TL;DR summary of stories on the internet
The author discusses the issue of state agencies using technology to spy on citizens and the need for users to take practical steps to protect their privacy. They highlight the mobile phone as the most vulnerable and important area of concern due to the lack of control and reliance on the hardware, OS, apps, and […]
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Nihon-ichi no Dagashi Uriba is Japan’s largest dagashi store, located in Okayama. Dagashi are cheap, small Japanese confectionery and snacks you would find in corner stores. Despite connotations of cheapness, dagashi are a core part of Japanese culture and have a wide array of both sweet and savory items. However, these sweets face a difficult […]
NASA and MIT have developed the fastest space-to-ground laser communication link ever. Data rates of 200 gigabits per second enable a satellite to transmit more than 2 terabytes of data in a single five-minute pass over a ground station. Ground-based receiver in California achieved downlink rates of up to 100 gigabits per second last June, […]
Trusting open-source software (OSS) contributors can yield unexpected benefits. When Simon Willison, founder of Django, abandoned his Django library for storing financial data, he read a blog post about OSS contributor trust that resonated with him. So, when a large pull request from someone he’d never met came in for his forgotten project, he gave […]
Tone is a cross-platform metadata editor that allows you to modify metadata for various formats, including mp3, m4b, and flac. It has no dependencies and can be downloaded as a single binary for various platforms, written in pure C#. You can use it to dump metadata, modify tags, and tag audio files with different kinds […]
The author introduces TiddlyWiki and discusses the overload of information caused by new Wiki technology. They go on to talk about the issues with floating-point numerical precision and suggest fixed-point numbers as a reliable alternative. The author also provides implementation tips and a summary of the main points. The tone is conversational and humorous, with […]
The emerging in-space economy and in-space manufacturing fields offer potential for a new and potentially bigger industry than existing space sectors, including telecommunications, launch, and research. In-space manufacturing could serve as an enabler and first customer for asteroid mining, commercial space station, and utility companies in space. The Factories in Space database is the largest […]
An analysis of Ordinal Inscriptions in Bitcoin block 779832 shows that 80% of all inscriptions created in early-mid May 2023 belong to a single person or entity that controls a single public key. Between the introduction of BRC-20 and May 25, 2023, this entity accounted for 64% of all inscriptions and their transaction fees amount […]
Tenzing Norkay, the world-renowned mountaineer who conquered Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary, is now at the height of his fame. However, his newfound success brings challenges such as dealing with contracts, publicity and politics, as well as criticism and controversy from his own community. Despite this, Tenzing remains dedicated to the Sherpa community and exhibits […]
Superoptimization is the concept of finding the absolute optimal code that has the same output as a given code snippet. It involves generating every possible permutation of code instructions and testing each program for equivalence to the original program. The computational complexity of this process is terrible, but it was possible on computers back in […]