TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
The author shares their story of trying to recover priceless data from a tape containing the final source code for Frogger 2: Swampy’s Revenge. They explain that the tape was written using OnStream technology, which had a dedicated data processing chip and custom hardware, making it difficult to read the data without a compatible tape […]
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The Thunderbird team has revealed a new logo, designed by Jon Hicks who created the original Firefox and Thunderbird logos. The redesign comes after years of being viewed as stagnant, as Thunderbird sees a resurgence in popularity. The software is evolving into something more modern, while retaining its powerful customization capabilities. The new logo represents […]
QLoRA is a new finetuning approach that allows a 65B parameter model to be finetuned on a single 48GB GPU while maintaining full 16-bit finetuning task performance. Using QLoRA, researchers were able to finetune more than 1,000 models, providing state-of-the-art results on various chatbot performance evaluations. The QLoRA approach introduces several innovations to save memory, […]
SectorC is a C compiler written in x86-16 assembly that can fit within the 512-byte boot sector of an x86 machine. Despite the size limitations, a large subset of C is supported, including global variables, functions, if and while statements, operators, pointer dereference, inline machine-code, and comments. A tokenizer/lexer was developed that also converts numbers […]
The Python Software Foundation (PSF) received three subpoenas for PyPI user data in March and April 2023, all of which were issued by the United States Department of Justice. Although no context was provided, the subpoenas requested user data related to five PyPI usernames, including names, addresses, connection records, length of service, and type of […]
The “success to the successful” system dynamics archetype is a prevalent pattern driving behavior in many situations and describes the late stages of twenty-first-century capitalism. In this system, as one entity succeeds, it receives more resources from a finite pool of resources, causing another entity to receive fewer resources. This system plays out in many […]
A team of theoretical physicists has discovered a unique structure in space-time that closely resembles a black hole, but it’s actually a defect in the universe’s fabric. These defects are actually stable solitons, existing without matter or other forces, and are comparable to the cracks found in ice. The team examined these solitons by inspecting […]
The author finds business self-help books boring, but acknowledges that they contain valuable ideas. As such, they have developed a five-step process that uses AI and human-written summaries to efficiently understand the main points of a book. The process involves enlisting the help of a GPT, seeking out human-written summaries, reading the table of contents, […]
Spain has called for an EU ban on end-to-end encrypted services from providers based within the bloc. The information was revealed in a leaked European Council survey about member countries’ views on encryption regulation. The survey shows a majority of the 20 member countries that responded favour some form of scanning of encrypted messages. Some, such as Denmark and […]
The modern workspace is full of distractions, with chat programs, email inboxes, and project management apps constantly throwing notifications our way. Inefficiencies caused by interruptions and multitasking can lead to stress, anxiety, and decreased productivity. To combat this, individuals need to regain control of their attention by implementing cultural and technological solutions to reduce notifications, […]