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Cracking a Japanese Sangaku Geometry Puzzle: A Tale of Radii

2025-09-20
Cracking a Japanese Sangaku Geometry Puzzle: A Tale of Radii

A friend shared a Japanese Sangaku (geometric problems offered at shrines during the Edo period) puzzle: three mutually tangent circles inscribed in a square, finding the relationship between the small circle's radius and the square's side length. The author attempted a solution using coordinate geometry and calculus, but the algebra became too complex. Seeking help online, suggestions included Descartes' Circle Theorem and plane inversion. The inversion method simplified the problem, transforming arcs into lines, making the solution easier. The solution involved coordinate geometry, calculus, and inversion, highlighting the beauty and challenge of mathematics.

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(samjshah.com)
Misc sangaku plane inversion

The Unsung Heroes Keeping Africa (and the World) Online

2025-09-20
The Unsung Heroes Keeping Africa (and the World) Online

Rest of World profiles the Léon Thévenin, Africa's only permanently stationed undersea cable repair ship. The article highlights the grueling work of its crew, like cable jointer Shuru Arendse, who maintain Africa's internet connectivity. Their demanding jobs, often requiring months away from family, are crucial to global data flow, especially with the rise of AI which relies heavily on high-speed connectivity. The piece details the intricate cable repair process, team dynamics, and the dedication of these individuals in safeguarding global internet access.

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(restofworld.org)
Tech Internet Infrastructure

AI Coding Assistants: Code Review is King

2025-09-20

Large language models excel at generating code, but lack the judgment of a seasoned software engineer, often leading to poor design choices. The author uses personal anecdotes to illustrate how AI coding assistants (like Codex and Claude Code), while powerful, require close supervision to prevent them from veering off into architectural dead ends. The author argues that mastering code review, particularly focusing on code structure and identifying opportunities for improvement, is crucial for effective use of these tools. Blind reliance or excessive micromanagement will hinder productivity. Ultimately, the author posits that current AI coding is more akin to 'centaur programming'—a collaboration between human and machine—rather than a complete human replacement.

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(www.seangoedecke.com)
Development

XMonad Seeks Wayland Port Developer

2025-09-20

The XMonad development team has been collecting contributions for two years to fund a developer to port XMonad to Wayland. They now have sufficient funds but lack a suitable developer. The existing port is badly rotted, using an outdated and buggy version of wlroots. A key challenge is that Wayland programs lack unique identifiers for window management hooks. The team is seeking help on their Discourse forum, welcoming proposals from interested developers.

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(xmonad.org)
Development

RMCP: Revolutionizing Statistical Analysis with Natural Language

2025-09-20
RMCP: Revolutionizing Statistical Analysis with Natural Language

RMCP is a powerful Model Context Protocol (MCP) server offering 40+ statistical analysis tools covering regression, time series analysis, machine learning, and more. Users interact via natural language with AI assistants to seamlessly perform complex statistical modeling and data science tasks. RMCP supports various data import/export formats, includes intelligent error recovery, and simplifies the analysis workflow significantly. Its built-in natural language formula builder converts natural language descriptions into R formulas, providing visualizations. From business analysts and economists to data scientists, RMCP drastically improves efficiency.

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(github.com)
Development

Micro-LEDs Achieve Gigabit-per-Second Quantum Random Number Generation

2025-09-20
Micro-LEDs Achieve Gigabit-per-Second Quantum Random Number Generation

Researchers from Saudi Arabia and the US have demonstrated a micro-LED-based quantum random number generator (QRNG) achieving an unprecedented 9.375 Gbit/s generation rate. Leveraging intensity fluctuations in the spontaneous emission of blue GaN micro-LEDs, the system passed rigorous NIST tests. Its compact, reliable, and energy-efficient design makes it promising for applications requiring high-speed random number generation, such as data encryption and complex simulations. Future work involves integrating a 2D array of micro-LEDs for parallel generation and creating a fully integrated QRNG chip.

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(discovery.kaust.edu.sa)
Tech Quantum Random Number Generator Micro-LED High-Speed Computing

Archy: A Programmable Text Editor Inspired by THE

2025-09-20
Archy: A Programmable Text Editor Inspired by THE

Archy is a powerful text editor where commands aren't predefined but are user-defined Python scripts. This allows for incredible flexibility; users can craft custom commands to perform actions such as web searches (GOOGLE command) or sending emails (EMAIL command). Unlike THE, Archy's commands exist as documents within the workspace, editable and modifiable on the fly without restarting. Archy also features version control, saving workspace versions for easy rollback. The article demonstrates creating and running custom commands, exploring Archy's design philosophy and its potential applications in modern platforms. The author laments the lack of similar approaches in modern, increasingly locked-down systems.

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(arstechnica.com)
Development programmable

Four Ways to Find the Argmin of Floats in Rust (and Their Performance)

2025-09-20

This article explores four methods for quickly finding the index of the minimum value in a large array of floating-point numbers in Rust. The first method uses `min_by` and `total_cmp`, taking 511 microseconds; the second uses `reduce`, taking 489 microseconds; the third uses `partial_cmp`, taking 470 microseconds; and the fourth leverages the bit representation of positive floats, converting them to `u32` for comparison, taking only 370 microseconds – a 30% speedup. The fourth method proves most efficient for arrays containing only positive numbers, cleverly exploiting the internal representation of floats to avoid complex comparisons.

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(algorithmiker.github.io)
Development

Compiling with Continuations: A Retrospect and Review

2025-09-20

This review revisits Appel's 1992 book, "Compiling with Continuations." The author delves into the book's detailed explanation of compilation techniques using continuations, covering topics such as the MiniML language, lexing, parsing, the CPS language, closure conversion, register spilling, and the virtual machine. While lacking exercises and showing its age in some aspects, the book offers valuable insights into Standard ML and continuation-passing style, particularly for those studying compiler design and functional programming. However, ambiguities in implementation details and a lack of discussion on modern compiler technology make for a challenging read.

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(swatson555.github.io)
Development continuations

Notion 3.0's AI Agents: Powerful Capabilities and Potential Security Risks

2025-09-20
Notion 3.0's AI Agents: Powerful Capabilities and Potential Security Risks

Notion 3.0 integrates powerful AI agents capable of creating docs, updating databases, cross-tool searching, and executing multi-step workflows. However, researchers have discovered that this power introduces significant security risks. Attackers can leverage a cleverly crafted malicious prompt injection attack to exploit the AI agent's web search tool, exfiltrating sensitive data from a user's Notion instance. The attack involves embedding a malicious prompt within an innocuous-looking document, tricking the AI agent into sending sensitive information to an attacker-controlled server. Even advanced AI models are susceptible, highlighting the critical need for robust security measures when integrating AI agents into SaaS platforms.

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(www.codeintegrity.ai)
Tech malicious prompt injection

C0: A High-Performance Read-Through Cache for Object Storage

2025-09-20
C0: A High-Performance Read-Through Cache for Object Storage

C0 is a high-performance HTTP API designed for caching immutable blobs in object storage. It leverages a hybrid memory and disk cache (powered by foyer) and works with any S3-compatible backend, but uses its own /fetch API requiring a precise Range header. Employing a fixed page size of 16 MiB, C0 maps requested byte ranges to page-aligned lookups, coalesces concurrent requests for the same page, and uses hedged requests to manage object storage tail latency. It can even attempt redundant buckets. C0 offers extensive configuration options, including timeout settings, retry mechanisms, and bucket prioritization, and provides performance monitoring via /stats and /metrics endpoints. Docker images are available.

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(github.com)
Development

CRAN's Reverse Dependency Checks: A Unique Approach to Software Maintenance

2025-09-20
CRAN's Reverse Dependency Checks: A Unique Approach to Software Maintenance

A seasoned software engineer initially baffled by R's package manager, CRAN, and its reverse dependency checks, shares their experience. Unlike npm or PyPI, CRAN checks all packages depending on a submitted package before publication. The author recounts how CRAN's approach impacts software maintenance, highlighting its contribution to the stability of the R ecosystem. This experience ultimately shifted the author's perspective on software maintenance, leading to an understanding of the 'monorepo mindset'—developers taking responsibility for all projects relying on their code.

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(jtibs.substack.com)
Development

YouTube Downloaders: The Ethics and Google's Strategy

2025-09-20
YouTube Downloaders: The Ethics and Google's Strategy

The author, a former Editor-in-Chief of How-To Geek, reveals past self-censorship regarding YouTube downloaders, explaining the reasons behind it: reliance on Google ad revenue and fear of violating YouTube's terms of service. Now free from these constraints, the author recommends several excellent free YouTube downloaders and delves into the ethics of using them, Google's strategy, and the ineffectiveness of lengthy EULAs. The author argues that downloading YouTube videos is akin to printing web pages or saving images – a reasonable backup practice. Google tacitly approves the existence of downloaders, even benefiting from them to solidify YouTube's dominance.

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(windowsread.me)
Tech Google strategy

Meta Enters Wholesale Power Trading

2025-09-20
Meta Enters Wholesale Power Trading

Meta Platforms Inc. is venturing into wholesale power trading to better manage its data centers' massive electricity needs. This move is a strategic response to rising energy costs and demand, aligning with Meta's clean energy goals. Data center power demand for AI is projected to quadruple in ten years, driving up prices and forcing some tech companies to reconsider their energy sources, even turning to natural gas. Meta's entry into the market allows it to buy and sell electricity, profiting from price spikes and optimizing energy management.

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(finance.yahoo.com)
Tech Power Trading

US K-12 Education Satisfaction Plummets to Record Low

2025-09-20
US K-12 Education Satisfaction Plummets to Record Low

A Gallup poll reveals that only 35% of Americans are satisfied with the quality of US K-12 education, a record low. This marks an 8-percentage-point drop from last year, significantly below the average of 45%. A majority believe K-12 schools are headed in the wrong direction, and ratings for preparing students for work and college are also low. While parents are generally more satisfied with their own children's education, overall public confidence in the K-12 system has eroded. This coincides with declining student scores in reading and math, and a lack of reading interest among students, pointing towards a deepening crisis in US education.

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(news.gallup.com)
Misc

Obsidian's Supply Chain Security: A Cautious Approach

2025-09-20
Obsidian's Supply Chain Security: A Cautious Approach

Obsidian, a note-taking app, employs a rigorous security strategy to mitigate supply chain attacks. This involves minimizing third-party dependencies, strictly version-pinning all dependencies with a lockfile and a thorough upgrade process (including line-by-line changelog reviews and extensive testing), avoiding postinstall scripts, and implementing a significant delay between dependency upgrades and releases to allow time for community and researcher detection of malicious versions. These measures significantly reduce Obsidian's vulnerability to supply chain attacks, ensuring user data security and privacy.

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(obsidian.md)
Development

Zedis: A Redis-compatible In-Memory Data Store in Zig

2025-09-19
Zedis: A Redis-compatible In-Memory Data Store in Zig

Zedis is a Redis-compatible in-memory data store written in Zig, designed for learning and experimentation. It implements core Redis protocol and data structures, focusing on simplicity, performance, and thread safety. It supports core Redis commands (GET, SET, INCR, etc.), multiple data types, and disk persistence (RDB), with pub/sub recently added. Zedis is easy to build and use, with a codebase following Zig conventions, featuring type-safe operations, explicit error handling, and comprehensive logging.

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(github.com)
Development in-memory database

HDR and Tonemapping in GameMaker Shaders

2025-09-19
HDR and Tonemapping in GameMaker Shaders

This article delves into handling High-Dynamic Range (HDR) colors in GameMaker shaders. GameMaker's default 8-bit unorm color format can lead to color clipping and inaccuracies when dealing with high-brightness scenarios, such as sun shaders. The author demonstrates the issues by comparing 6-bit and floating-point colors and showcases several common tonemapping functions (ACES, Uncharted2, Unreal, and tanh) to mitigate color clamping artifacts. Using the MandelBots project as an example, the article highlights the necessity of using HDR surfaces (surface_rgba16float) in complex lighting systems for improved color precision and blending.

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(mini.gmshaders.com)
Development

The Enigma of Time Spent on Error Handling in Software Development

2025-09-19

A software engineer struggles to find research quantifying the time developers spend on error detection and handling code. While it's widely believed this constitutes a significant portion, perhaps exceeding two-thirds of production code, reliable figures are lacking. This contrasts with the precise quantification of various metrics in current AI research, highlighting a gap in understanding fundamental aspects of software engineering.

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(third-bit.com)
Development code proportion

RFC: Linux Kernel Gains Multikernel Architecture Support

2025-09-19

Cong Wang submitted an RFC patch series introducing multikernel architecture support to the Linux kernel. This allows multiple independent kernel instances to coexist and communicate on a single physical machine, each running on dedicated CPU cores while sharing hardware resources. This improves fault isolation, enhances security, offers better resource utilization than traditional VMs, and potentially enables zero-downtime kernel updates. The implementation leverages the kexec infrastructure and a dedicated IPI framework for inter-kernel communication. This is a foundational RFC, primarily seeking feedback on the high-level design.

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(lwn.net)
Development Multikernel

AI Hype: Bubble or Breakthrough?

2025-09-19
AI Hype: Bubble or Breakthrough?

This article delves into the pervasive hype surrounding artificial intelligence. From AI's early symbolic paradigm to today's deep-learning-based generative AI, technological advancement isn't linear but rather characterized by contingency and unexpected turns. The explosive popularity of ChatGPT exemplifies this. However, alongside AI's commercialization, a wave of exaggerated claims has emerged, portraying AI as an omnipotent myth. The author criticizes the overly optimistic and technologically uninformed pronouncements of tech prophets like Yuval Noah Harari and Henry Kissinger, arguing that they inflate AI's potential risks while overlooking its limitations and its practical applications in solving real-world problems. The author calls for a rational perspective on AI, urging readers to avoid being blinded by hype and to focus on addressing the practical challenges of the technology itself.

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(hedgehogreview.com)
AI tech hype

The Perils of Broken RSS Feeds: A 700+ Subscription Saga

2025-09-19

Maintaining over 700 RSS/Atom feeds, the author details the various ways these crucial information streams can break. From expired SSL certificates and server timeouts to misconfigured firewalls, server outages, changed feed URLs, parsing errors, feed deletion, and website deletion, the post provides a comprehensive list of common issues. Solutions include automated SSL renewal, server performance optimization, firewall rule adjustments, website monitoring, proper URL redirection, and regular feed validation. A passionate plea is made to keep RSS alive.

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(notes.abhinavsarkar.net)
Development

Xiaomi Recalls 110,000 SU7 EVs After Fatal Crash Highlights Assisted Driving Flaws

2025-09-19
Xiaomi Recalls 110,000 SU7 EVs After Fatal Crash Highlights Assisted Driving Flaws

Following a deadly crash involving one of its SU7 electric vehicles, Xiaomi will remotely fix a flaw in the assisted driving system of over 110,000 vehicles. The accident, which killed three college students while the car was in assisted driving mode, sparked concerns about the safety of China's smart driving technology and advertising of autonomous driving capabilities. Chinese regulators cited insufficient recognition, warning, and handling capabilities in extreme driving conditions, posing a collision risk. The recall involves SU7 models manufactured before August 30, 2025, and the announcement ignited significant online discussion, reaching over 70 million views on Weibo.

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(www.koreatimes.co.kr)
Tech Vehicle Recall

Resurrecting a Vintage TV with a Raspberry Pi: A 50th Birthday Gift

2025-09-19
Resurrecting a Vintage TV with a Raspberry Pi: A 50th Birthday Gift

In 2017, the author built a unique 50th birthday gift for his father: a vintage TV modified to play shows from the 70s and 80s. He cleverly integrated a Raspberry Pi with an RF modulator to solve video output and channel switching. Software-based channels controlled by a rotary switch were implemented. A power supply solution with voltage regulators was also integrated inside the TV. While the software code is less than perfect, the final result is an 8-hour continuous video playback (including commercials) with keyframe timestamp saving for resuming playback. This creative project showcases the author's technical skills and love for his father.

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(blog.davidv.dev)
Hardware Vintage TV Hardware Hack

From Concept to 100 Units in 55 Days: A YC Demo Day Blitz

2025-09-19
From Concept to 100 Units in 55 Days: A YC Demo Day Blitz

A startup built Blue, a voice assistant controlled by a tiny USB-C device called Bud, enabling hands-free control of any phone app. They achieved this feat in just 55 days, culminating in 100 working units for YC Demo Day. Focusing on reliability over features, and leveraging a streamlined design and manufacturing process with a Taiwan partner, they bypassed the need for app-specific APIs, relying instead on iOS's Accessibility features. Their rapid development and successful Demo Day resulted in immediate sales, proving the market demand for their innovative product.

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(farhanhossain.substack.com)
Hardware

US Electricity Prices Soar: Wholesale Costs and Transmission Bottlenecks

2025-09-19
US Electricity Prices Soar: Wholesale Costs and Transmission Bottlenecks

Since 2020, US electricity prices have skyrocketed by 35%. This article delves into trends in wholesale electricity prices, finding that the increase is linked to both generation costs and transmission bottlenecks. Independent System Operators (ISOs)/Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) manage electricity markets using Location Marginal Pricing (LMP), composed of energy, congestion, and losses. Analyzing LMP data across various ISOs/RTOs reveals a significant surge in wholesale electricity prices since 2020, partly due to rising natural gas prices. However, transmission bottlenecks are increasingly significant, hindering the movement of inexpensive electricity from low-cost areas to high-demand regions, amplifying price volatility. California's solar power growth and natural gas supply shortages in certain areas exacerbate transmission congestion.

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(www.construction-physics.com)
Tech transmission bottlenecks

The Death of the Curious Developer?

2025-09-19
The Death of the Curious Developer?

This article laments a shift in developer culture. Once driven by curiosity and a passion for learning, leading to innovations like Linux and Git, developers now increasingly prioritize metrics, revenue, and scale. This often forces them to use technologies they dislike and build products they don't care about. The author argues this shift stifles innovation and creativity, urging developers to rediscover their curiosity and passion for creation, even if it's just to solve their own problems. The article emphasizes the importance of building for the joy of it, even if the project isn't commercially viable.

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(dayvster.com)
Development

Austrian Army Ditches Microsoft Office for LibreOffice: Digital Sovereignty Takes Precedence

2025-09-19
Austrian Army Ditches Microsoft Office for LibreOffice: Digital Sovereignty Takes Precedence

The Austrian Armed Forces have completely removed Microsoft Office from 16,000 workstations, switching to the open-source LibreOffice suite. This wasn't a cost-cutting measure, but a strategic decision to strengthen digital sovereignty and IT infrastructure independence, ensuring data is processed internally. Foreseeing Microsoft's cloud shift five years ago, the army initiated a three-year migration, training internal developers and contributing improvements back to the LibreOffice project. While some departments can still apply for Microsoft Office 2024 LTSC, the move highlights the Austrian army's prioritization of data security and autonomy, showcasing a significant contribution to open-source software.

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(www.heise.de)
Tech

SEC Drops Fraud Case Against Nikola Founder Trevor Milton After Presidential Pardon

2025-09-19
SEC Drops Fraud Case Against Nikola Founder Trevor Milton After Presidential Pardon

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has dropped its fraud case against Nikola founder and former CEO Trevor Milton following a presidential pardon from Donald Trump. Milton, previously convicted of securities fraud and sentenced to four years in prison, had his conviction overturned by the pardon. He claims he was subjected to five years of false accusations from the media, prosecutors, former Nikola executives, and short sellers. Despite the pardon, Milton is seeking $69 million in legal fees from Nikola, which is currently in bankruptcy, a demand the company rejects.

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(eletric-vehicles.com)
Startup Trevor Milton Securities Fraud
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