TimeLimit is an offline parental control app that limits device usage time for multiple users with configurable restrictions per app and time period. It operates in local mode with data stored on-device or connected mode with optional self-hosted servers, offering features like bonus time and circumvention detection through device admin permissions.
A-LIST released Guardian Pocket, a fully on-device health AI agent that runs locally on phones without sending data to remote servers. The system uses an 8B parameter quantized model (Prism's Ternary Bonsai) optimized through context engineering and a custom classification head to achieve frontier-model performance while maintaining speed and privacy.
A Google sign-in page for Google Scholar Labs with standard authentication options including email/phone entry, account creation, and guest mode.
Gemma is an iMessage bot that helps users find NYC apartments by describing their preferences in a chat interface, including budget, bedrooms, neighborhood, and move-in date.
Piphilology is the practice of using mnemonic techniques, particularly piems (poems where word lengths represent pi's digits), to memorize pi's expanding decimal expansion. From early examples by James Jeans to creative variations by authors like Dmitri Borgmann, piems employ constrained writing styles like Pilish to make memorization possible and entertaining.
Jane Street released a hardware puzzle in August asking solvers to reverse-engineer a chip from its GDS layout. The chip validates 11x11 Star Battle puzzles by checking star placement rules, and approximately 400 solvers from over 30 countries used tools like KLayout, Yosys, and Z3 to extract netlists, simulate circuits, and discover the chip's logic.
Pyronaut is a new high-performance Python application platform built on GraalVM and Micronaut that enables production-ready Python services with AOT compilation and optimized runtime execution. It delivers 2.6x the throughput of FastAPI and 6.5x that of Flask by leveraging Netty's asynchronous framework and integrating Python's asyncio with the Graal JIT compiler.
UtilsDock is a collection of 200 free browser-based tools for image conversion, file compression, unit conversion, and data formatting that process files entirely on the user's device without uploading to servers. The platform requires no sign-up, works offline after initial visit, and prioritizes privacy and speed by running computationally locally rather than server-side.
Reddit is sunsetting RSS feeds on November 13th and further restricting Old Reddit access to accounts that have logged in and used it within the past six months, citing efforts to combat AI scraping and automated abuse. The company is also ending public API access by March 2027 for apps that don't migrate to its developer platform. Moderators will retain unrestricted Old Reddit access.
Kweepa released DOOM64, a demake of the classic 1993 Doom for the Commodore 64, featuring dynamic floor/ceiling height changes, dithered lighting via text display refresh, and hand-tweaked sprites. The project is the second in a planned id Software conversion trilogy, with two versions available optimized for different C64 setups.
Windows hot-patching on Itanium uses a simpler approach than AArch64, overwriting the first instruction bundle with a nop and a 64-bit long branch instruction to redirect execution. Itanium's fixed-size instruction bundles eliminated the need for spare patching space, and contrary to appearances, function-preceding breakpoint bundles serve alignment purposes rather than hot-patching.
This article traces the history of x86 CPUs from their origins, beginning with Intel's 4004 processor designed for Busicom's calculator in 1971, and continuing through the 8008 developed for Computer Terminal Corporation's programmable terminal. The narrative explains how architectural quirks in x86 assembly—such as the accumulator and addressing schemes—resulted from design decisions made to maintain backward compatibility across generations of chips rather than from arbitrary choices.
Researchers tested Jev, a decision-making AI model from TypeSafe AI, across ~575,000 API calls and found it often remains confident when answering questions it has no basis for answering, contradicting its promise of calibrated probabilities. While Jev performs well on familiar tasks with sufficient information, it fails to distinguish between epistemic uncertainty (lack of knowledge) and aleatoric uncertainty (inherent randomness), and asking 'Do you know?' doesn't reliably detect these gaps.
An engineer named Emily proposes the 'Brain Sandwich' framework for working with AI: using your brain first to understand the problem, then delegating to AI for implementation, then using your brain again to review and refine the work. This approach balances leveraging AI capabilities while maintaining engineering skills and ensuring code quality.
A programmer reflects on 30 years of coding alongside Phish music, from a 1998 tech support job through a 2024 PhD at Carnegie Mellon, remaining skeptical of AI until 2026 when Claude Code and similar tools demonstrated capability to rapidly build applications, prompting a reconsideration of AI's role in software development.
Local LLM models can malfunction by generating beyond their answer or ignoring instructions due to incorrect chat templates, while the same model works properly through hosted APIs. Chat templates are Jinja programs stored in GGUF metadata that must exactly reproduce the format models were trained on; mismatches cause degraded behavior without requiring weight changes.
A game where players control a swarm of units that can be programmed with dynamic code injection. Once reaching 2000 units, players can describe desired swarm behaviors in natural language, and an LLM generates code to implement commands ranging from simple formations to complex tactical strategies.
Fortinet has issued a security alert regarding an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability in FortiMail. The company is warning users of the threat and urging immediate attention to the vulnerability.
Earshot SF is a tool that lets users check noise sources near San Francisco addresses before moving or signing leases, scanning for fire stations, police stations, hospitals, schools, transit stops, construction sites, noise complaints, and entertainment venues.
This article from the 'Hanami, Why?' series explains Hanami's dependency injection system via the Deps module, which allows developers to explicitly declare dependencies at the top of classes rather than scattering them throughout method bodies. The piece covers how dependencies are registered based on file paths, injected as ready-to-use instances, and discusses practical considerations like custom initialization logic and auto-registration of components.