The Vesuvius Challenge, initiated by tech entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, is a competition targeting the deciphering of ancient scrolls from a private library near Pompeii using machine learning models.
Computer science student, Luke Farritor, became the inaugural individual to identify a whole word in an unopened scroll from two millennia ago, winning $40,000. Independently, Youssef Nader discovered the same word and earned a $10,000 prize.
The term unearthed is "porphyras" which signifies "purple", an unusual occurrence in ancient manuscripts. The competition is ongoing, and a $700,000 grand prize is still available.
A computer science student has utilized machine learning to decipher the first word from an unopened Herculaneum scroll, prompting interest in classical literature and potential implications for excavations and ancient texts.
These advancements are believed to have sizable potential in the humanities and academia, with the Vesuvius Challenge potentially uncovering key insights into ancient civilizations from primary sources preceding the Council of Jamnia.
The method demonstrates the potential to illuminate the origins of Christianity by uncovering historical documents, pointing towards the profound implications and progress machine learning can bring to scroll analysis.
The post highlights the issue of decreasing scrollbar sizes posing difficulties for individuals with fine motor control issues or inaccurate pointing devices.
The author provides solutions for adjusting scrollbar widths in different software platforms like GTK, Qt, Firefox, and Chrome, but underscores challenges in Electron apps' configuration.
Minimaps are praised as a user-friendly alternative to traditional scrollbars, as they address the problems created by the shrinking scrollbar trend.
Users express dissatisfaction with current UI designs in software and operating systems due to limited customization options, inferior usability, and prioritization of appearance over functionality.
Participants discuss the decline in UI quality, preference for earlier versions, and the desire for more user-friendly and visually pleasing interfaces.
Emphasis is placed on the importance of considering user preferences, accessibility, and privacy when designing UI as well as challenges posed by different input methods, specifically mentioning issues with scrollbars.
The online graphing calculator, Desmos, is witnessing a surge in popularity among YouTubers for great animation creation features.
A comparison between Desmos and another graphing calculator, GeoGebra, preferred for its LaTeX integration and Tikz export features, saw users favoring Desmos for a smoother User Interface (UI).
The discussion also touches on GeoGebra's licensing, highlighting that commercial users need to acquire a license, and Desmos' team providing solutions to performance issues and animation variables.
The article delves into the complexities of establishing a smart home, proposing more straightforward alternatives for ease and convenience.
The discussion includes various remote-controlled devices used for managing lights, outlets, and appliances in a smart home context.
Special emphasis is given to the role of lights in home automation. It suggests the potential for developing new remote-controlled devices, indicating possible future trends in smart home technology.
The discussions cover topics around home automation including smart locks, switches, challenges, and the application of smart devices in controlling home utilities.
Users exchange experiences and thoughts on the convenience, security, reliability, and compatibility of different smart home devices and systems.
Topics such as privacy issues, the significance of backup options, and the demand for simpler, more user-friendly solutions in home automation are also discussed.
The Twelve-Factor App is a framework for creating software-as-a-service applications, focusing on automation, portability, cloud deployment, continuous deployment, and scalability.
This methodology can be used with any programming language and any mix of backing services and provides guidlines on various aspects, including codebase organization, dependency management, configuration, build and run stages, concurrency, and maintaining development-production parity, among others.
Created based on the contributors' experiences and observations, it aims to solve systemic issues in application development.
The conversation is centered on the Twelve-Factor App methodology and its suggested practices for software application development, covering areas such as configuration storage, secrets management, logs handling, and the use of event streams.
Participants have varied opinions on the effectiveness and applicability of the Twelve-Factor principles, leading to a debate on its practicality and security aspects.
Topics such as containerization and Kubernetes, along with the challenges of executing the principles in real-world scenarios, are also discussed, indicating the relevance of these principles to modern development practices.
The blog post argues that a perceived lack of motivation or laziness can often lead to technological debt.
The author points out the contrast between diligent developers who consistently improve their code, and their own propensity to delay certain tasks.
The author stresses the significance of self-awareness and honesty when dealing with motivation lapses, even suggesting breaks if necessary to avoid prompting tech debt via excuses like 'premature optimization' or 'cut scope aggressively'.
The article discusses "Can't be fucked" (CBF) as a potential cause of technical debt in the technology sector, emphasizing the need for better appreciation and motivation to manage high-interest tech debts.
Importance of maintaining code hygiene, understanding different types of tech debts, and addressing problems of legacy systems are also highlighted.
The piece also discusses the key role of craftsmanship, disconnect between developers and businesses, and the effect of organizational culture on prioritizing quality in software development.
Main language models (LLM) providers like OpenAI dominate in terms of the quality of models and the efficiency to serve the models at large scales.
The article advocates for cost-effectiveness by using OpenAI's platform over fine-tuning and serving models on personal hardware.
While discouraging organizations from deploying their own open-source LLM due to cost and complexity, it acknowledges open-source models' future, given they become more compact.
The article covers various aspects of OpenAI such as its low-cost model's sustainability, competitiveness in the AI industry, limitations of language models, and potential plans to expand into the smartphone market.
The piece discusses various companies' pricing strategies, including Uber and Google, efficiency, and costs associated with using OpenAI's models, hardware requirements for running AI models, and system limitations.
It highlights concerns related to the trustworthiness and security of OpenAI's services and the benefits of local AI—AI that runs on end user's device rather running on servers.
Diceright is an online platform for playing Dungeons and Dragons, developed using Ruby on Rails, and uses action cable to synchronize maps and tokens for all players.
The interface, built with HTML canvas and fabric.js, allows users to interact with the maps. The website is also optimized for mobile usage.
The creator, who also designed the user experience, put it together as a side project and is open to feedback and inquiries about the platform.
The author has developed a virtual tabletop for online Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) gameplay, specifically designed for mobile devices.
Feedback from users has led to improvements such as added mobile screenshots and videos, with the platform being praised for its innovation in RPG gaming.
The discussion highlight the comparison of tabletop and computer RPG's and emphasizes the communal storytelling aspect of D&D. It also underscores the importance of having a compatible Dungeon Master (DM) for game enjoyment.
The article tracks the transformation of road usage norms, primarily influenced by auto groups and manufacturers in the 1920s to deflect responsibility for accidents from drivers to pedestrians.
As the automobile prevalence increased, leading to a rise in pedestrian fatalities, industry groups advocated effectively for laws confining pedestrians to crosswalks and deploying strategies to ridicule jaywalkers.
The term "jaywalking" was created to label those disobeying these new laws as ignorant and hazardous to public safety, showing how the auto industry successfully shifted the streets' perception as zones for vehicles and not pedestrians.
The passages delve into various factors influencing pedestrian safety, including jaywalking laws and the impact of car-focused urban planning.
Historical context is noted, linking transportation with racial segregation, alongside potential remedies like prioritizing pedestrians and advocating for alternative transport methods.
There is also a discussion on the enforcement of jaywalking laws, behavior patterns of pedestrians and drivers, and the call for safer regulations and infrastructure.
The author recounts their experience of accidentally swapping their new MacBook Air with someone at airport security, and after retrieving it, discovered an Activation Lock was activated on it.
Despite repeated requests, Apple has been unresponsive in assisting to disable the Activation Lock, causing the author to critique Apple's stringent policies and inadequate customer support.
As a word of advice, the author recommends MacBook users to enable the "Find My" feature on their devices to prevent encountering similar issues.
The discussions encompass various topics about Apple products such as AirPods software glitches, the pros and cons of Bluetooth headphones, and experiences with customer support.
Users also discuss security measures like the activation lock, import duties and taxes for MacBooks, including the effectiveness and inconvenience of Apple's Activation Lock feature.
These discussions are platforms for users to share frustrations, personal experiences, and opinions about these issues.
This post is a collection of digital involvements from a forum thread, where people exchange their software projects for feedback and potential improvements.
The introduced projects are diverse, including a digital ant farm game, a ukulele chord learning app, various web-based tools and extensions, a streaming service user interface, and a search engine for legal documents.
Conversations focus on discussing features, objectives of their projects and exploring opportunities for refinement and potential collaborations.
The author shared their experience of supporting various platforms including web, Windows, macOS, and Linux, for their game Industry Idle and the distinct challenges each brings.
Discusses the impact of Valve's decision to no longer support macOS for Counter-Strike 2, as well as tackling issues related to cheating and platform-specific problems.
Provides insight into the cost and revenue implications of supporting multiple platforms, the struggles they encountered as a one-man indie developer, and their aspiration for making better choices and balancing workload in future projects.
The thread addresses obstacles and limitations in cross-platform game development, involving the application of web browsers, browser-based technologies, and native applications.
It discusses problems related to local storage for HTML5 games, debugging on iOS Safari, and the challenges of porting games to platforms like Linux and macOS.
Lastly, the usage of Steam and Proton for gaming across various platforms, as well as concerns regarding game maintenance, are discussed.
The Dutch parliament held a hearing on the EU's "Chatcontrol" proposal which pertains to client-side scanning; a debated technology that scans private messages, potentially leading to unwarranted investigations.
Despite parliamentary opposition through two motions, the Dutch government has decided to disregard them, thus maintaining the pursuit for said technology.
Concerns raised at the hearing were about not only the intrusion into private conversations but also the unproven effectiveness of the technology, with an additional warning against possible cooperation with China in this field.
The EU is contemplating a proposed law, "Chat Control," that necessitates device scanning for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), sparking potential privacy violation debates.
Critics worry it may be a precursor for escalated scanning, raising concerns over Europol's access to this data and its usage in uncontrolled Police AI.
Discussions extend to the impacts on messaging platforms, industry responsibilities, and control of autonomous vehicles, reflecting broad concerns about privacy, government overreach, and the respective roles of various industries in curbing criminal activity.
Atlassian, a software company, has announced its acquisition of video messaging platform Loom for approximately $975 million, which will strengthen its team collaboration tools and enable video integration into workflows.
Loom, with over 25 million global users, will be incorporated into Atlassian software like Jira and Confluence, with the acquisition expected to close by March 2024.
Although funded with existing cash balances, Atlassian predicts that the acquisition will cause dilution in their operating margins for fiscal years ending in June 2024 and 2025.
A vulnerability has been found in the HTTP/2 protocol that could be used to launch a denial-of-service attack on NGINX Open Source, NGINX Plus, and related products, affecting the NGINX HTTP/2 module.
The vulnerability lets an attacker rapidly cancel numerous HTTP/2 streams, thereby overloading the server without triggering its configured threshold.
NGINX has issued a patch to tackle this vulnerability, improving system stability by imposing a limit on the number of new streams within one event loop. They advise users to update to the newest packages and tweak configuration files for added protection. Limiting connections and requests from single clients is also advised. Cloudflare, Amazon, and Google assisted in mitigating this vulnerability.
The HTTP/2 rapid reset attack is impacting Nginx products, but by default, Nginx is equipped with a safeguard against it unless certain configurations are altered.
The discourse is circulating around the effect of this vulnerability on NGINX and other web servers, with mixed opinions: some worried about its implications, while others believing it predominantly influences non-standard settings.
The conversation extends to HTTP versions, server restrictions, ad blockers usage, and the significance of timely updates and patches, focusing on the potential influence of this vulnerability across different setups.