Front-page articles summarized hourly.
Open-Meteo is a free, open-source weather API for non-commercial use with no API key. It delivers high-resolution forecasts (1–11 km) worldwide via an easy JSON HTTP API, using local and global models updated hourly. It includes hourly forecasts plus 80 years of hourly historical data (10 km resolution; 50 TB) and 1 km recent data models. The code is on GitHub under AGPLv3; data is CC BY 4.0. Free to use with fair usage; commercial use or >10k calls/day requires a subscription. Documentation supports multiple languages.
CDs use 44.1 kHz; many DACs prefer 48 kHz. Resampling 44.1→48 kHz introduces approximations, but methods (nearest, linear, cubic) can be used. In theory a perfect resampling exists, but real-time or offline exact resampling is impractical; practical resampling uses polyphase filtering with finite history. With modern devices, 44.1→48 kHz can achieve inaudible errors, below the 21-bit noise floor. Generally avoid resampling if possible, but for most listeners the effects are undetectable unless listening on very high-end gear.
TimeCapsuleLLM is a from-scratch language model trained exclusively on London-era texts (1800–1875) to reduce modern bias and mimic historical voice. It uses Selective Temporal Training (STT) rather than fine-tuning and builds its own tokenizer. Versions range from v0 (16M params, ~187MB) to v1 (700M, ~6.25GB) and v2mini-eval1 (300M, ~15GB). Data include public-domain books, newspapers, and legal documents (tens of GB, ~136k documents). Early outputs are era-appropriate but incoherent; later versions show improved coherence and historical recall. MIT license; GitHub repository.
The Manchester Garbage Collector (mgc) for purple-garden is a stop-the-world, mark-and-copy collector using bump-allocated from/to spaces. It marks roots (VM registers and frames), copies live objects to the new space, and rewrites references via forwarding pointers, then swaps spaces. Each allocation has a GcHeader (marked, type, size, forward, next). Object types are raw, string, list, and map. Values encode type in 3 bits plus is_heap and is_some for optionals; Str is a non-owning view with hash/len. A growable bump allocator reduces syscalls. The article explains mgc’s design choices, invariants, and plan to port to Rust.
Apple reported a record year for services in 2025, driven by global expansion and new features across TV, Music, News, Wallet, Maps, iCloud, Arcade, Fitness+, and Podcasts. The App Store logged about 850 million weekly users, with developers earning over $550 billion since 2008. Apple Pay eliminated over $1 billion in fraud and generated more than $100 billion in incremental merchant sales, now in 89 markets. Apple TV+ posted record December viewership, highlighted by F1: The Movie and Pluribus, and earned multiple Emmys. Apple Music hit all-time highs; Shazam >1B recognitions per month; Arcade, Fitness+, News+, and Apple One expanded.
Date in JavaScript is a mutable, time-based mess: inconsistent parsing, local time bias, and weak time-zone handling. Temporal offers a better path: a non-constructor namespace with types like PlainDate, PlainDateTime, ZonedDateTime, and Now. Its methods return new Temporal objects rather than mutating originals, enabling safer chaining (add, subtract) and clear date arithmetic. Formatting is straightforward (plainDateISO). The article notes Temporal is at Stage 3 in the spec and already available in recent Chrome/Firefox previews, encouraging developers to try it now and replace Date progressively.
Keychron’s Nape Pro is a palm-height bar that hugs a mechanical keyboard, featuring a 25 mm thumb trackball, six buttons, and a scroll wheel. It can sit as a compact control surface or slide aside to become a wireless trackball with macro-pad capabilities. Its OctaShift orientation system remaps controls based on how it’s placed, while a Realtek MCU, 1 kHz polling, and PixArt PAW3222 sensor deliver responsive input. Connectivity includes Bluetooth, 2.4 GHz dongle, or USB-C. Built for keyboard enthusiasts with open-source ZMK firmware and planned 3D-printed case files.
nikic’s LLVM: The bad parts outlines improvement opportunities rather than criticisms. Core issues include: limited review capacity for PRs; churn and instability in C++/IR APIs; long build times and flaky CI; weak end-to-end testing; backend divergence; lack of public performance tracking; IR design problems (undef/poison semantics, provenance, constraint encoding, FP semantics); ongoing partial migrations (new pass manager, GlobalISel) delaying parity; messy ABI/calling conventions and builtins/libcalls; module vs. context dichotomy; LICM causing register pressure. It invites community input on concrete fixes.
Zootopia 2 pushes Disney Animation’s rendering tech beyond Zootopia (2016): the Chiang fur shading model remains, but ray-geometry intersections and multi-scattering are refined to preserve realism across dense crowds and varied environments. A production-scale path guiding system (OpenPGL) runs with Hyperion, delivering major workflow gains—about 12% of the film uses it. The water-tubes sequence uses a customized nested-dielectrics setup developed with Disney Research, and USD crowd rigs were optimized as the studio switched from Maya to Presto. Personal note: author’s wife Harmony Li was Associate Technical Supervisor.
I built a tangible, floppy-disk–based remote to empower a 3-year-old to control Chromecast without auto-play. Data lives on disk track 0 and is read by an AVR controller using the Arduino FDC Floppy library, with ESP8266 for WiFi. A rolling switch detects disk insertion; ATmega handles disk reads and sends data to the ESP, which talks to Chromecast via netcat/bash. The remote is battery powered (18650s) with a boost converter, and ground isolation prevents resets. Disk-in = play; disk-out = pause; other disks offer random or next-video playback. Lasercut MDF enclosure; repo: FloppyDiskCast.
The author explains why Rust and programming languages interest them—curiosity about language design, compilers, and tooling—and outlines their self‑taught journey into CS theory. They emphasize the challenge of PL theory and the need for a concrete, monthly plan with measurable goals (e.g., Rust Book chapters, a Markdown parser, Stanford’s compiler course, and a blog post). They advocate a growth mindset in a rich information era and hope to inspire others to explore CS‑heavy topics.
Anthropic’s January 2026 move to block third‑party access to Claude subscriptions by updating its API and closing a loophole angered customers, signaling a push to own the value chain. The change, announced only via a staff thread, invites backlash and competitive risk as OpenAI now supports OpenCode and other open‑source harnesses using Codex/ChatGPT subscriptions. With Claude’s market share around 1.07%, the move could undermine goodwill and long‑term competitiveness, despite Anthropic’s cash position and ambitions.
Head of Ireland’s Oireachtas AI committee urged fast-tracking the Protection of Voice and Image Bill to criminalise misuse of a person’s voice or image, including AI deepfakes. Introduced by Malcolm Byrne, it would create a standalone offence for knowingly exploiting someone’s name, image or likeness without consent, especially to harm or deceive. The move follows concerns over Grok on X. Current laws focus on individual users; advocates say platforms and product safety should be regulated more tightly to curb abuse.
Zen-C is a modern systems language that compiles to GNU C/C11 with 100% C ABI compatibility. It offers type inference, pattern matching, generics, traits, async/await, and RAII-style memory management (plus manual control). It provides high-level syntax (variables, structs, enums, unions, interfaces via traits, closures, destructuring, pattern matching), OOP via impl, composition, and a rich standard library. Quickstart: clone, make, make install; build/run with zc. The README covers language reference (types, control flow, memory, concurrency), metaprogramming, inline assembly, attributes, embeds, plugins, and tooling (tests, parser, codegen).
DeepSeek tests Hyper-Connections (HC) for transformers, using multiple streams with mixing matrices (H_res, H_pre, H_post) to boost expressivity. Unconstrained mixing can explosively amplify signals (Amax up to ~3000x at 27B params), causing instability across seeds; mHC imposes stability. The fix: require mixing matrices to be doubly stochastic via Sinkhorn-Knopp, producing manifold-constrained HC (mHC). In TinyShakespeare (~11M params, depth 24), HC yields lower val loss but high amplification variance; mHC is perfectly seed-consistent (Amax=1) and stable. Part 2 scales to 1B params to stress-test. Residuals are a conservation law; mHC preserves stability while remaining expressive.
tsazan/ikea-us-commercetxt is a HuggingFace dataset of 30,511 IKEA US products converted to CommerceTXT v1.0.1, organized into 632 categories with a root catalog and per-category files (products/..., categories/...). It supports RAG, product search, and AI shopping assistants. Data date: 2025-07-15; license CC0-1.0; unofficial for research/educational use; not affiliated with IKEA. Token efficiency: ~24% fewer tokens than JSON (≈3.6M saved).
Win8DE is a Windows 8-inspired desktop environment for Linux (Wayland) featuring a Start menu with draggable tiles, app search, wallpaper and lock-screen utilities, and OSD for volume and brightness. It includes a two-part OSD server/client, can auto-start, and supports system-wide installation via build.sh and install.sh. It runs as a separate DE with its own config per session (e.g., labwc2) and a .desktop session entry for login. Licensed GPL-2.0. Authors include er-bharat/bharat-lab; project has ~90 stars and 2 contributors.
HTTP 403 Forbidden access denied; an error page served by OpenResty.
The essay contends that travel is not a reliable path to education. It argues that a curious reader can learn much more about a place online than a brief vacation, since public data, media, and recordings provide broad, enduring knowledge, while travel yields only selective, often emotionally charged impressions. The author concedes travel can foster empathy but warns it is easy to be biased or propagandized. Tourism also feels intrusive and commercially driven. In short, informed, critical consuming of information may educate more effectively than wandering.
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