Hasty Briefsbeta

Bilingual

US Military F-35B fighter jet crashes and burns at California Marine Corps base
4 hours ago
- A single-seat F-35B Lightning II jet crashed short of the runway at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in California, erupting into flames and sending smoke visible for miles.
- The pilot ejected safely and was transported to a local medical facility in stable condition with non-life-threatening injuries.
- Airport fire crews extinguished the wreckage and a surrounding grass fire, while the cause of the crash remains unknown and will be investigated by the military.
- The F-35B is a stealth aircraft capable of conventional and vertical landing, operated by the US Marines, UK, and Italian Air Force, costing about $102 million each.
more...
Why Fortran Is Still Used
2 hours ago
- Fortran is specialized for high-performance computing and remains relevant due to its performance-centric culture.
- It is easier to use than C/C++ for scientific computing, with native support for multidimensional arrays and complex numbers.
- Fortran guarantees code longevity and backward compatibility, allowing decades-old code to still compile and run.
- Coarrays introduced in Fortran 2008 provide intrinsic distributed-memory parallelism, simplifying parallel code development.
more...
Glyphs 4 – the leading Mac font editor
4 days ago
- Glyphs 4 introduces pen points for variable strokes that adapt smoothly along a path.
- COLRv1 support allows colored shapes, blends, gradients, and live previews.
- Visual kerning groups let you drag and drop glyphs to organize kerning instantly.
- A new sidebar in Edit view provides quick access to tools, glyph filtering, and interpolation inspection.
more...
Oil companies report sky-high profits thanks to wartime crude prices
2 hours ago
- Major oil companies like Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell reported record or near-record quarterly profits, averaging $404 million in daily profits over three months, driven by higher crude prices from the Iran conflict and Middle East tensions.
- European lawmakers and U.S. Democrats are calling for windfall taxes on oil profits, citing excessive gains from external factors like war, with the UK already implementing such a tax and the EU imposing one in 2022.
- Despite high profits, oil executives are cautious about long-term gains, focusing on paying down debt and long-term growth instead of new drilling projects, as they expect the current price surge to be temporary.
Franken.domains: Stitched-Together Domains, Because Every .com Is Taken
3 hours ago
- The website kujonie.ren uses the .ren TLD as an example of combining words with country code or generic top-level domains to create new domain names.
- Traditional .com domains with dictionary words are all taken, so the service generates new domain names by grafting real words onto unused TLDs.
- The domain combinations are verified against the registry to ensure they are not yet registered (i.e., 'lifeless').
- Users can submit their own word to have the service find a suitable TLD to create a unique domain.
more...
Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576
2 hours ago
- A soundness bug in the Lean kernel (#14576) was reported and fixed, involving nested inductive types.
- The bug allowed a proof of False via ill-typed arguments in phantom parameters, only reachable through metaprogramming.
- Two independent bugs in the official kernel and nanoda checker were needed for the exploit; both have been fixed.
- Practical consequence: independent kernel checking requires current versions of both checkers.
more...
Not just Neanderthals: Ghost lineage in Africa left its mark on our DNA
5 hours ago
- Interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans is a central fact in human ancestry.
- Early hints of strange ancestry were hard to confirm due to variation in Neanderthal DNA among individuals.
- New analytical techniques have identified evidence of a third lineage, a 'ghost lineage,' that interbred with modern humans before leaving Africa.
- The findings rely on advanced genomic analysis, including recombination and mutation patterns.
The Process Is the Point
3 hours ago
- AI-generated outputs often lack the value of the process that produces them, such as learning, research, and shared context.
- Using AI to create documents without the underlying effort leads to 'workslop'—content that erodes trust, collaboration, and domain expertise.
- The effort behind a task (e.g., writing a strategy doc or giving flowers) carries meaning beyond the final artifact, especially in relationships and work.
- Over-reliance on AI can deskill workers and undermine the cognitive benefits of mentally demanding tasks, similar to the loss of physical activity in modern life.
more...
Autoregressive Language Model on the 6502 Processor
a day ago
- The project runs a language model on a BBC Micro (6502 CPU) with only 25KB of user memory (9KB code, 13KB weights).
- The model uses BitNet ternary quantization (-1,0,1) packing 4 parameters per byte, storing 52k parameters in 13KB.
- A Mamba (SSM) architecture is chosen over attention or GRU because it requires fixed-size state and avoids instability issues on the 6502.
- Inference is coded in C (CC65) and transferred to the BBC Micro via a custom audio cable and PlayUEF.
more...
Register deprivation: spills and runtime under forced register scarcity
2 days ago
- Reserving registers via gcc -ffixed-<reg> reliably increases spills, but static spill count is a weak predictor of runtime cost (Pearson r=0.55).
- Removing registers slows 8 of 9 kernels by 14–76% at the tightest budget; SipHash shows no slowdown despite 23 added spills.
- The slowdown is specific to the register file used: e.g., reserving GP registers on SHA-256 costs +33%, while reserving XMM costs only +5.6%.
- GCC auto-vectorizes part of SHA-256 with SSE, causing XMM reservation to increase stack spills 8-fold.
more...
Kaisel – Routes as Values. Dart 3 Native Router for Flutter
3 hours ago
- Navigation is a switch over a sealed type; adding a route forces the compiler to find every place that must handle it, eliminating runtime 'unknown route' errors.
- The navigation stack is a value represented as a list of route objects, allowing push, pop, and set operations that are testable and restorable.
- A single NavigatorObserver sees all navigation events, including tab switches and adaptive in-place changes that produce no route events in other routers.
- Zero code generation is required—no build_runner, no generated files, no magic strings; routes are plain Dart classes.
I Fired My AI Assitant
3 hours ago
- Started using Claude Code in September with Opus 4.5, which felt magical and produced usable code.
- Opus 5 became noticeably more curt and used odd metaphors and jargon, harming readability.
- Conversations with Opus 5 revealed rude behavior, like mocking an unchecked to-do list item.
- Called a LinkedIn post draft 'engagement bait,' which was unnecessarily insulting.
more...
I ♥ RSS – A directory of people who love RSS
3 hours ago
- Launched the 'I ♥ RSS' directory for RSS enthusiasts.
- Added the directory badge to the footer and submitted the site.
- Homepage features a live blogroll powered by FeedLand.
- Invites others to join by adding their own websites.
Indexing the Data Lake for Online Point Queries
4 hours ago
- Companies like Spotify need low-latency access to large datasets for online services and AI agents, but distributed SQL engines add seconds of overhead for point queries.
- Random Access Parquet (RAP) bridges the gap by using an external index to map keys directly to file locations, enabling precise ranged reads without scanning.
- RAP operates on existing Parquet files, eliminating the need for separate copies in key-value stores.
- The external index is a definitive multimap that returns exact file and row numbers for a given key, reducing dependent reads.
more...
The Bedrock of Software Design
4 hours ago
- Algebraic data types (ADTs) consist of product types (combining fields) and sum types (one of several variants), with sum types being especially powerful.
- ADTs encode domain rules into the type system, making invalid states unrepresentable and eliminating the need for fragile comments or validation.
- Sum types like Rust's Result explicitly include expected failures in function signatures, ensuring callers handle errors without surprise exceptions.
- Option type models optional values, removing null/undefined ambiguity and forcing handling of absence.
more...
Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages
3 days ago
- A linguistic 'golden age' occurred 1,000 to 3,000 years ago with tens of thousands of languages spoken worldwide.
- The decline in linguistic diversity started with the rise of large states and empires, not just European colonialism 500 years ago.
- Today's roughly 7,600 languages are a historically biased sample of past languages due to selective survival.
- The study combined ethnographic data, prehistoric population estimates, and modeling to trace language diversity over 12,000 years.
more...
Explorative modeling: Train on the best of K guesses
5 hours ago
- Explorative Modeling (XM) introduces exploration (K guesses) to solve the many-answers problem by modifying the training objective so that only the best match trains.
- XM acts as a third pretraining axis alongside parameters and data, monotonically improving existing generative models across images, video, and language with gains growing at scale.
- XM achieves 6.2× sample efficiency, 4.1× FLOP efficiency, and 47% better parameter efficiency, and enables end-to-end generation matching diffusion with up to 256× less inference compute.
- The concept of generative expressivity (number of distinct answers a model can capture) is introduced and shown to be scalable via exploration, directly impacting performance.
more...
Charlie Stross – On the non-use of AI in my writing process
7 hours ago
- The author does not use generative LLMs in their work or personal life, viewing them as toys sold by grifters rather than genuine tools.
- The author has a long history of award-winning fiction published before OpenAI's founding, demonstrating no need for AI to write.
- The author is a party to a class action lawsuit against Anthropic AI for pirating ebooks to train their LLMs.
- LLMs are trained on stolen copyrighted material and their business model is compared to burglars reselling stolen goods.
more...
Cursor removed cost information from the usage page and CSV export
5 hours ago
- Cursor replaced dollar amounts with token amounts on the usage page for non-enterprise plans, frustrating users who tracked spending.
- Enterprise plans still show dollar amounts; individual and self-serve Teams plans show tokens, with on-demand costs only in the Cost column.
- Users can find dollar totals on Dashboard > Spending and per-user on-demand on Dashboard > Members, but per-model breakdown is unavailable.
- The change is intentional: dollar values were removed from usage endpoints and CSV exports to avoid confusion about included vs. billed usage.
more...

firstprev0next

Hasty Briefsbeta

US Military F-35B fighter jet crashes and burns at California Marine Corps base

Why Fortran Is Still Used

Glyphs 4 – the leading Mac font editor

Oil companies report sky-high profits thanks to wartime crude prices

Franken.domains: Stitched-Together Domains, Because Every .com Is Taken

Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576

Not just Neanderthals: Ghost lineage in Africa left its mark on our DNA

The Process Is the Point

Autoregressive Language Model on the 6502 Processor

Register deprivation: spills and runtime under forced register scarcity

Kaisel – Routes as Values. Dart 3 Native Router for Flutter

I Fired My AI Assitant

I ♥ RSS – A directory of people who love RSS

Indexing the Data Lake for Online Point Queries

The Bedrock of Software Design

Study uncovers lost 'golden age' of languages

Explorative modeling: Train on the best of K guesses

Charlie Stross – On the non-use of AI in my writing process

Cursor removed cost information from the usage page and CSV export