TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
We are in the process of building a public cloud on our own hardware, with a key focus on GPU-enabled services for our customers. Despite the importance of AI/ML, our Fly GPU Machines product hasn’t gained the traction we hoped for. Security concerns and technical challenges with Nvidia drivers have been major hurdles. Developers seem […]
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In 1998, a man in Denver took a risky leap by investing in 120,000 plastic cups from Japan, rendered useless for drinking due to holes drilled in the base. These cups turned into a booming business as they were transformed into a phenomenon known as sport stacking, where kids stack cups into patterns for fun. […]
In his engaging and detailed content, Marcin Wichary explores the overlooked but ubiquitous font, Gorton. While researching for his book on typing history, he stumbled upon this quirky font that adorned various keyboards and signage. Despite its unconventional and eccentric design with mismatched letter forms and odd proportions, Gorton found its way onto diverse surfaces […]
The author reflects on the passing of their second daughter, who died at the age of six. They grapple with the pain of imagining what she would be like at sixteen and the weight of all the years she will never have. They visit her grave and find solace in remembering her at their temple […]
The ARK Development team and Acid_Snake have released a major update for the Sony PSP custom Firmware, allowing the portable console to connect to WPA2 encrypted Wifi networks. This was made possible by the wpa2psp plugin developed by Moment and shared on the PSP Homebrew discord. Despite the lack of support from Sony, enthusiasts continue […]
The author delves into the complex world of causality studies, exploring whether X causes Y through a multitude of academic studies. They highlight that while there are tons of studies on this topic, most are simple observational studies with significant limitations, including confounding factors. However, the author discovers several intriguing and rigorous studies that attempt […]
Summary: In February 2025, many are focusing on new data initiatives and planning infrastructure changes. Clickhouse Cloud adoption is increasing, but understanding MergeTree for bulk inserts is crucial to avoid performance issues. Tips for effective bulk inserts include batching data in larger chunks, pacing inserts, and using tools like Jitsu Bulker and Clickhouse Bulk. PeerDB, […]
The author discusses how network packet captures and BPF were used to identify a Linux kernel performance issue causing elevated listen overflow errors on Apache web servers after the fleet upgrade to Ubuntu. Initially suspected to be a network problem, it was revealed to be due to elevated system CPU, specifically inode cgroup switching, in […]
This paper introduces an open-source benchmark for evaluating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tasks in dynamic video environments, with a curated dataset of 1,477 manually annotated frames from various domains. Leading VLMs like Claude-3, Gemini-1.5, and GPT-4o are compared against traditional OCR systems. Results show VLMs have potential to outperform OCR models […]
AI agents like OpenAI’s Operator, Anthropic’s Computer Use API, and BrowserBase’s Open Operator, are now capable of mimicking real users and taking actions on a large scale on the web. However, the challenge lies in distinguishing between helpful agent use and potential abuse. While some apps may benefit from agent use to enhance usability, others […]