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That boolean should probably be something else

Monday, June 30, 2025 One of the first types we learn about is the boolean. It's pretty natural to use, because boolean logic underpins much of modern computing. And yet, it's one of the types we should probably be using a lot less of. In almost every single instance when you use a boolean, it should be something else. The trick is figuring out what "something else" is. Doing this is worth the effort. It tells you a lot about your system, and it will improve your design (even if you end up usi

Crystal Dynamics announces layoffs, but says Tomb Raider will not be impacted

Crystal Dynamics, the studio behind the recent Tomb Raider games, announced an unspecified number of layoffs today. In a post on LinkedIn, the game developer kept the size of the cuts vague, only stating that "a number of our talented colleagues" would be impacted. In what's becoming an all-too-familiar refrain, the company cited "evolving business conditions" as the reason for the layoffs. "This decision was not made lightly," the post reads. "It was necessary, however, to ensure the long-term

Using information theory to solve Mastermind

How you've just played optimal Mastermind Mastermind is a game all about information. The Code Master selects one of \( 6^4 = 1\,296 \) secret codes. Each incorrect guess gives us information by eliminating some of these; the more codes that are ruled out, the more information that guess has provided. Let's quantify this insight! Suppose a guess gets some response that reduces the number of possible keys from some number \(n\) to a smaller \(n'<n\). The convention in information theory, a branc

Verizon's Bringing Back That Landline Feeling With Its New Family Plan Feature

When we talk about a cellular "family plan," we mean a bundle of several individual phone lines for each person in a typical household. The plan usually includes features like high-speed data or a streaming video service that each family member can share. Now, Verizon has updated an add-on for its phone plans that's meant to bring the family closer together. The Verizon Family Plus perk, which offers features such as location check-ins and content filters, now includes Family Line, where up to

We regret but have to temporary suspend the shipments to USA

by OLIMEX Ltd in Uncategorized Starting August 29th, new regulations have come into effect. Both DHL and UPS currently have no working solution, so on their advice, we are temporarily suspending all shipments to the USA effective immediately. The issue is that we are now required to collect all taxes and tariffs on U.S. shipments in advance. However, there is no functioning calculator for this, which has created chaos. Parcels are being held in customs for weeks due to unreasonable requirement

A lightweight TypeScript library for assertion-based runtime data validation

Lightweight, zero-dependency library for validating arbitrary runtime data in TypeScript. decode-kit provides assertion-based validation that refines your types in-place — no cloning, no transformations, and minimal runtime overhead. Installation npm install decode-kit Quick Start decode-kit validates your data and narrows its type in-place. Your original values remain unchanged - only their TypeScript types are refined. The validate function runs a runtime check and, on success, asserts the

Busy beaver hunters reach numbers that overwhelm ordinary math

But just how much harder? In 1962, the mathematician Tibor Radó invented a new way to explore this question through what he called the busy beaver game. To play, start by choosing a specific number of rules — call that number n. Your goal is to find the n-rule Turing machine that runs the longest before eventually halting. This machine is called the busy beaver, and the corresponding busy beaver number, BB(n), is the number of steps that it takes. In principle, if you want to find the busy beav

Math Not Required (2023)

Let's examine a problem that we could math our way out of, but assume we don't know how. We'll lean on our programming to teach us what we don't know. The Monty Hall problem comes from an old game show called Let's Make a Deal, hosted by Monty Hall. In the show, Monty would show three closed doors to a contestant and explain that one holds a car while the other two hold goats. The contestant then chose a door. After this first pick, Monty would reveal one unchosen door that was hiding a goat. T

Topics: end enum heads switch win

People Who Don't Smoke Are Getting Lung Cancer in Scary Numbers

Image by Getty / Futurism Cancer It's no secret that our efforts to save the planet from the excesses of global trade are failing spectacularly. Our bodies are riddled with manmade compounds, cities are routinely enveloped by massive clouds of noxious smoke, and glaciers are melting faster than ever before. Indeed, in 2025, not even the remote ice shelves of Antarctica are safe from humanity's garbage. At the same time as the Earth struggles to hold the weight of all our garbage, a concerning

I wish Google would fix this one quirky limitation with Fi

Megan Ellis / Android Authority I’ve used Google Fi for almost three years now, and it’s been mostly smooth sailing. Although Google doesn’t promote its cellular services very much, it has slowly but surely released updates that continue to improve the service, all while keeping prices relatively competitive. There is plenty to love about Google’s offering in a competitive market, but one quirk has me considering other options. Have you tried Google's wireless service? 81 votes Yes, I'm curren

If You're a Millennial, We Have Bad News About Your Rapidly Impending Death

Image by Getty / Futurism As the world was emerging from the turmoil of COVID in 2023, insurers noticed an alarming trend: Americans were dying at a significantly higher rate compared to other countries. Anyone familiar with the way the US handled the viral outbreak — especially compared to similar countries — might not be surprised. But while the pandemic certainly contributed to a spike in deaths, expectations of a return to pre-pandemic mortality rates were smashed as number crunchers notic

Can AI Predict Powerball Numbers?

With the Powerball ballooning to $650 million after Wednesday’s drawing, hopeful players have been asking: Is winning the lottery a matter of luck or something that science and artificial intelligence can predict? Three students at the University of Salento in southern Italy say that science wins out. They say they used AI to analyze patterns from past draws to predict future winning numbers. Their experimental approach resulted in a €43,000 jackpot in April, which now has people wondering if

Scammers have infiltrated Google's AI responses - how to spot them

Reddit / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways Scammers are exploiting AI to trick people looking for customer numbers. Google's AI Overview, AI Mode, and OpenAI's ChatGPT are vulnerable. Run a regular search, or head to the company's website to find a number. Get more in-depth ZDNET tech coverage: Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome and Chromium browsers. Do you ever use Google's AI-powered search to look for customer service numbers and other contact info? If so, y

Python f-string cheat sheets (2022)

Python f-string cheat sheets See fstring.help for more examples and for a more detailed discussion of this syntax see this string formatting article. All numbers The below examples assume the following variables: >>> number = 4125.6 >>> percent = 0.3738 Example Output Replacement Field Fill Width Grouping Precision Type '4125.60' {number:.2f} .2 f '4,125.60' {number:,.2f} , .2 f '04125.60' {number:08.2f} 0 8 .2 f ' 4125.60' {number: 8.2f} 8 .2 f '4.1e+03' {number:.2g} .2 g '4125.6' {number:

Scammers are sneaking into Google's AI summaries to steal from you - how to spot them

Moor Studio/ DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images ZDNET's key takeaways Scammers are exploiting AI to trick people looking for customer numbers. Google's AI Overview, AI Mode, and OpenAI's ChatGPT are vulnerable. Run a regular search or head to the company's website to find a number. Get more in-depth ZDNET tech coverage: Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome and Chromium browsers. Do you ever use Google's AI-powered search to look for customer service numbers and other contact i

Think twice about using numbers supplied by Google’s AI Overviews

Tushar Mehta / Android Authority TL;DR Google’s AI Overviews have been sharing the wrong customer support numbers in some of its summaries. This has resulted in certain users contacting scammers instead of the company they were searching for. Google is reportedly aware of the issue. Most AI tools have disclaimers that some of the information they provide might not be factual. But this hasn’t stopped companies from rolling out chatbots to more apps and search engines, leading to many instance

A short statistical reasoning test

The second – likelihoodist – is to create a profile likelihood and take the \(q\) quantile. I personally find this approach more intuitive in general because it is contextually picking model parameters, rather than to directly making claims about degrees of belief: we are just trying to pick \(p\) such that it captures the first 5% of the likelihood sum of our binomial model. There are at least two general – from first principles – approaches to calculate a lower bound fraction without knowing

How randomness improves algorithms (2023)

Since the very first days of computer science — a field known for its methodical approach to problem-solving — randomness has played an important role. The first program to run on the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer used randomness to simulate nuclear processes. Similar approaches have since been used in astrophysics, climate science and economics. In all these cases, plugging in random numbers at certain steps in the algorithm helps researchers account for uncertainty about th

Dedicated volunteer exposes “single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia’s history”

Quick—what are the top entries in the category "Wikipedia articles written in the greatest number of languages"? The answer is countries. Turkey tops the list with Wikipedia entries in 332 different languages, while the US is second with 327 and Japan is third with 324. Other common words make their appearance as one looks down the list. "Dog" (275 languages) tops "cat" (273). Jesus (274) beats "Adolf Hitler" (242). And all of them beat "sex" (122), which is also bested by "fever," "Chiang Kai

What are the real numbers, really? (2024)

What is a real number? Let us consider the real continuum. The classical discovery of irrational numbers reveals gaps in the rational number line: the place where √2 would be, if it were rational, is a hole in the rational line. Thus, the rational numbers are seen to be incomplete. One seeks to complete them, to fill these holes, forming the real number line ℝ. Please enjoy this free extended excerpt from Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics, published with MIT Press 2021, an introduction

Incan numerical recordkeeping system may have been widely used

Inca bureaucrats recorded all the goings-on in their bustling empire using knotted cords called khipu, where the position and order of the knots represented numbers. They relied on the khipu system to track people, taxes, produce, livestock, and products like woven cloth and beer. Because khipu were so vital to the Inca government, and because the khipu itself is such a sophisticated way of recording numbers, colonial writers decided that these tools must be the exclusive knowledge of a very sp

Myths About Floating-Point Numbers (2021)

Floating-point numbers are a great invention in computer science, but they can also be tricky and troublesome to use correctly. I’ve written about them already by publishing Floating-Point Formats Cheatsheet and presentation “Pitfalls of floating-point numbers” (“Pułapki liczb zmiennoprzecinkowych” – the slides are in Polish). Last year I was preparing for a more extensive talk about this topic, but it got cancelled, like pretty much everything in these hard times of the COVID-19 pandemic. So in

iOS 26 brings back the iPhone calculator’s clear button

iOS 18 featured a major redesign to the Calculator app, including fancy features like Math Notes. Those changes included adding a back button to the keypad, replacing the traditional C/AC button. This was so frustrating for some, the real hard-core Calculator users I guess, that The Atlantic published an entire column when iOS 18 shipped, decrying the button’s removal. Apple has seemingly taken those complaints onboard. With iOS 26, the Calculator once again has a dedicated C/AC button. Apple

All known 49-year-old Apple-1 computer

If nothing happens, click Loading...If nothing happens, click here Notes = location, = batch, numbers/stamps/labels, = verification status, = picture and video count, = available history, = auctions. 'More or less verified': To the best of our knowledge and belief, evidence is almost given or obvious. Many times the current owner is unknown, pictures might be old, etc.! Unlisted Apple-1: The Apple-1 Registry is in contact with some owners who wish to have no information published. We respe

Matter enhancements enable cheaper HomeKit devices and slicker control

The Matter standard – which brings HomeKit compatibility to a far broader range of devices – is getting a significant upgrade. The latest version will enable the production of lower cost HomeKit-compatible smart home devices, as well as slicker control over your existing ones … A quick recap on Matter and HomeKit Originally, brands wanting to offer HomeKit compatibility had to comply with an Apple-specific standard, and submit their devices for approval. The Matter standard eliminates both st

The Real Reason You Haven’t Been Replaced by AI Yet

It’s the ticking time bomb in the global economy, and every CEO knows it: AI is already powerful enough to replace millions of jobs. So why haven’t the mass layoffs begun? The answer has little to do with technology and everything to do with fear. Corporate leaders are quietly waiting to see who will be the first to pull the trigger. My discussions about Generative AI reveal a stark generational divide. Most people under 35 are convinced that AI is a reality, not a gimmick, and that the displac

We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

We'd be Better Off with 9-bit Bytes A number of 70s computing systems had nine-bit bytes, most prominently the PDP-10, but today [1 Apparently, it was the System/360 that really set the standard here.] all systems use 8-bit bytes and that now seems natural. [2 Though you still see RFCs use "octet", and the C standard has a CHAR_BITS macro, to handle the possibility of a different-sized byte.] As a power of two, eight is definitely nicer. But I think a series of historical coincidences would act

Topics: 18 bit byte maybe numbers

The latest Pixel Watch 4 leak comes from Google itself

TL;DR Official renders of the Pixel Watch 4 have leaked online, providing a clean and detailed look at the device. The leak shows off different case and strap color combinations across both sizes of the Pixel Watch 4 (41mm and 45mm). However, it’s unclear if all combinations will be available for both watch sizes. Google is all set to announce the next set of Pixel devices on August 20, 2025, including the Pixel Watch 4. We’ve seen plenty of leaks for the watch so far, including details on it

Poll: What do you think Android 17’s dessert codename will be?

Google has a fun tradition of codenaming Android versions after desserts in alphabetical order. In the early days of Android, these dessert codenames were part of the Android name/branding. However, with Android 10’s release in 2019, Google dropped the codename from the public name, even though it has continued to use the dessert codename internally. Android 15 is internally called Vanilla Ice Cream, whereas Android 16 is called Baklava. With Android 16 out for a while now, and Android 16 QPR1 a

Sonos Roam speakers are overheating and partially melting, company admits

Complaints on Reddit shared over the past week have exposed a problem with Sonos’ first-gen Roam speakers overheating and partially melting, which the company just acknowledged while downplaying the number of known cases. Reports of overheating Sonos Roam speakers acknowledged Chris Welch writes at Bloomberg: Sonos Inc. acknowledged a “very low” number of complaints from customers who claim the audio brand’s first-generation Roam speaker has overheated and partially melted near the USB-C port