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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.

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(ppploanmap.com)
Misc PPP loans COVID relief

Open Source Game Dev Bible: Zero to Hero

2025-01-06
Open Source Game Dev Bible: Zero to Hero

This project, "2D Game Development: From Zero To Hero," is an open-source compendium of community knowledge on game design and development. Licensed under Creative Commons, it aims to be a learning resource and encourages community contributions. The book covers game design, development, algorithms, tips and tricks, and is available in PDF and EPUB formats. Source code is available on GitHub and GitLab. The author actively discourages AI-generated contributions to maintain quality and originality.

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(github.com)
Game community contribution

Is Your 3D Printing Filament Ruining Your Prints? The Ultimate Guide to Drying and Storage

2025-02-05
Is Your 3D Printing Filament Ruining Your Prints? The Ultimate Guide to Drying and Storage

This comprehensive guide tackles the often-overlooked issue of filament moisture in 3D printing. It details how hygroscopic filaments absorb moisture, leading to problems like stringing and poor adhesion. The guide covers different filament types and their hygroscopicity, symptoms of wet filament, and various drying methods, from dedicated dryers to oven drying (with strong cautions!). It also provides detailed storage solutions, emphasizing airtight containers with desiccants and vacuum-sealed bags. Proper desiccant care is also addressed, highlighting the need to periodically dry the desiccant itself.

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(syntaxglow.com)
Hardware filament drying

Proton VPN: The Digital Resistance Against Censorship

2025-01-27
Proton VPN: The Digital Resistance Against Censorship

In the face of escalating internet censorship, Proton VPN has become a crucial tool for millions seeking freedom of information under authoritarian regimes. This article details Proton VPN's battle against internet firewalls in Russia, Venezuela, and China, and how they navigate government crackdowns and blockades. Proton CEO Andy Yen points out that Big Tech companies contribute to autocratic control of the internet by removing VPN services from app stores. With its technological prowess and unwavering commitment to internet freedom, Proton VPN stands as a vanguard in the defense of online liberty, engaged in a continuous 'arms race' against censorship.

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(www.compiler.news)
Tech Internet Censorship Digital Freedom

Calling Strangers 'Uncle' and 'Auntie': A Global Phenomenon

2025-01-22

In many cultures, it's common to address older strangers as 'uncle' or 'aunt,' a practice the author terms 'ommerism.' This form of fictive kinship, the article argues, reflects the strength of a society's collective culture. The blog post explores this cultural practice across various regions, from Asia and Africa to the Americas, detailing the nuances of its application and its social implications.

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(solmaz.io)
Misc cultural differences sociology fictive kinship

CIA Leaks Employee Names in 'Counterintelligence Disaster'

2025-02-10

The New York Times reported that the CIA sent the White House an unclassified email listing all employees hired in the last two years, complying with an executive order to shrink the federal workforce. This list, including first names and the first initial of last names of probationary employees—many young analysts focusing on China—was deemed a "counterintelligence disaster" by former officials. They argue the information, easily combined with publicly available data, puts these employees at risk from foreign intelligence services. The article highlights core counterespionage principles: the "mosaic" effect of combining seemingly innocuous data, and the assumption that all unclassified systems are compromised. The CIA's action violated not only classification rules but also the fundamental obligation to protect intelligence sources and methods.

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(www.lawfaremedia.org)
Tech Intelligence Leak

Building a TPU from Scratch: A Fool's Errand?

2025-08-19

A team of hardware novices, driven by a desire to prove their capabilities, embarked on the ambitious project of building a TPU from the ground up. Rejecting the easy route of research, they adopted a 'hacky' approach, starting with a fundamental understanding of neural network mathematics. They constructed a systolic array for matrix multiplication, cleverly incorporating double buffering, pipelining, and a vector processing unit to achieve both inference and training on the XOR problem. Their success in building a fully functional TPU showcases remarkable ingenuity and perseverance.

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(www.tinytpu.com)
Hardware

Spice86: A .NET-based Real Mode DOS Emulator for Reverse Engineering

2025-02-20
Spice86: A .NET-based Real Mode DOS Emulator for Reverse Engineering

Spice86 is a .NET-based emulator for executing, reverse engineering, and rewriting real-mode DOS programs without source code. It emulates program execution, exports runtime data (memory dump and execution flow), then uses the spice86-ghidra-plugin to import this data into Ghidra, converting assembly instructions into C# code. This allows for a gradual rewriting of the assembly code with C# methods. Spice86 boasts numerous command-line options, including debugging, EMS memory, A20 gate, and GDB remote debugging, along with custom GDB commands for dynamic analysis. It also features a built-in debugger for inspecting memory, disassembly, registers, stack, and structured memory views.

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(github.com)
Development DOS emulator

Canva Outage: A Case Study in Saturation and Resilience

2025-01-12
Canva Outage: A Case Study in Saturation and Resilience

Canva recently experienced a major outage stemming from system saturation. A new editor page deploy wasn't the culprit; instead, a stale Cloudflare CDN rule caused massive latency for Asian users loading Javascript files. This triggered 270,000+ concurrent requests, subsequently overwhelming the API gateway with 1.5 million requests per second – three times its typical peak. A known, unfixed performance bug in the API gateway exacerbated the issue. The Linux OOM killer terminated all API gateway tasks, resulting in complete Canva.com failure. Canva engineers resolved the issue by manually increasing task counts, temporarily blocking traffic via Cloudflare firewall rules, and gradually restoring traffic. This incident highlights the importance of system resilience and the potential downsides of automated systems under heavy load.

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(surfingcomplexity.blog)
Tech system outage system resilience

nCompass: Revolutionizing AI Inference Cost

2024-12-16

nCompass Technologies has developed innovative AI inference serving software that reduces the cost of serving AI models at scale by up to 50%. By utilizing custom AI inference software and a hardware-aware request scheduler with Kubernetes autoscaling, nCompass maintains high-quality service on fewer GPUs, resulting in up to a 4x improvement in response time and significantly reduced GPU infrastructure costs. Users access open-source models via API with no rate limits and receive a $100 signup credit. On-premises solutions are also available for businesses demanding cost-effectiveness and responsiveness.

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(www.ncompass.tech)
AI AI inference cost optimization

NsJail: A Powerful Process Isolation Tool for Linux

2025-02-05

NsJail is a robust process isolation tool for Linux that leverages Linux namespaces, resource limits, and seccomp-bpf syscall filters to create secure sandboxes for various applications. It supports isolating networking services, hosting CTF competitions, and containing aggressive OS fuzzers. NsJail offers versatile isolation mechanisms including UTS, MOUNT, PID, IPC, NET, and USER namespaces, alongside filesystem constraints, resource limits, and programmable seccomp-bpf filters. Run untrusted code safely and protect your system from malicious actors.

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(nsjail.dev)
Development Process Isolation

Nordic Unveils VPR: Its First RISC-V Processor, Ushering in a New Era of Heterogeneous Computing

2024-12-26
Nordic Unveils VPR: Its First RISC-V Processor, Ushering in a New Era of Heterogeneous Computing

Nordic Semiconductor has launched VPR, its first RISC-V processor, integrated into the new nRF54H and nRF54L SoCs. VPR, an RV32EMC processor running at up to 320MHz, is designed for software-defined peripherals. The article details VPR's architecture, initialization process, and collaboration with the Arm Cortex-M33. Zephyr's sysbuild simplifies building and deploying VPR applications, enabling heterogeneous computing for enhanced performance and functionality.

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(danielmangum.com)
Hardware Heterogeneous Computing

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.

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(icicle-lang.github.io)
Development

The Fuzzing Book: Automating Software Testing

2025-01-19
The Fuzzing Book: Automating Software Testing

The Fuzzing Book is a comprehensive guide to automated software testing, focusing on fuzzing techniques. It covers various fuzzing methods, including lexical, syntactic, and semantic fuzzing, with executable code examples for hands-on learning. Whether you're a software tester, security engineer, or developer, this book empowers you to automatically generate test cases, improve software quality, and uncover hidden bugs.

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(www.fuzzingbook.org)
Development Fuzzing Automated Testing

Red Hat's Minimum Viable Open Source AI

2025-02-06
Red Hat's Minimum Viable Open Source AI

Red Hat defines the minimum criteria for open-source AI as open-source-licensed model weights combined with open-source software components. This article details Red Hat's vision for open-source AI, emphasizing the importance of open licensing for model weights to facilitate community contributions and improvements. They highlight their contributions through projects like InstructLab and the Granite model family, and their commitment to building open-source AI platforms on technologies like Kubernetes and KubeFlow. Their ultimate goal is to democratize and broadly deploy open-source AI across hybrid cloud environments.

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(www.redhat.com)
Tech Open Source AI Model Weights

DiscoTool: Effortlessly Manage Your Arduino USB Devices

2025-01-07
DiscoTool: Effortlessly Manage Your Arduino USB Devices

DiscoTool is a powerful command-line tool and Python library for discovering and managing Arduino-type development boards connected to USB. It supports macOS, Linux, and Windows and installs easily via pip without requiring additional installations. DiscoTool offers a rich set of commands, including connecting to the REPL, installing and updating modules, backing up board data, and more. It also allows customization of command-line tools and environment variables. Furthermore, a Python module allows developers to integrate it into their projects for easy access to device information such as manufacturer, serial number, and version.

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(github.com)
Development Development Tool

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.

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(gvolpe.com)
Development

NASA JPL Horizons: A Powerful Tool for Exploring the Solar System

2025-01-03

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Horizons system is a powerful online service providing precise orbital data and ephemerides for solar system objects. It offers multiple access methods including a web interface, command-line interface, email, and an API. Users can query information on asteroids, comets, planets, satellites, and more, and perform orbital calculations and visualizations. Horizons is a powerful tool for astronomers, aerospace engineers, and space enthusiasts exploring the mysteries of our solar system.

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(ssd.jpl.nasa.gov)
Tech Solar System Data

Slashing CI Time with AI-Powered E2E Test Selection

2025-09-06
Slashing CI Time with AI-Powered E2E Test Selection

End-to-end (E2E) tests are slow, fragile, and expensive, often run nightly due to CI bottlenecks. This leads to bugs slipping into production. This article details a solution using Claude Code to intelligently select only the relevant E2E tests for a given PR. By analyzing code changes and test files, Claude Code predicts which tests need to run, reducing testing time from 44 minutes to under 7 minutes. This significantly improves CI efficiency and prevents production bugs. While slightly costly, the savings in developer time and bug fixes make it a cost-effective solution.

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(jampauchoa.substack.com)
Development

LLMs Exacerbate the Underutilization of Libraries

2025-06-20

Libraries are underutilized, due to factors like the enjoyment of coding over reading documentation, the Dunning-Kruger effect underestimating library complexity, and internal projects competing with libraries. LLMs worsen this. While 'vibe coding' with LLMs is fun and efficient, the output often pales in comparison to battle-tested libraries. LLM-generated code is susceptible to prompt engineering limitations, whereas library creators possess deeper problem understanding and can leverage LLMs to generate higher-quality code. Ironically, excessive reliance on LLMs for code generation can be perceived as innovation, creating perverse incentives and further exacerbating the problem. For complex tasks, prioritizing established libraries over direct LLM usage is crucial.

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(makefizz.buzz)
Development Libraries

Senior Devs: Mastering AI-Powered Coding Tools

2025-04-03
Senior Devs: Mastering AI-Powered Coding Tools

This article details the author's positive experiences using AI coding tools in both personal and professional projects. The author finds that experienced developers are uniquely positioned to leverage these tools effectively, viewing the AI as a highly knowledgeable junior developer requiring guidance. Three key success factors are highlighted: well-structured requirements, robust quality assurance tools, and pre-defined code file structures. Two project examples (greenfield and brownfield) demonstrate significant productivity gains, even for developers unfamiliar with the tech stack. The article concludes that success hinges on leveraging traditional software engineering best practices alongside this new technology.

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(manuel.kiessling.net)
Development

GitHub Copilot Gets a Major Upgrade: Agent Mode and GA Copilot Edits

2025-02-06
GitHub Copilot Gets a Major Upgrade: Agent Mode and GA Copilot Edits

GitHub Copilot has received a significant update! The new agent mode empowers Copilot with greater autonomy, enabling it to iterate on code, identify and fix errors, and even infer and complete unspecified subtasks. Copilot Edits is now generally available, offering multi-file code editing with a smooth, conversational flow. Furthermore, GitHub teased Project Padawan, an autonomous software engineer agent that will handle GitHub issues, automatically generate and test code, and even assign reviewers. These updates aim to free developers from mundane tasks, allowing them to focus on more creative work.

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(github.blog)
Development

Alibaba Unveils Qwen2.5-Max: A Massive MoE Language Model

2025-01-28
Alibaba Unveils Qwen2.5-Max: A Massive MoE Language Model

Alibaba has released Qwen2.5-Max, a large-scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model pre-trained on over 20 trillion tokens and further refined with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback. Benchmarks like MMLU-Pro, LiveCodeBench, LiveBench, and Arena-Hard show Qwen2.5-Max outperforming models such as DeepSeek V3. The model is accessible via Qwen Chat and an Alibaba Cloud API. This release represents a significant advancement in scaling large language models and paves the way for future improvements in model intelligence.

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(qwenlm.github.io)
AI MoE Model Alibaba

Rethinking C's Time API: A Modern Approach

2025-02-16

C's time API is notorious for its legacy cruft and poor design choices. This article showcases the issues with a simple example of printing the current time, highlighting clunky functions and limitations. A proposed alternative utilizes cleaner data structures, nanosecond precision with floating-point representation, and streamlined timezone handling and formatting. While not intended for widespread immediate adoption, this proof-of-concept demonstrates a path toward a more modern and efficient C time library, offering valuable insights for other language's time API design.

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(oliverkwebb.github.io)
Development Time API

Resurrecting a Caltech DEC Pro 380: A Retro Hardware Upgrade

2025-03-22
Resurrecting a Caltech DEC Pro 380: A Retro Hardware Upgrade

This article details the author's journey upgrading a vintage DEC Professional 380 computer, a relic from Caltech, based on the PDP-11 architecture. This machine represents one of DEC's less successful forays into the personal computer market, but its robust build and unique design remain fascinating. The author meticulously documents the upgrade process, including replacing the aging hard drive with an SSD and upgrading the RAM, alongside experiences using the PRO/VENIX operating system. Interwoven is a compelling history of DEC's struggles in the PC market and the evolution of the PDP-11 architecture, making for a technically detailed and engaging read.

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(oldvcr.blogspot.com)
Hardware

DIY Type 1 Diabetes Smartwatch: A Father's Journey

2025-01-29
DIY Type 1 Diabetes Smartwatch: A Father's Journey

A software engineer father embarked on a six-month journey to build a simple smartwatch for his son with Type 1 diabetes. The watch reliably displays CGM data and provides haptic feedback for critical blood glucose levels. He overcame challenges including BLE connectivity, custom PCB design, haptic motor selection, display choice, waterproofing, and battery life. While not mass-produced, the project yielded valuable hardware R&D experience and is planned to be open-sourced for community benefit. The project highlights the possibilities and difficulties of hardware development.

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(andrewchilds.com)
Hardware Hardware Development Medical Technology

Fighting Canvas Fingerprint Forgery: Detection Methods and the Arms Race

2025-02-25
Fighting Canvas Fingerprint Forgery: Detection Methods and the Arms Race

Canvas fingerprinting is commonly used for anti-fraud, but fraudsters have developed techniques to bypass detection. This post delves into how fraudsters utilize techniques from platforms like Zenrows and browser extensions such as Canvas Blocker to modify canvas fingerprints. Two detection methods are analyzed: pixel value verification and function consistency checks to identify forgery. These methods verify preset pixel colors and check native function prototypes or error stack traces to determine if a canvas fingerprint has been tampered with.

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(blog.castle.io)
Tech Canvas fingerprinting anti-fraud

AI-Powered Video Analysis: Convenience Store and Home Settings

2025-02-20

Two AI segments analyze videos from a convenience store checkout and a home setting. The first describes a customer purchasing snacks and drinks using a 'PICK 5 FOR $8.00' deal, focusing on the interaction between the customer and the employee. The second shows a hand arranging a potted plant, with a home setting background including books, bowls, a watering can, etc., conveying a relaxed home atmosphere. Both segments demonstrate the AI's ability to understand video content through detailed action descriptions.

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(microsoft.github.io)
AI video analysis scene understanding

arXiv: How Preprints Revolutionized Research Sharing

2024-12-26
arXiv: How Preprints Revolutionized Research Sharing

From papyrus to preprints, the dissemination of scientific research has undergone a dramatic transformation. This article traces the history of peer review and highlights the emergence of arXiv and its impact on the scientific community. arXiv, as a preprint server, broke down the barriers of traditional journals, enabling rapid and open sharing of research findings. However, it also faces challenges related to quality control and information overload. The author explores the conflict and convergence between preprint culture and traditional academic publishing models, and the profound impact it has on the future direction of scientific research.

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(joinreboot.org)
Tech preprints peer review
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