iFixit has launched its first electronic tool: a USB-C powered soldering iron and smart battery power hub, designed to be highly repairable and user-friendly.
The soldering iron outputs 100W of heat, reaches soldering temperature in under 5 seconds, and features an accelerometer for automatic heating and cooling, enhancing the tool's longevity.
Key features include a heat-resistant storage cap, polished user experience, warranty and local support, comfortable grip, shorter soldering tip length, and a no-tangle, heat-resistant cable with a locking ring.
iFixit has introduced a new USB-C powered, repairable soldering system that heats up to 100W in under 5 seconds and cools automatically when set down.
The soldering iron includes an accelerometer to detect when it's picked up, extending the tip's life, and features a heat-resistant storage cap and a smart battery power hub.
Settings can be adjusted via a web console using Web Serial, currently supported only in Chromium browsers, and the iron along with its schematics are available on iFixit's website.
The first release candidate (RC1) for FreeCAD 1.0 is now available for download, aiming to gather user feedback for stability improvements.
There are currently 7 release blockers, with more issues expected to be reported, which will help enhance the software's stability.
Users are encouraged to test RC1 on real projects and report bugs, while developers can contribute by fixing issues and participating in weekly merge meetings.
The first release candidate of FreeCAD 1.0 has been announced, positioning it as a free alternative to costly CAD software like Solidworks and Fusion 360.
Key improvements include topological naming fixes and a new assembly workbench, though some users still find the UI and stability challenging.
The community is optimistic about FreeCAD's future, comparing its potential growth to other successful open-source tools like Blender and KiCad.
Konty offers a tool for creating hand-drawn style wireframes, allowing users to quickly sketch app ideas without focusing on perfection.
The tool supports various diagrams, including flowcharts, UML, and ER diagrams, and provides access to over 1,500 icons and templates for web, mobile, and desktop.
Features include a presentation mode for linking shapes to pages and a mirroring function to reuse and update master frames across multiple instances.
Konty is a lo-fi wireframe tool for modern apps, similar to Balsamiq, praised for its sketch-like style that helps focus on core functionality and encourages feedback.
Users appreciate Konty's ease of use and discuss potential improvements like AI integration and enhanced commenting features.
Currently desktop-based, Konty plans to release a web version, with discussions on pricing strategies and Linux support.
A new MiniGolf game, "Captain's MiniGolf (v0.6)," has been released for Palm OS in 2024, following a retro coding journey.
The game features the ability to create and share custom levelpack databases and can be played via a browser using the cloudpilot emulator.
The full source code is available under the GPL3 license, aiming to inspire more Palm OS game development despite challenges like memory leaks and debugging difficulties.
Feeld dating app had significant security vulnerabilities, including unauthorized access to user data and messages, as well as the ability to manipulate other users' profiles and interactions.
The issues were disclosed to Feeld in March 2024, but multiple follow-ups and delays occurred before the blog post was published in September 2024.
The post highlights the critical need for robust security controls in mobile apps and emphasizes the importance of thorough security testing, as advocated by FORTBRIDGE.
The Feeld dating app has significant security vulnerabilities due to implementing permission checks on the frontend rather than the backend.
This issue is particularly concerning given the sensitive nature of the app's user data, which includes personal and potentially compromising information.
The discussion highlights a broader industry problem where inexperienced developers or cost-cutting measures lead to critical security oversights.
The article emphasizes the importance of emotional intelligence in professional settings, advocating for regulating and stabilizing the emotional climate rather than merely reacting to it.
Practical advice includes making eye contact, leaning in, and using specific phrases to demonstrate understanding and commitment.
Some skepticism exists regarding the feasibility and potential exhaustion of maintaining constant emotional control, with concerns about the authenticity and challenges in various contexts like virtual meetings.
Haskell, often seen as "impractical" or "academic," is praised for building real-world applications, including web servers, and its features are influencing languages like Python, Rust, and Typescript.
Key benefits include a strong type system that reduces runtime errors, immutable data preventing state mutation issues, and pure functional programming for more predictable and debuggable code.
Haskell's declarative nature, concept reuse, and strong type system enhance productivity and make refactoring safer, while its expressiveness and algebraic data types simplify reasoning about programs.
Haskell enforces writing total functions but struggles with issues like endless recursion, especially as the ecosystem shifts towards dependent typing.
The language's progress is hindered by numerous ad-hoc extensions, reliance on C, and limitations with the Wasm backend due to GHC's runtime system.
Despite its maturity and practicality, Haskell's standardization and ecosystem lag behind newer languages like Agda, Idris, and Lean, affecting its appeal to developers.
NASA engineers successfully replaced clogged thrusters on the 47-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft, ensuring its continued operation in interstellar space.
The spacecraft faced issues due to aging hardware and silicon dioxide buildup in fuel tubes, but engineers managed to activate an older set of thrusters by carefully managing its limited power and heating systems.
Voyager 1, launched in 1977 and currently 15.14 billion miles from Earth, continues to provide valuable data from beyond the solar system.
NASA successfully performed a delicate thruster swap to maintain the Voyager 1 mission, showcasing the spacecraft's robust design and remote control capabilities.
The mission's success is due to the foresight in design, preservation of organizational knowledge, and the dedication of the team, including contributions from retired staff.
Voyager 1's longevity and adaptability underscore the remarkable engineering and management efforts behind the mission.
Dmitry.GR has developed a business card that runs Linux and Ultrix, showcasing a unique and practical application of microcontroller technology.
The project involves emulating a DECstation2100/3100 using a MIPS architecture, with significant optimizations for performance, including overclocking and custom boot processes.
Key updates include improved firmware versions, enhanced USB support, and hardware redesigns for better speed and compatibility.
In 2000, "bootable business cards" using mini CD-ROMs were popular among system administrators for promoting Linuxcare, allowing a Linux system to boot from a PC's CD-ROM drive.
Today, "live USBs" have replaced these mini CDs due to the decline of optical drives, showcasing the evolution from optical storage to tiny computers with usable OS images.
The article also covers technical advancements over the years, including the use of different CPUs and the challenges encountered in this technological transition.
SpaceX astronauts have begun a spacewalk to test new spacesuits, highlighting SpaceX's comprehensive capabilities in the commercial space sector.
This mission underscores SpaceX's ability to offer end-to-end space services, from rockets and capsules to ground operations and spacesuits, making space travel more accessible for those with sufficient funds.
The testing of SpaceX's new spacesuits is a significant step, showcasing their innovation and commitment to advancing space technology and safety.
Researchers are investigating Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) to enhance the transparency and interpretability of neural networks.
KANs differ from traditional multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) by using nonlinear functions instead of numerical weights, allowing for more nuanced adjustments and explanations of their outputs.
Recent studies have shown KANs' effectiveness in scientific applications, such as knot theory and condensed matter physics, highlighting their potential to derive scientific rules from data.
Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) could improve neural network interpretability by deriving symbolic expressions and conserved quantities from data.
A tutorial at MLCAD showcased KANs' potential for understanding physical systems, but challenges persist in learning complex tasks and integrating KANs with other architectures.
The debate continues on whether large models, including KANs, can ever be fully understood, despite their ability to produce simpler expressions compared to deep neural networks.
The RFD 26 document explores the software stack for the host CPU in Oxide Rack servers, focusing on the operating system (OS) and virtual machine monitor (VMM).
Key hypervisor choices include KVM on GNU/Linux and bhyve on illumos, with a preference for Rust-based userspace for safety and performance.
The chosen platform is Helios (an illumos distribution) and Propolis (Rust-based userspace) with bhyve for guest workloads, emphasizing open-source development and robust server management facilities.
Oxide selected Illumos for their host OS and virtualization software due to its advanced OS features, familiarity, and a preference for the Rust programming language.
Despite QEMU's reliability, Oxide chose bhyve over KVM, citing better fit and maintainability for their needs.
The decision was driven by the team's extensive experience with Illumos and a desire to avoid the complexities associated with Linux and systemd, aiming for long-term sustainability and quality.
In April 2024, Jina Reader was launched as an API to convert URLs into LLM-friendly markdown using the prefix r.jina.ai, leveraging a headless Chrome browser, Mozilla’s Readability, and Turndown.
New small language models, reader-lm-0.5b and reader-lm-1.5b, were released, supporting up to 256K tokens and multilingual capabilities, outperforming larger LLMs in HTML-to-markdown conversion.
Reader-LM models demonstrated superior performance in evaluations using metrics like ROUGE-L, Token Error Rate (TER), and Word Error Rate (WER), and excelled in structure preservation and markdown syntax usage.
Reader-LM is a new small language model designed for converting HTML to Markdown, developed by Jina AI.
The model has received mixed reviews, with some users noting it missed key elements on certain web pages and others questioning its efficiency compared to traditional methods like regex.
The model is not yet in production, and there are ongoing discussions about its performance, privacy considerations, and the potential benefits of using specialized LLMs for specific tasks.
French AI startup Mistral has launched Pixtral 12B, a multimodal model that processes both images and text, featuring 12 billion parameters and a size of approximately 24GB.
Pixtral 12B can answer questions about images using URLs or base64-encoded images and is available on GitHub and Hugging Face under an Apache 2.0 license, allowing unrestricted download and fine-tuning.
Mistral, valued at $6 billion after a $645 million funding round, aims to rival OpenAI by providing free models, managed versions, and consulting services.
Mistral has launched Pixtral 12B, its first multimodal model capable of understanding but not generating images.
Concerns have been raised about the data used for training, especially with increasing restrictions on web scraping, impacting the model's ability to stay updated with new styles.
Pixtral 12B, based on Mistral’s Nemo 12B text model, can answer questions about images but performs below Qwen2-VL-7B in benchmarks.