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THE ARCHITECTURE OF DROPBOX'S LOAD BALANCING SERVICE

Dropbox's Robinhood load balancing service improved its hardware utilization, reducing fleet sizes by 25% and saving millions annually. Robinhood operates by collecting load reports from services, using these reports to distribute traffic evenly across servers based on metrics like CPU utilization and geographic location. The performance indicators for Robinhood include max/avg ratio, p95/avg ratio, and p5/avg ratio.

WRITING SECURE GO CODE

It's easier to write secure Go code with tools for static code analysis, such as go vet, staticcheck, and golangci-lint, which help identify potential security issues and improve code quality. This article covers the use of govulncheck for scanning code and binaries for known vulnerabilities and introduces fuzzing as a method for automatically testing code with randomly generated inputs.

THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAYS TO IMPROVE CORE WEB VITALS

Better Core Web Vitals mean better web page user experiences. To improve Core Web Vitals, focus on breaking up long tasks, minimizing JavaScript, and optimizing rendering to improve Interaction to Next Paint (INP). Images should be preloaded and a CDN should be used where possible to reduce Time to First Byte.

I'VE HAD A CHANGE OF HEART REGARDING EMPLOYEE METRICS

Tools designed to track individual work output initially may have been predicted to identify "slackers" but they aren't a good gauge for productivity. Instead, managers should take responsibility for their own teams' performance.

PLEASE JUST STOP SAYING "JUST"

Using the word "just" in software engineering discussions can be detrimental. This is because "just" implies simplicity, which is very often not the case when building software.

GET ME OUT OF DATA HELL

This author worked in a data warehouse platform he calls the "Pain Zone." It had poorly designed code, illogical data structures, and a culture that prioritizes speed over quality. After deciding to resign, he decided that he prefers places that respect good code and craftmanship over speed.

DIAGRAMS

Diagrams is a Python library that allows you to draw cloud system architecture diagrams in code. It's designed for prototyping new architectures and visualizing existing ones. Diagrams supports major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes, along with on-premise nodes, SaaS services, and popular programming frameworks.

HTML TO REACT & FIGMA

This is a Chrome extension that allows users to convert any webpage or section into React code or an editable Figma design. It can be used to quickly grab designs for inspiration, import existing designs to work from, and use AI to customize them.

BENCHMARKING RUBY PARSERS

Prism is a new Ruby parser that is much faster than other parsers. It's tested against other parsers like RubyParser, Ripper, and the Parser gem in different scenarios like parsing and walking the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) and parsing directly to C structs. Prism is more than 10 times faster than the Parser gem and RubyParser when parsing and walking the AST, and it is 2.56 times faster than the traditional parse.y when parsing to C structs.

ANTHROPIC HIKES THE PRICE OF ITS HAIKU MODEL

Anthropic has released Claude 3.5 Haiku, which surpasses its predecessor in performance on various benchmarks. The company has decided to increase the price of the model fourfold from Claude 3 Haiku due to its increased intelligence.

REWRITE IT IN RAILS

This developer tried to rewrite a Rails application he was working on in Rust and Svelte. This effort failed due to the complexity and the lack of immediate user benefits. After returning to Rails, he realized that while learning new tech is fun as a developer, it comes with significant trade-offs.

SHOPIFY COMPLETES REACT NATIVE MIGRATION

Shopify has completed migrating its mobile app to React Native, where 86% of its code is now shared between iOS and Android.

REASONS TO WRITE DESIGN DOCS

Writing design documents leads to better design, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and understanding the rationale behind decisions.

THE OVERLOOKED GENAI USE CASE

Data analytics and decision support are the most overlooked GenAI use cases.

DIFFERENTIATING ROUTER.PUSH() AND REDIRECT()

Use router.push() for client-side navigation triggered by events in client components and use redirect() for server-side redirects within server components, server functions, or route handlers.

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APPLE IS SNAPPING UP ONE OF THE BEST NON-ADOBE IMAGE EDITORS, PIXELMATOR

Apple is acquiring Pixelmator, a Lithuanian firm that makes popular Mac-based photo editing tools, pending regulatory approval. Regulatory approval may be an issue - several large companies have had to abandon deals due to opposition from EU regulators. It is unknown whether Apple intends to integrate Pixelmator's features into its own apps or allow the apps to remain separate standalone apps. Pixelmator Pro recently introduced a number of AI and ML tools for adjusting photos and creating masks, vector tools, and support for more RAW photo formats and other design tool files.

GOOGLE'S 'BIG SLEEP' AI PROJECT UNCOVERS REAL SOFTWARE VULNERABILITIES

Big Sleep is an AI agent designed to mimic the workflow of a human security researcher. It recently discovered a previously unknown and exploitable bug in SQLite. This may be the first public example of an AI agent finding a previously unknown exploitable memory-safety issue in widely used real-world software.

SPACEX WANTS TO TEST REFUELING STARSHIPS IN SPACE EARLY NEXT YEAR

SpaceX will attempt to transfer propellant from one orbiting Starship to another as early as next March. The capability will enable an uncrewed landing demonstration of a Starship on the moon. A crewed landing is currently scheduled for September 2026. SpaceX recently made history when it caught the Super Heavy rocket booster in mid-air using 'chopsticks' attached to the launch tower.

SEMAGLUTIDE SO EFFECTIVE AT TREATING ARTHRITIS THAT PATIENTS WERE “MORE OR LESS WERE TREATED OUT OF THE STUDY”

A trial testing semaglutide on patients with knee osteoarthritis conducted in 11 countries found that the drug was so effective at treating the condition the participants no longer needed treatment by the end of the experiment. The study involved 400 obese patients who experienced pain when walking. The patients who received the drug lost weight, felt significantly less pain, and experienced more ease of everyday mobility compared to patients who received a placebo. Many of the improvements were due to taking weight off the affected knees, but the researchers think that semaglutide's anti-inflammatory effects also played a role.

PG_FLO

pg_flo is a tool for moving and transforming data between PostgreSQL databases using logical replication. It features real-time data streaming, fast initial loads, powerful transformations, and flexible routing. pg_flo can be used for real-time data replication between PostgreSQL databases, ETL pipelines with data transformation, data re-routing, masking, and filtering, database migration with zero downtime, and event streaming from PostgreSQL.

CASH

Cash is a jQuery alternative for modern browsers that utilizes modern browser features. It provides a jQuery-style syntax for manipulating the DOM. Cash doesn't have full feature parity with jQuery, but it covers most day-to-day use cases.

WHAT IF A.I. IS ACTUALLY GOOD FOR HOLLYWOOD?

AI can be used to create films that were not possible just a few years ago. It can help create special effects that would otherwise require hundreds of VFX artists, tens of millions of dollars, and months of post-production work in just minutes. AI has the potential to disrupt many aspects of the film industry. This article takes a look at how some filmmakers are using AI to create movies and discusses the impact that AI will have on movie-making.

TOUCHSCREENS ARE OUT, AND TACTILE CONTROLS ARE BACK

Designers are reintroducing buttons to their products. This 're-buttonization' could be a response to everything becoming a touchscreen. People like physical buttons because they don't have to look at them and they offer a greater range of tactility and feedback. This article contains an interview with Rachel Plotnick, an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she discusses the history of buttons, the rise of touchscreens, the shift back to buttons and physical controls, and more.

THE BUDGET HAWK ATOP A TECH GIANT'S $64 BILLION SPENDING SPREE

Microsoft's finance team has been reviewing the progress of projects nearly daily, monitoring the status of chip orders, the construction of new data centers, and the development and sales of AI software.

INCENTIVE INFRASTRUCTURE

Positive incentives are hard to design but have long-lasting positive effects if done correctly.

C INTERMEDIATE LANGUAGE (CIL)

CIL facilitates program analysis and transformation by parsing and type-checking programs and compiling them into a simplified subset of C.

EARLY APPLE M4 PRO AND M4 MAX BENCHMARKS HINT AT A MASSIVE PERFORMANCE BOOST

The M4 Pro can smoothly outperform Mac Studio with the M2 Ultra.

LEAVING STRIPE

This post tells the story of one person's journey joining Stripe and working there for four years.

Y COMBINATOR APPLICATION GUIDE

This is a simple guide on how to build successful applications and avoid common pitfalls.

AMD'S NEW LANGUAGE MODELS

AMD used the OLMO codebase to train and release a language model trained on its accelerators.

OASIS BY ETCHED & DECART

Etched and Decart's Oasis is an AI model that generates open-world games frame-by-frame from user inputs, showcasing advanced physical understanding and real-time interaction. Oasis uses a Diffusion Transformer architecture optimized for the upcoming Sohu chip, enabling large-scale, low-latency 4K video models. The model, which integrates custom hardware for improved performance at scale, represents a shift towards interactive AI-generated content.

OPENAI WILL START USING AMD CHIPS AND COULD MAKE ITS OWN AI HARDWARE IN 2026

OpenAI is collaborating with Broadcom and TSMC to develop custom AI chips which are expected to begin production by 2026. Meanwhile, OpenAI is integrating AMD's MI300 chips into its Microsoft Azure infrastructure. Despite aligning with other tech giants on custom chip strategies, OpenAI remains behind Google, Microsoft, and Amazon in hardware development.

3D SCENE RECONSTRUCTION WITHOUT CAMERA POSE

NoPoSplat is a feed-forward model that can reconstruct 3D scenes from sparse, multi-view images without needing accurate camera poses.

IMPROVING LANGUAGE MODELS' REASONING

This study tackles a unique challenge in LLMs: how well they handle reasoning prompts that contain irrelevant or incorrect rationale snippets.

LONG-CONTEXT EVALUATION IN LANGUAGE MODELS

This study identifies a key flaw in using perplexity (PPL) to evaluate LLMs' long-context capabilities - PPL averages across all tokens and misses crucial ones needed for understanding extended inputs. To improve this, the authors introduce LongPPL, a metric that highlights these essential tokens for a clearer measure of long-context performance.

Learn about their 90-day pilot

FAST VS. SLOW THINKING IN LANGUAGE MODELS

This project explores how different "thinking" approaches — fast (concise) versus slow (detailed, like chain-of-thought reasoning) — impact layer-wise gradients and stability in LLMs.

3D OBJECT DETECTION USING ONLY 2D IMAGES

ImOV3D is a framework that advances open-vocabulary 3D object detection (OV-3Det) by leveraging 2D images to overcome the scarcity of 3D annotations.

REALISTIC MOTION IN TEXT-TO-VIDEO GENERATION

DEMO is a framework that separates text and conditioning into content and motion components. By using distinct encoders and conditioning for static content and dynamic motion, DEMO better interprets and generates motion from text prompts.

PROJECT SID

Project Sid shows civilizational progress, specialization, governance, and the invention and spread of memes and religion. These were made possible by Altera's new cognitive architecture: PIANO.

WE'RE FORKING FLUTTER. THIS IS WHY

Google's corporate focus shift to AI has deprioritized Flutter's desktop platforms, creating a labor shortage for this once rapidly expanding UI toolkit. In response, a fork named Flock is being developed to include essential bug fixes and features the Flutter team can't tackle, aiming to accelerate Flutter's growth through community involvement. Flock plans to improve contribution processes and streamline PR reviews, bridging the gap in support and development pace left by the main Flutter team.