Japanese graphic designer Ippei Tsujio has created ultra-realistic bread wrapping paper that transforms gifts into lifelike loaves. From baguettes to ciabatta, the toasty brown hues, flour dusting, and hand-scored patterns mimic freshly baked bread. While currently just a concept, this creative wrapping paper is mouthwatering and may one day become a real product.
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In 1958-59, to commemorate the centenary of Darwin's *On the Origin of Species*, the Royal Society mounted an expedition to Southern Chile. A team of scientists from Britain and New Zealand retraced Darwin's steps and explored the islands of southern Chile, including Chiloé and Wellington Island. Their research, focusing on the similarities of species across the southern temperate zone, contributed to our understanding of plate tectonics. The expedition, documented through photographs and diaries, offers a fascinating glimpse into the challenges and discoveries of the journey, showcasing the unique landscapes and indigenous cultures of 65 years ago.
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The explosion of AI models presents developers with the challenge of choosing and integrating multiple models. Hypermode's new Model Router feature provides a unified API allowing developers to seamlessly switch between open-source and commercial language models like LLaMA, GPT, Claude, and Gemini, and even embedding models. Model Router simplifies development, reduces costs, improves reliability, and offers flexible access through OpenAI SDK, Vercel AI SDK, and Modus SDK, empowering developers to build smarter, more adaptable AI applications.
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A proposed 'gold card' program, allowing wealthy individuals to obtain US green cards for a $5 million investment, has sparked debate. This initiative would potentially replace the EB-5 investor visa, which requires a $1.05 million investment and job creation. While the EB-5 program has rigorous vetting to prevent illicit funds, the proposed 'gold card' lacks clarity on its screening process, raising concerns about potential abuse by wealthy individuals, particularly foreign oligarchs. Supporters argue it boosts the economy, while critics cite increased inequality and potential for misuse. The program's launch date remains uncertain.
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Security researchers at DARKNAVY conducted an in-depth reverse engineering analysis of SpaceX's Starlink user terminal, revealing its hardware, firmware, and security mechanisms. They discovered that Starlink utilizes chips from STMicroelectronics, including a custom quad-core SoC for core processing and a STSAFE-A110 security chip for authentication and key management. While most of the firmware was unencrypted, researchers also found a program labeled "Ethernet Data Recorder," potentially capable of data logging, but currently appearing to only log satellite telemetry data, not user privacy data. However, the terminal comes pre-loaded with 41 SSH public keys, and port 22 remains open, raising security concerns. This research highlights the importance of satellite internet security and the complexities of future offensive and defensive operations in space security.
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Mycoria is an open and secure overlay network connecting all participants. Valuing freedom of connectivity, it aims to emulate the early internet's adventurous spirit: everyone is equal with easy connection; everyone is welcome on its open, bureaucracy-free network; no surveillance with end-to-end encryption and private addresses; and no barriers, connecting via the internet or extending Mycoria with your own mesh network. Design goals include simplicity, compatibility with existing infrastructure (like DNS), default security, and default privacy (WIP). Features include automatic end-to-end encryption, modern cryptography, smart and scalable routing, a dashboard, .myco DNS resolution (OS configuration required), simple service discovery, auto-optimization/healing (for internet overlay, WIP), and rotating private addresses (WIP).
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Zed, a blazing-fast, open-source AI code editor, has arrived. Built entirely in Rust and licensed under GPLv3, Zed offers an unprecedented level of transparency with its open-source AI agent panel. This panel lets programmers directly interact with AI to modify code, write new code, and even search codebases. Prioritizing user privacy, Zed doesn't collect data by default and offers a selection of models, including Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Gemini 2.5, with Ollama support for running custom models on personal hardware. Currently available for macOS and Linux, a Windows version is slated for late 2025.
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Both Andor season two and Game of Thrones sparked controversy over scenes depicting sexual assault. Creators defended these scenes as necessary for 'realism,' but this article argues otherwise. While war historically included rape, it also involved disease, starvation, and other causes of death. The article posits that the creators aren't truly aiming for realism but rather a 'gritty' atmosphere, masking their reliance on sexual assault against women and their perpetuation of stereotypes. Using Bix's character in Andor as an example, the article highlights that her prior torture renders the additional sexual assault unnecessary. The choice seems driven by personal preference rather than artistic necessity.
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Tattoo removal is no longer a nightmare! Today's picosecond laser technology is revolutionizing how we remove unwanted ink. These lasers shatter ink particles into tiny pieces, allowing the body's immune system to clear them. While the process isn't painless, multiple sessions can effectively fade or remove tattoos. Advances in technology and affordability are making tattoo removal commonplace, comparable to routine maintenance. This boom signals a potential shift in tattoo culture itself, questioning the permanence of body art.
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This comprehensive guide details how to install and test beta apps using TestFlight. It covers everything from accepting email or public link invitations to install the app, to managing automatic updates, testing previous builds and build groups, and handling iMessage app and App Clip testing across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and visionOS. Key considerations include in-app purchases not carrying over to the App Store version and accelerated subscription renewal rates during beta testing.
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Multiple sinkholes have appeared on I-80 near Wharton, New Jersey, causing massive traffic disruptions. Investigations revealed these weren't natural occurrences, but rather the legacy of numerous underground iron mines from the past century. Early mining practices lacked planning and regulation, leaving behind unstable voids that, combined with water erosion, eventually led to surface collapses. The issue highlights complex land ownership, the challenges of predicting and mitigating such disasters, and underscores the importance of sustainable mining practices.
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This article explores the pitfalls of prematurely adopting microservices in startups. The author argues that premature microservices lead to increased developer cost, deployment complexity, fragile local development environments, duplicated CI/CD pipelines, and increased observability overhead, ultimately slowing down team velocity and hindering product iteration. The author recommends that startups prioritize monolithic architecture, only considering microservices when encountering real scaling bottlenecks. Microservices are only justified in specific scenarios such as workload isolation, divergent scalability needs, or different runtime requirements.
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Linux kernel development relies on PGP signatures, requiring maintainers to submit signed pull requests to Linus Torvalds. Due to issues with keyservers, Konstantin Ryabitsev maintains a git repository of relevant keys. Removing SHA-1 signatures would leave 485 public keys without a trust path to Linus Torvalds, impacting many core developers. This threatens the kernel's development process, potentially excluding key contributors. A keysigning event at Embedded Recipes 2025 aims to rebuild the trust chain.
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This article delves into the inner workings of Python's async/await concurrency model. Starting with the concepts of concurrency and parallelism, the author progressively demonstrates building a highly concurrent TCP server, comparing the pros and cons of using thread pools and I/O multiplexing. The core of the article lies in explaining how async/await is implemented based on generators, coroutines, and yield/yield from mechanisms. It meticulously details the underlying implementation of generators and coroutines, ultimately contrasting asyncio with other asynchronous programming libraries.
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Blogger Carl Öst Wilkens sought to simplify his wardrobe by scientifically determining his favorite t-shirt color. He created images of himself wearing different colored t-shirts using Photopea, then built an ELO-based arena app (generated using O4 Mini) to compare them pairwise. The experiment concluded with brown as his favorite and blue as his wife's favorite. He subsequently ordered second-hand shirts in those colors to test in real life.
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced it's retiring its well-known "billion-dollar weather and climate disasters" database, making it harder to track the cost of extreme weather events. This database, active since 1980, tracked the financial toll of disasters from hurricanes to hailstorms. Its discontinuation is seen as another blow to public access to information about how fossil fuel pollution is exacerbating extreme weather. While population growth and development contribute, climate change intensifies these events, increasing costs. The move follows staff reductions at NOAA leading to service cuts, and further budget cuts are proposed, jeopardizing future data collection and accessibility.
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Beat Saber's success isn't solely due to music and rhythm; its core lies in the design concept of 'Instructed Motion.' The article argues that scoring isn't based on precise timing, but on the breadth and accuracy of player movements. This isn't limited to music games; the VR combat game Until You Fall exemplifies this, guiding players through specific defensive and offensive motions to enhance immersion and control game intensity and player feeling.
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Many AI code review agents have emerged, using LLMs to analyze code diffs and identify issues. The author experimented with Coderabbit, finding it occasionally catches errors missed by human reviewers, but also generates irrelevant or incorrect suggestions. Building a basic agent is relatively easy using the GitHub API and an OpenAI key. However, LLMs struggle to fully understand code, especially without broader codebase context, leading to inaccurate suggestions. The author concludes that creating a truly helpful agent requires addressing the LLM's understanding of code and leveraging codebase context effectively.
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Urtext is an open-source library for plaintext writing that goes beyond a simple notepad. It combines writing, research, documentation management, knowledge base building, note-taking, Zettelkasten, and more. Using a plaintext format, it's cross-platform compatible, easily version-controlled, and extensible with Python code for custom functionality. Urtext prioritizes a local-first approach and a minimal UI, with almost all operations performed within the text buffer, eliminating menus and popups. It cleverly combines content, structure, and instructions within its syntax, and supports inter-file linking and organization, making it ideal for managing large projects.
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BD3-LMs cleverly combine autoregressive and diffusion model paradigms. By modeling blocks of tokens autoregressively and then applying diffusion within each block, it achieves both high likelihoods and flexible-length generation, while maintaining the speed and parallelization advantages of diffusion models. Efficient training and sampling algorithms, requiring only two forward passes, further enhance performance, making it a promising approach for large-scale text generation.
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Cursor's code completion initially lagged behind Supermaven's Babble model, which boasted a massive context window and superior speed and accuracy thanks to its innovative edit-sequence-based training. However, Cursor acquired Supermaven, gaining Babble and leveraging its massive user data to solidify its leading position in code completion. This acquisition highlights the importance of AI model training methodologies and the crucial role of data scale in model performance.
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Google's Android 16 Beta 4 removes the 16GB storage limit for the Linux Terminal app on Pixel phones. Users can now resize the Debian virtual machine's storage to utilize more of their phone's capacity. Future updates will introduce dynamic ballooning, automatically adjusting VM storage based on needs, eliminating manual resizing. While lacking GUI and audio support currently, this significantly enhances the potential of Pixel phones as portable PCs, allowing users to run Linux desktop apps alongside Android apps.
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Many startups face 'Product Purgatory': a good product, loved by customers, yet unsold. The author introduces the 'Magic Wand Test': if the product were free and perfectly implemented, would the customer use it? A 'no' suggests the product's value doesn't significantly outweigh implementation costs (risk, time, money). Even passing the test, customers might delay purchase due to a lack of urgency. The author advises focusing on customers urgently needing the product (e.g., due to regulatory pressure, competition, or emergencies) to escape Product Purgatory.
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This article provides a clear and concise explanation of reservoir sampling, an algorithm that elegantly solves the problem of fair random sampling when the total size of the data is unknown. Using the analogy of picking playing cards, the article progressively explains the algorithm's mechanics and illustrates its practical application with a log collection service example. Reservoir sampling ensures fairness while efficiently managing memory usage, preventing system crashes due to excessive data. The article also briefly touches upon algorithm extensions and applications, making it a highly recommended read for anyone interested in learning about this powerful technique.
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This article demonstrates how to leverage C++26 reflection to implement a high-performance struct-of-arrays vector (SoaVector). By storing struct members in separate arrays, SoaVector avoids memory waste and improves access efficiency. The article details the implementation of SoaVector, including memory management, element addition, reading, and referencing. A comparison with a similar Zig implementation highlights the power and potential of C++26 reflection.
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On May 8th, Cardinal Robert F. Prevost, a Chicago native, was elected the 267th Pope, taking the name Pope Leo XIV. He is the first North American to hold the papacy and was a leading contender before the conclave. The announcement was met with jubilant celebrations in St. Peter's Square. Pope Leo XIV, a long-time missionary in Peru holding dual US-Peruvian citizenship, is known for his work promoting church unity and combating clericalism. While facing past allegations of mishandling sexual abuse claims, investigations concluded there was insufficient evidence. His election marks a significant moment in Catholic Church history.
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During WWII, the US shipbuilding industry achieved a miracle, constructing thousands of military and merchant vessels in just a few years, turning the tide of the war. This was due to massive government investment and effective management of private enterprise, and entrepreneurs like Henry Kaiser adopting novel construction techniques such as prefabrication and welding, dramatically increasing efficiency. However, even under the urgency of war, US shipbuilding efficiency remained far below other nations, and rapidly declined after the war, highlighting the long-term challenges of improving shipbuilding efficiency.
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Microsoft recently increased prices on several Surface accessories, including a $20 price hike for the Surface USB-C Travel Hub and a $10 increase for the Surface Arc Mouse. Simultaneously, Xbox console prices have also risen, and some game prices may reach $80 later this year. While Microsoft claims the starting price for new Surface Pro and Laptop models remains unchanged, the discontinuation of the 256GB versions represents a de facto price increase. Analysts suggest that Trump-era import tariffs and rising global supply chain costs are contributing factors to these price hikes.
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Researchers have developed LegoGPT, an AI model that generates physically stable LEGO brick models from text prompts. Trained on a massive dataset of over 47,000 LEGO structures encompassing over 28,000 unique 3D objects and detailed captions, LegoGPT predicts the next brick to add using next-token prediction. To ensure stability, it incorporates an efficient validity check and physics-aware rollback during inference. Experiments show LegoGPT produces stable, diverse, and aesthetically pleasing LEGO designs closely aligned with the input text. A text-based texturing method generates colored and textured designs. The models can be assembled manually or by robotic arms. The dataset, code, and models are publicly released.
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The Hearst Newsreel online archive is now live! This website, a collaborative project between the University of California and the Packard Humanities Institute, features a vast collection of newsreels spanning from 1929 to 1967, originally donated by the Hearst Corporation. Users can browse and watch these historical films, offering a unique journey through time. Please note that some newsreels may contain outdated biases and potentially disturbing content.
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