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You can now add AI images directly into LibreOffice documents - here's how

Jack Wallen / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways There's a new LibreOffice extension for AI-generated images. The extension uses AI Horde to generate images. Images are automatically placed in your document. Although I don't use AI for image generation, I know a lot of people who do. Some of those people regularly work with documents and need the ability to quickly insert AI-generated images into those documents. Last w

The Extraordinary Rise in the Wealth of Older American Households

There has been a seismic shift in age-wealth profiles in the U.S. over years 1983 to 2022. The most notable is the sharp rise in the relative household wealth of age group 75 and over. Correspondingly, the relative wealth holdings of all other age groups dropped over these years. Using the Survey of Consumer Finances, the paper focuses on the youngest age group, 35 and under, and the oldest age group, 75 and over, and analyzes the factors behind these relative shifts in wealth. I find that the t

Prediction-Encoded Pixels image format

Prediction-Encoded Pixels This format is specifically designed to be for low-color pixel art (<=16 colors works best, up to 256 colors is supported). It uses "Prediction by Partial Matching, Order-2" compression, which is able to compress packed-palette-indices smaller than GIF, PNG, and QOI, while sacrificing a bit of time. It's 2-10x slower than GIF/PNG/QOI (depending on the image), but often compresses the image 20-50% smaller than GIF/PNG (and multiple-times smaller than QOI). If you care

Next set of VC judges locked in for Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025

The Startup Battlefield 2025 judging panel is getting even stronger. Our first wave of VCs brought serious firepower, and now we’re adding more top investors who will grill founders, unpack the big questions, and help crown this year’s $100,000 champion at TechCrunch Disrupt, October 27–29 in San Francisco’s Moscone West. Like the legendary investors who’ve judged in years past, this next group brings the insight, experience, and instincts that can change a founder’s trajectory in just one Q&A.

SmallJS: Smalltalk-80 that compiles to JavaScript

SmallJS is a free and open source implementation of the elegant and powerful Smalltalk-80 (ST) language. It compiles to JavaScript (JS) that runs in modern browsers or in Node.js. SmallJS is file based, not image based, so you can develop in your favorite IDE. The default setup is for Visual Studio Code, with ST syntax coloring and step debugging! You code separately from the SmallJS base libraries (image) and only the parts you use are imported automatically when running your app. SmallJS is

The Mysterious Shortwave Radio Station Stoking US-Russia Nuclear Fears

Shortly after US president Donald Trump hung up a call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin this spring, an obscure shortwave radio channel, broadcasting from a military base somewhere in Russia, sprang to life. Through a fog of static, at 4625 kHz on the shortwave dial, a man’s voice spoke in monotone: “Nikolai, Zhenya, Tatiana, Ivan.” He repeats the message—spelled out in the Russian phonetic alphabet—followed by a series of numbers and letters. The whole message reads: “NZhTI 01263 BOLTANKA 4430 952

Show HN: Bicyclopedia

Welcome! This is an interactive exploration of the parts of a bicycle. If you're reading this message, the images may still be loading. If you are using a screen reader or have Javascript disabled, unfortunately you won't be able to see the images or animations of the parts, but you can still read the descriptions and source code here and read more about this project here. Thank you for visiting!

The Hidden Ingredients Behind AI’s Creativity

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. We were once promised self-driving cars and robot maids. Instead, we’ve seen the rise of artificial intelligence systems that can beat us in chess, analyze huge reams of text, and compose sonnets. This has been one of the great surprises of the modern era: physical tasks that are easy for humans turn out to be very difficult for robots, while algorithms are increasingly able to mimic our intellect. Another surprise that has long p

Best 360 Cameras (2025), Tested and Reviewed

Top 4 360 Cameras Compared Insta360 X5 Insta360 X4 DJI Osmo 360 Ricoh Theta X Price (sale) $550 $500 ($350) $550 $597 Max Video Specs 8K 30 fps 360, 4K 60 fps in single lens mode 8K 30 fps 360, 4K 60 fps in single lens mode 8K 50 fps / 4K 120 fps in single-lens mode 5.7K 30 fps 360 / 4K 30 fps in single lens mode Single Lens Mode Yes Yes Yes Yes Photo Resolution 72 MP (11,904 x 5,952), 18 MP (5,888 x 2,944). RAW (DNG) supported 72 MP (11,904 x 5,952), 18 MP (5,888 x 2,944). RAW (DNG) supported

How to Fix Your Context

Mitigating & Avoiding Context Failures Following up on our earlier post, “How Long Contexts Fail”, let’s run through the ways we can mitigate or avoid these failures entirely. But before we do, let’s briefly recap some of the ways long contexts can fail: Context Poisoning: When a hallucination or other error makes it into the context, where it is repeatedly referenced. When a hallucination or other error makes it into the context, where it is repeatedly referenced. Context Distraction: When

How to build a coding agent

😎 The following was developed last month and has already been delivered at two conferences. If you would like for me to run a workshop similar to this at your employer, please get in contact Hey everyone, I'm here today to teach you how to build a coding agent. By this stage of the conference, you may be tired of hearing the word "agent". You hear the word frequently. However, it appears that everyone is using this term loosely without a clear understanding of what it means or how these coding

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is a perfect reimagining of the classic series

is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. Ninja Gaiden is having a renaissance. The last mainline entry was originally released more than a decade ago, but by the end of 2025, there will be three new Ninja Gaiden titles. Two are 3D: Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, a modern-day remaster of Ninja Gaiden II released earlier this year, and Ninja Gaiden 4, co-developed by PlatinumGames and set to release in October. But there’s a ne

Show HN: How to Build a Coding Agent (free workshop)

😎 The following was developed last month and has already been delivered at two conferences. If you would like for me to run a workshop similar to this at your employer, please get in contact Hey everyone, I'm here today to teach you how to build a coding agent. By this stage of the conference, you may be tired of hearing the word "agent". You hear the word frequently. However, it appears that everyone is using this term loosely without a clear understanding of what it means or how these coding

Exploring EXIF (2023)

← Harley Turan • August 2023 August 2023 Exploring EXIF According to iOS’ Photos application, I’ve taken 73,281 photos over the past 14 years of owning an iPhone. Each one of those images doesn't just contain the photo you see as you scroll through the Photos app — it contains a wealth of information stored encoded directly into the image file itself. It details useful metadata such as where the photo was taken (so that you can view your photos on a map at a later date), the time and date the

Line scan camera image processing for train photography

I use my line scan camera to take cool pictures of trains and other stuff. But there’s a lot that goes into properly processing the images. FIGURE 2 A cool train, the Renfe AVE Class 102, nicknamed Pato because of its duck bill-like appearance. FIGURE 4 Nice CRH6A intercity electric multiple unit. 1 Principle of operation The way it works is that the camera has a single column of pixels (or in this case, two columns), that scans at a super high speed. The camaera is stationary, but as a tra

Converting an online game to work without any JavaScript

Topics: #development Client-side rendering has become the dominant paradigm for building web apps. But frameworks like React can lead to major JavaScript execution bottlenecks during page load. For many web developers there’s a clear solution for this: Ship less JavaScript to the browser. Whether websites have to work without any JavaScript at all is a question almost as old as the web itself. By now, the answer is clear: No, they don’t. It’s firmly established that websites should be more tha

Websites and web developers mostly don't care about client-side problems

You're using a tool with a too-generic User-Agent You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace, the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately whatever you're using to do so has a HTTP User-Agent header value that is too generic or otherwise excessively suspicious. Unfortunately, as of early 2025 there's a plague of high volume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training) that behave like this. To reduce th

These are the best new MacBook deals this month: options as low as $599

In the Apple Silicon era, MacBooks have become more affordable than ever – with brand new models starting as low as $599. With looming global tariffs, these great deals could potentially be coming to an end soon – so if you’re in the market for a new MacBook for any reason, now may be one of the best ever times to purchase. Apple’s upcoming macOS 26 update is also dropping support for practically all Intel Macs (with some small exceptions) – so if you’d like to stay on the latest and greatest A

My tips for using LLM agents to create software

This post details my experiences creating software with LLM coding agents, emphasizing that what you do with AI agents is ‘creation’, not just 'coding,' and sharing what worked for me. This is not 'The One True Path To AI Success.' tl;dr: I’m not a professional developer, just a hobbyist with aspirations I wanted to accomplish a coding project beyond my skill level and have been experimenting with agentic coding tools for several months (spoiler: mostly success) You should use Anthropic’

Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi over Age Verification Law

People in Mississippi can no longer use the social media platform Bluesky. The company announced Friday that it will be blocking all IP addresses within Mississippi for the foreseeable future in response to a recent US Supreme Court decision that allows the state to enforce strict age verification for social media platforms. According to Bluesky, Mississippi’s approach to verification “would fundamentally change” how users access the site. “We think this law creates challenges that go beyond it

Computer fraud laws used to prosecute leaking air crash footage to CNN

Investigators Used Terrible Computer Fraud Laws To Ensure People Were Punished For Leaking Air Crash Footage To CNN from the if-it-can-be-abused,-it-WILL-be-abused dept Earlier this year, an Army helicopter collided with a passenger plane over the Potomac River in Washington, DC. All sixty-seven people aboard both vehicles were killed. While the FAA focused its investigation on the failures that led to this mid-air collision, local investigators in Virginia were somehow far more concerned abou

OpenCUA’s open source computer-use agents rival proprietary models from OpenAI and Anthropic

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now A new framework from researchers at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and collaborating institutions provides an open source foundation for creating robust AI agents that can operate computers. The framework, called OpenCUA, includes the tools, data, and recipes for scaling the development of computer-use agents (CUAs). Models trained usin

Our Response to Mississippi's Age Assurance Law

Keeping children safe online is a core priority for Bluesky. We’ve invested a lot of time and resources building moderation tools and other infrastructure to protect the youngest members of our community. We’re also aware of the tradeoffs that come with managing an online platform. Our mission is to build an open and decentralized protocol for public conversation, and we believe in empowering users with more choices and control over their experience. We work with regulators around the world on c

If we can find information by asking GenAI, who needs the Web?

The World Wide Web (Web) emerged as a new medium in the mid-1990s. It was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1989, but its exploding popularity was also enabled by the release of the Mosaic Web browser in 1993 and the Internet becoming commercially available in 1995. A communication revolution was launched. Roughly 30 years later, the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in Nov. 2022 launched another revolution. High-quality generation of natural-lan

Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi Over Age Verification Law

People in Mississippi can no longer use the social media platform Bluesky. The company announced Friday that it will be blocking all IP addresses within Mississippi for the foreseeable future in response to a recent US Supreme Court decision that allows the state to enforce strict age verification for social media platforms. According to Bluesky, Mississippi’s approach to verification “would fundamentally change” how users access the site. “We think this law creates challenges that go beyond it

Closing the Nix gap: From environments to packaged applications for rust

Closing the Nix Gap: From Environments to Packaged Applications for Rust Should I use crate2nix, cargo2nix, or naersk for packaging my Rust application? — (@jvmncs) January 21, 2025 This tweet shows a common problem in Nix: "Should I use crate2nix, cargo2nix, or naersk for packaging my Rust application?" devenv solved this for development environments differently: instead of making developers package everything with Nix, we provide tools through a simple languages.rust.enable . You get cargo

Meta partners with Midjourney on AI image and video models

Meta is partnering with Midjourney to license the startup’s AI image and video generation technology, Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang announced Friday in a post on Threads. Wang says Meta’s research teams will collaborate with Midjourney to bring its technology into future AI models and products. “To ensure Meta is able to deliver the best possible products for people it will require taking an all-of-the-above approach,” Wang said. “This means world-class talent, ambitious compute roadmap,

Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org

This was a tough decision, having used Gmail since 2007/2008. However, I had to draw the line and stop giving Google my data for free. The problem with email is that everything is transmitted in plain text. Technically, Google can store every message you receive and know everything, and U.S. agencies can request access to that data (this include also EU citizens under the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Frameworks). For someone like me, who cares about privacy and runs as much as possible

Much of the World Stops Sending Mail to U.S.

Do you have a package coming your way from overseas? (I do, it’s a gift, and I’m very annoyed.) Hopefully it’s not urgent, because it’s going to be a minute before that thing gets to our shores. Questions surrounding the Trump administration’s ongoing tariff regime, including a policy to end an exemption from taxing small packages, have resulted in postal services across the world simply choosing not to ship to the United States until things get sorted out, according to Bloomberg. Central to th

Bluesky blocks service in Mississippi over age assurance law

Social networking startup Bluesky has made the decision to block access to its service in the state of Mississippi, rather than comply with a new age assurance law. In a blog post published on Friday, the company explains that, as a small team, it doesn’t have the resources to make the substantial technical changes this type of law would require, and it raised concerns about the law’s broad scope and privacy implications. Mississippi’s HB 1126 requires platforms to introduce age verification f