Converting colors in JavaScript at 6B operations per second
An exploration of achieving extremely fast color conversion in JavaScript, purportedly around 6 billion operations per second, by Dima Kryaklin.
Front-page articles summarized hourly.
An exploration of achieving extremely fast color conversion in JavaScript, purportedly around 6 billion operations per second, by Dima Kryaklin.
Musician and retro-tech fan Chris Graue photographed Jupiter with a Game Boy Camera mounted to the Mount Wilson Observatory’s Hooker Telescope via a 3D-printed adapter. He’s now releasing the adapter’s 3D-printable schematics for free along with a short tutorial video. The tube fits a standard 1.25-inch eyepiece, letting the Game Boy Camera capture Jupiter even without a powerful telescope. The piece notes Game Boy cameras have a history of DIY uses, from mirrorless cameras to webcams and telephoto lenses.
BeavisUltrasound is an open-source clone of the Gravis Ultrasound PnP ISA sound card. The README describes a board designed around the AMD InterWave (AM78C201) with full schematic and reverse-engineered GAL source. The card measures 8.2 x 4.2 inches, 4-layer, with suggestions for edge plating. BOM allows LM833 or JRC5532 op-amps, +/-8V supply. It documents optional ferrite beads, unused components (JPR12/13, U100). Key components: IW78C21M1 1MB ROM, 93C66 EEPROM with plug-and-play data (ultrasound_pnp.bin), and GAL at U14 (gr_gal.jed or GR_GAL.PL2).
The author investigates a Letta Desktop performance issue caused by auto-scrolling to new messages with el.scrollTop = el.scrollHeight. scrollHeight is not static: accessing it triggers layout updates, so frequent new messages can cause reflows and slow scrolling. The shown Chromium-like implementation indicates scrollHeight depends on layout state. The lesson: readonly properties can be dynamic; don’t assume they’re cheap. A pragmatic fix is to cap with a large number instead of calculating exact scrollHeight, avoiding costly recalculations.
CalculiX is a free, cross-platform 3D finite element package for building, solving, and post-processing field problems. The standalone solver handles linear/nonlinear static, dynamic, and thermal analyses; it reads Abaqus input and can export mesh data to Nastran, Abaqus, Ansys, Code-Aster and several CFD codes. Its OpenGL-based pre/post-processor runs separately. It supports external CAD interfaces, 20‑node brick elements with reduced integration, and cyclic symmetry for eigenproblems. Developed by MTU Aero Engines, it is GPL licensed (v2 or later) with no warranty.
Key Postgres outage causes: (1) VACUUM and transaction-ID wraparound—I/O contention and 32-bit txIDs can trigger shutdown; 64-bit txIDs and undo-like approaches debated. (2) Connection limits and parallelism—process-based model hurts parallelism; pgrust uses a thread-based Rust design for safety and performance. (3) Bad query plans—no planner hints; aim for an adaptive planner to detect regressions and adjust. (4) JSON woes—poor statistics and no compression; plan to add JSON statistics and dictionary/cross-row compression. Roadmap: improve compatibility, stability, and architecture; continue building pgrust.
The article describes using A* for pathfinding among circular obstacles by transforming the obstacle forest into a tangent visibility graph. Paths consist of surfing edges (bitangents between circle pairs) and hugging edges (arcs around circles). It explains how to compute internal and external bitangents via theta formulas, test line-of-sight by point-to-segment distance, and how to detect/block edges. Hugging edges connect tangent endpoints; A* is augmented with direction-annotated nodes to prune cusps. Techniques like Minkowski expansion (growing obstacle radii by robot radius), delayed edge generation, and culling improve performance.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/e4/9a/e49a498f-f8fd-4afd-8d3c-66831cf87af2/entrance_puppets.jpeg)
Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in Queens opened to the public for the first time in 63 years, offering an 80‑minute tour of the bustling studio where puppets are designed, molded and dressed. The piece traces the shop’s history—from early Midtown spaces and the Muppet Mansion to its Long Island City home—while showing how Sesame Street characters and franchises like Fraggle Rock and The Dark Crystal are created. Visitors see the ‘puppet lounge,’ watch demonstrations, and learn about flocking and the handmade heart behind the puppets. Tours cost $150.
Billion Dollar PDFs is an open index of influential documents—memos, decks, whitepapers, threads—that crystallized a narrative at the right moment and moved billions in capital. Coined by Jeremy Giffon, the directory lists 117 items across categories (VC Doctrine, Worldview, Technical Paper, etc.). Notable entries include Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System; Attention Is All You Need; The Internet Tidal Wave; Ethereum Whitepaper; The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities; Why Software Is Eating the World; PageRank; ImageNet; The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville. Readers can browse, expand entries, and read originals. 2026 edition.
Max Ghenis builds a GiveWell‑style Monte Carlo model to translate MacKenzie Scott’s roughly $30.3B (2026 dollars) of giving into QALYs. Gifts are allocated across 13 archetypes (health, economic security, education, equity, etc.), with cost-per-QALY drawn from published estimates and adjusted by realization (how much of an effect a marginal grant delivers) and credibility (causal identification). Under skeptical assumptions, frontier health impact is about 1,500× more per dollar than the portfolio; under default settings, the frontier implies ~105 million QALYs (≈4.2 million child deaths averted). The largest buckets (equity/justice, education) contribute little QALYs due to weak health links. Code and data on GitHub.
Stanford Medicine highlights nicotine pouches as rapidly growing, highly addictive nicotine sachets marketed to youth. Sold as discreet, modern lifestyle products, they use candy-like flavors and social media, with ads linking them to healthier living. They don’t reliably aid quitting; pouches often deliver 9–12 mg nicotine per pouch (some up to 150 mg) and can be used in smoke-free settings, potentially deepening addiction. Regulation in the US lags; FDA has authorized a couple of brands, while others are banned or unregulated; calls for limits (e.g., ≤4 mg per pouch) and banning youth-targeted flavors.
The piece tests the “clear the pipe” idea—that bottlenecks, not inputs, limit growth—against real data. In Austin vs SF, throughput rose with looser rules, but price effects defied simple models. In Vienna vs London, Vienna’s large public/nonprofit housing and a parallel system kept rents low despite similar construction. The mechanism works only when isolable; parallel levers can dominate. Takeaway: profile before optimizing; use rough calculations to check order of magnitude and identify load-bearing parts, rather than assuming a single fix.
Codebase-posters is a GitHub project by unable12 that turns a repository’s git history into generative art posters. Run with npx codebase-posters; it reads your local git log, renders a 3600×4800 poster and an in-browser MP4 video, all offline with no uploads or telemetry. Posters are deterministic: same repo and seed yield identical pixels. It supports a gallery UI and a repo-picker, and can be built locally (npm install, npm run dev/build) or run via a packaged CLI (node bin/cli.mjs). To extend, drop a CanvasRecipe in src/recipes. MIT licensed; ~101 KB, zero dependencies.
Better Prayer is a free desktop app that reminds users of prayer times (with 10-minute pre-notifications) and can optionally lock the screen at prayer time to curb procrastination. When locked, apps are blocked until the user completes wudu, verified by AI analyzing a photo of their sink. It aims for a calm UI, no ads, and features daily Quran verses in various languages. Users report improved consistency and family-wide adoption.
Nanogpt-seis is a teaching repo showing end-to-end pretraining of a 113M-parameter decoder GPT for earthquake science. It builds a ~823M-token corpus by crawling Crossref/Unpaywall, arXiv/EarthArXiv, Wikipedia, and FineWeb-Edu/Substack; 24% domain, 76% general. It uses a 4096-token context model (RoPE, GQA, RMSNorm, SwiGLU, weight tying), trained on 2× NVIDIA A30 with DDP and FlashAttention. Inference is KV-cache streaming. It documents stage-by-stage data crawling, cleaning, dedup, BPE (16k), training, scaling-laws (IsoFLOP) and muP LR transfer, concluding the compute-optimal frontier near 117M non-embedding parameters for the budgets studied.
An electronics hobbyist documents designing and assembling a custom PCB for a BME280 sensor via I2C. Starting from an ESP32 Nano, they design a dedicated sensor module in KiCad, learning about footprints (0805 SMD), schematics, BOMs, and Gerber files. Parts were sourced from DigiKey; fabrication via JLCPCB cost under $10 and took 2–3 weeks. They hand-assembled with a Hakko iron and a Quick 861DW hot air station. The finished board worked plug‑and‑play, validating the end-to-end process and guiding future, more integrated designs.
A Caolan argues that, following Ivan Illich, there is a per-capita energy threshold beyond which more power reduces equity and increases time scarcity. He notes how speed concentrates control in transport and sees computing lacking comparable constraints. While regulators curb vehicle power, computing remains unconstrained by design. By contrast, the electrically assisted pedal cycle (EPAC) limits speed to 15 mph, expanding access without worsening time-lack. The piece imagines a restrained ‘computer’—a bicycle for the mind—with limits on power and fewer laws, to foster convivial modernity.
SHELLZINE’s Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels is a curated, illustrated guide listing Western comics and Japanese manga that define cyberpunk. It provides setting dates, formats, and brief themes for each work—ranging from The Long Tomorrow and Akira to Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner adaptations, Blame!, Eden: It’s an Endless World, Robocop comics and more. Entries emphasize motifs like dystopia, AI, robotics, cybernetics, virtual reality, surveillance and corporate power, and often note cross‑media connections within Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner, and related continuities.
Made by Johno Whitaker using FastHTML