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Porsche’s insanely clever hybrid engine comes to the 911 Turbo S

Today, Porsche debuted a new 911 variant at the IAA Mobility show in Munich, Germany. It's the most powerful 911 to date, excluding some limited-run models, and may well be the quickest to 60 mph from a standing start, dispatching that dash in just 2.4 seconds. And it's all thanks to one of the most interesting hybrid powertrains on sale today. Rather than just bolting an electric motor to an existing 911, Porsche designed an entirely new 3.6 L flat-six engine, taking the opportunity to ditch t

The cost of interrupted work (2023)

Interruptions cost 23 minutes 15 seconds, right? 2023-11-05 You’ve likely read lots of blog posts stating that it takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to work after an interruption, context switch, or meeting. Thus, “do you have five minutes” ends up not only costing those few minutes, but instead about half an hour. But where does that number come from? I just wanted to quickly reference this fact to a colleague. Quick search for the reference, copy’n’paste it, in and out, 20 minutes

I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer

How I accidentally became PureGym's unofficial Apple Wallet developer 47 seconds: A villain origin story ¶ Wednesday, 11:15 AM. I'm at the PureGym entrance doing the universal gym app dance. Phone out, one bar of signal that immediately gives up because apparently the building is wrapped in aluminum foil. Connect to PureGym WiFi. Wait for it to actually connect. Open the app. "Warming up..." The entire feed loads—suggested workouts I'll never do, my "recent" activities from 2024, a motivatio

The electric fence stopped working years ago

We were walking to watch the sunset when a dog started barking at us from a porch. From inside, a voice called out: "Don't worry, he won't leave the porch. The electric fence hasn't worked in years, but he still won't go past it." I stopped mid-step. A dog, imprisoned by a fence that only exists in his memory. The next question changed how I see everything: What electric fences do we have in our lives? The Invisible Barrier Electric fences train dogs through graduated discomfort, first a wa

The Electric Fence Stopped Working Years Ago

We were walking to watch the sunset when a dog started barking at us from a porch. From inside, a voice called out: "Don't worry, he won't leave the porch. The electric fence hasn't worked in years, but he still won't go past it." I stopped mid-step. A dog, imprisoned by a fence that only exists in his memory. The next question changed how I see everything: What electric fences do we have in our lives? The Invisible Barrier Electric fences train dogs through graduated discomfort, first a wa

Debounce

Debouncing, in the context of programming, means to discard operations that occur too close together during a specific interval, and consolidate them into a single invocation. Debouncing is very similar to throttling. The key difference is that throttling enforces limits on continuous operations, while debouncing waits for invocations to stop for a specific time to consolidate many noisy invocations into one single invocation. A typical use case of debouncing is when responding to user input.

Earth Is Spinning Weirdly Faster, Making Tuesday One of the Shortest Days Ever

Earth's rotation is randomly speeding up, and nobody is quite sure why. These speedups, which have occurred several times over the last few years, haven't had any effect on daily life, but they also haven't gone unnoticed by science. Tuesday, Aug. 5 is the next date when Earth's rotation is expected to speed up, shortening the day by between 1.25 and 1.51 milliseconds. According to Time and Date, the current prediction is set by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and

Earth Is Spinning Weirdly Faster, Making Today One of the Shortest Days Ever

Earth's rotation is randomly speeding up, and nobody is quite sure why. These speedups, which have occurred several times over the last few years, haven't had any effect on daily life, but they also haven't gone unnoticed by science. Tuesday, Aug. 5 is the next date when Earth's rotation is expected to speed up, shortening the day by between 1.25 and 1.51 milliseconds. According to Time and Date, the current prediction is set by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and

How accurate is Apple’s new transcription AI? We tested it against Whisper and Parakeet

As I pointed out recently, while Whisper is top of mind and still a pretty good transcription model, OpenAI has moved away from it. That said, the fact that Apple’s new transcription API is faster than Whisper is great news. But how accurate is it? We tested it out. Full disclosure: the idea for this post came from developer Prakash Pax, who did his own tests. As he explains it: I recorded 15 audio samples in English, randomly ranging from 15 seconds to 2 minutes. And tested against these 3 sp

I Solved a 7-Day Calculation Problem in a Weekend

How I Solved a 7-Day Calculation Problem in a weekend Jithin Sankar Follow 3 min read · 3 days ago 3 days ago -- Listen Share In a previous project, my team was building a SaaS application. The scenario was this: we had a slider for setting a price, from $0.00 to $10.00. When you moved the slider, the app would show you the projected sales for that price. The slider input was combined with two other attributes, Region and SKU name. The problem was performance. Each time the slider moved, it wo

Show HN: SnapQL – Desktop app to query Postgres with AI

SnapQL cursor for data ⚡️ - explore your postgresql db in seconds demo.mp4 generate schema-aware queries in seconds with AI supports any PostgreSQL database fully local desktop app use your own OpenAI key Build SnapQL locally I will eventually ship some precompiled binaries, but that takes some setup. In the meantime, follow these steps to build a local copy:

Fixing the mechanics of my bullet chess

I’ve been playing chess a long time now, and I’ve always been a good deal better (maybe a couple hundred ELO points) at blitz (3+0 or 5+0) than bullet (1+0). Well, I may have just fixed that. I changed how I move pieces this afternoon and have gained about 100 ELO already. When I play on a computer, I usually drag-and-drop pieces. But it turns out you can also move pieces by clicking first on your piece and then the target square. An analysis of my recent games indicates this shift saved me abou

watchOS 26: More Apple Watch faces using Series 10’s upgraded display

Apple Watch Series 10 features an upgraded display with a faster refresh rate. This enables select watch faces to display a ticking seconds indicator even in always-on mode. However, most watch faces don’t actually take advantage of the new hardware yet. The watchOS 26 software update coming this fall will change that. Series 10 enhanced faces At launch, three watch faces supported updating seconds in always-on display mode: Flux, Reflections, and Activity Digital. Apple later introduced 2025

India’s ‘Human Calculator Kid’ Shatters 6 World Records in a Single Day

Remember when your teachers used to say that mental math is important because you can’t walk around with a calculator everywhere you go? Never minding the fact that we now do, actually, take a calculator everywhere we go (hello, smartphones), a teenager from India has taken it a step further: He has essentially become a human calculator. Fourteen-year-old Aaryan Shukla cruised through six mental math calculation world records in a single day, according to a Guinness World Records statement publ