Because being a geek is a good thing

A 13th-century magical treatise promised to transmit all university knowledge through diagrams and prayers, without years of study. An essay from The Public Domain Review reconstructs its history, its condemnation by Thomas Aquinas, and its unexpected parallel with today’s promise of artificial intelligence.

ByteDance unveiled Seedance 2.5, its new video-with-audio generation model that doubles the maximum shot length to 30 seconds and adds multi-round extension, expanded multimodal referencing, and more precise editing. It’s already available on Jimeng AI and Doubao Pro, with API access announced for release soon through BytePlus ModelArk.

An open issue in the ripgrep repository documents a musl segfault that appears when searching trees with millions of files under high concurrency. The problem lives in mallocng, musl’s allocator, and has already been detected in the binary distributed by OpenAI Codex.

An interactive article from john.fun examines how the SCAN, LOOK, and Otis RSR elevator algorithms decide which cabin answers each call. The most striking finding: destination kiosks, despite having more information, tend to give worse wait times than traditional buttons.