OpenAI released two new preview models, o1-preview and o1-mini, which introduce "reasoning" capabilities through a chain of thought prompting pattern, allowing them to spend more time thinking before responding. These models have trade-offs in terms of cost and performance, but can handle more complicated prompts and are suitable for applications that demand deep reasoning and can accommodate ...

Former CrowdStrike employees criticized the company's software quality control, citing rushed testing and manual errors that led to customer data breaches. The company faced issues with its Falcon LogScale service, cloud threat hunting service, and coding practices, with some employees saying they were given unrealistic deadlines and inadequate training.

Sign up now to get your own personalized timeline! By signing up, you agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, including Cookie Use.

Annapurna Interactive's entire staff of 25 members resigned after failing to convince Megan Ellison to spin off the games division into a new company. Existing games and projects will remain under Annapurna, with Hector Sanchez as the new president of interactive and new media.

A zero-click vulnerability in macOS Calendar allows an attacker to add or delete arbitrary files, potentially leading to malicious code execution and compromising users' sensitive data. The vulnerability was fixed in macOS Monterey 12.6.1 and Ventura 13, and an attacker could have exploited it to steal iCloud Photos without user interaction.

The user has a 10-year-old 24-drive ZFS NAS that has never experienced a single drive failure, attributing its longevity to being turned off by default and only powered on when needed. The user has implemented various power-saving measures, including a script to turn the NAS on and off, and has also used a PID controller to regulate fan speed and keep drives cool.

The author is working on porting the Common Lisp game engine, Trial, to the Nintendo Switch, which involves overcoming various challenges such as building the SBCL runtime and compiler on the Switch, dealing with the Switch's unique constraints, and optimizing performance. The author is seeking support to continue funding the project and is asking for donations on Patreon, GitHub, or Ko-Fi to ...

A Rust-based Lisp interpreter written using declarative macros, which evaluates Lisp expressions at compile-time and supports lambda functions, recursion, and basic data structures. The interpreter uses a SECD machine simulation to evaluate lambda calculus terms, but its recursive evaluation can be inefficient and may cause performance issues.

Pieter Levels' approach to building micro-SaaS businesses on a single server highlights the importance of simplicity in infrastructure management, allowing teams to focus on product-market fit. By using simple infrastructure and Docker Compose, startups can avoid complexity and prioritize building a great product, rather than getting distracted by shiny new tools or complex setups.

FlowTracker is a Java agent that tracks how a program reads, manipulates, and writes data, providing insights into the program's behavior and output by connecting inputs and outputs to show where output came from. It achieves this by instrumenting Java bytecode, analyzing data flow, and creating a mapping of in-memory data to its origin, allowing users to understand the format of generated ...

Facebook admits to scraping public photos and posts of Australian adult users to train AI models without an opt-out option, despite offering opt-out options to EU users. The company claims it needs a large amount of data to provide a "flexible and powerful" AI tool, and that Australian users can set data to private, but critics argue this is an exploitation of users' privacy.

Nebula, a video on demand streaming service, claims to be owned by its content creators, but an investigation reveals that the company is actually owned by Standard Broadcast, a company owned by a small group of creators, with Curiosity Stream holding a minority stake. The creators have a "shadow equity" arrangement, where they receive 50% of the proceeds from a sale, but do not have actual ...

The article discusses the vulnerability of fiber optic cables to tapping and sniffing, and proposes a solution using encryption to secure 802.1q trunk links at high speeds. The solution uses a combination of VXLAN and Wireguard to encrypt and encapsulate 802.1q frames, and is demonstrated to work at speeds of up to 9.86 Gbps with a performance penalty of less than 2%.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has implemented cryptographic algorithms x25519 and Ed25519 in its open-source library AWS LibCrypto (AWS-LC), which offers secure and optimized implementations for AWS hardware. The company has optimized the algorithms for specific CPU microarchitectures, improved performance by up to 86%, and formally proved the correctness of the implementations using the HOL ...

A music video by Janet Jackson caused laptops to crash due to a natural resonant frequency in the hard drive, affecting multiple manufacturers. The issue was resolved by adding a custom audio filter to remove the offending frequencies, and the manufacturer likely forgot the reason behind the fix over time.

OpenAI's o1 models, trained to emulate reasoning, show promising results on various benchmarks, but their performance on ARC-AGI is modest due to the model's reliance on pre-training data and limited test-time scaling. The o1 model's ability to refine reasoning tokens at test-time is a significant advancement, but its efficiency and generalization capabilities are still limited, and further ...

The user used Pinboard as a microblog from 2011 to 2023, publishing over 50,000 bookmarks to various services, but has noticed decreasing communication and outages, leading to concerns about the service's future. The user plans to research alternative microblog options and will share their findings on their tech blog, while appreciating the value Pinboard provided during its run.

Intel Corp. has qualified for up to $3.5 billion in federal grants to produce semiconductors for the Pentagon. The Secure Enclave program aims to establish production for advanced chips with military and intelligence applications across multiple states.

A VR system provides multimodal feedback to improve concentration by simulating the experience of pulling out a holy sword. This innovative approach helps users confront and control their concentration more effectively.

The user developed an Emacs package, esi, that uses LLMs to enable real-time editing of spoken words, aiming to create a seamless dictation experience. The package is still in development, with room for improvement in latency and UX, and the user plans to replace dependencies on Deepgram and OpenAI with on-device or self-hosted alternatives.

The Financial Times offers a 1-year subscription for S$419, then S$99 per month, with a 24th October deadline. The subscription includes digital access to quality journalism and a Weekend Print edition, with the option to cancel anytime during the trial.

The author, Josh Erb, added maps to his travel blog posts to make them more visually engaging and nostalgic, drawing inspiration from his past work with maps and his love of travel. He implemented the feature using 11ty, d3-geo, and Natural Earth data, overcoming challenges such as performance, device variation, and styling to create a functional and visually appealing map.

JG Ballard's novel "Empire of the Sun" is a meditation on time and memory, exploring how the shocks we encounter become traumas we cannot escape, and how these traces of unbearable pain can become life-affirming and renewing. The novel is a realist account of Ballard's own experiences in wartime Shanghai, where he was interned as a child, and explores the themes of survival, memory, and the ...

Apple's new iOS 18 feature extends Activation Lock to individual iPhone components, linking each part to the owner's Apple Account via its unique serial number. This adds an extra layer of security, making it harder to use parts from stolen or lost devices and reducing the incentive for iPhone theft.

Haiku R1 beta 5 has been released, featuring numerous bug fixes, enhancements, and new features, including improved hardware support, stability, and software ports. The release includes updates to the Appearance preferences, Icon-O-Matic, PowerStatus, Tracker, and Terminal applications, as well as improvements to the TCP stack, network stack, and kernel and drivers.

NextNav's proposal to privatize the 900 MHz band, a shared resource for amateur radio operators and unlicensed devices, threatens to stifle innovation and community-driven projects. The FCC must reject this corporate land-grab and protect the open spectrum as a commons to ensure public safety, community empowerment, and grassroots innovation.

The author, a personal angel investor, has launched a micro VC fund called Materialized View Capital (MVC) to invest in early-stage infrastructure startups. The author also discusses the concept of modular monoliths, a potential alternative to microservices, and proposes tooling solutions to make monolithic architecture more maintainable and scalable.

The Safe C++ proposal aims to create a superset of the C++ language with a rigorously safe subset, providing a robust safety model that eliminates undefined behavior and ensures memory safety. The proposal introduces new language features, such as the "safe" keyword, borrow checking, and relocation, to achieve this goal, and also provides a way to interface with legacy code and unsafe ...

The Topics API infers topics of interest from a site's URL and records them in a private topics history storage, allowing ad tech platforms to serve targeted ads. Ad tech platforms can access a user's top topics through HTTP headers or the Document.browsingTopics() method, which can be used to display relevant ads and record page visits.

Google's DataGemma is an experimental set of open models that help address the challenge of hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding them in real-world statistical data from Google's Data Commons. DataGemma uses natural language queries to retrieve data from Data Commons, which contains over 250 billion global data points, and incorporates this data into LLM responses to ...

Wallops is a free, open-source IRC client for Macintosh Plus and newer classic Mac OS versions, featuring a tabbed interface, multiple connections, and query windows. The latest release includes interface overhauls, new features, and bugfixes, such as saved preferences, per-user queries, and optimized nick list sorting.

The Milky Way's magnetic field is thought to be large-scale and ordered, with different researchers proposing spiral or circular patterns, but a new method using OH maser Zeeman splitting provides complementary information to constrain models. The Very Large Array survey has determined many magnetic field directions, which will help refine our understanding of the Milky Way's magnetic field ...

Jensen's Inequality is a mathematical concept that helps predict the average output of a function when the input is non-linear, warning us that our intuition may be biased towards underestimating the average output if the function is convex and overestimating it if the function is concave. The concept is illustrated through various examples, including dice rolling, stock prices, and teacher ...

Martin Luther King Jr. visited Berlin in 1964, where he spoke at a ceremony commemorating John F. Kennedy's visit and delivered a sermon at St. Mary's Church in East Berlin, despite the US government's opposition. King's visit was facilitated by Willy Brandt and Heinrich Grüber, and he met with East German clergy and students, but his visit was not publicly acknowledged by the East German government.

The user experienced a creepy online identity verification process that asked them to smile for a camera, which they found unsettling due to the chipper voice and lack of accommodation for individual facial expressions. The user highlights the importance of considering cultural and personal differences in tech, as they themselves have a unique way of smiling and struggle with selfie cameras ...

Bounce Imaging has developed the Pit Viper 360, a 360° panoramic thermal-imaging tactical camera that can be thrown, rolled, or lowered to capture images and sounds in various environments. The camera can transmit thermal images, detect objects warmer or cooler than surroundings, and provide real-time panoramic views with low latency and power requirements.

OpenAI's "Strawberry" model, also known as o1, has been announced, and a user has created a model called "strawberry-mimi" that can solve the "strawberry problem" by generating Python code to count letters in words. The user claims that their model, strawberry-mimi, is a state-of-the-art model and is seeking funding to apply this technique to other problems.

Thank you to the volunteer contributions of many people over many years (especially Hari!) which has made this visualization possible. PLDB - Build the next great programming language · About · Keywords · Livestreams · Labs · Resources · Acknowledgements · Part of the World Wide Scroll

The author has been using MathAcademy.com, an online platform that adapts to each student's learning pace and style, for two months and has accumulated over 2,000 experience points, finding it to be a valuable tool for learning and retaining mathematical concepts. The platform's personalized approach, adaptive technology, and focus on long-term retention make it an efficient and effective way ...

cs career fair cancelled at community college because no companies reached out

Cognitive Biases and Principles you can use to create products people love

The author discusses the controversy between Little-Endians and Big-Endians, who have different orders for representing numbers in computer memory and transmission. The author argues that the Little-Endians' order is more consistent and convenient, but the Big-Endians' order is more widely used and has historical significance.

s6 is a suite of programs for UNIX that provides process supervision and various operations on processes and daemons. It offers a toolbox for low-level process and service administration, with tools that can be assembled together to achieve powerful functionality.

The author argues that software engineering plays a crucial role in machine learning, as poor engineering can lead to issues such as reproducibility crises, technical debt, and catastrophic failures. The book aims to provide best practices for machine learning and data science, covering topics such as algorithm analysis, data and hardware matching, and software documentation.

Kelsey Piper criticizes the degrowth movement, arguing that its literature is poor quality, lacks concrete policy proposals, and is not taken seriously by mainstream economists. A recent review of 561 degrowth papers found that most are opinions rather than analysis, with superficial and incomplete data analysis.

AWK The AWK Programming Language by Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, and Peter J. Weinberger

In 1983, Drexel University made a bold move by requiring all students to own a computer, choosing the Apple Macintosh over IBM due to its affordability and user-friendly interface. This decision had a significant impact on the University's reputation, with Drexel becoming known as the "Macintosh capital of higher education" and paving the way for future technological advancements on campus.

PGVector lacks features for dense vector search, scalability, and UX, making it less suitable for complex search queries. Trieve offers a dedicated search solution with native prefix expansion, highlighting, and scalability, providing a better user experience and more accurate results.

Greece is facing a population decline, with projections suggesting a 25% shrinkage by 2070, driven by low birth rates and high death rates. The government is taking measures to address the issue, including tax breaks and increased state allowances for newborns, but experts warn that a demographic collapse could have severe economic and social consequences.

Iron Mountain, a storage and destruction company, has found that one-fifth of hard disk drives from the 1990s are unreadable, highlighting the need for data backup and archiving. The company warns that all storage media, including hard drives, optical media, and magnetic tape, are prone to failure and degradation over time, emphasizing the importance of copying important data to fresh storage.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating a Tesla Semi crash and fire on California's Interstate 80 that required 50,000 gallons of water to extinguish and closed the highway for 15 hours. The incident occurred while the truck was headed to Tesla's battery factory in Nevada and highlights the challenges of fighting fires involving electric vehicles.

A study found that most researchers at a top university agree that air travel contributes to climate change, but many still fly to conferences, with professors and PhD students being the most frequent flyers. Researchers suggest that institutions and conference organizers should adopt alternatives to reduce the carbon footprint of academia, such as virtual and hybrid meetings, and carbon ...

Mars's thin atmosphere, composed of carbon dioxide, creates striking cloud patterns when cooled and mixed with dust and water vapor. Scientists are studying these patterns to better understand their impact on Mars's climate.

China is gradually raising its retirement age to 55 for women in blue-collar jobs and 58 for women in white-collar jobs, starting from 2025, to address an ageing population and dwindling pension budget. The plan aims to ensure the country's pension fund remains sustainable, as the main state pension fund is expected to run out of money by 2035.

Edward King, Viscount Kingsborough, died in 1837 due to typhoid fever while imprisoned for unpaid debts to a paper merchant, leaving behind his unfinished magnum opus "Antiquities of Mexico", a 9-volume series featuring Mexican pictorial manuscripts. Kingsborough's project aimed to preserve and showcase pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican books, but also promoted his theory that the peoples of Mexico ...

Pico-ASHA is a project to implement Android's Audio Streaming for Hearing Aids protocol on a Raspberry Pi Pico W microcontroller, allowing users to stream audio to Oticon More hearing aids. The project is still in progress and requires users to download and load the binary onto the Pico W, then pair and bond with the hearing aid devices to start streaming audio.

The user set up an older Android phone without logging into a Google account, using the Aurora Store and F-Droid app stores to download alternative apps. This semi-deGoogled phone allows for some independence from the Play Store, but still has Google apps installed, which can be ignored or used as needed.

Tesla's Cybertruck dominated the electric pickup truck segment in July 2024, with 5,175 registrations, a 61% month-over-month increase, and a $20,000 premium due to the Foundation Series edition. The Cybertruck's sales are increasing despite its raised price, and it remains to be seen how it will perform when its price is comparable to its competitors.

The Financial Times offers a subscription with varying prices: Rs1950 for 6 months, then Rs1950 every 3 months, and finally Rs4335 per month. The subscription includes FT Digital Edition and FT newspaper delivery, with options to cancel or save with a 12-month commitment.

The 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded at MIT, with a ceremony and companion event "Ig Nobel Face-to-Face" featuring new winners asking each other questions. The ceremony had a Murphy's Law theme, with a mini-opera, 24/7 lectures, and paper airplanes thrown by attendees.

Florida law enforcement officials are investigating voters who signed a petition to enshrine abortion rights in the state's constitution, with some residents receiving unannounced visits from officers asking to confirm their signatures. The investigation has been criticized by Democrats and voting groups, who say it is an effort to intimidate voters and undermine the will of the people.

Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker

Reinforcing feedback loops can create a cycle where toil breeds itself, leading to a decline in quality and development. However, by making targeted interventions, such as stricter code review requirements, it's possible to break this cycle and improve quality over time.

Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker

A 72-year-old man is considering taking semaglutide or tirzepatide to lose weight for his college reunion, but experts are divided on whether these injectable drugs are safe and effective for seniors with obesity. While some studies show benefits, others raise concerns about muscle and bone loss, and the long-term effects of these treatments are still unclear.

The author discusses the eternal conflict between protecting free speech and respecting the rule of law online, highlighting the need to separate facts from opinions and address the challenges of online identity, law enforcement, and fact verification. The author argues that the binary discussion about free speech is pointless and that practical solutions are needed to address the "real ...

Wealthy and powerful men have long sought to "rejuvenate" themselves through various treatments, from blood transfusions to testicular extracts, often with dubious effectiveness and safety. Despite the questionable nature of these treatments, the quest for anti-aging solutions continues, with wealthy individuals investing heavily in longevity startups and treatments, while scientists caution ...