Front-page articles summarized hourly.
Anatoly Zenkov's Stolen Buttons is a playful concept where the author claims to “steal” a button from every website he visits and curates a growing stash. The page itself reads as a collage of UI elements—registration prompts, shop features, and design showcases—echoing the idea of collecting borrowed buttons from various sites.
Blocked by Cloudflare: Paris Review refuses access until cookies are enabled. The page explains the security service may block requests that trigger its rules (e.g., unusual input). To resolve, contact the site owner with details of what you were doing and include the Cloudflare Ray ID (a20c07825e80ebe3) and your IP (192.155.84.206).
The piece argues for 2D spatial programming, showing how multi-argument operations can be written in two dimensions with operators like andFlip (and its 3-arity use) and its siblings maj and uma. It demonstrates a 3-bit adder built from chained maj/uma that also uncomputes scratch state, and poses puzzles about resetting temporaries within a single 2D expression. It surveys Befunge, Orca, Racket #2d, Hexagony, ladder logic, and the spreadsheet, and reflects on how language tooling shapes thinking.
Systems are the message: players learn what matters from the game systems, not patch notes or rhetoric. The author argues that incentives, visibility, and prices encode design intent, and players audit and react to signals, often demanding reversals when systems contradict stated goals. Through examples from Riot, Respawn, Black Ops 4, and Apex Legends, the piece shows how governance changes and monetization systems are read by players. The manual organizes design into seven timescales, from 33 milliseconds to seven years, covering game feel, UX, onboarding, competitive systems, metagame, social systems, and live ops, and extends to AI engineering today.
An overview of Fedora's release sausage: how source and packages become downloadables (ISOs, cloud images, containers, OSTree). It follows a packager's push through src.fedoraproject.org, fedpkg, and Koji builds, with Bodhi gating for updates. Pungi then composes a release by freezing the Koji tag, applying comps and variants to select packages, building boot images with lorax, creating ISOs, and assembling cloud/container images with Kiwi and Image Builder (including rpm-ostree OSTree workflows). Metadata via productmd, testing via openQA, and governance via the Changes process and FESCo. Steps: Init, Pkgset, Essentials, Images, Checksums, Test.
Jo experiments with dithering pink images to imitate printed halftones using CMYK channel tricks and dot grids (AM/FM). She outlines three approaches: an old monochrome pink method with large dots, a newer pink method using -remap to expand pink tones with a 32-color palette, and an earlier CMYK-AM attempt with 2 colors. She demonstrates ImageMagick scripts that resize, split color channels, rotate and overlay dot grids, then remap colors. She notes the effect looks cool but is slow and not ideal for file size, and that very light images can break the method.
PyPI now rejects uploading new files to releases older than 14 days to curb potential poisoning from compromised tokens/workflows. The patch, merged July 8, 2026, defers semantic details to the Upload 2.0 API/PEP 694 and stems from discussions since PEP 740, revived after LiteLLM/Telnyx breaches. A PyCon US 2026 Packaging Summit found it acceptable to require version bumps; only 56 of 15,000 packages had 3.14 wheels after 14 days. Authors: Seth Larson and Mike Fiedler; supported by Alpha-Omega.
Augmental's MouthPad is a custom-fit mouthpiece that converts tongue and head movements into cursor control, clicks, scrolling, and dragging across phones, tablets, and computers via Bluetooth. Worn inside the mouth, it’s lightweight (~10 g) and ~1 mm thick, designed for comfort across devices (macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android). Battery life is 7+ hours; charging ~1.5 hours. Priced at $1,400 for one or $1,900 for two, with US-only shipping, six-month production after scanning, and a 1-year warranty. Includes charging case and onboarding; aimed at giving independence to users with mobility challenges.
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Cristina Ramos chronicles creating a tiny CPU-based 3D renderer for Playdate. Starting with a raycaster to probe power, she adopts Quake BSPs with PVS for visibility, and builds an in-house 3D software rasterizer since there is no GPU. Key choices: 16-bit reciprocal z-buffer, perspective-correct texture mapping with infrequent full reciprocal recalculation, and 1-bit dithering (8x8 Bayer) to fake shading. She renders at 200x120, scaled to 400x240, uses hand-optimized math and compiler flags, and benchmarks to decide what helps. Aiming for a 'good enough' Playdate prototype with a strong cel-shaded look.
Erin Murphy and her partner built a compact vertical apartment aquaponics system in NYC using a media-based, continuous-flow setup on a 3-shelf rack. The ~20-gallon tank sits above a ~10-gallon grow-bed, total water 170–250 lbs. Plants grow in clay pebbles with crushed coral; water circulates continuously. They raise basil, lettuce, and Tiny Tim tomatoes with shrimp, snails, nerite, and a feeder guppy. Key improvements: larger drainage pipe, smaller pump, higher grow-light with timer. Lessons: cycle the tank first, bigger tanks are more stable, avoid overfeeding. Step-by-step guide and costs provided.
Extinct Media Museum Tokyo is a private, touch-friendly museum that collects media and equipment beyond paper and stone that are dying out. It houses about 4,000 items (3,000 on permanent display), focusing on home-video cameras and the evolution from 8mm to DV/memory cameras. Visitors may handle objects, take photos and 3D scans; two hours allotted per visit. 80% of items are donated; 90% are searchable in a free online web museum. The basement holds the Library of the Lost Catalog (3,000 catalogs). Some exhibits can be rented as props.
Android may restrict On-Device ADB, risking breakage of Shizuku, libadb, and related open-source tools that rely on loopback ADB (127.0.0.1). The piece explains ADB basics (USB, TCP/IP, Wireless) and On-Device ADB via Termux. A Google IssueTracker proposal aims to limit ADBD interfaces to reduce exposure after CVE-2026-0073, potentially breaking dev workflows (loopback ADB, VPN, Ethernet). The author argues On-Device ADB is not mainly used by attackers and a persistent user-toggle could balance security with legitimate use. It invites technical feedback and notes a niche ecosystem of tools like Shizuku and ShizuCallRecorder.
PartialString is a free, cross‑platform physical modelling synthesiser from Different Instruments that uses 1D FDTD to simulate a plucked string in real time. The string is a displacement array; lower notes need longer strings. You excite at any point and a pickup at a chosen location outputs audio. It supports up to 10 voices, dynamically limited by CPU. Controls include excitation position/shape (velocity‑sensitive), an LFO sweeping the pickup, and adjustable decay with dampers. Tips cover CPU load, possible monophony for low notes, and Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon. Available as AU/VST3 for macOS, Windows, Linux. v1.0.3 free or pay‑what‑you‑want.
ARC Prize Leaderboard surveys ARC-AGI competitions, with ARC-AGI-3 challenging agents to adapt to new interactive environments, evolving from ARC-AGI-1/2 which measured passive intelligence. Visuals plot cost-per-task vs performance to gauge efficiency; trend lines show how longer reasoning affects results. It contrasts base LLMs (single-shot GPT-4.5/Claude 3.7) with Kaggle systems built for constrained compute. Verification policy governs testing; notes indicate under $10k run costs, incomplete tests labeled incorrect, and some results provisional. ©2026 ARC Prize, Inc.; newsletter signup available.
Book Corners maps neighborhood book exchanges where people leave and take books. It lists about 37,184 libraries and lets users search, view a map, and submit new libraries. Recent entries include Biblio al paso (Río Ceballos, AR); Bedford Park Little Book Stop (Southport, GB); Arched Wall Nook Book Exchange (Pistoia, IT); Little Library in Big Local North Cleethorpes Community Hub (Cleethorpes, GB); Flemingate Little Sharing Library (Beverley, GB); Habrough Community Library (Habrough, GB); LittleFreeLibrary (Ottawa, CA); Snail-Topped Little Free Library (Pimpama, AU); Midway Free Library and Garden (Conewago Township/Hanover, PA, US). Created by Andrea Grandi.
UK AISI/CAISI evaluated Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 for cyber capabilities. Preliminary findings show Kimi K3 performs below the leading frontier models across cyber tasks. In ExploitBench, it scores 32% (vs 24% for GLM-5.2) but failed to achieve arbitrary code execution on 41 samples. In The Last Ones cyber range, Kimi K3 averaged step 17 of 32 (top models ~28.5); within 100M tokens it reached 17 vs 11 for GLM-5.2, and completed TLO in 1 of 10 attempts. Safeguards did not fully prevent exploit-development attempts. Results are preliminary and based on a small benchmark set.
Wasmtime 47 now enables Wasm GC and exceptions by default, making WebAssembly a better target for languages with high-level memory models. The Wasm GC adds struct/array types and subtyping, letting the runtime manage lifetimes and freeing toolchains from embedding a custom GC; the Wasm Exceptions proposal supports try/catch with zero overhead on normal returns. Wasmtime’s GC uses a Cheney-style semi-space collector built on WebAssembly linear memory with 32-bit references, prioritizing safety and portability. The team emphasizes correctness and multi-instance workloads and plans integration with the component model and alias-analysis optimizations.
Professor Hannah Fry has won the Leelavati Prize at the International Congress of Mathematicians for expanding public understanding of mathematics. Fry, Cambridge's first-ever Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics, is a broadcaster, author and podcaster renowned for making maths accessible. The Leelavati Prize, awarded every four years by the IMU, recognises outstanding public engagement with mathematics. Fry's work spans books, TV, podcasts and social media, earning numerous awards and reaching millions. She promotes mathematics as a language of wonder and aims to inspire the next generation.
An Unattributed blogger rails against Automattic’s changes (WordPress, Gutenberg) and Gravatar, labeling them anti-features. They refuse consent for AI use in their name, complain no notifications were given, and vow to delete Gravatar and all Automattic products. They question Gravatar’s usefulness for identity across sites, noting few sites auto-fill avatars anymore while GitHub still syncs. With Bio Link and FediProfile gaining traction, they declare goodbye to Gravatar and Automattic.
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