TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
Rickrolling, a popular Internet trend from the mid-2000s, has made its way into the academic world as shown in a systematic experiment conducted. Surprisingly, there are 23 academic documents deliberately incorporating rickrolling elements such as in footnotes, code listings, and references. The authors argue that rickrolling in academia adds inspiration and humor to the formal […]
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Joining an R&D team is often seen as a thrilling opportunity for developers to make a real impact. However, the success of these teams can vary greatly depending on their specific goals and actions. There are four main types of R&D teams: the Scout team, the Spy team, the Library team, and the Practical Research […]
Last year, I bought a GBS-Control to upscale game consoles for a VGA CRT monitor, but started having issues with random black screens while playing my Wii in 480p. What seemed like a simple software problem led to a months-long adventure involving overheating chips, RF interference, and debugging the GBS-Control firmware. Surprisingly, the root cause […]
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is back in action after experiencing communication issues due to its age and distant location in interstellar space. The team identified and successfully fixed the problem with the flight data subsystem, allowing the spacecraft to send back usable data from all four science instruments. Despite being launched in 1977 for a […]
In this study, we explore the potential for language models to act as world simulators in text-based environments, aiming to eliminate the need for manual coding in building virtual environments for complex tasks. The ByteSized32-State-Prediction benchmark is introduced to assess the ability of models like GPT-4 to predict game state transitions accurately. Despite GPT-4’s strong […]
In “Origin Story: The Trials of Charles Darwin” by Howard Markel, the tumultuous two years surrounding the publication of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” is vividly depicted. The oratorical showdown between Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and London biologist Thomas Huxley is the focus, showcasing the clash between Creation-based natural history and fact-led research. Markel’s examination of […]
Xavier Login, a new employee, encounters a memory error while validating an input in C code. After fixing the mistake, he wonders why ASan only detected the first error and not the second. This article explores how AddressSanitizer (ASan) works in detecting memory errors in C/C++. ASan divides the virtual memory into Application, Shadow, and […]
Baba Is You is a unique and challenging puzzle game that breaks mental categories and encourages continuous, fluid thinking relevant to life and the mind. It erases boundaries between objects and rules, data and algorithms, and challenges players to think differently. This game raises questions about semiotics, laws of physics, and the nature of biological […]
Skywatchers are in for a celestial treat this year with the first “major lunar standstill” since 2006. During this unique event, the moon rises and sets at extreme positions on the horizon due to Earth and moon movements. This phenomenon is possible because the moon’s orbit is tilted relative to the ecliptic, allowing it to […]
H.264 is a widespread video compression codec standard used in various devices, such as internet videos, Blu-ray, phones, and more. Developed over 30 years, it aims to reduce bandwidth for full-motion video transmission. Through lossy compression, H.264 discards less important bits while keeping essential ones to save space efficiently. Additional techniques like chroma subsampling and […]