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.

EEG shows brain can simultaneous encode two speech streams

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Study reveals asymmetric neural dynamics during attention switches in multi-talker scenarios, with transient dual speech tracking and reduced alpha power indicating cognitive effort. Lexical context resets post-switch, enhancing understanding of flexible speech processing in complex environments.

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.

Pebble Mega Update – July 2026

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Pebble has shipped 80% of Pebble Time 2 pre-orders, with in-stock availability soon. Software updates enhance battery life and SDK features, while hardware issues are addressed via replacements; Index 01 production is underway, with late August shipments expected.

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.

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.
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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.
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Digital Research's StarLink (1984) aimed to turn IBM PCs into multiuser systems with an 8088 board and Concurrent DOS, but high costs and Lotus 1-2-3 incompatibility led to its 1985 discontinuation. The name was later reused by other companies despite initial competition with Altos systems.

$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.

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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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 ...

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.

Mathematics of Data Science

https://arxiv.org/static/browse/0.3.4/images/arxiv-logo-fb.png
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 ...

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.

UIUC AI Teaching Assistant

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Our system uses 11 parallel models for text/image tasks with 2s median latency, leveraging non-public educational data and a novel semantic search dataset (available on Huggingface) for RLHF. Evaluations via GPT-3 (with self-bias limitations) and open-source tools (except textbooks) ensure iterative improvements, encouraging custom Pinecone database integration.

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.

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

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'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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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

https://arxiv.org/static/browse/0.3.4/images/arxiv-logo-fb.png
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.

CD sales growth outpaced vinyl in the first half of 2026

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CD sales surged 16% in 2026, outpacing vinyl, driven by K-pop and Gen Z's nostalgia for older music. Physical formats, including cassettes, rose 7.8%, with retailers like Target/Walmart capitalizing on collectible editions and fan demand.

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.