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Pwning the all Google phone with a non-Google bug
It turns out that the first “all Google” phone includes a non-Google bug. Learn about the details of CVE-2022-38181, a vulnerability in the Arm Mali GPU. Join me on my journey through reporting the vulnerability to the Android security team, and the exploit that used this vulnerability to gain arbitrary kernel code…
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The Tailscale Universal Docker Mod
Updates on innovations and the state of virtual private networks - globally, as well as Tailscale product and company news.
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Do high interest rates fix high inflation?
Published: June 2023 In prior articles and newsletters, I’ve explored the causes of consumer price inflation over time. In short, the rate of consumer price inflation in an economy comes from a combination of 1) money supply growth and 2) significant changes in productivity and/or resource abundance. -Periods of fast…
2227
Why Lisp?
A lot of people ask us the question, why do we choose to use Common Lisp as our primary development language? Often times the question comes disguised as a suggestion: "Flask is a great webserver you should consider using". This is a well intentioned suggestion- of course we would like to use the best tools available!…
2228
Shorting Tether
The trials and tribulations of betting against crypto's biggest stablecoin.
2229
Stop the Medicare “Advantage” Scam Before Medicare Is Dead
At the very least, let’s stop the egregiously deceptive advertising. Only Medicare should be able to call itself “Medicare.”
2230
Google Imagen 2
Today, we’re sharing a significant upgrade to Google Cloud’s image-generation capabilities with Imagen 2 , our most advanced text-to-image technology, which is now generally available for Vertex AI customers on the allowlist (i.e., approved for access).
2231
Maximizing the Potential of LLMs: A Guide to Prompt Engineering
Language models have rapidly improved in recent years, with large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 and GPT-4 taking center stage. These models have…
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My ranking of every Shakespeare play
A few years ago I set out on a personal journey to study and watch a performance of each of Shakespeare’s 37 plays. I’ve reached my goal and, though it’s not a usual topic around here, I wanted to get my thoughts down while fresh. I absolutely loved some of these plays and performances, and so I’d like to highlight…
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The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews
Companies spend thousands of dollars to buy fake reviews and get bad ones removed.
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Leave work slightly unfinished for easier flow the next day
A breakdown of 4 simple software engineering and coding habits that improved my productivity. These include keyboard shortcuts, learning to say no, reaching flow state faster, and keeping a big book of commands handy.
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A new class of tiny, self-propelled robots that can zip through liquid at speed
CU Boulder engineers have designed a new class of "microrobots" several times smaller than the width of a human hair that may be able to treat human illnesses
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LLMs confabulate not hallucinate
Minor terminological nitpick. People often describe the LLM as ‘hallucinating’ information whenever it makes up information which seems like it should fit for a given query even when it is trivially false. While evocative, this isn’t actually correct terminology. We already have a perfect word for this precise…
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Cases where full scans are better than indexes
Sometimes you have a lot of data, and one approach to support quick searches is pre-processing it to build an index so a search can involve only looking at a small fraction of the total data. The threshold at which it's worth switching to indexing, though, might be higher than you'd guess. Here are some cases I've…
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Encrypted Client Hello
We're excited to announce a contribution to improving privacy for everyone on the Internet. Encrypted Client Hello, a new standard that prevents networks from snooping on which websites a user is visiting, is now available on all Cloudflare plans.
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Unexpected downsides of UUID keys in PostgreSQL
Understand how using UUIDs as primary keys can affect PostgreSQL performance, and how to tweak your index to avoid UUID performance pitfalls.
2241
What Happened to Dolphin on Steam?
Well that blew up, huh? If you follow emulation or just gaming on the whole, you've probably heard about the controversy around the Dolphin Steam release and the Wii Common Key. There's been a lot of conclusions made, and while we've wanted to defend ourselves, we thought it would be prudent to contact lawyers first…
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The Sound Proof Booths of Silence
Welcome back to Between the Lanes, a blog feature where we let members of our development team walk through some of the challenges, bugfixes, and occasional happy accidents we encounter while working on a game as unique as Dota, and an event as unique as The International. The International is an unbelievably huge…
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Python-based compiler achieves orders-of-magnitude speedups
Codon is a new tool that compiles Python code to run it more efficiently and effectively while allowing for customization and adaptation to various domains.
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Wait, what's a bookmarklet?
How this one small browser quirk turned into a tool used by countless people for decades.
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Don't use DISTINCT as a "join-fixer"
Using DISTINCT to fix duplicate rows from a SQL join is a common antipattern. It generates all the duplicates first, then sorts them away - hurting performance. Learn how to rewrite these queries using EXISTS for cleaner, faster SQL Server results.
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On being ready to die, and yet also now being able to swallow ice cream
Part of being ready to die comes, I think, from psychedelics; I wrote in “How do we evaluate our lives, at the end? What counts, what matters?”: “Bess (my wife) and psychedelics taught me to …
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Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview”
Annotating Sam Bankman-Fried's attempts to explain the FTX collapse.
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The art and science of spending money
Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch once nearly died of a heart attack.
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A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store
Every morning, 67-year Hideyuki Akiyama drives to his store along the rural roads of Okayama in Western Japan. Today is no different. A line of excited customers queuing up before the shutters are open. “Disneyland isn’t our land of dreams, this is!” says one 20-something woman. “This”
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