Technology

Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own hands, our own minds, our own code. But that identity is being challenged.

the top post on my Bluesky feed was something along these lines: "ChatGPT is not a search engine. It does not scan the web for information. You cannot use it as a search engine. LLMs only generate statistically likely sentences." The thing is… ChatGPT was over there, in the other tab, searching the web. And the answer I got was pretty good.

over 37% improvement on a large sequential I/O workload.

Washington is joining a growing list of states trying to tear down barriers for consumers who want to repair their electronics rather than buy new ones.

It looks like a 13-inch laptop on the outside, until you open it to reveal an 18-inch foldable screen that's just 7.3 mm thick.

This screenshot was recently released by the Digg team.

Digg was the predecessor to reddit, which destroyed itself with a catastrophically bad redesign, pushing everyone to move to reddit. Now, they're attempting a re-launch.

Looks like they're going all-in on gamification, which doesn't inspire much hope from me. It'll be interesting to see what eventually arrives.

UPDATE: My source for this was here which is supposedly a screenshot of a tweet by https://x.com/avstorm

But there is no tweet about digg by that account. Also the tweet doesn't fit the style of his other tweets.

So yeah. The whole thing is likely to be fake.

UPDATE 2: original tweet https://x.com/avstorm/status/1924956444673106374. But it has no attribution and afaik 'avstorm' is not affiliated with Digg. I still think it's fake.

I built a programmable 8-bit computer from scratch on breadboards using only simple logic gates. I documented the whole project in a series of YouTube videos and on this web site.

a few-kilobyte storage device that only unlocks if the owner’s Bluetooth device is in the vicinity.

Unlike OpenAI's video generator Sora, released more widely last December, Google DeepMind's Veo 3 can include dialogue, soundtracks and sound effects. The model excels at following complex prompts and translating detailed descriptions into realistic videos. The AI engine abides by real-world physics, offers accurate lip-syncing, rarely breaks continuity and generates people with lifelike human features, including five fingers per hand. According to examples shared by Google and from users online, the telltale signs of synthetic content are mostly absent.

Firefox’s address bar just got an upgrade, and it’s all about putting you in control.

From The Register via this RSS feed

Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo:

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL

Let’s set the stage. Picture a semi-governmental company. Around $130 million in annual revenue. They build and operate very expensive things — in space. Hundreds of physical hosts. Nearly 4,000 VMs. Most of their IT stack, in fact, runs on our platform.

Are they paying customers?

No.

Are they using the fully open-source version, from source?

Also no.

Instead, they discovered our Xen Orchestra Appliance (XOA): a turnkey virtual machine, with Xen Orchestra pre-installed, regularly tested, easy to deploy and update (and yes, still running fully on-prem). A supported and stable experience, designed for teams that don’t want to git pull on master branch in production.

But they didn’t want to pay for it. So they came up with a creative workaround: abusing our 30-day trial (initially 15 days until recently), over and over again.

It all started back in April 2015 — yes, a full decade ago. At first, they used their corporate emails to request trials. One here, one there. Nothing suspicious. But over the years, the pattern grew. More emails. More trials. Enough that, when we looked back, we realized we could chart it. Literally. Here's what the "creative licensing strategy" has looked like over time:

As you can imagine, we ended up with what looked like the entire staff directory. Developers, sysadmins, managers… pretty sure we even had the janitor signed up for a trial at some point.

When those ran out, they switched to personal Outlook or Gmail addresses. Every time: starting with a new (real!) person with their… personal email, a new 30-day trial. And then go incrementally with it. [email protected], then [email protected]… We're now well past johndoe60. Same company name, every time… which is impressive considering the field isn’t even required in order to register your account. Hard to say if it was a mistake, a flex, or just their way of making sure we didn’t miss who was milking the trials.

Yes, they’re that committed. Committed to not paying.

Everyday AI become more and more common, but can we say no?

"The exercise was held from May 8 to 9, 2024, at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, and at a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) site in Denver, Colorado."

Article refers to a PDF of the report it's based on:

https://www.jhuapl.edu/sites/default/files/2025-04/Space-Weather-TTX-Report-Summary-v3-FINAL.pdf