Front-page articles summarized hourly.
KU researchers mapped about 20,000 English words into a visual ‘viseme’ landscape to study lip-reading. They found roughly one‑third of words look like at least one other word visually, and words with many look-alikes are harder to lip-read. Errors cluster in visually similar regions and are usually one viseme off. The map could guide lip-reading training and improve automatic transcription by combining visual cues with audio.
Even as it looks ugly and costs over $30k a year, the Bloomberg Terminal persists because its moat is infrastructural. It combines real-time data, news, analytics, and the IB chat that doubles as a trading platform, creating a powerful network effect and learning lock-in: many users must stay for liquidity and colleagues’ participation. Despite cheaper rivals, the switch cost is enormous. Bloomberg is weaving AI—BloombergGPT—into the terminal, treating AI as an enhancement to its existing moat, not a replacement.
Mir Books curates Soviet-era and Chinese children’s picture books, posting title-by-title notes with authors, illustrators, and links to obtain them. Recent entries include The Frog Rider, Hedgehog’s New House, Seven Clam Sisters, The Little Athletes, Little Elephant Goes Home, Three Little Girls, Dongdong And His Kitten, and Little Chicken And Her Friends, plus social and archival links. It also features Earth, Sweet Earth by Ekaterina Radkevich (Science For Everyone), the final volume in the series, with a full contents list. The site aggregates bibliographic posts, monthly archives, and reader comments.
Ruby can reverse‑engineer binary formats. Using Codemasters’ BIGF archives as example, the article shows a dependency‑free reader built with standard Ruby: Strings are byte buffers, File.binread gives raw bytes, and unpack decodes integers/floats (V = LE u32, e = LE float). It covers two directory layouts (fixed 24‑byte records and a variable‑length layout with a marker) and idioms like rec[0,16].split("\x00").first, unpack1('V'), data.index, and getbyte. The parser is fast (C‑backed unpack) and doubles as documentation. Full code at github.com/davidslv/bigf.
Learning new things is worthwhile and achievable across many skills (art, typing, modelling, music, languages). Set aside daily time—about 30–45 minutes—and start with doable basics. Expect initial struggle and occasional declines; practice builds data, and sleep consolidates gains. Progress often plateaus into a long-lasting, mediocre-to-competent state, after which improvement slows but remains possible. Avoid overload and rushing to advanced topics; focus on fundamentals and deliberate practice. Learning is a long-term project that compounds over months and years, expanding capability and social value.
An engineer details his experiments with coding agents and agentic loops, including a 'bisect a bug' anecdote that led to deeper use of AI for testing and data analysis. He argues for testing-driven workflows inspired by hardware centers (dedicated test engineers, fuzzing, minimal code review) to boost reliability and velocity in AI-enabled software. LLMs help speed analysis but are weak at testing, with high variance and false positives; success relies on feedback loops, multiple personas, artifact reviews, and human-in-the-loop checks. Benchmarks are often misleading; Caveman mode yields mixed results. The piece advocates systematic evals and pragmatic tooling over hype.
This post reviews link-rot studies (Pew 2024, Zittrain, ODU) and shows the web is brittle: about 38% of 2013 pages were inaccessible by 2023 and ~25% across 2013–2023. The Wayback Machine rescued roughly 15% of dead pages, lowering inaccessible/vanished URLs from ~25% to ~10% in Pew’s sample; 72% of the Pew dataset is archived, with 56% preserved and 16% rescued. Zittrain’s NYTimes outlinks: 40% dead live, 96% archived, ~2% vanished. ODU found 65% dead (1996–2021), but all dead URLs were rescued in their Wayback-based sample. The post argues for continued archiving (SPN, IndexNow, TARB).
Differential calculus (derivatives) is a local operation; integral calculus (areas) is global and often lacks closed-form solutions. They’re linked as anti-derivatives by the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. The piece uses this contrast to argue that synthesis—combining multiple parts into a whole—is harder than analysis, which breaks problems into smaller, local parts. In software, incident response is a synthesis problem: understanding how components normally fit together. The author urges building synthesis expertise among SREs and learning how to learn the operational details of systems to better resolve incidents.
BUSY is a lean, statically typed, cross-platform build system for GCC, Clang and MSVC, inspired by GN. It is designed to be bootstrapped from a minimal C89 toolchain and a Lua-based host, with builds driven by the BUSY specification language. The language provides pre-declared types and a small core, enabling static analysis and modular build definitions. Runs via lua build.lua and can output or generate projects for other backends (-G). It aims for minimal dependencies, direct builds from the source tree, and suitability for large projects (e.g., LeanQt, Oberon+, NAppGUI).
Karthik Kumar Viswanathan emphasizes Unicode support on any system, even DOS, and teases a "First Cut" release (with a link to the project).
Fong argues that privatizing the USPS would destroy universal service and is logistically impossible for private firms. The Wells Fargo privatization framework would sell off USPS parcel operations and subsidize mail with real estate, ending mail delivery as we know it. Private carriers lack the scale to reach every address, especially rural areas, and parcel prices would rise, harming the public. Amazon's growing dependence on USPS and its fear of privatization further complicate the issue. USPS’s mail matters for medications, benefits, taxes, housing notices, and disaster relief; it should be publicly funded and expanded, with reforms like postal banking.
Researchers from Exeter and European teams tracked pied flycatchers with light-data loggers to reveal how migratory songbirds choose wintering sites. The study, in Science, shows wintering location is partly inherited and partly shaped by upbringing. All populations first stop in Spain/Portugal, then undertake a ~40-hour non-stop Atlantic crossing to western Africa; routes bend eastward, with Spanish birds wintering in the west and Siberian birds in Nigeria (3,000–13,000 km autumn journeys). Hybrid Dutch-Swedish offspring winter in intermediate positions. The findings suggest migration distance, not just direction, is fixed, informing how birds may adapt to climate change.
Thesis: threat modeling is practical, not just formal. A simple model should answer: what are we protecting; who wants to harm it; how might they attack; what prevents it; how are assets connected; what assumptions are we making; what is out of scope. Threat models are living docs; iterate by mapping system components and their inputs/outputs, then drill down. The post critiques Matrix’s threat model for lacking assets/assumptions, contrasts with Signal, and shows how threat thinking guides real design choices (e.g., credential stuffing, passkeys, E2EE, hybrid PQ).
Security researcher MrBruh details a vulnerability in MSI Center's Notebook Foundation service. The service spawns a named pipe (MSI_SERVICE_2) that authenticated users can interact with, exposing commands to read/write/delete registry keys, use WMI, and run or kill executables as LocalSystem. A PoC showed launching cmd.exe; remote RCE possible over SMB with valid credentials. Exploitation relies on a brute-forced client-name and 3DES-encrypted messages. MSI issued a patch within two days; no CVE issued; reporter attempted vetting via PSIRT; patch shipped with MSI Center 2.0.70.0. The author notes no bug-bounty payouts so far.
Tinkerfont is a browser extension for inspecting, replacing, and testing fonts on live websites. It lets you right-click to inspect font properties, view all fonts on a page, and swap to 1,900+ open fonts from Bunny Fonts or upload your own, with per-hostname rules and one-click application. It persists settings in local storage and can export/import configurations. Built for Chrome and Firefox, it uses MV3 service workers, a mutation observer to reapply changes, and a bundled Bunny catalog. See mighil.com/tinkerfont and install from Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-ons.
Odin, Wikipedia and Engagement Farming analyzes the deletion of the Odin programming language article on Wikipedia via AfD, arguing Odin is notable in practice (used by JangaFX, discussed by Primeagen) but not adequately supported by reliable, independent sources per WP notability rules. The piece traces a Twitter thread between GingerBill, Jimmy Wales, and Casey Muratori, highlighting debates over sources, COI, and how notability is determined for programming topics. It critiques Wikipedia’s gatekeeping and the influence of engagement farming in tech discourse, calling for domain-specific sourcing guidelines.
Profile of Lucas Fernandes Aguiar, a patent prosecutor and researcher based in Brasília, Brazil. He writes about intellectual property, chemistry, and using AI to work smarter. The site features Blog, Consulting, About, Contact, policy links, and links to GitHub, LinkedIn, Threads, Lattes, and a CV.
Software, from First Principles traces how we turn reality into bits and back, from early mechanical counters and vacuum tubes to transistors and integrated circuits. It explains how logic gates enable binary arithmetic, how RAM, ROM and the CPU form a stored-program computer, and why abstractions (compilers, high-level languages, OS kernels) matter. It covers how networks and the Internet emerged (packet switching, TCP/IP), how the Web became a universal runtime via browsers and APIs, and how databases and cloud infrastructure enable modern software. The piece emphasizes understanding underlying layers to debug, secure, and scale software, especially with AI-assisted coding.
GitFut converts GitHub profiles into World Cup-style player cards rated out of 99, showing stats like PAC, DRI, SHO, DEF, PAS, and PHY for users such as torvalds, ThePrimeagen, pewdiepie, and t3dotgg. Over 151,381 cards have been rated. Built by Younes & Mawsis; scouts and a coffee‑support option are available.
Made by Johno Whitaker using FastHTML