PaintCam Eve isn’t your typical home security device. It’s a home security webcam…armed with paintballs to shoot anyone it doesn’t recognize via it’s facial recognition features. No word on how it will handle animals, your delivery guy, or asking everyone coming to a dinner party to send facial recognition info to you. I’m sure I can think of lots of other ways in which this could go wrong.
One more step towards ED-209.
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Enjoy the background sounds and music of the classic Scooby Doo episodes? The Mystery Supply Company creates lots of looped backgrounds of those classic episodes. Great if you need some background ambience.
Improving code quality has become as, if not the, most important aspect of software. Bugs and security holes are exposing attack surfaces for personal data theft, infiltration, and ransomware. Google has been trying a number of approaches to improve things, and now they released a report on the effect of replacing memory unsafe languages with memory-safe languages.
Their approach stems from a number of somewhat obvious, but powerful observations. Memory vulnerabilities in a block of code decay quickly as it is tested in live conditions. In fact, they disappear exponentially with time as bugs are found and fixed. Therefore, the time when code is most likely to have the most memory safety issues is in brand new code.
It makes sense. As bugs are fixed, code becomes more and more bug-free (which is one of the big fallacies of the ‘lets scrap it and re-write all this messy code’ approaches). This also means that replacing old code with memory-safe languages actually doesn’t give you the best ROI. Instead, a team should focus on making sure the NEW code they add is in a memory-safe language to reduce the maximum amount of issues in the least amount of development time.
Google proved this out in their Android stack. By leaving the old code alone (just fixing bugs), they focused on just ensuring all NEW code was in a memory-safe language. This simple approach gave them a huge improvement in the number of memory vulnerabilities encountered each year:
Definitely worth a read
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Holy Saturday is a very quiet time in the church. There is no mass celebrated anywhere in the world. No sacraments are celebrated (except in danger of death). Catholic churches, for one day of the year, sit quite. Jesus lays in the tomb. To the world, he is dead. But tradition holds that Jesus is very much at work.
The Harrowing of Hell is the period of time between the death of Jesus on the cross at around 3pm on Good Friday and his resurrection sometime during the night on Sunday morning. Before Christ, everyone in the world is subject to death due to the disobedience of Adam and Evil that brought death into the world. Jesus was was able to redeem humanity by the sacrifice of himself. Jesus tells us that all who die to themselves and are buried in Christ by baptism and following his teachings will also find redemption in him as his friends at their death and rise on the last day.
On Good Friday when Jesus dies on the Cross, Christ triumphantly descends into death and tradition tells us he brought salvation to the dead held captive there since the beginning of the world.
There’s nothing explicit in the Bible about it. It’s inferred from a few passages (primarily 1 Peter 4:6 and parts of Ephesians 4) that Jesus descended into “Sheol” or “Hell” or “Hades”. Matthew tells us in Chapter 27 that right after Jesus’ death that:
⁵⁰Jesus cried out again in a loud voice, and gave up his spirit. ⁵¹ And behold, the veil of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked, rocks were split, ⁵² tombs were opened, and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised. ⁵³ And coming forth from their tombs after his resurrection, they entered the holy city and appeared to many.
While some might say it is “just tradition” and can be discarded, the Bible itself is a product of tradition and should not be considered a sole or separate source of authority—though we may regard it as the most important product of tradition. After all, most of the bible after the gospels are writings and traditions of the earliest Christians – including the apostles.
Lent is now half over, and we are rapidly approaching the events of Holy Week. In Jerusalem, Christians will start walking the paths Jesus trod in those last hours. They start with the Palm Sunday procession into the city. Pilgrims re-enact the triumphant entrance to the city – singing as they go.
There are videos online that follow the annual procession – such as the ones on Zahi Shaked‘s channel. They are definitely worth watching because physically seeing the locations gives you much more information about what was going on. All the happenings make more sense when you see the places along his path and see the vistas as sights as they did 2000 years ago.
Mark 11
1As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples, 2 saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and just as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. 3 If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here shortly.’”4 They went and found a colt outside in the street, tied at a doorway. As they untied it, 5 some people standing there asked, “What are you doing, untying that colt?” 6 They answered as Jesus had told them to, and the people let them go. 7 When they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks over it, he sat on it. 8 Many people spread their cloaks on the road, while others spread branches they had cut in the fields. 9 Those who went ahead and those who followed shouted,
“Hosanna!”
“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”
10 “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!”
“Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
11 Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the temple courts. He looked around at everything, but since it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the Twelve.
Today, the procession starts at Bethphage and then they go up the Mount of Olives past Pater Noster church. They then proceed down the Mount of Olives to cross the Kidron Valley. They stop at Dominus Flevit church where Jesus, with full view of Jerusalem, wept over their lack of faith and predicted the destruction of the city (which did occur only 35 years later after Passover in 70AD).
They pass the the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus would spend the last few hours of freedom before his arrest, and head up from the Kidron Valley to the Golden/Mercy Gate.
The processions today have to go slightly south to the Lion Gate because the Golden Gate is sealed closed with a large cemetery blocking the way. The Golden Gate/Gate of Mercy was long predicted to be the gate at which the messiah would enter they city. It has been sealed/unsealed many times during the centuries.
I found it interesting that the gate has two entrance passages. The two bays of the gate contain the Door of Mercy and the Door of Repentance. I think it’s no mistake that through mercy and repentance, you will enter the new kingdom of God into the heavenly Jerusalem.
When Christ comes in his glory at the end of time, he will come from the east. The Kidron valley was supposed to be where the nations will be judged outside the walls of the new Jerusalem.
Give the video a watch – and many others he has. There are videos from other years after covid restrictions were lifted.
When I was a kid, I imagined quicksand would be a much more common daily problem than it has turned out to be. Still, it appears some folks still actually do get stuck – though it is more mud than sand.
— Portland Fire & Rescue (@PDXFire) January 23, 2025
Love it or hate it, the McRib was back for a limited time after Thanksgiving. The sandwich classic has been a crowd favorite since its debut in the 1980s.
But if you can’t get enough of that saucy taste, you could buy a whole gallon of sauce at their website WholeLottaMcRibSauce.com for $19.99.
As expected from such a marketing promotion, when they went on sale at 10:00 ET on November 25 they sold out almost instantly. Jugs appear to be going for about $100 a piece on eBay.
You could then try out the Sam’s club imitation McRib.
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Silicon Valley loves to disrupt and innovation – mostly to make a lot of money. One of the more innovative ideas I’ve seen involves changing things for those with disabilities. Counter to modern thinking that illnesses and limitations are purely something to be blotted out, some brave innovative folks are tackling the problem and making everyone’s lives better. Not just those with disabilities.
One example is the success of OXO/Good Grips kitchen utensils that were created when his wife’s arthritis made them hurt her hands. Now they are popular with everyone for being easier to use.
Another is a set of restaurants called Dans Le Noir. I went to the one in Paris and have recommended it widely. At Dans, people have dinner completely in the dark – and the servers are blind people who are completely at home in the dark. They even teach you some of the techniques blind people use for dining.
Japan just recently had this restaurants called Dawn Avatar Robot Cafe (〒103-0023 Tokyo, Chuo City, Nihonbashihonchō, 3-chōme−8−3, Nihonbashi Lifescience Building, ３ １). The servers are all robots – but they are all controlled by people who have disabilities (often ALS). It allows them to have jobs, talk, and interact with people even if they cannot leave their homes.
These kinds of innovations are not just great for those with disabilities – but as in the case of OXO – improve the lives of able-bodied people as well.
This is why there is no such thing as a life is not worth living. We simply must value it higher than productivity and inconvenience.
Artificial intelligence has already been being used for chip design. During it’s first integrations, it generated a lot of acadmic controversy. Despite the early pushback from the entrenched chip design players, new developments are showing that AI silicon development is here to stay by dramatically speeding up design and creating better chips than traditional methods.
Most recently, we see that AI is revolutionizing wireless chip design. It is dramatically reducing costs by cutting design times from weeks to hours, and it’s also generating unconventional designs that are faster and have unexpected circuitry patterns that are significantly outperforming traditional chip designs. Even the researchers aren’t sure how they are so much better.
We are coming up with structures that are complex and look random shaped and when connected with circuits, they create previously unachievable performance. Humans cannot really understand them, but they can work better.
lead researcher Kaushik Sengupta
Circuits are engineered to be more energy-efficient or operable across wider frequencies. Conventional algorithms sometimes take weeks to solve the complex and opposing structures. Some combinations do not have traditional solutions. Yet, new AI methods are solving these structures in minutes – and even solving problems that have previously been impossible.
This work presents a compelling vision of the future. AI powers not just the acceleration of time-consuming electromagnetic simulations, but also enables exploration into a hitherto unexplored design space and delivers stunning high-performance devices that run counter to the usual rules of thumb and human intuition.
Uday Khankhoje – associate professor of electrical engineering at IIT Madras
They also have discovered that AI started generating complex electromagnetic structures that are co-designed with circuits to create broadband amplifiers in a unique discovery. Beyond discovering new patterns, these tools are also improving designer’s lives by removing the more mudane, utilitarian work.
The researchers note that like many AI algorithms – they aren’t perfect. The AI often hallucinates faulty elements that don’t work are very inefficient and require human intervention. But the time saved far outweighs the cost.
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Oasis is a free to play online Minecraft clone built by an Israeli AI startup called Decart in collaboration with Etched – a company that designs custom silicon to demonstrate hardware optimized transformer-based AI algorithms.
Minecraft clones aren’t anything new, but Oasis is. That’s because nobody programmed it. It is completely AI generated rendering – just like the realtime AI generated Doom clone I wrote about earlier. Everything is generated via realtime AI rendering via transformer based network trained to generate minecraft-like output. No gameplay was programmed.
Like a lot of generative AI, it has a tendency to hallucinate when you look at things you have looked at before (textures will change, blur, etc). It certainly won’t be replacing minecraft anytime soon, but these kinds of projects show how one might use AI to do proof-of-concept work.
Go play it for free yourself at oasis.decart.ai
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