PurpleMind goes over the Miller-Rabin Primality Test that can determine primes very quickly – but only with a non-100% probability. This test, combined with other prime principles, are how modern huge prime numbers are generated.
Ma Chunlin has completed an astounding 5 year project: he recorded the entire Everest north side route in a single take. It’s a breathtaking, astounding technical feat to say the least.
Articles:
Reddit user “loozerr” found that if you ask Copilot “is there a script to activate Windows 11,” Copilot will happily share a how-to guide that includes a script you can run to activate the OS.
Links:
High Yield does a great job of walking over the physical design of a modern CPU and connecting what they see with the known features.
Sometimes travel photos get to be sublime. Much better than most influencer photos, Roberta Mazzone captured a wonderful view from Venice’s iconic Hotel Danieli.
The picture gave me a lot of nostalgia of my last visit to Venice. I remember sitting and soaked in almost this same view from the Doge’s palace right nearby. Maybe that’s what’s great about photos like this – they help you recapture the elegance and experience you had when your own photos do not do it justice.
I think the idea of capturing an emotional moment of traveling is much lacking in our influencer/social-media oriented world. Influencer photos seem to be primarily focused on boisterously ‘bragging’ about being in a fabulous place, to give the impression their lives are more fabulous, or even to invoke jealousy. Add to this the lengths and insulting local behavior we read about influencers taking those photos – and it makes these pictures even worse.
Instead, why not capture that feeling of the last day or two of a great trip? Like loving all the things you did but longing to go back home to loved ones. Or the desire to sleep in your own bed again? Or the 3rd day in a new place when the language barrier makes you sit down and take a deep breath to re-collect yourself?
Those are travel photos I think could really make a statement we can relate to – but are much harder to take.
If you spend much time in Portland, you’ll hear lots of people claim the recent woes are ‘just like this everywhere’ and because of national policy. While nationwide macro policies do make a difference such as tariffs that are causing broad price increases, many other metrics do not.
Moody’s analysis indicates that Oregon is one of 22 states already in, or at high risk, of recession, while around 16 other states are actually experiencing expanding economies.
Recent data from Oregon’s labor market shows a recent very high spike of unemployment and under-employment.
Oregon’s unemployment rate has steadily climbed for 2 years – now up to 5.0%. The U-6 rate (under-employment rate which consists of full-time employees that have had to take part-time jobs or recently given up looking for work) is at 9.3% – the highest level since Covid.
Sean Cunningham, the director of Friday the 13th, is very vocal that Friday the 13th’s theme is not the one that many pundits and horror ‘experts’ have claimed – namely that “sinners must be punished”. They often cite the fact many of the teens that are engaging in sex or other activities die, while the one that did not survives. Instead, Cunningham saw the whole story as “bad things happening to good people for no apparent reason.” He also rejected Gene Siskel’s complaint that the film was “misogynistic”. Cunningham said the film is not meant to be sexist, and both males and females get punished equally in this movie.
John Carpenter was similarly dismissive when critics complained that Halloween was pushing an old testament puritanical sex-must-be-punished-by-death moral code on the audience. Debra Hill, his co-producer and screenwriter on the project said in response: “I think people are reading moral and sociological messages into a simple horror story that has no agenda to lecture the audience in any way.”
So, all those pundits and critics that say early horror movies were puritanical are just projecting their own interpretations on something that was never intended to be the case.
IBM has a good video on what vector databases are and how they’re used by AI systems.
Windows Developer does a decent job of covering different Windows UI frameworks such as WinUI, WPF, WinForms, .NET MAUI, Uno Platform, Avalonia, React Native, and Progressive Web Apps.
In this video from the Portland City Council, local Portland business owners describe the daily nightmares they deal with when running a business in 2025.
This is not hyperbole. It’s not ‘fake news’. It’s the real life stories told by local shop owners and workers getting guns and knives pulled on them, being assaulted, calling in people having serious mental health crises (screaming, stripping, masterbating, assaulting passerbys/employees, or standing nude in front of their shops) and the city police and services do nothing. Their shops experience regular break-ins they must pay for out of pocket, rampant shoplifting and violent confrontations, homeless campers right in front of their businesses that scare customers and employees, spending thousands out of pocket for emergency repairs, being dropped for insurance, cleaning up drug paraphernalia, vomit, human feces, and urine on a daily basis.
They report customer foot traffic dropping more than 50%. Workers are regularly threatened to the point the owners decide to close their downtown shops because they no longer could keep putting their workers in harms way. It’s probably why Portland now has one of the highest commercial vacancy rates in the country.
As someone that volunteers at a local public entity downtown in NW, I can confirm all of this is true. We had to deal with this on a DAILY basis. We often had to do twice daily sweeps around the building to clean up multiple piles of human feces, drug paraphrenia such as needles, foil, bloody bandages, etc. All of which are serious biohazards. Local “harm reduction” groups gave out free drug paraphernalia and open-air drug dealing was a daily morning ocurance – all within 100 feet of an elementary school. Even when filming drug dealers and submitting daily reports – police and harm reduction groups would not come by or do anything.
Children there would see open air drug use right outside the windows of their school – and it was all legalized by Measure 110. Calling cops or city services did nothing. Police response for dangerous individuals was upwards of an hour – if they came at all. Other city services would pander, victim blame, and ultimately never do anything. The problems have been going on for months to years now – with little end in sight.
The semi-repeal of Measure 110 helped – but Portland is still a deeply troubled city that I cannot recommend to anyone. This is especially true for anybody looking to start a local business.