TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
To combat catastrophic climate change, excess carbon emissions must be addressed. Direct air capture technology, which extracts carbon dioxide from the air, offers a solution but faces challenges due to location-specific design requirements. A collaboration between Georgia Tech and Meta produced the innovative OpenDAC database, allowing for faster development of direct air capture technologies. This […]
Read more »
Last fall, I participated in a programming event, creating a 3D modeler called ShapeUp during the Wheel Reinvention Jam. The goal was to reimagine existing software, resulting in a faster subset of Typescript optimized to beat tsc. Using ray marched signed distance fields, I was able to create intricate models. ShapeUp, written in C, efficiently […]
In May 2024, Alex Garcia announced the development of sqlite-vec, a new SQLite extension for vector search that aims to replace sqlite-vss. This extension, written purely in C with no dependencies, will offer custom SQL functions and virtual tables for fast vector search, as well as tools for working with vectors. What’s exciting about sqlite-vec […]
Cardiorespiratory fitness is a crucial predictor of morbidity and mortality among adults, as evidenced by over 20.9 million observations from 199 cohort studies. High levels of cardiorespiratory fitness are associated with a significantly lower risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, and incident chronic conditions. Notably, a one-MET increase in CRF was linked to an 11%-17% […]
Words and Buttons Online offers interactive tutorials on math, algorithms, and programming. Image interpolation is explained as guessing pixels between pixels to create smooth images. Bilinear and bicubic interpolation methods are common but have their downsides. Inverse weight interpolation, a lesser-known technique, is introduced for image interpolation. The formula for 1D and 2D interpolation is […]
Backblaze monitored 283,851 hard drives and SSDs at the end of Q1 2024, with a focus on AFRs and average age of drive failure. Notably, AFR decreased to 1.41%. Three drive models had no failures in Q1 2024, including a 16TB Seagate. The 6TB Seagate drives, purchased in 2015, showed zero failures, defying their age. […]
In Indonesia, a Sumatran orangutan named Rakus healed a large wound on his cheek by self-medicating with a paste made from plants. This is the first time a wild animal has been recorded treating an injury using a medicinal plant. Scientists believe this behavior could come from a common ancestor shared by humans and great […]
This offset-allocator is a Rust port of Sebastian Aaltonen’s C++ OffsetAllocator package, designed for managing GPU resources efficiently, aiming to be used in Bevy. While it is not a Rust allocator conforming to the GlobalAlloc trait, it is optimized for managing allocations inside GPU buffers. The allocator is agnostic to what it allocates and uses […]
Terry O’Connor delves into the fascinating transformation of deceased bodies into blue-hued remains due to the formation of the mineral vivianite. This process occurs in specific conditions, where iron from the environment reacts with phosphate from decaying bodies, resulting in stunning blue crystals scattered over bones, teeth, skin, and even adipocere. Vivianite can complicate forensic […]
Qualcomm’s Adreno 6xx architecture, specifically the Adreno 640 GPU in the Snapdragon 855, showcases the company’s innovative approach to maximizing compute throughput while working within power and area constraints. The Adreno 640 features wide shader processors, efficient cache and memory access, and impressive tiled rendering capabilities. With Qualcomm’s focus on execution units and resource sharing, […]