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Decentralized Push Notifications: Escaping the Centralized Trap?

2025-02-04

This article explores how mobile push notifications introduce centralization to decentralized services and how to avoid it, even for mainstream configurations. Many decentralized apps (e.g., Mastodon, Nextcloud) currently rely on Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), leading to centralization. The article proposes a solution: directly using the WebPush protocol to communicate with FCM servers, combined with the UnifiedPush framework, to achieve decentralized push notifications. This eliminates the need for centralized gateways and allows users to choose their preferred services. While not all services will immediately support WebPush, the future trend is towards decentralization.

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(unifiedpush.org)
Development push notifications

Apple Launches Apple Invites: A New App for Seamless Event Planning

2025-02-04
Apple Launches Apple Invites: A New App for Seamless Event Planning

Apple unveiled Apple Invites, a new iPhone app designed to simplify event planning. Users can create custom invitations, share them easily, manage RSVPs, and even contribute to shared albums and collaborative Apple Music playlists. The app integrates with Maps and Weather for convenient guest information. Apple Intelligence features (available on select iPhone models) allow users to create unique invitations using AI-powered image generation and writing tools. Anyone can RSVP, regardless of Apple account ownership, while iCloud+ subscribers gain access to expanded storage and other premium features.

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(www.apple.com)
Tech Event Planning

Chat UIs Are a Bad Fit for Real Development Tools

2025-02-04

This article argues that chat interfaces are fundamentally unsuitable for serious software development. While AI promises to make programming more intuitive with natural language, the author contends that building robust software requires precision and explicit documentation, not guesswork. Chat interfaces hinder the ability to track changes, manage complexity, and ultimately deliver production-ready software. The article posits that the future of AI development tools lies in document-centric interfaces, allowing for clear specifications and systematic development.

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(danieldelaney.net)
Development

DoppelBot: Your CEO, Now an LLM

2025-02-04
DoppelBot: Your CEO, Now an LLM

Modal has created DoppelBot, a Slack bot that can replace your CEO (sort of!). It fine-tunes an OpenLLaMa model on your team's Slack messages to mimic your CEO's communication style. Built on Modal's serverless platform, the entire process—scraping, fine-tuning, inference, and Slack event handling—is streamlined and efficient. The open-source code allows for easy deployment and customization within your workspace. Using LoRA for efficient fine-tuning and supporting multiple workspaces, DoppelBot offers a novel approach to team collaboration and productivity enhancement. The article details its functionality and deployment steps.

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(modal.com)
Development Slack Bot

Spotify Paid Out $10 Billion to the Music Industry in 2024: A Streaming Success Story?

2025-02-04
Spotify Paid Out $10 Billion to the Music Industry in 2024: A Streaming Success Story?

Spotify announced it paid a record $10 billion to the music industry in 2024, a billion more than the previous year. This brings its total payouts to roughly $60 billion since its founding in 2006. While artist compensation from streaming remains a contentious issue, Spotify highlights its contribution to the industry's revival after a period of decline due to illegal downloading. The company attributes its success to high user retention, a freemium model, and global expansion, claiming to be both the most popular and highest-paying subscription streaming service. Further details on royalty distributions will be released in their annual Loud & Clear report.

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(variety.com)
Tech Streaming Music Music Industry

US Air Traffic Control System on the Brink: A Decades-Long Staffing Crisis

2025-02-04
US Air Traffic Control System on the Brink: A Decades-Long Staffing Crisis

The US air traffic control system is facing a decades-long staffing shortage, leading to flight delays and safety concerns. Despite increased hiring efforts, high-stress levels and a high attrition rate make filling vacancies extremely difficult. Many air traffic controllers work six 10-hour days a week, leading to burnout. This issue not only impacts controllers' well-being but also threatens flight safety, sparking discussions surrounding a recent fatal air crash. While former President Trump blamed diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, experts point to poor working conditions and a disregard for controllers' mental health as the root causes.

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(www.cnn.com)
Tech staffing shortage

100+ Books That Shaped a Century of Science

2025-02-04

American Scientist's November-December 1999 "Scientists' Bookshelf" featured over 100 books that significantly influenced a century of scientific progress. The list spans biographies (Darwin's autobiography, Feynman's adventures), field guides, monographs on pivotal scientific concepts (quantum mechanics, game theory), histories of science, examinations of the scientific method itself, and explorations of the interplay between science and various aspects of life, including the evolution of humankind. This curated collection offers a multifaceted perspective on the journey of scientific discovery and the evolution of scientific thought.

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(web.mnstate.edu)
Misc Science History Scientific Books Scientific Development

Building a Link Blog: Inspired by Simon Willison

2025-02-04

Inspired by blogger Simon Willison, I've started a link blog to share interesting web links along with my personal comments and thoughts. Simon's blog is known for its AI content and high-quality links, where he adds personal insights and even code snippets, inspiring my approach to personal knowledge management and sharing. I used to struggle with the uniqueness and value of my posts, but Simon emphasizes the importance of consistent writing and accumulating work over time. My link blog will be a combination of public bookmarks and my commentary, aiming to enhance the reader's experience by adding context, connecting to related topics, and supplementing with background information or other sources.

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(xuanwo.io)
Development link blog

The Demise and Rebirth of Programmers in the Age of AI

2025-02-04
The Demise and Rebirth of Programmers in the Age of AI

This article explores the impact of AI on the programming industry, arguing that AI is gradually replacing some of the basic skills of programmers, such as writing code and debugging errors. This is similar to how the invention of computers replaced human calculators. The author argues this isn't a degradation of programming skills, but an increase in efficiency. The role of programmers will shift towards higher-level architects and AI managers, focusing on system design, AI supervision, and result evaluation, rather than simply writing code.

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(jtlicardo.com)
Development Future of Work

TED Founder Chris Anderson to Give Up Control of the Nonprofit

2025-02-04
TED Founder Chris Anderson to Give Up Control of the Nonprofit

After 25 years at the helm, TED founder Chris Anderson is stepping down and giving away control of the nonprofit organization. He's seeking someone or an entity with a compelling vision and the resources to take TED to the next level. While financially sound with substantial cash reserves, Anderson believes relinquishing control will unleash new creativity and energy. Potential successors include universities, philanthropic organizations, media companies, tech firms, or even a decentralized autonomous organization. This bold move promises significant changes for TED, sparking considerable speculation about its future direction.

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(www.wired.com)
Startup

JS1K Winner: Bouncing Beholder - A 1KB Platformer

2025-02-04

Bouncing Beholder is a JavaScript platform game that fits within the incredibly tight constraints of 1024 bytes. The author achieved this feat through ingenious coding techniques, such as method name abbreviation, minimizing function use, and a highly holistic code design. The game involves navigating a procedurally generated landscape, collecting coins, and avoiding hazardous terrain. The article details the development process and showcases fascinating low-level optimization strategies, offering a unique look into the world of extreme code compression.

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(marijnhaverbeke.nl)
Game

Turing's Secret Wartime Project: Unveiling the Portable Voice Encryption System 'Delilah'

2025-02-04
Turing's Secret Wartime Project: Unveiling the Portable Voice Encryption System 'Delilah'

After WWII's victory in Europe, Alan Turing's assistant, Donald Bayley, learned of a secret project: the 'Delilah' portable voice encryption system. Recently, a cache of Turing's wartime papers, the 'Bayley papers,' sold for nearly half a million US dollars, revealing Delilah's secrets. This compact, 39kg device used a stream of pseudorandom numbers to encrypt speech, its core being a Turing-designed key generator based on multivibrators—an incredibly innovative feat for the time. The papers reveal Turing's exceptional skills in electrical engineering, adding a new dimension to his legacy beyond mathematics and computer science. They highlight his prowess as a creative and resourceful engineer.

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(spectrum.ieee.org)
Tech Turing Voice Encryption

Radiant Foam: Real-time Differentiable Ray Tracing Breaks New Ground

2025-02-04

Researchers introduce Radiant Foam, a novel scene representation combining the efficiency of volumetric mesh ray tracing with the reconstruction quality of splatting methods. Leveraging Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulation, Radiant Foam achieves real-time ray tracing surpassing even hardware-accelerated Gaussian ray tracing in speed while nearly matching Gaussian splatting's reconstruction quality. Avoiding complex acceleration structures and special hardware/APIs, it only requires a standard programmable GPU. This breakthrough promises to advance real-time rendering significantly.

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(radfoam.github.io)
AI real-time rendering

Motion Sickness in Gaming: An Often-Overlooked Accessibility Issue

2025-02-04
Motion Sickness in Gaming: An Often-Overlooked Accessibility Issue

Up to one-third of gamers experience motion sickness, significantly impacting their gaming experience. This article explores the causes of motion sickness—a mismatch between visually perceived movement and the vestibular system's perception of movement—and common triggers in games, such as field of view, screen shake, motion blur, etc. The article argues that game developers should provide more accessibility options, such as FOV sliders, FPS targets, and the ability to turn off motion bobbing, to improve game accessibility. Using personal experiences and Minecraft's accessibility settings as examples, the author emphasizes the importance of considering accessibility from the initial stages of game development. The article also points out that the misuse of accessibility options by some players highlights not a problem with the options themselves, but rather flaws in game design.

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(madelinemiller.dev)
Game motion sickness game accessibility

Seven Years Post-Google: Selling My Company & Becoming a Dad

2025-02-04
Seven Years Post-Google: Selling My Company & Becoming a Dad

Seven years ago, Michael Lynch left his job at Google to bootstrap his own software company. This year's update covers the sale of his million-dollar-revenue remote computer control device company, TinyPilot, for $600k, and the arrival of his first child. The sale allowed for better work-life balance; he's since refined a previous blogging course, started a book on writing for developers, and explored new technologies like Nix, htmx, and Zig, improving his fuzz testing workflow with Nix. He remains enthusiastic about independent founding.

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(mtlynch.io)
Startup

China Launches Antitrust Probe into Google Amid Escalating Trade War

2025-02-04
China Launches Antitrust Probe into Google Amid Escalating Trade War

China has launched an antitrust investigation into Google in apparent retaliation for President Trump's new tariffs on Chinese goods. The probe by China's State Administration for Market Regulation will examine alleged monopolistic practices. While Google's search engine is blocked in China, it maintains a presence there, primarily focused on advertising. This action further escalates trade tensions between the US and China, with Beijing also imposing tariffs on various US goods and adding several US companies to a restricted entities list.

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(techcrunch.com)
Tech US-China trade war antitrust investigation

26,000-Year-Old Mammoth Ivory Portrait: World's Oldest?

2025-02-04
26,000-Year-Old Mammoth Ivory Portrait: World's Oldest?

A tiny mammoth ivory carving unearthed at the Dolní Vĕstonice archaeological site in the Czech Republic is believed to be the oldest surviving portrait in the world, dating back approximately 26,000 years. Measuring just 4.8 centimeters tall, the sculpture depicts a woman's face with remarkably detailed features including eyes, chin, and nose, possibly wearing her hair up or a hat. Unlike other artifacts from the site, this individualized portrait represents the earliest known depiction of a specific person. In 2018, facial reconstruction of a woman's skull found at the same site revealed striking similarities to the carving, further supporting its identification as a portrait. This discovery offers invaluable insights into the art and culture of Upper Paleolithic humans.

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(www.livescience.com)
Misc Paleolithic art portraiture

Apple Scraps Advanced AR Glasses Project

2025-02-04
Apple Scraps Advanced AR Glasses Project

Apple Inc. has canceled a project to develop advanced augmented reality glasses designed to pair with its devices. This marks another setback in Apple's efforts to create a consumer-friendly AR headset. The project, shut down this week, involved glasses resembling regular eyewear but incorporating built-in displays and requiring a connection to a Mac. An Apple spokesperson declined to comment, highlighting the ongoing challenges in bringing mass-market AR glasses to fruition.

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(www.bloomberg.com)
Tech

Windows 11: Still a Waste of Time?

2025-02-04

A tech writer revisited Windows 11 and found it still lacking. File Explorer remains slow, Settings are inferior to Control Panel, and hardware requirements are unnecessarily stringent. The author criticizes Microsoft's insistence on TPM 2.0, arguing it's irrelevant for home users and contradicts Microsoft's own security narrative. While recent updates were relatively smooth, Explorer's sluggishness, poor UI design, and the ability for apps to override privacy settings persist. The conclusion? Windows 11 remains largely useless, its market share shrinking in favor of Windows 10.

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(www.dedoimedo.com)
Tech

Codeberg: A Non-Profit Git Hosting Platform Championing Open Source

2025-02-04
Codeberg: A Non-Profit Git Hosting Platform Championing Open Source

Codeberg, a non-profit organization based in Berlin, Germany, operates a Git hosting platform prioritizing the commons. Unlike commercial platforms, Codeberg rejects tracking, third-party cookies, and profiteering. It maintains its own servers, ensuring user data remains secure and is never sold. Its vibrant community comprises developers, artists, academics, hobbyists, and professionals united by a passion for free culture, openness, and creativity. Codeberg's future depends on its users, and welcomes global participation.

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(codeberg.org)
Development

OpenAI's $3B SoftBank Deal and Potential Open-Sourcing of Models

2025-02-04
OpenAI's $3B SoftBank Deal and Potential Open-Sourcing of Models

OpenAI announced a joint venture with Japan's SoftBank on Monday, involving a $3 billion annual investment from SoftBank to utilize OpenAI's software. This strategic shift follows the surprising emergence of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI firm whose advanced model requires significantly less computing power than OpenAI's ChatGPT, challenging conventional wisdom on AI's resource needs. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hinted at potentially open-sourcing their models, a move he suggested on Reddit was a correction of OpenAI's past mistake of keeping its source code private.

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(www.semafor.com)
AI SoftBank AI Open Source

Broken VSCode Extension Download Links

2025-02-04
Broken VSCode Extension Download Links

Download links for extensions in the VSCode marketplace are broken. New installation instructions direct users to download OS-appropriate versions from a 'Version History' link, but this link is missing. The previous sidebar download link has also been removed, preventing users from downloading extensions. This affects all operating systems and browsers.

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(github.com)
Development Extensions Download Links

Leningrad's Forbidden Garden: Botanists' Sacrifice During the Siege

2025-02-04
Leningrad's Forbidden Garden: Botanists' Sacrifice During the Siege

During the brutal 900-day siege of Leningrad in WWII, a group of botanists at the All-Union Institute of Plant Breeding made a harrowing choice: starve rather than consume their invaluable seed bank. Facing unimaginable hunger and death, they prioritized preserving the world's most comprehensive collection of plant specimens, a potential lifeline for future generations. Their story raises profound questions about the ethics of scientific progress versus immediate human needs, the value of preservation, and the complex legacy of sacrifice during wartime. Their actions ultimately contributed to the development of high-yield crops, but their decision to prioritize the future over present survival remains ethically complex and deeply moving.

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(www.lrb.co.uk)
Tech Leningrad Siege Seed Bank Botany

The Death of Microsoft: How Google, Ajax, and Apple Killed a Giant

2025-02-04

In 2007, the author realized Microsoft was no longer the fearsome software giant it once was. The rise of Google, the emergence of web-based Ajax technology, the proliferation of broadband internet, and Apple's resurgence all contributed to Microsoft's decline. While still profitable, Microsoft lost its dominance, its closed strategy and slow response to new technologies costing it the opportunities of the Web 2.0 era. The author argues that Microsoft's 'death' wasn't sudden but a result of multiple factors, its biggest weakness being its clinging to the traditional desktop software model and failure to embrace the new technologies and business models of the internet age.

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(www.paulgraham.com)
Tech

Open Source Projects Face Funding Crisis: Freedesktop.org and Alpine Linux Seek New Homes

2025-02-04
Open Source Projects Face Funding Crisis: Freedesktop.org and Alpine Linux Seek New Homes

Freedesktop.org and Alpine Linux, two crucial open-source projects, are facing server relocation challenges due to funding shortages. After exhausting Google Cloud Platform's open-source credits, Freedesktop.org is now rushing to move off Equinix and its leader proposes a new plan: Freedesktop.org pays for its own servers and seeks sponsors. Alpine Linux, widely used in containers and embedded devices, consumes 800TB of bandwidth monthly and needs new servers and continuous integration environments. It's currently searching for servers near the Netherlands. Both projects highlight the mismatch between their importance and funding, urging more individuals and organizations to support the sustainable development of open-source projects.

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(arstechnica.com)
Development

Cline: A Game-Changing AI Coding Assistant for Serious Engineering

2025-02-04
Cline: A Game-Changing AI Coding Assistant for Serious Engineering

The AI coding assistant market is flooded with tools, but Cline, a free VSCode plugin, stands out for its system-level integration and model flexibility. Unlike code-generation-focused tools, Cline interacts with your entire development environment, excelling in complex debugging, refactoring, and testing. It supports various models (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, etc.), boasts intelligent context management, real-time cost tracking, and a robust checkpoint system. Its unique 'Plan/Act' mode and Model Context Protocol (MCP) enhance efficiency and extensibility, making it ideal for complex systems and large codebases. While limitations exist, Cline's system-level integration, model flexibility, and respect for engineering principles make it a powerful tool for serious development work.

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(addyo.substack.com)
Development system-level integration model flexibility

Continuous LOD Mesh Library: nv_cluster_lod_builder

2025-02-04
Continuous LOD Mesh Library: nv_cluster_lod_builder

nv_cluster_lod_builder is a continuous level of detail (LOD) mesh library offering fine-grained control over geometric detail. It precomputes clusters of triangles, selecting a subset at render time for adaptive detail based on camera position. This results in faster rendering and reduced memory usage compared to discrete LOD, especially beneficial for ray tracing. A unique decimation strategy ensures smooth LOD transitions without gaps or overlaps. A spatial hierarchy accelerates cluster selection, and geometry streaming further minimizes memory consumption.

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(github.com)
Development Mesh Rendering

Steve Jurvetson: The Space-Obsessed VC Who Backed Tesla and SpaceX

2025-02-04
Steve Jurvetson: The Space-Obsessed VC Who Backed Tesla and SpaceX

This article profiles Steve Jurvetson, a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist whose office is a museum of space artifacts. His unique investment philosophy—backing only history-making innovations—led him to invest in transformative companies like Hotmail, Skype, Tesla, and SpaceX. The piece traces his journey from a curious childhood filled with scientific exploration to his rapid-fire academic career at Stanford, his close relationships with Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, and his distinctive investment approach. Jurvetson emphasizes the importance of maintaining a 'childlike mind' as key to staying ahead of the curve in the investment world.

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(cloudvalley.substack.com)
Startup Tech Investing

Backblaze's 1TB File Backup Nightmare: A 100,000 Chunk Limit?

2025-02-04

A user reports Backblaze continuously re-uploading a 1TB+ file, with log errors suggesting a 100,000 chunk limit (10MB each). This contradicts Backblaze's advertised unlimited storage. The user suspects a newly implemented limit, possibly even leading to deletion of existing backups. Support's response has been unhelpful, offering only standard troubleshooting steps.

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(wadetregaskis.com)
Tech cloud backup file size limit
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