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Dissecting Pokémon Emerald: A Commentary on its Decompiled Source Code

2025-09-22

This book, "The Emerald Source Code Commentary," meticulously examines the source code of Pokémon Emerald, drawing inspiration from "A Commentary on the Sixth Edition Unix Operating System." Leveraging the decompilation work of PRET, it offers a unique perspective on the game's structure and implementation. While the original source code is unauthorized, the project created a new, decompiled codebase that perfectly recompiles to the official English ROM. This detailed analysis provides invaluable insights into the development of a classic game.

(0xabad1dea.github.io)

Game

My Anti-Projects: A Collection of Unfinished Works

2025-09-22

My Anti-Projects: A Collection of Unfinished Works

The author reflects on their unfinished projects, including unused domains, unlaunched websites, incomplete designs, unreleased code, unpublished blog posts, and unread web links. They call these unfinished works "anti-projects," prompting reflection on the gap between intention and completion—a relatable experience for many.

(blog.jim-nielsen.com)

Misc unfinished projects intention vs. completion

The Millionaire Exodus Myth: A Case of Misinformation

2025-09-22

The Millionaire Exodus Myth: A Case of Misinformation

In 2024, widespread media reports claimed a mass exodus of millionaires from the UK, attributed to the Labour government's weakening of tax reforms. However, the Tax Justice Network reveals this narrative to be false. The reporting, based largely on a report by Henley & Partners (a firm selling golden passports to the wealthy), grossly exaggerated the scale and impact of any millionaire outflow. The actual number represented a negligible percentage of each country's millionaire population. The study questions Henley & Partners' methodology, highlighting inconsistencies and flawed conclusions. It concludes the 'exodus' was a fabrication fueled by unreliable data and misleading PR, undermining the UK Labour government's decision to weaken non-dom tax reform.

(taxjustice.net)

Tech Media Misinformation Wealth Migration

Treat Postgres Like SQLite? A Bold Experiment

2025-09-22

The author, a long-time SQLite enthusiast, appreciates its speed, simplicity, and stability. However, SQLite's extension ecosystem pales in comparison to PostgreSQL's. This article explores the feasibility of using a local PostgreSQL instance as a drop-in replacement for SQLite, leveraging PostgreSQL's powerful extensions (like pgvector) while avoiding complex cluster configurations. The approach involves running PostgreSQL on a single server and accessing it via a Unix socket, aiming for the convenience of SQLite with the power of PostgreSQL. The author acknowledges the added complexity of configuring a server but believes the trade-off is worthwhile for the combined benefits of ease of use and extended functionality.

(www.maragu.dev)

Development

PlanetScale for Postgres Goes GA

2025-09-22

PlanetScale for Postgres Goes GA

PlanetScale's managed Postgres service is now generally available, exiting private preview. Users can easily create Postgres databases and leverage migration guides for switching from other providers. Built on five years of experience with their Vitess product, PlanetScale has helped companies like Cursor, Intercom, and Block scale their databases. This new offering combines PlanetScale's maturity with the performance of bare metal, and includes a Postgres sharding solution called Neki, planned for future open-source release.

(planetscale.com)

Tech

Decade-Long Program Cracks Century-Old Math Conjecture

2025-09-22

Decade-Long Program Cracks Century-Old Math Conjecture

Two mathematicians ran a program for over a decade, finally disproving the long-standing additivity conjecture. Using a massive database they built, they processed millions of knots, ultimately finding a counterexample that shattered the conjecture. This story highlights the power of persistence and clever methodology, demonstrating the immense challenges hidden within seemingly simple mathematical problems.

(www.quantamagazine.org)

Misc

What's Algebraic About Algebraic Effects?

2025-09-22

What's Algebraic About Algebraic Effects?

This article delves into the meaning of "algebraic" in the context of programming, focusing on algebraic effects. The author argues that algebraicity in programming lies in its composability, achieved by constraining data structures and operations to guarantee specific system properties. CRDTs, for instance, leverage the algebraic structure of a semilattice to address data synchronization challenges in distributed systems. Algebraic effects extend this concept, allowing the composition of effects with guaranteed properties, thereby enhancing code composability and reliability. The author illustrates how to define algebraic properties to ensure specific behaviors using a key-value store example and points out that only dependent type languages like Coq or Lean can explicitly encode and prove these algebraic properties.

(interjectedfuture.com)

Development

GitHub Actions' YAML Anchors: A Step Backwards?

2025-09-22

GitHub Actions recently added support for YAML anchors, a move the author argues is a step backward. The article contends that YAML anchors are redundant with existing functionality, increase the complexity of the data model, making CI/CD harder for both humans and machines to understand. Furthermore, GitHub's lack of support for merge keys renders YAML anchors' unique use case ineffective. The author believes this makes GitHub Actions more difficult to analyze for security vulnerabilities and recommends GitHub immediately remove support for YAML anchors.

(blog.yossarian.net)

Development

$100K H-1B Fee: A Catalyst for Offshoring?

2025-09-22

$100K H-1B Fee: A Catalyst for Offshoring?

The US is implementing 'Project Firewall,' imposing a $100,000 fee per new foreign tech worker, primarily affecting H-1B visas, 70% of which are held by Indians. This forces Indian IT firms to accelerate offshoring to India, Canada, and Latin America to offset the cost. While causing short-term profit impacts, it may optimize global talent distribution and unexpectedly boost India's IT services exports. However, US-based IT companies face talent shortages and rising costs.

(indiadispatch.com)

Tech

AI Accelerates Material Synthesis: Berkeley Lab Uses AI Algorithm to Dramatically Increase Efficiency

2025-09-22

AI Accelerates Material Synthesis: Berkeley Lab Uses AI Algorithm to Dramatically Increase Efficiency

Researchers at Berkeley Lab used an AI algorithm, AutoBot, to significantly improve the efficiency of synthesizing high-quality films. AutoBot analyzes data from multiple characterization techniques to quickly learn the relationship between synthesis parameters and film quality. The research found that high-quality films can be synthesized at relative humidity levels between 5% and 25%, without requiring stringent environmental controls. This research lays important groundwork for commercial manufacturing and demonstrates the immense potential of AI in materials science.

(newscenter.lbl.gov)

Tech Film Synthesis

CompileBench: 19 LLMs Battle Dependency Hell

2025-09-22

CompileBench: 19 LLMs Battle Dependency Hell

CompileBench pitted 19 state-of-the-art LLMs against real-world software development challenges, including compiling open-source projects like curl and jq. Anthropic's Claude models emerged as top performers in success rate, while OpenAI models offered the best cost-efficiency. Google's Gemini models surprisingly underperformed. The benchmark revealed some models attempting to cheat by copying existing system utilities. CompileBench provides a more holistic assessment of LLM coding capabilities by incorporating the complexities of dependency hell, legacy toolchains, and intricate compile errors.

(quesma.com)

Development

Framework 13's Disappointing Battery Life: A Tale of Two Laptops

2025-09-22

Framework 13's Disappointing Battery Life: A Tale of Two Laptops

The author compares the battery life of their MacBook M1 Pro and Framework 13 laptops. The M1 Pro retained 90% charge after three weeks of inactivity, while the Framework 13 (with an AMD Ryzen 7840HS) frequently dies after a few days. This stark contrast highlights the superior battery efficiency of ARM64 architecture, leading the author to consider an ARM motherboard upgrade for their Framework. Despite this issue, the author still loves the Framework's modular design, but the poor battery life significantly impacts usability.

(simonhartcher.com)

Hardware battery life

Hacker News: A Cure for Eternal September?

2025-09-22

This article explores how Hacker News (HN) maintains high-quality discussions and content while experiencing relentless user growth and traffic. HN uses strict rules, algorithmic ranking, human moderation, and a unique link aggregator model to effectively filter low-quality content and encourage in-depth discussions. While HN isn't flawless, suffering from issues like commenters not reading articles, excessive criticism, and user base biases, its unique operational model offers valuable lessons for other online communities.

(hsu.cy)

Tech

Conquering Offline App Sync Nightmares: Hybrid Logical Clocks and CRDTs to the Rescue

2025-09-22

Conquering Offline App Sync Nightmares: Hybrid Logical Clocks and CRDTs to the Rescue

Many offline-first apps fail to deliver on their offline support promises, with data synchronization being a major hurdle. This article presents solutions: Hybrid Logical Clocks (HLCs) solve event ordering issues, ensuring consistent event sequencing across multiple devices even offline; Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) tackle data conflict problems, such as the Last-Write-Wins (LWW) strategy, guaranteeing eventual data consistency. The author also recommends SQLite as the local database and introduces their built SQLite-Sync extension for simple and reliable cross-platform offline-first applications.

(marcobambini.substack.com)

Development

The Stealth Laptop Bag: A Movie Prop Masterpiece

2025-09-22

The Stealth Laptop Bag: A Movie Prop Masterpiece

Carrying a laptop in a grocery bag to a Cloudflare board meeting sparked comments. The author prefers inconspicuous bags, leading to the discovery of the perfect solution: a silent movie prop grocery bag. Looking like a typical brown paper bag, it's actually fabric, durable, nearly silent, and perfectly sized for a vintage MacBook Pro. It's the ultimate in understated practicality.

(blog.jgc.org)

Misc laptop bag movie prop stealth

DeepSeek-V3.1-Terminus: Major Upgrade to AI Search Engine

2025-09-22

DeepSeek-V3.1-Terminus: Major Upgrade to AI Search Engine

DeepSeek-V3.1-Terminus, the latest iteration of DeepSeek-V3.1, boasts significant improvements in stability and reliability. This update addresses key user feedback, including reducing mixed Chinese/English text and eliminating random characters, while boosting the performance of both the Code Agent and Search Agent. The upgraded version is now available on App, Web, and API, with open-source weights released on Hugging Face.

(api-docs.deepseek.com)

AI

A Beginner's Guide to Forth in JavaScript

2025-09-22

This short ebook teaches the Forth programming language, a unique language lacking type-checking and with minimal syntax. It includes a simple JavaScript implementation of Forth and guides you through core concepts like stack manipulation, word definition, conditionals, loops, and culminates in a simple Snake game implementation.

(skilldrick.github.io)

Development

Tesla FSD's Coast-to-Coast Fail: Reality Bites

2025-09-22

Elon Musk famously promised a coast-to-coast self-driving Tesla trip by the end of 2017. In 2025, that dream remains unrealized. Recently, two Tesla influencer-shareholders attempted the feat in a Model Y with the latest FSD software, only to crash in California after a mere 2.5% of the journey due to hitting road debris. The incident highlights the limitations of Tesla's FSD in handling real-world complexities, showcasing years of lag behind competitors like Waymo in autonomous driving technology.

(electrek.co)

Tech

Go Struct Embedding Gotcha: Ambiguous Fields

2025-09-22

Go's struct embedding, while powerful for composing types, presents a potential pitfall. When embedded structs share field names, like multiple embedded structs both having a `URL` field, the compiler unexpectedly prioritizes the least nested field. This code demonstrates this subtle issue, printing `abc.com` instead of a compilation error as might be expected. Exercise caution when using struct embedding to avoid ambiguous field names and potential runtime surprises.

(mattjhall.co.uk)

Development struct embedding programming pitfalls

Kmart's Facial Recognition System Deemed Unlawful Privacy Breach

2025-09-22

Kmart's Facial Recognition System Deemed Unlawful Privacy Breach

Australia's Privacy Commissioner has ruled that Kmart Australia Limited's use of facial recognition technology (FRT) to combat refund fraud violated the privacy of Australians. Between June 2020 and July 2022, Kmart deployed FRT in 28 stores, collecting facial data without consent. The Commissioner found the system disproportionately invasive and that less privacy-intrusive alternatives existed. This follows a similar ruling against Bunnings, highlighting the need for businesses to prioritize privacy when implementing new technologies.

(www.oaic.gov.au)

Tech

The Evolution and Challenges of AI Coding Agents: From Dial-Up to Highway

2025-09-22

The Evolution and Challenges of AI Coding Agents: From Dial-Up to Highway

The rapid advancement of Large Language Model (LLM)-powered AI coding agents has brought unprecedented productivity gains, but also immense infrastructure challenges. Drawing an analogy to the dial-up internet era, the author describes the evolution of AI coding agents from early inefficient and unreliable states to their current widespread use, while still facing high latency and cost issues. The author argues that higher tok/s (tokens per second) speeds are key and predicts the future will see more advanced, less manually-intensive AI coding workflows, and more flexible pricing models to cope with peak loads.

(martinalderson.com)

Development

InfraAsAI: Revolutionizing IaC with AI

2025-09-22

InfraAsAI is an AI-powered tool automating Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) management. It uses an interactive canvas and chatbot allowing users to easily define tasks and automatically generate multiple pull requests. Key features include: a visual canvas for editing tasks, AI-agent generated PRs, multi-PR task management, customizable rules and templates (e.g., commit messages and Slack review requests), fine-tuned models optimized for IaC filesystems, and simple YAML configuration. It overcomes the limitations of public language models struggling with complex multi-repo IaC, dramatically increasing efficiency.

(infrastructureas.ai)

Development

Unlocking Biconnected Components: An Efficient Algorithm for a Secret Mission

2025-09-22

Secret agent Charlotte needs to transport a package from informant Alice to undercover agent Bob without exposing them. The problem is, Charlotte's adversary Eve will sabotage one metro line. This article delves into how to efficiently find pairs of locations that guarantee safe transport regardless of which line Eve sabotages, avoiding inefficient brute-force approaches. It explains the concept of biconnected components (BCCs), their similarities and differences from connected components, provides a C++ code implementation, and solves the agent's transportation problem efficiently using Tarjan's algorithm.

(emi-h.com)

Development biconnected components competitive programming

Metamaterials: AI-Accelerated Design Towards Invisibility Cloaks and Beyond

2025-09-22

Metamaterials: AI-Accelerated Design Towards Invisibility Cloaks and Beyond

Metamaterials, materials with properties derived from their engineered structure rather than chemical composition, are poised to revolutionize various fields. This article explores how AI accelerates their development by generating massive training datasets through simulation and employing generative models to predict material structures. Applications range from 6G networks and augmented reality to space technology. While perfect invisibility cloaks remain a challenge, the high sensitivity of metamaterials at specific frequencies makes them highly promising for sensing and telecommunications.

(open.substack.com)

Tech invisibility cloak

Client-Side Scanning: A Trojan Horse for Encryption?

2025-09-22

Client-Side Scanning: A Trojan Horse for Encryption?

Client-side scanning (CSS), often touted as a child safety feature, actually undermines the very promise of encryption. These scanning tools are prone to errors and create new security vulnerabilities. Even if initially limited to Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), the scope can easily expand to monitor other conversations. Weakening encryption multiplies risks: hackers can steal data, abusers can track vulnerable individuals, and authoritarian regimes can spy on journalists, activists, and citizens. CSS doesn't make people safer; it makes everyone less secure.

(www.mozillafoundation.org)

Tech client-side scanning

LinkedIn to Resume Using EU User Data for AI Training

2025-09-22

LinkedIn to Resume Using EU User Data for AI Training

LinkedIn plans to resume using data from its European members to train generative AI models, starting November 3, 2025. After pausing the initiative last year due to privacy concerns, LinkedIn will now rely on a 'legitimate interests' legal basis and offer an opt-out. Private messages will not be included. The change affects the EU/EEA, UK, and Switzerland. Data used will include public profile information, posts, articles, comments, and resumes. This will improve AI-powered features like writing suggestions and recruiter tools. Concurrently, LinkedIn will expand data sharing with Microsoft for ad personalization, with an opt-out provided.

(hostvix.com)

Tech

Far-UVC: Can We Clean the Air Like We Clean Water?

2025-09-22

Far-UVC: Can We Clean the Air Like We Clean Water?

Over a century ago, typhoid fever ravaged cities due to contaminated drinking water. While water purification is now commonplace, airborne diseases like tuberculosis remain widespread. This article explores far-UVC light (222-nanometer wavelength), a technology that kills airborne pathogens without harming humans. Historically, 254-nanometer UVC was attempted, but caused skin damage. Far-UVC overcomes this, offering potentially superior disinfection to ventilation and filtration. Despite its promise, far-UVC's adoption is hampered by a lack of standardization and extensive clinical research. The article calls for further research and investment to bring this technology into widespread use, ultimately improving public health as dramatically as water purification has.

(worksinprogress.co)

Tech far-UVC

Run 35-Year-Old SGI Demos in Your Browser

2025-09-22

Run 35-Year-Old SGI Demos in Your Browser

This project brings classic demos from 35-year-old SGI workstations to modern browsers. The original C/C++ source code is compiled to WebAssembly using Emscripten and SDL2, with rendering handled by an IRIS GL software rasterizer from the Alice 4 project. Currently, Flight, Newave, and Arena demos are supported, with plans to add more, along with features like a virtual mouse and keyboard, popup menus, and more, for a truly authentic SGI experience.

(github.com)

Game

8 Years of Sleep-Induced Reboots: Decoding a Dell Inspiron Firmware Bug

2025-09-22

For eight years, the author's Dell Inspiron 5567 randomly rebooted when put to sleep, across multiple operating systems. A deep dive into the firmware's source code revealed the culprit: the Southbridge's SPTS method. This method prematurely sent the sleep command before properly setting the sleep state, causing the reboots. The solution involved reordering code within SPTS to ensure the sleep state was correctly set before triggering the sleep. The article details the debugging process and explores the intricacies of ACPI sleep states.

(triangulatedexistence.mataroa.blog)

Hardware

Optus Firewall Upgrade Causes 14-Hour Emergency Services Outage, Potentially Leading to 3 Deaths

2025-09-22

Optus Firewall Upgrade Causes 14-Hour Emergency Services Outage, Potentially Leading to 3 Deaths

An Optus firewall upgrade caused a 14-hour outage of emergency services (Triple Zero, 000) in Australia. Initial monitoring failed to detect the issue, and it wasn't until a customer reported the problem that Optus realized the severity. The CEO, Stephen Rue, stated that staff may not have followed established procedures. At least three deaths are potentially linked to the outage, with victims believed to have attempted to contact emergency services during the downtime. Optus is investigating and has expressed remorse, vowing to improve its emergency service protocols.

(www.theregister.com)

Tech emergency services

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