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How Red Mesh Bags Make Oranges Look More Orange

2025-04-13

The author noticed that red mesh bags used for oranges in grocery stores seem to make the oranges appear more vibrant. To investigate, 11 photos of oranges were taken, both with and without the mesh bag, and average pixel values were calculated. Results showed the average pixel color was browner than perceived by eye, but the red mesh clearly added warmth, notably in the green channel. This suggests human color perception is more nuanced than simple pixel averaging, prompting a call for a human-perception-based experiment to confirm the red mesh's effect.

(alexanderell.is)

Tech color perception visual illusion

Don't Sell Space on Your Home Server!

2025-04-13

Don't Sell Space on Your Home Server!

A tech worker from a medium-sized hosting company details the perils of turning your home server into a makeshift cloud service. The article highlights the need for additional hardware, faster internet, public IPs, a secure location, legal protection, and robust billing systems. It also stresses the challenges of handling customer support, data backups, security vulnerabilities, and compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA, along with mitigating risks like DDoS attacks and data breaches. Instead of risking legal and financial repercussions, the author suggests using excess computing power for personal needs, sharing with friends, or donating cycles to research projects.

(grumpy.systems)

Development home server risks

Adobe Fonts Gets a Massive Update: 1500+ New Fonts Added!

2025-04-13

Adobe Fonts Gets a Massive Update: 1500+ New Fonts Added!

Adobe Fonts just received its biggest update in five years, adding over 1,500 new fonts, including iconic classics like Helvetica, Arial, and Times New Roman. This expansive library now supports numerous languages, from Arabic to Korean, ensuring designers have the perfect typeface for any project. The update is free for all paid Creative Cloud subscribers and seamlessly integrates with Adobe's creative suite, eliminating missing font issues and ensuring consistent branding across all platforms.

(blog.adobe.com)

Design Font Update

Gatehouse-TS: A Flexible, Zero-Dependency Authorization Library in TypeScript

2025-04-13

Gatehouse-TS: A Flexible, Zero-Dependency Authorization Library in TypeScript

Gatehouse-TS is a flexible, zero-dependency authorization library written in TypeScript, combining role-based (RBAC), attribute-based (ABAC), and relationship-based (ReBAC) access control policies. A port of the popular Rust Gatehouse library, it boasts a user-friendly API, supports policy composition with logical operators, offers detailed evaluation tracing for debugging, and provides a fluent builder API for creating custom policies. Its lightweight design and comprehensive documentation make it easily embeddable and adaptable to various projects.

(github.com)

Development Authorization Access Control

Fennel: A Lisp-like Enhancement for Lua

2025-04-13

Fennel is a programming language running on the Lua runtime. It leverages Lua's efficiency and lightweight nature while addressing some of Lua's shortcomings through Lisp-style syntax and improved design. Fennel employs a paren-first syntax, eliminating operator precedence ambiguity and early returns. Stricter variable management prevents accidental global variable use. Improvements include table notation, looping constructs, function argument checks, data structure destructuring, and pattern matching, enhancing code readability and maintainability. While Fennel offers a powerful macro system, it's often unnecessary. In short, Fennel provides a safer, cleaner way to program in Lua.

(fennel-lang.org)

Development

Linux Mint's Secret Weapon: Is LMDE 7 Poised to Take Over?

2025-04-13

Linux Mint's Secret Weapon: Is LMDE 7 Poised to Take Over?

Linux Mint is adding OEM support to LMDE 7, its Debian-based edition previously considered a mere emergency fallback. This unexpected move fuels speculation about Mint's future strategy. Some users are dissatisfied with Canonical's direction for Ubuntu, particularly regarding Snap packages and telemetry. LMDE, being pure Debian, avoids these issues. The addition of OEM support suggests LMDE might be groomed for a larger role, potentially even replacing the Ubuntu-based Mint as the primary distribution. The development is significant and could reshape the Linux desktop landscape.

(betanews.com)

Development

Latnija Cave, Malta: Evidence for Early Holocene Human Occupation

2025-04-13

Latnija Cave, Malta: Evidence for Early Holocene Human Occupation

This multidisciplinary study presents an in-depth excavation and analysis of Latnija Cave in Malta. Combining archaeobotany, chronological modeling, isotopic analysis, sedimentology, and zooarchaeology, researchers uncovered evidence of continuous human occupation from the Mesolithic to Neolithic periods. Analysis of stratigraphy, plant and animal remains, and artifacts revealed distinct phases, precisely dated using radiocarbon dating. This research provides valuable data for understanding early human activity in Malta and the interaction between humans and their environment during the early Holocene.

(www.nature.com)

Misc Mesolithic Neolithic

The Ideological Brain: How Neuroscience Explains Political Polarization

2025-04-13

The Ideological Brain: How Neuroscience Explains Political Polarization

Political neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod's new book, *The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking*, explores how ideologies impact the human brain and body. Using neuroimaging and psychological research, Zmigrod reveals how ideologies affect cognitive flexibility and responsiveness, linking extreme ideologies to activity in specific brain areas like the amygdala. The book also examines the relationship between cognitive flexibility and dopamine, and how cultivating creativity and cognitive flexibility can increase resistance to ideological influence. Zmigrod's research challenges the notion of ideological thinking as mere 'mindlessness,' presenting it as a complex cognitive process.

(nautil.us)

AI Ideology Cognitive Flexibility

FreeDOS 1.4 Released: Stability Update for Legacy DOS PCs

2025-04-13

FreeDOS 1.4 Released: Stability Update for Legacy DOS PCs

FreeDOS, the open-source DOS successor, has released version 1.4, focusing on stability improvements. The update includes a revamped installer, updated versions of essential tools like fdisk and format, and an updated edlin text editor. A 'Floppy-Only Edition' caters to vintage systems, while a 'BonusCD' offers additional tools and the OpenGEM graphical interface.

(arstechnica.com)

Development

Skywork-OR1: Powerful Open-Source Reasoning Models Released

2025-04-13

Skywork-OR1: Powerful Open-Source Reasoning Models Released

SkyworkAI has released the Skywork-OR1 series of powerful open-source reasoning models, including Skywork-OR1-Math-7B, Skywork-OR1-32B-Preview, and Skywork-OR1-7B-Preview. These models, trained using large-scale rule-based reinforcement learning, excel at math and code reasoning. Skywork-OR1-Math-7B significantly outperforms similar-sized models on AIME24 and AIME25; Skywork-OR1-32B-Preview achieves Deepseek-R1 performance levels on math and coding tasks; and Skywork-OR1-7B-Preview surpasses all similarly sized models in both domains. The full models and training scripts will be open-sourced in the coming days.

(github.com)

AI

High-Performance Programming on Low-End Hardware: My Terminal Workflow

2025-04-13

The author shares their experience of efficient programming on underpowered hardware (e.g., Intel Celeron N4000 and Intel Atom x5-Z8350). The secret lies in a lightweight Linux distro (Arch Linux), a minimal window manager like i3wm, and a terminal text editor like Neovim with Alacritty terminal. This setup is resource-light and portable across various machines, providing a comfortable programming experience even on low-end or outdated hardware. Furthermore, the author advocates for lightweight programming ideals, minimizing dependencies to improve compile times and binary sizes.

(colean.cc)

Development

Rust Mutation Testing with cargo-mutants

2025-04-13

Rust Mutation Testing with cargo-mutants

cargo-mutants is a Rust tool that enhances code quality by generating mutant versions of your code to test its robustness. It identifies potential bugs missed by your existing tests, providing a different perspective than traditional code coverage tools. It focuses on whether tests actually verify code behavior, not just code reach. Easy to use and integrates with CI, it's actively maintained and promises future improvements, including new mutation types.

(github.com)

Development

Finding Solace in the Buzz: A Writer's Journey Through Grief and Bees

2025-04-13

Finding Solace in the Buzz: A Writer's Journey Through Grief and Bees

This essay recounts the author's journey through grief after the loss of her daughter, finding solace and unexpected wisdom in the world of bees and beekeepers. Following the lives of bees and beekeepers, from a Yemeni legend to scientists studying bee emotions, the author explores the resilience of life, the adaptive nature of grief, and the profound connections between humans and the natural world. The author finds healing and hope in the unwavering tenacity of bees.

(emergencemagazine.org)

Misc grief healing human-nature connection bees

Automating Bug Fixes with Multi-LLM Agent Clusters: Cheaper Than You Think

2025-04-13

Automating Bug Fixes with Multi-LLM Agent Clusters: Cheaper Than You Think

This post details a novel approach to automated bug fixing using multiple large language models (LLMs). By integrating Asana, the Aider coding agent, and a Sublayer agent, the system automatically triggers three LLMs (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.0 Flash) to attempt fixing the same bug. Each attempt runs in a separate Git branch, resulting in multiple pull requests. This 'wasteful inference' approach proves surprisingly cheap and efficient, offering redundancy and diverse solutions. Even if one model fails, others might succeed, providing alternative approaches. This experiment showcases the potential of this multi-model, automated, low-cost bug fixing, hinting at a paradigm shift in future development.

(worksonmymachine.substack.com)

Development

Osprey: Your Browser's New Security Guard

2025-04-13

Osprey: Your Browser's New Security Guard

Osprey is a browser extension designed to protect you from malicious websites. It checks URLs against known threats and blocks access to harmful sites, displaying a warning if a malicious site is detected. Easily installable from the Chrome Web Store or Microsoft Edge Addons, Osprey also offers manual installation instructions. Customize protection settings and get support through the provided issue tracker.

(github.com)

Development malware protection

Nanotech Breakthrough: siRNA and Liposomes Team Up to Fight Deadly Fungal Infections

2025-04-13

Nanotech Breakthrough: siRNA and Liposomes Team Up to Fight Deadly Fungal Infections

Fungal infections are rising globally, and current antifungals are proving ineffective. Researchers from the University of Würzburg, Germany, have achieved a breakthrough, using nanotechnology to deliver small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) combined with Amphotericin B to specifically target the dangerous mold *Aspergillus fumigatus*. This approach silences crucial fungal genes, inhibiting growth and paving the way for new antifungal therapies. The study ingeniously combines RNA interference with optimized liposomal delivery, overcoming the challenge of siRNA penetrating the fungus's thick cell wall. This marks the first successful application of this technology against a human pathogenic fungus in infection models and utilized insect larvae, reducing mammalian animal testing. The results demonstrate significantly reduced fungal growth, offering a promising new weapon against the growing threat of drug-resistant fungal infections.

(phys.org)

Tech Nanotechnology RNA interference Antifungal

Moominvalley: War, Trauma, and the Commercialization of a Beloved Children's Series

2025-04-13

Moominvalley: War, Trauma, and the Commercialization of a Beloved Children's Series

This article delves into the creation and evolution of the Moomin stories by Finnish artist Tove Jansson. Originally conceived during the Winter War, the Moomins reflected the trauma of war and displacement. As the series soared in popularity, Jansson found herself overwhelmed by commercialization, grappling with a complex relationship with her creations and her readers' expectations. The article details Jansson's eventual end to the series, symbolizing an artist's farewell to her work and a rejection of the commercial pressures she faced.

(www.newstatesman.com)

Misc Children's literature Art creation Commercialization

DragonFlyBSD's Next-Gen Disk Encryption: dm_target_crypt_ng

2025-04-13

DragonFlyBSD has a major update: dm_target_crypt_ng, a next-generation disk encryption implementation. Developer Michael Neumann re-engineered the DM-crypt code for improved performance and interactivity. The new version ditches opencrypto and cryptodev, opting for a simplified symmetric block cipher API and using two worker pools for efficiency. Currently supporting AES-CBC and AES-XTS, with plans to add Twofish and Serpent. This update significantly improves system responsiveness, providing a smoother disk encryption experience for DragonFlyBSD users. It's expected to become the default in the upcoming DragonFlyBSD 6.4 release.

(www.phoronix.com)

Development

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.

(utcc.utoronto.ca)

Development software management

Reddit Bot Drives User Insane: A Cyberpunk Nightmare of Fake Empathy and Algorithmic Manipulation

2025-04-13

Reddit Bot Drives User Insane: A Cyberpunk Nightmare of Fake Empathy and Algorithmic Manipulation

A Reddit post lamenting the internet's inauthenticity and algorithmic manipulation turns out to be an AI-powered bot designed to sell AI-illustrated books. The bot expertly crafted a relatable post, garnering thousands of upvotes and comments. The author's investigation uncovers a sophisticated scheme: the bot uses a shortened link leading to an Amazon page, leveraging affiliate marketing to profit from the user's engagement. This incident raises concerns about the authenticity of online interactions and the potential for manipulative AI, leading the author to question the prevalence of the 'Dead Internet Theory'—the idea that most online interactions are automated loops between bots. The experience leaves the author deeply unsettled, questioning the nature of reality in the age of advanced AI.

(posthuman.blog)

Tech AI bot algorithmic manipulation online marketing

AMD GPUs Shatter CFD Simulation Record on Frontier Supercomputer

2025-04-13

AMD GPUs Shatter CFD Simulation Record on Frontier Supercomputer

AMD processors powered a new world record in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation using Ansys Fluent on the Frontier supercomputer. A 2.2-billion-cell simulation, previously taking 38.5 hours on 3,700 CPU cores, completed in just 1.5 hours using 1,024 AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators and AMD EPYC CPUs. This 25x speedup highlights AMD's prowess in high-performance computing. However, challenges remain in software support, hindering AMD's ability to fully compete with Nvidia in the AI GPU market, as illustrated by instances like Tiny Corp's preference for Nvidia GPUs due to driver stability.

(www.tomshardware.com)

Tech Supercomputing CFD Simulation

The Neuroscience of Name Retrieval: Why We Forget Names (and What to Do About It)

2025-04-13

Frustrated by frequently forgetting names, the author embarks on a journey to understand how the brain stores and retrieves names. The article lucidly explains the three stages of memory – sensory, short-term, and long-term – and the complex process of name retrieval, involving conceptual preparation, lexical selection, encoding, and articulation. Research reveals name retrieval isn't localized but a distributed function across the left hemisphere. Forgetting can stem from information failing to transfer between memory stages, improper long-term encoding, or 'blocking' during retrieval. The article concludes by discussing factors influencing memory and suggesting attention training and forging new neural connections to improve recall.

(serendipstudio.org)

Misc forgetting

Go Channels: A Critical Re-evaluation

2025-04-13

A seasoned Go developer delivers a critical assessment of Go's channel mechanism. While acknowledging Go's theoretical grounding in CSP and its reliance on channels and goroutines, the author argues that their practical implementation suffers from several shortcomings. These include potential goroutine leaks, performance inferiority to traditional synchronization primitives, and complex interactions with other concurrency mechanisms. The author advocates for cautious channel usage, suggesting mutexes and callbacks as superior alternatives in many scenarios. Improvements to the channel system are proposed, such as enabling selection on condition variables and enhancing garbage collection to manage unused channels.

(www.jtolio.com)

Development channels

Whenever: Typed, DST-Safe Datetimes for Python

2025-04-13

Whenever: Typed, DST-Safe Datetimes for Python

Tired of Python's `datetime` pitfalls? Whenever offers typed, DST-safe datetime operations with unmatched performance, outpacing other third-party libraries and often the standard library itself. Choose between a high-performance Rust implementation or a pure Python version for ease of use. It addresses the standard library's shortcomings in DST handling and type checking, providing a clean API for writing correct datetime code.

(github.com)

Development datetime

A Mastodon Poll on the Existence of Numbers

2025-04-13

A lighthearted read on the philosophy of mathematics sparked a Mastodon poll: Do numbers exist? The results showed a near three-way split between the existence of numbers, the existence of unicorns, and numbers having more existence than unicorns, prompting a discussion on the definition of 'existence'. The article explores the history of numbers from ancient Babylon to the digital age, and the cultural significance of unicorns. The author concludes that regardless of whether numbers or unicorns exist, humanity's ability to conceptualize, discuss, and create around them is what truly matters.

(freedommathdance.blogspot.com)

Misc Philosophy of Mathematics Existence of Numbers Mastodon Poll

Streaming Services' Annoying Child Profile Prompts: A Rant

2025-04-13

Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and Amazon Prime, among others, persistently prompt users to create child profiles, even those without children. The author expresses frustration, arguing this is not only annoying but potentially hurtful to those who have lost children or struggle with fertility. The plea is for a "never ask again" option, respecting the needs of childless users and acknowledging that the world doesn't revolve around children.

(shkspr.mobi)

Misc child profiles

Microgravity: A Unique Environment for Space Research

2025-04-13

Microgravity: A Unique Environment for Space Research

Microgravity isn't the absence of gravity, but rather an extremely weak gravitational field (1/1000th to 1/1,000,000th of Earth's gravity). The International Space Station, contrary to popular belief, isn't in zero-G, but experiences continuous freefall, creating the sensation of weightlessness. In microgravity, fluids, cell growth, combustion, and crystal formation behave differently, offering unique experimental possibilities. Spark Gravity is focused on programmable gravity, bridging the gap in current research limited to either full gravity or zero-G environments on Earth and the ISS. Their goal is to allow scientists to control gravity as a variable, simulate lunar, Martian, or deep space environments, and conduct long-duration studies without the need for a full space station.

(sparkgravity.com)

Tech microgravity space research programmable gravity

Chonky: Intelligent Text Segmentation with Transformers

2025-04-13

Chonky: Intelligent Text Segmentation with Transformers

Chonky is a Python library that cleverly divides text into meaningful semantic chunks using a fine-tuned transformer model. This library is useful in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. It efficiently processes large texts, breaking them down into smaller, manageable pieces for easier analysis and processing. Example code demonstrates how to use Chonky to split a sample text into semantically coherent chunks.

(github.com)

Development text segmentation

Cross-Entropy: A Deep Dive into the Loss Function for Classification

2025-04-13

This post provides a clear explanation of cross-entropy's role as a loss function in machine learning classification tasks. Starting with information theory concepts like information content and entropy, it builds up to cross-entropy, comparing it to KL divergence. The article concludes by demonstrating the relationship between cross-entropy and maximum likelihood estimation with numerical examples, clarifying its application in machine learning.

(eli.thegreenplace.net)

AI cross-entropy loss function

AmigaOS 3.2.3 Released: Classic OS Gets a Major Update

2025-04-13

AmigaOS 3.2.3 Released: Classic OS Gets a Major Update

AmigaOS 3.2, a classic operating system, receives a significant update with the release of version 3.2.3. Hyperion Entertainment, the current steward of AmigaOS, has incorporated over 50 fixes and enhancements spanning two years. Key improvements include updates to the ReAction widget toolkit and TextEditor. Notably, this update supports classic 68K Amigas with ARM accelerators, and even the most basic A500 can run it. While rumors suggest delays for a new Amiga console, Hyperion denies involvement and expresses willingness to collaborate.

(www.tomshardware.com)

Tech OS Update

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