TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
In the summer of 2024, the speed of computers is faster than ever, yet they often feel slow. The debate of why this is happening has been ongoing for a while. Windows 95 is seen as a turning point when bloat and poor performance came into consumer and small business software. Boot speeds have improved […]
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The author created a subway-style diagram of major Roman roads in 125 AD, requiring extensive research from various sources. The map includes authentic and creatively invented road names, as well as information on travel times and methods of transport. Sailing was preferred over roads when available. The map does not include maritime routes for simplicity. […]
CPU Energy Meter is a Linux tool developed at LMU Munich that allows monitoring of power consumption of Intel CPUs at fine time granularities. It can monitor power consumption in various power domains such as per package, per core, per uncore, per memory node, and per platform using RAPL feature of Intel CPUs. The tool […]
The article discusses a software attack that can set the PCRs of a TPM device to arbitrary values, allowing access to secrets such as disk encryption keys without physical manipulation of pins. By reassigning the reset pin to a GPIO block, the attacker can reset the device and derive new PCR values. This attack can […]
DeTikZify simplifies the creation of scientific figures by automatically generating TikZ graphics programs from sketches and existing figures. The innovative multimodal language model uses an MCTS-based inference algorithm for refining outputs without extra training. Users facing installation and inference difficulties can access the Hugging Face Space or Google Colab demo. The Python package can be […]
Earth’s crust is a treasure trove of water, holding vast amounts within its layers that play a crucial role in geological processes. Recent studies have revealed that water reaches greater depths than previously believed, with some hidden deep within the mantle’s transition zone. Scientists now estimate that Earth’s crust contains over 10.5 million cubic miles […]
The author introduces the concept of 7 famous Cathedrals aligned on a straight line related to Saint Michael and the research hypothesis of perfect alignment. They collect cathedral data, compute geodesic lines, and acknowledge flaws in their methodology involving the spherical model and bias towards misalignment. They create a geopandas dataframe of landmark locations and […]
Eric Blake discusses the intricacies of QEMU devices, explaining how emulation works by mimicking what an OS would see on bare-metal hardware. He delves into the details of different accelerators like KVM and TCG, highlighting how they allow for efficient emulation across different hardware platforms. The concept of paravirtualization with virtio devices is explored, showcasing […]
Qwen2 marks the evolution from Qwen1.5, introducing pretrained and instruction-tuned models in five sizes, enhanced multilingual capabilities, state-of-the-art performance, and extended context lengths. All models now feature Group Query Attention and improved embedding strategies. Qwen2-72B demonstrates superior performance in various domains, surpassing Qwen1.5-110B with fewer parameters. The models excel in coding, mathematics, and handling long […]
The article discusses the potential of social media data in predicting health-related conditions, particularly mental health issues like depression, using machine-learning models. It argues that individuals should have a right not to be subjected to AI profiling based on publicly available data without informed consent. The analysis includes three cases of AI-driven mental health profiling […]