The cameras at the front of Meta’s Quest VR headsets are off-limits to developers, but developer [Michael Gschwandtner] created a workaround (Linkedin post) and shared implementation details with a VR news site. The view isn’t a pure camera feed (it includes virtual and UI elements) but it’s a clever workaround. The demo shows object detection […]
With modern tools, you have to try very hard to do something stupid, because the tools (rightly) recognize you’re doing something stupid. [Andreas Karlsson] can speak to that first hand as he tried to get four billion if statements to compile. You may ask what state space requires four billion comparisons to evaluate? The answer […]
Data manipulation is at the heart of computation, and a system is said to be Turing-complete if it can be configured to manipulate data in a way that makes implementing arbitrary computation possible. [Keigo Oka] shared a proof that find and mkdir together are Turing-complete, which is to say, a system with only GNU’s find […]
Angry Birds, flash mobs, Russell Brand, fidget spinners. All of these were virtually unavoidable in the previous decade, and yet, like so many popular trends, have now largely faded into obscurity. But in a recent announcement, the developers of LightBurn have brought back a relic of the past that we thought was all but buried […]
We’ve all been stymied by a smart thermostat, coffee maker, or other device which would work fine on its own but ultimately seems to be worse off for having an Internet connection — so when something actually pulls off this feat it’s quite noteworthy. [James] has a powerful set of connected speakers and while they […]
The ps command is extremely useful when you want to get some quick information on active system processes (hence the name), especially followed by piping it into grep and kin for some filtering. One gotcha is of course that ps doesn’t run in the current shell process, but is forked off into its own process, […]
Anyone who’s ever had the pleasure of programming FPGAs knows that it’s a land of proprietary tools that almost require marriage level commitment to a specific platform to be effective. Symbiflow hopes to solve this by becoming the GCC of FPGAs. Rather than a tool built around a specific chip or architecture, Symbiflow will provide […]
When you think of the Unix and C revolution that grew out of Bell Labs, there are a few famous names. Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and Brian Kernighan come to mind. After all, the K in both K&R C and in AWK stand for Kernighan. While Kernighan is no stranger to book authorship — he’s […]
A fundamental truth about AI systems is that training the system with biased data creates biased results. This can be especially dangerous when the systems are being used to predict crime or select sentences for criminals, since they can hinge on unrelated traits such as race or gender to make determinations. A group of researchers […]
In a world with finite storage and an infinite need for more storage space, data compression becomes a very necessary problem. Several algorithms for data compression may be more familiar – Huffman coding, LZW compression – and some a bit more arcane. [Labunsky] decided to put to use his knowledge of steganography to create a […]