Entertainment

Software update bricks some Jeep 4xe hybrids over the weekend

Software update bricks some Jeep 4xe hybrids over the weekend

Owners of some Jeep Wrangler 4xe hybrids have been left stranded after installing an over-the-air software update this weekend. The automaker pushed out a telematics update for the Uconnect infotainment system that evidently wasn't ready, resulting in cars losing power while driving and then becoming stranded. Stranded Jeep owners have been detailing their experiences in forum and Reddit posts, as well as on YouTube. The buggy update doesn't appear to brick the car immediately. Instead, the failure appears to occur while driving—a far more serious problem. For some, this happened close to home and at low speed, but others claim…
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Prize in Economic Sciences 2025 – Popular information

Prize in Economic Sciences 2025 – Popular information

Navigate to: Summary- Joel Mokyr- Philippe Aghion- Peter Howitt Prize announcement Press release Popular information Advanced information Popular science background: From stagnation to sustained growth (pdf)Populärvetenskaplig information: Från stagnation till stadig tillväxt (pdf) From stagnation to sustained growth Over the past 200 years, the world has witnessed more economic growth than ever before. Its foundation is the constant flow of technological innovation; sustained economic growth occurs when new technologies replace old ones as part of the process known as creative destruction. This year’s laureates in economic sciences explain, using different methods, why this development was pos­sible and what is necessary…
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Two Paths to Memory Safety: CHERI and OMA in the Fight Against Cyber Threats

Two Paths to Memory Safety: CHERI and OMA in the Fight Against Cyber Threats

The last year has been brutal for businesses globally. Taking examples from my home country, the UK, the cost is over £1B and still rising, as well as the loss of at least one life due to cybercrime. These aren’t isolated incidents - they’re symptoms of a systemic vulnerability in how we build computer systems. According to the Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, credential abuse and exploitation of vulnerabilities continue to dominate as attack vectors, accounting for 22% and 20% of breaches respectively. The exploitation of vulnerabilities saw a 34% surge year-over-year, creating what Verizon describes as a “concerning…
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Matrices can be your Friends.

Matrices can be your Friends. By Steve Baker What stops most novice graphics programmers from getting friendly with matrices is that they look like 16 utterly random numbers. However, a little mental picture that I have seems to help most people to make sense of what's going on. Most programmers are visual thinkers and don't take kindly to piles of abstract math. Take an OpenGL matrix: float m [ 16 ] ; Consider this as a 4x4 array with it's elements laid out into four columns like this: m[0] m[4] m[ 8] m[12] m[1] m[5] m[ 9] m[13] m[2] m[6]…
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American Solar Farms

American Solar Farms

Last week, Jake Stid, a postdoctoral research associate at Michigan State University, announced Ground-Mounted Solar Energy in the United States (GM-SEUS). This is a 15K-array, 2.9M-panel dataset of utility and commercial-grade solar farms across the lower 48 states plus the District of Columbia. This dataset was constructed by a team of researchers including alumni from NOAA, NASA and the USGS. Below is a heatmap of the assets catalogued in this dataset. GM-SEUS is broken up into two datasets, one for arrays and another panels. Below you can see a solar farm with the array outlined in red and the panels…
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Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

Project documentation: pdfly.readthedocs.io pdfly is the youngest project of the py-pdf organization. It has been created by Martin Thoma in 2022. It's simply a CLI tool to manipulate PDF files, written in Python and based on the fpdf2 & pypdf libraries. I'm a maintainer of the project 🙂 What can … Project documentation: pdfly.readthedocs.io pdfly is the youngest project of the py-pdf organization. It has been created by Martin Thoma in 2022. It's simply a CLI tool to manipulate PDF files, written in Python and based on the fpdf2 & pypdf libraries. I'm a maintainer of the project 🙂 What…
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MAML

maml{ project: "MAML" tags: [ "minimal" "readable" ] # A simple nested object spec: { version: 1 author: "Anton Medvedev" } # Array of objects examples: [ { name: "JSON", born: 2001 } { name: "MAML", born: 2025 } ] notes: """ This is a multiline strings. Keeps formatting as-is. """ }Rationale ​JSON is the most popular data-interchange format. But it isn't a very good configuration language.MAML keeps JSON’s simplicity and adds only the needed bits for a good configuration language:CommentsMultiline stringsOptional commasOptional key quotesMAML is human-readable and easy to parse.What’s the difference between MAML and JSONC/JSON5?Why not Zig-style multiline?Implementations…
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An initial investigation into WDDM on ReactOS

An initial investigation into WDDM on ReactOS

The history of ReactOS spans a wider range than the lives of many of the people who work on it today. Incredible individuals have come and gone from the project with vastly different goals for what they want to see developed. In recent years, better hardware support has emerged as one of those goals. As ReactOS gazes towards the world of Vista and beyond, a few questions about how hardware works emerge. Vista introduced massive overhauls to how hardware drivers are written and maintained. Gradually we’re trying to handle many of these overhauls with great success. Today we talk about…
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Free Software hasn’t won

Free Software hasn’t won

This is a translated version of a talk I gave at P.I.W.O in June, with cleanups and adjustments for the blog form. …that doesn't sound right. I made the slides in Inkscape, on a computer running KDE and Linux, I use Firefox regularly. But maybe that's just me. What about you, are you using Free Software? Hands up! [hands go up in the audience] Of course! What nonsense, "Free Software hasn't won". Someone replaced my slides, hey conference staff! **Staff:** *The other folder.* [Browsing to a directory named "other folder", opening file called "your slides dimwit.pdf"] Now, those are finally…
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Introducing the Fastmail desktop app

Introducing the Fastmail desktop app

Fastmail is now available as a dedicated desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It’s the same Fastmail you know and love, now with the focus and convenience of a standalone app. With our desktop app you can: Launch Fastmail from your dock or taskbar and find it in your platform’s app switcher. Make Fastmail your default email client, so email links create a new message directly in Fastmail. Work whenever, wherever, with full offline support, just like our mobile apps. You can always read your mail, manage your calendar, and write replies — your changes sync back seamlessly when…
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