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Visual Timeline: A Colorful Journey Through Your Life

2025-03-01

Visual Timeline: A Colorful Journey Through Your Life

Visual Timeline is an app that lets you visualize your entire life—past, present, and future—in a colorful, week-by-week view. Color-code life periods (childhood, college, jobs), highlight important events (achievements, trips), and add detailed notes. It automatically adds birthdays and world events, and allows YAML export for backups. Keep it private or share it via a unique link; it's a living, growing representation of your life story, constantly updated.

(lifeweeks.app)

Misc life logging

Accidental Leak: Trump Officials' Signal Group Chats Reveal Yemen War Plans

2025-03-26

Accidental Leak: Trump Officials' Signal Group Chats Reveal Yemen War Plans

The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally added to a Signal group chat containing top Trump administration officials coordinating a military operation against the Houthis in Yemen. The group chat included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and others, and detailed discussions of the operation's specifics, including timing, targets, and munitions, were revealed. Initially suspecting a hoax, Goldberg later confirmed the authenticity of the messages. This incident highlights alarming security vulnerabilities within the U.S. government and raises questions about the decision-making process.

(www.theatlantic.com)

Tech

PPP Loan Map: Visualizing the Flow of COVID Relief Funds

2025-02-07

Ever wondered where the massive PPP loan money went? Now you can explore it interactively! This map visualizes public data on Paycheck Protection Program loans, letting you search by ZIP code, business type, or age. See the big picture of loan distribution across the US, explore your local area to see which businesses received funding, all without wading through spreadsheets. Simply click, zoom, and discover the stories the data tells.

(ppploanmap.com)

Misc PPP loans COVID relief

Django Turns 20: Celebrating Two Decades of Web Framework Excellence

2025-07-14

Django Turns 20: Celebrating Two Decades of Web Framework Excellence

On July 13th, 2005, Jacob Kaplan-Moss made the first commit to the public repository that would become Django. Twenty years and 400+ releases later, Django is celebrating its 20th birthday! To mark this milestone, a celebratory website has been launched, showcasing global events and a 20-day fundraising campaign. The goal is to attract 200 new donors, each contributing $20 or more, with at least 20 monthly donors. Currently, $76,707 has been raised, reaching 25.6% of the $300,000 goal. Django promises continued evolution, with many new releases, a thriving ecosystem, and a strong community for years to come.

(www.djangoproject.com)

Development Anniversary

FCC Scraps Net Neutrality Rules in Controversial Friday Order

2025-07-12

FCC Scraps Net Neutrality Rules in Controversial Friday Order

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued an order on Friday eliminating its Net Neutrality rules, sparking controversy. The decision bypassed public notice and comment periods. While a court had previously struck down the rules, critics see the FCC's move as political grandstanding, aimed at appeasing telecom companies and lobbyists. Free Press VP Matt Wood argues the action has minimal practical impact and the Friday announcement demonstrates recklessness. The appeals process isn't over, and this likely won't affect potential Supreme Court litigation.

(www.freepress.net)

Tech

Generating Stunning Point Cloud Geometry with Signed Distance Functions

2025-03-29

Generating Stunning Point Cloud Geometry with Signed Distance Functions

This article introduces a creative coding technique for generating point cloud geometry using signed distance functions (SDFs). The author uses the example of particles colliding with spheres to explain how SDFs can efficiently detect collisions and extend to more complex shapes. The article provides Processing code examples, including classes like Point, Vector, Ray, and Tracer, and SDF implementations like SphereSDF and BoxSDF, demonstrating how to use SDFs for sphere tracing to generate beautiful point cloud images.

(winterbloed.be)

Development signed distance functions point cloud

Hobby Lobby, the Lost City of Irisagrig, and a Multi-Billion Dollar Evangelical Empire

2025-03-24

Hobby Lobby, the Lost City of Irisagrig, and a Multi-Billion Dollar Evangelical Empire

This article details how the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, amassed a vast collection of ancient artifacts, including tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets from the lost city of Irisagrig. Driven by their faith, the Greens channeled their profits into evangelical missions, viewing artifact acquisition as a means to this end. The article explores their acquisition methods and the ensuing controversy surrounding the artifacts' provenance and legality, prompting reflection on the complex interplay between commercial interests, religious beliefs, and the preservation of cultural heritage.

(meghanboilard.substack.com)

Misc artifacts

xdg-ninja: Guarding Your $HOME Directory

2025-03-06

xdg-ninja: Guarding Your $HOME Directory

xdg-ninja is a powerful shell script that checks your $HOME directory for unwanted files and directories. Leveraging XDG base directory specifications from the Arch Wiki, antidot, and community contributions, it guides you on moving these files to their appropriate locations. Easily run with simple commands, it provides detailed instructions for relocation. Multiple installation methods are supported, including cloning from GitHub, using Nix, or via Homebrew. A companion tool, xdgnj, automates configuration file generation and management, simplifying the user experience.

(github.com)

Development Directory Management XDG Standard

Sand Mafia: How Gangs Are Making Millions from Illegal Sand Mining in Latin America

2025-02-09

Sand Mafia: How Gangs Are Making Millions from Illegal Sand Mining in Latin America

Just outside Rio de Janeiro, a powerful gang, led by 'Zinho,' amassed a fortune through illegal sand mining. Using heavy machinery, they extracted vast quantities of sand, fueling a lucrative, unregulated real estate market and monopolizing services for illegally constructed buildings. This activity not only caused significant environmental damage, including flooding and habitat destruction, but also fostered corruption and violence, with links to political figures and even murder. Similar operations in Colombia and Mexico reveal a widespread problem, where illegal sand mining is a highly profitable criminal enterprise with devastating consequences for the environment and social stability.

(insightcrime.org)

Misc illegal sand mining organized crime environmental damage

Belief Graphs: Understanding the Structure and Competition of Beliefs

2025-07-22

Belief Graphs: Understanding the Structure and Competition of Beliefs

This article explores the structure of belief systems and how they compete. Belief systems are visualized as graphs, with core ideas as nodes and connections between ideas as edges. Challenging core ideas is like shaking the foundations, while weakening connections is like damaging the structure. The author uses the conflict between Galileo and the Church, and modern examples like "Growth-First Capitalism" vs. "Ecological Sustainability," to illustrate the stability and competitive strategies of belief systems. Understanding the structure of belief systems is crucial to counter manipulation and polarization, the article concludes.

(vasily.cc)

Misc belief systems

arXivLabs: Community Collaboration on New arXiv Features

2025-02-07

arXivLabs is a framework enabling collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on the arXiv website. Individuals and organizations involved share arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners who uphold them. Got an idea for a project that will benefit the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

(arxiv.org)

Development

Mind-blowing! AI Art Model Can Now 'Read Your Mind'?!

2025-01-30

Recently, an AI art model called Midjourney has sparked heated discussions. It doesn't just paint from simple keywords; it understands the user's deeper intentions, even capturing subconscious thoughts to generate breathtaking artwork. This technological breakthrough signifies significant progress in AI's ability to understand human emotions and thought, potentially revolutionizing art creation and design in the future.

(mina86.com)

AI

tv.garden: Free Global Live TV Streaming

2025-04-02

tv.garden offers free live TV streaming from around the world. Users can easily browse and watch a wide range of channels, including international news, sports, movies, entertainment, and cultural shows, via an interactive 3D globe, sidebar, or a 'Random Channel' button. The platform prioritizes simplicity, reliability, and a seamless viewing experience, and maintains political neutrality, following UN country classifications. Built using open-source tools like Three.js, Video.js, and Luxon, tv.garden sources channels from the IPTV community on GitHub. The platform clarifies it doesn't host any video content and complies with DMCA takedown notices.

(tv.garden)

Tech live TV global channels

Kiro: Amazon's Agentic IDE Revolutionizes Development

2025-07-25

Kiro: Amazon's Agentic IDE Revolutionizes Development

As an AWS Community Builder, I got early access to Kiro, Amazon's new AI-powered development IDE. Kiro isn't just another code completion tool; it's an 'agentic' IDE capable of understanding and executing complex, multi-step projects. I built a portfolio website, contributed to open-source projects, and developed internal tools, demonstrating Kiro's significant productivity boost. Kiro's core is 'spec-driven development': invest upfront time defining requirements and architecture, then let Kiro autonomously execute much of the coding. While Kiro has limitations—it might need manual intervention with complex issues—it signals a fundamental shift in software development: from writing code to steering AI.

(yehudacohen.substack.com)

Development Agentic IDE

Dynamic Programming: It's Not What You Think

2025-07-21

The term "dynamic programming" in algorithm studies often causes confusion. 'Dynamic' doesn't refer to its changeability, but rather to the planning aspect of 'programming', originating from the 1950s when engineers planned construction projects as 'process scheduling'. In computer science, dynamic programming means planning the order of sub-steps required to solve a problem. For example, computing the Fibonacci sequence, the 'program' is the sequence of steps to calculate fib(2) to fib(10) in dependency order. This can be planned top-down or bottom-up; the final plan is the same, and both are considered dynamic programming. Richard Bellman coined the term to avoid a Secretary of Defense's aversion to 'mathematical research', cleverly choosing 'dynamic programming' because the adjective 'dynamic' cannot be used pejoratively.

(www.vidarholen.net)

Development

FLAME: A Lightweight Language Model for Spreadsheet Formulas

2025-01-22

Large language models are expensive to train and deploy for assisting with Excel formula authoring. This paper introduces FLAME, a transformer-based model trained exclusively on Excel formulas. With only 60 million parameters and a fraction of the training data used by larger models, FLAME achieves competitive or even superior performance on formula repair, completion, and retrieval tasks compared to models like Codex and CodeT5. This is attributed to its novel pre-training objectives and Excel-specific tokenizer.

(arxiv.org)

Development formula

EmacsConf 2024: A Smoothly Run Online Conference

2024-12-28

EmacsConf 2024 successfully concluded! This post, written by Sacha Chua, reflects on the conference's preparation, execution, and lessons learned. From the call for proposals to the final presentations, organizers cleverly used automation tools (Org mode, emacsconf-mail.el, Ansible, etc.) to boost efficiency and leveraged technologies like BigBlueButton and WhisperX for a smooth experience. While technical challenges (BBB server configuration, audio syncing) arose, they were effectively addressed. Sacha shares insights into time management, volunteer coordination, and future improvements, showcasing dedication to the open-source community.

(sachachua.com)

Development online conference

Raft: Simplifying Consensus in Distributed Systems

2025-08-17

Raft is a consensus algorithm designed for ease of understanding. It offers fault-tolerance and performance equivalent to Paxos, but decomposes the problem into simpler, independent subproblems, making it more practical. Consensus is fundamental in fault-tolerant distributed systems, requiring multiple servers to agree on values. Raft ensures that even with server failures (as long as a majority remain operational), all servers process the same commands, ultimately achieving a consistent state across the replicated state machines.

(raft.github.io)

Development consensus algorithm

Icicle: Destructive Updates via Tardis Monad and Stitching Graph

2025-03-20

Icicle, a high-level streaming query language, compiles to C using a struct-of-arrays approach. To ensure purity, the compiler initially inserts copy operations before array mutations. This post details an optimization using the Tardis Monad and a stitching graph to eliminate most of these copies, enabling destructive updates and achieving up to a 50% runtime reduction. The algorithm builds a reference graph to track array references, using forward and backward traversals with the Tardis Monad to determine safe destructive updates. This cleverly combines functional programming concepts with compile-time optimization, offering a novel approach to improving streaming query language performance.

(icicle-lang.github.io)

Development

Black Candy: A Self-Hosted Music Streaming Server

2024-12-26

Black Candy: A Self-Hosted Music Streaming Server

Black Candy is a self-hosted music streaming server, your personal music center. It offers easy installation via Docker, allowing you to quickly set up your own music streaming service. A demo is available for testing. While SQLite is the default database, PostgreSQL is also supported. Data persistence is managed by mounting the /app/storage directory. For improved performance, Nginx proxy is supported, and mobile apps are available.

(github.com)

Development self-hosted

Blender Now Natively Supports Windows 11 on Arm, Boasting Huge Performance Gains

2025-08-13

Blender Now Natively Supports Windows 11 on Arm, Boasting Huge Performance Gains

Thanks to a collaboration between Microsoft, Linaro, and Qualcomm, the Blender 3D creation suite now natively supports Windows 11 on Arm. Blender 4.5 LTS leverages a Vulkan graphics backend and the Adreno GPU in Snapdragon X chips, resulting in drastically improved viewport playback (up to 6x faster) and rendering performance (up to 4.5x faster). Future plans include hardware-accelerated ray tracing for Cycles on Snapdragon X by 2026.

(www.thurrott.com)

Development

North Korean Hackers Steal $1.5 Billion in Ethereum from Bybit

2025-02-22

North Korean Hackers Steal $1.5 Billion in Ethereum from Bybit

Security firm SEAL reports that North Korean hacking group TraderTraitor stole over $1.5 billion in Ethereum from Bybit, their largest heist ever. The attackers used sophisticated social engineering, contacting employees via LinkedIn, Telegram, or Twitter, then deploying malware to steal private keys. SEAL advises crypto exchanges to immediately conduct internal reviews, check for suspicious employee contacts, and implement multi-sig security measures like using isolated devices for signing transactions, regularly resetting devices, and conducting red team exercises. This is crucial to bolstering security and preventing future attacks.

(www.securityalliance.org)

Tech cryptocurrency theft North Korean hackers

Something's Rotten on the Internet: Tech Giants, Streaming Services, and the Erosion of User Experience

2024-12-22

Something's Rotten on the Internet: Tech Giants, Streaming Services, and the Erosion of User Experience

A blog post examines the current state of the internet, arguing that tech companies prioritize investor demands over user experience, manipulating user behavior through frustrating app designs, deliberately degraded search results, and pervasive ad tracking. Simultaneously, the Netflix streaming model is criticized for destroying the movie industry, its disregard for quality and manipulation of viewing data leading to a flood of low-quality content and inflated viewership numbers. The post concludes by highlighting widespread user dissatisfaction with the increasing cost and declining quality of online services, ultimately suggesting smartphones and social media in their current forms are fundamentally flawed and require significant improvement.

(www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com)

Tech internet streaming services

2024 Game Dev Retrospective: Lessons Learned from Unfinished Projects

2025-01-16

2024 Game Dev Retrospective: Lessons Learned from Unfinished Projects

An indie game developer reflects on their challenging 2024 game development journey. They tackled three diverse projects: a multiplayer turn-based RPG, a puzzle simulation game, and a co-op side-scrolling shooter. Despite failing to complete any, valuable lessons were gleaned regarding scope management, multiplayer mechanics, and art asset creation. Key takeaways include starting small, focusing on a solid game loop, and prioritizing polish later in development. Though 2024 ended without a finished game, significant progress was made, laying a strong foundation for 2025 and beyond.

(georgeallen.dev)

Game indie game lessons learned

Denmark's HPV Vaccination Program Nearly Eradicates Two Major Cancer-Causing Strains

2025-09-17

Denmark's HPV Vaccination Program Nearly Eradicates Two Major Cancer-Causing Strains

Research published in Eurosurveillance shows that Denmark has virtually eliminated infections with the two most prevalent cancer-causing strains of human papillomavirus (HPV) since the vaccine's introduction in 2008. Analysis of cervical cell samples from Danish women aged 22-30 (2017-2024) revealed that HPV16/18 infection rates in vaccinated women plummeted from 15-17% to less than 1%. This demonstrates not only individual protection but also herd immunity, reducing overall HPV16/18 circulation. However, roughly one-third of screened women still had infections with high-risk HPV types not covered by the initial vaccine. This is expected to decrease as women vaccinated with the newer nine-valent vaccine reach screening age, potentially prompting a review of cervical cancer screening guidelines.

(www.gavi.org)

Tech HPV vaccine cervical cancer herd immunity

OpenAI Accuses DeepSeek of Using Its Data to Train Rival AI Models

2025-01-29

OpenAI Accuses DeepSeek of Using Its Data to Train Rival AI Models

OpenAI has found evidence suggesting that Chinese AI company DeepSeek used OpenAI's model data to train its own low-cost AI models, potentially violating its terms of service. DeepSeek allegedly employed a 'distillation' technique to extract data from OpenAI's models, enabling it to train its own models at a fraction of the cost—far less than the $100 million OpenAI spent on GPT-4. OpenAI and Microsoft are investigating the matter, sparking a debate about AI intellectual property and data security, and highlighting the intensifying competition among tech giants.

(www.theverge.com)

AI Intellectual Property

Blizzard Reverses Hardcore WoW Classic Death Policy After DDoS Attacks

2025-03-25

Blizzard Reverses Hardcore WoW Classic Death Policy After DDoS Attacks

Streamer Sodapoppin's World of Warcraft Classic Hardcore raid was wiped out by a DDoS attack. Blizzard responded by resurrecting characters killed during the attack, a departure from the game's usual permadeath policy. Blizzard stated that the DDoS attack was a malicious third-party action, warranting a different response than typical in-game deaths. While the overall Hardcore mode rules remain unchanged, deaths specifically caused by external attacks like this will be handled differently.

(arstechnica.com)

Game Hardcore Mode

Technical Debt vs. Technical Assets: A Wise Investment Strategy

2024-12-21

Technical Debt vs. Technical Assets: A Wise Investment Strategy

This article explores the difference between technical debt and technical assets. Technical debt, similar to financial debt, represents code issues that must be addressed, such as bugs and poor code readability, hindering development efficiency. Technical assets, on the other hand, are proactive investments in known problems, like building high-quality SDKs, reducing future maintenance costs and increasing development freedom. The article advises prioritizing the repayment of technical debt before investing in technical assets, leveraging proven processes and technologies to avoid accumulating technical debt and ultimately achieving higher development efficiency and product quality.

(liblab.com)

Development technical debt technical assets

US Halts Offensive Cyber Ops Against Russia Amid Ukraine Concessions

2025-03-04

US Halts Offensive Cyber Ops Against Russia Amid Ukraine Concessions

The Trump administration has reportedly suspended US offensive cyber operations against Russia in an attempt to secure concessions from Moscow to end the war in Ukraine. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized the halt to hacking operations by US Cyber Command, excluding NSA espionage. While the Pentagon and CISA remain silent, CISA denied reports it stopped reporting on Russian cyber threats. This contradicts previous intelligence assessments labeling Russia a persistent cyber threat and recent US actions against Russian cybercriminals. The move raises significant questions about the administration's approach to cybersecurity and foreign policy.

(techcrunch.com)

Tech US-Russia relations Ukraine war

Chipmakers Slow Expansions in Japan and Malaysia Amid Weak Demand and Tariff Uncertainty

2025-03-29

Chipmakers Slow Expansions in Japan and Malaysia Amid Weak Demand and Tariff Uncertainty

Leading chipmakers and packagers, including TSMC and Intel, are slowing their expansions in Japan and Malaysia due to sluggish demand for older chips and tariff uncertainties. Companies like ASE Technology and SPIL are also scaling back Malaysian expansion plans, adopting a 'wait-and-see' approach alongside numerous other chip suppliers.

(asia.nikkei.com)

Tech chip industry investment slowdown global economy

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