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Ruby vs. Java vs. TypeScript: my experience on building a Cowork DOCX plugin

Three prototype implementations (Ruby, Java, TypeScript) for a Claude Cowork DOCX plugin show Java best handles ZIP/XML natively, with mature libraries and typing; porting to a desktop app took ~3 days and yielded an ~88MB binary. TypeScript was chosen for future MCPB support, using Bun for a single-executable, though PostHog source maps are problematic and final sizes are ~70MB Mac / ~120MB Windows. Ruby struggled due to lack of typing and tooling issues. Codex lags Claude Desktop; Java remains the author's winner, but TypeScript is preferred for MCPB prospects.

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AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes

AMD is changing Vivado licensing to a tiered model: Basic remains free but Windows-only; Linux support moves to Core and higher tiers, costing about $1.2k–$1.8k per year. This pressures Linux users—students, researchers, hobbyists—into paying or sticking with an aging, unsupported Linux version. AMD's forum responses offered little clarity, prompting criticism that the company betrays the Linux community and mirrors bait-and-switch tactics seen elsewhere.

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Seeing Around Corners Using Smartphone-Grade Lidar

MIT researchers show that off-the-shelf smartphone-grade lidar (<$100) can see around corners, not producing full images but sparse 3D shapes and motion of hidden objects. Using a portable 100-pixel lidar (emitter + single-photon detector) and bursts of frames, they combine measurements akin to synthetic aperture techniques to reconstruct static hidden objects and track known-shape motions. The approach could aid autonomous vehicles and robots, and democratizes non-line-of-sight sensing, though it's not full photographic imagery and relies on relatively stable scenes. Published in Nature (May 20, 2026).

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Rapira (Рапира) – Soviet programming language interpreter

Rapira is a TypeScript/Bun-based interpreter for the Rapira language, a Soviet educational language from the Agat system. The repo contains the interpreter core (lexer, parser, tree-walking evaluator) faithful to the 1985 dialect (Russian keywords, case-insensitive IDs, block comments, ; separators, three data types, three-arrow parameter scheme, trailing result), a CLI and multi-line REPL, a web playground, and tests. Build with bun; run examples and generate SVG from turtle graphics. Documentation includes SPEC.md and RAPIRA.md; live demo at the GitHub Pages site.

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Biff is a command line datetime Swiss army knife

Biff is a Rust-based command-line tool for datetime arithmetic, parsing, and formatting. It offers commands like biff time fmt, add, span, seq, in/untag, and a tag feature to extract datetimes from arbitrary data into JSON lines. Built atop the Jiff library and ICU4X for localization, it aims to provide a succinct, flexible alternative to date-like tools (not POSIX-compatible). Install via cargo install biff-datetime-cli or use prebuilt binaries; can build with locale support; tested with cargo and Insta; dual-licensed MIT/UNLICENSE.

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A Eureka machine that thinks like nature and explores what AI cannot

Researchers from IISc and international partners report a CMOS-based neuromorphic Ising machine using a Fowler-Nordheim annealer to solve hard combinatorial problems at scale, with asymptotic convergence to the optimal solution. The neuromorphic autoencoder navigates complex energy landscapes faster than conventional chips, tackling tasks like protein folding. Led by Shantanu Chakrabarty (WashU) with IISc’s Chetan Thakur, the work involves Heidelberg, Johns Hopkins, and UC Santa Cruz, and is published in Nature Communications (2026).

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Our 2D game character grew 3% taller every time he walked

Leo’s Moon Ship suffered a drift when switching animations: a single global scale/offset made different canvases yield inconsistent character heights, so Leo’s feet appeared off the ground. The fix: compute per-animation metrics at load. For each frame, detect the visual feet line by scanning the alpha bbox from the bottom, average across frames, and pick a reference (idle_right). Then set anim_scale and anim_offset_y per animation so every animation renders to the same height and feet align to ground; apply on animation changes. The shadow pins to the feet too. Result: stable, correct alignment.

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Qwen3.7-Max Ran for 35 Hours on Unknown Hardware and Achieved a 10× Speedup

Alibaba's Qwen3.7-Max autonomously ran a kernel optimization task on unfamiliar ZW-M890 PPUs for 35 hours, making 1,158 tool calls and continually writing, compiling, profiling, and redesigning the kernel to achieve ~10x speedup over the reference. It outpaced GLM 5.1 (7.3x), Kimi K2.6 (5x), and DeepSeek V4 Pro (3.3x). The effort illustrates 'environment scaling'—training across diverse tasks/tools to boost generalization beyond benchmarks. Limitations: proprietary API with no open weights or self-hosting; self-reported results; not readily deployable.

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I analysed 20 years of my chats

Vadim Drobinin mined 20 years of chats (1.2M messages) to build a structured vault of his life, turning messy data into a personal CRM. He pulled archives from ICQ/IRC/DC++ through VK, Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, and Instagram, then cleaned noise (roughly 41%) and resolved who’s who across platforms. An LLM-based pipeline produced daily notes, events, sentiment, and profiles, while a deterministic script ingested JSON into an provenance-tracked SQLite store. Findings show relationships evolve in bandwidth and vocabulary: ~13% of conversations are transactional, with changing endearment and response dynamics. Not a bad friend after all; memories and birthdays tracked.

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