Bypassing regulatory locks, hacking AirPods and Faraday cages
How we bypassed Apple’s regulatory restrictions, built a Faraday cages and enabled georestricted features on the Airpods Pro 2 for our grandparents. Last week, right after Apple dropped the iOS 18.1 update, my dad and I set out to go buy a pair of AirPods Pro 2 for my grandma who is hard of hearing. […]
Visualizing 13M Bluesky Users
Anyone who uses Twitter a lot knows that it’s a big place. Not just that it has a lot of active users, but more that there are lots of different parts. Over time, everybody develops their own mental map of the landscape, infering how vast and foreign the whole network is from hints and clues, […]
Large Language Models in National Security Applications
Abstract:The overwhelming success of GPT-4 in early 2023 highlighted the transformative potential of large language models (LLMs) across various sectors, including national security. This article explores the implications of LLM integration within national security contexts, analyzing their potential to revolutionize information processing, decision-making, and operational efficiency. Whereas LLMs offer substantial benefits, such as automating tasks […]
Instant (YC S22) Is Hiring a Founding Engineer to Help Build a Modern Firebase
We’re looking for a hacker to join our team of 3 on-site in San Francisco. You would be one of the founding engineers; why join us, when you can start a company yourself or work at an OpenAI? Here’s our case: Instant is (a) a really hard problem (b) that users want (c) worked on […]
US Senate to Revive Software Patents with PERA Bill Vote on Thursday
zoobab writes: The US Senate to set to revive Software Patents with the PERA Bill, with a vote on Thursday, November 14, 2024. A crucial Senate Committee is on the cusp of voting on two bills that would resurrect some of the most egregious software patents and embolden patent trolls. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act […]
The Wired Guide to Protecting Yourself from Government Surveillance
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. He’s vowed to jail his political foes and journalists. A Republican-controlled government could further restrict abortion and transgender rights. Influential conservatives have called for a crackdown on left-leaning activist groups, a replay of Trump’s hardline attitude against protesters in his first administration. To carry […]
A stubborn computer scientist accidentally launched the deep learning boom
So in 2006, Nvidia announced the CUDA platform. CUDA allows programmers to write “kernels,” short programs designed to run on a single execution unit. Kernels allow a big computing task to be split up into bite-sized chunks that can be processed in parallel. This allows certain kinds of calculations to be completed far faster than […]
Is the 80 character line limit still relevant? (2008)
Traditionally, it’s always been standard practice for programmers to wrap long lines of code so they don’t span more than 80 characters across the screen. This is because, back in the bad old days, most computer terminals could only display 25 rows of 80 columns of text on screen at once. Any lines that were […]
Emit-C: A time travelling programming language
A time travelling programming language emiT is a language all about parallel timelines. At any given point you can send a variable back in time, and make it change things about the past, starting a new timeline where the result is different. You can kill variables, which destroys them permanantly- at least until you send […]
I’m a neurology ICU nurse. The creep of AI in our hospitals terrifies me
The healthcare landscape is changing fast thanks to the introduction of artificial intelligence. These technologies have shifted decision-making power away from nurses and on to the robots. Michael Kennedy, who works as a neuro-intensive care nurse in San Diego, believes AI could destroy nurses’ intuition, skills, and training. The result being that patients are left […]