Goodbye, Microsoft: Schleswig-Holstein Relies on Open Source and Saves Millions
(Bild: Imilian/Shutterstock.com) Schleswig-Holstein saves 15 million euros in license costs by migrating from Microsoft to free software. The conversion is significantly cheaper. The state administration of Schleswig-Holstein is making a remarkable U-turn in its IT strategy and consistently relying on open source [1]. After the migration from proprietary Microsoft software to free solutions was initially accompanied […]
Google Titans architecture, helping AI have long-term memory
The Transformer architecture revolutionized sequence modeling with its introduction of attention, a mechanism by which models look back at earlier inputs to prioritize relevant input data. However, computational cost increases drastically with sequence length, which limits the ability to scale Transformer-based models to extremely long contexts, such as those required for full-document understanding or genomic […]
Java Hello World, LLVM Edition
After exploring Java bytecode in previous years (2022, 2023, 2024), this year we’ll take an unexpected detour for a Java advent: instead of generating Java bytecode, we’ll use Java to build and execute LLVM IR, the intermediate language behind compilers like clang. Using Java’s Foreign Function & Memory (FFM) API, we’ll call the LLVM C […]
Discovering the indieweb with calm tech
Blog Home When social media first entered my life, it came with a promise of connection. Facebook connected college-aged adults in a way that was previously impossible, helping to shape our digital generation. Social media was our super-power and we wielded it to great effect. Yet social media today is a noisy, needy, mental health […]
Z2 – Lithographically fabricated IC in a garage fab
Homemade 1000+ transistor array chip In 2018 I made the first lithographically fabricated integrated circuits in my garage fab. I was a senior in high school when I made the Z1 amplifier, and now I’m a senior in college so there are some long overdue improvements to the amateur silicon process.The Z1 had 6 transistors and was a great […]
Eurydice: a Rust to C compiler (yes)
Perhaps the greatest surprise of the last two years was, for me, the realization that people not only care about compiling C to Rust (for obvious reasons, such as, ahem, memory safety) – they also care about compiling Rust to C! Wait, what? I wrote about this briefly a couple years ago, but the level […]
Using LLMs at Oxide
While LLMs are adept at reading and can be terrific at editing, their writing is much more mixed. At best, writing from LLMs is hackneyed and cliché-ridden; at worst, it brims with tells that reveal that the prose is in fact automatically generated. What’s so bad about this? First, to those who can recognize an […]
Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image
Trains were halted after a suspected AI-generated picture that seemed to show major damage to a bridge appeared on social media following an earthquake. The tremor, which struck on Wednesday night, was felt across Lancashire and the southern Lake District. Network Rail said it was made aware of the image which appeared to show major […]
Show HN: FuseCells – a handcrafted logic puzzle game with 2,500 levels
FuseCells blends Sudoku deduction, Minesweeper logic, and Nonogram-style reasoning into a clean cosmic puzzle experience. Every puzzle is handcrafted and fully logical. FuseCells is a clean, no ads, satisfying logic puzzle that blends the deduction of Sudoku, the neighbor logic of Minesweeper, and the pattern reasoning of Nonogram into one fresh cosmic experience. Every puzzle […]