Keys Not Included: recovering the signing keys for US driver's license barcodes

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My personal website, portfolio, and blog.

Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust

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NVIDIA is developing native GPU programming in Rust, with two tracks: SIMT and Tile, to improve performance and safety. The projects aim to make GPU programming easier for the Rust community.

The Painful Truth: The RAM Crisis Is Only Just the Beginning

Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres

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A 4B model was trained using supervised fine-tuning and agentic reinforcement learning to produce Postgres query plans that beat Postgres's default plans, achieving a 44.7% latency reduction across 113 join-heavy queries. The model learned the harness language of the qo-agent harness through off-policy distillation and reinforcement learning, resulting in a geometric mean speedup of 1.81x and ...

DeepSeek-v4.1 Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compression

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DeepSeek-V4.1 Flash is a multimodal mixture-of-experts model designed for aggressive KVCache compression, achieving nearly 420 Tokens/s speed and reducing the computation overhead by nearly half while maintaining performance comparable to DeepSeek V4-Flash. The model architecture consists of a Causal Encoder-Decoder (CED) structure with cross-layer sharing mode built in CSA2, which reuses the ...

Xiaomi Mimo 2.6 live post-training dashboard

Training metrics of the mimo-v2.6-pro and mimo-v2.6-flash reinforcement-learning runs, live from the trainer's logs.

Backups Aren't Simple

The author shares their experience with data loss and the importance of having a backup system in place, including snapshots and deduplication. They discuss various methods for rotating backups to ensure efficient storage usage.

Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMs

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Researchers developed BITCOS, a distribution-adaptive layout for ternary Large Language Models. It stores weights more compactly than five-trit packing in 26 of the tested models and achieves up to $1.485$ bits per weight on sparse models.

Small programming tricks

The author shares valuable small nuggets of knowledge that can boost engineering productivity, such as shortcuts for tasks like starting a simple server or searching terminal history. These tiny tricks often require minimal mental infrastructure and can significantly ease work.

Developing provably correct Rust code with Verus

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The position is for an Applied Scientist to improve Amazon's complex logistics systems, focusing on data-driven decision making and solving large-scale challenges. The ideal candidate will have a deep knowledge of Operations Research and/or Machine/Deep Learning methods, experience in applying these methods to large-scale business problems, and excellent communication skills.

The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve

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The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve stores hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil in underground salt domes, rather than large tanks, to meet its requirements. This solution is relatively inexpensive and protects the oil from aerial attack, but requires ongoing maintenance and monitoring due to potential tradeoffs.

OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework

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OpenSpec helps teams refine and validate requirements, ensuring implementation matches the desired outcome. It aligns coding agents with evolving project needs through a centralized spec management system.

A 32-Year-Old Bug Walks into a Telnet Server

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A long-standing Telnet vulnerability, CVE-2026-32746, was discovered in 1994 and affects GNU inetutils implementations. The vulnerability allows an attacker to corrupt memory locations by sending specially crafted SLC (Set Linemode Characters) data to the server.

The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind

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Commercial shipping is adopting wind-assisted propulsion systems to reduce fuel consumption and emissions, with over 100 ships equipped and more in development. These modern systems work alongside conventional engines to harness the wind for efficiency gains whenever possible.

Performance Improvements in .NET 11

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The .NET 11 runtime has made significant performance improvements, particularly in the areas of just-in-time (JIT) compilation and garbage collection. The JIT compiler now uses more advanced techniques such as "guarded devirtualization" to optimize virtual method calls, and "escape analysis" to reduce heap allocations. Additionally, the runtime has improved bounds check elimination by ...

AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

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PCB is brought to you by Fable 5

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The author designed a simple PCB for an RPi Pico-based development board with a GDEY0154D67-FL04 display and buttons, using Fable 5.1 and KiCAD, after being disappointed with Claude Opus 4.

Reversing Factorio's RNG

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The author of the post has reverse-engineered the random number generator (RNG) used in Factorio, a popular game about factory-building and automation. The RNG is based on the taus88 algorithm, which uses three linear feedback shift registers (LFSRs) to generate pseudo-random numbers. The author has developed a method to predict future RNG outputs by analyzing past observations and using ...

Part-human part-mouse brain developed in science breakthrough

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US neuroscientists have successfully implanted human cells into mice brains to study psychiatric and neurodevelopmental diseases. The goal is to develop new treatments for conditions like epilepsy, autism, and cerebral palsy that are difficult to test in mice.

HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?

What does a coding-agent harness actually add, and at what cost? It turns out your Claude models may not need Claude Code… We evaluate 21 model–harness pairs spanning seven models and three harnesses—Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Pi—on SWE-bench Lite and Terminal-Bench 2.0.

Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations

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A Raspberry Pi-based e-ink bird frame uses AI for real-time bird detection, displaying hand-cut 1800s illustrations of birds heard in the garden. The project is still in development and welcomes contributions to improve its features and artwork.

Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries

Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"

Programmers tend to favor map and filter over reduce, with less feedback on its use in code reviews. This preference may be due to language limitations or personal familiarity with other methods rather than a fundamental issue with reduce itself.

Mapsnap: Automated Georeferencing for Historic Sanborn Insurance Maps

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The author has developed a program called mapsnap to automatically georeference old Sanborn insurance maps, which can help locate historic addresses and buildings. The program uses OCR to detect street labels and then generates a fit by averaging multiple intersections.

Reverse-engineered Jev-like model

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A Jev-like model generates probabilities for text options in one pass, similar to TypeSafe's commercial model. The repository provides an independent starter model with the same input and output shape, trained on synthetic data and evaluated on a test set.

Dream-RSI: Recursive Self-Improvement through Evolving Worlds

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AI agents need effective exploration strategies to discover high-value solutions, but current systems struggle with adapting to large search spaces. Dream-RSI is a framework that uses replay simulators and dreaming to improve exploration policies at low cost.

Anatomy of a Texture

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A graphics programmer shares the complexity of texture memory layout in modern video games, highlighting block compression, texel ordering, mip mapping, and texture tiles. This complexity arises from performance optimizations such as cache locality and memory transfer speed improvements.

Monsanto's Cruel, and Dangerous, Monopolization on American Farming (2008)

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Monsanto is using its vast resources to intimidate and sue farmers who use genetically modified seeds, claiming they are violating the company's patents. The company has a history of environmental contamination and health problems from its chemical operations in the past.

Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera

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Hackers stole data from a Flock camera, revealing how it tracks vehicles and people, and shared the files with media outlets. The breach shows that Flock's cameras can detect license plates, vehicles, bicycles, and even bumper stickers.

Accurate Models of AMD Matrix Cores

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Researchers studied matrix multipliers on AMD GPUs, finding non-compliance with IEEE 754 standard. They developed software models to validate bit-level accuracy and applied them to demonstrate application-level accuracy differences between AMD and NVIDIA cores.