Prolog Planners from LLMs: A Surprisingly Effective Approach

2025-04-02

This paper explores using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate Prolog planners, leveraging Prolog's combinatorial search capabilities. The authors argue that LLMs are better suited for translating natural language into Prolog than for planning directly. Their approach involves prompting an LLM to translate problem descriptions into Prolog code, which is then used by a Prolog engine to perform the planning. A detailed prompting guide is provided, focusing on generating state facts, action predicates, and check predicates. This approach bypasses limitations of LLMs in direct planning while utilizing Prolog's strengths in logical reasoning and combinatorial search. The method is shown to be effective on various toy planning problems.

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Development Automated Planning

Ace: Superhuman-Speed Computer Autopilot

2025-04-02
Ace: Superhuman-Speed Computer Autopilot

Ace is a computer autopilot that uses your mouse and keyboard to perform tasks on your desktop. It outperforms other models in a suite of computer use tasks and boasts superhuman speed. Trained on over a million tasks by software specialists and domain experts, Ace performs mouse clicks and keystrokes based on screen and prompts. While still under development and prone to occasional errors, its accuracy improves significantly with increased training resources. An early research preview is now available.

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AI

Verizon Call Filter Flaw Exposed Call Logs of Millions

2025-04-02
Verizon Call Filter Flaw Exposed Call Logs of Millions

A security researcher uncovered a critical vulnerability in Verizon's Call Filter iOS app, allowing attackers to access the call history of Verizon Wireless customers without authentication. The flaw exploited a server-side validation weakness, enabling attackers to retrieve call logs and timestamps for any Verizon number. This poses significant privacy and safety risks, especially for vulnerable individuals like domestic abuse survivors, law enforcement, and public figures. Verizon acknowledged and remediated the issue.

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Tech

CSS Item Flow: Unifying Flexbox, Grid, and Masonry Layouts

2025-04-02
CSS Item Flow: Unifying Flexbox, Grid, and Masonry Layouts

CSS Grid and Flexbox are powerful layout tools, but they fall short for complex layouts like masonry. A new proposal, "Item Flow," aims to solve this by unifying Flexbox's `flex-flow` and Grid's `grid-auto-flow` properties. It introduces new properties like `item-direction`, `item-wrap`, `item-pack`, and `item-slack`, enabling more flexible and powerful layout control. This would give Flexbox dense packing and Grid the ability to disable wrapping, while providing a clean solution for masonry layouts. The result is a more unified and user-friendly CSS layout system.

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Development Layout

Vets Who Code: A Nonprofit That Changed a Veteran's Life

2025-04-02
Vets Who Code: A Nonprofit That Changed a Veteran's Life

Osvaldo Vargas, a US Army veteran and now a Senior Software Engineering Manager at Accenture Federal Services, leveraged over 14 different resources during his transition to civilian life. While he participated in numerous programs, only three significantly aided his transition. He credits Vets Who Code as the single organization that truly changed his life for the better, providing more value than twelve other nonprofits combined.

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MathArena: Rigorously Evaluating LLMs on Math Competitions

2025-04-02

MathArena is a platform for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on recent math competitions and olympiads. It ensures fair and unbiased evaluation by testing models exclusively on post-release competitions, preventing retroactive assessments on potentially leaked data. The platform publishes leaderboards for each competition, showing individual problem scores for different models, and a main table summarizing performance across all competitions. Each model runs four times per problem, averaging the score and calculating the cost (in USD). The evaluation code is open-sourced: https://github.com/eth-sri/matharena.

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Automattic Announces Restructuring, 16% Workforce Reduction

2025-04-02
Automattic Announces Restructuring, 16% Workforce Reduction

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg announced a company restructuring involving a 16% workforce reduction. This decision aims to improve efficiency, profitability, and competitiveness in a rapidly evolving market. Affected employees will receive severance packages, benefits, and job placement resources. Automattic stated this restructuring is necessary to ensure long-term success and continue its mission to democratize the internet.

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Startup

Indiana University Professor Under Investigation for Undisclosed Chinese Research Funding

2025-04-02
Indiana University Professor Under Investigation for Undisclosed Chinese Research Funding

Indiana University (IU) data privacy professor Xiaofeng Wang and his wife are under investigation for allegedly failing to disclose research funding received from China. The university began reviewing whether Wang received unreported funding months before the FBI raided two of the couple’s homes last week. A statement, purportedly written by a long-time collaborator, reveals IU contacted Wang in December about a 2017-2018 Chinese grant listing him as a researcher. The statement alleges IU was concerned Wang failed to properly disclose the funding to the university and in US federal grant applications. While Wang claims to have explained the situation, the investigation continues. The allegations involve research misconduct, including failure to properly disclose the principal investigator and not fully listing co-authors. Wang regularly collaborated with researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Information Engineering, but his publications show his primary funding came from US government agencies and corporations. No evidence currently suggests impropriety in the collaborations.

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Mermaid Chart VS Code Plugin: Effortless Mermaid.js Diagramming in Your IDE

2025-04-02
Mermaid Chart VS Code Plugin: Effortless Mermaid.js Diagramming in Your IDE

The Mermaid Chart VS Code plugin empowers developers with a robust diagramming tool, directly within their Visual Studio Code environment. Create and edit Mermaid.js diagrams effortlessly – no account needed for basic features. Enjoy real-time rendering, syntax highlighting, and seamless Markdown integration. The plugin automatically recognizes .mmd files. Advanced capabilities like cloud sync, team collaboration, and AI-powered diagram generation are unlocked by logging into a Mermaid Chart account. Whether visualizing workflows, software architecture, or API flows, this plugin boosts productivity, supports offline editing, and integrates flawlessly with Git version control.

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Borges, Simon, and a 1970 Conversation That Still Matters

2025-04-02
Borges, Simon, and a 1970 Conversation That Still Matters

In 1970 Buenos Aires, a meeting between Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and AI pioneer Herbert A. Simon sparked a fascinating interdisciplinary dialogue. Their conversation, touching on free will versus determinism, explored the parallels between human behavior and computer programs. Borges's insightful questions challenged Simon to reconcile the deterministic nature of human actions with the preservation of individual identity. This exchange highlights the value of cross-disciplinary thinking and offers a timely reflection on the challenges facing academia today, emphasizing the need for collaboration between the humanities and STEM fields. The conversation also inspires contemplation on simulating historical figures using AI.

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Google's Gemini Robotics: A Slam Dunk on First Try

2025-04-02
Google's Gemini Robotics: A Slam Dunk on First Try

Google showcased its new Gemini Robotics model, enabling robots to perform complex tasks like successfully slam dunking a basketball on the first try, without prior training on the specific object or action. Built upon Gemini 2.0, the model is fine-tuned with robot-specific data, translating multimodal outputs (text, video, audio) into physical actions. Highly dexterous, interactive, and general, it adapts to new objects, environments, and instructions without further training. Google's ambition is to build embodied AI to power robots assisting with everyday tasks, eventually becoming as commonplace an AI interface as phones or computers.

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Why I Don't Discuss Politics with Friends

2025-04-02

The author explains why he avoids political discussions with friends, citing years of observation revealing a strong tribalistic tendency over rational thought. Most people cling to political tribal identities rather than independent viewpoints; developing such viewpoints requires significant intellectual effort, which most are unwilling to undertake. This is because forming well-informed political opinions demands interdisciplinary knowledge, overcoming biases, and deep empathetic understanding of opposing viewpoints—a considerable challenge. Additionally, people prioritize belonging and group identity over objective truth. The author thus avoids political discussions to prevent pointless arguments and emotional exhaustion. He ultimately moved to the Bay Area seeking a community valuing rational thought and objective truth.

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ReelControl: Reclaim Your Video Playback Control

2025-04-02
ReelControl: Reclaim Your Video Playback Control

Tired of the annoying lack of native progress bars on Instagram, YouTube Shorts, and Facebook Reels? ReelControl is here to help! This browser extension adds progress bars and playback controls to videos on these platforms, letting you easily see video length, rewind, fast-forward, and skip unwanted parts. The developer reports not only an improved viewing experience but also a significant reduction in time spent on these platforms. The project is open-source, and contributions are welcome!

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Solo Pacific Crossing: A Technical Deep Dive

2025-04-02

A consulting exploration geologist recounts his 24-day, 2142-nautical-mile solo voyage from Berkeley, California, to Hilo, Hawaii, aboard his West Wight Potter 19 sailboat, "Chubby." The article details the technical preparations, safety enhancements (including improved drainage, multiple jacklines, comprehensive safety equipment), navigation (GPS, sextant, celestial navigation), electrical systems, provisioning, route planning, and weather management. Despite initial headwinds and calms, and a near miss with a hurricane, the voyage was largely smooth, showcasing both the boat's and the captain's capabilities. The author emphasizes this isn't an endorsement of the Potter 19 as a bluewater cruiser, but rather a sharing of a unique technical adventure.

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Matrix.org Upgrading to Next-Gen Authentication

2025-04-02
Matrix.org Upgrading to Next-Gen Authentication

On April 7th, 2025, at 7 AM UTC, Matrix.org will migrate its authentication system to MAS (Matrix Authentication Service) for next-generation authentication. This will involve up to one hour of downtime but brings a revamped account management interface, improved security (credentials only visible to your server), and a better registration experience. The upgrade utilizes OAuth 2.0/OIDC and paves the way for features like QR code login, opening new possibilities for Matrix applications.

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Development

Visualizing Async Rust Execution Trees with await-tree

2025-04-02
Visualizing Async Rust Execution Trees with await-tree

await-tree is a Rust library for visualizing the execution tree of asynchronous tasks. It traces the execution flow of asynchronous tasks and presents the result as a tree structure, facilitating debugging and analysis of complex asynchronous code. Compared to similar tools like async-backtrace, await-tree supports runtime dynamic spans, more complex asynchronous control flows, and offers higher stability and efficiency. It has been used in production deployment in RisingWave, a distributed streaming database.

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Development

The Vanishing Act of Government Data: Archivists to the Rescue

2025-04-02
The Vanishing Act of Government Data: Archivists to the Rescue

For three decades, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has archived vast amounts of government websites and datasets crucial for research. However, various US administrations have deleted data, notably during Trump's presidency, where thousands of web pages and databases were taken down. While some data has been restored, keywords like "climate change" were purged. Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab has created a backup of Data.gov's 16TB archive and continues to update it, highlighting the crucial role of digital archives in preserving knowledge.

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Pulse: AI Startup Tackles Complex Document Data Extraction

2025-04-02
Pulse: AI Startup Tackles Complex Document Data Extraction

Pulse is tackling a persistent challenge in data infrastructure: extracting accurate, structured information from complex documents at scale. Their breakthrough approach combines intelligent schema mapping with fine-tuned extraction models, surpassing legacy OCR and other parsing tools. This fast-growing San Francisco-based team serves Fortune 100 companies, YC startups, and more, backed by top-tier investors. Their multi-stage architecture includes layout understanding, low-latency OCR, advanced reading order algorithms, proprietary table recognition, and vision-language models for charts and tables. If you're passionate about computer vision, NLP, and data infrastructure, Pulse offers a chance to directly impact customers and shape the future of document intelligence.

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Bare: A Minimal JavaScript Runtime Reimagining Node.js

2025-04-02
Bare: A Minimal JavaScript Runtime Reimagining Node.js

Holepunch has launched Bare, a groundbreaking minimal JavaScript runtime for desktop and mobile. Fast, modular, and efficient, Bare revisits the original vision of Node.js by embracing modularity and universal compatibility. Designed for peer-to-peer applications, Bare runs cross-platform and seamlessly integrates with Holepunch's Pear runtime, achieving true 'write once, run anywhere' capabilities and revolutionizing app development.

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Development Peer-to-Peer

The Vanishing of Color: A Modern Aesthetic Shift

2025-04-02
The Vanishing of Color: A Modern Aesthetic Shift

From cars and brands to film, grayscale and monochrome are dominating the world. This article explores the reasons behind this phenomenon, arguing it's not just about materials or fashion trends, but rooted in Western philosophy's long-standing devaluation of color. From Plato to Kant, reason was prioritized over senses, with color seen as sensory interference hindering the understanding of truth. Modernism further dismissed color as excessive ornamentation, pursuing pure form. However, the article argues this rejection of color ignores the harmonious unity of color and form, exemplified by the vibrant hues of Baroque art, where emotion and reason coexist. It's time to embrace color again, enriching our lives.

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Design Aesthetics

Viral Animal Illustrations Made Entirely of Circles

2025-04-02
Viral Animal Illustrations Made Entirely of Circles

Artist Dori's stunning illustrations of animals, constructed entirely from circles, have gone viral. The simple yet elegant designs sparked a wave of requests for high-resolution wallpapers and prints. Dori not only shared her creative process but also eventually published a full tutorial on Smashing Magazine. This story highlights the power of creative design and the engaging interaction between artist and audience.

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Design illustration

Tailscale on Plan 9: An April Fool's Prank That Actually Worked

2025-04-02
Tailscale on Plan 9: An April Fool's Prank That Actually Worked

Tailscale's April Fool's Day announcement wasn't a joke: they actually ported Tailscale to the Plan 9 operating system. The journey was fraught with challenges, including outdated Go compiler support for Plan 9, kernel issues, and inter-process communication bugs. The team even fixed a decades-old bug in the Plan 9 kernel. The project, initially a naive undertaking, evolved into a significant effort, culminating in a working demo running Tailscale on Plan 9, even showcased on a web browser. This wasn't just a prank; it was a testament to the team's technical prowess and a fascinating exploration of a niche OS.

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Development

Deel CEO Implicated in Espionage Scandal: Former Employee's Confession Reveals Details

2025-04-02
Deel CEO Implicated in Espionage Scandal: Former Employee's Confession Reveals Details

Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz is embroiled in a corporate espionage scandal. Former Rippling employee Keith O'Brien, in a sworn Irish affidavit, admitted to being hired by Deel to spy on competitor Rippling, acting on instructions from CEO Alex Bouaziz. O'Brien stated he communicated with Alex Bouaziz and Deel's CFO (Alex's father, Philippe Bouaziz) via Telegram and received payment for his actions. The incident has garnered attention from the Irish press, and Rippling has filed a lawsuit against Deel.

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JWST Captures a Stunning Einstein Ring

2025-04-02
JWST Captures a Stunning Einstein Ring

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a breathtaking image: a nearly perfect 'Einstein Ring'. This ring-like structure is caused by the gravitational lensing effect of a closer elliptical galaxy on a more distant spiral galaxy. Light from the farther galaxy is bent by the gravity of the nearer galaxy, creating an almost perfect circle. This phenomenon verifies Einstein's prediction of general relativity and showcases the power of modern telescopes, allowing us to peer into the depths of the universe and appreciate this cosmic artwork.

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Tech

Nintendo Switch 2 Unveiled: Beefed-Up Hardware and a Killer Game Lineup

2025-04-02
Nintendo Switch 2 Unveiled:  Beefed-Up Hardware and a Killer Game Lineup

Nintendo has officially revealed the Switch 2, boasting larger Joy-Cons with enhanced shoulder buttons, a sturdier adjustable stand, and an extra USB-C port. A slew of third-party AAA titles are coming, including Cyberpunk 2077, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Elden Ring, and more. FromSoftware showcased The Duskbloods, a Switch 2 exclusive vampire-themed action RPG. Switch 2 Online subscribers will gain access to a library of upscaled GameCube classics like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. New Kirby and Donkey Kong titles were also teased. The highly anticipated Donkey Kong Bonanza launches July 17th. Priority purchasing invitations for the Switch 2 will be sent to eligible Switch Online members starting May 8th.

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US Credit Card Debt Hits Record High, Bill Proposed to Cap Interest Rates

2025-04-02
US Credit Card Debt Hits Record High, Bill Proposed to Cap Interest Rates

US credit card debt has reached an all-time high, with soaring interest rates and economic factors exacerbating the problem. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Anna Paulina Luna introduced a bipartisan bill to cap annual credit card interest rates at 10%, aiming to help struggling Americans escape a cycle of debt. The average APR has nearly doubled in a decade, reaching 21%, leading to increased consumer debt and delinquencies. The bill's future remains uncertain.

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Nintendo Switch 2: June 5th Release, $450 Price Tag

2025-04-02
Nintendo Switch 2: June 5th Release, $450 Price Tag

Nintendo has finally revealed the Switch 2's release date: June 5th, priced at $450. Pre-orders start April 9th. This upgraded console boasts a 7.9-inch 1080p screen (up to 4K in docked mode), 120Hz refresh rate, HDR support, and a massive 256GB of internal storage, expandable via microSD Express cards. New Joy-Cons feature mouse functionality, and GameChat allows voice chat with up to 12 players. The Switch 2 offers backward compatibility with most Switch games and introduces GameShare for easy family and friend game sharing. Launch titles include Mario Kart World.

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Game

arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

2025-04-02
arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community Collaboration

arXivLabs is an experimental platform enabling collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on the website. Participants (individuals and organizations) embrace arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners who adhere to them. Got an idea to enhance the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

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Development

Protected Query Pattern: A Solution for Data Authorization in Full-Stack Apps

2025-04-02
Protected Query Pattern: A Solution for Data Authorization in Full-Stack Apps

Securing data access in modern full-stack applications is challenging. This article introduces the 'protected query pattern,' an elegant solution. It wraps pure query functions with an authorization layer, offering `query.protect` and `query.unsafe` methods for authorized and direct queries respectively. This approach avoids duplicated authorization logic, improves maintainability and readability, and supports data redaction. Kilpi simplifies implementation, offering centralized authorization and data filtering for enhanced efficiency.

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Development data authorization

Django 5.2 Released: Composite Primary Keys and Simplified BoundField Overriding

2025-04-02
Django 5.2 Released: Composite Primary Keys and Simplified BoundField Overriding

Django 5.2 has been released! Key features include automatic model import in the shell, support for composite primary keys (using multiple fields as a primary key), and simplified BoundField overriding. Django 5.1 has entered security maintenance, while Django 5.0 has reached end-of-life. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to 5.2 for continued security fixes and bug patches.

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Development
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