Electric motor company YASA, acquired by Mercedes-Benz in 2021, is transitioning its breakthrough high-density axial-flux technology from exclusive hybrid supercars to mass-market performance vehicles. The company’s latest prototype motor generates a peak 750 kilowatts (1,005 horsepower) while weighing only 12.7 kilograms (27.9 pounds). This yields a power density of 59 kilowatts per kilogram, which the company claims is an unofficial world record and approximately three times the efficiency of current leading radial-flux designs, including those used by Tesla. Daimler is actively retrofitting a factory in Berlin to produce up to 100,000 of these compact, powerful motors annually for deployment in upcoming Mercedes-AMG electric vehicles, marking the first time this high-performance technology will be used in mass production.
JavaScript, which runs on an estimated 98.9 percent of all websites globally, is celebrating the 30th anniversary of its initial announcement. The programming language originated from a joint press release issued by Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems in May 1995, following an intensive 10-day sprint by Netscape engineer Brendan Eich who developed the foundational working prototype. Netscape intended the design to be a lightweight scripting tool that would appeal to web designers and non-professional programmers, allowing them to add interactive elements to webpages. JavaScript quickly grew past its browser origins and now consistently ranks among the most widely used languages in the world, powering mobile applications, server infrastructure, desktop software, and embedded systems.
> appeal to web designers and non-professional programmers
Similar to COBOL and SQL - designed to be "accessible" by oversimplifying things and ended up being more complicated to actually use than better tools.
Security researchers successfully compiled a database containing 3.5 billion active mobile phone numbers and associated personal information from WhatsApp by exploiting a major security flaw in the platform’s contact-discovery application service. The vulnerability, stemming from a critical lack of usage controls, allowed the team to check over 100 million potential numbers per hour from a single server without detection or throttling. The collected data included phone numbers, public “about” text, device information, and 77 million profile images from a test of US users. Following the responsible disclosure of this failure, the company added traffic-limiting safeguards to the service to prevent future bulk collection efforts.
Mice were trained to indicate the location of a visual grating stimulus, which appeared on the left or right with a prior probability alternating between 0.2 and 0.8 in blocks of variable length. We found that mice estimate this prior probability and thereby improve their decision accuracy. Furthermore, we report that this subjective prior is encoded in at least 20% to 30% of brain regions that, notably, span all levels of processing, from early sensory areas (the lateral geniculate nucleus and primary visual cortex) to motor regions (secondary and primary motor cortex and gigantocellular reticular nucleus) and high-level cortical regions (the dorsal anterior cingulate area and ventrolateral orbitofrontal cortex). This widespread representation of the prior is consistent with a neural model of Bayesian inference involving loops between areas, as opposed to a model in which the prior is incorporated only in decision-making areas. This study offers a brain-wide perspective on prior encoding at cellular resolution, underscoring the importance of using large-scale recordings on a single standardized task.
Rick Weiland and I (Bill Gates) wrote the 6502 BASIC.
I put the WAIT command in.
Mark Chamberlin and I wrote the 6800 BASIC.
Earlier in that blog post:
Now who wrote the 6502 version? The KIM-1 BASIC manual credits Gates, Allen and Davidoff, the original authors of the 8080 version, but it might only be left over from the manual for the 8080 version. Davidoff, who worked for Microsoft in the summers of 1975 and 1977, had not been there when BASIC 6502 was written in the summer of 1976, but he probably changed the 6 digit floating point code into the 9 digit version that is first found in BASIC 6502 1.1 (KIM-1, 1977).
The ROM of the 1977/1978 Ohio Superboard II Model 500/600 (6 digit BASIC 1.0) credits RICHARD W. WEILAND, and the 1977 9 digit KIM-1 BASIC 1.1 as well as the 1981 Atari Microsoft BASIC 2.7 credit “WEILAND & GATES”. Ric Weiland was the second Microsoft employee. These credits, again, were easter eggs: While they were clearly visible when looking at the ROM dump, they were only printed when the user entered “A” when BASIC asked for the memory size.
According to apple2history.org, Marc McDonald (employee number 1) wrote the 6502 version, but it is more likely that McDonald wrote the 6800 simulator and Weiland ported 8080 BASIC to the 6800 and then McDonald adapted the 6800 simulator to the 6502 and Weiland wrote the 6502 BASIC.
This and the hidden credits in version 1.0 of 6502 BASIC suggest that Weiland was the main author of 6502 BASIC. Gates is added to the hidden credits in the 1.1 version, so Gates probably contributed to the 1.1 update..
Is there not some way to route Mississippi's Bluesky traffic through a third party (Cloudflare?, etc.?) that can provide age verification and parental consent as a service, so that it doesn't require every individual online service to implement it separately?
A recent study published in Science demonstrates the potential of sequencing B and T cell receptors for diagnosing autoimmune conditions. The study, which analyzed data from nearly 600 individuals, utilized machine learning and A.I. models to identify patterns in B and T cell receptors associated with specific diseases. The results, with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.986, suggest that this approach could revolutionize autoimmune disease diagnosis, potentially replacing current expensive and time-consuming tests.
Interesting. The word "calendar" does not appear on the Apple Invites announcement webpage. Does it integrate with Calendar? If not, I'm not sure how well this will fit into my daily routine - I definitely need events to appear on my calendar, not (just) in a dedicated "Events" app.
There's a button at the top of the event page (after it's created) to add it to your calendar, but it's a bit strange that you even have to do that manually.
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