How Has Roman Concrete Lasted for Millennia? 1,900-Year-Old Latrine Offers Clues

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Ancient Roman concrete's durability stems from carbonation, revealed by studying 1,900-year-old toilets at Hadrian’s Villa. This insight could lead to sustainable, crack-sealing modern concrete, reducing construction emissions.

Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence

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Kimi K3, a 2.8T-parameter open model with 1M-token context and native vision, excels in coding, knowledge work, and reasoning, outperforming many models despite trailing top proprietary systems. Built on Delta Attention and Stable LatentMoE, it enables end-to-end tasks like compiler design and scientific research, available via Kimi platforms and API by July 2026.

An Engineer's Guide to USB Typе-С (2024)

USB-C ports define data/power roles (DFP/UFP) via CC lines, with USB PD 3.1 enabling up to 240W power delivery. VCONN powers active cables, and signal conditioners like RT/LRD extend cable reach while managing data/power role negotiations.

Microsoft Comic Chat is now open source

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Microsoft has open-sourced Comic Chat, a 1990s IRC chat client that transformed text into comic panels with characters and expressions, popularizing Comic Sans. The project, now modernized for today’s systems, offers a nostalgic glimpse into early internet innovation and invites community exploration of its experimental visual communication design.
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Tech-facilitated abuse is prevalent in domestic violence, with 99% of cases involving tech and 650%+ reporting rises, impacting 27% of children. DV Safe Phones, like GrapheneOS on Pixels, offer privacy tools to enhance safety and reduce tracking risks.

Decoy Font

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Decoy Font is a TTF font using spatial frequencies to hide messages from AI by overlaying two layers visible at different distances, making text readable to humans but confusing to OCR and AI models. It serves as a deterrent against automated text scraping, though advanced models may still decode it.

LM Studio Bionic: the AI agent for open models

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LM Studio Bionic is an AI agent for open models, offering local/cloud execution, privacy, and voice keyboard with local transcription, supporting tasks like coding and document work. It uses models like Voxtral and GLM 5.2, ensures zero data retention, and provides secure cloud access for complex tasks.

$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol

https://www.tryai.dev/blog/ai-music-video-arena-claude-vs-gpt-5.6/opengraph-image-yqks0s?3313ef8f7f360358
Two AI models, Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, autonomously created music videos for "Uptown Funk" with $25 or $100 budgets using FAL/Replicate and ffmpeg. All four runs completed, but faced challenges in character consistency, tempo alignment, and self-iteration, with higher budgets generating more footage but not better quality.

Pebble Mega Update – July 2026

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Since we started mass production in late March, we’ve built over 23,000 Pebble Time 2 watches. We’re over 80% of the way through fulfilling all the pre-orders we’ve received! But that means there are still some ultra patient folks who haven’t received their watches yet. If you’ve placed an pre-order for PT2 and haven’t received it yet (including Batch 6 - August), here’s when we expect to ...

The Little Book of Reinforcement Learning

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This 2021 book introduces Reinforcement Learning from basics to applied algorithms, with a repo containing PyTorch implementations (MC to PPO) in 'algos/' and detailed proofs for dynamic programming in 'supplementary/'.

Solod: Go can be a better C

So translates Go to readable C11 with native C interop, enabling stack-allocated systems programming without CGO overhead. It supports Go features like interfaces and concurrency via standard libraries, currently in active development with 0.2 adding networking and WebAssembly.

NotebookLM is now Gemini Notebook

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Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook, adding cloud-based code execution for research, available to select users. Expanding integration with Gemini app and Search, with full rollout to Pro users soon.

M 3.9 Experimental Explosion – 147 Km ENE of Ponce Inlet, Florida

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Old Icons

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The early Mac app icons, with 32x32 black/white pixels, tilted rectangles, and hands, distinguished apps and influenced other publishers. Modern "squircle jail" debates reflect nostalgia for these lost design elements.

Simulating everything, sort of: The promise and limits of world models

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World models, an emerging AI frontier beyond large language models, aim to simulate physical environments for robotics, 3D asset generation, and scientific research, with companies like Runway and World Labs leading development. Challenges include computational costs, varying definitions, and balancing explicit 3D representations with generative approaches to enable dynamic, interactive simulations.

'Likweli': A new monkey species discovered in the Congo Basin

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Scientists identify new Colobus monkey, Colobus congoensis (Likweli), in DRC—the fifth African monkey in 75 years—emphasizing its endangered status and Lomami National Park's conservation. Yale-led study confirms its unique genetics, traits, and vocalizations, urging protection from habitat threats.

Mathematics of Data Science

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This book covers mathematical foundations of data science, including high-dimensional analysis, SVD, PCA, regression, clustering, optimization, and deep learning, with advanced topics like matrix concentration and compressive sensing. arXivLabs is a collaborative platform promoting open development of arXiv features, emphasizing community, excellence, and user data privacy through ...

How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going

The Roc compiler team completed a 1.5-year rewrite from Rust to Zig, achieving feature parity and enhancing performance with faster builds, memory efficiency, and zero-heap allocation features like hot code loading. While Zig's ReleaseFast improved memory safety and speed, Rust's ecosystem and incremental build improvements were noted, but Zig's flexibility and control better suited Roc's ...

Detecting LLM-Generated Texts with “Classical” Machine Learning

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The author developed an AI-generated text detector using traditional ML models (LinearSVC, Naive Bayes) with ~85% accuracy, leveraging human and LLM-generated text datasets, revealing strong statistical patterns in AI content. Despite limitations, the tool highlights widespread undetected AI use in online platforms like Lofter, raising concerns about authenticity and disclosure.

Immersive Linear Algebra Book with Interactive Figures (2015)

How to navigate, notation, and a recap of some math that we think you already know. The concept of a vector is introduced, and we learn how to add and subtract vectors, and more. In three-dimensional spaces you can produce a vector from two other vectors using this tool.

Helium escaping from atmosphere of nearby rocky exoplanet in a habitable zone

The website uses Cloudflare security to block bots, but browser extensions or network settings are preventing verification. To resolve, adjust firewall settings, switch networks, or consult documentation.

The human-in-the-loop is tired

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LLMs are transforming programming by automating code generation but causing burnout through relentless oversight demands. Developers now balance AI collaboration with evolving roles, grappling with fatigue, lost human connection, and the need to redefine expertise in an era of rapid, uncertain output.

Ring-Zero: Scaling Zero RL to a Trillion Parameters for Emergent Reasoning

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This study explores zero RL for large-scale reasoning, addressing scalability challenges via optimized training pipelines and revealing emergent cognitive behaviors in 1T-parameter models. Key findings include enhanced efficiency, structured reasoning, and spontaneous advanced capabilities like self-verification, validated across benchmarks and a novel evaluation framework.

Pseudpocalypse

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The author conjectures that writing styles leave unique statistical fingerprints, enabling de-anonymization of pseudonyms via text analysis, with 29 bits of identifying information making pseudonymity vulnerable once sufficient text is analyzed. This "pseudpocalypse" risks exposing identities despite efforts to obscure them, as writing patterns, demographics, and personality traits ...

UIUC AI Teaching Assistant

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Our system runs 11 separate models in parallel for text/image retrieval, generation, moderation and ranking and still achieves a median 2-second response time. We use data from textbooks, lecture videos, and student QA forums (ordered, subjuctively, by importance). None of this data is currently available publically because this project was not granted those rights by the authors. My favorite ...

Show HN: Clx – Compile Lua to Native Executables Through C++20

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clx is a cross-platform AOT Lua compiler generating compact native executables via C++ toolchains, prioritizing minimal size over speed. It includes examples like Pong and Mandelbrot, supports desktop apps, and offers build/install commands for Linux/Windows.

Abstracting Effects with Continuations

Representing errors and async operations as values (Result, Promise) improves reliability, but multiple implementations for different computation types lead to code duplication. Continuations abstract these details, enabling a single business logic implementation that works with any effect type, separating logic from effects for reuse and flexibility.

How to Train a Gen AI Kick Drum Model on Your Old Linux Desktop with 6GB VRAM

The author created KickWithReverb, a DAW using a diffusion model trained on 13,000 kicks on a 7-year-old GPU, enabling keyword-driven techno kick generation. The system combines a VAE, latent diffusion, and HiFi-GAN for audio synthesis, deployed serverlessly with Modal for on-demand generation.

Lingbot-map: A 3D foundation model for reconstructing scenes from streaming data

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LingBot-Map introduces a Geometric Context Transformer for efficient streaming 3D reconstruction, achieving 20 FPS on long sequences with paged KV cache attention and superior benchmark performance. It includes tools for offline rendering, sky masking, and sliding-window inference, with fixes and optimizations for stability and scalability in diverse scenes.

CVE-2026-25089: FortiSandbox unauthenticated command injection added to CISA KEV

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Fortinet FortiSandbox's unauthenticated OS command injection (CVE-2026-25089, CVSS 9.8) is actively exploited since mid-2026, alongside two related RCE/CVEs (CVE-2026-39808, CVE-2026-39813). Patch to 4.4.9+/5.0.6+, isolate management interfaces, and audit integrations to mitigate risks.