TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
Germany is making headlines by proposing a draft bill that would mandate email, messenger, and cloud providers to use strong end-to-end encryption, a move celebrated by privacy enthusiasts and cybersecurity experts. This comes in contrast to other countries planning to undermine encryption with client-side scanning. Germany’s strong data protection laws make it an ideal place […]
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Shortly after P. Takis Veliotis became general manager of the Davie Shipyard in Quebec, it was revealed that he was secretly building a pleasure yacht for his personal use, funded by the company’s projects. Veliotis went on to hold high positions at General Dynamics, overseeing the construction of sensitive and secret nuclear weapons. He later […]
Mazda recently reintroduced the Wankel rotary engine in their MX-30 e-Skyactiv R-EV model after a decade-long hiatus from the technology. The unique feature of the MX-30 R-EV is its use of the rotary engine to power a generator, which then supplies electricity to an electric motor, creating a series plug-in hybrid configuration. Mazda overcame technical […]
Author’s voice: Straightforward, informative, with a touch of skepticism towards temperature-controlled coffee mugs in the beginning but open-minded to their potential benefits. Summary: The author tests and reviews temperature control mugs, highlighting the Ember Travel Mug as the best overall choice due to its app control capabilities and superior ability to maintain coffee temperature for […]
One of the world’s leading environmental philanthropists, Hansjörg Wyss, is supporting the Foundation Conservation Carpathia in purchasing land in Romania to create “the European Yellowstone” – a massive protected area similar to North Cascades National Park. The Fagaras Mountains are home to diverse wildlife, including wolves, brown bears, and the reintroduced bison. The project aims […]
Recent works on extreme low-bit quantization have been gaining attention in the machine learning community, with the potential for matrix multiplication without actual multiplications to improve compute efficiency. The blog explores quantizing pre-trained models with extreme settings, including binary weights, using HQQ+. Surprisingly, fine-tuning just a fraction of the weights on top of an HQQ-quantized […]
Béla Bartók was an enigmatic figure, described as sullen, puritanical, and weak, yet transforming into a terrifying presence on stage. His obsession with tempo and unique music compositions left audiences horrified. Bartók’s peasant-hunting expeditions in Transylvania, although bizarre, led to a deep fascination with folk music that inspired his greatest works. His use of a […]
Andres Freund detected odd symptoms around liblzma in Debian sid installations, leading to the discovery that the upstream xz repository and tarballs were backdoored. The injected code modifies the build process and impacts openssh servers, causing slowdowns in logins. The exploit targets x86-64 Linux systems with glibc, and the backdoor involves obfuscated code, dynamic linker […]
Introducing OpenVoice, a cutting-edge voice cloning technology that can replicate a person’s voice with just a short audio clip and generate speech in various languages. This innovative approach allows for precise control over voice styles, including emotion, accent, rhythm, and intonation, while accurately preserving the tone color of the original speaker. Surprisingly, OpenVoice can even […]
Andres Freund discovered a backdoor in the upstream xz/liblzma package that compromised ssh servers after observing odd symptoms on Debian sid installations. The backdoor was found in the distributed tarballs, injecting an obfuscated script that modified certain files. The backdoor affected systems targeted x86-64 Linux and glibc-based systems. The impact was observed in slowed logins […]