You teach computer science and mathematics at Hendrix College, reflecting on the world and hopes for your students as they graduate. You are teaching two courses and a lab section this spring, with the semester nearing its end.
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Researchers have created a 13B vintage language model called talkie-1930-13b-base trained on 260B tokens of historical pre-1931 English text to simulate conversations with people from the past. The model's performance is compared to its modern counterpart, with talkie underperforming in some standard LM evaluations but showing similar performance on core language understanding and numeracy tasks.
Organizations can use standing meetings to maintain progress on complex projects with multiple stakeholders. By reviewing previous to-dos, it creates pressure to make progress and accountability among team members.
Toronto Police launched Project Lighthouse in November 2025 to combat an SMS blaster operating in downtown Toronto. The device mimicked a cellular tower, sending fraudulent texts to thousands of devices, posing a threat to public safety and financial security.
Extra-prominent disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own, and don’t represent the opinions of my current or previous employers. For some spicier takes! Anthony Moser’s “I Am An AI Hater”, Jenny Zhang’s “choosing friction”, Rusty Foster’s “A.I. Isn’t People”, or Ed Zitron’s “The Case Against Generative AI” if you have most of an afternoon to read it. Emily Bender and Alex Hanna’s ...
The Easyduino project is an open-source effort to create PCB designs for popular microcontrollers using KiCad. It aims to unify software and conventions across devboards like Arduino, ESP32, and Raspberry Pi.
Test your color perception with this interactive test.
RF engineering is experiencing a resurgence due to growing demand from industries such as space, 5G, and automotive, driven by a shortage of engineers who can work at the hardware level. The supply side is broken, with 73% of EE employers unable to fill positions within six months, and companies are investing in university partnerships to build their own talent pipeline.
Spanish archaeologists have documented 151 sites in the Bay of Algeciras, including 134 shipwrecks dating from the 5th century BC to the 2nd World War. The wrecks reveal the history of war, trade, exploration, and settlement in the strategically important waterway.
A data breach at Mercor exposed 40,000 contractors' voice biometrics and ID documents. Attackers can use this data to clone voices and commit crimes like bank verification bypass and vishing.
User tried Simple Lucas' focus routine, staring at a wall to recover focus, and found it effective but hard. They attribute their lack of focus to information overload and use wall staring with parasympathetic activation and mind blanking to improve productivity.
Apple is warning of two significant changes in macOS 27: removal of AFP support and a requirement for TLS 1.2 connections to certain servers. These changes may impact enterprise users and those with Time Capsules or NAS systems that don't support SMB3.
China's state planner asked Meta to withdraw its $2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Singaporean AI startup with Chinese roots, citing laws and regulations. The deal faced scrutiny from China and Washington, with lawmakers in the US prohibiting American investors from backing Chinese AI companies directly.
Scratch's approach to SVG sanitization has been ineffective due to numerous vulnerabilities discovered over the years. Despite multiple fixes, new security issues continue to arise.
The author's magnetometer stopped working when powered by a battery, but worked fine when powered by USB. The issue was likely due to a noisy 3.3V power line caused by a switching regulator.
This guide explains three ways to change Claude models using Claude Code: /model command, --model flag, and environment variables. The /model command is the simplest way to change models instantly without restarting the terminal.
Radar systems involve various concepts such as A-scope displays, matched filters, antenna apertures, and signal processing techniques like coherent integration and MTI cancellers to detect and track targets. Key performance metrics include signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), probability of detection (Pd), and probability of false alarm (Pfa), which are influenced by factors like target RCS, antenna ...
The IEEE 754 floating point standard defines a special value called Not-a-Number (NaN) which can be used to represent non-floating point values and their types in dynamically typed languages by storing them in the 51-bit payload. This technique, called NaN-boxing, is used in JavaScriptCore, SpiderMonkey, and LuaJIT to store non-float values and their types in NaNs, allowing for efficient ...
SUPER ZSNES is a re-written SNES emulator with GPU power, offering features like fast forward, save states, and high resolution graphics. It's still in development with some games supported, but has emulation bugs and performance issues.
GitHub Copilot will transition to usage-based billing on June 1, 2026, with a monthly allotment of GitHub AI Credits for each plan. Credits will be consumed based on token usage, and users can purchase additional usage if needed.
The DSPi transforms a Raspberry Pi Pico into a digital audio processor with features like room correction, active crossovers, and parametric EQ. It acts as a USB sound card with onboard DSP engine.
pgBackRest is a reliable PostgreSQL backup and restore solution that scales up to large databases and workloads. It supports parallel processing, compression, and block-level backups for efficient data storage and retrieval.
Dirac is an open-source coding agent that improves accuracy and reduces costs by 64.8% with tightly curated context. It achieves 100% accuracy on complex refactoring tasks at a fraction of the cost of other leading agents.
The author discusses the formalisation of mathematics and the rise of Lean, but notes that it's not the first system to achieve this. They mention AUTOMATH, which was developed in the 1960s and 1970s, and other systems like HOL Light and Isabelle/HOL. The author argues that Lean's success is partly due to its user community and the abandonment of "constructive proofs".
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The rise of mail-order magic in the US at the turn of the 20th century was fueled by improvements in postal networks and the emergence of a colossal mail-order industry. This led to the proliferation of occult correspondence courses that offered spiritual knowledge and self-help, often with a focus on rational self-improvement and Stoic self-regulation.
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