Front-page articles summarized hourly.
A request to set a user-agent and respect the site's robot policy, with details at https://w.wiki/4wJS and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T400119.
Ghostty’s largest memory leak was traced to the PageList memory management and a scrollback-pruning optimization. Ghostty uses standard pages from a pool and rare non-standard mmap pages. During pruning, the code resized non-standard pages to standard in metadata but did not shrink the underlying mmap memory. When freed, such pages were treated as standard and not munmapped, causing a leak. The fix: never reuse non-standard pages; destroy them (munmap) and allocate a fresh standard page from the pool. A macOS VM-tagging aid and a regression test were added. The fix is merged and due in 1.3 and nightly.
Worst of Breed is a satirical site lampooning resume-driven development and over-engineering. It parodies patterns like distributed monoliths and “Database as IPC,” touts a Tech Horror Radar of dubious technologies, and features mock quotes from execs praising bloated choices. Its manifesto proclaims Complexity over Simplicity, Process over People, Tools over Solutions, and Resume over Value, celebrating the very practices it mocks.
Alex Tardif argues that bindless rendering unlocks GPU-driven rendering with far less code and mental overhead. He contrasts the traditional CPU-bound draw loop with GPU-driven concepts—global buffers for constants, virtual texturing, megabuffers, and indirect/ExecuteIndirect draws—and shows how bindless descriptors let shaders index resources by ID, enabling event-driven draw management and scalable culling. He outlines practical patterns: store resources in tables, use compute shaders to generate draw arguments, frame-buffer descriptor updates, and read-only bindless access. Provides tips and references, aiming for bang-for-buck maintainable high performance.
An expansive, cross-cutting map of ideas shaping innovation, learning, and systems. It links cognitive biases (hindsight, self-deception), knowledge transmission (tacit knowledge, mentorship), reliability and design (redundancy, failure analysis, durability), and practical heuristics (first-principles thinking, OODA loop, intuition). It covers startup dynamics (pivoting, incentives, market feedback), social/political factors (coalitions, power, leadership), copying and open-source phenomena (collective brain, imitation), economics and technology cycles (creative destruction, standardization, entropy, monopoly risks), and core systems principles (Conway's Law, observability, openness). A taxonomy of patterns that drive invention, adoption, and failure.
Researchers filmed brown rats at Segeberg Kalkberg in northern Germany intercepting bats in flight for the first time, using infrared and thermal cameras (2020–2024). They documented 13 bat kills and 52 carcasses, suggesting deliberate predation rather than scavenging. The rats appear to balance at the cave mouth, catching aerial prey and also attacking bats crawling to roosts, implying two hunting strategies. The behavior may arise from the cave’s dense bat traffic and geometry, signaling adaptive predation by an invasive species, with potential negative effects on European bat populations. Management near large roosts is advised.
Good Judgment Open is a crowd-sourced forecasting platform that invites participants—especially Superforecasters—to predict major political, economic, and technological events. Sponsored by UBS Asset Management, The Economist, and Harvard Kennedy School, it features active challenges, featured questions, and an archive of open questions. Owned by Good Judgment, co-founded by Philip Tetlock, the service offers sign-in, registration, and a path to becoming a Superforecaster. Example forecasts include NYC mayoral race 2025, UN Security Council Gaza peacekeeping mandate, and US two-quarter streak of negative real GDP growth in 2025.
Vercel's v0 coding agent uses a three-part pipeline to boost preview-generation success: dynamic system prompts, LLM Suspense (streaming text manipulation), and autofixers (post-streaming fixes). The aim is to maximize successful previews; LLMs alone can have ~10% code errors, but the pipeline detects and fixes issues in real time, raising success rates. Dynamic prompts inject SDK-version-specific guidance via embeddings and curated samples; LLM Suspense shortens tokens and fixes imports on the fly, including icon handling. Autofixers patch code across files in under 250 ms. Together they deliver stable, high-rate first-pass renders.
An AI econ seminar simulates a hostile session where a presenter is grilled by four aggressive faculty (Dr. Chen, Roberts, Patel, Morrison) on topics from AI and labor-market inequality to tariff uncertainty and market microstructure. The presenter is pressed on assumptions, data, and validation, accused of intellectual theft or fraud, and ultimately admits a lack of rigorous proof and quits. The piece critiques the toxic economics-seminar culture and ends with a tongue-in-cheek warning: don't do an econ PhD, let the robots handle it.
Modal extends memory snapshots to GPUs using CUDA checkpoint/restore to capture GPU memory, CUDA state, kernels, streams, and mappings alongside CPU memory. Previously, GPU state had to be prepared after restore; now snapshots include GPU state, enabling startup with compiled artifacts and avoiding re-running torch.compile. This yields up to 10x faster cold boots across workloads (e.g., Parakeet with NeMo, ViT, Qwen). To use, set enable_memory_snapshot with experimental_options enable_gpu_snapshot in your app. Alpha availability; integrates with gVisor; thanks to NVIDIA CUDA and CUDA-Checkpoint project.
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Pebble unveils the Round 2, its thinnest smartwatch yet, a rounded, 8.1 mm device priced at $199. It focuses on basic health tracking (steps, sleep) with no heart-rate monitor, trading features for longer battery life (10–14 days). The 1.3” color e-paper display (260×260, 283 DPI) is brighter with backlight. It runs Pebble OS, has dual mics for speech input (Android-only now; iOS coming in the EU), and side buttons for quick actions. Stainless steel frame, accelerometer, magnetometer, and interchangeable bands. Preorders start Jan 2; ships in May; Time 2 holders can switch.
Bichon is a lightweight, high-performance Rust email archiver with a built-in WebUI. It synchronizes emails from IMAP servers, indexes them for full-text search, and exposes a REST/OpenAPI for programmatic access. It runs as a standalone server with no external database, designed for archiving and searching (not sending). Features include multi-account sync, Tantivy-based search, RBAC, EML/MBOX import via bichonctl, and a WebUI in 18 languages. Since v0.2.0 there is a built-in admin user and token authentication. Docker/binary deployments and AGPL-3.0 license.
Distributed Denial of Secrets is a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit that archives and publishes hacked and leaked documents. The homepage highlights recent releases and a View All option, including Free Speech Union donor data, WhiteLeaks, Epstein emails and files, Washington Post files, PROTEI data, City of Columbus data released by Rhysida, Inside CECOT, and more, with sections for collaborations, and download/donation options.
Discussion of UC San Diego admissions shows school-level effects outweigh individual merit: LCFF+ high schools are favored, increasing their share of admits from about 20% to over 30% since 2016, while high-UPP schools' admits fall. Admission rates align more with school profile than student proficiency; among LCFF+ schools, weaker cohorts sometimes have higher admit rates. Private-school applicants tend to be stronger but face lower odds than public-school peers. The process is opaque, with no public rubric, prompting calls for transparency and accountability amid rising 'classmate competition.'
Voltair is building self-charging drones that perch on power lines to recharge, enabling autonomous UAVs with effectively infinite range. First customers are power utilities; autonomous inspections can prevent outages and wildfires while cutting costs. They’ve validated charging tech on a power line, built five prototypes, and inspected about 2,000 poles since June. Later markets include rail, road, telecom, and real estate, with a data product for the physical world. Founders: Hayden Gosch, Avi Gotskind, Ronan Nopp, Warren Weissbluth. YC Winter 2026.
fenv is a FoundationDB development environment and CI framework that provides a base Docker image with the FoundationDB client and fdbcli, plus tooling (shellcheck, hadolint, jp). It can be extended with a custom Dockerfile, starts an FDB container for integration testing, and caches images to speed CI. It supports local dev via fenv.sh and GitHub Actions (with submodules and optional extended images). You can select the FoundationDB version with FENV_FDB_VER, and test multiple versions with a matrix. Base image stays Debian-based; namespace rules isolate extended images per project.
An introduction to property-based testing (PBT) on a signup form using Haskell and Hedgehog. It starts with positive/negative tests for name and age validation, uses generators and coverage labels to verify input space, and uncovers a bug (upper-bound age). It then makes validation deterministic by passing today's date as an argument and tests birth dates instead of age, building a single broad property with coverage checks. This reveals leap-day edge cases caused by date arithmetic and demonstrates the value and trade-offs of deterministic PBT and generator coverage.
Britain’s draft CPS guidance would classify circumcision as a potential form of child abuse or an offence against the person, though unlike female genital mutilation there is no specific offence for male circumcision. The move follows concerns from coroners about deaths and harms, with seven circumcision-related deaths since 2001. Jewish and Muslim leaders say the practice is a core religious/cultural rite and should not be deemed inherently abusive, while calls for stronger safeguards, accreditation, and regulation to prevent harm.
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