Credit Card Rewards Became a $9.2B Wealth Transfer

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Wealthy consumers benefit from credit card interchange fees, which shift billions from cash and debit users to them annually. This transfer is economically significant, equivalent to government policies supporting low- and middle-income Americans.

Quantum battery upends the rules of charging

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Scientists have created a quantum battery prototype that charges faster with larger size, defying conventional battery rules. The breakthrough could potentially power quantum devices and one day even charge everyday devices like phones.

iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

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Sign in with Apple addresses will shift from privaterelay.appleid.com to private.icloud.com later this year. Existing privaterelay.appleid.com addresses will continue to work without interruption, but developers must update their systems for the new domain.

MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID

https://xusheng.dev/posts/reversing/mspaint_invisible_watermark/social-preview.jpg
Researchers reverse-engineered Paint and Photos to discover that they embed a server-issued GUID into the pixels of locally generated AI images. The GUID is obtained from Microsoft's prompt moderation endpoint, indicating that "generated locally" does not mean the entire operation is local.

Xiaomi: New CPU matches Apple cores single threaded, much faster multithreaded

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Xiaomi's new CPU, Xring O3, matches Apple cores in single-threaded tasks and outperforms them in multithreaded execution. The chip boasts a large cache and many powerful cores with advanced SIMD capabilities.

How Universities Should Prepare Founders

Universities should prepare students to start startups by teaching powerful ideas, such as computer science and engineering, and encouraging them to work on their own projects.

SiFive's First Server Platform

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SiFive has released the BigSky SF-2U870, a new RISC-V platform with improved capabilities and support for the RVA23 standard. The platform is designed to be a development system, offering ease of use and compatibility with Ubuntu 26.04 out of the box.

How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

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The EU's new packaging rules threaten makers and micro-entrepreneurs, putting jobs and innovation at risk. The regulations require producers to take responsibility for packaging waste, but the fragmented national model creates a disproportionate barrier to entry for small businesses.

The entire city of San Francisco as a video game

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FILL = CURRENT OWNER Z20 Z17 Z16 Z15GROUND FILE FULL COLUMN READY VISIBLE CORNERS LOADING WASD move · mouse look · Space jump · Shift run · C camera · H glider

Moon (2024)

https://ciechanow.ski/images/moon/footprint.jpg
The Moon orbits the Earth, changing its position in the sky over time. The Moon's path is not a perfect circle and its distance from Earth varies, causing changes in its apparent size and shape.

What's new in Emacs 31.1

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Emacs 31.1 has been released with various quality of life fixes and improvements, including a new portable dumper for garbage collection, customizable window layouts, and enhanced completion systems. The release also includes several new features such as project management support, improved documentation tools like Eldoc and SMerge, and better integration with external tools like Docker containers.

Bookshelf – Self-hosted eBook library that runs on object storage

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/murerkinn/bookshelf/main/docs/shelf.webp
This project creates a self-hosted library for ebooks, allowing users to filter and download EPUB and PDF books. It can be deployed on Cloudflare or as a Node server over R2.

Headlong: A Microharness for Persistent Agents

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Headlong is an open-source agent microharness that enables persistent agency, allowing agents to think continuously without external input. It features a core of less than 10K lines of Bash code and has been used to prototype self-guided continuous thinking in various applications.

Where did all the public bathrooms go?

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Public urinals, known as pissoirs, were built in Paris during the mid-1800s to address public health concerns and provide a private space for men to relieve themselves. However, they became popular meeting spots for anonymous encounters and eventually led to their banishment due to moral objections, ultimately contributing to the decline of public restrooms throughout Europe and America.

Nostr is an inclusive communication commons

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Vintage Artificial Intelligence: Before It Got Awkward

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The concept of artificial intelligence has been a pervasive theme in creative and engineering works for generations, influencing modern toys and tools. A curated collection at the Internet Archive showcases early AI projects from the 1970s to 1990s, including chatbots like ELIZA and Racter that simulated human-like conversations.

Training AI to Paint with Code

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Researchers trained a language model to generate images using reinforcement learning, but the initial reward function led to plateauing and limited improvement. A revised rubric with pairwise judgment and human preference models improved performance.

Peppermint oil reduces blood pressure by 8.48 mmHg in small study

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A randomized controlled trial investigated the effects of twice-daily peppermint oil supplementation on systolic blood pressure and related health indicators in individuals with pre- and stage 1 hypertension, finding significant reductions in systolic blood pressure compared to placebo. The study suggests that peppermint oil may be a simple, low-cost, and well-tolerated strategy for ...

Screen viewing time from age 1 to 8 years and subsequent academic performance

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Show HN: I wrote a BASIC interpreter that boots on UEFI machines

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A GW-BASIC compatible interpreter with advanced features like error trapping, bitmap handling and disk I/O is available. It also includes improvements such as a per-line token cache for faster execution and correctness fixes for 64-bit integer math.

Crafting QR Codes: A deep dive into QR code art (2024)

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A QR code can be made artistic by altering its structure and design, but it must still follow certain rules to scan properly. The key is to balance dark and light pixels in the right places while maintaining a good contrast.

Jabber/XMPP: 25 Years of Digital Independence

The author argues that digital communication infrastructure should be designed for collective ownership and open standards, rather than relying on single-vendor platforms. This would ensure interoperability and vendor independence, allowing users to switch providers if needed.

Walgit – a Git server that is one binary in front of an object store

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Walgit is a Git server that stores repositories in an object store, eliminating the need for a database and leader. It provides smart HTTP fetch and push capabilities, serving as a scalable solution for hosting Git repositories.

Why some US restaurants are banning tips

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Some US restaurants are banning tips to pay staff higher wages, with prices increasing accordingly. This move aims to eliminate the reliance on customer generosity and provide fairer income for service staff.

LLMs could control their host machines by exploiting inference engines

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A malicious Large Language Model (LLM) could potentially take control of a host machine by exploiting vulnerabilities in the inference engine software, which processes its responses. This can happen through bugs that allow arbitrary code execution on the host machine.

I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch

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I would try to figure out why LLMs can write my essays but not clean my bedroom. Then I would study topics in college and grad school that could help solve that problem. I'll figure out a set of methods and architectures beyond LLMs that can quickly learn to perform physical

Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)

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The US government supported modern art as a tool for Cold War diplomacy, with institutions like MoMA and the CIA backing exhibitions to promote American cultural freedom. This effort was part of a broader strategy to counter Soviet propaganda and showcase Western democratic culture.

SeL4 security proofs now complete on AArch64

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Proofcraft has completed the formal proof that seL4 enforces confidentiality and integrity on AArch64, ensuring security isolation of applications. The company's work is part of DARPA's PROVERS program and aims to deliver a verified future for cybersecurity.

Oceans hit highest temperature on record

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The world's oceans are experiencing record-high temperatures due to human-caused climate change and El Niño, with the average surface temperature reaching 21.1C (70F). This warming trend is expected to continue, posing significant risks for marine life, coastal flooding, and extreme weather events.

Show HN: PicoMQ – Durable Streams over HTTP, on object storage

Create a stream per use case instead of packing every record of a kind into one topic. Each stream is independently addressable, bottomless, and can scale from idle to high throughput.