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Soviet Hero: A Daring Rescue from the Depths of Lake Yerevan

2025-01-14

In 1976, Shavarsh Karapetyan, a Soviet swimming champion, witnessed a trolleybus plunge into Lake Yerevan. Ignoring the perilous icy water and pollution, he launched a daring rescue, repeatedly diving into the submerged vehicle to save dozens of passengers. This heroic act, suppressed by Soviet authorities, remained largely unknown until years later. Karapetyan's story is a testament to extraordinary courage and the power of human compassion.

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(grantland.com)
Misc Heroism Rescue

RCL's Design Dilemma: The Challenge of Floats

2025-03-04

The author faced a challenge while building the new configuration language RCL: how to handle floating-point numbers. As a superset of JSON, RCL needs to balance JSON semantics, the type system, and code readability. The article delves into the trade-offs between integer and floating-point types, such as whether to distinguish between integer and floating-point types, and how to handle numerical equality and type conversion. Ultimately, the author chose a single numeric type, "Number," to simplify language design and improve user experience. This solution is implemented in RCL 0.8.0.

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(ruudvanasseldonk.com)
Development floating-point numbers

Tracing Myanmar's Military Command Chains: A Data-Driven Case Study

2025-01-19

DOT • STUDIO partnered with the Security Force Monitor (SFM) to build "Under Whose Command," a platform leveraging cutting-edge technology to precisely trace Myanmar's complex military command chains. Employing sophisticated data modeling (EAV and Datalog databases) and precise handling of time and location, the platform overcomes the challenges of dynamic and overlapping command structures, providing journalists, courts, and researchers with a powerful tool for accountability. The project successfully integrated existing research workflows with new technologies, resulting in a user-friendly and sustainably maintained public platform.

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(www.dot.studio)
Tech command chain

Building an Open-Source Laptop from Scratch: The anyon_e Project

2025-01-22
Building an Open-Source Laptop from Scratch: The anyon_e Project

Bryan embarked on an ambitious journey to build a highly integrated open-source laptop, anyon_e, from the ground up. The resulting machine boasts a 4K AMOLED display, a Cherry MX mechanical keyboard, and impressive performance running games like Minecraft and 7B parameter LLMs, all while maintaining ~7 hours of battery life. The project involved designing a custom motherboard around an RK3588 SoC, a dedicated power controller (ESP32-S3), and creating a mechanical keyboard and trackpad. This interdisciplinary endeavor, spanning hardware design, software development, and mechanical engineering, showcases the power of open-source collaboration and the drive to push boundaries.

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(www.byran.ee)
Hardware

Network States: Utopian Fantasy or Dystopian Nightmare?

2025-02-05
Network States: Utopian Fantasy or Dystopian Nightmare?

Balaji Srinivasan's new book, *The Network State*, envisions a new social contract powered by Web3 technology, proposing the creation of 'startup countries' via blockchain. These 'network states' would consist of highly aligned online communities crowdfunding territory globally, eventually gaining diplomatic recognition. Critics argue this model resembles an archipelago of 'privatopias', exacerbating inequality and suppressing democratic participation with its simplistic 'one-commandment' governance. Instead of fragmented network states, leveraging network technology to build a more inclusive and participatory network society to solve real-world problems is proposed as a more viable solution.

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(www.cip.org)
Tech Network Governance

GPUs Are So Fast, Why Do We Still Need CPUs?

2025-01-08
GPUs Are So Fast, Why Do We Still Need CPUs?

A viral video uses a painting duel to illustrate the performance difference between CPUs and GPUs: a CPU painstakingly draws a smiley face, while a GPU instantly renders the Mona Lisa. But this overlooks a crucial point: program types. CPUs excel at sequential instructions, while GPUs thrive on parallel processing. Most applications blend sequential and parallel code; for example, a program might be 50% parallelizable. CPUs are like head chefs, adept at handling unexpected events; GPUs are like line cooks, mastering repetitive tasks. Chips like Apple's M3 integrate both, combining CPU flexibility with GPU computing power.

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(codingstuff.substack.com)
Tech parallel processing

Open-Source R1 Shakes Up the AI World: Accelerated Development!

2025-01-26
Open-Source R1 Shakes Up the AI World: Accelerated Development!

The AI landscape is exploding with new models. DeepSeek's open-source reasoning model, R1, matches the performance of OpenAI's closed-source o1, but at a fraction of the cost, sending shockwaves through the industry. R1 validates OpenAI's o1 and o3 approaches and reveals new trends: pretraining's diminished importance and the emergence of inference time scaling laws, model downsizing, reinforcement learning scaling laws, and model distillation scaling laws, all accelerating AI development. R1's open-source nature intensifies US-China competition, highlighting the massive geopolitical implications of AI's rapid progress.

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(timkellogg.me)
AI

Roe AI: Revolutionizing Data Warehousing, Seeking Founding Engineer

2025-02-06
Roe AI: Revolutionizing Data Warehousing, Seeking Founding Engineer

Roe AI, backed by Gradient Ventures and Y Combinator, is building the next-generation data warehouse aiming to be the last data warehouse you'll ever need. They're looking for a founding engineer to develop their core SQL engine, multi-modal AI data engines, and multi-modal RAG system. The ideal candidate will have experience with generative AI, front-end and back-end development, and strong computer science fundamentals. Excellent benefits and a hybrid work arrangement are offered.

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(www.ycombinator.com)
Startup Data Warehouse

Resurrecting the 1972 UNIX V2 'Beta'

2025-02-19

A researcher successfully recovered a working 1972 UNIX V2 beta system from magnetic tapes. This version differs from its predecessors in kernel size and a.out format support, considered an early beta of V2. While bootable on aap's PDP-11/20 emulator, it fails on others. Through a series of clever steps, the researcher created a bootable disk image and shared it publicly. This discovery provides invaluable material for researching the evolution of early UNIX systems.

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(www.tuhs.org)
Tech UNIX history

Amazon Chime Shutdown Announced for February 2026

2025-02-20
Amazon Chime Shutdown Announced for February 2026

Amazon has announced the end of support for its communications service, Amazon Chime, including Business Calling, effective February 20, 2026. New customer sign-ups will cease on February 19, 2025. Existing customers can continue using Chime until February 20, 2026, after which all features will be unavailable. Amazon recommends migrating to alternative collaboration solutions such as AWS Wickr or partner offerings from Zoom, Webex, and Slack.

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(aws.amazon.com)
Tech Collaboration

RPCEmu 0.9.5 Released: Major Update for Acorn Computer Emulator

2025-03-31

RPCEmu, an emulator for classic Acorn computer systems like the Risc PC and A7000, has released version 0.9.5. This release boasts numerous improvements, including mouse wheel support, enhanced floppy disk and IDE hard drive drivers, more accurate timers, and high-resolution timestamp support for HostFS on 64-bit Linux. The project is open-source and welcomes community contributions.

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(www.marutan.net)
Development

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

DIY Pipe Organ: A University Student's Musical Odyssey

2025-01-30

In 1992, a university student with no musical background embarked on a DIY pipe organ journey to fulfill a course requirement. Initially using a vacuum cleaner motor to power crude wooden pipes, the result was deafening. Through experimentation and refinement, he designed an ingenious valve system and pipe structure, culminating in a unique instrument. This humble organ, built with ingenuity and passion, became a testament to the joy of creation and a source of inspiration for fellow music enthusiasts.

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(www.sentex.ca)
Misc DIY instrument pipe organ

WFH: Longer Days, More Meetings, and Zoom Fatigue

2025-05-16
WFH: Longer Days, More Meetings, and Zoom Fatigue

A Harvard Business School study reveals that during the early days of the pandemic, remote workers experienced an 8.2% increase in their average workday (48.5 minutes). While meeting frequency rose, individual meetings shortened. Analyzing data from 3.1 million people across 16 global cities, researchers found that remote work blurred work-life boundaries, leading to longer hours and employee burnout. Managers are advised to focus on output, not hours worked, and to empathize with employees' unique circumstances.

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(www.library.hbs.edu)
Tech work hours

Redis UNLINK vs DEL: A Deep Dive into Internal Mechanics

2025-01-21
Redis UNLINK vs DEL: A Deep Dive into Internal Mechanics

Both Redis' UNLINK and DEL commands remove keys, but their internal implementations differ. DEL synchronously deletes keys and frees memory, while UNLINK asynchronously queues the deletion for background processing. UNLINK's 'non-blocking' nature isn't absolute; it calculates the cost of deleting an object: if the cost is less than 64, it deletes synchronously; otherwise, asynchronously. The article delves into the Redis source code, explaining the implementation details of UNLINK and DEL, including key slot calculation, two-phase unlinking, and asynchronous deletion, and discusses the role of LAZYFREE_THRESHOLD.

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(www.pankajtanwar.in)
Development

arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

2025-02-18
arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

arXivLabs is a framework for collaborating on and sharing new arXiv features directly on the website. Participants, individuals and organizations alike, embrace arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners who share them. Got an idea for a project that will benefit the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

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(arxiv.org)
Development

xan: A Blazing-Fast CLI Tool for CSV Processing

2025-03-29
xan: A Blazing-Fast CLI Tool for CSV Processing

xan is a command-line tool built in Rust for lightning-fast processing of massive CSV files (gigabytes!). Leveraging multithreading for parallelism, it easily handles tasks like previewing, filtering, slicing, aggregating, sorting, and joining CSV data. xan boasts a powerful expression language surpassing the speed of Python, Lua, or JavaScript for complex operations. Originally forked from xsv but extensively rewritten, xan caters to social science data analysis needs, including lexicometry, graph theory, and even web scraping. Installation is simple via cargo, Homebrew, pacman, Nix, or pre-built binaries.

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(github.com)
Development CSV processing

Botswana Launches its First Satellite: BOTSAT-1

2025-03-26
Botswana Launches its First Satellite: BOTSAT-1

Botswana successfully launched its first satellite, BOTSAT-1, on March 15th, 2025, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. This 3U hyperspectral Earth observation satellite, developed by the Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST), will provide crucial data for national development priorities including food security, environmental conservation, and urban planning. The launch represents a significant milestone in Botswana's space program and fosters human capital development through practical training for local engineers. Collaboration with Dragonfly Aerospace enhances BIUST's capabilities with advanced imaging technology and support for cleanroom facility development.

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(spaceinafrica.com)
Tech Satellite Launch African Space Program

Hello World: Minimized to 167 Bytes

2025-01-02
Hello World: Minimized to 167 Bytes

This article documents the author's journey to create the smallest possible 'Hello World' program. Initially using Rust, the author discovered that minimizing the binary size required a deep dive into low-level programming. Ultimately, assembly language was chosen, and through clever techniques such as removing debugging symbols and manually crafting the ELF header, a 64-bit Linux 'Hello World' program was reduced to an impressive 167 bytes! The article delves into the file size expansion during the linking process and the details of the ELF file format, making it highly valuable for low-level system developers.

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(blog.lohr.dev)
Development minimal program

Go Error Handling Syntax Sugar Proposal: A Trade-off Between Brevity and Clarity

2025-01-28
Go Error Handling Syntax Sugar Proposal: A Trade-off Between Brevity and Clarity

The Go community is debating a new error handling syntax proposal aimed at reducing boilerplate code. The proposal introduces a new '?' operator to handle function return errors more concisely while preserving readability. The proposal has sparked extensive community discussion, primarily focusing on whether the new syntax is clear enough and if it might encourage developers to neglect error handling. Some argue it efficiently reduces boilerplate, improving readability; others worry the new syntax is too implicit, potentially leading to harder-to-debug errors.

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(github.com)
Development syntax sugar

Trump Threatens 20-Year Jail Sentences for Tesla Vandals

2025-03-30
Trump Threatens 20-Year Jail Sentences for Tesla Vandals

Amidst a surge of vandalism targeting Tesla vehicles, dealerships, and charging stations across the US, President Trump issued a stern warning: perpetrators face up to 20 years in prison, including those who funded the attacks. The FBI is investigating incidents in at least nine states, involving arson, gunfire, and graffiti. Three individuals have already been charged with crimes related to these attacks. This comes as Tesla's stock has plummeted nearly 48% this year, and top executives have offloaded $100 million in stock.

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(abc7.com)
Tech Vandalism

APL Challenge: Win $100!

2025-02-05
APL Challenge: Win $100!

The Dyalog Ltd APL Challenge is on! Four rounds a year, each with ten problems running for three months. Win one of three $100 prizes! No prior programming experience needed; the problems teach you APL as you go. Even if you just want to learn about APL, register to stay updated on future rounds. Start your coding journey and compete for a chance to win!

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(challenge.dyalog.com)
Development prize money

OpenZFS 2.3.0 Released: RAIDZ Expansion, Blazing Fast Deduplication, and More

2025-01-14
OpenZFS 2.3.0 Released: RAIDZ Expansion, Blazing Fast Deduplication, and More

OpenZFS 2.3.0 is here! This release boasts exciting new features including RAIDZ expansion for adding devices to existing RAIDZ pools without downtime, blazing fast deduplication for significantly improved performance, direct I/O for bypassing ARC caching to boost efficiency on devices like NVMe, optional JSON output for most commands, and support for file/directory names up to 1023 characters. Numerous critical bug fixes and performance improvements round out this release. Supported platforms include Linux kernels 4.18-6.12 and FreeBSD releases 13.3, 14.0-14.2.

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(github.com)
Development storage

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

Kremlin's Assassination Plot Against Investigative Journalist Foiled

2025-03-07
Kremlin's Assassination Plot Against Investigative Journalist Foiled

An investigative journalist exposed a chilling plot by the Kremlin to kidnap and possibly assassinate him. The plan, orchestrated by Russian security service operatives, involved forged documents, a clandestine route, and a violent attack, even considering the use of poison or explosives. Despite its meticulous planning, British authorities intervened, dismantling the criminal operation and bringing several suspects to justice.

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(theins.press)
Misc Kremlin assassination plot investigative journalist

Frequency Shifts Don't Imply Quantum Entanglement: The Tardigrade Case

2025-01-01
Frequency Shifts Don't Imply Quantum Entanglement: The Tardigrade Case

A recent, unpublished manuscript claims to demonstrate quantum entanglement between a superconducting qubit and a tardigrade, sparking much media attention. However, the authors cite a frequency shift in the qubit as evidence, a claim challenged by physicists. This post uses a simple mass-spring system analogy to illustrate the commonplace nature of frequency shifts. Even in quantum systems, frequency is primarily determined by mass and springiness, not entanglement. The author argues the experiment lacks sufficient evidence for quantum entanglement, attributing the observed frequency shift to classical physics.

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(benbrubaker.com)
Tech quantum entanglement frequency shift tardigrade

Hilbert Curve: A Beautiful Space-Filling Curve and its Visualization

2025-01-18

This article delves into the Hilbert curve, a space-filling curve with excellent clustering properties. The author creatively visualizes it by projecting a 3D RGB color space Hilbert curve onto a 2D plane. The visualization is aesthetically pleasing and intuitively demonstrates the clustering characteristics of the Hilbert curve. The article also explains the algorithm implementation of the Hilbert curve and provides a Python project for generating and visualizing various space-filling curves.

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(corte.si)
Development Hilbert curve space-filling curve

My Correspondence with Edward Gorey: A Curious Friendship

2025-03-01
My Correspondence with Edward Gorey: A Curious Friendship

This article recounts a unique correspondence between the author and the illustrator Edward Gorey. From childhood fascination with Gorey's distinctive style to adult exchanges with the eccentric artist, the author shares their mutual interest in literature, art, and the macabre. Their letters, filled with whimsical observations, ranged from murder mysteries to bizarre recipes, from London's cheap bookstores to the behavior of zombies, showcasing Gorey's unique writing style and meticulous attention to detail. The article concludes with the author's account of the mysterious disappearance of Gorey's letters and the lasting presence of a cover Gorey designed, reflecting on the unpredictable connections in life.

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(www.tcj.com)
Misc Correspondence

Mikey: Audio Recorder, Transcriber, and Meeting Note Generator

2025-02-12
Mikey: Audio Recorder, Transcriber, and Meeting Note Generator

Mikey is an application for recording audio, transcribing it using the Groq API, and automatically generating meeting notes. Its user-friendly PyQt GUI provides a seamless experience for managing recordings, viewing transcriptions, and browsing saved sessions. It uses pyaudiowpatch for audio recording, the Groq API for transcription, and a conversational model for generating concise meeting notes. A standalone executable can be built for easy distribution.

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(github.com)
Development audio recording transcription meeting notes
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