Easyduino is an open-source project that reimplements PCB designs for popular microcontroller dev boards — Arduino UNO, Nano, ESP32, ESP32 S3, Raspberry Pi Pico, and STM32 Bluepill — using the free KiCad EDA tool and adding USB-C support. The project addresses fragmentation caused by original designs built across different eras, countries, and proprietary tools (Eagle, Altium). All boards use a 4-layer copper stackup (JLC04161H-7628) targeting JLCPCB manufacturing constraints. Some original components, like the ATmega16U2, were substituted due to supply shortages circa January 2023, and Pi Pico's 01005 passives were excluded due to assembly cost. Each board includes KiCad project files, schematics, Gerbers, JLCPCB-formatted BOM/CPL files, datasheets, and photos. Compatible with KiCad v8–v10, with v10 Jobsets streamlining Gerber and BOM generation, though multi-project Git integration has known limitations. V1.0 hardware bugs exist in the RP2040 (Flash pin mix-up) and ESP32 S3 (missing RST/SUSPEND pull resistors on CP2102), with v1.1 revisions awaiting testing. Licensed under CERN OHL v2 Permissive, allowing commercial use with license attribution only.

l123 is an open-source terminal spreadsheet that faithfully recreates the Lotus 1-2-3 Release 3.4a for DOS (1993) interaction model using a modern Rust and IronCalc compute stack with native .xlsx round-trip support. It features slash menus, a three-line control panel, 13 modes (READY, LABEL, VALUE, EDIT, POINT, etc.), keyboard-first workflows, and a WYSIWYG icon panel with mouse support across 17 icons. Formulas use original 1-2-3 syntax (@SUM, .., #AND#), translated internally to Excel syntax before reaching IronCalc. Eight milestones are complete: grid/nav, control panel, formula engine, menu system, .xlsx/CSV I/O, 3D sheets and undo, printing/range search, graphing (7 chart types, SVG/PNG), and the WYSIWYG panel; macros and final polish remain. The architecture is a strict layered Rust workspace keeping the UI engine-agnostic. Its two core promises: an experienced 1-2-3 user can drive it cold without documentation, and files round-trip cleanly to/from .xlsx. Testing relies on keystroke transcript acceptance tests. It explicitly is not a DOS emulator, visual homage, or macro player for .WK3 files.

Project Herakles, a three-year University of Cádiz investigation in the Bay of Algeciras, identified 151 archaeological sites including 134 shipwrecks ranging from a 5th-century BC Punic vessel to WWII-era remains, with 34 documented so far. Phoenician, Roman, medieval Islamic, Spanish, British, Venetian, and Dutch ships reflect the strait's role as a global maritime bottleneck for trade, exploration, and war. Notable finds include 23 Roman vessels, medieval ships potentially linked to late Islamic Spain, and the Puente Mayorga IV—an 18th-century Spanish gunboat that disguised itself as a fishing boat before attacking British warships with prow-mounted cannons. A mysterious book-shaped wooden box found aboard proved anticlimactic: it contained wooden combs rather than spy documents. Sites face growing threats from port dredging, construction, rising sea levels altering sediment layers, and invasive algae. Researchers are producing VR models and 360-degree videos to build public awareness and push Andalucían regional authorities toward formal site protection.

China's National Development and Reform Commission ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup founded in China, citing export control and technology transfer laws. Manus develops general-purpose AI agents for tasks like coding and market research, launched its flagship product in March 2025, hit $100M ARR in eight months, and raised $75M from Benchmark before closing China offices and relocating to Singapore. Meta announced the deal late last year to integrate Manus into its AI products and insists it "complied fully with applicable law." China's Ministry of Commerce opened an investigation in January, and co-founders CEO Xiao Hong and chief scientist Ji Yichao were summoned to Beijing and barred from leaving. The move targets the "Singapore-washing" strategy — relocating from China to Singapore to sidestep scrutiny from both Beijing and Washington — and the acquisition is reportedly already complete, making any unwind legally uncertain.

Apple is warning enterprise users about two potential breaking changes in macOS 27, due September 2026. First, AFP support is expected to be dropped—telegraphed since OS X 10.9 Mavericks 12 years ago—which would block users with Apple silicon Macs from upgrading unless they replace Time Capsules or AFP-only NAS devices. Second, Apple may require connections to MDM, DDM, Automated Device Enrollment, app distribution, and software update servers to use TLS 1.2 or higher, ATS-compliant ciphersuites, and valid ATS certificates. Auditing compliance requires installing a special logging profile and running a complex terminal predicate command, as no GUI tool exists for this. Apple says the TLS change could come "as early as the next major software release" but has left room to delay if enterprise impact proves severe. Both changes are non-retroactive, so Macs not upgraded to macOS 27 remain unaffected, but Apple silicon users have no fallback option for AFP storage. Local Content Caching servers are explicitly exempt from the TLS requirements.

The two original ZSNES developers have reunited to build SUPER ZSNES, a completely rewritten SNES emulator with a GPU-powered PPU core enabling high-resolution Mode 7 and per-game visual upgrades. It delivers more accurate CPU and audio cores than the original, alongside a modernized version of the classic snow-falling UI. The standout feature is the Super Enhancement Engine, currently supporting 7 games with options for manually redrawn high-resolution graphics, texture/normal mapping, overclocking slowdown-heavy titles, widescreen where internally supported, uncompressed audio sample replacement, and 3D height-mapped Mode 7. All enhancements can be toggled individually, and enhancement data contains no ROM or copyrighted content. Standard features include save states, rewind, fast forward, cheat codes, and auto save history, with netplay and special chip support (DSP1, SuperFX) planned. The project touts "No Vibe Coding, Classic development style." This is an early build: special chip emulation is absent, optimization is incomplete, and emulation bugs are present.

The author, experiencing chronic brain fog cycles driven by poor sleep, excessive caffeine, and media-fueled dopamine loops, discovered that staring at a blank wall for 5–10 minutes effectively restored focus during midday slumps. Inspired by a video by Simple Lucas, the technique combines defocused peripheral vision to activate the parasympathetic nervous system with "mind blanking." A 2012 paper estimated 34 GB of daily information exposure per person in 2008, extrapolating to roughly 87 GB today weighted by media quality. The brain fog cycle involves poor sleep leading to heavy caffeine use, enabling continued media consumption, which disrupts sleep further — a self-reinforcing loop. Small, repeated dopamine hits from scrolling create a tolerance hole requiring ever-stronger stimulation. Wall-staring proved harder than expected, requiring sustained effort similar to working out, but yielded significant focus recovery within a single session. The method is positioned as a zero-cost, screen-free intervention requiring no equipment, usable anywhere regardless of circumstance.

Scratch has suffered a cascading series of SVG security vulnerabilities since 2019, each fix exposing new attack surfaces. Early patches used regex and DOMPurify, but were bypassed via case sensitivity and inline event handlers. HTTP leaks emerged through image href attributes, CSS @import, and CSS url() — each requiring more parser complexity. A 2024 XSS found Paper.js receiving unsanitized SVGs, while 2026 brought three new url() bypasses exploiting CSS escape codes, multiple url() per attribute, and CSS variables. A full-page restyling attack via long CSS transitions remains unfixed, as does an image-set() HTTP leak disclosed after six months without a fix. Future CSS specs (src(), image()) will open more vectors once browsers implement them. Claude Opus 4.6 independently found the image-set() issue and a css-tree relaxed nesting bypass — where relaxed CSS nesting syntax is parsed as raw text, escaping sanitization entirely. TurboWarp instead sandboxes SVGs in an iframe with strict CSP, blocking all external requests and style bleed-out without ever-growing sanitization code.

World (formerly Worldcoin until October 2024), co-founded by Sam Altman, scans irises via spherical orbs and assigns a "proof of humanity." On April 17, 2026, strategic partnerships with Tinder, Zoom, and DocuSign were announced to verify users and reduce deepfakes and fraud. The company operates 7,000 orbs across six U.S. cities and claims 18 million verifications in 160 countries. Nine governments—including Kenya, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Hong Kong, Germany, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand—have halted or banned operations over privacy violations and lack of informed consent. A 2022 MIT Technology Review investigation found deceptive onboarding and undisclosed collection of vital signs beyond iris data. Brazil specifically outlawed the company's practice of paying users $50 in cryptocurrency for iris scans, ruling it violated consent law. Edward Snowden condemned it for "cataloguing eyeballs." World published citizen-support studies from Portugal, Spain, and South Korea and released a revenue blueprint for companies adopting its digital ID, while looser U.S. biometric regulations make American expansion easier than in the EU.

GitHub is transitioning all Copilot plans to usage-based billing on June 1, 2026, replacing premium request units with GitHub AI Credits consumed based on token usage. Base prices stay the same ($10/mo Pro, $39/mo Pro+, $19/user/mo Business, $39/user/mo Enterprise), with each plan's monthly price equaling its included credit allotment. Code completions remain free of credit consumption, but fallback to lower-cost models when credits run out is eliminated. Annual plan subscribers face steep model multiplier increases (Opus 4.6/4.7 jumping from 3x to 27x, GPT-5.4 from 1x to 6x) starting June 1, before transitioning to monthly billing at expiration. Business and Enterprise customers receive promotional credit boosts for June-August ($30 and $70 respectively), plus new pooled usage and admin budget controls. The shift is driven by agentic coding sessions consuming far more compute than simple chat, making per-request flat pricing financially unsustainable. A preview billing dashboard launches in early May to help users prepare before the transition.

Mail-order occultism flourished in the early 20th-century US, enabled by linotype printing, cheap pulp paper, and expanding postal networks. Weber's "disenchantment" thesis proved wrong: modernity redistributed spiritual practice privately rather than eliminating it. Pioneer Sydney Flower ran multiple fictitious imprints from Chicago, was arrested for postal fraud, yet edited a magazine from prison. AMORC, founded in 1915 by Harvey Spencer Lewis, claimed an initiated Rosicrucian lineage and still operates today, as does Paul Foster Case's Builders of the Adytum (BOTA), teaching Kabbalah and tarot as rigorous self-development. Maurice Doreal's Brotherhood of the White Temple blended Gnostic mysticism with pulp sci-fi, seeding later conspiracy thinking. Many courses, including the Mystic Brotherhood University's, anticipated cognitive-behavioral therapy decades before CBT was codified. Psychiana charged roughly $1 per weekly lesson in the 1930s. These courses ultimately commodified initiation, substituting therapeutic self-management for genuine transcendence under an American ideology of self-reliance.

A new CX team was created without consulting the Engineering Manager responsible for the related product tribe, reporting directly to a separate product vertical leader rather than tribe leadership. The team planned a centralized microfrontend React dashboard, but the EM viewed this as misaligned with the tribe's shift toward E2E product ownership per team. Rather than integrate, the EM directed each product team to build simpler Spring Boot template dashboards, deliberately sidelining the CX team and accepting duplicated effort as a strategic tradeoff. Adoption stalled when the product manager absorbed all support work herself; pairing sessions and Jira-aligned workflows eventually enabled CX staff to resolve tickets autonomously. Within a month, resolution dropped from days to hours, meeting the OKR. After five months of no progress from the dedicated CX team, leadership disbanded it. The author frames bypassing the CX team as the least-wasteful path, citing Team Topologies' principle against forced platform adoption.

pgBackRest, a PostgreSQL backup and restore tool developed over 13 years by David Steele, is being discontinued after the loss of corporate sponsorship following Crunchy Data's acquisition. Steele was unable to secure a new position or sponsors to sustain the project and chose a clean break over sporadic, poor-quality maintenance. Version 2.58.0 is the final stable release; Steele requests forks use a new name. The tool was feature-rich, supporting parallel compression (lz4, zstd), remote backup via TLS/SSH, S3/Azure/GCS object storage, full/differential/incremental and block-level backups, WAL archiving with async push/get, page checksum validation, delta restores, and repository encryption across ten PostgreSQL versions. Supabase was its sole remaining sponsor. The repository will be archived, and any future fork must independently rebuild user trust from scratch.

DSPi converts a Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) or Pico 2 (RP2350) into a plug-and-play USB audio interface with a full DSP pipeline, compatible with macOS, Windows, Linux, and iOS without drivers. It accepts 16/24-bit PCM stereo at 44.1–96 kHz and outputs via S/PDIF or I2S — 8 channels on RP2350, 4 on RP2040 — plus a PDM subwoofer. The DSP chain covers per-channel preamp, 10-band parametric EQ, RMS volume leveller with lookahead, BS2B headphone crossfeed with interaural time delay, ISO 226:2003 loudness compensation, a matrix mixer, and per-output delay up to 85 ms. The RP2040 runs at 307.2 MHz overclocked using Q28 fixed-point with hand-optimized ARM assembly; the RP2350 uses hardware FPU with a hybrid SVF/biquad architecture for superior low-frequency accuracy. Core 0 handles USB and primary DSP; Core 1 runs either a 2nd-order delta-sigma PDM modulator or parallel EQ for additional outputs — mutually exclusive modes. A 10-slot preset system, runtime GPIO reassignment, OTA firmware updates, and diagnostics for peak metering, USB PHY errors, and CPU load complete the feature set.

Google's Decoupled DiLoCo splits large AI training runs across decoupled compute islands called learner units with asynchronous data flow, isolating disruptions so other units keep learning. It builds on Pathways (async distributed AI) and DiLoCo (low inter-datacenter bandwidth), adding self-healing: tested via chaos engineering, it survived loss of entire learner units and reintegrated them on recovery. Google trained a 12B-parameter model across four U.S. regions over 2-5 Gbps of standard WAN — no custom inter-facility infrastructure needed. The system ran 20x faster than conventional sync methods by folding communication into computation windows, eliminating blocking bottlenecks. It also supports mixing hardware generations like TPU v6e and TPU v5p in one run, matching single-type ML performance, extending hardware lifespan and easing capacity bottlenecks as newer chips roll out unevenly.

A 2019 Virginia bank robbery spawned a Supreme Court case on geofence warrants, which compel tech companies to produce location data from all cellphones near crime scenes. Police forced Google to search 500 million accounts to identify devices near the bank for 30 minutes before and after the robbery, leading to Okello Chatrie's conviction. Oral arguments scrambled ideological lines: conservative Gorsuch and liberal Sotomayor both challenged the government on whether warrantless location access would extend to emails and cloud documents. The government argued people "advertise" their location publicly, making it unprotected; critics countered that password-protected cloud data is private property. Justices noted the government conceded it could search location records of abortion clinic visitors or political event attendees without a warrant. Google now stores location data on-device and no longer responds to geofence warrants, though roughly 30 other providers still retain similar data centrally.

FDA approved Otarmeni (lunsotogene parvec-cwha), the first dual AAV vector-based gene therapy, for patients with severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss caused by biallelic OTOF gene mutations. The OTOF gene encodes otoferlin, essential for sound signal transmission; variants account for 2–8% of inherited non-syndromic deafness. Otarmeni is a one-time biologic-device combination surgically injected into the cochlea, delivering a functional OTOF gene copy to restore otoferlin. In a 24-patient pediatric trial, 80% of 20 evaluable patients experienced improved hearing — unexpected without treatment. FDA approved it just 61 days after BLA filing, tied for the fastest in modern history, as the first gene therapy under the Commissioner's National Priority Voucher program. The therapy requires preserved outer hair cell function and no prior cochlear implant in the treated ear. Common side effects include middle ear infection, nausea, dizziness, and procedural pain. Approved to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, continued approval hinges on long-term durability and speech/quality-of-life outcome data.

OpenAI published a principles document outlining five core values: Democratization (resisting AI power consolidation), Empowerment (AGI enabling everyone to achieve their goals), Universal Prosperity (widespread flourishing requiring new economic models), Resilience (managing AGI-introduced risks), and Adaptability (updating positions as circumstances change). The document states that power should be held decentrally rather than by a handful of companies, and envisions AI delivering broad societal benefits like curing diseases and expanding access to education and healthcare. It also references a prior charter commitment that if a safety-conscious competitor nears AGI first, OpenAI would stop competing and assist them. The release came amid controversy over OpenAI's military contract and renewed public scrutiny of Sam Altman, timed just before the Musk v. Altman trial, prompting widespread skepticism about the gap between stated values and the company's actual conduct.

Workers on the Magic: The Gathering Arena team at Wizards of the Coast have formed "United Wizards of the Coast - CWA," with a supermajority signing union cards before informing company leadership and calling for voluntary recognition. The union aligns with the Communications Workers of America, which has been active in game industry organizing. Key grievances detailed in the workers' open letter include mounting pressure from leadership to adopt LLMs and generative AI tools despite explicit employee objections, Hasbro's policy of claiming ownership over creative work employees produce in their own time using personal resources, and lack of layoff and remote work protections. Workers frame the effort as a step forward not just for their team, but for the broader gaming industry, aiming to demonstrate that a game studio can collectively advocate for better conditions while continuing to build a successful product.

The project builds a 3x3 grid flipdisc wall display using 9 AlfaZeta panels (84x42 discs total) powered by a 24V 10A Meanwell supply and framed with 80/20 aluminum extrusions. Communication runs over RS485 using 3 USB adapters; each frame encodes a start byte, flush or buffer command, board address, RLE-compressed binary image data, and an end byte. An Nvidia Orin Nano handles ML processing alongside an IMX708 camera and Waveshare audio board, while the open-source Node.js "flipdisc" npm library supports AlfaZeta and Hanover boards over USB or Ethernet. Rendering stacks PIXI.js, Three.js, Matter.js, and GSAP; MediaPipe gesture recognition runs Python scripts via ZeroMQ IPC. Scenes—NYT RSS, Spotify, and weather—are managed via REST API and WebSocket, controllable through an Expo mobile app supporting queue management, scene config, and freehand drawing. Design uses 3x5 bitmap fonts, Floyd-Steinberg dithering for images, and Bayer 4x4 ordered dithering for UI. Panels alone cost roughly $5,000, remain hard to source, and are primarily sold to the transportation industry.

Quarkdown is an open-source Markdown extension tool started as a university research project that adds scripting, reusable functions, and multiple document output formats—paged documents, plain text, documentation sites, and interactive slides—to standard Markdown syntax. The project lead developed it over two years, and its landing page demonstrates capabilities via a demo document about supermassive black hole 1ES 1927+654, which had its corona disappear and reassemble in 2018 in a first-of-its-kind astronomical event. Quarkdown offers blazing-fast compilation with live preview and allows authors to define reusable functions to avoid repetition across documents. It positions itself as a single tool replacing specialized systems like LaTeX, Pandoc, and presentation frameworks. The broader ecosystem it competes in includes Typst, MyST, Quarto, and Pandoc, none of which has yet claimed the title of definitive LaTeX successor. While Quarkdown extends rather than replaces Markdown, its additional syntax—such as .abstract, .doctype, and custom function blocks—pushes well beyond Markdown's original minimalist design philosophy.

The standard GPU metric from nvidia-smi and cloud monitoring tools only detects GPU activity, not compute efficiency — real throughput can be 1% while dashboards read 100%. Systalyze open-sources Utilyze, a free tool measuring true GPU efficiency via hardware performance counters with near-zero overhead. Utilyze reports Compute SOL % (achieved FLOPs ÷ peak FLOPs) and Memory SOL %, validated within 2% of ground truth; even DCGM's SM Active reads 99% on a workload with only 6% actual throughput. It also estimates Attainable SOL %, the realistic ceiling for a given model and hardware, distinguishing tunable headroom from physics-imposed limits. In practice, Llama-3.1-8B prefill runs at 45% actual vs 89% attainable, LoRA fine-tuning at 1–7%, and MoE training at 3–15%, while standard tools read ~100% throughout. Systalyze's optimization platform, guided by Utilyze measurements, achieved 40% more token throughput on LLM inference and 6–8× compute gains in LoRA fine-tuning. AMD support is planned; the tool currently targets NVIDIA hardware only.