Foreground p.20 RECYCLING USED ICs [theme Hardware] [author Mikkelsen] p.62 DECIPHERING MYSTERY KEYBOARDS [theme Hardware] [author Heltners] p.72 LIFE...
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.
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.
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.
Frank Dudley Beane wrote an 1884 article about his cannabis and ergot tincture experience, describing vertigo, dread, and hallucinations. His account is considered a pioneering work in drug literature and may also be seen as pharmaceutical trade literature due to his connection with Parke Davis.
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.
The user explains that programming languages can be grouped into seven fundamental "ur-languages" that share common patterns and characteristics, and that learning a language from the same ur-language is easier than learning one from a different ur-language. The user suggests learning a language from the ALGOL family (such as Python or Java), then learning a language from the Prolog family ...
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.
Anthropic published system prompts for their chat system, with updates from Claude 3 to Opus 4.7, showing changes in child safety, tool usage, and response style. The new prompt includes tools like Claude in Chrome and a tool search mechanism to resolve ambiguities.
You started a solo consultancy helping SMEs with back-office issues and are looking for advice on getting your first project. You're offering 10 hours free to the first 5 clients to help them get started.
Zip drives were a popular portable storage format in the 90s with high capacity and speed, but they failed due to frequent failures known as the "click of death". The format eventually lost market presence to CDs and USB flash drives, leading to Iomega's downfall and the eventual removal of its branding from products.
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.
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.
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.
The writer is in New York to see the musical Operation Mincemeat on Broadway, a show about British spies who fooled Hitler with a dead body and fake papers. The writer sees the show as a story about friendship and the power of caring about something.
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.
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 binary GCD algorithm is a variant of Euclid's algorithm that uses binary shifts, comparisons, and subtractions to find the greatest common divisor of two numbers, which is ~2x faster than the C++ standard library's gcd function. The algorithm's performance can be further optimized by using __builtin_ctz to reduce the number of iterations and by rearranging the assembly code to take ...
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.
Top (Modern Common Lisp with FSet)
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.
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 2026 edition of our penguins relationship chart is finally here! It's fun, adorable, and as complicated as always!
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 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 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.
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.