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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.

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(rdel.substack.com)
Development interruptions

Microsoft's New Surfaces: Intel-Powered Models Cost $400 More

2025-01-31
Microsoft's New Surfaces: Intel-Powered Models Cost $400 More

Microsoft launched new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop models for business customers, powered by Intel's Core Ultra processors. These are $400 more expensive than their Qualcomm Snapdragon-based counterparts. The Intel-based models start at $1499 with a second-gen Core Ultra 5 processor, 16GB RAM, and 256GB storage. Qualcomm-based Surfaces start at $1099. Consumer models currently only offer Qualcomm options. Available February 18th, the new Surfaces support Microsoft's new AI-enhanced mobile device management portal.

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(www.theregister.com)
Hardware

OS/2's Demise: How IBM's Commitment Shaped Modern Software

2025-01-06
OS/2's Demise: How IBM's Commitment Shaped Modern Software

A retrospective on a 1995 Usenet post by Gordon Letwin, Microsoft's lead architect on the OS/2 project, reveals the true reason for OS/2's failure. It wasn't the lack of native applications, but IBM's commitment to designing OS/2 for 286 machines already sold, missing the opportunity to embrace the 386 processor and its potential. This allowed Windows 3.0 to rise and dominate the market. The article argues that IBM's adherence to customer promises, while seemingly responsible, ultimately led to OS/2's downfall and profoundly impacted the direction of modern software, such as the ever-increasing size of programs.

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(www.theregister.com)
Tech

Rust Learns from Python's Dynamic Capabilities: Reflection with Serde

2025-05-15
Rust Learns from Python's Dynamic Capabilities: Reflection with Serde

This article details how the author used Rust and the Serde library to mimic Python's dynamic attribute access (__getattr__) mechanism, creating a clean and user-friendly API for accessing system information. The article thoroughly explains the implementation process, including custom trait, Deserializer, and Visitor implementations, and how to leverage Serde's derive(Deserialize) feature to simplify the code. Ultimately, the author successfully built an efficient and user-friendly Rust library that achieves a Python-like concise API, and discusses alternative approaches and trade-offs.

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(ohadravid.github.io)
Development

Radiant Foam: Real-time Differentiable Ray Tracing Breaks New Ground

2025-02-04

Researchers introduce Radiant Foam, a novel scene representation combining the efficiency of volumetric mesh ray tracing with the reconstruction quality of splatting methods. Leveraging Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulation, Radiant Foam achieves real-time ray tracing surpassing even hardware-accelerated Gaussian ray tracing in speed while nearly matching Gaussian splatting's reconstruction quality. Avoiding complex acceleration structures and special hardware/APIs, it only requires a standard programmable GPU. This breakthrough promises to advance real-time rendering significantly.

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(radfoam.github.io)
AI real-time rendering

Chopstick Sleeves: Micro-Epics of Japanese Typography and Culture

2025-01-19
Chopstick Sleeves: Micro-Epics of Japanese Typography and Culture

The Letterform Archive's recent acquisition of over 500 Japanese chopstick sleeves reveals a fascinating history of Japanese culture and design. From Heian-era silk wrappings to modern printed advertisements, these seemingly humble objects chronicle societal shifts. Designs range from iconic Mount Fuji imagery and Edo-period woodblock prints to modern fusions of East and West, reflecting evolving aesthetics and national identity. The collector's meticulous preservation embodies the Japanese concept of 'mottainai,' highlighting the value found in even the most ephemeral objects.

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(letterformarchive.org)
Design Japanese culture

Tenerife Lunar Eclipse Shoot: A Battle Against the Odds

2025-03-24
Tenerife Lunar Eclipse Shoot: A Battle Against the Odds

Two photographers planned an ambitious shoot to capture a total lunar eclipse in Tenerife, using the Teide crater as a unique foreground. However, equipment malfunctions, severe weather, and even a car break-in threatened to derail their plans. Despite facing seemingly insurmountable challenges, their perseverance paid off, resulting in stunning images and timelapses of the lunar eclipse captured under extreme conditions. This story is a testament to the photographers' determination and passion for their craft.

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(lrtimelapse.com)
Misc lunar eclipse Tenerife

The Marshmallow Test: It's Not Just About Willpower

2025-02-13
The Marshmallow Test: It's Not Just About Willpower

The famous marshmallow test suggests that children who delay gratification achieve more in life. However, further research reveals that factors like stable home environments, economic background, and cultural differences significantly impact the results. Children from stable homes with reliable adults are more likely to develop patience, while those from impoverished backgrounds are more inclined to seize immediate opportunities. The author uses personal parenting experiences to emphasize the importance of adult consistency and creating a trustworthy environment for fostering patience in children, highlighting that patience is a strategy, not simply a personality trait.

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(desunit.com)
Misc delayed gratification marshmallow test

Tabby: Your Self-Hosted AI Coding Assistant

2025-01-12
Tabby: Your Self-Hosted AI Coding Assistant

Tabby is an open-source, self-hosted AI coding assistant offering a local alternative to GitHub Copilot. It's self-contained, requiring no DBMS or cloud service, features an OpenAPI interface for easy integration, and supports consumer-grade GPUs. Recent updates include Llamafile deployment integration, an enhanced Answer Engine user experience, the ability to switch between different backend chat models in the Answer Engine, and displaying recently shared threads on the main page. It also boasts IDE plugins and enterprise features like team management and secured access.

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(github.com)
Development AI coding assistant

Toxic Legacy: Dried-Up Reservoir Reveals a Health Crisis

2025-03-20
Toxic Legacy: Dried-Up Reservoir Reveals a Health Crisis

Jesús displays infected spots on his hands caused by water pollution at the completely dry Endhó Dam reservoir. Independent scientific reports reveal the nearby soil contains numerous toxic substances dumped by chemical plants, causing skin allergies among residents. These include heavy metals like lead and mercury, arsenic, cyanide, nitrates, and other pollutants far exceeding environmental limits. Data suggests at least two generations of locals suffer from serious health issues, including cancer, kidney, and lung diseases.

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(mexicocitywater.longlead.com)
Misc health crisis

Particles.js: Code Samples and More

2025-01-09

Particles.js is a powerful JavaScript library for creating stunning particle effects. This article provides code samples and additional examples of Particles.js, enabling developers to easily implement various particle animations, from simple falling effects to complex interactive scenes. Whether for web design or game development, Particles.js adds a touch of visual flair to your projects.

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(tiki.li)
Development particle effects web effects

DM50: A Cheap, Open-Source, High-Precision Calculator

2025-01-24
DM50: A Cheap, Open-Source, High-Precision Calculator

DM50 is a cheap, powerful, easy-to-build, open-source hardware calculator boasting high precision. The project is hosted on GitHub and offers downloads for PCBs, firmware, bezels, and a 3D-printed case. Recent updates include finalizing the casing design, battery life testing, key model selection, and processor advancements. DM50 aims to provide a user-friendly, high-performance calculator experience.

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(50calc.com)
Hardware

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.

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(www.jmeiners.com)
Development virtual machine

The Rise of Open, Multi-Engine Data Lakehouses: An S3 and Python Implementation

2025-02-18
The Rise of Open, Multi-Engine Data Lakehouses: An S3 and Python Implementation

The data industry is experiencing a surge in the adoption of open, multi-engine data lakehouses. This six-part series details building an open lakehouse using S3 and Python, supporting multiple engines. Snowflake's Open Catalog manages metadata, while PyArrow and Polars enable data processing and analysis. The result? Concurrent read/write capabilities across Spark, Snowflake, and Polars, eliminating costly ETL processes and representing a significant data stack evolution.

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(tower.dev)
Development multi-engine

Serbia: A Digital Prison – State Surveillance and the Suppression of Civil Society

2025-01-03
Serbia: A Digital Prison – State Surveillance and the Suppression of Civil Society

Amnesty International's report reveals Serbia's use of surveillance technology and digital repression to control and suppress civil society. The report details widespread use of spyware, including NSO Group's Pegasus and a newly disclosed domestically-produced Android spyware, NoviSpy, along with Cellebrite's UFED tools against environmental activists and protest leaders. This constitutes a serious human rights violation and attack on freedom of expression.

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(www.amnesty.org)
Tech digital repression surveillance technology human rights

L3 Systems WristPC Keyboard: A Rugged Wearable Keyboard

2025-01-27

L3 Systems has developed the WristPC Keyboard for portable and wearable computer applications. This rugged QWERTY keyboard features a standard PC keyboard interface and comes in black anodized aluminum or blue ABS plastic housings. Completely sealed, it's designed for use in rain and harsh environments. Its curved back ensures comfortable and secure wrist placement, with an optimized alphanumeric layout and conveniently positioned arrow keys. Optional wrist straps and keyboard illumination are available. Custom keyboards for Aaton Cantar users are also offered (requires separate Gotham Sound Dsub15-USB adapter).

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(www.l3sys.com)
Hardware keyboard ruggedized

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.

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(www.govexec.com)
Tech VA Layoffs PACT Act Veteran Healthcare

Branchless UTF-8 Encoding: A Clever Hack

2025-01-17
Branchless UTF-8 Encoding: A Clever Hack

This article explores branchless UTF-8 encoding. The author starts with a problem: efficiently calculating the number of bytes needed for UTF-8 encoding. An initial solution using if-else statements is presented, but the author cleverly uses bit manipulation and lookup tables, leveraging Rust's features, to achieve branchless UTF-8 encoding and eliminate runtime array bounds checks. While performance isn't deeply analyzed, this article showcases a creative solution in the pursuit of elegant code, offering a fresh perspective on efficient UTF-8 encoding.

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(cceckman.com)
Development UTF-8 encoding bit manipulation

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.

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(qwenlm.github.io)
AI

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.

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(blog.gregbrockman.com)
Development

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.

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(developer.mozilla.org)
Development Date Time

Complete Decompilation of LEGO Island (1997)

2024-12-23
Complete Decompilation of LEGO Island (1997)

The isle project has achieved a functionally complete decompilation of the classic game LEGO Island (Version 1.1, English) released in 1997. The goal is to create an accurate representation of the original game's code, matching recompiled instructions to the original machine code. Both ISLE.EXE and LEGO1.DLL are fully decompiled and functionally identical to the originals. Further work focuses on improving code accuracy, naming, documentation, and structure. While some bugs may remain, the game is playable. The project uses CMake and recommends Microsoft Visual C++ 4.2 for compiling for optimal accuracy.

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(github.com)
Game game decompilation LEGO Island reverse engineering

UK Shifts AI Regulation: Risk Mitigation Trumps Mandatory Testing

2025-02-20
UK Shifts AI Regulation: Risk Mitigation Trumps Mandatory Testing

The UK government has quietly shifted its approach to AI legislation, dropping plans to force AI companies to provide pre-release access to the AI Safety Institute (AISI) for testing. This move, met with industry resistance, has raised concerns. Michael Birtwistle, associate director at the AISI, warned that it risks leaving various societal harms unaddressed, such as algorithmic bias. The shift comes amid escalating trade tensions with the US, with the UK's Technology Secretary, Peter Kyle, largely focusing on Ukraine and tariffs in media appearances, offering little comment on the AI policy change.

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(www.politico.eu)
Tech algorithmic bias

Webb-site.com to Shut Down: A Founder's Farewell Amidst a Cancer Battle

2025-02-12

David Webb, founder of Webb-site.com, announces the site's closure on March 31, 2025, due to his battle with metastatic prostate cancer. The article reflects on the site's contributions to public data transparency in Hong Kong since its 1998 launch, including uncovering government spending, tracking vaccination rates, and immigration data. An attempt to transfer the database to the University of Hong Kong failed due to the post-National Security Law environment. Webb will cease manual data collection, making existing data publicly available for download. The piece is a poignant reflection on the site's legacy, observations on Hong Kong's socio-political climate, and a peaceful farewell from a determined individual.

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(webb-site.com)
Misc Hong Kong Data Transparency Public Interest

AMD Instinct™ MI300X Boosts Ansys Fluent CFD Performance

2025-01-19

AMD released a blog post showcasing the impressive performance of its Instinct™ MI300X accelerator in Ansys Fluent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. Benchmarks using four benchmark models (sedan car, aircraft wing, exhaust system, and F1 race car) on both AMD MI300X and NVIDIA H100 platforms showed up to a 10% improvement in time-to-solution for the MI300X. This is attributed to the MI300X's 192GB HBM3 memory capacity and high memory bandwidth, along with AMD Infinity Cache™. The blog details the testing methodology, system configurations, and a step-by-step guide to installing and running the benchmarks. The MI300X proves to be an excellent choice for applications requiring steady-state analysis.

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(rocm.blogs.amd.com)
Hardware

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.

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(github.com)
Development Ad Blocker

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.

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(forum.qubes-os.org)
Development GPU Passthrough

Cloudflare Prevents DNS Conflicts with Formal Verification

2025-01-07
Cloudflare Prevents DNS Conflicts with Formal Verification

Cloudflare uses Topaz, a system that formally verifies the correctness of its internal DNS addressing behavior. Topaz encodes DNS business objectives as declarative programs, each with a match function, a response function, and a configuration. Before deployment, a custom model checker verifies these programs for conflicts and bugs, ensuring reliable and consistent DNS configuration. This improves internet reliability by preventing inconsistencies in IP address resolution.

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(blog.cloudflare.com)
Tech Formal Verification

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.

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(shaunlebron.github.io)
Development Code
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