TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
cronexpr is a library that parses and drives crontab expressions, requiring a timezone to determine the next timestamp. It supports standard and non-standard extensions, such as Last day of month (L) and Nearest weekday (1W). The crate implements Vixie’s cron behavior, which can result in unexpected outcomes due to intersect or union modes. Edge cases, […]
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In this paper presented at the annual Usenix Meeting in 2006, Stephen C Johnson questions the traditional algorithms and data structures taught to computer science students, emphasizing the changing nature of machines on which these algorithms run. Using cycle counters on desktop machines, the author examines the impact of memory access patterns on performance. Surprisingly, […]
Dobble (Spot It!) is a card game where special circular cards use symbols. Cards have one symbol in common, designed for various gameplay options. Exploring the design process mathematically reveals no simple formula for the number of symbols and cards. Empirical play and examples show how to create decks with requirements for unique cards and […]
The author embarked on a journey to analyze Italian music as a network, connecting artists to the bands they contributed to from the 1902 of Enrico Caruso to the present. The resulting bipartite network revealed interesting findings about the temporal proximity of bands and the genre clusters formed within Italian music history. Surprisingly, Gianni Maroccolo […]
DoNotPay, originally promoted as the “world’s first robot lawyer,” was found by the FTC to have made deceptive claims without testing its AI chatbot’s output against a human lawyer’s level. DoNotPay did not employ attorneys to verify outputs or validate legal claims, leading to an FTC settlement where the AI startup agreed to pay $193,000 […]
Trail of Bits, leaders in confidential computing security, share insights on potential security pitfalls related to AWS Nitro Enclaves. They emphasize the importance of identifying and mitigating security risks, implementing best practices, and avoiding common pitfalls in virtual socket handling. Their in-depth analysis covers topics such as virtual socket security, randomness, side-channel attack mitigations, memory […]
XKCD 1425, Tasks, celebrates its tenth anniversary today, highlighting the transformation of once complex challenges into trivial tasks with the advancement of technology like LLMs, CLIP, and ResNet+ImageNet. The comic emphasizes the importance of experience in deciphering between easy and hard tasks in software development, a notion that has become more perplexing with the introduction […]
NKRYPT is a cryptography installation outside Questacon in Canberra, Australia. Designed by Stuart Kohlhagen in 2013, the work remains an unsolved mystery with multiple ciphers. The installation features stainless steel pillars with various ciphertexts structured as ring ciphers, with intricate interconnections. Visitors are invited to decipher these codes, with the challenge of a hidden message […]
In summary, the author shares a detailed account of a spacecraft testing scenario that involved a critical error due to incorrect memory addresses being used. This led to an ERIU crash, resulting in challenges with telemetry and the need to reboot the entire onboard computer. Despite the complexity and high stakes involved, the team successfully […]
Professor Megan Fritts assigned an easy task for her ethics and technology course, but many students used ChatGPT for their answers. The AI-generated responses did not reflect what individuals expected from the course. Fritts believes offloading thinking onto a machine does not create liberated minds. She expressed concerns that technology addiction is affecting students’ thinking […]