How ICE is becoming a secret police force
Secret police are a quintessential feature of authoritarian regimes. From Azerbaijan’s State Security Service to Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organisation, these agencies typically target political opponents and dissidents through covert surveillance, imprisonment and physical violence. In contrast to the regular police and armed forces, secret police primarily use preemptive repression to thwart threats to the government. […]
The CRDT Dictionary: A Field Guide to Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types
Back around 2014, I kept hearing about this cool database called Riak, a distributed database that could survive network partitions and keep accepting writes. Some really interesting companies were using it at massive scale, and I was curious about it. One of the big selling points was that it could handle concurrent writes without any […]
Show HN: I built Magiclip – an all-in-one AI studio
01.How does Magiclip’s AI work? Magiclip uses advanced AI algorithms to analyze your videos, automatically generate subtitles, create optimized clips, and even generate AI voices. Our technology understands the context of your content to produce professional results. 02.What video formats are supported? 03.How many videos can I process per month? It depends on your plan: […]
DMT-induced shifts in criticality correlate with self-dissolution
Abstract Psychedelics profoundly alter subjective experience and brain dynamics. Brain oscillations express signatures of near-critical dynamics, relevant for healthy function. Alterations in the proximity to criticality have been suggested to underlie the experiential and neurological effects of psychedelics. Here, we investigate the effects of a psychedelic substance (DMT) on the criticality of brain oscillations, and […]
Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out
OpenAI is now internally testing ‘ads’ inside ChatGPT that could redefine the web economy. Up until now, the ChatGPT experience has been completely free. While there are premium plans and models, you don’t see GPT sell you products or show ads. As spotted by Tibor on X, ChatGPT Android app 1.2025.329 beta includes new references to an […]
High air pollution could diminish exercise benefits by half – study
We all know exercise is good for us. It lowers the risk of heart disease, cancer, and early death, and keeps the body and mind in shape. But when the air you breathe is polluted, a new study suggests that exercise might not provide the same benefits it normally would. An international team, including researchers […]
Garfield’s Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem
Garfield in 1881 Garfield’s proof of the Pythagorean theorem is an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem discovered by James A. Garfield (November 19, 1831 – September 19, 1881), the 20th president of the United States. The proof appeared in print in the New-England Journal of Education (Vol. 3, No.14, April 1, 1876).[1][2] At the […]
The Great Downzoning
In 1890, most continental European cities allowed between five and ten storeys to be built anywhere. In the British Empire and the United States, the authorities generally imposed no height limits at all. Detailed fire safety rules had existed for centuries, but development control systems were otherwise highly permissive. Over the following half century, these […]
System 7 natively boots on the Mac mini G4
(And Mac OS 8!) Hey, guys! Surely y’all know and have enjoyed Mac OS 9.2.2 booting and beautifully-running on all four Mac mini G4 models for close to 8 years now. (Wow!) Well, that was one massive revolution… … But most of us did not think we would live to see the day New World […]
Every mathematician has only a few tricks (2020)
From a physicist point of view I want to mention this trick and its generalization for operators: “Two commuting matrices are simultaneously diagonalizable” (for physicists all matrices are diagonalizable). Of course the idea is that if you know the eigenvectors of one matrix/operator then diagonalizing the other one is much easier. Here are some applications. […]