Andi McClure complaining about #Microsoft shoving #Copilot down her throat. Other people hate it too. #AI #politics
The first recording released of “You Were Always on My Mind” was by Gwen McCrae, who died in February. #history #music
5' #news #video of autonomous #drones #weaponry contract won by a company in Texas #USA named Mach Industries, founded by 21-year-old MIT dropout Ethan Thornton, and its high-altitude-dropped fixed-wing project Glide and parking-lot-launched Viper, and balloon-launched Stratus, visualizing warfare with tens of millions of balloons #politics
#video #toread by #Murray-Smith about #3D-printing some sort of electric generator #mechanisms?
16' #video by #Diffraction-Limited on an open-source laser interferometer with 100nm #precison over 200mm. He ended up using a US$20 110mW 520nm OSRAM PLT5 520B laser diode with a coherence length over 4 meters, stabilizing its wavelength with feedback altering the drive current. He uses a corner-cube reflector to produce a return beam path offset to avoid backreflection into the diode in his Michelson-interferometer design, and an additional measurement arm (using a glass plate as a double beamsplitter) to provide wavelength/frequency feedback. Voiceover is probably AI text-to-speech. #mechanisms
6' #video about an analog #electronics circuit for adding a dc bias to an (amplified) ac voltage using an opamp for a “validation engineer” test. The circuit was actually designed to power an op-amp with controlled ripple on its power supply to test its PSRR. He keeps using Laplace transforms without comment, I guess I need to level up!
6' #video on #Ibanis-Sorenzo’s wirenut #mechanisms made by #3D-printing: a split screw with a flexure at one end clamps down on the wire when compressed with a conical nut. He calls it a “lever screw” but there’s no levering going on.
16' #video #toread by #CodysLab on #mining magnetite #materials (on the beach with a shovel?)
25' #video #toread on how to use the NanoVNA vector network analyzer #electronics
28' #video #toread by #faircompanies about a dome home in Spain with geothermal something
21' #video about #machining difficult parts, or failing to do so. Specifically, free hobbing worm wheels with a homemade hob was really difficult because the hob kept cutting the wrong number of teeth.
61' #video #toread of Rich Hickey’s 02011 Strange Loop talk, “Simple Made Easy”
3' #video of #Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker about #AI risks: agentic AI will need to have basically root on your phone in order to do the things it’s marketed for.
entry point to James Hague’s “Purely Functional Retrogames” series about writing #videogames with #functional-programming (using Erlang syntax)
#video of a talk by Kulukundis at cppcon 2017. Kip says, “Presentation about the latest tricks in hash tables. Uses SSE instructions and man is it fast. Good benchmarks against the standard C routines.” Heh: “As with anything like this, benchmarks are the only source of truth you will ever get, and they are lies.” Called "Swiss tables" (because Alkis and Roman, its primary developers, “are in the Zurich office”, and it’s “closed hashing”), supposedly the fastest hash table in the world. “What did we gain? (...) the vague feeling of superiority when we force a difficult decision onto the user. And that is the #C++ way.” You put metadata about which array elements are full or deleted into a separate byte array, along with truncated-to-7-bits hash values, to avoid needing magic sentinel values for your key type. By using SSE matching to look for truncated-hash matches in a 16-bucket group, you can find the candidates in three instructions, which also means that your erase function can avoid inserting tombstones “if any other element in the group was empty”, which seems like a pretty big win actually. Also he mentions “other sizes [than power of 2] with fast modulus”. #algorithms #performance #hashing
“Security Check” (3990 words, short story) in Clarkesworld, Issue 107 – August 2015, by Han Song, translated by Ken Liu. #fiction
photo of the oldest recorded transaction from 5000 years ago #archaeology #humor