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Software engineer on the real state of AI agents (they're not there yet)

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years.TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust A hot potato: Amid growing hype around AI agents, one experienced engineer has brought a grounded perspective shaped by work on more than a dozen production-level systems spanning development, DevOps, and data operations. From his vantage point, the notion that 2025 will bring truly autonomous workforce-transforming agents looks increasingly unrealistic. In a recent blog post, systems engineer Utka

VPNs top App Store charts as Online Safety Act age checks kick in

VPNs top App Store charts as Online Safety Act age checks kick in Just now Share Save Liv McMahon Technology reporter Share Save Getty Images Virtual private network (VPN) apps have become the most downloaded on Apple's App Store in the UK after sites such as PornHub, Reddit and X began requiring age verification of users on Friday. VPNs can disguise your location online - allowing you to use the internet as though you are in another country. It means people are likely using them to bypass re

I was a Niagara Launcher doubter until I built my ultimate productivity home screen

Andy Walker / Android Authority There was a time when Nova Launcher was the only home screen app I’d consider using on my Android phones. It was the pinnacle of the genre, offering a dizzying array of customization options and a wealth of search features. However, as my need for a launcher that enhances focus and productivity grew, Nova fell off my radar. I began exploring the many alternatives available. My current launcher choice is Kvaesitso, thanks to its unique vertically biased design an

Google Messages gets Material 3 Expressive on Wear OS before Android

Joe Maring / Android Authority TL;DR Google Messages is the latest Wear OS app to receive Google’s Material 3 Expressive redesign. The update brings more consistent coloring, slight changes to shapes, and new icons to complement text. Google may be testing the update with a small set of users, since it has yet to reach a wider audience. Google has already begun transitioning many of its apps to the new, more fluid and vivid Material 3 Expressive design philosophy. These changes haven’t been

Internet age verification begins rollout, and Apple is set to be dragged into it

The UK has become the first major country to introduce a legal requirement for internet age verification, but it affects all websites and apps worldwide. Additionally, the US has recently revived a bill very similar to the British legislation. While the law was presented as a way to prevent children accessing adult websites, the reality is very different, and we’re already seeing the privacy risks of good intentions being turned into bad legislation – with iMessage and FaceTime in the firing li

Programmers Aren’t So Humble Anymore—Maybe Because Nobody Codes in Perl

Perl was once everywhere. Or at least it felt that way. Around the turn of the millennium, it seemed that almost every website was built on the back of this scripting language. It processed massive amounts of text—mechanisms for doing this powerfully and easily were part of the language—and it was even used in bioinformatics, munging and churning through genetic data. Based on one list, the companies that used Perl ranged widely: Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Deutsche Bank, Akamai, Citibank, Comcast, M

How big can I print my image?

How big can I print my image? Jul 24, 2025 For an image to look as sharp as real life, it needs to have a resolution higher then that of the human eye: usually around 1 arcminute, or 1/60th of a degree. $$ \text{Linear resolution} = \frac{\text{Distance}}{\text{1 radian}} \times 1 \text{ arcminutes} $$ $$ \text{Linear resolution }(\text{inches}) = \text{Distance (m)} \times 0.0115 $$ $$ \text{Features / Inch } = \frac{87}{\text{Distance (m)}} $$ For an image to look good at 1 meter, around

Why I write recursive descent parsers, despite their issues (2020)

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

Making Postgres slower

July 27, 2025 Everyone is always wondering how to make Postgres faster, more efficient, etc, but nobody ever thinks about how to make Postgres slower. Now, of course, most of those people are being paid to focus on speed, but I am not (although, if you wanted to change that, let me know). As I was writing a slightly more useful guide, I decided someone needed to try to create a Postgres configuration optimized to process queries as slowly as possible. Why? I am not sure, but this is what came o

How I fixed my blog's performance issues by writing a new Jekyll plugin

How I fixed my blog's performance issues by writing a new Jekyll plugin: jekyll-skyhook posted Jul 24, 2025 💡 If you don't want to read the full story, you can check out the jekyll-skyhook plugin on GitHub here. When I started writing this blog, I figured I could write my posts, submit my website to Google Search Console for indexing, and presto - my posts would start appearing in Google search results. That way, people who encounter issues like I did with dark/light mode not working in Ubunt

Performance and telemetry analysis of Trae IDE, ByteDance's VSCode fork

Performance and Telemetry Analysis of Trae IDE: A Deep Dive into ByteDance's VSCode Fork Executive Summary This analysis examines concerning performance and privacy issues discovered in Trae IDE, ByteDance's fork of Visual Studio Code. Key findings include excessive resource consumption (33 processes vs 9 in VSCode), persistent telemetry transmission despite user settings, and concerning community management practices. 1. Background and Methodology During evaluation of development environmen

The Bootstrap Load

The Bootstrap Load Home Back The Intel 4004 Microprocessor and the Silicon Gate Technology A testimonial from Federico Faggin, designer of the 4004 and developer of its enabling technology Quick Links: Silicon Gate Technology The Buried Contact The Gilbert Hyatt Patent The Bootstrap Load "an understanding of the physics of how devices work, because in a bootstrap load what you need to do is to always have a virtual junction, instead of a physical junction." (Faggin, in a 2007 oral panel inte

IBM Keyboard Patents

JavaScript disabled or not supported It appears you have prevented JavaScript from running in your web browser or are using a web browser that does not support JavaScript. Admiral Shark's Keyboards presently requires JavaScript for quality-of-life features like switching between light/dark mode, navigating via title or image and copying search query links, and is necessary for the keyboard matrix simulators, keyboard property modals, interactable slideshows and image size optimisation. Please c

Performance and Telemetry Analysis of Trae IDE, ByteDance's VSCode Fork

Performance and Telemetry Analysis of Trae IDE: A Deep Dive into ByteDance's VSCode Fork Executive Summary This analysis examines concerning performance and privacy issues discovered in Trae IDE, ByteDance's fork of Visual Studio Code. Key findings include excessive resource consumption (33 processes vs 9 in VSCode), persistent telemetry transmission despite user settings, and concerning community management practices. 1. Background and Methodology During evaluation of development environmen

Crunchyroll is Bringing More Anime to Movie Theaters

The last few years have seen anime movies and premiere episodes take to the big screen and make a ton of money, so Crunchyroll is getting on that with its new Anime Nights program. During San Diego Comic-Con, the streamer/distributor revealed its plan to put an anime on the silver screen for the third Monday of every month to “honor the past, elevate the present, and celebrate the future of anime.” The titles will range from fan favorites and anniversaries to “curated” TV episodes, and even pre

Peacemaker S2 trailer finds our anti-hero in a parallel world

HBO Max dropped the hotly anticipated full trailer for S2 of Peacemaker—James Gunn's Emmy-nominated series spun off from his 2021 film, The Suicide Squad —at San Diego Comic-Con this weekend. (Spoilers for S1 below.) As previously reported, the eight-episode first season was set five months after the events of The Suicide Squad. Having survived a near-fatal shooting, Peacemaker—aka Christopher Smith—is recruited by the US government for a new mission: the mysterious Project Butterfly, led by a

Analyzing Ancient Footprints, Scientists Find Evidence Dinos Like T-Rex Did the "Moonwalk" to Attract Mates

Scientists have discovered that a fossil site in Colorado was once the equivalent of a popular nightclub back in the long-ago Cretaceous era. In those times, male dinosaurs, some similar to the Tyrannosaurus rex, traveled to this once long-ago plain of tidal mud to preen and bust dance moves — even doing what the researchers described as a prehistoric moonwalk a la Michael Jackson— in hopes of catching the eyes of obliging females at the scene, according to a new study in the journal Cretaceous

I found cheap accessories that made my AirTags twice as useful (and secure)

Elevation Labs accessories ZDNET's key takeaways These are tough, water- and dirt-resistant AirTag holders that will last years. They go a long way to preventing bad guys from removing your AirTags from secured items. They work on everything from suitcases, camera bags, jackets, and even your cat or dog! View now at Amazon I've mentioned more than once my undying love for Apple AirTags. These devices have made my life so much less stressful, and I have them attached to pretty much everything

Constrained languages are easier to optimize

jyn, what the fuck are you talking about a recurring problem in modern “low-level” languages is that they are hard to optimize. they do not reflect the hardware, they require doing complex alias analysis, and they constantly allocate and deallocate memory. they looked at the structure/expressiveness tradeoff and consistently chose expressiveness. what does a faster language look like consider this paper on stream fusion in Haskell. this takes a series of nested loops, each of which logically

4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

Nearly 4,000 NASA employees have opted to leave the space agency through the Trump administration's deferred resignation program, NASA said on Saturday. The cuts amount to an estimated 20% of NASA's workforce, and will reduce the agency from 18,000 to 14,000 employees, NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner said in a statement shared with NPR. The total number includes the agency's loss of 500 other workers due to normal attrition, she said. During a second round of the program, which closed at midni

Your iPhone's Messages App Can Do Math. Here's How

Apple will release iOS 26 this fall, and it will bring Liquid Glass and more features to your iPhone. But iOS 18 upgrades your Messages app so that it can solve tricky equations without your Calculator app, and it doesn't need Google to look up conversion rates, either. Prior to iOS 18, if you wanted to figure out how to split a bill with your texting group from afar, you'd have to use your calculator app or Spotlight and then switch back to Messages. With iOS 18 you can perform multistep calcu

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

Why is everyone in such a rush? The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about programming, or that programming is somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. Felleisen et al. give a nod to this trend in their book How to Design Programs, when they say "Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies." The Abtruse Goose comic also had their take. Let's analyze what a title like Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours could mean: Teach

Getting decent error reports in Bash when you're using 'set -e'

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

‘Magic: The Gathering’ Swung Into the Spider-Verse at Comic-Con

We’re on the cusp of the release of Magic: The Gathering’s next major set, Edge of Eternities, next week, but that didn’t stop Wizards of the Coast from swinging into San Diego Comic-Con to show off its next big crossover: Spider-Man. And in our first major glimpse at what to expect from the set, we got treated to a whole spider-verse of new cards—and, of course, some very nifty comic book-themed variants to get your wallet’s spidey senses tingling. It’s no surprise that transforming cards are

Astronomer winks at viral notoriety with ‘temporary spokesperson’ Gwyneth Paltrow

After spending the past week-plus in the headlines due to a seemingly inescapable social media scandal, data operations startup Astronomer is trying to shift the narrative with a tongue-in-cheek video starring actress and entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow. Paltrow was, of course, previously married to Coldplay singer Chris Martin. And it was at a Coldplay concert in Massachusetts that the company’s CEO Andy Byron and Chief People Officer Kristin Cabot were apparently caught dancing together on the “

U.K. starts enforcing online age check rules

In Brief A U.K. law requiring that pornography websites verify the age of their users took effect Friday. The BBC reports that around 6,000 porn sites have said they will start verifying users’ ages to comply with the Online Safety Act, although at least one major site was not requiring age checks as of Friday morning. The law also requires that online platforms prevent children from being exposed to harmful content, which is why sites like Reddit, Bluesky, X, and Grindr have also begun askin

5G promised a revolution, but here’s what we actually got

Robert Triggs / Android Authority Depending on where you live, you’ve likely had 5G in your pocket for at least a couple of years — or possibly close to half a decade. In any case, the wireless tech has certainly been around long enough to have had time to accomplish the numerous lofty promises that CEOs piped up to upsell us, which included everything from rejuvenating retail to traffic lights pushing updates to your car. While some of those promises might have come to pass, quite a lot of th

Apple @ Work: Apple makes Managed Apple Account transitions easier for IT at scale

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Ageing accelerates around age 50 ― some organs faster than others

Ageing of many tissues accelerates around age 50, according to an analysis of tissues in people ranging from teenagers to individuals in their sixties.Credit: Karen Haibara/AFP/Getty It is a warning that middle-aged people have long offered the young: ageing is not a smooth process. Now, an exhaustive analysis of how proteins change over time in different organs backs up that idea, finding that people experience an inflection point at around 50 years old, after which ageing seems to accelerate.

A Rare Interstellar Object Is Zipping Through Our Solar System. This Brand-New Telescope Saw It First

Nearly a month ago, a mysterious object was seen hurtling through the solar system and later confirmed as an interstellar visitor traveling toward the Sun. Several telescopes have since turned their attention to the wandering object, but it turns out the brand-new Vera C. Rubin Observatory was the first to catch a glimpse of 3I/ATLAS. In an act of cosmic serendipity, astronomers pointed the Rubin Observatory toward the patch of sky where the interstellar object appeared during its commissioning