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Meta's Llama 3.1 Community License: Not Free Software

2025-01-26

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has released an evaluation concluding that Meta's Llama 3.1 Community License is not a free software license. The license not only denies users their freedoms but also attempts to grant licensors powers that should only be exercised through democratically-elected governments. Furthermore, its application to a machine learning application fails to address inherent software freedom challenges. The FSF urges the free software community to avoid using this license and any software released under it.

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(www.fsf.org)
Development

Revisiting Barricelli's Cellular Automata: Spontaneous Generation of Life

2025-01-07

This article explores the work of Nils Aall Barricelli, who pioneered cellular automata 15 years before John Conway. Barricelli's 'symbioorganisms' model, in a finite, circular 1D space, simulates the movement and interaction of different elements through simple rules of collision elimination, positional replication, and mutation. The simulations reveal that even with simple rules, stable periodic patterns spontaneously emerge, resembling the spontaneous generation of life. The author delves into the stability of these patterns and proposes combining early universe simulations with simulations of abiogenesis to find more efficient ways to explore life's origins.

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(akkartik.name)
AI abiogenesis complex systems

Managing Multi-Account AWS Architectures with Terraform Workspaces

2025-02-05
Managing Multi-Account AWS Architectures with Terraform Workspaces

This article demonstrates managing multi-account AWS architectures using Terraform workspaces. The focus is on associating accounts with workspaces, without delving into modularity, security, or remote state storage. A local testing approach using Localstack is presented, leveraging OpenTofu as an open-source Terraform alternative. Different workspaces are created, dynamically loading variable files to manage configurations for different environments (e.g., development and UAT).

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(github.com)
Development Multi-Account Architecture

Walkman Interface Enhancement Addon: Revamp Your Music Experience

2025-02-27
Walkman Interface Enhancement Addon: Revamp Your Music Experience

A new addon called Walkman One enhances the interface and adds features to Sony's NW-A50, ZX300, WM1A, and WM1Z series Walkman players. It boasts Winamp 2 skin support, custom cassette skins, on-the-fly skin changing, a volume table editor, per-song audio options, and access to all audio filters. Additional features include a clock, larger cover art, a digital clock skin, a low-latency USB DAC module, and FM radio (on compatible models). While supporting many Walkman models, some older ones require Walkman One firmware. Installation is easy: download and run the installer, select your model and firmware version.

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(github.com)
Hardware Interface Enhancement

Has Our Respect for Complexity Vanished?

2025-01-21

This blog post explores the modern societal loss of understanding and respect for complexity. With automation and the information age, direct contact with complex systems has diminished, leading to a lack of appreciation for the intricacies of fields like agriculture and manufacturing. This lack of respect manifests in simplified approaches to complex problems in daily life and impacts education and future perspectives. The author argues that admitting 'I don't know' is a valuable trait, and respect for complexity is truly admirable.

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(wilsoniumite.com)
Misc information age

Helix: A Vision-Language-Action Model for General-Purpose Robotic Manipulation

2025-02-20
Helix: A Vision-Language-Action Model for General-Purpose Robotic Manipulation

Figure introduces Helix, a groundbreaking Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model unifying perception, language understanding, and learned control to overcome long-standing robotics challenges. Helix achieves several firsts: full upper-body high-rate continuous control, multi-robot collaboration, and the ability to pick up virtually any small household object using only natural language instructions. A single neural network learns all behaviors without task-specific fine-tuning, running on embedded low-power GPUs for commercial readiness. Helix's "System 1" (fast reactive visuomotor policy) and "System 2" (internet-pretrained VLM) architecture enables fast generalization and precise control, paving the way for scaling humanoid robots to home environments.

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(www.figure.ai)
AI Vision-Language-Action

Understanding Functors, Applicatives, and Monads in Haskell

2025-03-30
Understanding Functors, Applicatives, and Monads in Haskell

This article provides a clear and accessible explanation of functors, applicatives, and monads in Haskell functional programming, using analogies to make complex concepts easier to grasp. The author uses the metaphor of boxes to illustrate how these types handle function application in different scenarios, providing code examples to demonstrate their usage and differences. The article concludes with a reflection on the importance of learning and sharing knowledge, stemming from an interaction with the Haskell community.

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(www.thecoder.cafe)
Development Monads

Kylie Minogue's Obscure Techno-Pop Anthem About a Font

2025-03-25
Kylie Minogue's Obscure Techno-Pop Anthem About a Font

In 1997, pop icon Kylie Minogue teamed up with producer Towa Tei for the surprisingly catchy "GBI (German Bold Italic)", a song uniquely sung from the perspective of a typeface. This wasn't just a song; it was a creative font design experiment. Artist Hiro Sugiyama created the GBI font to accompany the track, included as a data track on Tei's album and available for download. The single and font design, a blend of late-90s techno and pop culture, remain relatively obscure today, but hold a unique place in design and music history, with occasional use by select artists.

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(abcdinamo.com)
Design

LFortran Compiles PRIMA: A Major Milestone Towards Beta

2025-03-09

The LFortran compiler team successfully compiled and executed libprima/PRIMA, marking the eighth production-grade, third-party code compiled with bit-for-bit alignment to GFortran. This significant milestone brings LFortran closer to its goal of compiling ten such codes, a key step toward achieving beta-quality. Compiling PRIMA, a Fortran package for nonlinear optimization, presented challenges related to procedure variables, arrays with non-unit strides, and precision loss, all of which were overcome. Future efforts focus on compiling additional third-party codes, including fpm and LAPACK, to solidify LFortran's beta readiness.

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(lfortran.org)
Development

The Science of Mocktails: Mimicking the Taste of Alcohol

2025-01-30
The Science of Mocktails: Mimicking the Taste of Alcohol

This article delves into the science behind creating alcohol-free cocktails that taste remarkably similar to their alcoholic counterparts. It challenges the common assumption that alcohol's flavor is dominant, instead highlighting the role of trigeminal nerve stimulation (the burning sensation) and its drying effect on the mouth. The article analyzes the bitterness and sweetness of low-alcohol beverages and how alcohol enhances other flavor compounds. By using spicy ingredients like ginger and chili to mimic the burn, and strong tea tannins to replicate the astringency, one can craft mocktails with a similar mouthfeel. The focus, however, isn't on perfectly replicating the taste of alcohol, but rather using these elements to enhance the overall flavor profile.

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(www.seriouseats.com)
Misc mocktails alcohol-free cocktails sensory science

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.

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(randomaugustine.medium.com)
Development Secure Architecture

Auto-Commit Bot: Automated Git Commits with Gemini AI

2025-02-01
Auto-Commit Bot: Automated Git Commits with Gemini AI

The Auto-Commit Bot is a Python tool automating Git workflows. It monitors a directory for changes, generates descriptive commit messages using Google Gemini's AI, and commits them. This eliminates repetitive tasks and ensures consistent messaging. Features include real-time file monitoring, auto-committing, AI-powered commit messages, and easy customization. Simply install dependencies, set your API key, and run the command.

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(github.com)
Development

DeepGEMM: Clean and Efficient FP8 GEMM Kernels with Fine-Grained Scaling

2025-02-26
DeepGEMM: Clean and Efficient FP8 GEMM Kernels with Fine-Grained Scaling

DeepGEMM is a library for clean and efficient FP8 General Matrix Multiplications (GEMMs) on NVIDIA Hopper Tensor Cores, featuring fine-grained scaling as proposed in DeepSeek-V3. Supporting both normal and Mix-of-Experts (MoE) grouped GEMMs, it uses a lightweight Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler, eliminating the need for compilation during installation. It tackles the imprecision of FP8 tensor core accumulation via CUDA-core two-level accumulation (promotion). Despite its concise design (~300 lines of core code), DeepGEMM's performance matches or surpasses expert-tuned libraries across various matrix shapes.

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(github.com)
Development

Leaked: Massive Directory of The Sims Design Documents

2025-02-16

A massive directory of what appears to be internal The Sims design documents has surfaced online. Hundreds of files detail nearly every aspect of the game's development, from character modeling and animation to game mechanics and software architecture. The sheer volume and size of the files offer a rare glimpse into the complexity and scale of a large-scale game development project. This leak provides fascinating insight into the design and development processes of The Sims, sparking interest in game development workflows and documentation management.

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(donhopkins.com)
Game The Sims Document Leak

Command-line VPN Tool: Parameter Breakdown

2025-03-02
Command-line VPN Tool: Parameter Breakdown

This is a command-line driven VPN tool. Users can specify the private network destination (-d), global routing (-g), local address (-l), remote server address (-s), server mode (-srv), client and server TUN device IPs (-tc, -ts), and TUN device name (-tname). Crucially, the server must be able to reach the private network; otherwise, packets will be lost.

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(github.com)
Development

Mastodon Shifts to Non-profit Ownership, Embracing Decentralization

2025-01-14

Mastodon, the decentralized social media platform, announced a significant shift towards community ownership. Key assets, including the name and copyrights, are being transferred to a new European non-profit organization. Founder Eugen Rochko will step down as CEO to focus on product strategy. This move aims to solidify Mastodon's independence from single entities, ensuring its long-term sustainability and prioritizing community safety and growth. Future efforts will concentrate on enhancing user experience, bolstering privacy, and expanding the decentralized Fediverse network.

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(blog.joinmastodon.org)
Tech community ownership

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.

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(blog.yaakov.online)
Development container orchestration

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

Zero-Downtime PostgreSQL Major Version Upgrade

2025-01-29
Zero-Downtime PostgreSQL Major Version Upgrade

The Instant team shares their experience upgrading PostgreSQL from version 13 to 16 with zero downtime. They tried in-place upgrades and blue-green deployments, but both failed. Their manual approach involved creating a new PostgreSQL 16 replica, gradually switching subscriptions and writes, and cleverly designing an algorithm to ensure zero data loss by briefly pausing new transactions. They encountered challenges like custom function search path issues and sequence data replication problems, sharing valuable lessons learned along the way.

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(www.instantdb.com)
Development PostgreSQL upgrade zero downtime database migration

The Insane Genius: Karl Hans Janke's Fantastic Inventions

2025-03-04
The Insane Genius: Karl Hans Janke's Fantastic Inventions

Karl Hans Janke, a patient at an East German psychiatric hospital, spent his life creating over 4,500 drawings and hundreds of models of technological inventions, mostly fantastical flying machines. He claimed to have invented a fuel-less energy system using the magnetic energy of the universe, his so-called 'German atom,' constantly seeking contact with the scientific community while fearing plagiarism. His archive, rediscovered a decade after his death, reveals a brilliant mind overshadowed by mental illness, leaving a poignant legacy.

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(www.cabinetmagazine.org)
Misc mental illness inventor

The Decline of Music and the Fall of Civilization: Lessons from Ancient Greece and China

2025-03-25
The Decline of Music and the Fall of Civilization: Lessons from Ancient Greece and China

This article explores the common thread in the decline of ancient Greek and Chinese civilizations: the degeneration of music. Plato and ancient Chinese texts argue that musical chaos directly led to the collapse of social order. The article posits that this wasn't merely an aesthetic shift, but a departure from the principles of cosmic harmony (the Greek Logos and the Chinese Tao). Initially, music adhered to strict conventions, maintaining social cohesion. However, when artists broke these conventions in pursuit of sensory stimulation, the audience's rational judgment was weakened, and social order crumbled. This wasn't rebellion against authority, but a rejection of cosmic harmony, ultimately leading to civilizational decline.

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(renovatio.zaytuna.edu)
Misc civilization decline philosophy of music ancient greek philosophy

House Subpoenas Google Over Biden Admin's Alleged Content Moderation Interference

2025-03-06
House Subpoenas Google Over Biden Admin's Alleged Content Moderation Interference

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Alphabet (Google's parent company) to investigate communications with the Biden administration regarding content moderation policies. Chairman Jim Jordan also requested similar communications with outside groups. The subpoena targets content restrictions on topics such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, COVID-19, and other conservative viewpoints. While Meta previously admitted to pressure from the Biden administration, Google denies similar actions, claiming its policies are independently enforced and committed to free expression.

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(ca.finance.yahoo.com)
Tech

Tangled: A Decentralized Git Collaboration Platform Built on AT Protocol

2025-03-03

Tangled is a new social-enabled Git collaboration platform built on the AT Protocol, aiming to give developers full ownership of their code, enable open-source communities to self-govern, and make coding social and fun again. Combining the strengths of ActivityPub's federated model and Radicle's P2P approach, it uses lightweight 'knots' servers to simplify Git repository hosting. Tangled offers free managed knots and a consolidated app view at tangled.sh for seamless access and collaboration across the network. Still in its infancy, the team is building with a focus on data ownership, low barrier to entry, and a great user experience. Currently invite-only.

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(blog.tangled.sh)
Development

US Bans Chinese Vehicles, Impacting Polestar and Others

2025-01-15
US Bans Chinese Vehicles, Impacting Polestar and Others

The US finalized a rule effectively banning the import of Chinese-made connected vehicles, even those manufactured in the US, citing national security concerns. This impacts major automakers like Ford and GM, smaller companies like Polestar, and even Waymo. The ban covers technologies like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, aiming to prevent data collection by China. It takes effect in 2027 for software and 2030 for hardware, with exceptions for vehicles over 10,000 pounds. The auto industry strongly opposes the ban; Polestar stated it would prevent the company from selling cars in the US. This represents an escalation in US-China trade tensions and highlights growing concerns about data security and national security.

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(www.theverge.com)
Tech US ban Chinese vehicles

18 Years in the Linux Console: No Regrets

2025-01-12
18 Years in the Linux Console: No Regrets

A programmer recounts his 18-year journey using only the Linux command line. Starting in the early 2000s in a rural area with limited internet access, he learned Linux, eventually finding his 'zen' through countless nights of coding and experimenting with various distributions. The author details challenges and solutions, sharing insights on modern Linux trends like the rise of systemd and his choice of Gentoo. This nostalgic piece is a captivating tale of dedication to pure technology.

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(eugene-andrienko.com)
Development

St. Peter's Basilica: Immersive Digital Experience

2025-01-18
St. Peter's Basilica: Immersive Digital Experience

St. Peter's Basilica has launched a new digital experience, allowing people worldwide to explore the magnificence of this architectural marvel from the comfort of their homes. The experience includes a virtual 3D tour and a story detailing the Basilica's history, all available in multiple languages. Users can immerse themselves in the grandeur of St. Peter's, experiencing its art and architecture regardless of their location.

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(virtual.basilicasanpietro.va)
Misc digital experience St. Peter's Basilica

British Entrepreneur Challenges US-Europe Work Ethic Narrative: It's Not Effort, It's Optimism and Ambition

2025-02-06
British Entrepreneur Challenges US-Europe Work Ethic Narrative: It's Not Effort, It's Optimism and Ambition

Monzo founder and former CEO Tom Blomfield challenges the narrative that Americans work harder than Europeans. He argues the difference lies in "positivity, optimism, and ambition." The deeply American belief that anyone can achieve anything through hard work contrasts sharply with British culture. He notes that top UK students gravitate towards finance or consulting, while US students are more entrepreneurial. This cultural divergence contributes to Europe's productivity gap with the US. Blomfield's own experience reflects this; he faced hurdles securing a banking license in the UK but found more support in the US.

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(finance.yahoo.com)
Startup entrepreneurial culture

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

Mastering the Kalman Filter: A Comprehensive Tutorial

2025-01-18
Mastering the Kalman Filter: A Comprehensive Tutorial

This tutorial provides a thorough guide to the Kalman filter, a powerful tool for estimating and predicting system states. Starting with basic univariate filters, it progressively covers multivariate filters, non-linear filters, and practical implementation aspects like sensor fusion and outlier handling. The tutorial features numerous numerical examples and illustrations, along with Python and MATLAB code. Even without a strong math background, you can learn to design, simulate, and evaluate Kalman filter performance.

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(www.kalmanfilter.net)
Development Kalman Filter State Estimation
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