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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

YC Backs EU's Digital Markets Act, Challenging Big Tech

2025-03-14

YC Backs EU's Digital Markets Act, Challenging Big Tech

Y Combinator, a prominent startup accelerator, surprisingly publicly endorsed the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), a law aimed at curbing Big Tech's monopolistic practices. YC argues the DMA, unlike other criticized EU tech regulations, aligns with values promoting American innovation. They cite examples like Apple's delayed AI voice assistant as evidence of a lack of competitive pressure. While less influential in Washington than a16z, YC's public support, alongside other startups and trade associations, puts pressure on the Trump administration. This advocacy aims to unlock opportunities for smaller American firms in AI, search, and consumer apps.

(techcrunch.com)

Startup

Stratechery Plus: In-Depth Tech Analysis Subscription

2025-02-18

Stratechery Plus: In-Depth Tech Analysis Subscription

Stratechery Plus offers a suite of subscription services, including a thrice-weekly Stratechery Update email or podcast providing in-depth analysis of daily tech news; interviews with leading CEOs and analysts; and multiple themed podcasts covering technology, China, the NBA, and more. Users can receive updates via various methods and can purchase team or annual subscriptions.

(stratechery.com)

Tech Tech Subscription News Analysis

Hetzner AX162 Server Reliability Nightmare: A Painful Debugging Journey

2025-02-19

Hetzner AX162 Server Reliability Nightmare: A Painful Debugging Journey

Ubicloud encountered serious reliability issues with Hetzner's new AX162 servers: a 16x higher crash rate than its predecessor, AX161. After months of debugging, they suspected power limiting by Hetzner and motherboard defects as the root causes. Multiple hardware upgrades, especially motherboard replacements, ultimately resolved the issue. This experience taught them the risks of early adoption and led to process improvements, including more thorough vetting and gradual hardware rollouts.

(www.ubicloud.com)

Hardware server reliability

The Graphics Codex: Your Ultimate Guide to Computer Graphics

2025-01-26

The Graphics Codex is an interactive learning resource for computer graphics, featuring 400+ cross-referenced equations and diagrams, 14 chapters on physically-based shading and rendering, and multi-platform programming projects with links to external API documentation. It serves as a reference, textbook supplement, or standalone learning guide, updated monthly. Topics range from ray tracing and shadow map shaders to the rendering equation and Fresnel equations, making it ideal for students and professionals alike.

(graphicscodex.com)

Development 3D rendering programming tutorial

Unveiling Cloud Cost Savings with Bare Metal

2024-12-22

Bare Metal Savings is a tool designed to help users analyze the true cost of cloud computing. It allows users to explore potential savings by using bare metal servers compared to traditional cloud services. Frequently asked questions revolve around price calculation methodology, accuracy, savings calculation assistance, whether it runs on bare metal, its suitability for all users, CapEx vs. OpEx considerations, benchmark availability, smaller instance options, and the inability to choose specific hardware. The tool aims to empower users with a clearer understanding and control over their cloud computing expenses.

(baremetalsavings.com)

Tech bare metal server

Zapier Security Incident: Misconfigured 2FA Leads to Unauthorized Access

2025-03-01

Zapier Security Incident: Misconfigured 2FA Leads to Unauthorized Access

Zapier experienced a security incident due to a misconfiguration in an employee's two-factor authentication (2FA). An unauthorized user gained access to certain code repositories. While no databases or production systems were affected, some customer data may have been inadvertently copied for debugging purposes. Zapier has secured the repositories, provided affected customers with a secure link to their data, and recommends reviewing and rotating any potentially compromised plain text authentication tokens. They also advise reviewing account security settings and activating 2FA where possible.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech security incident

Apple Exec Initially Opposed 27% App Store Commission, Court Testimony Reveals

2025-02-25

Apple Exec Initially Opposed 27% App Store Commission, Court Testimony Reveals

Apple Fellow Phil Schiller testified in court that he initially raised concerns about Apple's plan to charge a 27% commission on app purchases made outside the App Store. He argued this presented compliance risks, could create an antagonistic relationship with developers, and required Apple to audit developers. While Apple claims compliance with a 2021 court ruling allowing alternative payment methods, they only reduced the commission by 3%, prompting Epic Games to accuse Apple of “bad-faith” compliance. The case is back in court to determine if Apple violated the original order. Schiller's testimony revealed internal Apple debates on the commission, including analyses of the impact on developers using external links, considering user experience, developer adoption, and financial implications. Ultimately, Apple CEO Tim Cook and other executives decided to proceed with the commission, though with additional discounts for smaller developers.

(techcrunch.com)

Tech

DeepSeek R1 Brings AI to the Edge on Copilot+ PCs

2025-02-01

DeepSeek R1 Brings AI to the Edge on Copilot+ PCs

Microsoft is bringing the power of AI to the edge with DeepSeek R1, now optimized for Copilot+ PCs powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon and Intel Core Ultra processors. Leveraging the Neural Processing Unit (NPU), DeepSeek R1 runs efficiently on-device, enabling faster response times and lower power consumption. Developers can easily integrate the model using the AI Toolkit to build native AI applications. This initial release of DeepSeek R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, along with upcoming 7B and 14B variants, showcases the potential of edge AI for efficient inference and continuously running services.

(blogs.windows.com)

AI Edge AI

FOSDEM 2025: Statement on Planned Protests

2025-01-21

FOSDEM 2025 organizers issued a statement addressing planned protests against a controversial talk. The statement clarifies that the talk's inclusion wasn't influenced by sponsorship; claims suggesting otherwise are false. FOSDEM has always welcomed peaceful protests, provided they don't disrupt proceedings. Organizers urge protest organizers to contact them beforehand to ensure safety and fire regulations are met.

(fosdem.org)

Misc protest

Can You Beat Oregon Trail by Waiting at a River for 14,272 Years? A Reverse Engineering Odyssey

2025-01-13

Can You Beat Oregon Trail by Waiting at a River for 14,272 Years? A Reverse Engineering Odyssey

A Twitch streamer attempted to beat the classic game Oregon Trail by exploiting a bug: waiting at a river for 14,272 years. This led to an epic reverse engineering challenge. Using MAME emulator and debugging tools, the author delved into the Apple II version's code, discovering the game crashed due to flawed year handling during save/load. While not achieving a complete victory, the author successfully modified the game's code, resolving the crash, and shared their reverse engineering approach, offering valuable insights for other developers.

(moral.net.au)

Game game

The Oklo Natural Nuclear Reactor: A 2-Billion-Year-Old Mystery Solved

2025-06-20

The Oklo Natural Nuclear Reactor: A 2-Billion-Year-Old Mystery Solved

In 1972, a peculiar discovery at the Oklo uranium mine in Gabon baffled scientists: the uranium ore contained a lower-than-expected proportion of uranium-235. Investigations revealed a naturally occurring nuclear fission reaction dating back over two billion years. The high uranium concentration, coupled with groundwater acting as a moderator, allowed a sustained chain reaction. This astonishing find demonstrates that natural nuclear reactors can exist, with Oklo remaining the only known example preserved to this day.

(www.iaea.org)

Tech natural phenomenon

Creatr: Boosting Productivity and Accelerating Development

2025-05-23

Creatr: Boosting Productivity and Accelerating Development

Creatr is a powerful development tool dramatically increasing developer efficiency. User feedback highlights Creatr's ability to streamline coding, allowing developers to focus on higher-level development and design, leading to faster and better project building. Seamless Supabase integration simplifies deployment. Whether it's a quick mockup or a full-fledged app, Creatr significantly reduces development time, helping developers bring their ideas to life faster.

(getcreatr.com)

Development productivity boost Supabase integration

GameStop Bets Big on Pokémon Cards

2025-06-13

GameStop Bets Big on Pokémon Cards

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen revealed a major strategic shift: a heavy focus on trading cards, particularly the wildly popular Pokémon cards, alongside its significant Bitcoin holdings. This is considered a "natural extension" of GameStop's business, offering high profit margins. The resurgence in Pokémon card popularity has created high demand and fueled scalping. GameStop is leveraging this, partnering with PSA for card grading services and seeing a massive revenue boost from this sector. Despite past struggles including store closures and layoffs, GameStop's foray into trading cards offers a promising path to recovery.

(www.gamespot.com)

Game Pokemon Cards Trading Cards

Alibaba's Qwen3: Hybrid Reasoning Model Family Takes on Edge AI

2025-09-13

Alibaba's Qwen3: Hybrid Reasoning Model Family Takes on Edge AI

Alibaba's Qwen3, a hybrid reasoning model family, is rapidly expanding across platforms and sectors, driving real-world AI innovation. A key milestone is its support for Apple's MLX framework, enabling efficient large language model execution on Apple devices. Thirty-two open-source Qwen3 models are now available, optimized for various quantization levels. Leading chipmakers like NVIDIA, AMD, Arm, and MediaTek have integrated Qwen3, demonstrating significant performance gains. Furthermore, Qwen3 powers enterprise applications: Lenovo integrated it into its Baiying AI agent, serving over one million business customers; FAW Group, a major Chinese automaker, uses it in its OpenMind internal AI agent. By January 2025, over 290,000 customers across diverse sectors adopted Qwen models via Alibaba's Model Studio, showcasing its impact on China's AI-driven digital transformation.

(www.alizila.com)

AI Hybrid Reasoning

Your Second Brain: The Astonishing Gut-Brain Connection

2025-03-09

Your Second Brain: The Astonishing Gut-Brain Connection

The gut is far more than a digestive organ; it's intricately connected to the brain via the gut-brain axis. Through the vagus nerve and molecular signals in the bloodstream, the gut and brain are in constant communication. The gut microbiome, its neurons, and the molecules they produce influence mood, sleep, cognitive function, and even the development of Parkinson's disease. Research shows impaired gut-brain signaling in long COVID patients leads to cognitive impairment, while alterations in the gut microbiome are linked to exercise motivation and mental health. Targeting the gut microbiome or stimulating the vagus nerve holds promise for treating related diseases.

(scopeblog.stanford.edu)

Tech gut-brain axis gut microbiome Parkinson's disease

Why My Personal Website Is Built With C

2025-03-30

The author, blogging since 2017, tried Django and Nuxt.js for their website, but abandoned them due to high maintenance costs. They finally chose C and the md4c library to build a static site, prioritizing speed, minimal dependencies, and long-term stability. This significantly reduced maintenance overhead. In contrast, the author found other static site generators like Hugo to be overly powerful and unnecessarily complex for their needs.

(marcelofern.com)

Development static site generation

Physically Based Rendering: A Milestone in Ray Tracing

2025-01-16

Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation is a seminal work in computer graphics, meticulously detailing the construction of modern photorealistic rendering systems through rigorous mathematical theory and executable code. Its impact extends beyond film and game production, influencing product design and architecture. The authors were even awarded an Academy Award for its contribution to filmmaking. The third and fourth editions are now freely available online, offering invaluable learning resources for developers.

(pbr-book.org)

Development ray tracing rendering

Multiplicative Infinitesimals: A New Calculus Approach

2025-01-08

Multiplicative Infinitesimals: A New Calculus Approach

This paper introduces a new concept called "multiplicative infinitesimals," analogous to traditional additive infinitesimals, to construct a new calculus system. Unlike traditional calculus based on differences, multiplicative calculus is based on quotients, using a Leibniz-like notation but with 'q' instead of 'd', representing a multiplicative perturbation of an expression. The author establishes the relationship between 'q' and 'd' through logarithmic and exponential operations and applies it to elasticity theory and multiplicative derivative calculations. This approach may offer new solutions to problems intractable with traditional methods.

(github.com)

Mathematics calculus infinitesimals

PuzzleZilla: Online Jigsaw Puzzle Maker Launches

2024-12-15

PuzzleZilla is a new online platform allowing users to create custom jigsaw puzzles from any image uploaded from their device or the internet. The site offers a wide variety of pre-categorized puzzles, including cars, babies, cities, animals, flowers, nature, girls, landscapes, dinosaurs, castles, movies, anime, cats, dogs, paintings, food, and fantasy themes. Users can easily create and play their puzzles online.

(puzzlezilla.com)

Game online jigsaw puzzle image upload custom puzzle

Meta's Massive Java-to-Kotlin Translation: Conquering Millions of Lines of Code

2024-12-22

Meta's Massive Java-to-Kotlin Translation: Conquering Millions of Lines of Code

Meta has undertaken a multi-year effort to translate its massive Android codebase from Java to Kotlin. This post details how Meta built the Kotlinator, an automation tool, to overcome challenges like slow build speeds and insufficient linters, successfully converting over half of its code. The Kotlinator comprises several phases: preprocessing, headless J2K conversion, postprocessing, and error fixing. Meta also collaborated with JetBrains to improve J2K and open-sourced parts of the process to foster community collaboration. The article highlights null safety handling and various code issues encountered and resolved during the conversion.

(engineering.fb.com)

Development code migration

Why I Hate Finishing Things

2025-02-27

The author struggles with an inability to finish anything, from software projects to books and household chores. He proposes three hypotheses: 1. Existential dread after completion; 2. The constant emergence of new goals prevents true completion; 3. Possible undiagnosed ADHD. He contrasts his work productivity with his personal project struggles and explores potential solutions, including exposure therapy and coping mechanisms. Ultimately, he suggests it's a combination of factors, prompting reader engagement with a shared question.

(jeremyaboyd.com)

Misc

Kaggle Competition: A Biased Metric and the Unexpected Power of XGBoost

2025-02-23

The author participated in a Kaggle competition to predict survival chances after a bone marrow transplant. The competition's evaluation metric is a stratified concordance score designed to avoid overly disparate predictions for different racial groups. However, this metric has flaws: improving the score for one group doesn't always improve the overall score; it can even decrease it. While using an XGBoost model, the author found that simple decision tree ensemble models were more effective than complex statistical models, and explored the differences between statistical and machine learning approaches. Finally, the author discovered that adjusting the scale parameter of the AFT distribution significantly impacted model accuracy and posed several open questions for improving the model.

(blog.griffens.net)

Development

Deep Learning Course Outline: From Perceptrons to Transformers

2025-03-20

This course outline covers a comprehensive range of deep learning topics, starting from early perceptrons and backpropagation algorithms, and progressing to modern Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Transformer models. The course will progressively explain techniques for training neural networks, including optimization algorithms and regularization methods. Advanced topics such as time series prediction, sequence-to-sequence prediction, and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) will also be covered. The course will be assessed through a series of lectures, assignments, and quizzes.

(deeplearning.cs.cmu.edu)

AI

Rocky Linux 10 Embraces RISC-V: A Giant Leap for Open Source

2025-05-21

Get ready for Rocky Linux 10! This release marks a significant milestone: official support for the RISC-V architecture. Thanks to the collaborative efforts of the Fedora RISC-V community and Rocky's AltArch SIG, a riscv64gc build will be included, targeting platforms like the StarFive VisionFive 2, QEMU, and SiFive HiFive Premier P550. While some features might be limited on certain platforms like the P550, out-of-the-box functionality on the VisionFive 2 and QEMU is a highlight. This community-driven initiative, started in early 2024, showcases the power of open-source collaboration with upstream Fedora RISC-V efforts.

(rockylinux.org)

Development

Gig Workers Earned Less in 2024 Despite Increased Hours, Report Finds

2025-02-22

Gig Workers Earned Less in 2024 Despite Increased Hours, Report Finds

A new report reveals that gig workers for platforms like Uber, Instacart, and others saw a decrease in average earnings in 2024, even as their hours worked increased in some cases. Uber drivers experienced a 3.4% drop in weekly earnings to $513, while working 0.8% more hours. Lyft drivers saw a steeper 13.9% pay decline, despite a 5.4% reduction in hours. Instacart shoppers also faced an 8% pay cut. While DoorDash and Amazon Flex saw earnings increases, these were accompanied by significant increases in working hours. Only Favor showed a notable increase in pay alongside a decrease in hours worked. The report highlights the significant reliance on tips for delivery workers, contrasting with ride-sharing drivers. Despite this, consumer surveys indicate continued use of these services.

(www.businessinsider.com)

Tech earnings working hours

Matrix.org Upgrading to Next-Gen Authentication

2025-04-02

On April 7th, 2025, at 7 AM UTC, Matrix.org will migrate its authentication system to MAS (Matrix Authentication Service) for next-generation authentication. This will involve up to one hour of downtime but brings a revamped account management interface, improved security (credentials only visible to your server), and a better registration experience. The upgrade utilizes OAuth 2.0/OIDC and paves the way for features like QR code login, opening new possibilities for Matrix applications.

(matrix.org)

Development

Finnish: More Familiar Than You Think

2025-08-07

Finnish: More Familiar Than You Think

This article explores the surprising connections between Finnish, a Uralic language, and the Indo-European family, particularly Germanic. Despite their separate origins, Finnish vocabulary contains a significant number of loanwords from Proto-Germanic, and even earlier pre-Proto-Germanic sources. By examining etymological links between Finnish words and their English/German counterparts, and analyzing sound changes, the author reveals a long and intense history of language contact between Finnish and Germanic languages, dating back to the Bronze Age. This challenges common perceptions of Finnish and demonstrates the power of historical linguistics to bridge linguistic divides.

(dannybate.com)

Misc Finnish language Germanic languages

Ancient Brain Vitrified by Vesuvius Eruption

2025-03-04

Ancient Brain Vitrified by Vesuvius Eruption

A remarkable discovery from the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius: a human brain, vitrified into glass by the intense heat and rapid cooling of the volcanic event. This unprecedented preservation method, never before seen in human or animal tissue, offers a unique window into the past and challenges our understanding of tissue preservation under extreme conditions. Analysis revealed the brain underwent a rapid transformation into organic glass at temperatures exceeding 510°C, a process confirmed through various scientific techniques.

(www.nature.com)

Tech Volcano

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