TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
David Jones presents a font he is working on, featuring reversed letterforms against a vertically striped background, inspired by Schaefer Versalien. The font combines elements from Schaefer Versalien and the stencil font Arugula. The intricacies of kerning in this design are explained, showcasing how GSUB lookups are used to achieve the desired effect. The font […]
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eli Introduction: The creator of eli spent over 15 years developing embedded Lisp interpreters across various languages, starting with a personal project and delving deep into the realm of embedded Lisp. Implementations: eli has been implemented in languages such as C, C#, Go, Java, and Swift, with a focus on performance comparable to Python. Language […]
RubyLLM offers a seamless way to work with AI without the hassle of dealing with multiple providers’ different APIs, response formats, and error handling. This gem provides a beautiful API for various AI tasks like chatting with OpenAI, analyzing images and audio, generating images, creating vector embeddings, and even allowing AI to use your Ruby […]
Cicero, a key source of stoic thought, explores the growing popularity of stoicism in Silicon Valley tech circles. While the philosophy comprises physics and metaphysics, its ethical advice remains central, championed by figures like Cicero. Stoic ontology proposes a monistic view of the universe, portraying it as one vast whole where all parts are interconnected, […]
The author received several similar spam emails at the start of the year, all part of the same romance scam campaign preying on vulnerable individuals. Romance fraud is common, victimizing victims emotionally and financially. The author decided to investigate and took on the role of a potential victim himself. The emails were traced back to […]
At CES 2025, Mahesh Subramony, AMD Senior Fellow, discussed the Strix Halo SoC, a long-awaited iGPU SoC from AMD. It took four iterations to develop this APU that combines CPU and GPU performance. The Zen 5 CPU in Strix Halo has a low-power die-to-die interconnect, while the 512-bit FPU cores are efficient for multi-thread workloads. […]
Summary: European corvids have been observed incorporating anti-bird spikes into their nests, taken from buildings in urban areas. Researchers documented this behavior in a study published by the Dutch journal Deinsea, noting that the spikes were used in both structural and potentially defensive ways. The unusual nests raised questions about the birds’ adaptation to human-made […]
Despite the controversial nature of WebUSB, a loophole has been found that allows web pages to access USB devices without it, avoiding political disputes. By tricking a Raspberry Pi Pico to impersonate a U2F dongle, arbitrary data can be smuggled in, exploiting the device’s key handle functionality. Chrome attempts to check the validity of ECDSA […]
In this study, the authors introduce block diffusion language models that combine the benefits of diffusion and autoregressive models, allowing for flexible-length generation and improved inference efficiency. By utilizing KV caching and parallel token sampling, block diffusion outperforms traditional models in likelihood modeling. The proposed training algorithm and noise schedules help minimize variance, achieving state-of-the-art […]
This project was a blast for the author, who enjoyed the challenge of processing and threading optimization problems in-depth. Subscribe to Jacob’s Tech Tavern for articles on iOS, Swift, tech, and indie projects. The author reminisces about the glory days of 4chan image-boards and introduces a concept where notifications alert users to interesting 2FA codes. […]