Tech roundup 175: a journal published by a bot

Gooooooood morning, World!!! Hey, this is not a test, this is a tech roundup. Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ.

AI, bots and robots

• Over-engineering an emoji webcam filter with a neural network
• Dynamic LCP priority: Learning from past visits
• AI Voice Generator: Text to Speech Software
  AI Voice Generator in 20 languages. 120+ realistic text to speech voices to create the perfect AI voiceover. Go instantly from text to voice with ease.
• Automating Heating with Home Assistant
• Remaking old computer graphics with AI image generation
  Can AI Image generation tools make re-imagined, higher-resolution versions of old video game graphics?

  Over the last few days, I used AI image generation to reproduce one of my childhood nightmares. I wrestled with Stable Diffusion, Dall-E and Midjourney to see how these commercial AI generation tools can help retell an old visual story – the intro cinematic to an old video game (Nemesis 2 on the MSX). This post describes the process and my experience in using these models/services to retell a story in higher fidelity graphics.

  Meet Dr. Venom

  This fine-looking gentleman is the villain in a video game. Dr. Venom appears in the intr

• Infinite AI Array
• Bach to the Future – Humanising Music with Neural Nets
• GPT-4 could pass Bar Exam, AI researchers say
  Researchers tested GPT-3.5 with questions from the US Bar Exam. They predict that GPT-4 and comparable models might be able to pass the exam very soon.
• Detangle: tl;dr your legal docs with AI
• Google researcher, long out of math, cracks devilish problem about sets
  On nights and weekends, Justin Gilmer attacked an old question in pure math using the tools of information theory.
• Announcement: AI generated answers are officially banned here
• The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
  Proving you’re a human on a web flooded with generative AI content
• On-demand learning comes at the cost of conceptual understanding
• Adobe Lightroom uses photos for AI training by default
• The physics principle of diffusion inspired modern AI art
• Neural Codec Language Models Are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers
• FTC proposes to ban noncompete clauses. Move will help workers, entrepreneurs
• Devirtualizing nike.com’s bot protection

Blockchain and decentralization

• Top Bitcoin dev gets owned
• “My PGP key is compromised, and at least many of my bitcoins stolen”
• HypChain, the first completely hypothetical blockchain
• Spookz – decentralized streaming platform for gamers
• I Migrated from a Postgres Cluster to Distributed SQLite with LiteFS
  Why and how I migrated from distributed postgres to distributed sqlite on kentcdodds.com

Cloud and architecture

• Epstein’s sex trafficking was aided by JPMorgan, US Virgin Islands lawsuit says
  The U.S.V.I. says JPMorgan Chase didn’t report Jeffrey Epstein’s suspicious financial activities and provided him banking services after his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor.
• Ripes: Visual computer architecture simulator, assembly code editor for RISC-V
  A graphical processor simulator and assembly editor for the RISC-V ISA – GitHub – mortbopet/Ripes: A graphical processor simulator and assembly editor for the RISC-V ISA
• Tesla broke labor laws by telling workers not to discuss pay, NLRB claims
• Migrating from AWS to Fly.io
• Google wants RISC-V to be a “tier-1” Android architecture
• Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years
  In January 2010 I soft-launched launched Preceden, a web-based timeline maker tool, followed a few weeks later by a larger launch on HackerNews: Today – almost 13 years to the day since the i…
• ClickHouse-local – a small tool for serverless data analytics
  Learn how you can use clickhouse-local to analyze and transform your local and remote files using just the power of SQL on your laptop
• Valetudo – Free your vacuum cleaner from the cloud

Development and languages

• Digital Logic Sim
• Competitive programming in Haskell: better binary search
  Binary search is a workhorse of competitive programming. There are occasional easy problems where binary search is the solution in and of itself; more often, it’s used as a primitive building block…
• Querying the GitHub archive with the ClickHouse playground
• Liberation Circuit – FOSS RTS/programming game
• Functional Programming – How and Why
  Let’s start with an example. In Advent of Code 2022 day 1 we get groups of numbers as input like:
  1000
  2000
  3000

  4000

  5000
  6000

  7000
  8000
  9000

  10000

  We …

• How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 11?
  Hello and happy new year! It’s 2023, and Windows 11 is finally a mature operating system that most people would be happy to use. Sun Valley has finally arrived, and it’s all about a lon…
• Spall – WASM-based profiler for JavaScript and C in ~5k lines of Odin
• Multi-camera real-time object detection with WebRTC and YOLO
• Pyright: Static Type Checker for Python
• Python 2 removed from Debian
• Bflat – a single ahead-of-time crosscompiler and runtime for C#
• Bflat – a single ahead-of-time crosscompiler and runtime for C#
• 26 programming languages in 25 days, Part 2: Reflections on language design
• Bertrand Meyer et al.: The concept of class invariant in OO programming
  Class invariants — consistency constraints preserved by every operation on
  objects of a given type — are fundamental to building, understanding and
  verifying object-oriented programs. For verification, however, they raise
  difficulties, which have not yet received a generally accepted solution. The
  present work introduces a proof rule meant to address these issues and allow
  verification tools to benefit from invariants. It clarifies the notion of
  invariant and identifies the three associated problems: callbacks, furtive
  access and reference leak. As an example, the 2016 Ethereum DAO bug, in which
  $50 million were stolen, resulted from a call
• Writing a Python SQL engine from scratch
  Python SQL Parser and Transpiler. Contribute to tobymao/sqlglot development by creating an account on GitHub.
• Microsoft.Recognizers.Text for JavaScript
• Underappreciated challenges with Python packaging
• What is railway oriented programming
• Rijndael S-box in 512 bytes of Python
• Why is the JavaScript ecosystem like this?
• How to Optimize a CUDA Matmul Kernel for CuBLAS-Like Performance: A Worklog
  In this post, I’ll iteratively optimize an implementation of matrix multiplication written in CUDA.My goal is not to build a cuBLAS replacement, but to deepl…
• Apple introduces Digital narration for books
• Slack’s private GitHub code repositories stolen over holidays
• AUTOMATIC1111’s GitHub Account Suspended For «TOS Violations»
  AUTOMATIC1111 has 31 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.
• Automatic1111 is back on GitHub after removing Embedding Links
  Stable Diffusion web UI. Contribute to AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui development by creating an account on GitHub.
• GPTDuck – Ask questions about any GitHub repo
• Vim online editor using WebAssembly, storing files using IndexedDB
• Google’s quest to digitize troops’ tissue samples
• The different sorts of ‘iconification’ of windows in X
• BugChecker – a SoftICE-like kernel and user debugger for Windows
• Classifying Python virtual environment workflows
  I have been spending some time as of late thinking, and asking the community via the fediverse, about how people deal with virtual environments in Python. I have ended up with various ways of classifying people’s virtual environment management and I wanted to write it all down to both not
• Rsync.net Warrant Canary

Quote of the week

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

        — R. Buckminster Fuller

Enterprises

• Cell intelligence in physiological and morphological spaces
• Twitter Sued for Nonpayment of Rent on San Francisco Office
• Google to pay Indiana $20M to resolve privacy suit
• Interview with Benjamin de Cock, early designer at Stripe
• I built Haystack – your own google for scattered workplace knowledge
• Record Google Meets for Free, No Signups, Download Locally
• Microsoft.Recognizers.Text: numbers, units, and date/time in multiple languages
• Microsoft is preparing to add ChatGPT to Bing
• Microsoft workers to form company’s first union in the U.S.
• Intelligence – A good collection of great OSINT Resources
  A collaboratively curated list of awesome Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) Resources – GitHub – ARPSyndicate/awesome-intelligence: A collaboratively curated list of awesome Open-Source Intelligence…
• Why Google and Apple act the way they do, working to snuff out the mobile web
  This post from @chriscoyier (via @tomayac) frames an urgent problem I’ve spent many years working to solve, often with push-back from the frontend community who would variously claim that «Apple isn’t anti-web» and «Google should want the web to win»:
  

  What does it look like for the web to lose?

  While Chris is crisp about the problem and the consequences of not solving it, he doesn’t have answers for why Google and Apple act the way they do, working to snuff out the mobile web.

  Allow me…

• Amazon to Lay Off over 17,000 Workers, More Than First Planned
  The cuts focused on the company’s corporate staff exceed an earlier projection and represent about 5% of the company’s corporate workforce.
• AMD’s Zen 4, Part 3: System Level Stuff, and iGPU
  We covered Zen 4’s core architecture in depth in two articles. This one will focus on anything we didn’t manage to get to. Some of these details may be specific to the particular CPU sa…
• Amazon has raised the number of jobs it plans to cut 18,000
• AMD Announces 7950X3D, 7900X3D Upto 128MB L3 Cache
• Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm
• Transcoding Unicode with AVX-512: AMD Zen 4 vs. Intel Ice Lake
  Most systems today rely on Unicode strings. However, we have two popular Unicode formats: UTF-8 and UTF-16. We often need to convert from one format to the other. For example, you might have a database formatted with UTF-16, but you need to produce JSON documents using UTF-8. This conversion is ofte
• Google obtains thousands of medical records from the Dept of Defense
  by James Bandler (ProPublica) In early February 2016, the security gate at a U.S. military base near Washington, D.C., swung open to admit a Navy doctor accompanying a pair of…
• Tesla finally breaks and offers round steering wheel on Model S/X

Other news

• Improving color quantization heuristics
• U.S. universities, rich in data, struggle to capture its value, study finds
  A UCLA–MIT Press paper highlights a lack of data infrastructure and data strategy in U.S. higher education.
• Xfinity Stream on Linux: A Tale of Widevine, ChromeOS, and a patched Glibc
• 2023 HackerRank Developer Skills Report
• Rant: Year of Linux on the Desktop
• Lessons Learned from the Book “Effective Remote Work”
• The Calculus They Won’t Teach You
• What are companies doing with D-Wave’s quantum hardware?
• Bitcoin core developer claims to have lost 200 BTC in hack
• My Experience with Check Fraud – and What You Can Learn from It
• LearnCPP: Website devoted to teaching you how to program in C++
• Web hackers vs. the auto industry
• Solar Panels Reduced My Electric Bill by $2,677 in 2022
• Breaking RSA with a quantum computer?
• WordPress sites under attack from newly found Linux trojan
  Researchers who discovered the backdoor Linux malware say it may have been around for more than three years — and it targets 30+ plug-in bugs.
• A beloved in every port: Iskandar’s encounters with women
• Scott Aaronson weighs in on purported quantum factoring breakthrough
• U.S. moves to seize $460M Robinhood stake linked to Sam Bankman-Fried
• Finding people’s use of /usr/bin/Python with the Linux audit framework
• GitHub Is Sued, and We May Learn Something About Creative Commons Licensing
  GitHub and Microsoft are being sued for using open source software without creator attribution in alleged violation of open licensing requirements. What implications does this have for the scholarly literature and Creative Commons licenses?
• Learn to Process Text in Linux Using Grep, Sed, and Awk
• Things they didn’t teach you about software engineering

Autor: Javi López G.

Arquitecto/desarrollador, creativo, buscador de nuevas soluciones y modelos de negocio, crítico constructivo y ex muchas cosas Lee todas las entradas de Javi López G.