TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
Google and Microsoft are building datacenters in Phoenix, Arizona, despite the city’s extreme heat and drought conditions. Analyst Alan Howard explains that several factors make the region appealing for datacenter construction. The availability of cheap land, tax incentives, and competitive power prices contribute to the economic viability of the projects. Phoenix’s power comes from a […]
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Deep within the Prague Castle complex lies a hidden gem that serves as a reminder of a tragic moment in history. The 1618 defenestration, where individuals were thrown out of a window to their supposed death, marked the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. This war, often simplified as a conflict between Protestants […]
Instagram’s new app, Threads, has gained significant attention in its first week, reaching over 150 million downloads. However, a completely unrelated app called Threads, which is a Slack alternative, has also experienced a surge in traffic to its website due to the confusion surrounding the similar names. The Slack alternative saw a spike in downloads, […]
Matrices and graphs are closely connected in linear algebra. Representing matrices as graphs simplifies the study of complex behavior. Each row of a matrix corresponds to a node, and elements represent directed and weighted edges. The powers of a matrix correspond to walks in the graph. The directed graph of a Markov chain’s transition probability […]
The Uxn/Varvara ecosystem is a unique personal computing stack centered around a small virtual machine that enables applications to run on various systems, designed with an implementation-first approach. It is open for anyone to use as a release target and is programmed in its own distinct language. Emulators are available for major operating systems to […]
Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal, a popular encrypted chat service, strongly criticized the proposed British online safety legislation and declared that the company would leave the U.K. market if the law is enacted. Whittaker argued that the government’s requirement for a back door to access encrypted messages is “mathematically impossible” and undermines user privacy […]
Snakemake is a powerful tool for defining and executing data analysis workflows. It uses a specification language on top of Python to describe each step in an analysis, making it easy to read and adapt. The tool automatically determines dependencies between rules and deploys all software dependencies using the Conda package manager and container virtualization. […]
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a startup that emerged from research at MIT, is using high-temperature superconducting tape to build its Sparc fusion reactor. This tape, made of yttrium barium copper oxide deposited on a steel substrate, allows for the creation of powerful electromagnets that shape and confine the plasma in the reactor. CFS believes this […]
Researchers have developed a surfactant spray that can effectively combat mosquitoes without the need for insecticides. The spray targets the mosquitoes’ natural water-resisting properties, immobilizing them and preventing them from spreading diseases such as dengue fever, malaria, and Zika virus. Traditional methods of mosquito control using insecticides have led to resistance and health issues in […]
In this web content, the author describes their project of remaking the game Another World (also known as Out of This World) on an FPGA hardware. They explain that the original game runs on a Virtual Machine (VM) that uses a blitter and rasterizer to produce the graphics. The author decided to create a hardware […]