Touchscreens are being replaced by tactile controls to address accessibility issues, particularly for sight-impaired and older individuals with dry skin.
Physical controls, such as those on Garmin's Edge 840, are favored for their efficiency and reliability over touchscreens, which can lack tactile feedback and responsiveness.
The shift back to tactile interfaces is viewed as a move towards improved usability and accessibility, countering the cost-driven rise of touchscreens influenced by devices like the iPhone.
The author discusses the drawbacks of fixed-price contracts, highlighting that they often create poor incentives for both clients and consultants.- Emphasizes the importance of charging a fair hourly rate, providing realistic estimates, and ensuring clients value the consultant's work.- Advises against negotiating on price to avoid difficult clients and suggests setting a high rate to ensure clients take the consultant's advice seriously.
Over 25 years, Google has developed its data-center networking to achieve high speed, scale, and reliability, culminating in the fifth-generation Jupiter network architecture with 13 Petabits per second (Pb/s) bandwidth.- Key principles in this evolution include efficiency, low latency, software-defined networking, and dynamic topology, with significant milestones in 2015, 2022, and 2023.- Google plans to continue advancing its network infrastructure to support artificial intelligence (AI) with further innovations in network scale, bandwidth, and reliability.
The discussion covers Google's 25-year evolution in data center networking, highlighting the shift from older systems like "Watchtower" to the advanced "Jupiter" system, which supports high-speed connections up to 100Gbps.
Nvidia's contribution to networking hardware is noted, particularly through their ConnectX Network Interface Cards (NICs), which enable efficient GPU communication with minimal CPU involvement.
There is speculation on Nvidia's future role in data center hardware and a debate on the industry's dependence on their technology, alongside discussions on the scale and visibility of data centers, advocating for smaller, less conspicuous facilities.
Nvidia has discovered eight high-severity security vulnerabilities in their GeForce GPU display drivers and software, potentially allowing attackers to access systems and steal data.- These vulnerabilities affect a range of Nvidia products, including GeForce, Nvidia RTX, Quadro, NVS, and Tesla, on both Windows and Linux operating systems.- Users are advised to update their drivers immediately to the latest versions: 566.03 for Windows and 565.57.01, 550.127.05, and 535.216.01 for Linux, available through Nvidia's Manual Driver Search tool, Nvidia App, and GeForce Experience app.
Nvidia GeForce GPUs have a security vulnerability in their Windows and Linux drivers, which could allow attackers to escalate permissions, leading to potential code execution and data tampering.- The flaw is particularly concerning for multi-user systems, systems with existing malware, and virtualization hosts, though it is not easily exploitable via browsers.- Nvidia has released updated drivers to mitigate the issue, and users are advised to update their drivers, especially on systems with untrusted users or existing malware.
The article reviews the evolution of the Finite Element Method (FEM) over 80 years, highlighting its significance in engineering and scientific modeling, particularly in solid mechanics.- FEM's development is categorized into four periods: early years (1941-1965), golden age (1966-1991), industrial applications and materials modeling (1992-2017), and the present and future.- It emphasizes FEM's integration with modern computational techniques like machine learning, its impact on industries, and its role in advancing engineering education and software development.
The Finite Element Method (FEM) remains a fundamental tool in engineering, but its practical application has seen little innovation, with many advancements not succeeding in real-world use.
Industry attention has moved towards Verification and Validation, emphasizing FEM's limitations, while commercial software such as ANSYS and NASTRAN continue to lead the market.
Emerging methods like Isogeometric Analysis (IGA) and Neural Operators offer potential but have not yet gained widespread adoption.
In 2023, Shopify optimized Ruby's garbage collector by implementing out-of-band garbage collection to reduce latency, though initial heuristics were not fully effective.- By March 2024, a proof of concept was developed to disable major garbage collections during request cycles, leading to the introduction of a new method, GC.config(rgengc_allow_full_mark: true/false), in Ruby 3.4.0-preview2.- Implementing this method on 50% of Shopify's servers resulted in significant latency improvements, with modest capacity gains, and future efforts will focus on optimizing minor collections.
The discussion highlights the advantages of using Hack/PHP for HTTP requests, focusing on its stateless functional core, request-scoped objects, and cooperative async/await model, which help avoid threading issues.
It also explores garbage collection (GC) in Ruby-on-Rails and other languages, suggesting performance improvements through request-scoped memory management and advanced GC techniques, such as those in Java Virtual Machine's (JVM) Z Garbage Collector (ZGC).
The challenges of switching programming languages for large codebases, like Instagram's use of Python, are noted, emphasizing the complexity of rewriting systems despite potential performance benefits.
Matrix 2.0 has been launched to position Matrix as a mainstream-ready, open, decentralized, and secure communication protocol.- Key features include Simplified Sliding Sync for instant login, Next Generation Auth with OpenID Connect, and MatrixRTC for encrypted multiparty VoIP/Video.- The update focuses on improving encryption reliability and requires community financial support for ongoing development.
Matrix 2.0 has been released, featuring improvements to the chat protocol, including invisible encryption and native Matrix Encrypted Multiparty VoIP/Video.
A new "quick start" guide using docker-compose is being developed to simplify the setup process, with matrix-docker-ansible-deploy recommended for ease of hosting.
The release aims to enhance speed and user-friendliness, though some users have concerns about specific features like audio calls in Element X, while others are optimistic about the potential for peer-to-peer (P2P) Matrix.
The guide introduces Ractor, a Rust library for actor-based programming, covering key concepts like messaging, installation, and creating actors.
It explains the "cast" (fire-and-forget) and "call" (wait for reply) messaging schemes, similar to Erlang, and provides code examples for creating and running actors.
The guide also details how to add state to actors and use RpcReplyPort for inter-actor communication, with examples of stateful actor implementation.
Ractor is a Rust actor framework that emphasizes supervision, a feature inspired by Erlang's OTP, to manage actor systems effectively.- It integrates with Tokio and has a companion library, ractor_cluster, for distributed scenarios, and is notably used at Meta for distributed overload protection in Rust Thrift servers.- The framework's design, including the use of async_trait, is shaped by Rust's evolving features, but integration with Erlang systems remains complex due to differing messaging semantics and VM requirements.