Foreground p.20 RECYCLING USED ICs [theme Hardware] [author Mikkelsen] p.62 DECIPHERING MYSTERY KEYBOARDS [theme Hardware] [author Heltners] p.72 LIFE...
A new type of malware called SPEAKE(a)R can covertly turn headphones, earphones, or simple earbuds connected to a PC into microphones when a standard microphone is not present, muted, taped, or turned off. The malware can record human speech of intelligible quality and eavesdrop from nine meters away, posing a significant cyber security threat.
Game developers use various methods to pause games, including manipulating time, freezing frames, and ignoring pause commands for certain functions. Pausing a game can be a complex process, but most modern game engines support it, and developers can implement it with proper testing and consideration of different pause scenarios.
The Nanopass Framework is an embedded domain-specific language for creating compilers that focuses on creating small passes and many intermediate representations. Nanopass reduces the boilerplate required to create compilers making them easier to understand and maintain.
The user explains that programming languages can be grouped into seven fundamental "ur-languages" that share common patterns and characteristics, and that learning a language from the same ur-language is easier than learning one from a different ur-language. The user suggests learning a language from the ALGOL family (such as Python or Java), then learning a language from the Prolog family ...
A Dubai airline worker was arrested for sharing bomb damage photos in a private WhatsApp group, charged with publishing information harmful to state interests. He remains in detention, highlighting concerns over Dubai's surveillance operations and access to private communications.
A powerful toolkit to create, stack, and animate shaders.
Unauthorized access to Vercel systems has been detected, and an investigation is underway with incident response experts and law enforcement. Affected customers are being notified directly, and all customers are advised to review environment variables and use sensitive variable features.
The user encountered a problem at Antithesis where they needed to efficiently query a large tree data structure in Google BigQuery, but point lookups were slow. They solved this by inventing a "skiptree" data structure, which is a hierarchy of skiplists that allows for efficient querying with a fixed number of JOINs in SQL.
Scientists at NIST have developed a way to make integrated circuits for light, which could power emerging technologies like AI, quantum computers, and optical atomic clocks. The new technique allows for the creation of complex circuits that can manipulate light in various ways, potentially making these technologies more powerful and portable.
Grit Matthias Phelps, a Cornell University instructor, introduced manual typewriters to her German language class to prevent AI use and teach students the value of writing without digital assistance. The "analog" assignment allowed students to experience the raw feeling of typing without screens, online dictionaries, or delete keys.
Adobe's Creative Cloud is facing competition from free alternatives like Autograph and Canva, which offer similar design tools at no cost. Industry rivals like Apple and DaVinci Resolve are also undercutting Adobe's pricing with affordable subscription options.
Anonymous request-token comparisons from the community, showing how Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7 differ on real inputs Open source · stored rows contain anonymous submission IDs onlyNot affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.
You started a solo consultancy helping SMEs with back-office issues and are looking for advice on getting your first project. You're offering 10 hours free to the first 5 clients to help them get started.
Before GPS, aircraft navigated using celestial navigation, which was automated in the 1960s with the development of the Astro Compass system that used an electromechanical analog computer called the Angle Computer. The Angle Computer physically modeled the celestial sphere to solve the navigational triangle and provide accurate heading and position information to the aircraft navigator.
The binary GCD algorithm is a variant of Euclid's algorithm that uses binary shifts, comparisons, and subtractions to find the greatest common divisor of two numbers, which is ~2x faster than the C++ standard library's gcd function. The algorithm's performance can be further optimized by using __builtin_ctz to reduce the number of iterations and by rearranging the assembly code to take ...
Gemma 4 E2B generating Excalidraw diagrams from text prompts, running entirely in desktop Chrome via WebGPU. KV cache compressed 2.4× using TurboQuant's polar+QJL algorithm reimplemented in WGSL compute shaders. Requires Chrome 134+ on desktop — Safari/iOS not supported.
Japan's railway system excels due to good public policy, business structure, and land use rules, not cultural factors. Its unique model of private companies building cities and capturing value from real estate and commercial side businesses has contributed to its success.
The writer is in New York to see the musical Operation Mincemeat on Broadway, a show about British spies who fooled Hitler with a dead body and fake papers. The writer sees the show as a story about friendship and the power of caring about something.
The user is updating their 10-year-old Unity project, Gun Rocket, to the latest version, starting with Unity 5.5 and migrating through various versions, noting changes in Unity's tech and UI along the way. The user successfully updates the project to the latest Unity version, 6000, and fixes various bugs, concluding that simplicity and luck played a significant role in the project's success.
A minimal viable program is the smallest program that solves a particular problem. It is small and beautiful. It has no additional features. If you removed a single feature it would be totally useless. If you added a new feature that feature would not be essential, you could use the program without making use of the new feature. Very few of the programs I use are minimal viable programs, but ...
The user attended an IETF meeting to learn about TCP BBR and observed the ongoing debate about IPv6 replacing IPv4, which led them to investigate the history of networking protocols and their complexities. The user discovered that the intertwining of ethernet and IP protocols has resulted in a complicated system, making it difficult to imagine a network without MAC addresses and IP addresses, ...
The user gave a talk at FOSDEM 2026 about phantom binary dependencies, invisible package relationships that threaten sustainability and security of tech infrastructure. To address this issue, the user suggests creating tools to identify and record binary dependencies, and making systemic changes to package management ecosystems to ensure security and sustainability.
The Kdenlive team made significant progress in 2025, releasing new features, bug fixes, and improvements to the user interface, with a focus on stability and community support. The team is now looking ahead to upcoming features, including 10/12 bit color support, playback optimizations, and OpenFX support, and is grateful for community contributions and donations that enable continued development.
Matt Mullenweg has directed core committers to proceed with registering Automattic’s Akismet spam plugin on the new Connectors screen that’s shipping in WordPress 7.0, overruling a revert backed by several core committers. “I did say that, and have changed my mind and we’re doing this,” Mullenweg wrote on Trac ticket #65012 last week. The ticket was opened on April 1 by Automattic-sponsored ...
A company migrated from DigitalOcean to Hetzner dedicated servers with zero downtime, saving $14,388 per year. The migration involved six phases, including MySQL replication, DNS TTL reduction, and reverse proxy setup.
Top (Modern Common Lisp with FSet)
The author optimized Ruby's Bootsnap and File.join methods to improve performance, reducing setup time and boot time in Ruby applications. The optimizations included load path caching, reducing syscalls, and implementing fast paths for UTF-8 and ASCII encodings.
Lawmakers blocked a reauthorization of Section 702 with no changes, pushing for a 10-day extension to pass real reform. They want probable cause warrants for FBI access to collected information, not just a blanket reauthorization.
When you make speed and “moving fast” the biggest priority on a project or in an organization, the first thing to breakdown is talking to each other. Talking takes time. Consensus is expensive and slow. In a pressurized environment there’s no time to schedule calls, get input from subject matter experts, or resolve key differences of opinion. ASAP makes a big assumption that all relevant ...