Personal Software Lee Robinson Personal computers became mainstream in the 90s. Yet in a strange twist, the software they ended up running wasn’t very personal at all. Sure, you could bring the machine home, plug it in, and have your very own computer. But the programs inside—the operating systems,…

[CLIP: Theme music] Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. No matter what you believe, I’m willing to bet you’ve been feeling a lot of outrage lately. To me personally, it feels unavoidable: I can’t look down at my phone or glance up at a TV without seeing…

Julia Levy, Contributing Photographer “Introduction to Computing and Programming,” better known by its Harvard course code of “CS50,” will not be returning in fall 2025. One of Yale’s largest computer science courses, jointly taught with Harvard University, was canceled during a monthly faculty…

The MP3 format, once the gold standard for digital audio files, is now free. The licensing and patents on MP3 encoders have expired, meaning you can now include them in your applications without paying royalties. For software developers and audio enthusiasts, this might seem like a big deal. But,…

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. This edition is for everyone, but do consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support my work and to fully unlock all 170+ essays. You can also support my work by buying my book FLUKE: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters—coming soon…

Canon’s RF 100-300mm f/2.8 L IS USM takes a different approach, offering the flexibility of a zoom while maintaining the optical quality expected from a prime. The question is whether the trade-offs—extra size, weight, and price—are worth it. Coming to you from Jan Wegener, this thorough video puts…

I have 10,000 photos on my website. About 9,000 have no alt-text. I'm not proud of that, and it has bothered me for a long time. When I started my blog nearly 20 years ago, I didn't think much about alt-texts. Over time, I realized its importance for visually impaired users who rely on screen…

A bad seed? Meta torrented over 81.7TB of pirated books to train AI, authors say Meta's alleged torrenting and seeding of pirated books complicates copyright case. Ashley Belanger – Feb 6, 2025 4:26 pm | 1 Credit: Devonyu | iStock / Getty Images Plus Credit: Devonyu | iStock / Getty Images Plus…

I have had it write a number of ten-page papers for me, each of them outstanding. I think of the quality as comparable to having a good PhD-level research assistant, and sending that person away with a task for a week or two, or maybe more. Except Deep Research does the work in five or six minutes.…

This article describes the four main approaches to building reasoning models, or how we can enhance LLMs with reasoning capabilities. I hope this provides valuable insights and helps you navigate the rapidly evolving literature and hype surrounding this topic. In 2024, the LLM field saw increasing…

When we introduced GitHub Copilot back in 2021, we had a clear goal: to make developers’ lives easier with an AI pair programmer that helps them write better code. The name reflects our belief that artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t replacing the developer. Instead, it’s always on their side. And…

Donald Trump has repeatedly and flagrantly broken the law since reassuming the presidency. But the national media – whose mission is ostensibly to hold the powerful accountable – is treating it like the new normal. I’m not saying our top journalists are ignoring the story – we know about it, after…

Series: A Closer Look: Examining the News More in this series ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. On Jan. 10, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 123-page report on the 1921 racial massacre…

About Resources Toolkits Programs Blog Podcasts Bookstore Login/Register Search November 01, 1787 Image: Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. Gainsborough, Thomas. (1748) UK National Gallery. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/thomas-gainsborough-mr-and-mrs-andrews No study questions American Founding…

Subscriber-only Newsletter David French Feb. 6, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET By Opinion Columnist It is a mistake to think of the first two and a half weeks of President Trump’s second term as a series of discrete and separate constitutional and legal crises. It is one crisis, with many manifestations. Think…

Burned all my notebooks What good are notebooks? They won’t help me survive TALKING HEADS, “LIFE DURING WARTIME” The above lyric always makes me bristle because notebooks do help me survive. For 17 years, I’ve haphazardly recorded my experiences, dreams, ideas, and observations in black-and-white…

There are a handful of challenges that many developers like to tackle as something of a rite of passage to prove their coding worth. One is creating a compiler. That fundamental building block of many programming languages ​​​​translates the more human-understandable code into something a computer…

This fine looking new lens from Canon has aspirations that cross boundaries, being pitched at stills photographers, videographers, broadcast and cinema. It has a good solid focal length range that covers most eventualities, perhaps travel, landscape, street, reportage, close range sports,…

@audible Speed it up or slow it down? The decision is yours with Narration Speed. ♬ original sound - Audible To speed up or not speed up. Audiobook lovers are debating listening speeds on social media. Should you listen at regular speed or should you bump it up to two or even three times faster? In…

The Apache Kafka build system has evolved many times over the years. There has been a concerted effort to modernize the build in the past few months. After dozens of commits, many of conversations with the ASF Infrastructure team, and a lot of trial and error, Apache Kafka is now using GitHub…

Part Two: From sun therapy to divorcee singledom, and now, serenity… the history of The Standard Spa, Miami Beach on Belle Isle is anything but standard. Hey, time traveler. Following Part One, we’re going back again…in time, that is, so hop into our cozy time machine and journey with us. We’re…

Part One: From sun therapy to divorcee singledom, and now, serenity… the history of The Standard Spa, Miami Beach on Belle Isle is anything but standard. Miami Beach's very own The Standard has a singularly special magnetism. Sitting at the nexus of the past, present, and future, the history of…

Imagine you start a research company that swiftly, and largely unexpectedly, becomes a product-focused tech titan, with a controversial tool that finds itself being used by around 300 million people every week. The company’s value has exploded from around $29 billion in 2023, to $157 billion in late…

01 · A spreadsheet for exploring scenarios 2025 Feb 4 From calculating monthly budgets to planning dream vacations, spreadsheets are our trusted companions as we navigate life’s complex decisions—a playground for thinking, where possibilities come to life through numbers. Spreadsheets are…

Quiet Quitting: Why Employees Are Demanding Fairness and Boundaries getty The response to my recent article on why soft quitting at work could be more dangerous than quiet quitting has been overwhelming. Readers passionately shared their thoughts, frustrations, and personal experiences, sparking a…

The rapid spread of artificial intelligence has people wondering: who’s most likely to embrace AI in their daily lives? Many assume it’s the tech-savvy – those who understand how AI works – who are most eager to adopt it. Surprisingly, our new research (published in the Journal of Marketing) finds…

10 min read· Jan 28, 2018 -- As a consequence of scanning thousands of slides, I learned quite a bit about taking photos that capture a family’s life. Here’s a personal memoir, with a few lessons in taking memorable snapshots. My father was an avid amateur photographer. He loved to take pictures, he…

As someone who spent ~10 years working as a generalist investment analyst at various long/short hedge funds (including stints at Millennium and Balyasny), while also being something of a math and computer nerd who has been studying deep learning since 2010 (back when Geoff Hinton was still talking…

Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share…

castor In the Czech Republic, beavers built a dam in two days, which local authorities had planned for 7 years. The rodents have saved the administration $1.2 million. A project to restore water areas in the Brdy nature park had been under development since 2018. Over the years, the administration…

Beyond Good and Evil Directed by Liliana Cavani Biography, Drama 2h 7m Credit...The New York Times Archives See the article in its original context from May 18, 1984, Section C, Page 14Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.…

This may become a blog post or FAQ entry or something. For now, I'm just writing up something to answer the questions I've gotten about it! Rewriting a Language's Compiler in Itself Scratch-rewriting a code base in a different language is usually considered a risky move that often leads to failure.…

Shortly after midnight, a few hours after the horrifying collision between an airplane and a helicopter at Reagan National Airport, President Donald Trump felt the time was right for a shocked nation to hear his insights into the tragedy. “It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing,…