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Button Pushes You (2022)
From reconfiguring the system to reconfiguring the user.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,299 posts.
2672
Big Tobacco knew radioactive Po210 in cigarettes posed cancer risk, kept quiet
Tobacco companies knew that cigarette smoke contained radioactive alpha particles for more than four decades and developed "deep and intimate" knowledge of these particles' cancer-causing potential, but they deliberately kept their findings from the public, according to a new study by UCLA researchers.
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Red algae proteins grafted into tobacco double plant growth
Cornell researchers have successfully transferred key regions of a highly efficient red algae into a tobacco plant to dramatically improve plant productivity and increase carbon sequestration.
2674
How fast should you accelerate your kid in math?
We thought we were accelerating fast enough. Turns out we weren't.
2675
Gzip beats BERT? Part 2: dataset issues, improved speed, and results
Summary : Update to my last post analyzing the gzip+knn paper. Some of the datasets have heavily contaminated train/test tests. I show some ways to significantly speed-up the gzip method. I present more results of my "fair" reimplementation .
2676
Functions are vectors
Conceptualizing functions as infinite-dimensional vectors lets us apply the tools of linear algebra to a vast landscape of new problems, from image and geometry processing to curve fitting and machine learning.
2677
Ways to shoot yourself in the foot with Redis
Personal website of Phil Booth
2678
Critical theory is radicalizing high school debate
New rhetorical tactics are creating a generation of nihilists
2679
Cyberdecks (2013)
Article about the philosophy of custom made computers without displays, usually known as decks.
2680
What happened to Vivaldi Social?
A deep dive into the events of Saturday 8 July 2023, when user accounts started disappearing from the Vivaldi Social Mastodon instance.
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IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)
An article on why IRC is still the only chat protocol worth using, and a positive look at the surprisingly autistic-friendly Microsoft Comic Chat IRC client.
2682
So you want to build your own open source chatbot
A small team within Mozilla’s innovation group recently undertook a hackathon to build a trustworthy internal chatbot prototype.
2683
Using C++ as a scripting language, part 8
Improving API function calls using inline assembly
2684
IBM Blue Lightning: World’s Fastest 386? (2014)
One of the OS/2 Museum’s vintage boards is a genuine Made in U.S.A. Alaris Cougar. These boards were produced by IBM for Alaris and are a bit unusual: There’s a small IBM DLC3 processor in plastic package soldered on board, and there’s also a Socket 2 which accepts regular 5-Volt 486DX/SX processors or a Pentium…
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LPython: Novel, Fast, Retargetable Python Compiler
About LPython is a Python compiler that can compile type-annotated Python code to optimized machine code. LPython offers several backends such as LLVM, C, C++, WASM, Julia and x86. LPython features quick compilation and runtime performance, as we show in the benchmarks in this blog. LPython also offers Just-In-Time…
2686
The U.K. government is close to eroding encryption worldwide
The U.K. Parliament is pushing ahead with a sprawling internet regulation bill that will, among other things, undermine the privacy of people around the world. The Online Safety Bill, now at the final stage before passage in the House of Lords, gives the British government the ability to force backdoors into messaging…
2687
Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis
Allowing more unsupervised free play is among the most powerful and least expensive ways to bring down rates of mental illness
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An ultra-sensitive on-off switch helps axolotls regrow limbs
Stanford Medicine researchers discover an "on-off" switch that powers tissue regeneration in axolotls, a type of salamander.
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Cap'n Proto 1.0
It’s been a little over ten years since the first release of Cap’n Proto, on April 1, 2013. Today I’m releasing version 1.0 of Cap’n Proto’s C++ reference implementation.
2692
US smartphone shipments fall sharply, but Android more than iPhone
Counterpoint Research Insight
2693
The future of Clang-based tooling
Clang is a marvelous compiler; it’s a compiler’s compiler! But it isn’t a toolsmith’s compiler. As a toolsmith, my ideal compiler would be an open book, allowing me to get to everywhere from anywhere. The data on which my ideal compiler would operate (files, macros, tokens), their eventual interpretation…
2694
The Resilience of Costco (2018)
For 40 years, Costco has succeeded with a simple formula: reinvest merchandising profits into lower prices and better products; be a disciplined operator; and treat customers and employees well. But with greater share of shopping moving online, it’s fair to wonder if the company's best da
2695
VyOS From Scratch – Edition 1 (set up your own router)
As a VyOS evangelist, maintainer, and more, I’ve been meaning to write a simple series of “how-to” guides for VyOS for a while. Sure, there are plenty of guides out there, but I think a lot of them fall short in demonstrating WHY you are entering specific commands.
2696
Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
We’ve spoken about arcade Tron a few times here on the blog over the years. Specifically, I shared some development documents a few months back here. For those of you that don’t know, T…
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On the future of free long term support for Linux distributions
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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How to Roman Republic 101
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023145 points37 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the first of a planned five-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V, A1, A2) looking at the structure of the Roman Republic as another example of civic governance structures in antiquit…
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Faster filesystem access with Directfs
Directfs is now the default in runsc. This feature gives gVisor’s application kernel (the Sentry) secure direct access to the container filesystem, avoiding expensive round trips to the filesystem gofer. Learn more about this feature in the following blog that was originally posted on Google Open Source Blog .
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LeMUR: LLMs for Audio and Speech
Introducing LeMUR, our new framework for applying powerful LLMs to transcribed speech With a single line of code, LeMUR can quickly process audio transcripts for up to 10 hours worth of audio content, which effectively translates into ~150k tokens, for tasks like summarization and question answer.