Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
The AI boom is making the world's cheapest smartphones disappear
Rest of World's Kinling Lo reports how AI data centers are soaking up memory chip supply, pushing phone makers to raise prices and drop their most affordable sub-$150 models, and what that means for people in lower-income markets who depend on cheap smartphones to get online.
4 min · 889 words
John Murray walks through installing Nix on Valve's Steam Frame headset using the official installer's Steam Deck mode, then managing apps and dotfiles declaratively with standalone Home Manager, including launcher integration, system files on SteamOS's immutable root, Tailscale, and the Frametop desktop.
9 min · 2,004 words
An essay comparing commodity and engineering plastics to literary character types—why “polymer” is often marketing spin, and how chemistry shapes toughness, clarity, heat tolerance, and reputation.
7 min · 1,565 words
Why My Asus Laptop Kept Rebooting After Sleep and How to Fix it
Ibrahim Diallo traces years of lost work on his Asus Zenbook Pro 17 to the MediaTek MT7922 Wi-Fi card crashing on resume from sleep, and shares the simple fix: stop the Wi-Fi device from entering its power-saving sleep mode.
3 min · 689 words
eth68: Ethernet Audio Interface for Linux
eth68 is an Ethernet audio interface for Linux: bare-metal STM32H7 firmware that emulates a netJACK1 master endpoint, aiming for low-latency networked audio without a traditional USB audio gadget.
8 min · 1,749 words
Jane Street reveals what its August ASIC reverse-engineering puzzle chip actually did, how solvers approached the GDS layout without a netlist, and lessons from the physical-design challenge.
10 min · 2,405 words
Surely you have ultra-wideband radios on your bins too?
Simon Green over-engineers bin-night reminders with UWB ranging tags, a Home Assistant anchor, OTA firmware, and tip-detection — a detailed build log of BinRange from experiment to production.
3 min · 684 words
MIT class project turns into an FDA-cleared treatment for tremors
What began as an MIT class project became an FDA-cleared treatment for tremors: the path from student prototype to regulated medical device, and what the team learned along the way.
6 min · 1,273 words
Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB
Cactus Compute releases Whistle, an on-device speech recognition model that fits in a single 16.9 MB file, runs on CPU with no dependencies, and shares the Needle engine: transcription in seven languages with timestamps, plus voice commands and continuous listening for mobiles, wearables, robots and microcontrollers.
4 min · 974 words
Phase LockA manifesto on brain-computer interfaces and preserving human agency in the age of AI.
Executive summary of Saturnin Pugnet's manifesto arguing that a bandwidth gap between human cognition and AI threatens human agency, and that brain-computer interfaces offer alignment-by-integration. He contends AI scaling laws will carry over to brain decoding, that consumer non-invasive BCI is the fastest path to scale, and that a Phase Lock Window to shape the outcome is open now.
4 min · 861 words
David Buchanan explores how C2PA content credentials handle time, and what it takes to forge or bend timestamps in the provenance chain.
4 min · 919 words
How Futhark’s compiler keeps sparse Jacobian graph-colouring work efficient on the CPU—why not every data-parallel kernel belongs on the GPU, and what that means for the language’s CPU backend.
7 min · 1,610 words
The forgetful CPU (Linux on M4)
A detailed write-up of first-booting Linux on an M4 Mac mini, covering CPU quirks, bring-up details, and the hardware surprises along the way.
7 min · 1,650 words
The Inner Ring tours Shimano’s bicycle museum in Sakai—history of components, racing artifacts, and how the brand presents its industrial and sporting story to visitors.
5 min · 1,171 words
Archiving The World's Oldest Webcam Feed
Hackaday covers Fog-Bank, Justin Earl’s multi-network scraper that preserves FogCam—the San Francisco State University webcam that has been uploading images since 1994—now holding hundreds of thousands of frames.
1 min · 249 words
CHOMPI portable sampler is now open-source
CHOMPI Sampler Reference Hub Open Source Intro to CHOMPI Open Source This is a discontinuation open-source release: a permanent source for the files and documentation related to CHOMPI. To customize it, clone the repo into your own GitHub. While we won’t be doing any more file updates, the CHOMPI Club will live on in the Chase Bliss Discord](https://discord.gg/q3KcumMcBB). Check out the CHOMPI Open Source channel to discuss the project, share what you make, and see what others have made on their
4 min · 876 words
SIGSALY: Churchill's Top Secret Hotline To The President
The Imperial War Museums explain SIGSALY, the scrambled voice system that let Churchill speak securely with Roosevelt from a hidden room in the Churchill War Rooms during the Second World War.
6 min · 1,269 words
Modal Clusters are generally available
Modal announces general availability of Modal Clusters: multi-node GPU clusters with RDMA networking, gang scheduled from its shared capacity pool and billed by the second, enabled with a single @modal.clustered decorator for distributed training, post-training and large-scale inference.
6 min · 1,277 words
Minions: A Dynamic and Distributed Virtual GPU Cloud Built on Idle Apple Silicon Devices
Apple Machine Learning Research paper presenting Minions, a dynamic, distributed virtual GPU cloud that aggregates idle Apple Silicon GPUs across macOS devices to run large-scale ML inference with fault tolerance and efficient resource use, without new GPU procurement.
1 min · 141 words
How Machines Learned Precision
Gary Linscott's illustrated history of how Industrial Revolution workshops learned to make accurate machines without accurate machines to copy. It follows Maudslay's screw-cutting lathe, the three-plate method for flat surfaces, straight edges and lead screws, and Joseph Whitworth's measuring machine that could detect a millionth of an inch, through to gauge blocks.
29 min · 6,560 words