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Nix Home Manager: A Guide to Dotfiles Management

2024-12-22

This article delves into the advantages and techniques of using Nix Home Manager for dotfiles management. The author begins by acknowledging the steep learning curve of Nix and Home Manager, recommending a gradual approach to mastering its features. The article explains various Home Manager use cases, including software installation, declarative program and service configuration, and dotfiles management. A key focus is on the `mkOutOfStoreSymlink` function, which creates symlinks to dotfiles, allowing modifications without rebuilding the entire system. A custom module example is provided for easy switching between mutable and immutable configurations. Finally, the author compares Home Manager to other dotfiles management tools, highlighting its reproducibility benefits.

(gvolpe.com)

Development

Trae: Ship Code Faster with AI

2025-01-23

Trae is an adaptive AI IDE that changes how you work, collaborating with you to ship faster. It boosts your development speed and efficiency.

(www.trae.ai)

Development Development Speed

UK Electricity Bills Soar: High Subsidies and Grid Investment Lag

2024-12-20

UK Electricity Bills Soar: High Subsidies and Grid Investment Lag

High UK electricity bills aren't solely due to wholesale power costs. A recent analysis reveals that network costs and green energy subsidies are major drivers. Twenty years of stagnant grid investment now necessitate urgent expansion, skyrocketing network costs. Contracts subsidizing renewables will continue increasing bills, while past subsidies, like the Renewables Obligation and Feed-in Tariff, failed to adjust quickly enough to falling renewable energy prices, locking in massive long-term costs. The author suggests reducing grid dependence or improving grid utilization as pathways to lower future electricity bills.

(climate.benjames.io)

Tech UK electricity bills energy subsidies grid investment

Go Iterators: Efficiently Handling Paginated APIs

2024-12-21

This article demonstrates how to efficiently handle paginated APIs using the iterator feature introduced in Go 1.23. Using the GitHub API as an example, the author shows how to write a custom iterator to abstract pagination logic, making the code more readable and reusable. The article focuses on the implementation and testing of the iterator, including mocking API calls and using pull iterators to ensure the iterator returns the expected results. Iterators allow developers to separate pagination logic from business logic, improving code maintainability and readability.

(blog.thibaut-rousseau.com)

Development Iterators Paginated APIs

Schrödinger: The Biotech Firm Trying to Crack the AI Drug Discovery Code

2025-01-25

Schrödinger: The Biotech Firm Trying to Crack the AI Drug Discovery Code

Schrödinger, a biotech company using quantum mechanics to design new medicines and materials, boasts all top 20 pharmaceutical companies as clients. Despite this, five years post-IPO, its stock price languishes near all-time lows. This article explores Schrödinger's unique business model—part biotech, part software—and its struggles with valuation. A pivotal dinner between Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Schrödinger's CEO highlighted a crucial turning point: embracing AI more fully. While initially hesitant, Schrödinger now leverages AI's power, particularly AlphaFold's protein structure predictions, and is preparing for crucial clinical data releases in 2025. The company's future hinges on successfully navigating the complex interplay of software sales, biotech pipeline development, and clear investor communication.

(hntrbrk.com)

Tech Drug Discovery

Trellis: AI-Powered PDF Workflow Automation

2025-01-22

Trellis: AI-Powered PDF Workflow Automation

Trellis is an AI-powered platform that automates PDF workflows. Its engine transforms complex documents and calls into usable data for Ops and engineering teams in seconds, not weeks. Offering customizable actions, data validation, and real-time syncing with data sources, Trellis prioritizes security with SOC II Type 2 compliance, data encryption, and private cloud deployment options. Applicable across finance, healthcare, and real estate, Trellis helps organizations improve efficiency and ensure regulatory compliance.

(runtrellis.com)

Tech PDF Automation Data Processing

Lossless Compression of Vector IDs Boosts Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

2025-01-23

Researchers introduce a lossless compression scheme for vector IDs to address the high storage cost of indexes in approximate nearest neighbor search. Leveraging the fact that the order of IDs is irrelevant in many index structures, and utilizing asymmetric numeral systems or wavelet trees, the method achieves up to 7x compression of vector IDs without impacting accuracy or search runtime. This translates to a 30% reduction in index size for billion-scale datasets. Furthermore, the approach can also losslessly compress quantized vector codes by exploiting sub-optimalities in the original quantization algorithm.

(arxiv.org)

AI Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Vector Compression Lossless Compression

Zipshare: Effortless Android Screen Sharing for Support

2024-12-18

Zipshare offers seamless Android screen sharing, perfect for internal help desks supporting retail staff or field employees. No signup or meeting IDs are needed for the screen sharer – just instant sharing, with the option to add your own voice or video chat. Created by Miso Software, Zipshare is a simple yet powerful tool for team collaboration.

(www.getzipshare.com)

Development screen sharing Android app remote support

Bayesian-Powered AI Agent Achieves Breakthrough in Atari 10k Challenge

2025-01-26

Bayesian-Powered AI Agent Achieves Breakthrough in Atari 10k Challenge

VERSES' Genius AI engine achieved a significant breakthrough in the Atari 10k challenge. Outperforming leading AI models based on deep reinforcement learning, Genius matched or exceeded human-level performance on several Atari games using only 10% of the data and drastically less compute. This hyper-efficiency stems from its unique Bayesian inference and active inference framework, showcasing superior sample efficiency and continuous learning capabilities. This marks a significant step towards highly efficient, reliable, and explainable AI.

(www.verses.ai)

AI Bayesian Inference Atari Games

egui: An Immediate Mode GUI in Rust

2024-12-26

egui is a lightweight and efficient immediate mode GUI (graphical user interface) library written in Rust. Its clean and simple API allows developers to rapidly build interactive interfaces. Unlike traditional retained-mode GUIs, egui redraws the entire UI every frame, leading to more flexible layouts and simpler state management. This makes it ideal for games, data visualization, and applications requiring high responsiveness. Its ease of use and powerful features make egui a compelling choice for Rust developers building GUIs.

(www.egui.rs)

Development

Adaptable Text Editor 'ad': Blending Vim and Acme

2024-12-18

Adaptable Text Editor 'ad': Blending Vim and Acme

ad is a novel text editor that combines the modal editing interface of Vim and Kakoune with the extensibility approach of Plan9's Acme. ad allows users to execute text and serves as a playground for experimenting with implementing various text editor features. Currently, ad is stable enough and feature-complete enough to try out, though documentation is sparse and bugs may exist. ad's design philosophy blends Vim's modal editing, Emacs's mini-buffer, and Acme's editing commands and extensibility, aiming for a comfortable editing environment that supports direct interaction with external tools and programs.

(github.com)

Development text editor modal editing extensibility

SiYuan: A Privacy-First, Self-Hosted Personal Knowledge Management System

2024-12-26

SiYuan: A Privacy-First, Self-Hosted Personal Knowledge Management System

SiYuan is a privacy-first, self-hosted, fully open-source personal knowledge management software written in TypeScript and Go. It boasts features like fine-grained block-level referencing, Markdown WYSIWYG editing, custom attributes, SQL query embedding, web clipping, and PDF annotation link export. Available via app stores (App Store, Google Play, F-Droid) and Docker, SiYuan offers a powerful yet user-friendly experience. Most features are free for both personal and commercial use.

(github.com)

Development knowledge management

GitHub's UI: Past, Present, and a 10x Frontend Cost

2025-01-24

This is a retrospective by GitHub engineer Joel Hawksley on the evolution of GitHub's UI architecture. He recounts GitHub's journey from simpler beginnings to its current focus on usability and accessibility, highlighting the challenges encountered along the way. He emphasizes that mobile is the new baseline, and building and maintaining design systems (like Primer) comes with unforeseen costs, with frontend code complexity being 10 times that of backend. Hawksley advises developers to avoid reinventing the wheel, leverage existing design systems, and carefully budget for frontend complexity to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

(hawksley.org)

Development UI Architecture

Million-Dollar Prize for Open-Source AI Coding Competition

2024-12-16

Andy Konwinski launched the K Prize, a $1 million competition to advance open-source AI coding capabilities. The competition uses a revamped version of the SWE-bench benchmark, eliminating test set contamination for a more accurate assessment of AI models' real-world coding skills. Inspired by the Netflix Prize, Konwinski believes the competition will spur AI research and attract top talent globally.

(andykonwinski.com)

AI AI competition open-source

Attention as Electromagnetic Field Line Management: A New Model of Consciousness

2024-12-17

Attention as Electromagnetic Field Line Management: A New Model of Consciousness

Qualia Research Institute proposes a novel model of attention, conceptualizing it as the management of dynamic patterns in the brain's electromagnetic field. By simulating electric field lines arising from weighted sums of harmonic oscillations, researchers demonstrate how attention controls charge density by modulating underlying resonant modes, explaining seemingly random fluctuations and drifts in attentional behavior. This model also offers a potential explanation for psychedelic experiences, suggesting that psychedelics disrupt the normal flow of attention by altering the configuration of harmonic modes. The research provides a new lens for understanding consciousness and developing novel neuro-interventions, such as inducing exotic states of consciousness by non-invasively perturbing the phase locking of attention.

(qualiacomputing.com)

AI consciousness attention electromagnetic field

Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre: A Lightweight OS Committed to Freedom and Long-Term Support

2024-12-15

Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre is a community-driven operating system project aiming to provide a fully free, stable, secure, simple, and lightweight long-term support distribution. It leverages Arch Linux's package management and Debian's security patches, adhering to the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines. Supporting i686 and x86_64 architectures, Hyperbola plans to release a BSD-based system, HyperbolaBSD. Recent news includes continued support for 32-bit systems, discontinuation of Debian patchsets beyond version 12, and concerns expressed regarding the Free Software Foundation's statement on machine learning.

(www.hyperbola.info)

Development Operating System Free Software

In Praise of the 100-Page Idea: A Case for Brevity in Nonfiction

2024-12-22

Tracy Durnell argues for the value of concise nonfiction books, specifically those around 100 pages long. She finds these shorter works ideal for exploring a single, impactful idea without excessive detail, fitting modern readers' shorter attention spans. Durnell highlights several examples of excellent books in this length, contrasting them with longer works that she believes often dilute their core ideas through padding. She champions the efficiency of a focused approach, emphasizing the benefits of connecting multiple concise ideas to build a broader understanding over consuming lengthy, highly-detailed tomes.

(tracydurnell.com)

Misc reading books writing

Web3 Insider Confesses: I Barely Use Web3

2024-12-27

Web3 Insider Confesses: I Barely Use Web3

A Web3 veteran since 2018 confesses to rarely using crypto, highlighting the industry's stagnation. Despite billions invested, Web3 products fail to meet the needs of non-crypto users, largely offering volatility and online entertainment. The author reflects on the industry's focus on developer tools over consumer products, noting the shortcomings of traditional finance—high fees, inefficiency—without driving mass crypto adoption. Personal concerns about compliance, wallet management, time constraints, and risk aversion lead him to prioritize simpler investment strategies. He suggests Web3 might be better suited for a future generation.

(research.auditless.com)

Development cryptocurrency industry development

Reclaiming Sensor Data: Breaking Free from the Cloud

2024-12-18

Reclaiming Sensor Data: Breaking Free from the Cloud

This article details how an embedded software engineer regained control of data from a cloud-connected radon sensor by bypassing the manufacturer's servers. By analyzing network traffic, the engineer discovered a vulnerability where the sensor didn't properly validate server certificates. Leveraging a local DNS server and a custom Python web server, the engineer successfully intercepted and read the raw sensor data. This grants programmatic access and ensures continued functionality even if the manufacturer's servers go down. The article highlights the importance of network security and the privacy risks associated with DNS traffic.

(embeddedartistry.com)

Development IoT security data autonomy embedded systems

Fast LLM Inference Engine Built From Scratch

2024-12-15

This article details the author's journey in building an LLM inference engine from scratch using C++ and CUDA, without relying on any libraries. The process provided a deep dive into the full stack of LLM inference, from CUDA kernels to model architecture, showcasing how optimizations impact inference speed. The goal was to create a program capable of loading weights from common open-source models and performing single-batch inference on a single CPU+GPU server, iteratively improving token throughput to surpass llama.cpp. The article meticulously outlines the optimization steps on both CPU and GPU, including multithreading, weight quantization, SIMD, kernel fusion, and KV cache quantization, while analyzing bottlenecks and challenges. The final result achieves near state-of-the-art performance for local LLM inference.

(andrewkchan.dev)

Development LLM inference

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol Impeached Over Martial Law Decree

2024-12-14

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol Impeached Over Martial Law Decree

South Korea's parliament impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol on Saturday over his controversial six-hour-long martial law declaration. The National Assembly voted 204-85 in favor of impeachment, suspending Yoon's powers and duties. Prime Minister Han Duck-soo assumed presidential authority. The Constitutional Court has 180 days to decide whether to remove Yoon from office; a new election would follow within 60 days if he is dismissed. The impeachment followed days of political turmoil and widespread protests, with public opinion overwhelmingly in favor of removing Yoon. While Yoon declared the martial law as a measure against the opposition, his actions are seen by many as an attempt to undermine democratic processes. The US and Japan expressed support for South Korea's democratic process.

(apnews.com)

Misc South Korea Impeachment Yoon Suk Yeol

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

Conquering iPhone NFC Compatibility: Reviving Magic MIFARE Tags

2024-12-15

The author encountered a tricky NFC issue: some Magic MIFARE cards couldn't be read by iPhones. Using a Proxmark3 tool, they tried wiping card data and formatting with ndefformat, but the iPhone still refused to recognize them. Finally, after writing data using the iPhone's NFC Tools app in "compatibility mode", the iPhone successfully read the card. The author also demonstrates how to use the ndeflib library to create and write NDEF records, ultimately enabling the Magic MIFARE card to work on iPhones.

(ewpratten.com)

Misc

Meta FAIR Unveils Breakthrough AI Research, Open-Sourcing Key Models

2024-12-13

Meta FAIR Unveils Breakthrough AI Research, Open-Sourcing Key Models

Meta FAIR released a suite of groundbreaking AI research artifacts, including Meta Motivo, a foundational model for controlling virtual embodied agents, and Meta Video Seal, an open-source model for video watermarking. This release focuses on advancements in agent capabilities, robustness, safety, and architectural innovations for more efficient learning. Other key contributions include the Flow Matching codebase, Meta Explore Theory-of-Mind for theory-of-mind reasoning, Large Concept Models (LCMs), and the Dynamic Byte Latent Transformer. By open-sourcing these tools and models, Meta aims to foster collaboration and accelerate responsible AI development.

(ai.meta.com)

AI

Visualizing Concurrency: A Guide to Understanding Program State Space

2024-12-20

Concurrent programming is notoriously complex due to the difficulty of enumerating all possible states. This article uses visualization to explain how to understand the mechanics of concurrent program execution. It begins by introducing the concept of program state, which is a combination of variable values and instruction location, and then demonstrates the transition process of program states and the generation of state space using a simple C-like program example. The article then introduces concurrent programs, and, using two concurrently executing programs, P and Q, it explains how to represent the state of a concurrent program and the construction of the state space. Finally, the article explores how to use the model checking tool SPIN and the LTL language to verify the correctness of concurrent programs, highlighting the important role of model checking in ensuring the correctness of concurrent programs.

(wyounas.github.io)

Development state space model checking

Antimatter Propulsion: The Future of Space Exploration?

2024-12-14

Antimatter Propulsion: The Future of Space Exploration?

A groundbreaking technology, antimatter propulsion, holds the potential to revolutionize space exploration. Antimatter annihilation offers the highest known energy density, with 100% efficiency, theoretically enabling voyages across the solar system in mere weeks or even days. However, significant challenges remain in producing, storing, and controlling antimatter, keeping the technology firmly in the theoretical realm for now. Further research and development are crucial to unlock its immense potential.

(www.sciencedirect.com)

Tech antimatter space exploration propulsion technology

Microsoft Open-Sources MarkItDown: A File-to-Markdown Conversion Tool

2024-12-13

Microsoft Open-Sources MarkItDown: A File-to-Markdown Conversion Tool

Microsoft has open-sourced MarkItDown, a Python tool that converts various files (including PDF, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, images, audio, and HTML) into Markdown format. The tool boasts a simple API, supports a wide range of file types, and incorporates OCR and speech transcription for enhanced functionality, making it ideal for text analysis or indexing. Contributions are welcome, and the project adheres to the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct.

(github.com)

Development Markdown conversion file conversion Python tool

Saying Goodbye to bcachefs: One User's Reluctant Migration

2025-01-23

After a year of using bcachefs, Steinar Gunderson has migrated to XFS. His reason? A lack of confidence in bcachefs' future. While appreciating its compression and mixed SSD/HDD capabilities, he found the developer's uncompromising attitude, hostility towards distributions like Debian, and numerous unfixed bugs (including catastrophic data loss) unbearable. Reporting bugs proved a frustrating experience, with the developer prioritizing arguments with Debian over bug fixes. He ultimately chose the stability of XFS, sacrificing compression benefits, a trade-off he deems worthwhile.

(blog.sesse.net)

Development

Debian's Controversial Approach to Rust Dependency Handling

2024-12-26

Debian's integration of Rust has been a long-standing effort, but its dependency handling approach has become a point of contention. Author Ian Jackson argues that faithfully following Rust's Semantic Versioning (semver) in Debian package dependencies is impractical. Fundamental differences exist between Debian's and Rust's dependency management semantics, leading to significant manual work when directly translating Rust's version dependencies. Jackson proposes a radical solution: Debian shouldn't precisely follow upstream Rust semver dependency information, but instead optimistically try various package combinations, letting automated QA discover and fix breakages. This approach, while violating semver, is argued to be mitigated by the Rust community's emphasis on API safety and change notifications, along with Debian's QA mechanisms. The proposal aims to improve the update efficiency of Debian Rust packages, but it might also lead to some dependency combinations failing.

(diziet.dreamwidth.org)

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

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