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Building the Rust Compiler with GCC

Bootstrapping Rust with GCC If you know one thing about me, it is that I love working on the Rust compiler. Some people kayak, travel or play guitar - and I stare at assembly, trying to figure out what I broke. This summer, I am taking on quite a large task: bootstrapping the Rust compiler using `cg_gcc` What does that mean? "bootstrapping" is simply a name given to the Rust compiler build process. So, what I am really trying to do is build a Rust compiler, without using LLVM - and using GCC

Today's NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for July 7, #757

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles. Today's NYT Connections puzzle could be tricky, but it's not as tough as yesterday's bizarre purple category ("ending with homophones of parts of the leg"). Read on for clues and today's Connections answers. The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go

TikTok’s ‘ban’ problem could end soon with a new app and a sale

is a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget. Even with the TikTok divest-or-ban law officially in effect since January, the app has only shut down service in the US for one day. Now, The Information reports that an agreement for a sale satisfying the law’s requirements is close and would come with a new, separate version of the app. Any deal, however, would need approval from the Ch

Apple Didn’t Approve, but Amazon Is Clearing Out AirPods Pro 2 at a Record Low for Prime Day

AirPods Pro 2 are in stores just a year but already they set the benchmark by which other wireless earbuds with active noise cancellation are judged. On the subject of sound quality, nothing else comes close to holding a candle right now. Normally these earbuds cost $249, but Amazon is offering them over 30% off early Prime Day, reducing the price to as low as $169. This deal is for everyone (and not just Prime members) and it is a rarity for an Apple device. Remember, Apple never really offers

The DJI Power 2000 is my new favorite mid-sized, high-power portable power station

DJI Power 2000 Portable Power Station The DJI Power 2000 Portable Power Station is a great device for those who want ample power and capabilities without sacrificing portability. It has a large 2,048Wh battery, 3,000W of output, and a really nice selection of ports. Its 30-amp AC outlet can even power an RV! When an outage occurs or you need power during your adventures, nothing is a lifesaver quite like a power station. I’ve been testing some of the best ones around, and the latest one I’ve ha

Yet Another Zip Trick

To delete account insert your password. After that, a e-mail with deletion confirm link will be send. Click on it to confirm account deletion. You already have a account? and to the I have read and agree to the Do you consent to our site using cookies in accordance to our Privacy Policy? You can consent either to all cookies, or accept only selected types. Reject optional Cache only Allow all cookies Advanced cookie settings

Just Ask for Generalization (2021)

Generalizing to what you want may be easier than optimizing directly for what you want. We might even ask for "consciousness". This blog post outlines a key engineering principle I’ve come to believe strongly in for building general AI systems with deep learning. This principle guides my present-day research tastes and day-to-day design choices in building large-scale, general-purpose ML systems. Discoveries around Neural Scaling Laws, unsupervised pretraining on Internet-scale datasets, and o

Is It Cake? How Our Brain Deciphers Materials

One of the greatest questions of the modern age is: Is it cake? As in: Is it an espresso machine, or cake? Paint can, or cake? Air fryer, or …? Millions of viewers have watched rapt as TikTok bakers slice or bite into inedible-looking objects with fluffy, frosting-filled innards … or have tuned into Is It Cake?, the aptly named Netflix show. Why? As a form of entertainment, this kind of visual trick is hardly new. For centuries, artists have delighted in fooling us into thinking one material is

WinUAE 6 Amiga Emulator

Major update to custom chipset emulation. Internally almost everything in main chipset emulation has been rewritten. Fastest possible/JIT mode chipset timing/sync had major changes which can cause side-effects. Bugs are very possible, especially in very rarely used features. Custom chipset rewrite Custom chipset emulation (Agnus/Alice and Denise/Lisa) almost completely rewritten. Almost every part of chipset emulation is now internally cycle accurate. Custom chipset Denise/Lisa emulation is

macOS Icon History

With macOS 26, Apple has announced a dramatically new look to their UI: Liquid Glass. Solid material icon elements give way to softer, shinier, glassier icons. The rounded rectangle became slightly more rounded, and Apple eliminated the ability for icon elements to extend beyond the icon rectangle (as seen in the current icons for GarageBand, Photo Booth, Dictionary, etc.). With this release being one of the most dramatic visual overhauls of macOS's design, I wanted to begin a collection chroni

Speeding up PostgreSQL dump/restore snapshots

The last few pgstream releases have focused on optimizing snapshot performance, specifically for PostgreSQL targets. In this blog post, we’ll walk through the key improvements we made, share the lessons we learnt, and explain how they led to significant performance gains. But first, some context! What is pgstream? pgstream is an open source CDC(Change Data Capture) tool and library that offers Postgres replication support with DDL changes. Some of its key features include: Replication of DDL

Today's NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for July 6, #756

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles. Today's NYT Connections puzzle could be tough. That purple category almost sounds like one of the goofy TikTok parody Connections categories, like "18th century whaling ships spelled backwards and minus three letters." That's not the category, but it feels a little bit lik

Today's NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for July 6, #286

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles. Need some answers for today's Connections: Sports Edition? Sitting here in Seattle, I was proud to nail the yellow category immediately (I might have had to move if I didn't get it right.) The green category wasn't too tough, but the others were more difficult. Read on for hints and the answer

CEOs Say AI Is Poised to Wipe Out an Astonishing Number of Jobs

Billionaire tech moguls aren't the only ones doomsaying about artificial intelligence layoffs. CEOs across a range of industries are now jumping on the bandwagon, saying it's no longer a matter of "if," but "how many" jobs AI will take. A recent survey by the Wall Street Journal explored just how pervasive the automation idea is throughout a number of industries, and execs aren't pulling any punches. For example, CEO of Ford Motor Company Jim Farley recently predicted that AI "is going to repl

Why government red tape is draining your phone’s battery potential

Robert Triggs / Android Authority You’re not alone if you’re pining for longer battery life from your latest smartphone. Despite emerging technologies like silicon-carbon cells, we’ve seemingly hit a ceiling just above the 5,000 mAh mark — at least for phones sold in the US and Europe. Meanwhile, glance over at models in China or India, and you’ll spot far larger batteries in otherwise identical handsets. For example, the new Nothing Phone 3 packs a 5,150mAh battery globally, but bumps that up

Is It Time to Stop Protecting the Grizzly Bear?

This story originally appeared on Vox and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In the early 1900s, long before smartphones and selfie sticks, tourists flocked to Yellowstone National Park—not for the geysers or scenery, but for a grotesque show: a nightly spectacle of grizzly bears raiding cafeteria scraps from open-pit landfills like desperate, starving pirates. The bears were in dangerous proximity to humans: Hungry bears tore at open car windows. Tourists posed a little too close with

The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Pho­to of Karl­heinz Stock­hausen by Kathin­ka Pasveer via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons You may hear the phrase “elec­tron­ic music” and think of super­star dub­step DJs in fun­ny hel­mets at beach­side celebri­ty par­ties. Alter­na­tive­ly, you may think of the mer­cu­r­ial com­po­si­tions of Karl­heinz Stock­hausen, the musique con­crete of Pierre Hen­ry, or the oth­er­world­ly exper­i­men­tal­ism of François Bayle. If you’re in that lat­ter camp of music nerd, then this post may bring you very glad

Topics: elec ic music tion tron

N-Back – A Minimal, Adaptive Dual N-Back Game for Brain Training

Playing the N-Back test is straightforward but requires focused attention. Watch the 3x3 grid as blue squares appear in different positions. Your task is to remember the sequence and identify when the current position matches the one from N steps ago. For a 2-Back test (the standard version), you need to determine if the current square's position matches the position from 2 steps earlier. Click 'Match' or press the spacebar when you detect a match, or click 'No Match' or press 'N' when there's

Making My Own Hacktoberfest T-Shirts

Between 2014 and 2022, DigitalOcean sent free t-shirts to developers who completed the Hacktoberfest challenge. For entirely sensible reasons related to sustainability and spammy entrants, they stopped doing physical merchandise in 2023. I'm the sort of hip fashionista who only wears free conference t-shirts. Sadly, after several years of constant catwalk modelling, my beloved Hacktoberfest shirts are full of holes. I couldn't find any for sale on eBay or Vinted - so I decided to make my own.

The messy reality of SIMD (vector) functions

We’ve discussed SIMD and vectorization extensively on this blog, and it was only a matter of time before SIMD (or vector) functions came up. In this post, we explore what SIMD functions are, when they are useful, and how to declare and use them effectively. A SIMD function is a function that processes more than one piece of data. Take for example a mathematical sin function: double sin(double angle); This function takes one double and returns one double. The vector version that processes four

Today's NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for July 5, #285

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles. Today's Connections: Sports Edition raised my confidence with a very easy yellow category. Then my guesses kind of fell apart. Need some help? Read on for hints and the answers. Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta now, making its debut on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 9. That's a sign that t

BLUETTI AC70 Power Station drops to an all-time low price

I am a big fan of these “relatively portable” power stations. Their place in the market is solidifying right between the ultra-portable and the ultra-high-capacity models. You can easily take them places, but they are pretty powerful. If you’re looking for one of these middle-of-the-ground batteries, there’s currently a really nice sale on the BLUETTI AC70 Portable Power Station. Buy the BLUETTI AC70 Portable Power Station for just $328.99 ($270.01 off) This offer is available from Amazon, but

The ITTAGE indirect branch predictor

While investigating the performance of the new Python 3.14 tail-calling interpreter, I learned (via this very informative comment from Sam Gross) new (to me) piece of performance trivia: Modern CPUs mostly no longer struggle to predict the bytecode-dispatch indirect jump inside a “conventional” bytecode interpreter loop. In steady-state, assuming the bytecode itself is reasonable stable, modern CPUs achieve very high accuracy predicting the dispatch, even for “vanilla” while / switch -style inte

Air pollution may contribute to development of lung cancer in never-smokers

Now, a study published on July 2 in Nature has uncovered compelling genomic evidence that points to air pollution—and other environmental exposures—as a potential major factor behind this growing public health concern. The study was jointly led by researchers at the University of California San Diego and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “We’re seeing this problematic trend that never-smokers are increasingly getting lung cancer, but we haven’

Free as Air, Free as Water, Free as Knowledge (1992)

``Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge'' by Bruce Sterling Speech to the Library Information Technology Association June 1992, San Francisco CA Hi everybody. Well, this is the Library Information Technology Association, so I guess I ought to be talking about libraries, or information, or technology, or at least association. I'm gonna give it a shot, but I want to try this from an unusual perspective. I want to start by talking about money. You wouldn't guess it sometimes to hear so

VLLM: Easy, Fast, and Cheap LLM Serving with PagedAttention

GitHub | Documentation | Paper LLMs promise to fundamentally change how we use AI across all industries. However, actually serving these models is challenging and can be surprisingly slow even on expensive hardware. Today we are excited to introduce vLLM, an open-source library for fast LLM inference and serving. vLLM utilizes PagedAttention, our new attention algorithm that effectively manages attention keys and values. vLLM equipped with PagedAttention redefines the new state of the art in LL

Pilou Asbæk on Playing the Mule, ‘Foundation’ Season 3’s Terrifying Villain

Long before joining Apple TV+ series Foundation as the Mule—season three‘s ruthless, flamboyant, and deeply complicated villain—Pilou Asbæk already had a fan base of genre TV watchers. He played Euron Greyjoy (a ruthless, flamboyant, deeply complicated villain) on HBO’s Game of Thrones. There’s a connection there, but to hear the Danish actor tell it, the similar characters are not a reflection of his actual personality whatsoever. “I’m the most boring guy alive,” Asbæk told io9 at a recent Fou

Today's NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for July 5, #755

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles. Today's NYT Connections puzzle has a few tough, and a few easy categories today. Read on for clues and today's Connections answers. The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program ana

Air Pollution May Contribute to Development of Lung Cancer in Never-Smokers

Now, a study published on July 2 in Nature has uncovered compelling genomic evidence that points to air pollution—and other environmental exposures—as a potential major factor behind this growing public health concern. The study was jointly led by researchers at the University of California San Diego and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “We’re seeing this problematic trend that never-smokers are increasingly getting lung cancer, but we haven’

``Free as Air, Free as Water, Free as Knowledge'' (1992)

``Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge'' by Bruce Sterling Speech to the Library Information Technology Association June 1992, San Francisco CA Hi everybody. Well, this is the Library Information Technology Association, so I guess I ought to be talking about libraries, or information, or technology, or at least association. I'm gonna give it a shot, but I want to try this from an unusual perspective. I want to start by talking about money. You wouldn't guess it sometimes to hear so