Front-page articles summarized hourly.
An AI agent learns to play RollerCoaster Tycoon, tackling park management, ride design, and profit optimization. The piece explores how reinforcement learning and planning enable the agent to build appealing coasters, balance costs, attract visitors, and maximize satisfaction, highlighting the challenges of creativity, constraint satisfaction, and long-horizon rewards in a complex simulation.
Since 1969, each decade brings promises to replace developers with easier tools. From COBOL promising business analysts could write code, to CASE tools, Visual Basic/Delphi, and today no/low-code and AI, yet professional developers remain essential. The recurring lesson: software complexity is an intellectual problem, not just typing or syntax. AI augments but does not eliminate judgment—someone must understand the business problem, architecture, and integration. Leaders should ask whether a tool helps developers tackle complex problems, reduces repetitive work, and requires new skills, while keeping realistic expectations.
Italy's antitrust regulator AGCM opened two investigations into Activision Blizzard (owned by Microsoft) over allegedly misleading and aggressive monetization in Diablo Immortal and Call of Duty Mobile. Probes examine design tricks to keep players, especially children, playing longer and urging in-game purchases, and obscured pricing of virtual currency and bundles; free-to-play model with loot boxes and cosmetics can drive high spend (Diablo Immortal has items up to about $200). AGCM scrutinizes parental controls and the sign-up consent flow for data collection, raising privacy concerns. If found in breach, the company could face penalties. Activision Blizzard did not comment.
Brookings Institution warns that generative AI in K-12 risks harming cognitive development and emotional well-being, outweighing benefits. The premortem study draws on focus groups in 50 countries and hundreds of articles. AI can aid reading/writing and save teachers time, but risks cognitive off-loading, reduced critical thinking, and widened inequities as richer districts access better models. It may affect social-emotional development, with teens reporting AI relationships or companionship. Recommendations: use AI to supplement—not replace—teachers; foster curiosity; design antagonistic, reflective AI; build holistic AI literacy; regulate to protect health/privacy and support underfunded districts; foster co-design hubs.
Sergei Fedorov defected from the Soviet Union to the Detroit Red Wings in July 1990, in a meticulously planned operation that involved Wings executives Jim Lites, Nick Polano, and intermediary photographer Michel Ponomarev, aided by journalist Valery Matveev. After a tense near-miss with a Soviet teammate, Fedorov slipped away with Lites and boarded Mike Ilitch’s Gulfstream G2 to Detroit, leaving behind a system that could end his military service. The defection helped spark the Red Wings’ “Russian Five” era and reshaped modern hockey.
Fitdrop is a personal exploration of fashion from 1980 to 2025. It uses a 'Stack'—Gemini 3.0 Pro for outfit prompts, Nano Banana Pro for image generation, Matter.js 2D physics, and Python for auto image cutouts—to build a Fashion Expert agent that yields many fashion prompts/images. Creator Iain, a web nerd at FOOD, embraces 'vibe coding' to make playful projects and invites followers to connect on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Github.
An on-call engineer found a 50,000-goroutine leak in a WebSocket notification service. Root causes: per-subscription goroutines were never canceled, heartbeats used un-stopped tickers, and a messages channel was never closed, so each WebSocket spawned 2–3 goroutines that leaked over time. Diagnosis used goroutine dumps, pprof and LeakProf. Fixes: track subscriptions with cancel, use a buffered messages channel, close on Unsubscribe, stop tickers, and add a CloseHandler to unsubscribe; monitor connections and add tests and alerts. Result: leakage containment and stronger preventive measures.
"Hello" has a roughly 600-year footprint, but its written history begins in 1826 in The Norwich Courier; its roots lie in earlier greetings such as Old High German halâ, halloo, hullo, and the late-16th-century hollo. Spelling varied (hullo, hillo, holla) before it crossed to Britain by the 1850s. Bell favored telephonic "ahoy," but Edison championed "hello," helping it become the standard. The word carries nuances through length and tone, shaped by dialect and mood. In the digital age, brevity, emojis, and new variants stretch or replace it, yet greeting remains recognition; cross-cultural forms echo but resist simple characterizations.
Using metagenomic data from 34,694 participants across US/UK ZOE PREDICT cohorts, the study built ZOE MB Health Ranking and ZOE MB Diet Ranking for 661 gut species. The rankings link specific microbiome profiles with health markers (glycemia, lipids, inflammation) and with diet quality; health ranks correlate with BMI and disease status across public cohorts. Most top-ranked species are from the Firmicutes/Clostridiales and many are uncultured; unfavourable SGBs include known pathogens such as Ruminococcus gnavus, Flavonifractor plautii, Ruminococcus torques and Enterocloster bolteae. Dietary interventions shifted abundances toward favourable-ranked SGBs, supporting diet–microbiome–health links, but causality remains unproven. Rankings publicly available.
AVIF v1.2.0 adds sample transforms, enabling higher bit depths (up to 16-bit or more) while remaining backward-compatible with legacy decoders. Older implementations can decode up to 12-bit; newer software can access full 16-bit. Example: avifenc input_16bit.png --depth 12,8 output.avif preserves top 12 bits with full 16-bit decoding. A test shows ~10% file-size savings for lossless 16-bit PNG. The update strengthens conformance, refines AV1 metadata-to-file signaling, and aligns with HEIF/ISOBMFF/MIAF; adds required AVIF boxes and gain-map guidance for HDR images SDR-compatible. Try libavif and share feedback on GitHub.
Four years after adopting PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive), the author added a Tasks layer in Notion—linked to projects/areas, with 5–20 minute tasks, infrequent recurring tasks, inbox capture, and time-delayed activation. Notion’s relational pages let them extend PARA without losing connections. Lessons: avoid over-automation and excessive recurring tasks, maintain the Areas/Projects distinction, ensure tasks are concrete actions, and use inbox as a staging point. True productivity comes from continuous tuning, not a perfect system; identify pain points, build a minimal system, test for a month, then adapt rather than copy blindly.
Microsoft's January Patch Tuesday breaks power-down on some Windows 11 23H2 machines, which won't shut down or hibernate after updates. The bug ties to Secure Launch, a virtualization-based protection; with Secure Launch enabled, shutdown/restart/hibernate can fail. A workaround is to run "shutdown /s /t 0" to force shutdown. Microsoft hasn’t provided a technical fix or numbers of affected devices and says a resolution will come in a future update. The issue adds to post-patch disruption, alongside a separate Outlook POP profile freeze.
Disposable software is generated, used, discarded rather than maintained. The traditional model invested in long-term maintenance; with cheap generation, maintenance becomes the expensive option. Architecture for Disposable Systems proposes a three-layer approach: Core (Durable) as the immutable Source of Truth; Connectors (APIs) with Immutable contracts enabling swaps without breaking; Disposable Layer—the AI-generated glue, parsers, UI that can be regenerated as needed. Emphasize Contract-First Design: code to strict schemas (OpenAPI, gRPC, Smithy); immutable contracts ensure reliability while disposable parts may be messy. Expect more disposable software as coding agents improve; survivors have durable cores and contracts.
Scott Alexander examines Scott Adams’ life through Dilbert—from its cubicle-hero sharpness to Adams’s later quests: bungled business ventures (Dilberito, Stacey’s), religious pseudo-science in God’s Debris, and a persuasion-technique persona that shaped Trump-era politics. Adams’ audacious self-belief and self-awareness collide: genius at cartoons, failing at startups, chasing ideology, then a controversial endorsement for Clinton for safety. The piece portrays Adams as a gifted but flawed teacher, whose paradoxes offer a bracing mirror for nerds navigating fame, power, and belief.
ASCII rendering is improved by using shape-aware characters. The author builds a 6D shape vector for each ASCII character based on how its glyph occupies a cell’s regions, then maps a per-cell image sampling vector to the nearest character in this high-dimensional space (normalized). This preserves contour and produces sharp edges far better than lightness-based nearest-neighbor downsampling. He adds contrast enhancements (per-component and directional) to sharpen boundaries and uses caching and GPU acceleration to achieve interactive frame rates. The result: crisp, readable ASCII renderings of 2D and 3D scenes.
Wikipedia shows news can be evergreen and continuously updated rather than tied to daily outputs. When events occur, editors create articles quickly and refine them over time using citations and talk-page debate. The piece argues Wikipedia’s culture—no original research, neutral point of view, consensus, transparency, persistent links, and documented edits—offers lessons for journalism: stories should be updated, verifiable by sources, and kept on stable URLs while exposing the process to readers.
How to run and explore VM/370 Community Edition via Docker or Hercules, log in as CMSUSER, and experiment with the CMSPROFILE EXEC. It covers running BASIC and FORTRAN programs (Hello World; prime finder), disk navigation with LISTFILE and QUERY DISK, and uploading/running VMARC game archives (e.g., Tic Tac Toe, ZORK, VM86F155). The guide touches managing disks and modules, adding a user, mounting disks, and printing, with networking and some items marked as TBA.
Ember reports US electricity demand rose 3.1% in 2025 ( +135 TWh ), with solar driving 61% of the growth by adding 83 TWh (a 27% rise). Solar met 81% of demand growth in Texas and the Midwest, and 33% in the Mid-Atlantic. Daytime (10am–6pm ET) demand was fully covered by solar, and rising storage helped extend solar support to 6pm–2am. California’s solar+storage grew 58% over six years, while peak-hour solar output increased only 8%, showing storage shifting solar use. Dave Jones of Ember calls solar essential to meet rising demand.
MapToPoster is a Python tool to generate minimalist city map posters from code. Provide city and country, choose a theme and distance, and it outputs a poster image using OSM data (via OSMnx) and matplotlib. It supports 17 themes, can list themes, and allows custom themes via JSON. Generated posters are saved to posters/ as {city}_{topic}_{timestamp}. It includes a CLI (python create_map_poster.py -c ... -C ... -t ... -d ...), a README, fonts, and a modular workflow (geocoding, data fetching, rendering). MIT licensed.
Formal verification is not inherently “slopless”; proofs can be misleading or wrong, and formal models can diverge from the intended software. The article argues that proof bugs are hard to fix and that changing code often alters the specification. It discusses autoformalization challenges, how to translate software into theorem provers, and semantic gaps between lifting vs reimplementing in a prover’s language. It warns against axiom leaks (e.g., AC) and backdoors (ACL2 defttag), and even true proofs can be false. The path forward lies in spec elicitation, validation, and robust proof cores, not naive trust in formal methods.
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