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B enito Mussolini was a tyrant, but at least he made the trains run on time. Or so the story goes. Dictators are often seen as ruthless but effective. Official GDP figures support this view. Since 2002 average reported economic growth in autocracies has been twice as fast as in democracies.
Today in 1971, David Scott and James Irwin went for a drive—but this was no joyride. Scott and Irwin, NASA astronauts on the Apollo 15 moon mission, became the first people to burn rubber on the moon’s surface. The battery-powered Lunar Roving Vehicle, or “moon buggy,” could travel up to a cool 12 miles per hour, and took astronauts on longer journeys than previously possible during brief, cumbrous walks in their bulky suits. The buggy weighed a mere 77 pounds on the moon and could whisk around
UniFi OS Server is now available in Early Access, and it’s being promoted as a major advancement for MSPs and enterprise IT teams. But does it actually solve any problems we couldn’t already work around? Let’s break down what this release is, what it isn’t, and whether it brings real benefits to the table. What is UniFi OS Server? UniFi OS Server is a self-hosted platform that lets you run UniFi Network and select UniFi apps (currently InnerSpace and Identity) on your own hardware — no Dream M
When it first launched in 1991, Python “wasn’t lucrative,” remembers long-time Python community organizer Paul Everitt (now a Python and web developer advocate at JetBrains). “But we believed in it. The passion was there — we were doing good in the world.” Yet surprisingly, Python traveled a bumpy early road on its way to becoming the world’s #1 most popular programming language, safely ensconced in the nonprofit Python Software Foundation that would help it grow through the years. It’s a stor
Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now As AI continues to take on more and more new competencies, junior coding, as we knew it, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Tasks that used to be the bread and butter for junior developers — such as repetitive scripting, HTML layout or simple DevOps setups — are now being reliably handled by AI assistants like ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot
UniFi OS Server is now available in Early Access, and it’s being promoted as a major advancement for MSPs and enterprise IT teams. But does it actually solve any problems we couldn’t already work around? Let’s break down what this release is, what it isn’t, and whether it brings real benefits to the table. What is UniFi OS Server? UniFi OS Server is a self-hosted platform that lets you run UniFi Network and select UniFi apps (currently InnerSpace and Identity) on your own hardware — no Dream M
Critcl lets you easily embed C code in Tcl. A (certainly incomplete) list of packages using critcl is: Readers wishing to make their use of critcl public here are asked to file a ticket or pull request here, against branch gh-pages More notes are available on the Tclers' Wiki Slides for "Critcl - Beyond Stubs and Compilers" [ PDF ], [ HTML ] A paper from the Ninth Annual Tcl/Tk conference (2002, Vancouver). Critcl currently has two major branches, version 2, and version 3. Only version 3 i
Language models are strange beasts. In many ways they appear to have human-like “personalities” and “moods,” but these traits are highly fluid and liable to change unexpectedly. Sometimes these changes are dramatic. In 2023, Microsoft's Bing chatbot famously adopted an alter-ego called "Sydney,” which declared love for users and made threats of blackmail. More recently, xAI’s Grok chatbot would for a brief period sometimes identify as “MechaHitler” and make antisemitic comments. Other personali
Fans of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime have been looking forward to seeing Lucy cut it up in Guilty Gear Strive as a DLC character for a while now. During this weekend’s EVO tournament, Arc System Works finally pulled back the curtain on how everyone’s favorite living Edgerunner fits into its fighting game. Lucy’s appearance here looks to be justified through her mind being hacked and transferred to the Guilty Gear universe. Still dealing with the events of Edgerunners that left her old crew
Once upon a time, in their startling report titled "Bigger Monsters, Weaker Chains," ACLU analysts Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt argued that the US was quickly becoming a full-blown "surveillance society," where advanced technology and crumbling regulation come together to create the kind of world that was previously the domain of dystopian science fiction. "The fact is, there are no longer any technical barriers to the Big Brother regime portrayed by George Orwell," they wrote. That was in
You don't need to be a Photoshop expert to give its new generative AI a test drive. Adobe has added a number of AI features to its premiere photo editor over the past few years, and if you use Photoshop regularly, you've probably seen these pop up on your task bars. I spend a lot of time reviewing AI image generators and other AI creative software, so I had to put the original photo editor's AI to the test. AI might not be right for every project, especially for professional creators who regula
If it's been a while since you added up how many digital subscriptions you're paying for, it's likely to be more than you think: streaming services, software packages, games, AI bots, health and fitness wearables ... the list goes on. You can add cloud storage subscriptions to that list too. Apple, Google, and Microsoft offer very little in the way of free storage in the cloud, which means if you want the convenience of having your photos, videos, and other files safely backed up and accessible
is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 92, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I’ve kept my phone case on all week, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) I also have for you: a new Elgato webcam, LG’s next
Maria Diaz/ZDNET Costs are steadily rising in the US, and energy costs are a prominent example. This is made worse by summer temperatures being at record highs, with heat waves wreaking havoc across various states in the past few weeks. As someone who's gone through a few of these this summer alone, I'm constantly looking for ways to conserve energy. There are many little things you can do that can shave dollars off your monthly energy bill, and they go beyond switching off the lights when you
My general vintage computing projects, mostly microcomputers, 6502, PalmOS, 68K/Power Mac and Unix workstations, but that's not all you'll see. While over the decades I've written for publications likeand, these articles are all original and just for you. My promise: No AI-generated article text, ever. All em-dashes are intentional and inserted by hand. Be kind, REWIND and PLAY.Old VCR is advertisement- and donation-funded, and what I get goes to maintaining the hardware here at Floodgap. I don'
Sentinel-2 Super-Resolution GUI A simple, user-friendly desktop application to increase the resolution of Sentinel-2 satellite images. This tool takes the standard 10-meter Blue, Green, Red, and Near-Infrared (NIR) bands and uses a pre-trained AI model to create a higher-resolution, 2x upscaled image. It's designed for users who want to easily enhance their satellite imagery without complex command-line tools. TL;DR (For the Impatient) Install stuff: pip install pyqt5 torch safetensors raste
According to the Shepherd Services documentation, the start and stop fields of shepherd-service take G-Expressions. But what's a g-expression? Well, because Guix uses Scheme for both higher-level actions–like defining packages–and lower-level actions–like building derivations generated by packages– it needs a faculty for embedding lower-level code in higher-level code. So in the start field of wesnoth-shepherd-service : (start #~(make-forkexec-constructor/container (list #$(file-append package
Mezzano, an operating system written in Common Lisp. Pre-built images Demo releases are available through GitHub. These releases are designed to be run in VirtualBox, though QEMU is also supported. 2GB of RAM, a virtio-net NIC and an Intel HDA audio controller are recommended. x86-64 images are published. AArch64 has been made to work on some hardware. But to set expectations: making Mezzano run on any given piece of hardware or emulator is still typically a project that requires the user to
A dive into open chat protocols I’m between projects right now, so as is my idiom I’m going to take some random topic that has caught me on a manic swing in my little bipolar life, and dive deeper into it for a few days. One of the low-key topics in the back of my mind is that “the world needs an open chat protocol that doesn’t suck”, and something made me start thinking seriously about XMPP again for the first time in a decade. I used XMPP myself a fair amount in its little Golden Age of the e
Cutting corners: As the landscape for AI-powered products evolves, companies face growing demands to deliver not just innovation, but clearly supported and honestly communicated claims about what their technology can actually do. "When you market AI like magic, you're going to invite scrutiny," said George Heudorfer, an adjunct professor at the University of New Haven's Pompea College of Business. "Sometimes that exaggeration isn't just puffery. It's a performance claim, and you need to back tha
Kris Carlon / Android Authority Despite some speed and network coverage improvements, 5G hasn’t really lived up to the hype. You know it, I know it, and deep down, even the carriers know it. In fact, a few of the industry’s bigwigs would probably rather we all forget about some of the absolutely outlandish claims and overenthusiastic visions they tried to sell us about 5G. But the internet never forgets, so it’s time for us to play “where are they now” with some of the worst nonsense from the
Instagram is no longer allowing public accounts to go live if they have less than 1,000 followers. Users have been reporting over the past few days that their accounts aren't eligible for Live broadcast on the app anymore. "We changed the requirements to use this feature," reads the notice that pops up when people try to host a livestream broadcast to their followers. "Only public accounts with 1,000 followers or more will be able to create live videos." Now Meta has confirmed the new eligibilit
Part of the Software Internals Email Book Club. The next book we'll read is The Art of Multiprocessor Programming 2nd Edition (ISBN 9780124159501) from 2020 by Herlihy, Shavit, Luchangco, and Spear. A free PDF comes up for me on a Google search of this book but it is of the 1st Edition from 2008. Make sure you grab the 2nd Edition from 2020. Date Discussion starter Chapter Title August 16th Phil 1 Introduction August 23rd TBD 2 Mutual exclusion August 30th TBD 3 Concurrent objects September 6t
In the spring of 2019, the six-wheeled Spirit rover was driving backwards to drag an inoperable front right wheel when it got stuck on the sandy Martian surface. Despite spending months trying to excavate its robot, NASA could not free Spirit. Now, engineers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison may have figured out a way to better prepare NASA’s robots for extraterrestrial environments. In a paper published in the Journal of Field Robotics, the team of engineers used computer simulations to
A new version of the TikTok mobile app for people in the US is reportedly being developed by the vertical video social media network's owner ByteDance. It will replace the current version of TikTok being used in the US ahead of a September deadline for the Chinese company to divest ownership, according to a report last month by The Information. The new app, codenamed "M2," could launch on Sept. 5. If you're in the US, you would then be required to switch from the existing app to the new one, th
Startup founders face a perplexing and even contradictory capital market in 2025, according to Sapphire Ventures partner Cathy Gao. “Capital isn’t scarce. But access to that capital is harder than ever,” she said. Gao, who spoke at TechCrunch’s All Stage conference in July, said it’s possible for startup founders, especially those in later Series C stage, to navigate this particular economic environment. And they need to start with a reality check. To begin, she said, it’s important to note th
Robert Triggs / Android Authority I’ve been using smartphones since 2011, and they’ve all been Samsung and Google devices (aside from a few other brands due to my job). Both companies have come a long way over the years, and while the S24 Ultra is my phone of choice for now, that may soon change for one reason. Pixels and Galaxy phones each have their strengths and weaknesses, but one thing I’ve always found Google is best at is customer support, while Samsung has more reliable devices. As I t
Integrating an electronic material that exhibits a strange property called negative capacitance can help high-power gallium nitride transistors break through a performance barrier, say scientists in California. Research published in Science suggests that negative capacitance helps sidestep a physical limit that typically enforces trade-offs between how well a transistor performs in the “on” state versus how well it does in the “off” state. The researchers behind the project say this shows that n
A Miami jury found Tesla partially liable Friday in a 2019 crash that killed one person and injured another—all while the driver of the Model S used the automaker’s Autopilot driver assistance feature. The jury found Tesla liable for $200 million in punitive damages, plus an additional $43 million in compensatory damages. (Because of state laws, the company will likely end up paying less.) A jury found the automaker one-third responsible for the crash; it found the driver of the Tesla, who sett
Mindfulness is grounding ourselves in the present moment, which means paying attention to our inner feelings and thoughts as well as what's going on around us. Easier said than done. Like many, I struggle to keep my mind stationed in the present and often turn to meditation apps for assistance. Yet, what has helped me practice mindfulness the most came in the form of an unexpected app -- not one for breathing exercises or mental health, but one for identifying birds. Merlin Bird ID was created