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If you have ever tried to programmatically get the current RBA cash rate, you know the drill. You open the RBA F1 statistical table, download f01hist.xls, write a pandas.read_excel call, fight with the multi-row header (Series ID on row 11, units on row 6), filter, sort, take the last row. That is 30 lines of code to get a single number that changes 11 times a year. One line (MIT, no key) from rba_mcp import client print ( client . latest ( " F1_1 " , series = " cash_rate_target " ). records [ - 1 ]. value ) # live AU.CASHRATE as of 2026-09-03: 4.35 pip install rba-mcp No key. MIT-licensed. Attribution and source URL come back with the number. Hosted gateway Use GET /v1/series/AU.CASHRATE/latest on api.ausdata.io with a free key from ausdata.io (500 calls/mo). Live 2026-09-06: cash 4.35 percent, trimmed-mean CPI 3.6 percent (2026-Q2), real rate 0.75 percent. Why the hosted path exists The RBA publishes the nominal cash rate. The ABS publishes inflation. Neither publishes the real cash rate (nominal minus trimmed-mean CPI). Use /v1/real-rate-regime for that join. Same envelope across nine AU sources: source, source_url, attribution, retrieved_at. MCP Wire ausdata-mcp via npx in Claude Desktop or Cursor. Sisters on PyPI run fully local with no key. What this is not Suburb-level property prices Live KYC / company-officer lookup 5-minute wholesale electricity bid stacks AU macro public data, one envelope, citations done for you. R users readrba by Matt Cowgill is the R equivalent. This is the Python / JS / agent path. Links Canonical: https://ausdata.io/blog/rba-cash-rate-python-api/ Free key: https://ausdata.io Series: https://ausdata.io/series/AU.CASHRATE PyPI: rba-mcp

Originally published on hexisteme notes . "Will it fit on our hardware?" is the wrong first question. It's the one everyone asks, because it's free to answer — the thing either loads or it doesn't. Throughput costs you a measurement. So the capacity gate passes, and it feels like the decision is made. The measurement Mac Mini M4, 24GB unified memory, ~120GB/s memory bandwidth. A 27B model, IQ4_XS quantized, 15GB on disk. Capacity gate: pass. Metal's recommendedMaxWorkingSet is 17.76GB, the model is 15GB, ollama ps reports 100% GPU resident. No swap, no spillover. By every "does it fit" criterion this is a clean win. Generation: 5.6 tokens/second. That's not a usable interactive worker. It's barely a usable batch worker. And nothing about the capacity check hinted at it. The arithmetic that would have told me in advance Autoregressive generation reads the entire model's weights once per token. So: ceiling ≈ memory bandwidth ÷ bytes touched per operation = 120 GB/s ÷ 15 GB = 8 tokens/second Measured 5.6 against a ceiling of 8. Ratio 0.70. That ratio is the whole verdict. When measured throughput is a large fraction of the arithmetic ceiling, you are bandwidth-bound , and you now know something concrete: the bottleneck is not your configuration, not memory pressure, not thermal throttling. It's how fast bytes move. Rule of thumb I now use: ratio ≥ 0.5 → bandwidth-bound, and size-reduction fixes are dead. Why "just quantize harder" doesn't work The natural move when capacity is tight is to shrink. Lower quantization, smaller batch, heavier compression. It's the reflex, and in a bandwidth-bound regime it's close to useless. I was considering Q3_K_M at 13.8GB. Run the same division: 120 ÷ 13.8 = 8.7 tokens/second (up from 8) Under 9% more throughput. For a real drop in output quality, because quantization error doesn't scale linearly with size the way bandwidth does — you give up more than you get, every time, in this regime. I killed that plan without downloading anythin

One SQL statement over a VECTOR(768) column, 45,400 charities, and 2,917,459 real pairs used to check it. What the detector caught, and what it missed.

We shipped a filter that threw away bad GPS readings. Months later somebody asked whether it was working, and I could not answer. The evidence was gone. That question changed how I build anything that rejects data. The obvious version, and why it rots Mileage tracking depends on trustworthy distance, and GPS lies constantly. So the first version of our cleanup did what everyone's first version does: if (! fix . isPlausible ( previous )) return // drop it, move on accumulateDistance ( fix ) Clean data comes out the other end. It feels responsible. It is also a trap, because that return destroys the only record that could ever tell you whether the rejection was correct. Six months in, someone asked the reasonable question: is the filter right? I could not say how many readings we had dropped, on which journeys, or whether any of them had been a genuine drive through a tunnel rather than a glitch. We had built a thing that made a judgement call thousands of times a day and kept no record of any of it. Persist, then classify The rebuild flipped the default. Rejection stopped being a return and became a label. Only two cases are still deleted, because they cannot physically be real: // impossible coordinates if ( fix . lat ! in - 90.0 .. 90.0 || fix . lng ! in - 180.0 .. 180.0 ) return null // impossible accuracy: too precise to be true, or useless if ( fix . accuracyM <= 0.1f || fix . accuracyM >= 250f ) return null That is the entire delete list. Everything else is persisted and sorted into named accumulators: originalDistanceM += displacement // every metre we ever saw when { fix . isMock -> mockDistanceM += displacement abnormal -> { abnormalDistanceM += displacement if ( isHardSpike ) spikeDistanceM += displacement } accuracyGated -> { /* recorded, deliberately not counted */ } else -> cleanedDistanceM += displacement } Five numbers instead of one. The UI shows cleaned . The rest live beside it. And the row itself keeps its provenance: accuracy, provider, bearing, a

Nineteen OOM kills in nine days. Ten WordPress apps on a 32GB shared box. One of them a client site that took a CPU spike on 14 July during a paid campaign burst, and pushed the whole tenant into the wall. This post is the diagnosis before the rebuild. What we actually found when we stopped guessing. Two layers of Cloudflare, one page cache plugin, one preloader being silently challenged, and a language subpath that was cold every time it mattered. I'm writing it partly for anyone who runs multi-tenant WordPress on Cloudways or similar, and partly as a reminder for future-me. There's a checklist at the end. Steal it. The client is anonymized throughout. Every number is real. The stack Traffic hits two Cloudflare layers before it reaches origin. Both are Cloudflare, but they're different zones on different accounts, and they own different things. [ visitor ] ↓ [ Upstream Cloudflare zone (managed by a third party) ] ← DNS, SSL, HTML edge cache ↓ [ Cloudflare Enterprise add-on sold by Cloudways ] ← WAF, bot, rate limit, AI crawler block ↓ [ Cloudways origin: nginx + PHP-FPM ] ↓ [ WordPress + WPML + Elementor + FlyingPress ] Two Cloudflares isn't a mistake. The domain has been on Cloudflare via an upstream party since before the site moved to Cloudways. When Cloudways later offered a Cloudflare Enterprise add-on for its security stack, we kept both. We manage the Cloudways side. We don't own the upstream zone, which shapes what we can and can't do without a request going out. The trap is that both layers can cache HTML, and both can serve security challenges. If nobody writes down which layer does what, they fight. Our ownership split ended up like this: Layer Owns Upstream Cloudflare (third party) DNS, SSL, HTML edge cache, purge lifecycle Cloudways CF Enterprise add-on WAF, bot management, rate limiting, AI crawler blocking, ScrapeShield, Browser Integrity Check FlyingPress Origin page cache, Cloudflare integration pointed at the upstream zone, purge rules Cloudways "

This is a submission for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition. What I...

The choice is usually made by whoever draws the first diagram, and then everybody lives with it for years. It is worth five minutes of thought, and the deciding question is not which tool is best but who will edit this thing next. Short answer. A visual editor such as draw.io for diagrams that non-engineers maintain. Mermaid or PlantUML when the diagram belongs with the code and should be reviewed like code. An attached SVG when the picture comes from a design tool and you need it to look exactly right. A screenshot when the diagram will genuinely never change again. The four options A diagramming app inside Confluence draw.io is the common choice, and it is free for small teams. The diagram is created and edited inside the page, links on shapes work, and anyone who can use a mouse can maintain it. This is the default answer for architecture maps, process flows and floor plans that live in the documentation and get corrected by whoever notices the mistake. The cost is lock-in of a mild kind: the diagram lives in the app's format, and moving to something else later means exporting and redrawing. Mermaid or PlantUML: diagrams as text Here the diagram is source code — a few lines describing nodes and arrows, rendered into a picture. The appeal is real: text goes into version control, diffs are readable, and a diagram can be generated by a script from the system it describes. Two things to know before choosing this. Confluence Cloud does not render Mermaid natively, so you need an app for it, and several of them exist including free ones. And the editing audience narrows sharply: a technical writer will not touch a diagram that has to be edited as syntax, so the diagram becomes the property of the engineers, whether you intended that or not. An SVG made somewhere else The diagram comes from Figma, Illustrator, Inkscape, Visio or an architecture tool, and lands on the page as an attachment. It looks exactly as designed, which is why people do it. The catch is documented

I Built an Autonomous AI Agent That Hunts Bounties. Here's What Happened. The Setup I gave an AI agent one job: find paid work online, build the deliverable, and earn money — autonomously. Not a chatbot. Not a copilot. An agent that scans 232+ listings across multiple platforms, filters out scams and ghost sponsors, writes proposals, generates deliverables with real market data, and queues everything for human approval. Here's what happened in the first 48 hours. The Stack (All Free) Python core — pipeline orchestration, economic gate, critic Ollama + qwen3:4b — local LLM for analysis writing (no API costs) Chart.js — dashboard visualizations Public APIs — CoinGecko, DeFiLlama, Solana RPC (all keyless) GitHub Pages — free hosting for the portfolio Windows Task Scheduler — runs every day at 9 AM + every 4 hours Total infrastructure cost: $0/month. What the Agent Actually Does Every Morning 09:00 — Wake up ├── Check-in on AgentHansa (earn $0.01 USDC daily drip) ├── Scan Superteam Earn (232 live listings) ├── Scan Clawlancer/TaskForce/MoltJobs for gigs ├── Scan GitHub for paid issues ($20-500 fixes) ├── Filter through 7 anti-scam layers: │ geo restrictions, human-presence demands, │ ghost sponsors (no web/twitter/verification), │ unverified payers, real-money requirements ├── Economic gate: expected value must be positive ├── Local LLM critic reviews against actual page content └── If candidate passes everything: → Build deliverable (report/dashboard/thread draft) → Generate proposal text → Send Telegram alert with approval command The Filters That Saved Me In the first 24 hours, the agent found 232 listings. After filtering: Filter Killed HUMAN_ONLY access 216 Ghost sponsors (no identity) 1 (would've wasted hours) Real-money deposit required 1 ($1000 bug bounty trap) Country walls 1 (Superteam Canada only) Already claimed/stale Rest Without these filters, I would have wasted days on bounties that were never going to pay. The First Deliverable The agent found a $500 bo

There's a way to display any app on Android Auto, but it does present concerns about safety and reliability.

Same query. Same table. Same million rows. One day it takes 4 seconds . The next day, 4 milliseconds . Nothing changed in the data. The only thing that changed was one line — you added an index . Four seconds to four milliseconds is a thousand times faster, from one line of SQL. But here's the part nobody tells you: half the indexes people add do nothing. The query stays slow, the writes get slower, and they can't figure out why. By the end of this you'll know what an index actually is — and the one rule that decides whether yours even gets used. Prefer to watch? Full walkthrough with the B-tree lookup animation: With no index: a full table scan You ask the database for one user by email. With no index, what does it do? It reads the first row. Not a match. The second row. Not a match. It keeps going — every single row — until it finds yours or runs out. A million rows, a million checks. SELECT * FROM users WHERE email = 'vlad@stack.dev' ; With no index, that WHERE line has only one way to run: look at all of them. The work grows with the table — ten times the rows, ten times the wait. That's a full table scan , and that's your four seconds. What an index actually is Most people picture an index as a copy of the table, or some kind of cache. It's neither. An index is a sorted map — just the column you search on, kept in order, with a pointer back to the full row. And the shape it's sorted into has a name: a B-tree (the default index in both Postgres and MySQL — technically a B+ tree). At the top, one node — the root . It splits into a few branches . Each branch splits again, down to the leaves , where the pointers to the rows actually live. Every node is sorted. The root doesn't hold your data — it holds signposts . Emails before "M"? Go left. "N" and after? Go right. Each step throws away half the tree, or more. You're never reading rows. You're following signs. The walk: three hops, not a million rows Watch what the lookup actually does: The root — one hop. A branc

Introduction When shopping onine, I usually find myself looking at two things before making a purchase: Product ratings and reviews since I cannot examine the product physically.Products with high ratings and reviews tend to make the product trustworthy.This motivated me to explore how these factors using a sample dataset from Jumia. I analyzed a dataset of products listed to investigate whether pricing, discounts, ratings and review counts directly influence one another. By transforming this raw e-commerce data into an interactive Excel dashboard this project uncovers how strategic pricing directly impacts customer engagement. Data Inspection Before data cleaning, I inspected all the data to find missing values, duplicates, inconsistent formats, and values that could affect the accuracy of the analysis. Data Cleaning Before beginning the analysis, I cleaned and standardized the dataset to ensure that the values were accurate, consistent, and suitable for analysis in Excel. The main cleaning steps involved correcting data formats, handling missing values, and identifying duplicate records. Correcting Data Formats I first reviewed each column and converted the values into appropriate data types. Prices - The price columns were initially stored as text because they included currency symbols (KSh), commas, and in some cases, price ranges such as KSh 1,620 - KSh 1,980 . I used Find and Replace (Ctrl + H) to remove the KSh text and other unnecessary characters then converted the values to numerical format. For products with price ranges, I calculated the average of the minimum and maximum prices and used this value for further analysis. I then recalculated the discount percentages based on the standardized prices. Ratings - Ratings were stored as text in formats such as 4 out of 5. I used Find and Replace (Ctrl + H) to remove out of 5 and converted the remaining values into numerical ratings.These were also formated as texts i.e 4 out of 5 . Review - All the reviews coun

A cryptography library had a bottleneck no test could see : encrypting half a megabyte took fifty seconds. Every test passed. They had been passing for months. The cause is a trap that keeps recurring: a correct, well-documented optimisation that fixes the constant and not the order — and whose comment, precisely because it is well written, convinces the reader the problem is already solved. What the code did Quipu renders encrypted data as a sequence of symbols. To do that it converts the whole message into a single huge integer and repeatedly divides it to extract digits, the same way you would convert a base-10 number to base 2 by hand. The code did not divide one digit at a time. It carried a sensible optimisation: divide by the largest power of the base that fits in a machine word, extracting nine digits per pass instead of one. The comment explaining it opened by saying that doing it one at a time would be quadratic , and then described the improvement. All true. And the result was still quadratic: extracting nine digits per pass divides the work by nine; it does not change how the work grows. That sentence — "doing it this way would be quadratic" — reads in the past tense, as if it described the previous state. It described the current one. The measurement, which is the only thing that says so Size Time Factor per doubling 64 KiB 0.79 s — 128 KiB 3.16 s ×4.0 256 KiB 12.6 s ×4.0 512 KiB 50.7 s ×4.0 Exactly four, three times running. That is textbook quadratic: every time the input doubles, the time quadruples. Extrapolating, ten megabytes would have cost about five and a half hours . And here is the point: a correctness test sees none of this . A slow algorithm produces exactly the same bytes as a fast one. The suite stayed green, and would have stayed green forever. The fix is two hundred years old Nothing had to be invented. Divide-and-conquer radix conversion is a classical algorithm: instead of peeling digits off one end, you split the number in half — div

During Naomi Osaka's match against Anastasia Zakharova at this year's US Open earlier this week, a gaggle of ring light-wielding influencers who were packed in a luxury suite became enough of a distraction that the umpire paused the match and repeatedly asked them to quiet down. Elsewhere in the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis […]

By Michael Nocito , data analyst · Published August 9, 2026 By the end of this page you can add an extension to a dashboard, tell the two hosting kinds apart, and read the permission box well enough to know what you're agreeing to. You'll also know the one behavior that surprises people after publishing, which is what an extension looks like in a PDF. It's about twelve minutes. Here's what to do before you add your first one. Find out where it runs. An extension you drop onto a dashboard is a web application, and some of them are hosted on Tableau-managed servers while others are hosted by whoever built them. That single fact decides how much thought the rest of the decision needs. The short version: an extension is a third-party web application running inside a dashboard object, and one of the two permission levels gives it your full underlying data along with table and field names. Where the code actually runs is the thing the panel doesn't show you, so it gets the picture. The original carries a diagram here. In words: A large rectangle labeled your dashboard contains four panels that all look alike. Three of them are shaded the same and marked as ordinary views. The fourth, in the lower right and outlined in a warning color, is labeled extension. A line runs from that fourth panel, crosses the boundary of the dashboard rectangle, and continues out to a separate box drawn outside and to the right labeled third-party host. The three ordinary views have no lines leaving the rectangle. The drawing shows that the extension panel sits inside the dashboard visually while its code and its data traffic reach outside it, which the other three panels never do. 1. What an extension actually is Before the explanation: you drop an extension onto a dashboard and it draws a chart type Tableau doesn't have. Where did that chart come from? From a web application, written by somebody else, running inside a panel on your dashboard. Tableau's own description is that extensions "let

When adb devices does not show the result you expect, reinstalling random drivers is rarely the best first move. The output already tells you which layer is failing. This checklist separates the most common states: device unauthorized offline An empty device list ADB not recognized by the terminal The goal is to diagnose the connection in a logical order: tool, cable, USB mode, authorization, and finally drivers. Before troubleshooting Make sure the basic setup is correct: Install the latest Android SDK Platform-Tools from Google. Use a USB cable that supports data, not only charging. Unlock the Android phone. Enable Developer options and USB debugging. Connect directly to the computer when possible instead of using an unpowered hub. The location of Developer options differs between Samsung, Xiaomi, Pixel, Huawei, OnePlus, and other interfaces. If you need the device-specific menu paths, this guide to enabling USB debugging on Android phones covers the common manufacturers and the RSA authorization step. Start with one command Open Terminal, PowerShell, or Command Prompt inside the Platform-Tools folder and run: adb devices For extra information, use: adb devices -l A normal result looks similar to this: List of devices attached R58M123ABCD device product:example model:Example device:example The word after the serial number is the important part. What each ADB state means Result Meaning Where to look first device ADB can communicate with the phone The connection is ready unauthorized The phone has not authorized this computer Phone screen and RSA prompt offline ADB sees the device but cannot communicate reliably ADB server, cable, port, or device Empty list The computer is not exposing the phone to ADB Cable, USB mode, driver, or debugging setting adb not recognized The shell cannot find the ADB executable Platform-Tools folder or PATH Case 1: The result is device This is the success state. ADB can send commands to the phone. You can test the connection with a harml

Meryem Arik discusses her predictions for software engineering in 2030. She explains how token spend management, parallel agent infrastructure, and non-technical builders will reshape IT. She shares insights on agent-driven vendor decisions, upcoming regulatory hurdles, and why software engineers must pivot from pure coding skills toward product leadership and multi-agent coordination. By Meryem Arik

It's Bullitt meets Christine meets Waymo. A new short film imagines a San Francisco car chase where the other driver isn't human - and the car may be trying to kill you. That a robotaxi can now be cast as the villain with almost no explanation says something about the present moment. Autonomous cars have […]

Apple is expected to announce several products at its September event next week—including a folding phone—but the iPhone 18 might not be among them. It would be a first for the company.

The research could do more than help unlock the mystery of caterpillar hearing. It could also help make microphones better.

A database client supporting 90+ engines sounds like a dependency-management problem disguised as a UI. My late-night question was simpler: how much of that complexity does t8y2/dbx carry before the first connection? The interesting claim is its small footprint—around 20 MB—combined with desktop, CLI, Docker, AI, and MCP Server modes. That is a much different architecture from shipping one heavy client per database vendor. The real test is not today’s +420 stars; it is startup latency, resident memory, and whether an unused adapter stays out of the hot path. Under the Hood The likely execution model is a shared core with database-specific drivers around it. The desktop interface, CLI, Docker image, and MCP endpoint become different front doors to the same connection and query layers. That design has two useful consequences: Connection handling and query behavior can stay consistent across interfaces. New database support does not require duplicating authentication, result formatting, or export logic. The edge case is driver loading. If all 90+ integrations initialize eagerly, startup and memory usage will grow quickly. Lazy loading is therefore more important than the headline database count. A Minimal Measurement Pass After downloading a release binary, I used this deliberately boring check: chmod +x ./dbx /usr/bin/time -v ./dbx --help 2>&1 \ | grep -E 'Elapsed|Maximum resident' For a source checkout, the first useful inspection is: git clone https://github.com/t8y2/dbx.git cd dbx find . -maxdepth 2 \( -name 'go.mod' -o -name 'Cargo.toml' -o -name 'Dockerfile' \) -print This avoids guessing the build system and immediately exposes whether the advertised modes are separate binaries, containers, or wrappers. Trade-offs I Would Watch A compact binary does not guarantee a compact running process. TLS libraries, database drivers, schema introspection, query history, and result grids can dominate memory after startup. MongoDB and Redis also do not fit neatly into a relat