Tech News

A study cited by Seth Godin shows that search ads on marketplaces like Amazon don’t increase total sales, they only decide which seller gets each purchase. Here we explain the mechanism with code and examples.

In 1996, id Software tried to sell its entire catalog inside the Quake shareware CD-ROM through a phone unlock system. The GNOMON group cracked it in 39 days, and the company ended up with 150,000 unsold discs.

Bluesky’s iOS app swaps the Follow button for its butterfly logo the instant the system detects a screenshot. The mechanism, found in the app’s open source code, repurposes an iOS feature meant to hide passwords.

The CH32V003, a ten-cent RISC-V microcontroller, is at the center of a response from an embedded engineer in Trinidad and Tobago to the harshest article the architecture has received in years. The debate exposes a real tension between design elegance and hardware access outside the United States and Europe.

The NSF budget cut brought the agency’s funding down to nearly half for fiscal year 2026. The freed-up money is being redirected to a federal plan for artificial intelligence applied to science, while thousands of basic research grants are left without funding.

On iOS, no browser can bring its own ad-blocking engine: Apple requires everyone to use WebKit and its content blocker system. We look at how that API works in Firefox, its technical limits, and how to enable it right now.

A technical critique of RISC-V’s design, published by engineer Dmitry.GR, breaks down why the open ISA’s interrupt handling is more costly than that of a low-end ARM Cortex-M0 core. The analysis counts cycle by cycle how the lack of automatic register stacking forces developers to write assembly routines before reaching the C code.

Apple blocked an Irish developer over a name invented in 2009, while Nasdaq and DHL resolved the same restricted-list error within hours. The case exposes how automated name matching can trip up anyone with a common name.

Alibaba published Qwen3.8-27B-FP8 on Hugging Face, a 27-billion-parameter model with native FP8 quantization and reasoning effort control. We cover its chat template, how to use it with transformers, and its hardware limits.

A new artificial intelligence model identifies hidden signals in solar data that anticipate a flare with hours of lead time. The news, reported by Phys.org, adds to the wave of AI tools applied to space science. An early warning like this could change how satellites, airlines, and power grid operators prepare for space weather.