LEGO Interferometers Bring Quantum Physics to Life

2025-02-25

Researchers at the University of Nottingham have developed LEGO-based interferometer kits to make quantum science more accessible. These hands-on kits, designed for secondary school students and beyond, replicate professional optical equipment, allowing students to build and experiment with lasers, mirrors, and beamsplitters to observe interference patterns. The project, 'Photon Bricks,' has been a hit at exhibitions, with participants praising its engaging approach to complex concepts. The kits are designed to inspire the next generation of scientists and are currently being rolled out to schools in Nottingham and Cardiff.

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20% Productivity Boost: A Real-World Look at AI Coding Assistants

2025-05-08
20% Productivity Boost: A Real-World Look at AI Coding Assistants

A 12-year-old SaaS company with 40 developers experimented with AI coding assistants, Cursor and Claude Code. Eight developers use them almost exclusively, while 11 use them about half the time. Claude excels at writing entire features, while Cursor is better for smaller changes. The AI assistants boosted productivity, particularly in repetitive tasks and understanding unfamiliar code. However, AI-generated code sometimes needs careful review, and the consistent style sacrifices individuality. The author argues mastering AI coding assistants is a crucial future skill, but ultimately, human thought remains paramount in defining software functionality.

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Development code assistants

From Zero to iOS App in Three Days: An AI-Powered Development Journey

2025-06-08
From Zero to iOS App in Three Days: An AI-Powered Development Journey

The author, a product and GTM expert with limited coding experience, built a functional iOS photo management app in just three days using AI assistance. Leveraging Gemini, they navigated challenges such as Apple's CLGeocoder limitations in China and overcame coding hurdles with AI-assisted debugging and learning. The app, designed for one-time purchase instead of a subscription model, reflects a critique of current iOS app marketing practices.

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(mgx.me)
Development AI-assisted Coding

Wear OS Air Mouse: Bluetooth HID Device Emulator

2025-08-29
Wear OS Air Mouse: Bluetooth HID Device Emulator

This project showcases the new Bluetooth HID Device API in Android P, implementing a simple air mouse and cursor keys emulator on a Wear OS device. Connect to laptops and desktops running Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, macOS, or Android TV without extra software – just a Bluetooth receiver is needed. Utilizing the Google VR library for orientation tracking ensures a stable and reliable air mouse experience.

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Development Bluetooth HID Air Mouse

Saturn's Rings: Older Than We Thought?

2024-12-19
Saturn's Rings: Older Than We Thought?

A new study challenges the long-held belief that Saturn's rings are relatively young. Previous research, based on data from the Cassini spacecraft, suggested an age of only a few hundred million years. However, a team led by planetary scientist Ryuki Hyodo used computer simulations to show that micrometeoroid impacts on the rings produce far less contamination than previously thought. This implies the rings could be billions of years old, as old as Saturn itself, predating even the dinosaurs. This finding significantly alters our understanding of early solar system evolution and points towards future missions for more detailed investigation.

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Par: An Experimental Concurrent Language with Interactive Playground

2025-02-06
Par: An Experimental Concurrent Language with Interactive Playground

Par is an experimental concurrent programming language attempting to bring the expressive power of linear logic to practice. It features unique properties: processes communicate via channels, each channel has at most two endpoints, and deadlocks are impossible. All values are channels, including lists, functions, and infinite streams. While Par currently lacks some features like primitive types and non-determinism, it already expresses rich concurrency. This article details Par's syntax, semantics, and examples, covering channels, signals, recursion, and expression syntax. An interactive playground lets users experience Par's concurrency.

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Development linear logic

Building a Code-Editing Agent in 94 Lines of Ruby

2025-05-16

This article challenges the perceived difficulty of building a code-editing agent, showcasing a fully functional one built in just 94 lines of Ruby using the RubyLLM gem. The agent leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) and three tools – read file, list files, and edit file – to perform code editing tasks. The author details the implementation of each tool and demonstrates the agent's capabilities by building an ASCII Minesweeper game. A shell command execution tool is added to enhance functionality, resulting in a self-testing code-editing agent.

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Development

Electro: Blazing-Fast, Lightweight Image Viewer

2025-02-24
Electro: Blazing-Fast, Lightweight Image Viewer

Electro is a lightning-fast, lightweight image viewer built with Rust. Designed with developer experience in mind, it boasts a built-in command terminal and instantly views local and web-hosted images. Its core strength is unparalleled performance—images load near-instantly. Electro is open-source and easily extensible, allowing developers to contribute code or build their own versions.

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Development image viewer

Xbow Reports Nearly 1,000 Vulnerabilities, Including a Zero-Day in Palo Alto Networks VPN

2025-07-06
Xbow Reports Nearly 1,000 Vulnerabilities, Including a Zero-Day in Palo Alto Networks VPN

Security research firm Xbow submitted nearly 1,060 vulnerabilities to HackerOne in the last 90 days, including critical flaws like remote code execution and information disclosure. They also discovered and reported a previously unknown vulnerability in Palo Alto Networks' GlobalProtect VPN, impacting over 2,000 hosts. While many have been addressed (130 resolved, 303 triaged), approximately 45% remain unpatched, highlighting the sheer volume and impact of the disclosed vulnerabilities.

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Tech

Oregon State University's Open Source Lab Faces Funding Crisis

2025-05-06
Oregon State University's Open Source Lab Faces Funding Crisis

Oregon State University's (OSU) Open Source Lab (OSL), a 22-year-old project, is facing a critical funding shortage, jeopardizing its future. The OSL hosts numerous open-source projects worldwide, having played a crucial role in supporting projects like Gentoo, Drupal, and the Mozilla Foundation. The funding shortfall stems from federal budget cuts, with OSU's president expressing concern. The OSL is seeking $250,000 to stay afloat, and the open-source community has voiced strong support, with many beneficiaries highlighting its significance.

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Development

A Senior Data Scientist's Pragmatic Take on Generative AI

2025-05-05
A Senior Data Scientist's Pragmatic Take on Generative AI

A senior data scientist at BuzzFeed shares his pragmatic approach to using large language models (LLMs). He doesn't view LLMs as a silver bullet but rather as a tool to enhance efficiency, highlighting the importance of prompt engineering. The article details his successful use of LLMs for tasks like data categorization, text summarization, and code generation, while also acknowledging their limitations, particularly in complex data science scenarios where accuracy and efficiency can suffer. He argues that LLMs are not a panacea but, when used judiciously, can significantly boost productivity. The key lies in selecting the right tool for the job.

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AI

Australia's Outdoor Cinemas: A Century-Old Charm Netflix Can't Beat

2024-12-29
Australia's Outdoor Cinemas: A Century-Old Charm Netflix Can't Beat

Australia boasts a remarkable history of outdoor cinemas, starting with Broome's Sun Pictures in 1916. This history reflects changing Australian culture and social shifts, including past racial segregation. Outdoor cinemas, from traditional picture gardens to drive-ins, remain vital community hubs and unique cultural experiences. Despite the rise of streaming services like Netflix, they continue to thrive, offering a distinct cinematic experience that draws Australians to share stories on the big screen.

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Google's Gemini 2.5: A Giant Leap Towards Universal AI

2025-05-20
Google's Gemini 2.5: A Giant Leap Towards Universal AI

Google unveiled significant upgrades to Gemini at its I/O conference, introducing the enhanced Gemini 2.5 Pro and the faster Gemini 2.5 Flash. Pro boasts a new 'Deep Think' mode enabling multi-hypothesis reasoning, achieving impressive scores on challenging math and coding benchmarks. Flash shows marked improvements across reasoning, multimodality, and code, while boasting increased efficiency. Both versions now feature native audio output, text-to-speech, thought summaries, and thinking budgets, supporting multiple languages and dialects, and improving integration with open-source tools. Google's ambition is a 'universal AI assistant' understanding context, planning, and acting; Gemini 2.5 represents a major step towards this goal.

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AI

Gemini 2.5 Pro: The New King of Code Generation?

2025-03-31
Gemini 2.5 Pro: The New King of Code Generation?

Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro, launched on March 26th, claims coding, reasoning, and overall superiority. This article focuses on a head-to-head comparison with Claude 3.7 Sonnet, another top coding model. Through four coding challenges, Gemini 2.5 Pro demonstrated significant advantages in accuracy and efficiency, especially with its million-token context window enabling complex task handling. While Claude 3.7 Sonnet performed well, it paled in direct comparison. Gemini 2.5 Pro's free access further enhances its appeal.

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AI

Critical Rsync Vulnerabilities: Remote Code Execution Possible

2025-01-15

Researchers have uncovered six vulnerabilities in rsync, the most critical of which allows remote code execution on a server with only anonymous read access to a public rsync mirror. These vulnerabilities range from heap buffer overflows and information leaks to path traversal and race conditions. The vulnerabilities are patched in rsync 3.4.0; users are urged to update immediately.

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Tech

Val: An Arbitrary-Precision Calculator Language

2025-04-17
Val: An Arbitrary-Precision Calculator Language

Val is a simple arbitrary-precision calculator language built on top of chumsky and ariadne. It runs on Linux, MacOS, BSDs, and Windows. Installation is easy via Cargo, or pre-built binaries are available. Val features a command-line interface and REPL with syntax highlighting, persistent history, and emacs-style editing. The language supports functions, loops, conditionals, and a rich set of built-in functions covering arithmetic, logical, comparison, and collection operations. Data types include numbers, booleans, strings, and lists.

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Development

CVE Program Funding Cuts Threaten Global Vulnerability Management

2025-04-16
CVE Program Funding Cuts Threaten Global Vulnerability Management

US government funding for the global Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program, which assigns unique identifiers to software vulnerabilities, ends this week. This crucial program's termination risks disrupting global vulnerability management, potentially halting new vulnerability publication, taking the CVE website offline, and jeopardizing critical infrastructure and national security. While temporary measures are being explored, long-term solutions require industry collaboration to prevent the CVE program's collapse.

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Tech

Efficient Right-Truncatable Prime Counter in C

2025-05-27
Efficient Right-Truncatable Prime Counter in C

This C program efficiently calculates the number of right-truncatable primes for a given number of digits. It utilizes a custom hash table for fast primality checks and the primesieve library for optimized prime generation. A right-truncatable prime remains prime after successively removing its rightmost digit. The program handles input from 1 to 19 digits, reporting the count of right-truncatable primes for each digit length and the total execution time. For example, for 8-digit numbers, it finds 5 such primes and a total of 83 up to 8 digits.

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Development

Coroot: Actionable Observability Without Code Changes

2025-04-08
Coroot: Actionable Observability Without Code Changes

Coroot is an open-source observability platform that automatically gathers metrics, logs, and traces without requiring any code modifications, turning this data into actionable insights. Leveraging eBPF for zero-instrumentation monitoring, it provides a service map, predefined inspections, application health summaries, distributed tracing, log analysis, and profiling capabilities. Coroot quickly identifies and resolves application issues, integrates with Kubernetes and major cloud platforms, and offers SLO tracking and cost monitoring to help developers optimize application performance and reduce cloud costs.

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Development

Global Pandemic Treaty Reached: Preventing the Next Outbreak

2025-04-16
Global Pandemic Treaty Reached: Preventing the Next Outbreak

After three years of negotiations, the World Health Organization (WHO) has reached a landmark agreement on the world's first pandemic treaty. This treaty aims to prevent, prepare for, and respond to future pandemics. While not perfect, it marks a defining moment in global health history, establishing crucial norms for global safety. Central to the treaty is a 'pathogen access and benefit-sharing' mechanism, designed to ensure fairer distribution of vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics, avoiding a repeat of the COVID-19 vaccine inequities. Despite the absence of the US in the negotiations, the treaty's completion demonstrates global cooperation. Implementation details still need to be worked out, but the treaty provides a solid foundation for global pandemic response.

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arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaboration

2025-05-23
arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaboration

arXivLabs is a framework enabling collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on the website. Individuals and organizations involved uphold arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only partners with those who share them. Have an idea to enhance the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

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Development

Oldest Whale Bone Tools Found, Dating Back 20,000 Years

2025-05-31
Oldest Whale Bone Tools Found, Dating Back 20,000 Years

Scientists have unearthed the oldest known evidence of humans using whale bones to make tools, dating back approximately 20,000 years. Discovered in the Bay of Biscay near Spain and France, these narrow projectiles were crafted from the bones of blue whales, fin whales, sperm whales, and other species. Researchers believe ancient humans likely scavenged beached whales, repurposing their bones for hunting reindeer or bison, rather than actively hunting whales themselves. This discovery, published in Nature Communications, highlights the importance of coastal resources for early human survival and pushes back the timeline of whale bone tool use.

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MoonBit Compiler Goes Open Source: A High-Performance Language for WebAssembly

2024-12-19
MoonBit Compiler Goes Open Source: A High-Performance Language for WebAssembly

After two years of development, the MoonBit compiler, including its Wasm backend, is now open source! MoonBit aims to be a WebAssembly-optimized programming language, known for its speed, compactness, and ease of use. This release uses a modified SSPL license, allowing users to freely choose the license for their generated artifacts and permitting modifications to the compiler for non-commercial purposes. The team chose this license to maintain stability while the project is still in beta and to prevent large cloud vendors from misusing their work. In the future, MoonBit plans to open source more components and generate revenue through hosting services and hardware SDKs, aiming to build a vibrant community ecosystem.

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Development Open Source Compiler

Florida's Elderly Face Medicaid Cuts: A Looming Crisis

2025-03-16
Florida's Elderly Face Medicaid Cuts: A Looming Crisis

Proposed spending cuts in Washington, D.C., threaten Florida's nursing home residents who heavily rely on Medicaid for care. Medicaid is the primary payer for nursing home care in Florida, crucial for two-thirds of residents to afford daily assistance. Potential cuts could lead to nursing home closures, job losses for caregivers, and increased burdens on families. The average annual cost of nursing home care in Florida is between $104,000 and $117,000, making Medicaid essential for most. The uncertainty surrounding the extent of these cuts has Florida's elder-care advocates deeply concerned about the future of senior care in the state.

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Art Attack: A Global Phenomenon in Children's Art

2025-03-13
Art Attack: A Global Phenomenon in Children's Art

Art Attack, a British children's television program, captivated audiences worldwide since its debut in 1990. Hosted by Neil Buchanan, the show's unique approach to art creation, guiding children step-by-step through painting and crafting, made it a beloved classic. Multiple revivals and translations into numerous languages ensured its global reach, impacting generations of children. The memorable 'The Head' segment further cemented its place in pop culture.

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MCP Server Boilerplate: OAuth & PostgreSQL on Cloudflare Workers

2025-06-04
MCP Server Boilerplate: OAuth & PostgreSQL on Cloudflare Workers

This project offers a complete boilerplate for building remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers on Cloudflare Workers, featuring custom OAuth authentication and PostgreSQL database integration. It includes a full OAuth 2.1 provider, PostgreSQL integration, serverless deployment via Cloudflare Workers, an MCP tools framework, a custom routes framework, a beautiful UI, robust security features, and mobile readiness. Developers can leverage TypeScript, hot reload, and comprehensive error handling. The boilerplate also includes an easy-to-use system for adding REST API endpoints and a fully customizable OAuth consent screen.

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Development

The Verbosity Problem: Why LLMs Generate Bloated Code

2025-05-14
The Verbosity Problem: Why LLMs Generate Bloated Code

This article explores the issue of large language models (LLMs) generating overly verbose and inefficient code. The author argues that the token-based pricing model of many AI coding assistants incentivizes the generation of lengthy code, even if it's less efficient. This is because more tokens processed mean more revenue. The author outlines strategies to mitigate this, including forcing planning before coding, implementing strict permission protocols, using Git for experimentation and ruthless pruning, and utilizing cheaper models. The ultimate solution, the author proposes, is for AI companies to shift their economic incentives to prioritize code quality over token count.

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Development Economic Incentives

FSF: Guardians of Software Freedom

2025-01-11

Since its founding in 1985, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been a steadfast advocate for software freedom, resisting the encroachment of commercial interests. Its unique non-member governance structure ensures its mission remains uncompromised, weathering challenges from the 'open source' movement and corporate influence to uphold software freedom as a fundamental human right.

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GNU Interface Layer (GIL) for g++

2025-09-23
GNU Interface Layer (GIL) for g++

This repository provides an implementation of the GNU Interface Layer (GIL) and standard library for g++. It includes a simple "Hello, world!" example in C++, along with other examples like a calculator and merge sort. Running the code requires g++ and careful attention to path settings. The project showcases a non-traditional approach to C++ programming using a custom standard library.

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Development

Apache SedonaDB: A Single-Node Spatial Database Engine Launches

2025-09-25

The Apache Sedona community announces SedonaDB, a new open-source, single-node analytical database engine built in Rust that treats spatial data as first-class citizens. Blazing fast and easy to install, SedonaDB offers Python and SQL interfaces and seamlessly integrates with tools like GeoArrow, GeoParquet, and GeoPandas. Leveraging Apache Arrow and Apache DataFusion, it provides a modern, vectorized query engine and optimizes spatial operations with spatial indexing and data pruning. Ideal for small-to-medium spatial data analytics, SedonaDB complements the existing Sedona ecosystem by offering a simple, high-performance alternative to distributed systems for local processing.

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