TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
After importing various Chinese electric vehicles, including mini-trucks, boats, and tractors, the author now focuses on electric mini-excavators. These machines are ideal for tasks like trenching, loading, and demolition, providing a safer and quieter alternative to diesel-powered equipment. Most electric mini-excavators available in the US are expensive, but the NESHER NX2500 model offers similar performance […]
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Europe’s top AI companies and research institutions are teaming up for the groundbreaking OpenEuroLLM project. Led by experts Jan Hajič and Peter Sarlin, the project aims to create high-quality, open-source language models to boost European AI capabilities. Through collaboration with key players like LAION and open-sci communities, the project ensures transparency, inclusivity, and adaptability to […]
The author expresses their love for building side projects and explores different hosting options, starting with WordPress and eventually moving to AWS. They mention the complexity and cost associated with hosting on AWS, including the risk of surprise bills. The author highlights their discovery of NearlyFreeSpeech (NFS), praising its prepaid model that offers complete control […]
The Video Game History Foundation has launched early access to its digital archive of video game history research materials. Their library includes never-before-seen game development materials, out-of-print video game magazines, and unique behind-the-scenes content. They highlight retired game producer Mark Flitman’s papers and footage from the production of the Myst series by Cyan. The library […]
El Salvador’s experiment with Bitcoin as legal tender has proven to be a complete failure, with most Salvadorans never using the cryptocurrency. President Nayib Bukele’s economic bet backfired, leading to a reform that removes the obligation to accept Bitcoin in transactions or debt payments. Despite confusion surrounding the reform, the government insists on continuing to […]
The complexity of block I/O caching is detailed in this article, delving into the importance of understanding I/O profiles. The use of Solid State Drives (SSDs) as caches for slower HDDs is highlighted, aiming to bridge the performance gap. Various caching methods like writeback, write-through, and write-around are discussed, with solutions like dm-writecache, bcache, and […]
The author discusses the motivation for optimizing the time crate, noting the task’s position at the bottom of the priority list due to lack of complaints. Despite this, they decide to work on a performance audit. They choose to implement a new date-time algorithm from scratch based on principles of correctness, performance, and integer-only operations. […]
During the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, Philip Ball explores a 1924 paper by Niels Bohr along with Hendrik Kramers and John Slater that proposed abandoning the first law of thermodynamics. While their theory was proven wrong, it showed the radical ideas in quantum physics at the time. This history reveals Bohr’s contributions […]
The author delves into the concept of thread contention in Ruby, clarifying that threads orderly queue up to be handed the GVL and patiently wait their turn. This organized process allows for efficient distribution of the GVL among threads. The content highlights the potential issue of “Tail Latency” in multithreaded behavior, where greedy CPU-bound threads […]
Summary: The TetrisAI program was developed to play Tetris 99 on the Nintendo Switch. It utilized computer vision to analyze the game state, a depth-first search algorithm to determine optimal block placement, and a microcontroller to send button presses to the Switch. The algorithm achieved top 15 rankings consistently and even first place occasionally. The […]