A new type of malware called SPEAKE(a)R can covertly turn headphones, earphones, or simple earbuds connected to a PC into microphones when a standard microphone is not present, muted, taped, or turned off. The malware can record human speech of intelligible quality and eavesdrop from nine meters away, posing a significant cyber security threat.
Game developers use various methods to pause games, including manipulating time, freezing frames, and ignoring pause commands for certain functions. Pausing a game can be a complex process, but most modern game engines support it, and developers can implement it with proper testing and consideration of different pause scenarios.
Scientists at NIST have developed a way to make integrated circuits for light, which could power emerging technologies like AI, quantum computers, and optical atomic clocks. The new technique allows for the creation of complex circuits that can manipulate light in various ways, potentially making these technologies more powerful and portable.
The user encountered a problem at Antithesis where they needed to efficiently query a large tree data structure in Google BigQuery, but point lookups were slow. They solved this by inventing a "skiptree" data structure, which is a hierarchy of skiplists that allows for efficient querying with a fixed number of JOINs in SQL.
Anonymous request-token comparisons from the community, showing how Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7 differ on real inputs Open source · stored rows contain anonymous submission IDs onlyNot affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.
Grit Matthias Phelps, a Cornell University instructor, introduced manual typewriters to her German language class to prevent AI use and teach students the value of writing without digital assistance. The "analog" assignment allowed students to experience the raw feeling of typing without screens, online dictionaries, or delete keys.
Before GPS, aircraft navigated using celestial navigation, which was automated in the 1960s with the development of the Astro Compass system that used an electromechanical analog computer called the Angle Computer. The Angle Computer physically modeled the celestial sphere to solve the navigational triangle and provide accurate heading and position information to the aircraft navigator.
The user is updating their 10-year-old Unity project, Gun Rocket, to the latest version, starting with Unity 5.5 and migrating through various versions, noting changes in Unity's tech and UI along the way. The user successfully updates the project to the latest Unity version, 6000, and fixes various bugs, concluding that simplicity and luck played a significant role in the project's success.
The user attended an IETF meeting to learn about TCP BBR and observed the ongoing debate about IPv6 replacing IPv4, which led them to investigate the history of networking protocols and their complexities. The user discovered that the intertwining of ethernet and IP protocols has resulted in a complicated system, making it difficult to imagine a network without MAC addresses and IP addresses, ...
The user gave a talk at FOSDEM 2026 about phantom binary dependencies, invisible package relationships that threaten sustainability and security of tech infrastructure. To address this issue, the user suggests creating tools to identify and record binary dependencies, and making systemic changes to package management ecosystems to ensure security and sustainability.
Japan's railway system excels due to good public policy, business structure, and land use rules, not cultural factors. Its unique model of private companies building cities and capturing value from real estate and commercial side businesses has contributed to its success.
Lawmakers blocked a reauthorization of Section 702 with no changes, pushing for a 10-day extension to pass real reform. They want probable cause warrants for FBI access to collected information, not just a blanket reauthorization.
The Kdenlive team made significant progress in 2025, releasing new features, bug fixes, and improvements to the user interface, with a focus on stability and community support. The team is now looking ahead to upcoming features, including 10/12 bit color support, playback optimizations, and OpenFX support, and is grateful for community contributions and donations that enable continued development.
Top (Modern Common Lisp with FSet)
Request rates should be measured as the number of requests per second to ensure consistency. Using the becquerel (Bq) unit is suitable for request rates due to its association with average frequency.
I’m sitting in a small coffee shop in Brooklyn. I have a warm drink, and it’s just started to snow outside. I’m visiting New York to see Operation Mincemeat on Broadway – I was at the dress rehearsal yesterday, and I’ll be at the opening preview tonight. I’ve seen this show more times than I care to count, and I hope US theater-goers love it as much as Brits. The people who make the show will ...
A company migrated from DigitalOcean to Hetzner dedicated servers with zero downtime, saving $14,388 per year. The migration involved six phases, including MySQL replication, DNS TTL reduction, and reverse proxy setup.
The user discovered a zero-copy path for WebAssembly modules to share memory with the GPU on Apple Silicon, eliminating expensive serialization boundaries and enabling near-zero overhead between the CPU and GPU. This discovery is the foundation for a runtime called Driftwood, which will allow stateful AI inference and actor mobility with GPU acceleration, including portable snapshots of ...
The author optimized Ruby's Bootsnap and File.join methods to improve performance, reducing setup time and boot time in Ruby applications. The optimizations included load path caching, reducing syscalls, and implementing fast paths for UTF-8 and ASCII encodings.
The author discusses how people misinterpret confessional essays by assuming the writer lacks self-awareness, when in fact the writer may be intentionally portraying themselves in a negative light. This phenomenon is often seen in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series and real-life examples like Daniel Oppenheimer's NYT article.
A section of the original Eiffel Tower staircase is going to auction on May 21, expected to fetch between $141,000 and $176,000. The staircase fragment, owned by a French businessman, is one of 24 sections dismantled in 1983 and recently restored by Eiffel Tower maintenance workers.
The 2026 edition of our penguins relationship chart is finally here! It's fun, adorable, and as complicated as always!
The author thinks Figma's systemization led to a complex, manual design process that's being replaced by code as the source of truth. This shift will make Figma's infrastructure look outdated.
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This directory contains Architecture Decision Records for Tachyon, documenting significant design choices and their consequences. New ADRs use a template and are never deleted once accepted.
I’ve spent roughly the last decade and some change as a software engineer, and recently decided to start a solo consultancy. I’m focused on helping SMEs sort out the messy back-office parts of the business: spreadsheet glue, brittle internal workflows, poor reporting, awkward integrations, backend/platform problems, and AI workflows that need to do real work rather than just look good in a ...
User installed ROCm and Strix Halo on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, requiring a BIOS update and adjusting video memory settings. They successfully ran PyTorch and Qwen3.6 with Podman.
The user writes documents, dashboards, and slides in a Markdown superset using a theme and named styles. The rendered output is self-contained HTML and PDF, and can be previewed live in VS Code with auto-reload.
Scientists discovered a unique partnership in Arizona's desert where tiny cone ants act as "cleaners" for larger harvester ants, licking and nibbling their bodies. This behavior is the first known example of one ant species cleaning a much larger ant, similar to cleaner fish in the ocean.
NASA engineers shut down Voyager 1's LECP instrument to conserve power, giving the spacecraft about a year of extra life. The move is part of a plan to extend Voyager operations, with a more ambitious energy-saving fix, called "the Big Bang," planned for later this year.