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.
Foreground p.20 RECYCLING USED ICs [theme Hardware] [author Mikkelsen] p.62 DECIPHERING MYSTERY KEYBOARDS [theme Hardware] [author Heltners] p.72 LIFE...
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.
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.
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.
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 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, ...
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)
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.
Anthropic are the only major AI lab to publish the system prompts for their user-facing chat systems. Their system prompt archive now dates all the way back to Claude 3 in July 2024 and it’s always interesting to see how the system prompt evolves as they publish new models. Opus 4.7 shipped the other day (April 16, 2026) with a Claude.ai system prompt update since Opus 4.6 (February 5, 2026). ...
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 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 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 ...
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.
In this section, we will derive a variant of gcd that is ~2x faster than the one in the C++ standard library. Euclid’s algorithm solves the problem of finding the greatest common divisor (GCD) of two integer numbers $a$ and $b$, which is defined as the largest such number $g$ that divides both $a$ and $b$:$$ \gcd(a, b) = \max_{g: \; g|a \, \land \, g | b} g $$ You probably already know this ...
I regularly hear people asking which programming language to learn, and then reeling off a list of very similar languages (“Should I learn Java, C#, C++, Python, or Ruby?”). In response I usually tell them that it doesn’t really matter, as long as they get started. There are fundamentals behind them. What do I mean when I say fundamentals? If you have an array or list of items and you’re ...
The 2026 edition of our penguins relationship chart is finally here! It's fun, adorable, and as complicated as always!
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.
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.
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.
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.