often fail? This article explores evidence-based strategies for goal setting and behavior change. Studies show that success rates for New Year's resolutions aren't as low as often perceived. The key is leveraging the "fresh start effect" and combining it with goal hierarchy setting (superordinate, intermediate, and subordinate goals), approach vs. avoidance goals, process vs. outcome goals, mastery vs. performance goals, flexible vs. rigid restraint, and implementing intention strategies. The article also details how tools like MacroFactor can support goal setting and behavior change.

(www.strongerbyscience.com)

Misc goal setting behavior change New Year's resolutions

Leaving 18F: A Designer's Exit Amidst Political Turmoil

2025-02-18

Leaving 18F: A Designer's Exit Amidst Political Turmoil

A designer recounts their departure from 18F, a US digital services agency, due to the increasingly hostile political climate and restructuring under the new administration. The author details the positive work culture and collaborative spirit at 18F, contrasting it with the new leadership's thinly veiled attempts to downsize the workforce under the guise of evaluating 'technical wins'. Facing potential dismissal as a probationary employee, the author chose to resign. The narrative transcends a personal account, highlighting the political infighting within the US government, its impact on public services, and the implicit threat to federal employees.

(ethanmarcotte.com)

Misc government layoffs political pressure

20 Lines of Code to Outperform A/B Testing

2025-01-13

Tired of inefficient A/B testing? This article introduces an algorithm based on the multi-armed bandit problem that significantly improves website optimization with just 20 lines of code. By tracking the reward of each choice and incorporating random exploration, the algorithm quickly finds the best option and continuously uses it until a better one emerges. This method handles multiple options simultaneously, adapts to change, and eliminates the need for constant monitoring and adjustments, saving significant time and effort. Say goodbye to inefficient A/B testing and embrace smarter website optimization!

(stevehanov.ca)

Development website optimization multi-armed bandit

San Francisco Nob Hill Historic Building Investment Opportunity: A 3-Unit Package Deal

2025-02-26

San Francisco Nob Hill Historic Building Investment Opportunity: A 3-Unit Package Deal

This prime Nob Hill, San Francisco property boasts a fantastic location near Grace Cathedral, Huntington Park, and Chinatown, offering cultural richness and convenience. The building retains its original Edwardian details, representing a quintessential piece of San Francisco history and appealing to those who value architectural character. Its proximity to public transportation simplifies commuting. A motivated seller is offering Units 4 & 6, plus storage, as a package deal for $1,275,000—a potentially cost-saving opportunity. The HOA covers common areas, heat, structural maintenance, management, trash, and water, streamlining budgeting and reducing individual responsibilities.

(www.trymasterkey.com)

Misc real estate investment San Francisco real estate historic building

ClickHouse Lock Contention: A Year-Long Performance Bottleneck

2025-03-21

Tinybird experienced a year-long puzzle of extremely low CPU utilization in one of their ClickHouse clusters during peak loads. The root cause was identified as Context lock contention. By adding a `ContextLockWaitMicroseconds` metric to monitor lock wait times and redesigning the Context locking mechanism – replacing a single global mutex with read-write mutexes – performance significantly improved. The article details using Clang's thread safety analysis to debug and resolve concurrency issues, along with benchmark results showing a 3x increase in QPS and substantial CPU utilization gains.

(maksimkita.com)

Development

Massive Data Breach: 190 Million Americans Affected by Change Healthcare Ransomware Attack

2025-01-25

Massive Data Breach: 190 Million Americans Affected by Change Healthcare Ransomware Attack

UnitedHealth Group confirmed that a ransomware attack on its subsidiary, Change Healthcare, in February 2024 affected approximately 190 million Americans – nearly double previous estimates. The attack resulted in the theft of massive amounts of sensitive health and insurance data, including names, addresses, birthdates, Social Security numbers, and medical records. Some data was even published online by the hackers. Change Healthcare paid ransoms to prevent further data release. This is the largest healthcare data breach in US history, highlighting critical vulnerabilities in the healthcare system's cybersecurity.

(techcrunch.com)

Tech healthcare security

Anna's Archive: The Fight to Preserve Humanity's Legacy Continues

2025-08-18

Anna's Archive team releases an update, announcing significant progress in their fight against knowledge censorship. They've successfully backed up tens of millions of books, scientific articles, and more. Despite facing increasing attacks, they're working to improve security. The team thanks volunteers and partners (including LibGen forks, STC/Nexus, and Z-Library) for their contributions and regrets the disappearance of a LibGen fork. They also caution users against using the emerging WeLib platform due to its lack of community contribution. Looking ahead, they'll continue processing hundreds of terabytes of data and call for volunteer and donation support.

(annas-archive.org)

Tech

Jujutsu: A Revolutionary Version Control System

2024-12-22

Jujutsu is a new version control system built on top of Git, offering a simplified approach to local file interaction through a unique conceptual model and command set. Unlike Git, Jujutsu always treats the working copy state as a commit, instantly reflecting any on-disk edits in the current commit. This streamlines many operations, including fixing typos in old commits, viewing diffs, and managing work in progress. The workflow is intuitive, easily accessible even without prior Git experience, and seamlessly integrates with the Git ecosystem. While some features like perfect VSCode integration are still missing, Jujutsu shows immense potential with its innovative design and user-friendly experience.

(neugierig.org)

Development

Building Software with AI: A Four-Document System and the Everlasting Beginner

2025-07-19

Building Software with AI: A Four-Document System and the Everlasting Beginner

The author built Protocollie in four days using AI pair programmer Claude, not through expert coding skills but via four documents: Architecture Overview, Technical Considerations, Workflow Process, and Story Breakdown. This process, likened to "throwing spaghetti at the wall," highlights experimentation over planning, showcasing the changing landscape of AI-assisted programming. It reveals a shift in the programmer's role and embraces the uncertainty of this new era, where rapid technological advancement outpaces the accumulation of expertise.

(worksonmymachine.substack.com)

Development

Programmer Creates Pseudo-3D Game in Bash

2024-12-20

Programmer Creates Pseudo-3D Game in Bash

A programmer, izabera, has developed a surprisingly impressive pseudo-3D game using the Bash scripting language. This project, a homage to the classic game Wolfenstein 3D, is open-source on GitHub. The code is concise yet the result is stunning, showcasing the power of Bash and the programmer's ingenuity. The repository includes the game source code and demonstration videos. Developers interested in learning more can check it out on GitHub.

(github.com)

Development Game Development

AttendList's Ruby on Rails Stack: A Deep Dive

2025-06-02

AttendList's Ruby on Rails Stack: A Deep Dive

AttendList, a Google Meet attendance tracker, leverages a Ruby on Rails backend interacting with a Chrome extension. This article details the infrastructure and gem choices behind AttendList, covering everything from background jobs, authentication, and blogging to deployment and extra features. The core stack includes PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, and RSpec. Authentication utilizes Devise with Google OAuth, employing an incremental authorization flow. The view layer uses Tailwind CSS and ViewComponents. Performance and profiling are handled by Bullet and Rack Mini Profiler. The author also describes their cost-effective hosting solution using Hetzner servers and the Hatchbox deployment platform.

(attendlist.com)

Development

Mysterious New Life Form Discovered in the Human Gut

2025-02-02

Mysterious New Life Form Discovered in the Human Gut

Scientists have discovered a new class of life within the human digestive system, dubbed 'Obelisks'. Unlike known viruses, Obelisks possess unique protein-coding abilities. Researchers identified at least 30,000 distinct Obelisks in roughly 10% of the human microbiomes examined, suggesting they may be colonizers of these microbiomes. Their origin remains unclear, but they all contain codes for a novel protein class called 'Oblins', differentiating them from other RNA loops like viroids. The findings, published on the preprint server bioRxiv, require further peer review.

(bgr.com)

Tech Life Science Microbiome New Life Form

Europe's First Commercial Orbital Rocket Launch Fails: Isar Aerospace's Spectrum Crashes into the Sea

2025-03-30

Europe's First Commercial Orbital Rocket Launch Fails: Isar Aerospace's Spectrum Crashes into the Sea

Isar Aerospace's first attempt to launch its Spectrum rocket into orbit from Norway's Andøya Space Center on March 30th ended in failure. The two-stage rocket lost control around 18 seconds into flight and was terminated 30 seconds later, falling into the sea. This marked the first orbital launch attempt from continental Europe (excluding the UK and Russia). Despite the failure, Isar Aerospace plans to utilize the flight data gathered and continue developing the rocket, aiming to become a major player in the European commercial space launch market. The company already boasts launch contracts with several customers.

(www.nasaspaceflight.com)

Tech European space

Versailles: Power and the Absence of Soul in Design

2025-02-19

The construction of Versailles stemmed from Louis XIV's lust for power and envy of his former finance minister's magnificent gardens. The author uses this as a springboard to discuss the lack of soul in modern product design. He argues that, much like Versailles is awe-inspiring yet lifeless, many modern products prioritize superficial aesthetics and functionality, neglecting emotional connection. True design, he contends, should stem from the designer's emotional experiences, drawing inspiration from their own depths, like a gardener cultivating the soil, to create products full of life. The article uses architecture as an example, contrasting the feelings evoked by the Sagrada Família and a telephone exchange building, highlighting the importance of emotion in design.

(www.doc.cc)

Design Product

Google's Gemma 3: A Major Upgrade to its Single-Accelerator AI Model

2025-03-20

Google's Gemma 3: A Major Upgrade to its Single-Accelerator AI Model

Over a year after releasing the initial Gemma AI models, Google unveils Gemma 3, boasting superior performance compared to competitors like Llama and OpenAI, especially on single-GPU systems. This enhanced model supports over 35 languages and processes text, images, and short videos. Gemma 3 features an upgraded vision encoder for high-res and non-square images, and includes the new ShieldGemma 2 image safety classifier to filter inappropriate content. While the definition of 'open' remains debated regarding its license, Google continues to promote Gemma 3 via Google Cloud credits and an academic program offering $10,000 in credits for research.

(www.theverge.com)

AI

Beyond Meat: Is the Plant-Based Meat Giant Falling?

2025-07-20

Beyond Meat: Is the Plant-Based Meat Giant Falling?

Beyond Meat, once a promising plant-based meat company, is now facing a severe financial crisis. Revenue growth is sluggish, profitability is elusive, massive debt is maturing, and the stock price has plummeted 98%. While the company is attempting a turnaround through cost-cutting, improving its brand image, and seeking debt restructuring, time is running out, and bankruptcy remains a significant risk. This is not only a crisis for Beyond Meat itself but also reflects the challenges facing the plant-based meat industry as a whole.

(foodinstitute.com)

Startup plant-based meat

Run DeepSeek R1 LLM Locally with Ollama

2025-01-29

Run DeepSeek R1 LLM Locally with Ollama

DeepSeek R1, an open-source LLM excelling in conversational AI, coding, and problem-solving, can now be run locally. This guide details using Ollama, a platform simplifying LLM deployment, to run DeepSeek R1 on macOS, Windows, and Linux. It covers installing Ollama, pulling the DeepSeek R1 model (including smaller, distilled variants), and interacting with the model via the command line. Local execution ensures data privacy and faster responses. The article also explores practical tips, including command-line automation and IDE integration, and discusses the benefits of distilled models for users with less powerful hardware.

(workos.com)

AI Local Deployment

LLMs Fail a Simple Chess Puzzle: A Curious Test

2025-01-26

LLMs Fail a Simple Chess Puzzle: A Curious Test

The author tests various new LLMs with a simple chess puzzle featuring underpromotion and the 50-move rule. Despite guidance, most LLMs fail to solve it, highlighting limitations in logical reasoning and domain-specific knowledge. This quick test serves as a benchmark, sparking discussion on whether LLMs can ever reach master-level chess play without specialized training. The puzzle's simplicity and focus on a less common technique make it an insightful probe into LLM capabilities.

(gist.github.com)

AI

Playing Baba Is You with a Large Language Model: An AI Gaming Challenge

2025-07-05

This article details an experiment combining the game Baba Is You with a large language model (LLM). Baba Is You is a unique puzzle game where players manipulate the rules themselves to win. The author attempts to use LLMs like Claude to control the game, leveraging game state information to aid LLM decision-making. Results show current LLMs struggle significantly with complex levels, but the project offers a novel approach to exploring LLM applications in gaming.

(fi-le.net)

Game

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