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How to perform a reverse phone number lookup

In an age of constant communication, receiving phone calls or messages from unknown numbers has become increasingly common. Whether it's a missed call from an unfamiliar number, a potential scam or a wrong number, performing a reverse phone number lookup can help you identify the caller. You could start your search with free tools like Google or Whitepages, but if you’re struggling to find the person behind the number, paid services such as Spokeo or BeenVerified might give you more detail. In t

Intel Patents 'Software Defined Supercore'

Intel has patented a technology it calls 'Software Defined Supercore' (SDC) that enables software to fuse the capabilities of multiple cores to assemble a virtual ultra-wide 'supercore' capable of improving single-thread performance, provided that it has enough parallel work. If the technology works as it is designed to, then Intel's future CPUs could offer faster single-thread performance in select applications that can use SDC. For now, this is just a patent which may or may not become a reali

Magnesium Supplements Crash Course: Benefits and Side Effects

Suddenly, everyone is obsessed with magnesium supplements. It’s the key ingredient in #sleepygirlmocktails, powders stirred into tart cherry juice and prebiotic soda, a wellness cocktail for anxious millennials. Your coworkers are popping magnesium glycinate before bed instead of melatonin, because it allegedly cures insomnia, constipation, and existential dread. Folks seem especially concerned with optimizing their poop and pillow time. In the past year, Google searches for “which magnesium is

Here’s how we picked this year’s Innovators Under 35

We’ll also soon reveal our 2025 Innovator of the Year, whose technical prowess is helping physicians diagnose and treat critically ill patients more quickly. What’s more (here’s your final hint), our winner even set a world record as a result of this work. MIT Technology Review first published a list of Innovators Under 35 in 1999. It’s a grand tradition for us, and we often follow the work of various featured innovators for years, even decades, after they appear on the list. So before the big

Android 16 has an annoying notification bug, but a fix is coming

Google released the stable version of Android 16 back in June, and it brings some welcome features to the platform. Unfortunately, the update has also introduced a peculiar bug for some. A user posted a report on Google’s Issue Tracker back in June, detailing a strange notification issue in Android 16. More specifically, the user and several others found that notifications don’t play any sounds when there’s already a notification in the notification shade. “When testing notifications, we reali

Bayes, Bits and Brains

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

Ford and the Birth of the Model T

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Origins of Efficiency, out September 23rd. Ford’s status as a large-volume car producer began with the predecessor to the Model T: the Model N, a four-cylinder, two-seater car initially priced at $500. At the time, the average car in the US cost more than $2,000, and it seemed nearly unimaginable that a car with the capabilities of the Model N could cost so little. In 1906, the year the Model N was introduced, Ford sold 8,500 of them, making the

What Is Complexity in Chess?

Pacto Visual May 2020 an interesting proposal was suggested. I provided some constructive criticism on research paper A Metric of Chess Complexity by FM David Peng, as well as constructive criticism on the codebase used to validate this experiment. For many months I have refrained from further comment, and although code has not progressed, two things have: 1. Public interest in "complexity" as determined by ACPL (yuck). 2. Lichess has a blogging platform where I can properly address deficien

My Trip Through Netflix's Zodiac Hub Landed Me on a Hidden-Gem Series

Earlier this week, I received an email from the communications team at Netflix announcing the debut of a new astrology hub on the streaming platform. According to the release, these curated playlists include show and movie recommendations that "reflect the character traits and themes most associated with that sign." They don't include this week's horoscope. At least for now. Lots of people feel strongly about their zodiac sign and how it affects their lives. While I don't normally give much tho

Today's NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for Sept. 1, #343

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 is pretty fun -- especially if you're into athletes who share the same first name, or know the teams that don't actually play in the city on their jerseys. If you're struggling but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers. Connections: Spor

Escape from Tarkov is finally coming to Steam 'soon,' developer says

Following news that Escape from Tarkov is escaping its perpetual beta, the pioneering extraction shooter is also about to make its debut on Steam. Nikita Buyanov, head of the Battlestate Games studio that developed Escape from Tarkov, confirmed on X that the game's Steam page "will be available soon," only teasing that the full details will come later. Buyanov's confirmation comes less than a day after the developer posted a GIF on X of a man spraying steam from an iron. Earlier this month, Buy

How is Ultrassembler so fast?

How is Ultrassembler so fast? Ultrassembler is a superfast and complete RISC-V assembler library that I'm writing as a component of the bigger Chata signal processing project. Assemblers take in a platform-dependent assembly language and output that platform's native machine code which runs directly on the processor. "Why would you want to do this?" you might ask. First, existing RISC-V assemblers that conform the the entirety of the specification, as and llvm-mc , ship as binaries that you r

Lunar soil machine developed to build bricks using sunlight

Lunar soil machine developed to build bricks using sunlight by Riko Seibo Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Jul 30, 2025 A Chinese research team has created a prototype machine that transforms moon soil into durable construction bricks using solar energy, marking a critical step toward building lunar structures from local materials. Developed by the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) in Hefei, Anhui province, the system functions as a 3D printing device powered by concentrated solar heat. It em

When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire

Click to enlarge A while ago I treated you to a dissertation entitled “Does The Sun Set On The British Empire?”, and concluded that it doesn’t. The UK’s widely scattered overseas territories, sparse though they are, mean that the sun is still always shining, somewhere in the world, over British territory. The most important territories in maintaining this late-empire sunlight are the Pitcairn Islands, in the Pacific, and the British Indian Ocean Territory, in the Indian Ocean. To illustrate th

People Still Spending on Tech Despite Red Flags in July Report

U.S. consumers continued to open their wallets in July, a new study from the Bureau of Economic Analysis showed on Friday, underscoring the resilience of household demand even as inflation held above the Federal Reserve’s target. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t wince while doing it. The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, the personal-consumption expenditures price index, rose 0.2% on the month and 2.6% from a year earlier. The core measure, which strips out food and energy, advan

Today's NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for Sept. 1, #813

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 is a fun one. As an English major, I especially liked the blue group. 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

MasterClass Labor Day sale: Get 50 percent off subscriptions

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

My favorite Bluetti power stations are on sale for Labor Day

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET Power stations are quickly replacing gasoline generators. They're quieter, safer, require less maintenance, and don't erupt into a fireball when the instructions aren't followed. I'm also seeing more campsites, festivals, and commercial outdoor markets starting to prohibit the old generator. Also: The best Labor Day deals live now Power stations are great, but they aren't cheap, running into the hundreds and even thousands of dollars, so any time you can grab a di

A 20-Year-Old Algorithm Can Help Us Understand Transformer Embeddings

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

iOS 26 Beta Brings AI Summaries Back to News Apps, but With a Warning

Apple released the fifth public beta of iOS 26 on Aug. 25, and the beta brings a new Liquid Glass design to the iPhones of developers and beta testers, alongside other updates such as call screening. And developers and beta testers with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone will see AI notification summaries for news and entertainment apps in the latest beta. Apple disabled AI notification summaries for news and entertainment apps in January. That came a few weeks after the BBC pointed out in De

I'm a Runner with Over 15 Years of Running Experience. These Are the Best Treadmills of 2025

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

Big Tech Companies in the US Have Been Told Not to Apply the Digital Services Act

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

Running our Docker registry on-prem with Harbor

As of early 2025, we’re deploying all of our applications with Kamal using Docker as our containerization platform. The container registry that holds our app images is one of the most integral pieces of our deployment pipeline. Like many organizations, we’d been using external container registries for years. Our ecosystem was tightly coupled to both Dockerhub and Amazon’s Elastic Container Registry. However, as part of our cloud exit and kamalization journey, several issues started emerging:

Today's NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for Aug. 31, #342

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 is tough. The purple category does that thing where the editors chop up a team name and expect you to find it. If you're struggling but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers. Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta now, making its deb

The space race is transforming Southern California's economy – again

In a giant Long Beach warehouse near where Boeing used to build the C-17 cargo jet, Vast is fabricating what could be the first commercial space station to circle Earth. Just up the road in El Segundo, Varda Space Industries has grown molecular crystals in microgravity with few impurities for pharmaceuticals that one day could be injected in cancer patients. And a little south in Seal Beach, a scrappy company called AstroForge aims to land a satellite on an asteroid just a football field wide

From multi-head to latent attention: The evolution of attention mechanisms

From Multi-Head to Latent Attention: The Evolution of Attention Mechanisms Vinithavn 7 min read · 15 hours ago 15 hours ago -- Listen Share Press enter or click to view image in full size What is attention? In any autoregressive model, the prediction of the future tokens is based on some preceding context. However, not all the tokens within this context equally contribute to the prediction, because some tokens might be more relevant than others. The attention mechanism addresses this by allow

Spectrum – catching clojure.spec conform errors at compile time

spectrum A library for doing static analysis of Clojure code, catching clojure.spec conform errors at compile time. Wait what? It's like core.typed, but it relies on clojure.spec annotations. So it's an optional static type system? Kind-of. It finds errors at compile time, and predicates kind of look like types. So sure. Current Status Developer Preview, not yet ready for any kind of use. Current development is working towards making spectrum self-check. Goals usable pragmatic readab

Today's NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for Aug. 31, #812

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 fun mix of categories. If you played a lot of Monopoly then you'll ace the green group. 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

You can save up to $700 on my favorite Bluetti power stations for Labor Day

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET Power stations are quickly replacing gasoline generators. They're quieter, safer, require less maintenance, and don't erupt into a fireball when the instructions aren't followed. I'm also seeing more campsites, festivals, and commercial outdoor markets starting to prohibit the old generator. Also: The best Labor Day deals live now Power stations are great, but they aren't cheap, running into the hundreds and even thousands of dollars, so any time you can grab a di