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Why Semantic Layers Matter (and how to build one with DuckDB)

Many ask themselves, "Why would I use a semantic layer? What is it anyway?" In this hands-on guide, we’ll build the simplest possible semantic layer using just a YAML file and a Python script—not as the goal itself, but as a way to understand the value of semantic layers. We’ll then query 20 million NYC taxi records with consistent business metrics executed using DuckDB and Ibis. By the end, you’ll know exactly when a semantic layer solves real problems and when it’s overkill. It's a topic that

How Figma’s multiplayer technology works (2019)

Operational transformation (OT) is a technology for supporting a range of collaboration functionalities in advanced collaborative software systems. Hero illustration by Rose Wong. When we first started building multiplayer functionality Multiplayer Editing in Figma Today’s public release of Figma contains two long-awaited changes. in Figma four years ago, we decided to develop our own solution. No other design tool offered this feature, and we didn’t want to use operational transforms (a.k.a.

Figma's Multiplayer Technology (2019)

Operational transformation (OT) is a technology for supporting a range of collaboration functionalities in advanced collaborative software systems. Hero illustration by Rose Wong. When we first started building multiplayer functionality Multiplayer Editing in Figma Today’s public release of Figma contains two long-awaited changes. in Figma four years ago, we decided to develop our own solution. No other design tool offered this feature, and we didn’t want to use operational transforms (a.k.a.

Kirby Air Riders launches November 20 exclusively on Switch 2

Nintendo has confirmed that Kirby Air Riders, a modern revival of the 2003 GameCube cult classic Kirby Air Ride, will be released exclusively on Switch 2 on November 20. The announcement came during a marathon 45-minute Nintendo Direct devoted entirely to the new game, hosted by Kirby's creator Masahiro Sakurai. Sakurai said he was asked to create Air Riders while still working on DLC for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate , and drafted a written proposal for the game at the request of Shinya Takahashi,

Best Outdoor Games to Play in 2025

Pickleball started to gain attention during the COVID-19 pandemic when people discovered it was a sport that could be played outdoors. Pickleball is a mix of tennis, ping-pong and badminton and is played using a tennis net, wooden paddles and a small ball. It can be played with two people (similar to tennis) or four people with two players making up one team. It's the ideal game to play if you have enough people at your get-together and the best part is it often comes in portable kits. The Fran

VB AI Impact Series: Can you really govern multi-agent AI?

Single copilots are yesterday’s news. Competitive differentiation is all about launching a network of specialized agents that collaborate, self-critique, and call the right model for every step. The latest installment of VentureBeat’s AI Impact Series, presented by SAP in San Francisco, tackled the issue of deploying and governing multi-agent AI systems. Yaad Oren, managing director SAP Labs U.S. and global head of research & innovation at SAP, and Raj Jampa, SVP and CIO with Agilent, an analyt

Topics: agents ai data layer sap

Macintosh Drawing Software Compared

Below is a list of various drawing applications that are available to use with System 7 (68K). I’m mostly interested in apps that can do both pixel and vector, and that support layers and transparency. The table below might be useful for at-a-glance comparisons. Apps run in both mono or colour, unless stated otherwise. Deneba artWORKS can do both pixel and vector, has layers and partial transparency. The bottom layer is opaque and all layers on top are transparent. Collections of pixels are ma

A gigantic jet caught on camera: A spritacular moment for NASA astronaut

Left: Gigantic Jet Event from the International Space Station, taken by NASA Astronaut Nichole Ayers. (Credit: Ayers) Right: Sprite event appearing over a lightning strike, seen from space. This photo was taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station during Expedition 44. Credit: NASA astronauts on board Expedition 44 Did you see that gorgeous photo NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers took on July 3, 2025? Originally thought to be a sprite, Ayers confirmed catching an even rarer form of a

Tversky Neural Networks

Authors: Moussa Koulako Bala Doumbouya, Dan Jurafsky, Christopher D. Manning Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11035 Once a year, some interesting architecture inevitably appears where they change some fundamental building block. This happened with KAN last year, where they changed the parameterization of the neuron activation function (though it's unclear what the outcome is after a year — many follow-up works seem to have appeared, but KANs haven't displaced anyone anywhere yet). The same is

The 20 Best Xbox Games Right Now

Over the past two decades, Microsoft has turned the Xbox brand into a veritable juggernaut in the console gaming world. The Xbox Series X and Series S, the combined fourth generation of the Xbox, have sold over 21 million units. The Xbox One, which was still supported until 2023, sold over 58 million units worldwide. As Microsoft shifts its focus toward supporting console and PC gamers alike with the Game Pass subscription service, there's never been a larger ecosystem of Xbox consoles to choos

Tiny flyers levitate on the Sun's heat alone

Devices (artist’s illustration) kept aloft by sunlight could take sensors into an understudied layer of the atmosphere.Credit: Schafer et al. Nature (2025) Theory and mathematics said his device would fly. But Ben Schafer was still pleasantly surprised the first time he flipped a switch and watched the centimetre-square device his team had built levitate, if only for a moment before flipping over. It was a proof of concept for a design that has been published today in Nature1. One day, it migh

EA Makes Big Changes to Rush Mode in Battlefield 6 Beta

The Battlefield 6 beta is raging, with players free to jump into the fray now through the end of Sunday, Aug. 17. This is the second weekend of the multiplayer shooter's preview period, and there are a few changes that open up the beta with more modes, maps and play options. Plus, the game's developer DICE has enacted tweaks in response to player feedback. Those enjoying the beta on PS5 have to be subscribed to PS Plus to play online, but for their trouble, they're getting double experience poi

Evaluating GPT5's reasoning ability using the Only Connect game show

Given the proliferation of reasoning models, we wanted to go beyond knowledge-based benchmarks to test reasoning abilities such as pattern recognition, lateral thinking, abstraction, contextual reasoning (accounting for British cultural references), and multi-step inference. In addition to reasoning, we aimed to assess how effectively models make decisions when presented with judgment calls—such as choosing between making an educated guess based on available clues or calling a function to retri

The Anti-Pattern Game

The anti-pattern game Håkon Robbestad Gylterud Here is a small game I though of when taking a course on modal logic. It is a bit too tedious to be played by humans, but I had great fun finding a winning stategy for it – and there are still simple questions about this game I cannot answer. The rules The anti-pattern game is a two-player game. It is played using black and white pebbles (like Go). These pebbles are placed in sequence on a line. On their turn the player has a simple choice: to co

The 20 Best PS4 Games

It has been more than a decade since Sony released the PlayStation 4, but the console is just as important as ever. Despite being released in November 2013, the PS4 is still in production today, with well over 100 million units being sold over its lifetime and some new games still arriving on it, including Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii. When it launched in 2013, Sony's eighth-gen console arrived with tech upgrades that seem du jour now, but were exciting over a decade ago. For instance

GPT-OSS-120B runs on just 8GB VRAM & 64GB+ system RAM

Here is the thing, the expert layers run amazing on CPU ( ~17T/s 25T/s on a 14900K) and you can force that with this new llama-cpp option: --cpu-moe . You can offload just the attention layers to GPU (requiring about 5 to 8GB of VRAM) for fast prefill. KV cache for the sequence Attention weights & activations Routing tables LayerNorms and other “non-expert” parameters No giant MLP weights are resident on the GPU, so memory use stays low. This yields an amazing snappy system for a 120B mod

Topics: gpu layers moe ms tokens

Apple Arcade just got four new games, including Play-Doh World

As promised last month, Apple today released four new titles to Apple Arcade, adding to the catalog of over 200 ad-free games available to subscribers. Here’s what’s new. Play-Doh World Play-Doh brings its magic to the digital space with Play-Doh World, allowing players to craft their own characters and watch them spring to life. From inventing wild zoo animals to styling outrageous salon hairdos, every corner of this colorful universe responds to the player’s creative whim. With dozens of int

How to Watch Bayern Munich vs. Tottenham From Anywhere: Stream Preseason Friendly Soccer

Bundesliga champion Bayern Munich hosts Premier League club Tottenham on Thursday as both teams continue their preparations for the season ahead. Below, we'll outline the best live TV streaming services to watch this friendly match as it happens, wherever you are in the world. We'll also explain how to use a VPN if the match isn't available where you are. Following its appearance at the recent FIFA Club World Cup, today's match is only Bayern's second preseason game of the summer. Vincent Komp

Tom Holland Gives Us a Sneaky Look at Spider-Man’s New Web Shooters in ‘Brand New Day’

Has the Buffy reboot found its new slayer? Strange New Worlds‘ Henry Alonso Meyers talks puppet shop with Angel‘s Jeffrey Bell about how to bring puppets to the world of Star Trek. Plus, rumors of Hannibal‘s return are back on the menu. Spoilers get! Spider-Man: Brand New Day To mark the film entering production, Tom Holland shared a few more pictures from set featuring Spider-Man atop a large armored vehicle—and revealing the new spider-suit’s large, rectangular chrome web shooters. Sanatori

I Played Battlefield 6: Hands-On With the Return To Big Battle Warfare

After a few hours playing the upcoming Battlefield 6, it's clear the game is designed to be a mea culpa to fans: Trust us, we're bringing back the Battlefield you remember. At a massive preview event in Los Angeles, I sat down to play a slice of the game's multiplayer mode -- and came off it suitably whelmed with a mix of raucous moments and tedious deaths. Ultimately, it feels like it will deliver the kind of big team battles players have been craving, with technical flourishes that amplify the

I still love VLC, but this lightweight video player changed the game for me

Andy Walker / Android Authority VLC Player has been my go-to video app for years, dating back to the good ol’ Windows XP days. That loyalty progressed to Android, and I still use it across desktop and mobile for my video content needs. While it remains a powerful product, VLC often feels cumbersome when I crave simplicity. Why opt for a piledriver when you need a chisel? I searched for a secondary player for more immediate video viewing tasks a few months ago and discovered Next Player. Althou

Best Outdoor Games for 2025

Pickleball started to gain attention during the COVID-19 pandemic when people discovered it was a sport that could be played outdoors. Pickleball is a mix of tennis, ping-pong and badminton and is played using a tennis net, wooden paddles and a small ball. It can be played with two people (similar to tennis) or four people with two players making up one team. It's the ideal game to play if you have enough people at your get-together and the best part is it often comes in portable kits. The Fran

The biggest fighting game tournament is a little smaller this year — but still exciting

is a reporter who covers the business, culture, and communities of video games, with a focus on marginalized gamers and the quirky, horny culture of video game communities. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Evo 2025, the biggest fighting game tournament in North America, starts this weekend. If you tune into one of the nine different Evo Twitch channels you’ll see some of the top players in the world compete in fighting game staples like St

These Are the Switch 2 Launch Games You Should Actually Consider

The Nintendo Switch 2 hasn't been out long but it's still somewhat disappointing that not many new games are available yet to use the new hardware. Yes, Donkey Kong Bananza is probably the biggest hit for the Switch successor that everyone should pick up but aside from that and Mario Kart World, there's not much else to get. For those who are still looking for something else to play on their Switch 2, here's a list of some of the more interesting launch games to pick in the meantime. Cyberpunk

PUBG’s plan to beat Fortnite, Roblox, and every other game

Roblox and Fortnite are two of the biggest games around, and a huge part of why is because they aren’t just one game: instead, they’re vast platforms where you can party up with your friends, dress up in ridiculous digital outfits, and quickly jump from one experience to another. Back in the day, Fortnite copied PUBG by making a battle royale, and now, PUBG is mimicking Fortnite by trying to become more of a platform than a game. As part of a roadmap released earlier this year, PUBG developer K

PlayerZero raises $15M to prevent AI agents from shipping buggy code

As Silicon Valley races toward a future where AI agents do most of the software programming, a new problem is created: finding the AI-generated bugs before they are put into production. Even OpenAI is dealing with such issues, a former employee has described. Newly funded startup PlayerZero has created a solution: use AI agents trained to find and fix problems before the code is put into production, the startup’s CEO and sole founder, Animesh Koratana, tells TechCrunch. Koratana created Player

NBA quietly trials smart basketballs with embedded sensors and AI tracking

In brief: Kinexon and other companies have spent years refining connected-ball technology to enhance sports analytics, improve training, and collect more data than ever. As professional leagues begin adopting the new tech, questions remain about potential minute changes to basketball physics. Unbeknownst to most players, about half of the NBA games played in Las Vegas earlier this month used balls equipped with smart tracking technology. The league is considering full adoption, but one company

NBA quietly tested smart basketballs with embedded sensors and AI tracking

In brief: Kinexon and other companies have spent years refining connected-ball technology to enhance sports analytics, improve training, and collect more data than ever. As professional leagues begin adopting the new tech, questions remain about potential minute changes to basketball physics. Unbeknownst to most players, about half of the NBA games played in Las Vegas earlier this month used balls equipped with smart tracking technology. The league is considering full adoption, but one company

Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’ Looks Absolutely Stunning

When Guillermo del Toro finally got the chance to make his dream project, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, you just knew it was going to be beautiful. Del Toro’s films are known for a lot of things, and sumptuous production design and costumes are right near the top of the list. So, it almost goes without saying that a group of new images from the film are stunning, but these almost go beyond that. First revealed in an article by Vanity Fair and then released by Netflix, 10 new ima

KMPlayer is a powerful media player with broad format support

The KMPlayer is a versatile media player which can cover various types of container format such as VCD, DVD, AVI, MKV, Ogg Theora, OGM, 3GP, MPEG-1/2/4, WMV, RealMedia, and QuickTime among others. It handles a wide range of subtitles and allows you to capture audio, video, and screenshots in many ways. The new KMPlayer is a player optimized for high-end PCs such as 8K and 60FPS. It is a powerful player that plays all the files such as 4K, 8K, 60FPS, and has greatly improved performance to incre