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Build Your Own Virtual Machine: A Step-by-Step Guide

2024-12-26

This tutorial guides you through building your own virtual machine (VM) capable of running assembly language programs, such as 2048 or Roguelike games. Even if you're already a programmer, this project provides a deeper understanding of computer architecture and how programming languages work. The tutorial covers core VM concepts, the LC-3 architecture, instruction sets, trap routines, program loading, and more, with detailed code examples and explanations. The final code is approximately 250 lines of C, making it accessible to those with basic C/C++ knowledge.

(www.jmeiners.com)

Development virtual machine

Deep Dive into Apple's XNU Kernel Exclave Architecture

2025-03-09

Deep Dive into Apple's XNU Kernel Exclave Architecture

This article delves into the secure enclave architecture within Apple's XNU kernel. Exclaves manage resources via a two-level kernel table structure, encompassing domains (e.g., com.apple.kernel) each containing multiple resources (services, buffers). Conclaves, a special resource type, enable shared access among services, controlled by a Conclave Manager. A new _exclaves_ctl_trap() system call manages various Exclave operations, including launching conclaves, looking up services, and executing downcalls (secure world code execution). Upcalls allow secure world code to invoke specific XNU kernel functions. The article details the three-stage Exclave boot process and how the SPTM memory typing system controls Exclave memory access.

(randomaugustine.medium.com)

Development Secure Architecture

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

Cruz Releases NSF DEI Grant Database, Sparks Controversy

2025-02-14

Senator Ted Cruz released a database of purportedly "woke" NSF DEI grants, alleging that the Biden administration weaponized federal agencies to push a far-left ideology. However, searches within the database for terms like "homo," "hetero," and "race" yielded results contradicting Cruz's claims. Several research projects, such as those on wireless networking and molecular spintronics, appear unrelated to the accusations. This suggests Cruz's critique may lack factual basis, raising questions about the integrity of his claim to restore integrity to scientific research and the United States Senate itself.

(ramadda.org)

Misc

How Interruptions Impact Software Engineers: A Research Deep Dive

2025-01-20

How Interruptions Impact Software Engineers: A Research Deep Dive

New research explores how interruptions affect software engineers' productivity and stress. The study found that different types of interruptions (e.g., in-person vs. on-screen notifications) impact coding, code comprehension, and code review differently, with complex tasks being less affected. Interestingly, physiological data (heart rate variability) showed less stress with in-person interruptions, but engineers perceived them as more stressful. Managers should prioritize engineers' perceived stress, minimizing high-priority interruptions and providing focused time for tasks like coding to boost team efficiency.

(rdel.substack.com)

Development interruptions

VA Announces Massive Layoffs, Sparking Outrage

2025-03-05

VA Announces Massive Layoffs, Sparking Outrage

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) plans to lay off tens of thousands of employees later this year, sparking widespread criticism. An internal memo reveals a department-wide review aimed at streamlining management, reducing the agency's size, and improving efficiency. The goal is to reduce staffing levels to 2019 levels (approximately 399,000), down from the current 482,000. Democratic lawmakers strongly condemn the move, arguing it will harm veterans by jeopardizing healthcare access, claims processing, and education benefits. They contend that the VA needs more staff to handle the increased demands from the PACT Act, not fewer.

(www.govexec.com)

Tech VA Layoffs PACT Act Veteran Healthcare

The Zizians: When Rationalism Goes Wrong

2025-02-01

The Zizians: When Rationalism Goes Wrong

This article delves into the transcontinental Rationalist cult, the "Zizians," implicated in at least six murders since 2022. Following the charismatic leader "Ziz," who espouses a radical philosophy and eccentric theories of cognition, the group initially focused on AI safety and alignment. However, their beliefs morphed into violent actions, highlighting the dark side of the Rationalist movement and its potential for extremism. The article explores the cult's origins, the violence they committed, and the broader implications for the Rationalist community, raising questions about self-improvement gone awry.

(maxread.substack.com)

Tech Rationalism Cult

Atop 2.11 Heap Overflow Vulnerability: CVE-2025-31160

2025-03-29

A heap overflow vulnerability (CVE-2025-31160) has been discovered in Atop 2.11. The vulnerability stems from Atop attempting to connect to the TCP port of the atopgpud daemon during initialization. If another program is listening on this port, Atop may connect to it and receive malicious strings, leading to parsing failures, heap overflows, and segmentation faults. This vulnerability has been present since the introduction of atopgpud in Atop 2.4.0. The solution involves: not connecting to the TCP port by default, only attempting to connect when the '-k' flag is used; improved string parsing to avoid heap overflows; and not searching for netatop or netatop-bpf by default, only when the '-K' flag is used.

(openwall.com)

Development

MiniMax-M1: A 456B Parameter Hybrid-Attention Reasoning Model

2025-06-18

MiniMax-M1: A 456B Parameter Hybrid-Attention Reasoning Model

MiniMax-M1, a groundbreaking open-weight, large-scale hybrid-attention reasoning model, boasts 456 billion parameters. Powered by a hybrid Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture and a lightning attention mechanism, it natively supports a context length of 1 million tokens. Trained using large-scale reinforcement learning, MiniMax-M1 outperforms other leading models like DeepSeek R1 and Qwen3-235B on complex tasks, particularly in software engineering and long-context understanding. Its efficient test-time compute makes it a strong foundation for next-generation language model agents.

(github.com)

AI Hybrid Attention

Qwen2.5-1M: Open-Source LLMs with 1 Million Token Context Length

2025-01-26

Qwen2.5-1M: Open-Source LLMs with 1 Million Token Context Length

The Qwen team released Qwen2.5-1M, open-source large language models supporting up to one million tokens of context length, in 7B and 14B parameter versions. These models significantly outperform their 128K counterparts on long-context tasks, even surpassing GPT-4o-mini in some cases. An open-sourced inference framework based on vLLM, leveraging sparse attention for a 3x to 7x speed boost, is also provided for efficient deployment. Qwen2.5-1M's training employed a progressive approach, incorporating Dual Chunk Attention (DCA) and sparse attention techniques for effective long-context handling.

(qwenlm.github.io)

AI

Unit Testing Reimagined: Beyond the Dogma

2025-02-15

Traditional unit testing often falls into dogma, leading to wasted time and ineffective tests. This article challenges the very definition of a 'unit', advocating for user-centric integration and end-to-end tests instead of rigidly testing every class or method. The author suggests reducing reliance on code isolation and mocks, leveraging real databases and tools like Docker for increased efficiency and meaningful tests. TDD is presented as not a silver bullet, with software architecture design prioritizing non-functional requirements. Ultimately, the key decision in choosing a testing strategy is balancing quality assurance, refactoring resilience, and speed of feedback; often, modern tools make fast e2e or integration tests feasible.

(linkedrecords.com)

Development unit testing

OpenAI Engineer: AI Has Reached Utility Threshold, Needs More Great Engineers

2025-02-20

OpenAI Engineer: AI Has Reached Utility Threshold, Needs More Great Engineers

An OpenAI engineer reflects on 15 years in AI, noting that cutting-edge models like GPT-3, Codex, and DALL-E 2 have pushed AI past a utility threshold, enabling tasks previously impossible for computers. Progress hinges on precise execution of large-scale models, demanding more engineers with strong software skills. OpenAI invites talented engineers to join, emphasizing the importance of technical humility, as many established software intuitions don't apply to machine learning.

(blog.gregbrockman.com)

Development

Databricks in Talks to Acquire Open-Source Database Startup Neon for $1B+

2025-05-05

Databricks in Talks to Acquire Open-Source Database Startup Neon for $1B+

Data and AI unicorn Databricks is in advanced talks to acquire Neon, a maker of an open-source database engine, for approximately $1 billion, according to four sources familiar with the matter. While some believe the deal is done, sources say negotiations are ongoing and could still fall apart. The final price could exceed $1 billion when employee retention packages are included. Neon and its CEO declined to comment, and Databricks did not respond to a request for comment.

(www.upstartsmedia.com)

Tech Database Acquisition

FiveM: The alt:V Integration Disaster

2025-02-20

This post details the disastrous integration of the former alt:V team into the FiveM project. The ex-alt:V team demonstrated a profound lack of teamwork, ignoring communication and unilaterally altering code and build systems, resulting in numerous regressions. They failed to test their changes, disregarded backward compatibility, and treated the original development team with arrogance. Specific examples highlight the ex-alt:V team's technical incompetence, lack of accountability, and malicious behavior towards the original team. Ultimately, the destructive actions of the ex-alt:V team led to the departure of the original FiveM developers and plunged the project into chaos.

(fivem.team)

Game

LLMs Hit a Wall: Einstein's Riddle Exposes Limits of Transformer-Based AI

2025-02-02

LLMs Hit a Wall: Einstein's Riddle Exposes Limits of Transformer-Based AI

Researchers have discovered fundamental limitations in the ability of current transformer-based large language models (LLMs) to solve compositional reasoning tasks. Experiments involving Einstein's logic puzzle and multi-digit multiplication revealed significant shortcomings, even after extensive fine-tuning. These findings challenge the suitability of the transformer architecture for universal learning and are prompting investigations into alternative approaches, such as improved training data and chain-of-thought prompting, to enhance LLM reasoning capabilities.

(www.quantamagazine.org)

AI Compositional Reasoning

Temporal API: Revolutionizing Date and Time Handling in JavaScript

2025-01-30

Temporal API: Revolutionizing Date and Time Handling in JavaScript

The Temporal API simplifies date and time manipulation in JavaScript. It supports various calendar systems (like the Chinese Lunar calendar), handles time zone conversions seamlessly, and offers intuitive comparison methods. For example, it can calculate the next Chinese New Year or determine the duration until a future Unix timestamp. While `toLocaleString` behavior varies slightly across browser implementations, the Temporal API offers robust date and time operations, making it a boon for developers.

(developer.mozilla.org)

Development Date Time

A Stunning Display of Multilingual Support: A Mysterious Code Snippet

2025-02-14

A Stunning Display of Multilingual Support: A Mysterious Code Snippet

This code snippet showcases an impressive multilingual support, containing the names of almost all known languages. This has sparked speculation about the purpose behind the code; is it an art installation, or a fragment of code from a mysterious project? The simple code structure also raises curiosity about how its function is implemented, and where it will be applied in the future.

(www.langturbo.com)

Misc multilingual

Samsung to Mass Produce World's First Rollable OLED Laptop Screen

2025-01-10

Samsung to Mass Produce World's First Rollable OLED Laptop Screen

Samsung Display will begin mass production of the world's first rollable OLED screen for laptops in April 2025. This screen will be featured in Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus G6 Rollable laptop, launching globally in June. The screen expands from a 14-inch 5:4 aspect ratio to a 16.7-inch 8:9 aspect ratio, offering a unique mobile computing experience. Samsung also incorporates its unpolarized Eco² OLED™ technology for the first time in a laptop, reducing panel thickness and power consumption by 30%.

(global.samsungdisplay.com)

Hardware rollable OLED Samsung Display

DeepSeek's $5.6M Model Defies Altman's $10M AI Startup Claim

2025-01-28

DeepSeek's $5.6M Model Defies Altman's $10M AI Startup Claim

Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, previously claimed that AI startups with only $10 million in funding were 'totally hopeless' in competing with OpenAI. However, the emergence of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, challenges this assertion. DeepSeek's groundbreaking model, r1, was trained for a mere $5.6 million, proving Altman's statement inaccurate and sending shockwaves through the industry. Altman himself has since praised DeepSeek's achievement, highlighting the rapid pace of AI development and the unexpected disruption from unexpected players.

(www.tomshardware.com)

AI

From Nero's Poison to Turkish Jam: The Deadly Double Life of Cherry Laurel

2025-03-11

The author discovers a cherry laurel tree in their backyard, a plant whose fruits and leaves contain the deadly poison cyanide. Historically, it was used by Locusta, Nero's poisoner, to assassinate enemies. However, cherry laurel has also been used as a food flavoring; 19th-century British cooks used its leaves in puddings, resulting in child poisonings. Today, in Turkey, ripe cherry laurel fruits are made into jams and other foods. The article engagingly recounts the plant's transformation from ancient poison to modern food, warning against confusing cherry laurel with bay leaves to prevent accidental poisoning.

(suziepetryk.com)

Misc plant poison

BlogScroll: A GitHub-Hosted Directory of Personal Blogs and Sites

2025-01-03

BlogScroll is an open directory of personal websites and blogs, entirely maintained on GitHub. Created to highlight the often-overlooked digital gardens individuals cultivate outside the major tech platforms, it champions a decentralized internet. With categories spanning design, photography, and technology, and an RSS feed for updates, BlogScroll offers a valuable resource for discovering unique online voices and content.

(blogscroll.com)

Misc Personal Blogs Site Directory

Minecraft Server Crafted in COBOL: A Retro Rewind

2024-12-26

Minecraft Server Crafted in COBOL: A Retro Rewind

CobolCraft is a Minecraft server audaciously built using the legacy COBOL programming language. Despite COBOL's limitations in low-level data manipulation, this project surprisingly supports features like infinite terrain generation, dynamic chunk loading, and multiplayer capabilities. It even handles Minecraft's data files, showcasing the unexpected potential of this often-overlooked language and challenging perceptions of its capabilities. This project serves as a testament to programming ingenuity and an interesting experiment in using unconventional tools.

(github.com)

Development Server Development

Sei (YC) Hiring Full-Stack Engineer (TypeScript, React, Gen AI)

2025-01-24

Sei (YC) Hiring Full-Stack Engineer (TypeScript, React, Gen AI)

Sei, a Y Combinator-backed AI-powered regulatory compliance platform, is hiring a full-stack engineer. They use TypeScript, React, Next.js, and Python, building a scalable and secure platform. The ideal candidate is experienced, takes ownership, and aligns with Sei's human-centric, fast-execution culture. Competitive salary and equity are offered, but expect intense work.

(www.ycombinator.com)

Startup

Bun: Why Package Installs Are 7x Faster Than npm

2025-09-11

Bun package manager is renowned for its blazing speed, averaging ~7x faster than npm, ~4x faster than pnpm, and ~17x faster than yarn. This isn't magic; Bun treats package installation as a systems programming problem, not a JavaScript problem. It achieves this through minimizing system calls, caching manifests as binaries, optimizing tarball extraction, leveraging OS-native file copying, and scaling across CPU cores. The article delves into how Bun, written in Zig, bypasses Node.js's limitations (thread pool, event loop) to achieve incredibly fast package installations.

(bun.com)

Development

Spark 1.2 Released: A Major Leap in GPU Texture Compression

2025-03-09

Spark 1.2 is finally here! This real-time GPU texture compression solution boasts major optimizations, new compression formats, and expanded platform support. This release focuses on improving vectorization performance on RDNA, consoles, and Mali GPUs, and includes many unexpected features such as an improved EAC codec, new BC3-YCoCg and HDR codecs, and an ETC2 codec. The development team will focus more on long-term goals, rather than chasing feature requests from potential clients who haven't committed to a license yet. Spark 1.2 also supports Android TV and consoles, and features improved ASTC 6x6 and streaming codecs, as well as sideband data codecs, significantly improving compression quality and performance.

(www.ludicon.com)

Development GPU Texture Compression Real-time Rendering

WebShield: A Powerful Open-Source Ad Blocker for Safari

2025-02-28

WebShield: A Powerful Open-Source Ad Blocker for Safari

WebShield is an open-source, wide-spectrum content blocker for Safari, similar to uBlock Origin. It blocks ads, trackers, cookie notices, and more, supporting custom filter lists and advanced scriptlets/extended CSS. Currently in beta, it supports macOS 14, iOS 17, and visionOS 1.3+. Entirely user-funded, it promises no ads or third-party deals. Download via TestFlight, contribute code, report bugs, or improve documentation. An App Store release and detailed documentation are coming soon.

(github.com)

Development Ad Blocker

Saying Goodbye to Kubernetes' CPU Hog: Podman's Lightweight Container Automation

2025-05-05

Saying Goodbye to Kubernetes' CPU Hog: Podman's Lightweight Container Automation

In 2018, the author experimented with Kubernetes for container orchestration. While enjoying the automated deployment, Kubernetes' high resource consumption proved troublesome. Eventually, they discovered Podman—a lightweight Docker alternative. Combined with systemd and user lingering login, it achieved similar automated updates as Kubernetes, but with significantly reduced resource usage, making their server run faster and more energy-efficiently. This post shares the author's experience migrating from Kubernetes to Podman and how to utilize Podman, systemd, and user lingering login for automated container updates, providing a new perspective for developers seeking lightweight container orchestration solutions.

(blog.yaakov.online)

Development container orchestration

GPU Passthrough Gaming on Qubes OS: A Debugging Odyssey

2025-02-15

GPU Passthrough Gaming on Qubes OS: A Debugging Odyssey

This guide details the complex process of setting up GPU passthrough for gaming within the Qubes OS virtual machine manager. It requires a strong understanding of Linux, GRUB, IOMMU, and Xen virtualization. The guide covers hardware prerequisites, identifying IOMMU groups, modifying GRUB to hide the GPU, resolving the `max-ram-below-4g` parameter issue, and installing/configuring GPU drivers within the VM. For Nvidia GPUs, `nvidia-open` drivers are recommended. Differences between Linux and Windows VM setups are discussed, along with solutions using VirtualGL and Vulkan for potential issues. Automation scripts are provided, and common problems and fixes are listed. Be prepared for a debugging odyssey requiring significant patience and time.

(forum.qubes-os.org)

Development GPU Passthrough

Parinfer: A Simpler Way to Edit Lisp

2025-01-20

Parinfer is a novel editor mode for Lisp programming languages that simplifies Lisp coding by cleverly linking parentheses and indentation. It tackles the notorious parenthesis problem in Lisp, offering a more intuitive editing experience for both beginners and experts. Parinfer features two modes: Indent Mode and Paren Mode, allowing users to focus on either indentation or parentheses while Parinfer automatically manages the other. It also provides Paredit-like functionality without requiring complex hotkeys. At its core, Parinfer relies on a formal definition of the relationship between parentheses and indentation and employs a smart auto-adjustment mechanism based on this definition.

(shaunlebron.github.io)

Development Code

GitHub Code Suggestion Application Restrictions: Issues You Might Encounter

2025-01-31

GitHub Code Suggestion Application Restrictions: Issues You Might Encounter

This snippet from GitHub documentation lists various restrictions encountered when applying code suggestions, such as no code changes, closed pull requests, viewing a subset of changes, applying only one suggestion per line, applying to deleted lines, invalid suggestions, and other temporary restrictions. These limitations aim to maintain the integrity and consistency of the codebase and ensure the effective application of suggestions.

(github.com)

Development code suggestions restrictions

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