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The article argues Franklin’s greatest freedom came from inventing alter egos. By writing as Silence Dogood, Polly Baker, Richard Saunders, Americanus, Benevolus, and Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, he could punch up authority, mock folly, and push progress without exposing his name. Saunders produced aphorisms in Poor Richard’s Almanack; Americanus and Benevolus debated taxation and policy; Polly Baker and Silence Dogood voiced women’s concerns; Ibrahim satirically defended slavery. Franklin’s self-fashioning complemented his inventions, such as the Gulf Stream chart that sped Atlantic travel.
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Artificial Analysis benchmarks on-device inference for small models (≤8 GB after quantization, 4-bit or smaller) using llama.cpp. In collaboration with Liquid AI, they measure real-device inference on mobile hardware (e.g., iPhone 17 Pro and Galaxy S26 Ultra). The Mobile Device Benchmark Set covers 23 of 39 models and reports End-to-End Generation Time, Peak Memory, Output Speed, and Token Efficiency, plus an Intelligence score via five evaluations (BFCL, IFBench, AA-Omniscience, GPQA Diamond, MATH-500). Context up to 16K tokens; methodology page available.
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Access to onenorth.com is blocked by Cloudflare's security; enable cookies. The block was triggered by unusual activity or malformed input. To resolve, contact the site owner with details of your action and the Cloudflare Ray ID (a330ce059fc1df82) and your IP. Cloudflare provides performance and security.
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Defragger is a Linux graphical defragmenter written in Rust and Qt/Kirigami. It analyzes fragmentation, shows an adaptive block map, and defragments ext4 and offline FAT16/FAT32 volumes. It does not shell out to existing CLI tools; it moves extents with the kernel's EXT4_IOC_MOVE_EXT and reads maps via FS_IOC_GETFSMAP/FS_IOC_FIEMAP. Privileged operations run through a PolicyKit helper, keeping the GUI unprivileged. Target: Linux with Qt 6/Kirigami; FAT support is offline. Alpha software—back up data. Build/run from source; MIT/Apache-2.0 licenses.
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CPython now officially supports RISC-V as a tier-3 platform. The milestone results from broad community work, real-hardware testing, and patches, with help from the RISE Project (machines and buildbots) and the Sovereign Tech Agency fellowship. Future work includes bringing RISC-V into CPython CI (RISE RISC-V Runners) and aiming for tier-2, plus architecture-specific optimizations. The author urges users with RISC-V hardware to build and test CPython and report issues to improve support across Python and its ecosystem.
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FreeCORE is an independent fork of TrueNAS CORE 13.3 rebased on FreeBSD 15, continuing CORE after upstream development ended. It descends from FreeNAS/TrueNAS CORE, built on FreeBSD and OpenZFS. FreeCORE 15.0-U1 is stable, with an in-place upgrade path from CORE 13.3 to 15.0. Install at freecore.org/install; downloads include FreeCORE-15.0-U1.iso and freecore-enroll.sh. Source on Codeberg and GitHub; report bugs and contact security. FreeCORE is not affiliated with iXsystems or the FreeBSD Foundation; trademarks noted.
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Bug blindness argues that many software flaws go unnoticed by most users because fans and teams misperceive quality; the author contrasts his bug-hunting knack with others' tendency to overlook issues. He describes strategies to cure quality blindness—pointing out bugs, dogfooding, and cultivating receptive critique—though progress depends on willingness to accept criticism. He offers anecdotes: search engines returning low-quality results (Kagi), forums misrepresenting reliability (Volvo), Blackboard’s dislike, Discourse’s performance cheating, and habitual user workarounds (Docs title delay, login glitches). He warns that coding agents ease shipping flawed software, but awareness and process can improve quality.
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Python signal handlers are scheduled to run later in a safe interpreter state, not inside the C handler. However, they are unexpectedly reentrant: another signal can arrive while a Python handler runs, causing reentry. The author tests printing from a signal handler and experiences a RuntimeError: reentrant call inside stdout, or crash under extreme conditions. Conclusion: calling non-trivial work (like print) in a signal handler is unsafe; rare in practice, but could crash; better to avoid work in handlers and just set a flag and handle later.
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Texas lawmakers approved a $1 annual auto-insurance fee in 2023 to curb catalytic converter theft. The Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority has steered at least $30 million of that fee to expand Flock license-plate readers, funding roughly 3,200 cameras (with DPS adding about 1,200 more) via grants to many departments. A new $3 million grant boosts tollway coverage. Abbott paused state funds for Flock grants. The money’s growth has sparked privacy and Fourth Amendment concerns, with critics citing misuse and broader surveillance, while some legislators push bans or warrants to curb data sharing.
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Finn is a small, grumpy agent that lives inside a router and only comments on what the router can see. It runs on OpenWrt-based hardware (GL.iNet GL-MT3000), monitors per-device traffic, presence, and network events, and reports unusual activity with themed, varied remarks. It uses a tiny local state and a capped number of API calls to OpenAI/Anthropic for replies and optional speech synthesis. It does not inspect traffic contents, greets known devices, and shares one Telegram contact. Setup requires a compatible router, a Telegram bot, an API key, and the install script. MIT licensed.
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John Law, Burning Man cofounder, argues the festival has sacrificed its anarchist soul for wealth and spectacle. It began as a small, egalitarian project in 1990, run by the Cacophony Society and Suicide Club with no owner or fixed ideology. In 1993, Desert Site Works collaborations added immersive installations, helping shape what Burning Man would become. As the internet era and Silicon Valley grew, attendance climbed to about 25,000 by 1999, and luxury, celebrity-driven camps and corporate PR followed. Law rejects a grand founding philosophy; today’s burn is a costly, top-down, celebrity-infused event rather than the original confederation of equals.
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Defrag98 is a free, browser-based Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter simulator. Pick a virtual drive (C–F) and watch fragmentation rearrange in real time with authentic hard-drive sounds. Drive sizes range 512 MB–2 GB, with slow to fast options. It’s a nostalgia-only simulator, runs offline as an installable web app, and never touches real files.
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Stolen Desire (1958) is Shohei Imamura’s brisk early film about an itinerant Yamamura theater troupe. The story centers on Kunida, a naïve stage manager, and his entanglements with Yamamura’s daughters, Chidori and Chigusa, as the troupe travels from Osaka to the countryside. Backstage sexuality and the vitality of sub-Kabuki theatre collide with financial pressures, mixing raucous comedy with darker undercurrents. Imamura framed Kunida as his younger self, exploring society’s outliers. Cast includes Hiroyuki Nagato and Ko Nishimura. It won a Blue Ribbon Award; U.S. release is unavailable; Blu-ray options exist; Radiance Films’ 2026 set planned.
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During a MySQL upgrade, adding an auto-increment primary key to table X and updating six related tables led to divergence between source and replica. Five tables were updated via statement-based replication and remained correct, but one table used row-based replication, copying the source’s generated IDs to the replica. Because table X had a different ID layout on the replica, its references pointed to wrong rows. MIXED binlog_format with AUTO_INCREMENT is unsafe for replication; be vigilant with replicas, as such issues can appear after upgrades.
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The author argues for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle enabled by space-age tools, criticizing big institutions, rules, and bureaucracy for eroding personal meaning. Degrowth fantasies of a simple past are acknowledged, but time cannot be reversed. Instead, we should RETVRN: reclaim a more personal life using technology to recreate tribes, direct relationships, and meaningful work, while treating personalization and guidelines as flexible aids, not immutable laws. Move forward by applying insights about community formation and balance between progress and individual meaning.
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NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch Aug. 30 to probe the cosmos, potentially changing our understanding of the universe. Modifying a decommissioned reconnaissance satellite, it will survey vast sky areas with Hubble-like sharpness but far faster, building large catalogs of stars, galaxies, and exoplanets. It aims to map the Milky Way in a month (vs. a century for Hubble) and detect planets via gravitational microlensing, including those inaccessible by other methods. Over a five-year mission, it could reveal new cosmology and unexpected discoveries, with data publicly accessible to students and researchers.
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Paolo Galeone laments that LLMs strip away the craft and learning-by-doing that used to fuel his software engineering. While AI speeds ideation and prototyping, it deprives him of the satisfaction of building, thinking deeply, and learning from mistakes. He worries about becoming bored, producing brittle code, and ceding learning to models that may train on his data. Corporate pressure to adopt LLMs risks technical debt and less savviness. He still enjoys local inference setup, but the piece reads as a frustrated reminder that the point of engineering is the journey, not just the outcome.
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Aptera announced a $44 million partnership with Launch Design to design and build its first solar electric vehicle. Launch becomes an early investor and gains stock warrants, while Aptera gains volume discounts and mass-production access. The deal enables scalable production: Launch will supply finished sub-assemblies to Carlsbad for final assembly, making Carlsbad a hub and reducing needs for long lines and large warehouses. Launch’s global supply chain should lower costs, helping Aptera reach target price points.
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Could not summarize article.
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