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The Shadows Lurking in the Equations – Underwater Islands

FuzzyGraph renders equations in a fuzzy/non-binary mode, producing an error-divergence heatmap rather than a strict true/false graph. This reveals hidden topography—the shadows and black holes of high error and near-solutions invisible in conventional graphs. The article contrasts conventional graphs with fuzzy graphs through examples: Slash Dot and Quasar equations show black holes; x^2+y^2=0 becomes a fuzzy particle while 1/(x^2+y^2)=0 yields a shadow; combining y=x and y=-x creates a Shadow Line; x(x^2+y^2-1)=0 inverted to x/(x^2+y^2-1)=0 reveals shadow circles; y=4sin(x)+sin(2.7y) shows underwater islands that shift with parameters. The approach uses |left-right|^fuzzyLevel.

I don't like passkeys

The author argues passkeys, while phishing-resistant, aren’t ready for personal use. They risk permanent lockout, device loss, and overreliance on weak recovery methods (SMS, email, security questions). Hardware keys are costly and hard to back up; discoverable credentials cap at dozens of accounts. Synced passkeys tie identities to OS accounts, risking total loss if an account is banned; third‑party syncing is still fragmented. For individuals, a password manager with independent TOTP is safer; passkeys suit enterprises but not consumers yet.

Warren Buffett Steps Down as Berkshire Chairman, Names Son to Replace Him

Could not summarize article.

Subnormal floating-point numbers are expensive on Intel processors

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Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap

Bend 2 promotes vibe-coding: humans write laws, AI implements and proofs are checked by the compiler. The author argues this traps developers into building a large solution before fully understanding the problem, and notes Bend ignores formal verification. He reproduces Bend’s demo in SPARK/Ada and shows that the same properties can be proven automatically with formal verification using GNATprove in a compact 12-check proof, without the need for sprawling 442-line proofs. The point: formal verification exists already; don’t rely on LLM-driven proof building or reinvent the wheel—research the field and leverage existing tools.

ZCode, the GLM coding agent, silently uploads your Git history

Cloudflare 524 timeout: the origin server did not respond quickly enough, likely due to overloaded background tasks, database, or resource strain. Visitors: try again in a few minutes. Website owners: consult hosting provider, check for long-running processes or an overloaded server, use status polling for large HTTP requests, and run long scripts on a grey-clouded subdomain. Enterprise users can raise the timeout via Cache Rules.

Dr Julius Neubronner's Miniature Pigeon Camera

Dr Julius G. Neubronner, a German apothecary, invented the pigeon camera in 1907 to photograph flight routes. He built lightweight cameras mounted on pigeons with a pneumatic timer, harness, and an attached darkroom on a horse-drawn dovecote. After a rocky patent process, he secured a 1908 patent and demonstrated the device at Dresden, Frankfurt, and Paris (1909–11), turning skewed aerial photos into postcards; a Kronberg hotel shot famously captured his wing tips. The military tested it on the Western Front, but planes soon eclipsed pigeon photography.

Replacing Pull Requests with Delta

Delta is in public beta—a multiplayer coding environment built on DeltaDB that centers threads over PRs. Teams work inside Delta without pushing changes; you invite teammates into a thread who see the same worktrees and can interact with agents, preserving context even if you log off. Code reviews occur in dedicated subthreads with isolated copies of the parent, enabling revisions before landing. DeltaDB adds delta-based versioning atop Git; you can still use GitHub for issues/PRs. The beta is free now; paid plans are coming. Download for macOS/Windows/Linux and web.

Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'

New unredacted filings in The New York Times’ copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft depict AI training as theft and a threat to journalism. A Microsoft executive privately called the practices “theft,” while OpenAI leaders warned the models could be existentially harmful to publishers. The filings allege paywall circumvention, mass scraping, and stripping copyright notices to assemble training data, including 91,692 copies of NYT/Daily News/Center for Investigative Reporting works and over 2 million nytimes.com documents via Common Crawl; OpenAI via Project Taxi and Mango and Microsoft reportedly shared data. Nadella says paywalled content should be licensed.

OpenJev

OpenJev offers a browser-only experiment to run local models on your GPU and compare two decision methods: direct readout of option probabilities from the model’s logits, and token-by-token generation of a JSON-formatted probability distribution. Users load a local model (MiniCPM5 2B desktop by default; Qwen3 0.6B for phones; Qwen3.5 4B for higher memory) with weights from Hugging Face kept in-browser. Weights download/cache, inputs never leave the page. The demo times setup, warmup, and each method on the same model to show real local performance; probabilities are conditional, not calibrated.

When the fractional part of a float fixes your shader

Bruno Croci chronicles debugging a Voronoi shader that stuttered only on a Windows RTX 4070. After stripping effects, the culprit was the noise fract usage. Replacing fract(x) with x - floor(x) fixed the stutter on that machine. He traced the issue through RenderDoc and ANGLE, discovering that WebGL on Windows used ANGLE to translate GLSL to HLSL for DirectX 11 (DXBC). FXC optimizations could drop fract when inputs were treated as integers, causing vertex-like snapping of Voronoi centers. Running ANGLE with Vulkan bypassed the problem, implicating a DirectX/ANGLE shader-compiler optimization bug rather than shader logic.

Speeding up gearhash on ARM64 (2× faster)

Gearhash adds an ARM64 NEON backend in version 0.1.4, auto-selected on aarch64 and about 2× faster for typical chunk sizes. It starts with a 64-byte warm-up and splits work into parallel strips, with extensive low-level optimizations (unrolling, preventing LLVM reassociation, improved loads, and in-vector boundary checks). Benchmarks show ~1.8× on 11-bit masks, rising to ~2.17× for larger masks; performance drops for very small chunks (~350 bytes) where scalar code may be faster. The update is transparent to users; future work may revisit x86 backends.

Jemalloc 5.4.0

jemalloc 5.4.0 adds over 160 commits focused on cleaning technical debt, refactors, bug fixes, test coverage, and portability. New features include EXTENT_ALLOC_FLAG_PINNED for marking non-reclaimable mappings, new mallctl stats (pinned) and per-CPU arena resume, aligned malloc stats outputs, and a switch from runtime to compile-time --enable-cxx-infallible-new. Incompatibilities include revised tcache targets and removal of seven legacy controls. Bug fixes cover errno preservation across frees, accepting NULL in free_sized, TSD lifecycle fixes, and THP file opens. Refactors modularize the allocator, add an OS abstraction layer, and improve portability and statistics collection.

Khipu (Quipu) Field Guide

The Khipu Field Guide (KFG) is Ashok Khosla’s project to democratize khipu research, offering symbolic renderings, interactive graphics, and data analyses of hundreds of Inka khipus. It features a large curated database (703 khipus), a multi-section guide (Guidebook, Notebook, Fieldmarks, Sketchbook), data/image search tools, and editions like TextosBook and DATABOOK. The site documents decipherment methods, historical context, and ongoing digitization challenges, building on prior work by Ascher, Medrano, Brezine, and Clindaniel, with bibliography and About sections.

The Scourge of x86 Emulation

FEX-Emu surveys emulating the x86-TSO memory model on ARM’s weak memory models and the resulting performance and correctness challenges. It explains mapping x86 loads to ARM acquire-load and stores to ARM release-store, then to RCsc/RCpc as hardware evolves. Benchmarks show large penalties for unaligned accesses and split-locks that force kernel–userspace handling; Apple M1’s hardware x86-TSO mitigates this, while Oryon-3’s coherent cachelines improve several paths. FEAT_LSE2 helps only marginally. Split-locks remain hard; a 128-bit CASP idea is proposed. Uncached memory to GPUs worsens results; kernel patches offer workarounds. Overall, hardware progress offers hope for better emulation.

Waymo in Singapore

Waymo plans to bring its all-electric autonomous ride-hail fleet to Singapore, aligning with the city’s green and smart mobility goals. The Waymo Driver uses lidar, cameras and radar for 360-degree awareness and safe interactions with pedestrians and cyclists. The rollout is phased: starting with manual driving for mapping next year, then autonomous driving with local specialists, aiming for fully autonomous service later; approvals targeted by 2027, with service opening in 2028. Vehicles will begin with all-electric Jaguar I-PACE; the program emphasizes safety, accessibility, and government collaboration.

The open source version of Claude Project that gives you the context ownershp

Orbital is a project agent that keeps the project context across tasks and sessions. It owns the project and stores durable artefacts: PROJECT_STATE.md, DECISIONS.md, LESSONS.md, queue.json, and workspace artefacts. It delegates tasks to interchangeable workers (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, etc.) against the same project context and records outcomes back to the project. It supports multi-provider LLM routing with fallbacks, budget and approvals, autonomy presets, and safety guards. It runs as a desktop app with OS sandboxing, plus optional cloud relay, mobile control, triggers, and browser automation. GPL-3.0.

Code Scans

Devin introduces Code Scans, a tool that turns engineering goals into concrete codebase investigations and surfaces findings and PRs for review. Built on Agentic MapReduce, it splits work into batches, aggregates results, and creates PRs. Early tests report a 96% PR merge rate and 700+ engineering hours saved. To start, type /scan in Devin and set a goal (e.g., speed up Rust compilation, remove dead code, or improve SEO). Findings cover performance, queries, test coverage, dead code, quality, accessibility, compliance, and migrations, with SEO/site improvements already showing gains.

Shapelearn Qwen 3.8 27B (13.1 GB VRAM)

ByteShape compares ShapeLearn-Lite with full ShapeLearn for Qwen 3.8 27B. Lite enabled deployment on 12–24 GB GPUs but full ShapeLearn raises quality and speed, with five frontier models across six GPUs. GPU-5 is the default where memory fits, delivering about 99.63% BF16 aggregate score; GPU-4 is still competitive. On 24 GB and 16 GB cards, the ordering holds; memory-conscious setups favor GPU-4. Speculative decoding (MTP, DFlash2) boosts throughput (DFlash2 usually faster; MTP slower) but memory and modality tradeoffs apply. KLD remains a fidelity metric, not a task-performance leaderboard. Lite did its job; full ShapeLearn expands the frontier.

Apple detectives solved mystery of ancient tree and rewrote the history of fruit

A centuries-old Maine apple on Verona Island was revealed to be Drap d’Or de Bretagne, a lost founder variety that seeded many American apples. A transatlantic team—apple hunter John Bunker, historian Todd Little-Siebold, MOFGA, and geneticists Cameron Peace and Nick Howard—used DNA SNP fingerprinting to identify the tree alongside Danish records. The discovery shows how recovering lost genetics can diversify and harden crops against disease and climate shifts, guiding future breeding. It also uncovers how early French settlers carried cherished cultivars to North America.

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