Google announced Willow, a quantum chip that achieved two major breakthroughs: reducing errors exponentially as qubits scale up and performing a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take a supercomputer 10 septillion years. Willow brings Google closer to running practical, commercially-relevant algorithms that can't be replicated on conventional computers.

Funko used AI-powered Brand Shield to create a bogus phishing report, causing domain iwantmyname to disable the domain. The real issue lies with the registrar's handling of reports, not just the AI tool.

Sora.com is launching a video generation model that creates realistic videos from text, available to ChatGPT Plus and Pro users. The model, Sora Turbo, allows users to generate videos up to 1080p resolution and has various features, but still has limitations and safeguards to prevent abuse.

Luigi Mangione, 26, was arrested in Pennsylvania on firearms charges after a nearly week-long manhunt in New York City. He is a person of interest in the slaying of the United Healthcare CEO and had a manifesto with grievances against the US healthcare system.

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The user discovered a vulnerability in the sysupgrade.openwrt.org service that allowed for command injection and SHA-256 collision attacks, which could be used to compromise devices by forcing them to upgrade to malicious firmware. The OpenWrt team was notified and fixed the issues within 3 hours, releasing a patched version and notifying users to ensure no devices were compromised.

Researchers introduce TRELLIS, a 3D generative model that creates high-quality 3D assets with versatile output formats. TRELLIS uses a unified Structured Latent representation and Rectified Flow Transformers to surpass existing methods in 3D generation.

Pat Gelsinger's leadership at Intel was marked by arrogance and a failure to address the company's cultural problems. His decisions, such as maintaining the dividend and killing the Tofino project, were short-sighted and damaged Intel's relationships with partners.

Our server host Hetzner canceled service without warning, wiping our data and leaving us unable to access our library. We quickly moved to a new host, Scaleway, and re-imported our data, learning from the experience to implement new safeguards.

Himalaya CLI is a Rust application that relies on cargo features for enabling or disabling functionalities. It can be installed using various methods, including a pre-built binary from GitHub or cargo install.

Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider observed the first evidence of antihyperhelium-4, a bound state of two antiprotons, an antineutron and an antilambda. The discovery confirms the statistical hadronisation model's ability to describe the production of hypernuclei in heavy-ion collisions.

Debanking refers to the practice of banks involuntarily closing a customer's account, often without explanation, which can have a disproportionate impact on socially disadvantaged individuals and small businesses. The issue is complex, driven by a combination of factors including AML regulations, risk tolerance, and the need for banks to protect themselves from potential financial losses, ...

A scientific study found that home storage system fires in Germany have a 0.0049% probability, which is 50 times lower than general house fires. The study compared fire risks of home storage systems to other home appliances and vehicles, concluding they are relatively safe.

The article discusses the security risks of Direct Memory Access (DMA) attacks, which allow malicious devices to access and manipulate memory on a computer, and how the industry has struggled to address these risks despite the development of technologies like IOMMU. The article also explores the potential for new devices like SD Express and microSD Express to introduce new DMA attack vectors, ...

The author shares useful evaluation metrics for common tasks like classification, summarization, and translation, focusing on simple and effective methods to save time and improve model performance. They also discuss the importance of human evaluation, calibration of evaluation criteria, and mitigating the Innovator's Dilemma in building reliable LLM applications.

As an open-source maintainer, it's okay to step away if you're not happy, and you're not obligated to continue maintaining a project, even if you're the only one capable of doing so. Establish a baseline for yourself, prioritize your happiness and well-being, and consider creating a transition plan or archiving the project to ensure a smooth exit.

Ken Thompson built a chess machine named Belle that won a World Computer Chess Championship, and he created endgame databases that showed the queen vs rook endgame is a win for the queen. However, Ken predicted that the game of chess itself is a draw, and this has been confirmed by recent experiments with AlphaZero.

When storing event times, it's recommended to record the original user's intent and the event location to accurately determine the timezone, rather than relying on UTC alone. This approach allows for denormalization of the UTC time for sorting and display purposes while maintaining the original time and location for editing and updates.

The user is working on a Ternary microprocessor project, creating a processor architecture and hardware to test its operation and develop the first ternary programs. They are seeking collaborators and funding to complete the project and license the VLSI layout to hardware manufacturers.

Embodied is shutting down due to financial difficulties, affecting its AI-powered social robot Moxie. Moxie will soon cease to function as its cloud-based services are discontinued.

Bazel 8.0 is a major LTS release with new features and backwards incompatible changes. It includes changes to Android, C++, Protobuf, and Java rules, as well as improvements to Bzlmod, symbolic macros, and the build event protocol.

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The Raspberry Pi 500 is a powerful computer in a keyboard form factor, offering good thermal performance and a pleasant package. It lacks some features like camera and display ports, and PCIe storage, but is suitable for a child's first computer or a desktop computer for basic tasks.

Xylella fastidiosa, a deadly bacterium, is destroying millions of olive trees in Europe, threatening the global olive oil market and local economies. The disease, which has no cure, is spread by insects and has already infected over 20 million olive trees, causing devastating economic losses.

The author is excited about the rapid improvement in large language models (LLMs) that can run on consumer-grade laptops, citing Meta's Llama 3.3 70B as a prime example. This model delivers similar performance to larger models like GPT-4 at a fraction of the cost and resources.

The puzzle is about a liar who says they have either one green hat or two green hats. The solution will be revealed later.

The 1€ Filter is a low pass filter for real-time signals with two configurable parameters: minimum cutoff frequency and speed coefficient. It uses exponential smoothing with an adaptive smoothing factor to balance jitter and lag.

This Post is showing how to Reverse Engineer a Unknown FPGA Board which I got off Ebay. This board has Intel Cyclone IV FPGA EP4CGX22BF14 board can be found on internet with part number IBM 98Y2610

A mysterious illness dubbed Disease X has killed 31 people in DR Congo, with over 400 cases reported since late October. The WHO has sent a rapid response team to investigate the outbreak, which is centered in a remote rural area.

Misinformation on social media often evokes moral outrage, leading people to share it impulsively without checking accuracy. This relationship between misinformation and outrage makes it harder to counter misinformation with existing measures like accuracy nudges.

Kafka's "Investigations of a Dog" is a philosophical tale of a dog's quest for knowledge and freedom, poking fun at the follies of metaphysical speculation. The story is a satire on the university discourse, highlighting the gap between knowledge and power, and the dog's futile attempts to uncover the truth.

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Holos is a Kubernetes config management tool using rendered manifests, handling single resources to multi-cluster platforms. It leverages CUE for strong typing and validation, with customizable workflows and support through Discord and GitHub.

Shivika Sabharwal, a 32-year-old ceramist, used WhatsApp Business app to grow her pottery business by managing messages and reaching new customers. WhatsApp is now a platform for businesses to connect with customers, with 1 billion users messaging with a business each week.

Chinese cyberspies targeted high-level US political figures, recording calls, according to White House security boss Anne Neuberger. The Salt Typhoon campaign compromised eight US telecom providers and dozens of global organizations for espionage and intellectual property theft.

The user learned that simplicity is key to a startup's speed of execution and that adding complexity through employees, products, and markets increases exponentially, making decisions multi-dimensional. They advise exploring new markets or products only if the gains are exponential or necessary, and to focus on building towards economy of scale, scope, or innovation.

Ted Chiang is a slow writer who focuses on philosophical questions in his science fiction stories, often using thought experiments to explore human reactions to big ideas. His stories, like "Arrival" and "The Merchant And The Alchemist's Gate," examine human values and identity in the face of technological and societal changes.

A Perl script is designed to parse XML responses from a server that provides information about the Earth's past based on observations. The script uses the XML::Twig module to parse the XML response and extract specific data, such as the year, nation, purpose, and details of an observation.

The Raspberry Pi 500 is a powerful computer in a keyboard form factor, offering good thermal performance and a pleasant package. It lacks some features like camera and display ports, and PCIe storage, but is suitable for a child's first computer or a desktop computer for basic tasks.

Rupert Murdoch's children James, Elisabeth, and Prudence will retain control over their father's media empire after a Nevada court ruled against him. The court found Murdoch acted in "bad faith" in trying to give his oldest son Lachlan complete control over the companies.

Saving for a pension can be unappealing but employers and governments offer incentives like matching contributions and tax relief. Compound returns can work well over a long horizon but actual outcomes are uncertain and taxes may apply in retirement.

Palantir and Anduril formed a partnership to advance US AI capabilities and deliver technological infrastructure for national security. They aim to solve two main problems: retaining sensor data for AI training and creating a secure enterprise pipeline for AI use.

Software development is a process of growing a living thing, not building a toy model, and its value depends on how well it's understood by the team that needs to fix and modify it. A team's stability and ability to retain its mental model of the code are crucial for the software's survival, and constant churn can be devastating, making deadlines meaningless and turning software into a ...

Gemini and Claude struggled with categorization tasks, often making incorrect connections. They had trouble identifying proper nouns and understanding nuances in language.

A compromised release was uploaded to PyPI after a project automatically processed a pull request with a flawed script that used a vulnerable GitHub Action trigger to access repository secrets. The issue highlights the importance of separating data and code, and GitHub's complexity has created a large number of footguns that make it tricky to use GitHub Actions securely.

Inkscape 1.4 is a significant release with new features, improved user interface, and enhanced functionality. It includes a new extensions gallery, filter gallery, and unified font browser.

Meta platforms failed to moderate political ads, allowing a far-right group to reach 160 million users with 4,140 ads violating policies and possibly Romanian laws. The company's inaction raises concerns about electoral integrity and accountability of digital platforms.

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The user is implementing a PDP-11/20 emulator to run the Knight TV system, a terminal system connected to the AI KA10, and is writing a new emulator in C instead of using simh. The emulator is designed to model the PDP-11's Unibus and devices, including the KE11 extended arithmetic module and the TV hardware, and will be used to connect to the ITS system.

Google introduced its latest quantum chip, Willow, with 100 qubits, achieving two key milestones: breaking the Quantum Error Correction Threshold and posting a new benchmark for quantum performance.

Intel's dominance in the computing industry was lost due to its failure to adapt to the shift from desktop to mobile computing, where efficiency became the top priority, and its refusal to become a foundry, which would have allowed it to participate in the growing demand for AI chips. The US government could potentially save Intel by funding an independent foundry and providing price support ...

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Amazon's app development team in Minnesota successfully built an app for drivers using a network of competence approach, which is now used by 20% of public firms and leads to faster growth and higher staff engagement. Hierarchies of authority, which are still used by 80% of public firms, are less effective in today's fast-paced customer-driven marketplace and often lead to low staff ...

A recent study found that people in powerful relationships are more likely to cheat due to increased confidence and a sense of entitlement. Those who feel more powerful tend to rate their value higher than their partner's, leading to a weakened commitment to the relationship.

User connected a Geiger counter to an ESP8266 microcontroller, using pulses to generate a hardware random number generator (HRNG). The HRNG compares pulse durations to produce a random bitstream, which is then emitted as a number.