Front-page articles summarized hourly.
Explains the complexity of rendering the basmala in Arabic. The four-word phrase Bismi Allah al-raḥman al-raḥim is highly ligature-dependent; early renderers showed letters separated and ugly. Unicode provides U+FDFD for a single basmala glyph. The post walks the four words, diacritics, and connections, cites font designer Khaled Hosny criticizing Android's basmala glyph, and links to Saleh's article for deeper coverage, celebrating Arabic script's beauty.
Manual model training is too complex and fragmentation across teams leads to errors and slowdowns. Aleph Alpha’s Savanna encodes the entire training pipeline as executable code—Model Training as Code (MTaC). Runs are hermetic and one-click, with CI on GitHub, Flyte on Kubernetes, and immutable artefacts tracked by Weights & Biases. Benefits include composability (functions form the pipeline), consensus (main branch holds the recipe), and provenance (commit history and artefact lineage). This enables end-to-end ownership by capability teams, rapid experiments and sweeps, and lays groundwork for auto-research and self-improving models.
POSIX is a specification, not a program. Shells (bash, dash, ash, ksh, etc.) implement POSIX with gaps and extensions, so portability is not guaranteed. Simple tests reveal that echo backslash handling differs across shells; POSIX treats escapes as implementation-defined—use printf. Features diverge: local, arithmetic expansion, and [[ ]] (the latter not POSIX and dash lacks it). /bin/sh varies (dash on Debian/Ubuntu/Alpine; bash elsewhere). Portable means tested on the actual shells you’ll run. The author’s shell-docs project validates 14 shells to define what ‘POSIX sh’ actually means; verification is essential.
An inquiry into why ice cream melts in India and how to design a heat-stable version. Ice cream is four-phase: ice crystals, unfrozen sugar solution, air (overrun), and fat network; heat undermines any of these. The piece traces global history, explains India's cold-chain fragility, and notes regional dairy-versus-vegetable-fat formulations. It explores solutions—soft serve, high-total solids, robust stabilizers, polyphenol emulsifiers, and bacterial proteins like BslA and antifreeze proteins—and highlights Unilever’s warmer-freeze reformulation patents. It argues India needs homegrown, affordable, non-melting ice cream built on open patents.
QSOE Systems released QSOE 0.1, a QNX-inspired two-kernel OS for 64‑bit RISC‑V (RV64, Sv39) on the HiFive Unmatched (FU740), with QEMU day-to-day support. It ships in two variants that share a common userspace and build system: QSOE/N (Skimmer microkernel) and QSOE/L (seL4). Only kernel-specific bits (taskman, libc.so) diverge. The system uses a small kernel with userspace IPC and resource-manager services. Prebuilt images, bootloaders, and documentation are available, with a roadmap to 1.0; Apache-2.0 licensed.
Xonaly is a private, ad-free, independent Canadian search engine built in Canada. It offers features such as Add Site and Core Monitor, and is available in French. The site provides Privacy, Terms of Service, Help, and API Documentation.
Autonomous excavators trench to a pre-designed surface with centimeter precision, without a human in the seat. The on-board system uses RTK GPS, tilt sensors, and arm-joint angles to compute the bucket teeth position in the design frame, yielding a real-time grade error. Two paths: machine guidance for human operators vs full autonomy. Bedrock Robotics and Built Robotics push autonomous trenching; outdoor ground variability remains the core challenge, unlike indoor, tighter tolerances.
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Le Guin argues that fears of reading’s decline miss that books endure as a social practice. Literacy has long been a means of power, but reading remains a communal act—a shared ground, a conversational bond—and it requires active engagement, not passive entertainment. She critiques corporate publishers for prioritizing blockbusters and growth over midlist authors and lasting backlists, turning books into commodities. While electronic media compete for attention, print books’ durability and physical presence keep literature as memory and culture. We should defend reading for pleasure and resist reducing art to immediate profit.
Brown University economist Roberto Serrano reports mass AI-assisted cheating in ECON 1170, with evidence of at least 50 students cheating on the March midterm—the largest such case at Brown and the Ivy League. After initial administrator silence, the Academic Code Committee acknowledged it as a wake-up call. He says take-home exams enable cheating; the final (average 48) lagged far behind the midterm (average 96), with many perfect midterm scorers skipping the final. He plans to drop take-home and weekly exercises and urges a public debate to defend academic integrity amid AI.
Appaca provides an AI-powered workspace for operators to build, run, and integrate internal tools without coding. It creates apps around your workflows, with a built-in database, a knowledge base, and AI agents that access your data and run tasks across OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models. Schedule tasks, share with the team, and connect to tools you already use. Use cases span Sales (lead follow-up, scoring, proposals), Finance (invoices, reminders, monthly reports), Marketing (content generation, briefs, campaigns), HR (directory, onboarding, job descriptions), Operations (reporting, vendor tracking, SOPs), IT (helpdesk, ticket routing). Free plan available; enterprise options; quick builds.
Bash4LLM⁺ is a Bash-based, single-script wrapper for Groq’s OpenAI-compatible API, secure, portable, and Termux-friendly. It dynamically lists models via the API, avoids /tmp and eval, and validates providers. It’s modular (PRECORE_BOOT, CORE, PROVIDER) with a UI-state JSON and per-session NDJSON memory for GUI/tools. Optional extras add providers and templates. Requires bash, coreutils, findutils, util-linux, gawk, curl, jq. Install by cloning, exporting GROQ_API_KEY, and running. CLI supports model/provider selection, sessions, various input/output modes, and streaming. Exit codes cover common errors.
PCMag argues the US has shifted from demanding the best tech to restricting it, blocking affordable, advanced Chinese tech like BYD and Xiaomi SU7 through tariffs (up to 100%), 25-year import walls, and bans on drones and routers. While China surges with inexpensive EVs and energy tech, US automakers struggle to compete, and innovations like Aptera show promise. The piece critiques Musk and policymakers for contradictions, framing a 'closed‑loop' system that leaves Americans dependent on others for cutting-edge tech.
JustVugg/nanoeuler is a from-scratch GPT-2–style LLM implemented in C/CUDA with hand-written backprop, a byte-level BPE tokenizer, and a custom CUDA engine (FlashAttention). It ships a complete training pipeline (pretraining on Gutenberg books plus web data; supervised fine-tuning to an Alpaca-style chat), runs CPU for a small showcase (~1M params) and a full CUDA path for ~116M parameters. It emphasizes end-to-end engineering, with hand-written gradient checks, no ML libs, and a residual/forward-Euler interpretation of depth. Not a capable assistant; a research/educational artifact. Usage: make, train, chat, etc.
Ford rehired about 350 veteran engineers—former employees and supplier staff—after AI-driven quality systems fell short. Dubbed “gray beard” engineers, they hunt for failure points before parts reach the plant floor and will train younger staff and reprogram AI tools. The move aims to lift quality and save about $1 billion this year; Ford says AI plans aren’t abandoned. Ford also topped JD Power’s Initial Quality Survey among mainstream brands.
ISC’26: LineShine in Shenzhen becomes TOP500 No.1, a CPU-only system based on the LX2 Armv9 CPU. Each LX2 has two dies totaling 304 active cores; two LX2s per node yield 1.6 Tbps networking. The system spans ~22,000 nodes across 90 cabinets (≈13 million cores). LineShine delivers 2.198 exaflops FP64 (Rmax) from 2.735 exaflops peak at 42.22 MW (52 GFLOPS/W) and tops HPCG at 22.004 PFLOPS. HPC7 from Eni is No.6; Fugaku sits at No.9 but remains HPCG leader. Green500 unchanged. TOP500 to ACM SIGHPC with DOIs.
LibrePods is an open-source project that reverse-engineers the AirPods protocol to enable Apple-only features on non-Apple devices (Linux/Android). It supports features such as noise control, ear detection, battery status, head gestures, conversational awareness, multi-device connectivity, accessibility customizations, and more. Some features require vendor ID spoofing or root access; not all are implemented or guaranteed. The project is GPL-3.0, not affiliated with Apple, and invites contributions. It provides installation guidance and references to protocol disclosures.
Semgrep Security Research benchmarked IDOR detection across models with a task-specific harness. Semgrep Multimodal leads (61% F1 with GPT-5.5; 53% with Opus 4.8). Surprisingly, GLM 5.2 run with no scaffolding beat Claude Code by about seven points (39% vs 32%) at roughly $0.17 per vulnerability. The main takeaway: the harness matters more than the model, and open-weight models are becoming cost-effective, though results are task- and dataset-specific.
Linux kernel historically used strncpy to avoid buffer overruns, but strncpy's lack of guaranteed termination and possible padding led to bugs. It took six years and 360 patches to remove strncpy from the kernel, replacing it with safe, clearer APIs such as strscpy (and strscpy_pad, strtomem_pad, memcpy_and_pad, memcpy) that separate string handling from memory operations and return meaningful errors (e.g., E2BIG). The post discusses why C's string library is hard to fix, the push toward better API design, and hints at potential assembly-optimized implementations.
Colby (1968) reports on computer-aided language development for nonspeaking children, examining how assistive technology and augmentative communication can support language growth in children with speech disorders, autism, and other developmental disabilities. The paper, published in Archives of General Psychiatry, discusses methods of computer-assisted instruction and its potential implications for child psychiatry and psychology, highlighting early exploration of technology-assisted communication for nonverbal populations.
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