Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers’ court win
Enlarge Tim Macpherson | Image Source As a result of book publishers successfully suing the Internet Archive (IA) last year, the free online library that strives to keep growing online access to books recently shrank by about 500,000 titles. IA reported in a blog post this month that publishers abruptly forcing these takedowns triggered a […]
Formal methods: Just good engineering practice?
Yes. The answer is yes. In your face, Betteridge. Earlier this week, I did the keynote at TLA+ conf 2024 (watch the video or check out the slides). My message in the keynote was something I have believed to be true for a long time: formal methods are an important part of good software engineering […]
Emerge Tools (YC W21) is hiring a senior front end engineer
A crucial component of Emerge is our web platform. Developers can do something as simple as view dashboards and insightsor as complicated as analyzing data visualizations with our X-Ray and Flamegraph features. In addition to our web platform, we also have pages like our landing, blog, and deep-dives which are frequently featured on the front […]
Aster shootdown over Sydney in 1955
FOR more than three hours on a fine, calm August morning in 1955, the eyes of Sydney’s suburbia were fixed skyward, anxiously watching the flight of a pilotless Auster aeroplane as it circled above and headed from Bankstown to the City, pursued by Service aircraft. It was school holiday time, the alert had gone out […]
Babylon’s Mystery Goddess
The Queen of the Night is today best known for her leading role in The Magic Flute, but for Babylonian historians the star of the show is an ancient goddess with the same name. Although almost 4,000 years old, she was only given her evocative title in 2003, soon after the British Museum paid £1.5 […]
CRIU, a project to implement checkpoint/restore functionality for Linux
Welcome to CRIU, a project to implement checkpoint/restore functionality for Linux. Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace, or CRIU (pronounced kree-oo, IPA: /krɪʊ/, Russian: криу), is a Linux software. It can freeze a running container (or an individual application) and checkpoint its state to disk. The data saved can be used to restore the application and run it […]
Testing Generative AI for Circuit Board Design
TLDR: We test LLMs to figure out how helpful they are for designing a circuit board. We focus on utility of frontier models (GPT4o, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5) across a set of design tasks, to find where they are and are not useful. They look pretty good for building skills, writing code, and getting […]
54 Humans in One 8-meter Gravitics Module
Marysville, WA – January 24th, 2024 – Gravitics, Inc., an aerospace manufacturing company, demonstrated that it can fit 54 people, with room to spare, inside its 8-meter “StarMax” module mockup. The exhibit, a 1:1 scale space station module cutaway, is a tangible example of Gravitics’ vision for large and efficient space environments. The 8-meter mockup […]
Fastly launches free developer accounts
Since its founding, Fastly has supported the individuals and companies that innovate and push boundaries. The people who bring amazing things into the world. Creators. Developers. You. The loudest and clearest feedback we heard from you is the need for freedom and autonomy to build on your own terms and at your own pace, without […]
How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number
Introduction The ancient Greeks wanted to believe that the universe could be described in its entirety using only whole numbers and the ratios between them — fractions, or what we now call rational numbers. But this aspiration was undermined when they considered a square with sides of length 1, only to find that the length […]