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JavaScript Required This is a heavily interactive web application, and JavaScript is required. Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is. Learn more about Bluesky at bsky.social and atproto.com.
September brings with it io9’s biggest list of new books so far this year, with an emphasis on horror titles as the days grow shorter. That said, there are still plenty of sci-fi adventures and fantasy tales on the way. September 1 and 2 Kingdom of Tomorrow by Gena Showalter “A fusion of modern and fantastical worlds, where a young woman must navigate a secret society, uncover a shocking enemy… and resist an undeniable attraction.” (September 1) Bees in June by Elizabeth Bass Parman “With a
Researchers have disrupted an operation attributed to the Russian state-sponsored threat group Midnight Blizzard, which sought access to Microsoft 365 accounts and data. Also known as APT29, the hacker group compromised websites in a watering hole campaign to redirect selected targets "to malicious infrastructure designed to trick users into authorizing attacker-controlled devices through Microsoft’s device code authentication flow." The Midnight Blizzard threat actor has been linked to Russia
JavaScript Required This is a heavily interactive web application, and JavaScript is required. Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is. Learn more about Bluesky at bsky.social and atproto.com.
Apple’s commitment to end-to-end encryption is so strong that it withdrew a key privacy feature from the UK market rather than be forced to compromise it globally. The company also faced pressure on this front from the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). In a surprising twist, the White House came out in support of strong encryption, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is now urging Apple and other tech giants to stand firm on the issue … The US’s changing narrative on strong encryption I des
If you use ChatGPT to learn new topics, you might want to try its new flashcard-based quiz feature, which can help you evaluate your progress. I used a simple prompt: "Turn financial econometrics into a clean GPT flashcard quiz." In this case, I'm trying to learn Financial Econometrics, which is all about applying statistical methods to financial market data. Econometrics is a complex topic, and I want GPT-5 to come up with better questions, which is why I've selected GPT-5-Thinking, but you c
Bash Prompts This web page is a child of the Bash Prompt HOWTO that I'm maintaining for the Linux Documentation Project. The HOWTO explains a lot more than I'm going to here. My interest in Bash Prompts developed when I found "The BashPrompt Themes Project (now long deceased). Some of their prompts show up here, and a lot of what I've done shows the influence of their work. I started these pages because so many people have been mailing me cool prompts that I couldn't see putting them all in t
Netflix's September movie lineup is a sampler of everything the streaming service has become known for: riveting, real-life documentaries, family-friendly romances and great films from all over the world. One of the month's biggest titles is sure to be aka Charlie Sheen, the two-part documentary about the actor's life. Sheen has been on a path to sobriety and reflects on his often chaotic life, which was fodder for tabloids for decades. That film arrives on Sept. 10. In The Wrong Paris, out Se
The supercomputing infrastructure at the University of Tarapacá (UTA) in Arica, Chile, is a fundamental pillar for Latam-GPT. With a projected investment of $10 million, the new center has a cluster of 12 nodes, each equipped with eight state-of-the-art NVIDIA H200 GPUs. This capacity, unprecedented in Chile and the region more broadly, not only enables large-scale model training in the country for the first time, it also encourages decentralization and energy efficiency. The first version of L
Bayes, bits & brains This site is about probability and information theory. We'll see how they help us understand machine learning and the world around us. A few riddles More about the content, prerequisites, and logistics later. I hope you get a feel for what this is about by checking out the following riddles. I hope some of them nerd-snipe you! 😉 You will understand all of them at the end of this minicourse. 🧠 Intelligence test Test your intelligence with the following widget! You will be
This is a tutorial for the Jujutsu version control system. It requires no previous experience with Git or any other version control system. At the time of writing, most Jujutsu tutorials are targeted at experienced Git users, teaching them how to transfer their existing Git skills over to Jujutsu. This tutorial is my attempt to fill the void of beginner learning material for Jujutsu. If you are already experienced with Git, I recommend Steve Klabnik's tutorial instead of this one. This tutoria
It appears that it was US military communications doctrine to not send the exact same message twice using different encryption ("none" counting as one type of encryption), and the term of art for changing a message to avoid that was indeed "paraphrase". I managed to dig up a US Army document on Cryptology from roughly that era that appears to discuss paraphrasing. The document in question is Department of the Army Technical Manual TM 32-220(pdf), dated 1950, titled "BASIC CRYPTOGRAPHY". It appa
Andrew Ferguson, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission, recently expressed concern that “Alphabet’s administration of Gmail is designed to have partisan effects.” In a letter addressed to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Ferguson pointed to a recent story in the New York Post describing complaints by Targeted Victory (a consulting and PR firm that’s worked with the Republican National Committee and Elon Musk’s X) claiming that Gmail flags emails linking to the Republican fundrais
If you want to brush up on some skills or learn new ones, MasterClass offers a good way to do just that. The streaming service has hundreds of classes taught by professionals and experts in their fields, and now you can get a subscription for 50 percent less than usual. All MasterClass membership tiers are on sale right now, so you can sign up for as low as $5 per month. With a subscription, you could watch a class on writing taught by James Patterson, or learn cooking techniques from Thomas Ke
shared_ptr<T>: the (not always) atomic reference counted smart pointer Introduction This is a write-up of the “behavioral analysis” of shared_ptr<T> reference count in GNU’s libstdc++. This smart pointer is used to share references to the same underlaying pointer. The mechanism beneath works by tracking the amount of references through a reference count so the pointer gets freed only after the last reference is destructed. It is usually used in multi-threaded programs (in conjunction with oth
Suppose we ask an LLM: “Can you tell me about Java?” What “Java” is the model thinking about? The programming language or the Indonesian island? To answer this question, we can try to understand what is going on inside the model. Specifically, we want to represent the model’s internal states in a human-interpretable way by finding the concepts that the model is thinking about. One approach to this problem is to phrase it as a dictionary learning problem, in which we try to decompose complex emb
AI companies are causing a content drought that will eventually starve them. In a recent article, The Economist didn’t mince words: “AI is killing the web.” Published last month, the piece raises urgent questions about how artificial intelligence is reshaping the internet as we know it: ChatGPT, Google, and its competitors are rapidly diverting traffic from publishers. Publishers are fighting to survive through lawsuits, partnerships, paywalls, and micropayments. It’s pretty bleak, but unfortun
It appears that it was US military communications doctrine to not send the exact same message twice using different encryption ("none" counting as one type of encryption), and the term of art for changing a message to avoid that was indeed "paraphrase". I managed to dig up a US Army document on Cryptology from roughly that era that appears to discuss paraphrasing. The document in question is Department of the Army Technical Manual TM 32-220(pdf), dated 1950, titled "BASIC CRYPTOGRAPHY". It appa
This is a tutorial for the Jujutsu version control system. It requires no previous experience with Git or any other version control system. At the time of writing, most Jujutsu tutorials are targeted at experienced Git users, teaching them how to transfer their existing Git skills over to Jujutsu. This tutorial is my attempt to fill the void of beginner learning material for Jujutsu. If you are already experienced with Git, I recommend Steve Klabnik's tutorial instead of this one. This tutoria
The first thing I noticed about the NordicTrack Commercial 2450, NordicTrack's newest addition to its commercial treadmill series, is the touchscreen. It has a 22-inch HD touchscreen that resembles a desktop computer screen, so it's huge. It also tilts and pivots so you can adjust it for different uses, like if you want to take workout classes on the floor. The treadmill itself is also on the bigger side since it's a commercial treadmill, but it does fold up using its easylift assist feature, so
LG Gram 17 (2025) ZDNET's key takeaways The LG Gram 17 (2025) is available now for $1,699. You won't find a thinner, lighter 17-inch laptop out there, and the Intel "Lunar Lake" processor is a big upgrade from last year's model. The touchscreen is wobbly, the black matte finish attracts fingerprints, and I wish it had a haptic trackpad. View now at LG View now at Best Buy more buying choices Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. So you like a big screen, 17-inch laptop, but y
Trouble is brewing for the Digital Services Act (DSA), the landmark European law governing big tech platforms. On August 21, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), sent a scathing letter to a number of tech giants, including Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. The letter's subject: the European Digital Services Act cannot be applied if it jeopardizes freedom of expression and, above all, the safety of US citizens. The opening of the letter—signed by FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson—features a
Optical technology is well established for long-haul communications, but the distances it serves are shrinking — especially in the data center. Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) already drive short fiber links. But efforts are underway to further scale them down to provide more connections through waveguides than fiber can provide. “We have seen the transition from long haul to metro-to-local area networks and then into the data center,” said Suresh Jayaraman, senior director fo
Perhaps it is the inevitable fate of any convention, but literary history does not, it turns out, have many examples of people appreciating great chaptering. In The History of English Prose Rhythm (1912) – one of the sources for James Joyce’s virtuosic-or-unreadable parodies of the evolution of English prose in Ulysses – George Saintsbury remarks on Thomas Malory’s decision to insert a chapter break at a decisive moment in his fifteenth-century Morte d’Arthur. At the end of chapter ten of the Mo
Nearly 40% of Nvidia’s second quarter revenue came from just two customers, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. On Wednesday, the chipmaker reported record revenue of $46.7 billion during the quarter that ended on July 27 — a 56% year-over-year increase largely driven by the AI data center boom. However, subsequent reporting highlighted how much of that growth seems to be coming from just a handful of customers. Specifically, Nvidia said that a single customer
2025 There has to be a laptop that does it all and won’t break my back as I haul it around town. I’m sure every mobile-minded gamer has asked themselves that question and come away without a good answer. The one arena I keep coming back to is the 14-inch gaming laptop. Today’s tiny beasts have the performance necessary to keep up with 16- or 18-inch laptop without needing to lug around a huge chunk of aluminum. What’s not to like? Here’s the kicker: it’s only getting more expensive to achieve t
I don't know anyone who's satisfied with their phone's battery life. We always want more power so we don't wind up with a tapped-out phone at the end of the day or the need to carry a portable charger everywhere. So I'm very curious to see how Adaptive Power affects iPhone battery life when iOS 26 is released, likely soon after the iPhone 17 is announced at Apple's Sept. 9 fall event. Currently, the iPhone uses as much power as it needs to perform its tasks. You can extend the battery life by d
CNET's key takeaways Laptop prices are on the rise -- and the more they increase, the better Acer's Aspire 14 AI looks. The Acer Aspire 14 AI is available for $500 at Costco $625 at Amazon The Intel Lunar Lake CPU offers good performance for the price and long battery life. The display and design won't wow you. When I reviewed it in April, it cost $700 at Costco and was the cheapest Copilot Plus PC I had reviewed. Fast-forward two months, and a Labor Day deal has brought that price down to
I recently moved to a new apartment, and unfortunately, the television didn’t make the cut during the amicable roommate split. While my studio isn’t as cramped as my previous living situations, fitting a bulky TV into the living area still felt impractical to me. In my search for a suitable alternative, a startup called Lumi Labs reached out about testing its new portable projector, the Lumi Max. From the moment I unboxed it, I was impressed by how far projectors have come since my college days
Henrik Fisker once envisioned a burgeoning EV empire at the startup he named after himself, which was to be led by the Ocean SUV. But cracks started showing in that vision almost as soon as the Ocean hit the road in 2023. Fisker cut production targets multiple times, failed to meet sales goals and laid off staff. What’s more, its Ocean SUV was beset with software and mechanical issues, rendering it inoperable for some. Add troublesome brakes, sudden power loss and doors that wouldn’t open to th