TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
This blog post discusses the PixieFAIL vulnerabilities that affect EDK II, an open source reference implementation of the UEFI specification. These vulnerabilities can be exploited during the network boot process, which is a common feature in enterprise computers and servers. The vulnerabilities in the network stack of EDK II can lead to denial of service, […]
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Engineer’s Codex has provided a detailed overview of Meta’s XFaaS serverless platform, which processes trillions of function calls per day across multiple datacenter regions. The article highlights that XFaaS focuses on optimizing hardware utilization and throughput of function calls, achieving a daily average CPU utilization of 66%, better than the industry average. The paper emphasizes […]
User feedback on Flowblade, a video editing software, has been overwhelmingly positive. One user commended the ease of editing and organization, praising how the clips snap together when deleting or rearranging. Another user, part of a group of German students working on a movie project, stated that Flowblade was their preferred solution after trying various […]
Niklaus Wirth, a pioneer of computer science, passed away in January 2024. He was known for his practical impact on the field while adhering to scientific and engineering principles. Wirth, an engineer himself, developed programming languages, compilers, and systems software, often having to create the necessary science himself. The author of the content had the […]
Happy New Year! In this web content, the author discusses various updates and fixes for the Ryujinx emulator. They highlight the compatibility and performance improvements, as well as some quirky issues encountered with specific games. The author also delves into a technical explanation of sleep functionality in computer systems and how it affects CPU usage […]
In this post, the author discusses the design choices and future work directions for question answering systems that utilize LLMs (Language Model Models) over unstructured data in enterprises, referred to as RAG-U systems. The author explores the options for additional data in prompts, such as chunks of text, full documents, or extracted triples from documents, […]
Willow is a protocol for peer-to-peer data stores that offers several unique features. It allows for fine-grained permissions and prioritizes privacy, ensuring that other users cannot access your data unless they already have knowledge of it and are able to decrypt it. One interesting aspect is the total erasure of data, using prefix pruning to […]
In this article, the author explores how Apple built iCloud and discusses the use of FoundationDB and Cassandra in their cloud backend service, CloudKit. The author highlights that Apple stores billions of databases in their extreme multi-tenant architecture. The article also draws comparisons between Apple’s architecture and Meta’s serverless platform, noting similarities in their use […]
In this post, the author discusses a cross-language issue between C, C++, and Rust related to empty slices of memory. They highlight the rules and limitations of each language when it comes to representing empty slices, such as the use of nullptr in C++ and the unique representation in Rust. The author argues that the […]
The author discusses the recent trend of news stories about magic mushrooms and their potential medical use in treating depression, PTSD, and other conditions. They highlight the long history of magic mushroom use in Latin America and the efforts of scientists to understand how they produce their effects in the human brain. The author then […]