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Deconstructing Zork: A Deep Dive into 15,000 Lines of 80s Game Dev

2025-01-20
Deconstructing Zork: A Deep Dive into 15,000 Lines of 80s Game Dev

Rok Ajdnik, in a whimsical quest to test a Kubernetes cluster, embarked on a journey through the 15,000 lines of code that comprise the classic text adventure game, Zork. This article details Zork's evolution across different versions, its ZIL programming language, and its ingenious architecture, including the parser, game objects, syntax, and object tree. Hidden gems are unearthed, such as easter eggs (XYZZY), questionable commands (RAPE), and intentionally trollish mechanics. The author also shares progress on porting Zork to Go.

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(medium.com)
Game Game History

Systemd: Red Hat's Stealth Takeover of the Linux Ecosystem?

2025-01-20

This article delves into the true motivations behind systemd, revealing how Red Hat leveraged its business interests in embedded devices to transform systemd from a simple init system into a core component of the Linux operating system. The author alleges that Red Hat used various tactics, including lobbying open-source projects to depend on systemd and poaching developers from other distributions, to exert control over the Linux ecosystem, sparking a backlash within the open-source community and leading to the resignation of several Debian developers. Systemd is described as a monolithic system with privacy concerns, and Red Hat's ambition is portrayed as creating the next Windows. The article concludes by advocating a return to community-driven development and recommending alternatives to systemd, such as runit and s6.

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(unixdigest.com)
Development

Affordable Vision-Based GNSS-Denied Strapdown Celestial Navigation for UAVs

2025-01-20
Affordable Vision-Based GNSS-Denied Strapdown Celestial Navigation for UAVs

This paper presents a low-cost, lightweight strapdown celestial navigation solution for Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments. Utilizing a modular system with a stabilized imaging system and a low-cost Attitude and Heading Reference System (AHRS), the algorithm achieves position estimates within 4 km accuracy. By performing an orbital maneuver through a full compass rotation and averaging position outputs, biases inherent in the strapdown system are nullified. An iterative method for in-flight geometric alignment of the camera with the AHRS, without external position input, is also presented. The results demonstrate the potential for low-cost celestial navigation as a redundant navigation modality in affordable, lightweight drones.

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(www.mdpi.com)
Tech UAV Navigation Celestial Navigation GNSS Denial

Online Nostalgia Trip: A Retro Gaming Paradise

2025-01-20

Relive your childhood gaming memories with this website! It boasts a massive collection of online DOS games, Atari 2600 titles, and other classic retro games. A powerful search function and multiple sorting options (by developer, publisher, genre, etc.) make finding your favorites a breeze. Whether you're craving a game of Oregon Trail or another timeless classic, this site is your portal to instant retro gaming fun.

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(playclassic.games)
Game retro games DOS games online gaming

Pluto's Largest Moon, Charon, Formed Via a 'Kiss and Capture' Event

2025-01-20
Pluto's Largest Moon, Charon, Formed Via a 'Kiss and Capture' Event

A new study proposes a novel 'kiss and capture' mechanism for the formation of Charon, Pluto's largest moon, challenging the previous catastrophic impact theory. Billions of years ago, Pluto and Charon collided in the outer solar system, briefly merging into a spinning dumbbell shape before separating, yet remaining gravitationally bound. This collision didn't destroy either body, preserving their structural integrity. The theory, incorporating the strength of Pluto and Charon's materials, was validated by computer simulations, accurately predicting the current binary system's orbit. This discovery challenges conventional understanding of planetary collisions and offers a new perspective on the formation of other binary systems.

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(www.smithsonianmag.com)
Tech Pluto Charon Planetary Collision

DeepSeek-R1: A Reasoning Model Trained with Reinforcement Learning, No Supervised Fine-tuning Needed

2025-01-20
DeepSeek-R1: A Reasoning Model Trained with Reinforcement Learning, No Supervised Fine-tuning Needed

The DeepSeek team open-sourced its first-generation reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1, and a suite of distilled models. DeepSeek-R1-Zero, trained via large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without supervised fine-tuning (SFT), demonstrates remarkable reasoning capabilities, though it has some flaws. DeepSeek-R1 addresses these issues by incorporating cold-start data before RL, achieving performance comparable to OpenAI-o1. Six distilled models based on Llama and Qwen are also open-sourced, with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B outperforming OpenAI-o1-mini on various benchmarks. The project supports commercial use and provides an online chat website and an OpenAI-compatible API.

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(github.com)
AI reasoning

Using eSIMs on Devices with Only Physical SIM Slots: A 9eSIM Review

2025-01-20
Using eSIMs on Devices with Only Physical SIM Slots: A 9eSIM Review

This blog post details using a 9eSIM SIM card to enable eSIM functionality on devices that only accept physical SIM cards, tested on Android and Linux. The author purchased a 9eSIM bundle including the SIM, smartcard reader, and adapter. Initial setup proved slightly tricky, requiring the SIM card to be used within its original packaging for proper reader connection. Adding, switching, and deleting eSIM profiles was straightforward using an Android app or the Linux command-line tool lpac (and its GUI, EasyLPAC). Tests were conducted with free test eSIM profiles and a paid LycaMobile eSIM, successfully achieving eSIM connectivity on a Debian Linux laptop.

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(neilzone.co.uk)
Hardware physical SIM

Running DOOM in Microsoft Word: A VBA Hack That's Actually Impressive

2025-01-20
Running DOOM in Microsoft Word: A VBA Hack That's Actually Impressive

A developer has ported the classic game DOOM into a Microsoft Word document! Using VBA macros and base64 encoding, they embedded the DOOM engine and game data within a Word document, rendering the game in real-time by reading keyboard input. While lacking sound, this unusual project showcases the power of VBA and the developer's creativity, prompting reflection on security and the exploration of software boundaries.

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(github.com)
Game

Interactive Groundwater Movement Simulator: Unlocking Aquifer Mysteries

2025-01-20

This interactive science simulation lets learners explore groundwater movement. By adjusting permeability parameters, they observe how water flows through different layers, track a water droplet's path, and learn about aquifer formation. Users can also drill wells, experiencing sustainable versus unsustainable water extraction to understand groundwater resource management. This game is part of the "Will there be enough fresh water?" lesson.

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(has.concord.org)
Tech groundwater science simulation

Parinfer: A Simpler Way to Edit Lisp

2025-01-20

Parinfer is a novel editor mode for Lisp programming languages that simplifies Lisp coding by cleverly linking parentheses and indentation. It tackles the notorious parenthesis problem in Lisp, offering a more intuitive editing experience for both beginners and experts. Parinfer features two modes: Indent Mode and Paren Mode, allowing users to focus on either indentation or parentheses while Parinfer automatically manages the other. It also provides Paredit-like functionality without requiring complex hotkeys. At its core, Parinfer relies on a formal definition of the relationship between parentheses and indentation and employs a smart auto-adjustment mechanism based on this definition.

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(shaunlebron.github.io)
Development Code

CFRS[] Community Demos: Drawing Amazing Art with Six Commands

2025-01-20

CFRS[] is an extremely minimal drawing language consisting of only six commands (C, F, R, S, [, ]). This document compiles CFRS[] demos contributed by community members, including dynamic demos (using the 'S' command for animation) and static demos. These demos showcase a wide variety of shapes, such as flowers, crosses, kaleidoscopes, and leaves, demonstrating the language's expressive power. Even simple commands can create stunning art. This collection offers fun and inspiration for beginners and programming enthusiasts alike.

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(susam.github.io)
Development programming art minimal drawing community contributions

The Architectural Revolution of the Enlightenment: Boullée and Ledoux's Geometric Utopias

2025-01-20
The Architectural Revolution of the Enlightenment: Boullée and Ledoux's Geometric Utopias

During the late 18th century French Revolution, two architects, Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, rejected the excessive ornamentation of Baroque and Rococo styles, embracing bold new geometries. Boullée's designs were highly idealistic, utilizing spheres, cubes, and pyramids to create monumental structures like his massive spherical cenotaph for Newton, showcasing a pursuit of science and light, though largely unrealized. Ledoux, more pragmatic, designed functional structures such as the Chaux saltworks, balancing practicality with symbolic geometric layouts. Both architects' works reveal an extreme focus on geometric forms and utopian ideals, leaving a lasting impact on architectural design.

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(publicdomainreview.org)
Design Architectural Design French Revolution

TypeScript Enums: Use Cases and Alternatives

2025-01-20

This blog post takes a closer look at TypeScript enums: How do they work? What are their use cases? What are the alternatives if we don’t want to use them? The post concludes with recommendations for when to use which approach. It covers enum basics, use cases (e.g., namespace for constants with primitive values, custom type with unique values, namespace for constants with object values), alternatives (e.g., object literals, union of string literal types), and how to perform exhaustiveness checks and enumerate members.

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(2ality.com)
Development Enums

Byzantine-Sasanian War (602-628 CE): The Last Great War of Antiquity

2025-01-20
Byzantine-Sasanian War (602-628 CE): The Last Great War of Antiquity

The Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628 CE was a protracted conflict that nearly destroyed both empires. Triggered by Sasanian King Khosrow II's revenge for the murder of his ally, the Byzantine Emperor Maurice, the war saw years of brutal fighting between evenly matched powers. Emperor Heraclius' military genius and shrewd diplomacy ultimately secured a Byzantine victory, but both empires emerged exhausted and vulnerable to the rising power of the Rashidun Caliphate. This war dramatically reshaped the Middle East and left a lasting impact on religious and cultural landscapes.

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(www.thecollector.com)
Tech Byzantine Empire Sasanian Empire Ancient Warfare

Session Messaging App: A Cryptographic Security Audit

2025-01-20
Session Messaging App: A Cryptographic Security Audit

Security engineer Soatok published a blog post questioning the cryptographic design of the Session messaging app. The post highlights Session's use of 128-bit seeds for Ed25519 key generation, making it vulnerable to batch collision attacks; a proof-of-concept is provided. Furthermore, the post criticizes design flaws in Session's signature verification process and the removal of forward secrecy. Soatok concludes that Session's cryptographic design poses significant security risks and advises against its use.

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(soatok.blog)
Tech

Linux 6.13 Stable Released: AMD Optimizations, Broader Apple Support & More

2025-01-20

The Linux 6.13 stable kernel is here, bringing exciting features like AMD 3D V-Cache optimizations for Ryzen X3D processors, improved power efficiency for AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" servers, support for older Apple devices, and AutoFDO/Propeller compiler optimizations. Initial Intel Xe3 graphics support, NVMe 2.1 support, and expanded Rust language infrastructure are also included. Marking the first major kernel release of 2025, Linux 6.13 significantly boosts performance and hardware compatibility.

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(www.phoronix.com)
Development

GitHub Actions: Why I'm Reconsidering

2025-01-20

This post details the frustrations of using GitHub Actions for CI/CD in a large monorepo with 15 engineers constantly pushing to the main branch. The author highlights key issues: flawed 'required checks' for pull requests in a monorepo setup, poor workflow reusability and YAML management, lack of local development environment, and GitHub's unresponsive attitude towards user feedback. The conclusion advocates exploring alternative CI/CD platforms like GitLab, Jenkins, or even Dagger for better solutions.

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(ninkovic.dev)
Development

Blinkenlights: A Glimpse into Hacker Culture

2025-01-20
Blinkenlights: A Glimpse into Hacker Culture

Blinkenlights, a term originating from a deliberately misspelled German warning sign in hacker culture, refers to the diagnostic blinking lights on the front panels of old mainframe computers. As CPUs sped up, interpreting these lights became impossible in real-time. However, they persist as status indicators on modern network hardware and remain a unique symbol of tech culture, a nostalgic nod to the past.

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(en.wikipedia.org)
Tech hacker culture indicator lights

Revolutionizing Fine-Grained Authorization: Feldera's Incremental Compute Engine

2025-01-20
Revolutionizing Fine-Grained Authorization: Feldera's Incremental Compute Engine

Feldera introduces a revolutionary approach to Fine-Grained Authorization (FGA). Traditional FGA systems evaluate authorization requests in real-time, leading to inefficiency. Feldera precomputes all authorization decisions and uses its incremental compute engine (based on SQL) to update results, turning authorization requests into simple key-value lookups. Even with large object graphs, Feldera processes changes in milliseconds, dramatically improving performance. The article details FGA principles and demonstrates building a high-performance FGA engine using SQL, showcasing its superiority in handling large datasets.

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(www.feldera.com)
Development Fine-Grained Authorization Incremental Computation

SATA SSD's DRM Functions and Accessibility Limitations

2025-01-20
SATA SSD's DRM Functions and Accessibility Limitations

A Linux kernel log shows warnings about an Intel SSDSCKJF360A5L SSD: "supports DRM functions and may not be fully accessible." This relates to an ATA protocol extension allowing the storage device to respond differently based on whether a request is signed by the mainboard's trusted platform module. This enables features like preventing modification of video players. Linux might have an incomplete view of the SSD, hence the warning. Additionally, the log notes the SSD's read cache is enabled but doesn't support outdated DPO or FUA techniques, which are irrelevant for SSDs.

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(unix.stackexchange.com)
Hardware

Rhai: A Safe and Efficient Embedded Scripting Language for Rust

2025-01-20
Rhai: A Safe and Efficient Embedded Scripting Language for Rust

Rhai is an embedded scripting language and evaluation engine for Rust, providing a safe and easy way to add scripting capabilities to any application. It targets all CPU and OS architectures supported by Rust, including WebAssembly, and features a simple, JavaScript-like syntax. Rhai boasts efficient evaluation and tight integration with native Rust functions and types, allowing seamless passing and use of Rust values. Its robust security features protect against malicious attacks such as stack overflows and runaway scripts.

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(github.com)
Development Scripting Language Embedded

Amazon's Return-to-Office Mandate Backfires: Parking Chaos, Desk Shortages, and Theft

2025-01-20
Amazon's Return-to-Office Mandate Backfires: Parking Chaos, Desk Shortages, and Theft

Amazon's mandatory five-day-a-week return-to-office policy has sparked widespread employee discontent. Staffers report insufficient parking, desk shortages, inadequate meeting rooms, and a rise in office theft and poor hygiene. Many employees are conducting video calls from the office, negating the intended benefits of in-person collaboration. While Amazon claims only a few offices are unprepared, the negative feedback highlights the risks of a poorly planned transition away from remote work and raises questions about company management.

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(nypost.com)
Startup office management

Apple's AI Flubs, TikTok's Fate, and More Tech News

2025-01-20

Apple's new AI-powered notification summaries are causing a stir due to inaccuracies, such as misinterpreting a message about a messy child's room as the husband being messy. Apple acknowledges the issue and plans improvements in a future update. Meanwhile, TikTok faces an impending ban, with its fate uncertain. Sonos replaces its CEO following app issues, and Samsung is set to unveil its Galaxy S25 phones. OpenAI introduces a proactive chat feature for ChatGPT, allowing users to schedule messages.

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(techthings.cmail20.com)
Tech

A Physicist's Guide to Ice Cream: The Unexpected Science of a Beloved Dessert

2025-01-20
A Physicist's Guide to Ice Cream: The Unexpected Science of a Beloved Dessert

Ice cream, a seemingly simple dessert, is a marvel of physics and chemistry. Professor Douglas Goff, a food scientist at the University of Guelph, Canada, unravels the science behind its creation, from emulsification and foaming to ice crystal formation. He explains how principles of materials science contribute to the perfect scoop, highlighting differences in structure between homemade and commercially produced ice cream, the impact of additives, and the challenges of vegan ice cream production. The article also details Goff's team's innovative use of electron microscopy to study ice cream's microstructure without melting the samples, showcasing the fascinating intersection of science and culinary arts.

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(physicsworld.com)
Tech ice cream materials science

CollectWise: Hiring its First Founding Engineer (YC Backed)

2025-01-20
CollectWise: Hiring its First Founding Engineer (YC Backed)

Y Combinator-backed startup CollectWise is searching for its first founding engineer. CollectWise uses generative AI to automate debt collection, achieving 2x the efficiency of human collectors at a fraction of the cost. They're looking for a full-stack engineer with experience in React JS, Node JS, Firebase, AWS, SQL, and GPT-4, who can work independently and take ownership. This is a rare opportunity to join a fast-growing team disrupting a massive, outdated industry.

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(www.ycombinator.com)
Startup

California Wildfires Wipe Out Decades of Climate Progress

2025-01-20
California Wildfires Wipe Out Decades of Climate Progress

A University of Chicago study reveals that California's 2020 wildfires negated nearly two decades of emission reduction efforts. The fires caused billions of dollars in economic losses and fatalities, significantly jeopardizing the state's climate goals. The study shows that a single year's wildfire emissions amounted to almost half of California's 2030 emission reduction target, highlighting the critical need for wildfire prevention in state climate policy.

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(news.uchicago.edu)
Tech Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Computational Geometry with Probabilistically Noisy Primitives

2025-01-20

A new preprint explores computational geometry algorithms under probabilistically noisy primitive operations. Many such algorithms rely on primitives accessing input coordinates and converting them to combinatorial information. The paper considers primitives randomly producing incorrect results and investigates achieving high-probability correct outcomes without significant efficiency loss. It finds that for some problems (like convex hull construction), slowdown from repetition can be avoided, while for others (like finding closest pairs), it cannot. This connects to prior work on communication complexity using noisy comparisons to improve efficiency.

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(11011110.github.io)
Development computational geometry probabilistic noise algorithm efficiency

Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect: Extracting the Private Key

2025-01-20

Security researchers reverse-engineered the Bambu Connect printer app, revealing it uses Electron and employs code obfuscation and asar packaging to protect its private key. Researchers detailed a multi-step process, including using asarfix to repair the asar file, analyzing main.node with Ghidra, and ultimately extracting the private key and certificates. The process also involved RC4 decryption and URL decoding.

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(wiki.rossmanngroup.com)
Tech private key extraction

Bambu Connect's X.509 Certificate and Private Key Extracted

2025-01-20
Bambu Connect's X.509 Certificate and Private Key Extracted

Following Bambu Lab's announcement of locking down network access to its X1-series 3D printers with new firmware, the X.509 certificate and private key from the Bambu Connect application have been extracted by hWuxH. This application was intended to be the sole method for third-party software to send print jobs to Bambu Lab hardware. The Bambu Connect app, a relatively simple Electron application, employed obfuscation and encryption, but not enough to deter determined users. The de-obfuscated main.js file reveals the certificate and private key used to encrypt HTTP traffic with the printer, the only obstacle preventing tools like OrcaSlicer from communicating with authentication-enabled Bambu Lab printers. Bambu Lab's next steps are unclear, highlighting the ineffectiveness of security through obfuscation alone.

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(hackaday.com)
Hardware 3D printer security X.509 certificate private key leak
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