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Automating the Search for Artificial Life with Foundation Models

2024-12-24
Automating the Search for Artificial Life with Foundation Models

Sakana AI, in collaboration with MIT and others, has developed ASAL, an algorithm using vision-language foundation models to automate the discovery of artificial life. ASAL tackles three search problems: finding simulations with specific target behaviors, discovering simulations generating perpetual novelty, and illuminating all possible simulations. Successfully applied to Lenia, Boids, Particle Life, and others, ASAL unearthed novel artificial lifeforms and cellular automata rules surpassing Conway's Game of Life in open-endedness. This breakthrough promises to revitalize ALife research by overcoming the limitations of manual simulation design and offers insights for future AI development, incorporating principles of open-endedness and self-organization.

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(sakana.ai)
AI Artificial Life Foundation Models Automated Search

Excel's Date Parsing: A 400-Year-Old Bug?

2025-04-07
Excel's Date Parsing: A 400-Year-Old Bug?

While building Quadratic, an AI spreadsheet, the team uncovered bizarre quirks in Excel's date parsing. Entering "1/2" and adding 1 yields 45660; "10:75" becomes 0.46875. This stems from Excel's serial date system, counting days since January 1, 1900. However, historical inaccuracies (treating 1900 as a leap year and the Gregorian calendar shift) create discrepancies. Quadratic uses Rust's chrono library, avoiding these issues and integrating seamlessly with Python, SQL, and other modern tools. The team corrected the 1900 leap year error, restoring balance to the universe.

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(www.quadratichq.com)
Development Date Parsing

US Tariffs: A Doomed Economic Gamble

2025-04-15

On April 2nd, 2025, the US president announced hefty new tariffs on imports, aiming to revive American manufacturing. However, a 15-year manufacturing veteran argues this policy is fundamentally flawed. High labor costs, a weak industrial supply chain, lack of crucial expertise, insufficient infrastructure, and policy uncertainty will likely backfire, harming the US economy. The author advocates for improving worker skills, building infrastructure, addressing social issues, and implementing gradual, targeted policies instead of blanket tariffs.

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(www.molsonhart.com)
Tech

Blue Shield Data Breach: Google Analytics Misconfiguration Exposed Member Data

2025-04-10

Blue Shield of California announced a potential data breach affecting some members' protected health information. Between April 2021 and January 2024, a misconfiguration of Google Analytics allowed certain member data, including plan details, location, and demographics, to be shared with Google Ads for targeted advertising. Social Security numbers and financial information were not compromised. Blue Shield severed the connection in January 2024 and is taking steps to prevent future incidents. Members are advised to monitor their accounts and credit reports for suspicious activity.

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(news.blueshieldca.com)
Tech

Rowhammer Attacks Now Target NVIDIA High-End GPUs

2025-07-13
Rowhammer Attacks Now Target NVIDIA High-End GPUs

Researchers from the University of Toronto have demonstrated that Rowhammer attacks, previously known to affect standard DRAM, can now target GDDR6 memory on NVIDIA's high-end GPUs when ECC is disabled. This vulnerability exploits a memory bug where repeated access to one memory row causes bit flips in another. NVIDIA recommends enabling ECC for protection, especially crucial for data center admins and workstation users. While newer memory types like GDDR7 and HBM3 have built-in OD-ECC, many users disable ECC for performance or configuration reasons, increasing their risk. Check your ECC status now if unsure!

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(nerds.xyz)
Tech

GTA V Remains King of Twitch, Hints at GTA VI's Immense Potential

2025-04-24
GTA V Remains King of Twitch, Hints at GTA VI's Immense Potential

Eleven years after its release, Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) continues its reign as Twitch's most-watched game, accumulating over 1 billion hours watched last year! This dominance, alongside League of Legends also exceeding 1 billion hours, foreshadows the immense potential of the upcoming GTA VI. Other top performers include Call of Duty, Fortnite, and Valorant. Interestingly, V-Tubers also saw a 10% increase in viewership, reaching over a billion hours. GTA V's staggering numbers strongly suggest that GTA VI's launch later this year will be a monumental event.

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(www.theverge.com)
Game GTA V GTA VI

Koa.js: A Next-Gen Node.js Web Framework

2025-01-10

Koa.js, from the creators of Express, is a new web framework for Node.js that aims for a smaller, more expressive, and robust foundation for web applications and APIs. Leveraging async functions, Koa ditches callbacks and significantly improves error handling. It doesn't bundle middleware, offering instead an elegant set of methods for building fast and enjoyable servers. Middleware cascades in a streamlined fashion, and Koa provides a rich context with methods simplifying common HTTP tasks like content negotiation, caching, and redirection.

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(koajs.com)
Development

Award-Winning Abrams Planetarium Sky Calendar: Your Guide to the Cosmos

2025-08-18

The Abrams Planetarium Sky Calendar is a monthly guide to skywatching for all ages. Each month's calendar features diagrams tracking the moon, planets, and bright stars. The reverse side provides a simplified star map for mid-evening viewing across the continental US. Used in classrooms, planetariums, and astronomy clubs, this highly illustrated calendar has won awards and received praise from publications like Scientific American. A yearly subscription (12 issues, mailed quarterly) costs $12.

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(abramsplanetarium.org)
Misc subscription

AWS Aurora DSQL: A Database Architecture Revolution from JVM to Rust

2025-05-27
AWS Aurora DSQL: A Database Architecture Revolution from JVM to Rust

AWS announced Aurora DSQL at re:Invent, and this post delves into its development journey. To tackle the challenge of horizontally scaling writes in traditional databases, the AWS team initially used JVM but encountered severe performance bottlenecks, especially tail latency issues caused by garbage collection. They ultimately decided to rewrite the data plane in Rust, which significantly improved performance and reduced tail latency. Furthermore, the team also migrated the control plane to Rust, avoiding the complexities of multiple languages. This project demonstrates that questioning existing solutions and experimenting with new technologies (even costly language migrations) can yield significant rewards.

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(www.allthingsdistributed.com)
Development

Google's AI Summaries: Devouring the Web's Ecosystem?

2025-06-22
Google's AI Summaries: Devouring the Web's Ecosystem?

Google's AI-generated web page summaries, launched in May 2024, increased search impressions but decreased click-through rates to source websites by 30 percent. This means more people use Google Search, but fewer visit the original sites. Studies show significantly higher click-through rates when AI summaries are absent. Web publishers are alarmed as search traffic, and thus ad and subscription revenue, plummets. Data reveals a drastic imbalance between web page crawling and referral traffic for AI companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic; Google's ratio has soared from 2:1 to 18:1. This has led to lawsuits from publishers questioning compensation for the content used to train AI models. While Google dominates search, its actions risk undermining the very foundation of its business.

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(www.theregister.com)
Tech Content Ecosystem

My $91 PowerMac G4 MDD Repair Odyssey: A Tale of Woe and Triumph

2025-04-14

The author acquired a cheap PowerMac G4 MDD, only to find it missing RAM, HDD, and a PRAM battery. After a frantic parts hunt and assembly, the machine booted, but the noise was deafening. Attempting a fan replacement, the author broke the original fan, forcing the purchase of a high-performance replacement. While the noise issue was solved, the new fan roared. The entire journey was a hilarious mix of unexpected problems and eventual success, offering a valuable lesson in vintage hardware repair.

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(loganius.org)
Hardware Repair

Bitcoin Hits All-Time High Above $118,000, Fueled by Tech Rally

2025-07-12
Bitcoin Hits All-Time High Above $118,000, Fueled by Tech Rally

Bitcoin surged to a new all-time high above $118,000, mirroring the strong performance of tech stocks like Nvidia. Analysts attribute the rally to sustained institutional investment, increased corporate bitcoin holdings (e.g., MicroStrategy, GameStop, Trump Media), and anticipation surrounding upcoming crypto regulation discussions during "Crypto Week." The correlation between Bitcoin and tech stocks, along with shifting regulatory expectations, are key factors driving the price increase.

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(finance.yahoo.com)
Tech

Self-Domestication: How Wolves May Have Tamed Themselves

2025-02-25
Self-Domestication: How Wolves May Have Tamed Themselves

A new study suggests that dog domestication may not have been entirely human-driven. Using a statistical model, researchers found that over 15,000 years, wolves could have self-domesticated by choosing to live near humans for consistent food scraps and selectively mating with similarly docile partners. This 'food-driven' strategy allowed wolves to adapt to human life, eventually evolving into domestic dogs. The research offers new insights into animal domestication mechanisms and sheds light on the long-term co-existence between humans and animals.

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(www.livescience.com)
Tech animal domestication natural selection

F2: Blazing Fast Command-Line Batch Renamer

2025-05-24
F2: Blazing Fast Command-Line Batch Renamer

F2 is a cross-platform command-line tool for quickly and safely batch renaming files and directories. It boasts a dry-run default for previewing changes, support for file attributes (like EXIF and ID3 tags) for flexible renaming, comprehensive options including string replacement and regular expressions, automatic conflict resolution, and undo functionality. Go developers can install with `go install github.com/ayoisaiah/f2/v2/cmd/f2@latest`; others can download pre-compiled binaries. Bug reports and feature requests are welcome!

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(github.com)
Development batch renaming

Discord Beta Tests New In-App Currency: Discord Orbs

2025-05-29
Discord Beta Tests New In-App Currency: Discord Orbs

Discord is beta testing "Discord Orbs," a new in-app currency redeemable for digital items. Users earn Orbs by completing promotional Quests, which involve interacting with advertiser content. Orbs can be spent on items in the Discord Shop or exchanged for exclusives like badges or Discord Nitro trials. The rollout is initially limited to a small number of users globally. Previously, Quest rewards were handled by publishers; Orbs offer an alternative.

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(www.theverge.com)
Game in-app currency rewards

Apple's 2027 Product Blitz: A Mostly Glass, Curved iPhone and a Home Robot?

2025-05-12
Apple's 2027 Product Blitz: A Mostly Glass, Curved iPhone and a Home Robot?

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman predicts a major Apple product launch in 2027, including a 'mostly glass, curved iPhone' with no display cutouts, marking the iPhone's 20th anniversary. This follows reports of an under-display front-facing camera for at least one 2027 model. Gurman also anticipates Apple's first foldable iPhone, smart glasses, camera-equipped AirPods and Apple Watches, and a tabletop robot with an AI assistant featuring a 'personality'. Finally, an LLM-powered Siri and new chips for server-side AI processing are also expected by 2027.

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(www.theverge.com)
Tech

AlphaGo's Stunning Victory: A Glimpse into the Future of AI

2025-04-17
AlphaGo's Stunning Victory: A Glimpse into the Future of AI

The historic match between AlphaGo, Google's AI, and Lee Sedol, one of the world's best Go players, concluded with AlphaGo winning 4-1. AlphaGo's move 37 in game two was hailed as a moment of genius, a move no human would make. However, Lee Sedol's response in game four demonstrated the enduring brilliance of human intuition. This match showcased not only the remarkable advancements in AI but also the resilience and creativity of the human mind. AlphaGo's victory marks a significant leap for AI in complex game playing, hinting at transformative potential across various fields, while simultaneously prompting reflection on the ethical implications of AI's rapid advancement.

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(www.wired.com)
AI

The Outdated Religion of Goals: Constraints > Goals

2025-06-10
The Outdated Religion of Goals: Constraints > Goals

The author reflects on years spent chasing goals, finding that a sole focus on achieving them without inner alignment leads to misdirection. The article critiques goal-setting culture, arguing it transforms uncertainty into an illusion of progress. True innovation often stems from leveraging constraints, not pursuing goals. Examples include John Boyd's OODA loop, Richard Feynman's scientific approach, and NASA's moon landing, illustrating how constraints drive creativity. The author posits that in ambiguous domains, constraints act like machetes, guiding direction better than goals, ultimately emphasizing that identity surpasses image.

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(www.joanwestenberg.com)
Misc

NASA's Europa Lander: From Frozen Moon to…Another Frozen Moon?

2025-06-08
NASA's Europa Lander: From Frozen Moon to…Another Frozen Moon?

After a decade of development, NASA's Europa Lander, a rugged, semi-autonomous probe designed to explore Jupiter's moon Europa, has been shelved due to budgetary and technical challenges. Equipped to walk, sample, and drill in extreme cold and high radiation, the lander aced its tests. However, NASA leadership ultimately canceled the Europa mission. Engineers are now lobbying to redirect the lander to Saturn's moon Enceladus, which offers lower radiation and better access windows. This robot built for Europa may yet get its chance at a moonwalk – albeit on a different celestial body.

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(gizmodo.com)
Tech

Redis 8.0 Open Source Comeback and Valkey Performance Showdown

2025-05-31
Redis 8.0 Open Source Comeback and Valkey Performance Showdown

Redis Inc.'s controversial decision last year to close-source Redis shook the open-source community, but the community responded by forking Redis into Valkey. Now, Redis 8.0 is open-source again, and the original creator, Antirez, has returned. This article benchmarks Valkey 8.1 against Redis 8.0, showing Valkey outperforms Redis 8.0 in throughput and latency, especially with I/O threads enabled. It also explores core allocation optimization techniques and the limitations of benchmarking.

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(www.gomomento.com)
Development

Dark Mirror Ideologies: Do You Really Believe What You Say?

2025-04-07
Dark Mirror Ideologies: Do You Really Believe What You Say?

This article explores a phenomenon called "Dark Mirror" ideologies, which are defined by their opposition to "Light Mirror" ideologies. Crucially, a Dark Mirror ideology isn't a complete inversion; it only opposes its counterpart morally while agreeing on factual claims about the world. The disagreement lies solely in what actions should be taken. The author argues that Dark Mirror ideologies are rare in real life but frequently invoked in online political debates. Using examples like minimum wage debates, Darth Vader, and Satan, the article illustrates the rarity of Dark Mirror ideologies. It then analyzes the "Dark Mirror" versions of Marxism, Capitalism, Veganism, Grill Dads, Christianity, New Atheism, Liberalism, and Conservatism. The author concludes that accusing opponents of possessing Dark Mirror ideologies is a sign of a lack of empathy, and understanding your opponent's true position is key to effective engagement.

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(www.fortressofdoors.com)
Misc

A Nasty Postgres Bug in Logical Replication Slot Creation, and How We Fixed It

2025-07-15
A Nasty Postgres Bug in Logical Replication Slot Creation, and How We Fixed It

The ClickPipes team encountered a perplexing bug while creating logical replication slots in PostgreSQL: a query that should have taken seconds was taking hours and couldn't be terminated. Investigation revealed a Postgres bug where, on read replicas, creating a logical replication slot would get stuck in a long sleep loop while waiting for primary transactions to finish, making it impossible to interrupt. The team submitted a patch to the Postgres community adding an interrupt check, effectively resolving the issue. This case highlights how even mature database systems can harbor unexpected edge cases, and the vital role of open-source community collaboration in resolving them.

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(clickhouse.com)
Development Logical Replication

Chasing Darkness in the Age of Light

2025-04-29
Chasing Darkness in the Age of Light

Two friends bicycle through the Nevada desert, escaping the glow of Las Vegas to find a dark night sky. They observe constellations, learn about the night sky, and use a sky quality meter to measure light pollution. The article explores the impact of light pollution on stargazing and the importance of reconnecting with nature and the night sky in modern life.

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(www.hcn.org)
Misc night sky stargazing

A Personal Approach to Unix Package Management

2025-04-13

The author shares a clever method for managing personal software packages on Unix systems. They use a `~/lib/` directory tree to store software for different architectures, with each program installed in a separate, versioned subdirectory (e.g., `emacs-30.1`). A `~/bin/bin.` directory contains symbolic links or wrapper scripts pointing to these programs, allowing easy switching between versions. For tools like pipx and Cargo, the author keeps their default installation locations but creates links in `~/bin/bin.` to avoid path conflicts. This setup isn't perfect, but it's very useful for managing software unavailable through the system's package manager or that is too old.

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(utcc.utoronto.ca)
Development software management

Iran Orders Citizens to Delete WhatsApp Amidst Rising Tensions

2025-06-19
Iran Orders Citizens to Delete WhatsApp Amidst Rising Tensions

Amid escalating tensions with Israel, the Iranian government urged its citizens to delete WhatsApp, citing safety and privacy concerns and alleging the app shares user data with Israel. This directive, delivered via state television, raises concerns about potential information control. WhatsApp denies these claims, highlighting its end-to-end encryption and lack of user location tracking, stating the move could cut off communication when people need it most. This follows previous allegations by Meta of Israeli spyware targeting WhatsApp users, resulting in a substantial settlement.

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(time.com)
Tech

Building Cost-Effective AI Production Systems: A Taco Bell Approach to Cloud Computing

2025-03-03
Building Cost-Effective AI Production Systems: A Taco Bell Approach to Cloud Computing

This article explores building cost-effective AI production systems. Drawing parallels to Taco Bell's simplified menu, the author advocates for constructing complex systems using simple, industry-standard components (like S3, Postgres, HTTP). The focus is on minimizing cloud computing costs, particularly network egress fees. By using object storage with zero egress fees (like Tigris) and dynamically scaling compute instances up and down based on demand, costs are dramatically reduced. The importance of choosing dependencies to minimize vendor lock-in is stressed, with an example architecture provided using HTTP requests, DNS lookup, Postgres or object storage, and Kubernetes, allowing for portability across cloud providers.

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(www.tigrisdata.com)
AI

GeoDeep: Object Detection in Maxar Satellite Imagery of Myanmar and Thailand

2025-04-13

This post details using the Python package GeoDeep to perform object detection on Maxar's open satellite imagery of Myanmar and Thailand, following a recent earthquake. Leveraging a high-performance workstation, the author runs GeoDeep's built-in AI models to detect cars, trees, buildings, and roads. The results reveal varying accuracy and efficiency across different models, with some exhibiting missed detections and false positives. The experiment highlights the potential and challenges of AI-powered object detection in satellite image analysis.

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(tech.marksblogg.com)
Tech object detection

Zero-Downtime Database Migration Verified with PlusCal

2025-03-11

This blog post details how the author used PlusCal, a DSL for TLA+, and formal verification to ensure the correctness of a zero-downtime database migration. A PlusCal model was built simulating user Upsert, Delete, and Get operations on a database, along with a background migration process. By simulating a system without migration and one with migration, and verifying the consistency of Get operation results across all states, the author ensured the correctness of the migration algorithm. Formal verification helped in early detection of flaws, such as improper handling of TOMBSTONES, and highlighted the importance of atomic operations, like the atomicity of checking and inserting data during migration.

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(biradarganesh25.github.io)
Development

Sole Maintainer of Popular Node.js Utility Raises Security Concerns

2025-08-28
Sole Maintainer of Popular Node.js Utility Raises Security Concerns

A Node.js utility, fast-glob, used by thousands of public projects and over 30 Department of Defense systems, is maintained solely by a Yandex employee residing in Russia. While fast-glob has no known vulnerabilities, its deep system access and the maintainer's affiliation with Yandex raise serious security concerns. Hunted Labs' report highlights the utility's 79+ million weekly downloads, exposing a vast attack surface. This incident underscores the critical importance of open-source security and the need to know who writes your code.

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(www.theregister.com)
Tech geopolitical risk
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