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How developers are using Apple’s local AI models with iOS 26

Earlier this year, Apple introduced its Foundation Models framework during WWDC 2025, which allows developers to use the company’s local AI models to power features in their applications. The company touted that with this framework, developers gain access to AI models without worrying about any inference cost. Plus, these local models have capabilities such as guided generation and tool calling built in. As iOS 26 is rolling out to all users, developers have been updating their apps to include

Why the iPhone is my favorite video camera for B-roll footage

While I am almost certainly the least-prolific videographer on the planet, I am finally starting a long-planned series of interviews on my fledgling YouTube channel. The first of these went live this week, and I’m aiming for roughly one a month from now on. I use a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K rig as my primary video camera, but my iPhones have long been my camera of choice for B-roll footage … Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K For most of my life, I’ve been a Nikon guy when it comes t

CNET Survey: 47% of Americans Use VPNs for Privacy. That Number Could Rise as State Internet Bans Increase

Getty Image/Zooey Liao/CNET Americans are turning to virtual private networks for online privacy and protection, and a potential wide-reaching ban on online adult content in Michigan might further increase interest in and demand for VPNs in the US. An exclusive CNET survey found that 43% of US adults use VPNs, and nearly half do so to safeguard their online activity and IP address. Beyond privacy concerns, VPNs are also gaining popularity for other reasons, including saving money and accessing

Topics: adults use using vpn vpns

Apple: SSH and FileVault

When FileVault is enabled, the data volume is locked and unavailable during and after booting, until an account has been authenticated using a password. The macOS version of OpenSSH stores all of its configuration files, both system-wide and per-account, in the data volume. Therefore, the usually configured authentication methods and shell access are not available during this time. However, when Remote Login is enabled, it is possible to perform password authentication using SSH even in this sit

How to Set Up and Use a Burner Phone

Authorities around the world can use your cell phone to track your location and potentially access other sensitive private information about you. One possible protection from this data collection is a burner phone. As invasive state surveillance ramps up globally—including new initiatives in the United States to monitor travelers, protesters, and vulnerable populations—privacy tools that were formerly the domain of digital hermits and people involved in organized crime are now more and more appe

DuckDB 1.4.0 LTS

Announcing DuckDB 1.4.0 The DuckDB team · 7 min TL;DR: We're releasing DuckDB version 1.4.0, codenamed “Andium”. This is an LTS release with one year of community support, and it packs several new features including database encryption, the MERGE statement and Iceberg writes. We are proud to release DuckDB v1.4.0, named “Andium” after the Andean teal (Anas andium), which lives in the Andean highlands of Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador. In this blog post, we cover the most important updates f

What do people actually use ChatGPT for? OpenAI provides some numbers.

As someone who writes about the AI industry relatively frequently for this site, there is one question that I find myself constantly asking and being asked in turn, in some form or another: What do you actually use large language models for? Today, OpenAI's Economic Research Team went a long way toward answering that question, on a population level, releasing a first-of-its-kind National Bureau of Economic Research working paper (in association with Harvard economist David Denning) detailing ho

Pgstream: Postgres streaming logical replication with DDL changes

pgstream - Postgres replication with DDL changes pgstream is an open source CDC command-line tool and library that offers Postgres replication support with DDL changes to any provided target. Features Schema change tracking and replication of DDL changes Support for multiple out of the box targets Elasticsearch/OpenSearch Webhooks PostgreSQL Initial and on demand PostgreSQL snapshots (for when you don't need continuous replication) Column value transformations (anonymise your data on the g

The Download: computing’s bright young minds, and cleaning up satellite streaks

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 China has accused Nvidia of violating anti-monopoly laws As US and Chinese officials head into a second day of tariff negotiations. (Bloomberg $) + The investigation dug into Nvidia’s 2020 acquisition of computing firm Mellanox. (CNBC) + But China's antitrust regulator hasn’t confirmed if it will punish it. (WSJ $) 2 The US is getting closer to making a TikTok deal But it’s still p

California lawmakers pass SB 79, housing bill that brings dense housing

This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . California lawmakers just paved the way for a whole lot more housing in the Golden State. In the waning hours of the 2025 legislative session, the state Senate voted 21 to 8 to approve Senate Bill 79 , a landmark housing bill that overrides local zoning laws to expand high-density housing near transit hubs. The controversial bill received a final concurrence vote from the Senate on Friday, a day after passin

QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system

QGIS is a full-featured, user-friendly, free-and-open-source (FOSS) geographical information system (GIS) that runs on Unix platforms, Windows, and MacOS. Features 1. Flexible and powerful spatial data management Support for raster, vector, mesh, and point cloud data in a range of industry-standard formats Raster formats include: GeoPackage, GeoTIFF, GRASS, ArcInfo binary and ASCII grids, ERDAS Imagine SDTS, WMS, WCS, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, and other GDAL supported formats. Vector formats includ

KDE launches its own distribution

KDE launches its own distribution (again) [LWN subscriber-only content] Welcome to LWN.net The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN. Thank you for visiting LWN.net! At Akademy 2025, the KDE Project released an alpha version of KDE Linux, a distribution built by the project to " in

Kerberoasting

I learn about cryptographic vulnerabilities all the time, and they generally fill me with some combination of jealousy (“oh, why didn’t I think of that”) or else they impress me with the brilliance of their inventors. But there’s also another class of vulnerabilities: these are the ones that can’t possibly exist in important production software, because there’s no way anyone could still do that in 2025. Today I want to talk about one of those ridiculous ones, something Microsoft calls “low tech

Hitting Peak File IO Performance with Zig

Intro This post goes through how to maximize file IO performance on linux using zig with io_uring. All code related to this post can be found in this repo. a) Benchmark We are comparing fio and the zig code which can be found here. test system We are using a machine with: ubuntu 24.04 (6.14 kernel, HWE). kernel parameter nvme.poll_queues=16 . . "datacenter" NVMe SSD without any RAID. 756 GB of RAM. This amount of RAM should be irrelevant for this test. Since we are using direct_io henc

Fiber Concurrency

Fiber Concurrency The :fiber_concurrency plugin enables connections a session to be used seamlessly across fibers managed by a fiber scheduler. This is of particular relevance if the connections are long-lived/persistent. Note that, if you’re using the :persistent plugin, this plugin is required by default. How to use http = HTTPX . plugin ( :fiber_concurrency ) Thread . start do # assuming fiber scheduler is set here 10 . times . each do Fiber . schedule do http . get ( "https://example.com

This blog is running on a recycled Google Pixel 5 (2024)

This blog is running on a recycled Google Pixel 5 If you glance over this blog, you will see that I am an avid Android fan. After setting up numerous Linux proot desktops on phones, I wanted to see if I use a phone as a server and run my blog from an Android phone. Since you are reading this, I was successful. I was inspired my a few Mastodon posts earlier this week to give it a go. First, I stumbled on a post from @kaimac who is running a site from an ESP32 microcontroller. In the comments of

GAO warns of privacy risks in using facial recognition in rental housing

RENTAL HOUSING Use and Federal Oversight of Property Technology Report to Congressional Requesters July 2025 GAO-25-107196 United States Government Accountability Office Highlights For more information, contact Alicia Puente Cackley at [email protected]. Highlights of GAO-25-107196, a report to congressional requesters RENTAL HOUSING Use and Federal Oversight of Property Technology Why GAO Did This Study Some policymakers have raised questions about the use of property technology tool

The AI Hype Index: AI-designed antibiotics show promise

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. Using AI to improve our health and well-being is one of the areas scientists and researchers are most excited about. The last month has seen an interesting leap forward: The technology has been put to work designing new antibiotics to fight hard-to-treat conditions, and OpenAI and Anthropic have bo

Connecting M.2 drives to various things (and not doing so)

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

Microsoft working on fix for ongoing Outlook email issues

​Microsoft is working to resolve an Exchange Online issue causing email access problems for Outlook mobile users who use Hybrid Modern Authentication (HMA). HMA is a Microsoft Exchange Server feature that allows users to access on-premises mailboxes using authorization tokens from the cloud. Tracked under EX1137017 in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, this known issue is caused by a recent service change, designed to improve the efficiency of mailbox syncs, which is triggering 12-hour sync delay

Websites and web developers mostly don't care about client-side problems

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

WebR – R in the Browser

WebR - R in the Browser WebR is a version of the statistical language R compiled for the browser and Node.js using WebAssembly, via Emscripten. WebR makes it possible to run R code in the browser without the need for an R server to execute the code: the R interpreter runs directly on the user’s machine. Several R packages have also been ported for use with webR, and can be loaded in the usual way using the library() function. Warning The webR project is under active development, and the API i

Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos

Manim is an engine for precise programmatic animations, designed for creating explanatory math videos. Note, there are two versions of manim. This repository began as a personal project by the author of 3Blue1Brown for the purpose of animating those videos, with video-specific code available here. In 2020 a group of developers forked it into what is now the community edition, with a goal of being more stable, better tested, quicker to respond to community contributions, and all around friendlie

Apple is in talks to use Google’s Gemini for Siri revamp, report says

In Brief Apple is falling behind in the race to transform Siri into an AI assistant that’s as powerful as its competitors. As consumers grow more impatient, Apple is considering using another company’s tech instead of developing its own. Apple is now exploring a partnership with Google, its most direct competitor in the smartphone business, according to Bloomberg editor and Apple insider Mark Gurman. The company previously approached OpenAI and Anthropic for similar discussions about using th

Dev gets 4 years for creating kill switch on ex-employer's systems

A software developer has been sentenced to four years in prison for sabotaging his ex-employer's Windows network with custom malware and a kill switch that locked out employees when his account was disabled. Davis Lu, 55, a Chinese national living legally in Houston, worked for an Ohio-based company, reportedly Eaton Corporation, from 2007 until his termination in 2019. After a corporate restructuring and subsequent demotion in 2018, the DOJ says that Lu retaliated by embedding malicious code

Basic dependency injection in OCaml with objects

In his article Why I chose OCaml as my primary language, my friend Xavier Van de Woestyne presents, in the section Dependency injection and inversion, two approaches to implementing dependency injection: one using user-defined effects and one using modules as first-class values. Even though I’m quite convinced that both approaches are legit, I find them sometimes a bit overkill and showing fairly obvious pitfalls when applied to real software. The goal of this article is therefore to briefly hig

Starting game development in JavaScript with no experience

It’s been a while since I started making web games in JavaScript. In this post, I’d like to share tips that would be helpful for beginners wanting to do the same. Learn JavaScript Outside of Game Development Alongside HTML and CSS This might sound obvious, but I really recommend learning to program before learning game dev. For JavaScript, that means learning the fundamentals of the language and how it integrates with HTML and CSS. Considering that JavaScript is primarily used on the web to m

It's the Housing, Stupid

A few weeks ago, I was on The Compound and Friends, and there was a debate about why we were seeing 2021-like meme stock activity and money market funds holding record assets at the same time. For context, both of these things are true. If we look at the performance of the 100 most shorted stocks compared to the Russell 1000, that performance spread is nearing 2021 levels: It’s like a bunch of mini GameStop short squeezes all over again. And if we look at the non-profitable tech retail invest

Stop using AI for these 9 work tasks - here's why

zokara/iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images ZDNET's key takeaways Sometimes an AI can cause you or your company irreparable harm. Sharing confidential data with an AI could have legal consequences. Don't let an AI talk to customers without supervision. A few weeks ago, I shared with you "9 programming tasks you shouldn't hand off to AI - and why." It's full of well-reasoned suggestions and recommendations for how to avoid having an AI produce code that could ruin your whole day. Then,

Topics: ai chatbot use using work

The Folk Economics of Housing

Abstract Why is housing supply so severely restricted in US cities and suburbs? Urban economists offer two primary hypotheses: homeowner self-interest and political fragmentation. Homeowners, who outnumber and have organizational advantages over renters, are said to lobby against development to protect their property values. The fragmentation hypothesis emphasizes that development's negative externalities are borne locally while most of the benefits accrue regionally or nationally, leading local