My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood
Memoir about the author's grandmother, a federal agent, and the lessons learned from digitizing hundreds of hours of childhood footage.
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Memoir about the author's grandmother, a federal agent, and the lessons learned from digitizing hundreds of hours of childhood footage.
Ring has canceled its planned integration with Flock Safety after intense backlash over surveillance concerns and a controversial Super Bowl ad. The partnership would have allowed Ring owners’ video to be shared with Flock’s law-enforcement network, but it never launched and no customer videos were sent. Ring said the integration would have required more time and resources and reaffirmed its commitment to responsible data use. The controversy surrounding Ring’s ties to police and new features like Familiar Faces persists, with Axon remaining a partner and Community Requests continuing.
AWS SDK for Go v2 release 2026-02-12 updates the EC2 module to v1.288.0, introducing nested virtualization to run nested virtual machines on non-bare-metal EC2 instances.
macOS 26.3 RC claimed to fix the window-resizing issue in Tahoe. A pixel-by-pixel test showed the resize areas now follow the corner radius rather than square regions, improving accuracy, but the vertical/horizontal resize thickness shrank from 7 to 6 px overall (inner‑frame portion from 3 to 2 px), making misses more likely. In the final macOS 26 release, the fix was removed and regions returned to squares; release notes changed from 'Resolved Issue' to 'Known Issue'.
Uncertainty-aware STDP (iuSTDP) uses timing intervals instead of exact spike times. When pre/post intervals are disjoint, learning proceeds (LTP/LTD). When overlapping, learning is uncertain; two modes: conservative (learn only on certain events) or probabilistic (learn with confidence-scaled updates). A plasticity governor computes confidence c from P = Phi(mu/sigma) where mu and sigma come from interval midpoints and widths, and gates per-neuron plasticity g. This four-factor rule combines timing evidence, confidence, eligibility traces, and reward to stabilize networks under noisy timing. Simulations show governor reduces weight churn vs vanilla.
Herbert Lui argues that anxiety-inducing decisions should be evaluated by the worst realistic outcome and whether you can recover from it. If you can’t, make the decision more recoverable (pre-orders, extra income, selling unused items) or reduce the severity of irrecoverable loss. A haircut is a relatable example of a recoverable change. Many so-called irreversible decisions are actually recoverable. Bias for action grows when decisions are recoverable, and entrepreneurship rests on making more decisions recoverable. Credit to Bernice Liu.
Discord starts mandatory age verification, ending anonymous gaming chats; users flee to Matrix, but Matrix.org will also comply with laws and explore privacy-preserving verification. However Matrix’s federated model lets users run own homeserver on Raspberry Pi or VPS abroad, bypassing ID requirements. Trade-offs include rough UX and lack of features like seamless game streaming and voice channels. If you stay on Discord, expect surveillance; otherwise consider self-hosting a Matrix server.
Three cache layers sit between a SELECT and disk: Postgres shared_buffers, the OS page cache, and the disk. Memory sizing trades off between shared_buffers and the page cache. A Postgres page is 8KB; data hits disk at CHECKPOINT. work_mem affects on-disk spills. In a heavy MVCC workload, two queries using an index on account_id plus JSONB filters caused thousands of reads and ~2k IOPS for zero results. Root cause: missing JSONB-friendly index (GIN or partial) and MVCC row scattering. In managed environments you often can’t see hardware, so indexing choices matter most.
Lichess announces Op1, a partial 8-piece tablebase covering endings with at least one opposing pawn pair (white and black pawns opposing on the same file). In collaboration with Marc Bourzutschky, about 63 TiB of data is publicly accessible: downloadable tables, a tablebase API for developers, and integrated support on the analysis board and mobile app. Op1 adds to the 7-piece Syzygy coverage and accounts for roughly half of 8-piece endgames in practice. Generated by retrograde analysis, it uses Depth to Conversion (DTC) rather than DTZ50. Future work includes 7-piece DTC, op2 (9-piece) tables, and a standalone frontend.
Techdirt reports that ICE and CBP used NEC's Mobile Fortify facial recognition app to identify migrants and others, but rushed deployment without Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) or AI impact assessments as required. DHS claimed the tool could verify identities, but it cannot reliably do so. The app has been used on targeted individuals, protesters, observers, and even U.S. citizens, despite lacking proper oversight. The rollout dismantled centralized privacy reviews; critics warn it enables unlawful surveillance and retribution. The pattern reflects 'deploy first, regulate later' under the Trump era.
Cities rely on distinctive retail, but value created by shops leaks to landowners, risking vacancies and weaker public goods. The piece outlines fixes: unified ownership with anchor tenants; transit-plus-property models; cross-subsidization via mixed-use developments; zoning reforms to enable larger land assemblies; hyperlocal taxes or bonds via homeowners’ associations or BIDs to fund streets and amenities; localized planning to realize spillovers; and private–public 'commons' spaces as third places. If retail shifts online, these value-capture institutions could sustain vibrant streets and nearby homes.
Anthropic raised $30B in a Series G, valuing it at $380B post-money. Led by GIC and Coatue, with co-leads D.E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ and MGX; investors include Accel, Temasek, Sequoia, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and others, plus ongoing Microsoft and NVIDIA commitments. Funds will accelerate enterprise-grade AI products and infrastructure. Run-rate revenue is about $14B, up ~10x annually for three years; >$1M annualized spend customers exceed 500; eight of the Fortune 10 are Claude customers. Claude Code (May 2025) >$2.5B run-rate; Cowork; Opus 4.6; Claude on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure; trained on Trainium, TPUs, GPUs.
Disc refers to optical media (CD, DVD) that is removable and can be read-only, write-once, or rewritable (CD-R, DVD-R, CD-RW, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM). Disks refer to magnetic media (hard drives, floppy) that are usually sealed inside a case, are rewritable, and can be partitioned; external disks may be removable. Both are pronounced the same.
Matrix.org welcomed the surge of signups after Discord announced age-verification. Matrix is a decentralised, open standard: anyone can run a server, but admins must verify user ages under local law. UK’s Online Safety Act and similar laws in Australia, NZ, the EU (with US/Canada moving) demand stricter checks than self-declaration. The Safety team is exploring privacy-preserving options; Premium accounts may help fund compliance, with account portability to move between servers. While not a full Discord drop-in yet, Matrix offers end-to-end encryption, openness, and extensibility. The Foundation relies on donations to operate.
Tom Vanderbilt tours the US metrology world to reveal how time is made and kept. At JILA/NIST, clocks from cesium fountains to masers define UTC via an ensemble, then distributed by GPS and time.gov. The “second” is no longer tied to Earth's rotation but to 9,192,631,770 cycles of cesium-133, with leap seconds sometimes inserted to keep astronomy and atomic time aligned. New optical clocks (based on ytterbium, strontium, aluminum ions) promise even greater precision, fueling debates on how to redefine the second. Time, it seems, is becoming a frequency-based, fundamentally uncertain construct.
syntux is an open-source React/Next.js library that generates UIs from a value by producing a lightweight JSON-DSL called the React Interface Schema (RIS), which is hydrated to render the UI rather than emitting source code. It supports custom React components, caching, and server actions, and can integrate with AI providers via the Vercel AI SDK (e.g., Anthropic/Claude). Installation is via npx getsyntux; examples show a GeneratedUI component wired to a model. MIT-licensed.
An employee describes being accused of AI-writing after proposing a simple opening for a colleague’s report. He defends that all words are his own, offers a witty reply, and laments society’s quickness to assume AI authorship, questioning the future of human creativity. The post insists it is entirely human-written (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
HDRify is a pure-JavaScript library and web demo for reading and writing HDR, EXR, and JPEG-R images and applying tone mapping. It supports Radiance RGBE HDR, OpenEXR, and Ultra HDR/JPEG with gain maps, and can display true HDR on compatible browsers via Direct HDR. It runs in browser and Node.js and is tree-shaking friendly. It supports EXR compression options (no compression, RLE, ZIPS, ZIP, PIZ, PXR24). Tone mapping options include ACES, Reinhard, Khronos Neutral, and AgX. A CLI tool hdrify-cli on npm is available for batch conversion. Built by Ben Houston; sponsored by Land of Assets.
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