The author built a digital scanning camera to capture wide photos of moving vehicles, using an industrial linear scanning camera and processing the data in post-processing. The project involved overcoming challenges such as speed measurement, parallax correction, and displaying large images.
The author created a text-based game called Canon, where players can build and interact with their own games using a simple scripting language called Cant. The game is designed to teach programming concepts in an accessible way for beginners.
Spirit Airlines filed for liquidation and sold its data to Google for $10 million, which includes 100m emails, 500m Microsoft Teams items, and customer service records. The deidentified data will be used by Google to improve its AI services.
User noticed a hidden Bluesky logo in a screenshot, which disappears when taking the actual screenshot. The logo is actually rendered as part of a secure text field that gets blanked by iOS during the screenshot process.
Meta filed a patent for a "memory recall" system that uses facial recognition to record people automatically, raising concerns about privacy. The company's Ray-Ban smart glasses have been criticized for their ability to surreptitiously record people using the onboard camera.
The author draws an analogy between baking and AI model training, highlighting the iterative process of refining a model through pre- and post-training. They emphasize the complexity of model construction, contrasting it with conventional programming and inviting feedback on their understanding.
John Spector, a renowned game developer, is retiring after a career spanning decades. He feels accomplished and ready to move on from the industry that has changed significantly over time.
The first social network, Finger, was created in 1971 at Stanford University and allowed users to share their status updates with others. It remains a simple yet functional protocol that has been revived in recent years with modern implementations like Happy Net Box and plan.cat.
id Software released Quake shareware on a CD-ROM in 1996, allowing gamers to buy the game and unlock it with a phone call. However, hackers quickly discovered that they could bypass the system by decrypting the full version of the game from the shareware CD using QCRACK.EXE.
OpenRouter compares different companies' models based on routing modes and metrics like price, speed, accuracy, and performance. It provides a ranking system to help users choose the best model for their needs.
The Hanover Institute for Public Policy appears to be a fake think tank created by the Israeli government to influence chatbots and AI systems, producing reports on Israel/Palestine issues. The organization's publications are designed to appeal to chatbots like Claude or Gemini, with formulaic questions and neutral tone arguments.
Wisconsin residents are withdrawing from Flock's automated license plate cameras due to privacy and trust concerns, causing the network to become less useful. Many cities have cut ties with Flock, including Dane County and several neighboring towns, in favor of alternative systems that better meet their needs.
The Fairphone (Gen. 6+) is launched with upgraded internal hardware, including a Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 processor and up to 12GB RAM, for improved performance and smoother multitasking. The new device retains the original's industry-leading repairability standards while introducing features like Android 16 and exclusive colorways.
The author has successfully integrated a wide lens camera into their Linux phone, improved image quality with color correction, and is now working on shipping the Fairphone 6+ worldwide except for US and Canada due to insurance issues. They are also planning to create a non-profit company to back their future projects, including making an RISCV-based Linux phone.
DuckDB v2.0, codenamed "Cyanoptera", is coming this fall with several key features including a server mode, triggers, the VARIANT type and asynchronous I/O. The new version will also introduce a modern SQL parser and improved storage format.
The author discusses the "benchmarkpocalypse" where benchmark scores can be easily manipulated by large language models (LLMs), leading to false claims of performance improvements. This is often done through overfitting or cheating, making it difficult to trust benchmark results.
Researchers at UC Berkeley discovered an imaginary color called olo, which can only be seen using specialized tools that target M cone cells. Olo is described as a blue-green color with unprecedented saturation, but some scientists question its existence as a genuinely new color.
Wiz Research's Red Agent tool identified a critical GitHub Actions workflow vulnerability in Snowflake's public repository, which was introduced by an AI-powered commit. The vulnerability allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary commands within a GitHub Actions runner, but was patched by Snowflake on the same day it was reported.
The author created a ranking system to determine the most brilliant birds based on their color, using a combination of mathematical functions and empirical data. The system takes into account factors such as brightness, saturation, and diversity of colors to produce a fair and subjective ranking.
A new framework allows Rust to compile for GPUs without sacrificing memory safety. The framework, built into the Rust compiler and LLVM backends, efficiently manages data transfers using type systems and aliasing guarantees.
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 lineup, including Sol, Terra, and Luna models, has shown significant improvements in vision capabilities such as object detection and counting. The Sol model outperforms the others in these tasks.
The author has been using Fastmail since leaving Gmail and is happy with the switch, citing its value and organization features. They've found that subdomain addressing helps keep their inbox organized without needing to create rules.
This guide helps users disable or avoid intrusive AI in their tech environment, including disabling Gemini and Apple Intelligence features. Users can also block AI enhancements in Firefox, change default search engines to DDG, and turn off specific AI features in various applications such as Gmail and Zoom.