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The Quest Begins (The "Why") I still remember the first time I faced a problem that asked for the sum of numbers in a sub‑array, over and over again, with updates sprinkled in between. It felt like I was stuck in a never‑ending loop of for i in range(l, r+1): total += arr[i] – O(n) per query, and with up to 10⁵ queries the solution timed out every single time. I was staring at the screen, thinking, “There has to be a smarter way to answer these range questions without scanning the whole array each time.” That moment was my dragon: a seemingly simple problem that kept biting me because I kept reaching for the brute‑force sword. I needed a data structure that could give me the answer in logarithmic time while still supporting point updates. Enter the segment tree – the tool that turned my O(n·q) nightmare into an O((n+q)·log n) victory. The Revelation (The Insight) So why does a segment tree work? Imagine you have an array and you want to know the sum of any interval [l, r] . If you could break that interval into a handful of pre‑computed chunks, you’d only need to add those chunk values together instead of touching every element. A segment tree is exactly that: a binary tree where each node stores the aggregate (sum, min, max, etc.) of a segment of the original array. The root covers the whole array [0, n‑1] . Its two children cover the left half and the right half, and this keeps splitting until the leaves represent single elements. The magic lies in two facts: Every node’s value is a function of its children. If you know the sum of the left child and the sum of the right child, the parent’s sum is just their addition. This means we can build the tree bottom‑up in O(n) time. Any interval can be represented as O(log n) disjoint nodes. When you walk down the tree to answer [l, r] , you either take a whole node (if its segment lies completely inside the query) or you recurse further. Because the tree’s height is log₂n, you’ll visit at most 2·log₂n nodes. Thus, building

Book: Decoupled PHP — Clean and Hexagonal Architecture for Applications That Outlive the Framework Also by me: Thinking in Go (2-book series) — Complete Guide to Go Programming + Hexagonal Architecture in Go My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools Me: xgabriel.com | GitHub You have two copies of the same rules. One lives in a StoreUserRequest on the server. The other lives in a Zod schema, or a Yup object, or a pile of required attributes, on the front end. They started identical. Then someone bumped the password minimum from 8 to 12 on the backend and forgot the client. Now the form says the password is fine, the user clicks submit, and a 422 bounces back with an error the UI never predicted. That drift is the whole reason live client-side validation is annoying to maintain. You are keeping two rulesets in sync by hand, and the sync breaks quietly. Laravel Precognition removes the second copy. The front end asks the server "would this pass?" before the user submits, and the server answers using the exact same validation rules the real request will run. What a precognitive request actually is A precognitive request is a normal HTTP request to your real endpoint, tagged with a Precognition: true header. Laravel sees the header, runs the route's middleware and validation, and then stops before your controller does any real work. It never writes a row. It never sends an email. It runs the rules and returns the verdict. Success comes back as 204 No Content with a Precognition-Success: true header. Failure comes back as a normal 422 with the same JSON error bag your form submit would produce. Same rules, same messages, same field names. There is no second schema to drift. The lifecycle is worth holding in your head: Front end sends the form state to the real URL with Precognition: true . Middleware runs. FormRequest validation runs. Laravel short-circuits: your controller body never executes. Response is

Mozilla shut down the well-loved read-it-later Pocket app last year, and now Meta is launching an app called Pocket with an entirely different, AI-focused pitch: this new app lets you make and share little interactive "gizmos" built from an AI prompt, as reported by Business Insider. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is all in on AI […]

“We have more people voting on the ‘Love Island USA’ app than we do in many political elections taking place across the country,” says the show's executive producer.

IQM, a full-stack quantum company out of Finland, went public on the Nasdaq today at a valuation of about $1.9 billion.

Just for kicks, I took a look at Jersey Mike's IPO documents. Surely a sandwich shop would have no need to mention AI. But lo and behold.

The discovery underscores the increased effort being poured into Mac infostealers.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said today it worked with industry partners to seize hundreds of domains associated with NetNut, a sprawling residential proxy service operated by the publicly-traded Israeli company Alarum Technologies [NASDAQ: ALAR]. The action comes roughly two weeks after KrebsOnSecurity published findings from multiple security firms connecting NetNut to the Popa botnet, a collection of at least two million devices that have been compromised by malicious software with little or no consent from victims.

AI has made it a lot harder for tech companies like Amazon and Google to deliver on their net-zero pledges.

Meta has quietly launched Pocket, an experimental AI app that lets users generate and share interactive mini games using text prompts.

TL;DR: Most extensions block Google's AI Overviews by hiding the panel with a content script after it renders — fragile, flickery, and always a step behind Google's markup changes. A better approach: force udm=14 at the network layer with declarativeNetRequest , so the AI Overview never loads. The content script becomes a backstop, not the main mechanism. One Chrome API mystery — AI Mode being invisible to four different extension APIs — shows why the DOM was never the right layer. Google puts an AI Overview at the top of most search results now, and a lot of people would rather it didn't. So there's a whole shelf of Chrome extensions that remove it. Almost all of them work the same way, and I think that way is a mistake. The obvious approach, and why it's a trap The default move is DOM-hiding: inject a content script, wait for the AI Overview panel to render, find it by class name or attribute, and set display: none . It's the first thing anyone reaches for, and it works — until it doesn't. The problems are all baked into the approach. You're reacting after the render, so there's a flash of AI content before your script catches it. You're matching against Google's markup, which is obfuscated and reshuffled constantly, so every layout change is a silent breakage. And you're paying for DOM churn on a page you don't control. You end up in a permanent game of catch-up against a page that changes whenever Google feels like it. The deeper issue is that you're operating one layer too high. The panel is a symptom . By the time it's in the DOM, the work is already done — the server decided to send it, the page rendered it, and now you're scrambling to un-render it. If you can move the decision earlier, none of that scramble has to happen. The thesis: prevent it at the network layer Google Search takes a parameter, udm , that selects which result vertical you get. udm=14 is the plain "Web" results view — the classic list of links, no AI Overview, no AI Mode. It's Google's ow

Hopper will pay $35 million to settle FTC allegations that it used deceptive “dark patterns” to hide fees and mislead travelers about the cost and benefits of services.

Everyone reads the Hugging Face trending page in a browser. Almost nobody knows the whole Hub sits behind a plain JSON API with no key, no login, and cursor pagination. If you want a weekly report of what the AI community is actually adopting, you can build it with fetch . The endpoints GET https://huggingface.co/api/models GET https://huggingface.co/api/datasets GET https://huggingface.co/api/spaces Useful parameters, same across all three: sort ranks results: trendingScore , downloads , likes , createdAt , lastModified direction=-1 for descending search matches names, author restricts to one org like meta-llama filter matches Hub tags: text-generation , license:mit , even arxiv:2606.23050 limit up to 100 per page So the top trending models right now: https://huggingface.co/api/models?sort=trendingScore&direction=-1&limit=100 trendingScore is the interesting one. Downloads and likes rank all time popularity, which is dominated by the same old models. Trending score is Hugging Face's own measure of current momentum, and it moves daily. Today it puts a four day old OCR model from Baidu at the top, which no downloads sort would surface for weeks. Slim payloads with expand By default the models endpoint returns a siblings array listing every file in the repo, which bloats a 100 item page. Ask for exactly the fields you want instead: const fields = [ ' downloads ' , ' likes ' , ' trendingScore ' , ' pipeline_tag ' , ' tags ' , ' createdAt ' ]; const params = new URLSearchParams ({ sort : ' trendingScore ' , direction : ' -1 ' , limit : ' 100 ' }); for ( const f of fields ) params . append ( ' expand[] ' , f ); const res = await fetch ( `https://huggingface.co/api/models? ${ params } ` ); const models = await res . json (); Pagination is a Link header There is no page parameter. Each response carries a Link header with a cursor for the next page, GitHub style: function nextUrl ( res ) { const m = ( res . headers . get ( ' link ' ) || '' ). match ( /< ([^ > ] + ) >; \s *r

Not long ago I wrote about how I built a browser-based board game called "Growing City" in three days using AI — and how the hardest part wasn't the code at all. Some time has passed, and I wanted to share what happened next. Layout Bugs While vibe-coding solo, I only tested on my own screen, resolution, and browser. The problem surfaced as soon as real users joined with different setups: some people saw everything misaligned, some things got clipped, some cards overlapped each other. This is how it looked on some screens I had to rewrite the layout to use adaptive sizing so the game looks correct regardless of screen resolution. It should work now — but if something still looks off on your end, let me know and I'll fix it. Bots Started Talking Another change, unrelated to bugs. The service started feeling more alive. Previously, bots just played: rolled dice, bought cards, said nothing. Now they react in the chat to what's happening in the game — if someone's building gets taken, if someone buys an expensive card or runs out of money. It's a small thing, but the game feels noticeably more lively. An empty game with silent bots versus a session where someone's commenting on what's happening in chat — it's a meaningfully different experience, even though the game itself is the same. Thank You to Early Players A special thanks to everyone who tried the game after my first article. And extra thanks to a user with the nickname SHAM, who pointed out that the game rules never said you can't buy multiple purple cards in a row — even though the game itself has that restriction. Fixed! What's Next The project is still going. I'm thinking about ads and other ways to bring in players. Without new users, it's hard to get feedback — and without feedback, it's hard to know what to fix or improve first. The unit economics don't quite work out yet: paid acquisition costs more than I'm willing to invest at this stage. I'll keep figuring it out. If you have ideas on how to find playe

Here's the thing: i Cut My LLM Bill 40x and Rewrote Nothing: A CTO's Migration Story Six months ago my CFO slid a single line item across the table. OpenAI: $4,800 for the month. I'd like to say I was surprised, but I'd been watching the number climb for two quarters. What actually surprised me was how little it took to bring that number down to under $200 without anyone on my engineering team writing new code, without a single regression, and without telling my customers anything had changed. This is the story of how we did it, what we evaluated, what broke, and what I'd tell any other CTO walking into the same conversation with their finance lead. The Real Cost of Vendor Lock-In I've been a CTO long enough to recognize the pattern. You pick a vendor. The vendor becomes the default. Procurement assumes you're locked. Your engineers build abstractions around their quirks. Six months later nobody can tell you what it would actually cost to switch because the switching cost has become invisible. It's just "how we do things." OpenAI was that vendor for us. GPT-4o handled our summarization pipeline, our customer support copilot, and a few internal tools I'd hacked together on a Saturday. We were paying $2.50 per million input tokens and $10.00 per million output tokens. At our volume, those numbers add up faster than you'd think because the output side balloons in conversational workloads. Here's the arithmetic that should scare every CTO: at $10/M output, every million tokens of generated text costs a dime on the dollar. If your product generates a 1,000-token response for 100,000 users a day, that's 100 million tokens a day, which is $1,000 a day in output alone. That's $30,000 a month. Just for one feature. The 40x claim I keep seeing isn't marketing spin. DeepSeek V4 Flash charges $0.18/M input and $0.25/M output. Do that math against GPT-4o and the comparison is brutal. Multiply your current OpenAI output spend by 0.025 and you'll get the rough number you'd pay for

The news comes about a week after OpenAI announced its own custom AI chip in a partnership with Broadcom.

One of Kalshi’s most prominent traders tells WIRED he’s swearing off Spotify-related markets until the issue is resolved.

Laptop chargers are much easier to travel with these days, and there's one specific technology that is largely to thank.

When looking for a Property Management System (PMS) dashboard for a hotel project, I noticed most existing solutions look like they were built in 1998. I decided to code a modern, premium dashboard from scratch using pure HTML and vanilla CSS. I focused on two main design trends: Dark Mode and Glassmorphism. Here is a breakdown of how I approached the design, along with some CSS snippets you can use in your own projects. The Dark Mode Color Palette Instead of using pure black (#000000), I used a deep slate blue for the background. This reduces eye strain for hotel staff working night shifts and feels much more premium. `css :root { --bg-dark: #0f172a; /* Deep slate / --surface-dark: #1e293b; / Slightly lighter surface / --accent-gold: #facc15; / Premium gold for CTAs */ --text-main: #f8fafc; } body { background-color: var(--bg-dark); color: var(--text-main); }` The Glassmorphism Effect For the statistics cards (like Revenue and Occupancy Rate), I used a subtle glass effect to make them pop off the dark background without looking flat. `css .stat-card { background: rgba(30, 41, 59, 0.7); backdrop-filter: blur(12px); -webkit-backdrop-filter: blur(12px); border: 1px solid rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.08); border-radius: 16px; padding: 24px; transition: transform 0.3s ease; } .stat-card:hover { transform: translateY(-5px); }` The Result By combining these modern design tokens with a clean CSS Grid layout, the dashboard feels incredibly sleek. It tracks live bookings, room statuses, and RevPAR seamlessly. Want the full code? If you are a developer, agency, or freelancer building a SaaS or a booking system, you don't have to start from scratch. I've packaged the complete, fully responsive HTML/CSS template. You can see the design and grab the source code here to save yourself 20 hours of coding: 👉 Download the Lumina PMS Template Happy coding! Let me know if you have any questions about the CSS architecture in the comments.

Every sprint starts with optimism. The board is clean, the story points are perfectly balanced, and the team is ready to ship. Then, Tuesday happens. The CEO wants a "quick favor." A major client finds a critical bug in production. The marketing team urgently needs a landing page tweak. By Thursday, your pristine sprint board is buried under a mountain of "urgent" tickets that were never discussed in planning. This is Unplanned Work , and it is the silent killer of engineering velocity. Why Unplanned Work is So Dangerous It’s not just that unplanned work takes time. The real damage comes from context switching . When a developer is deeply focused on building a new feature, forcing them to stop, spin up a local environment for a different repository, debug a legacy issue, and then try to return to their original task destroys their flow state. A "10-minute quick fix" actually costs the company an hour of lost productivity. When this happens multiple times a week: Deadlines Slip: The tasks you actually committed to get pushed back. Burnout Increases: Developers feel like they are working hard but accomplishing nothing. Trust Erodes: Management wonders why the team can't stick to a timeline. How to Protect Your Team You cannot eliminate unplanned work completely. Bugs will happen, and production will break. But you can manage it. 1. The "Firefighter" Rotation Instead of letting unplanned work disrupt the entire team, assign one developer per sprint to be the "Firefighter" (or Batman/Support). Their only job for that sprint is to handle urgent bugs, ad-hoc requests, and unblock others. The rest of the team is completely shielded. 2. The 20% Buffer Rule If you have 100 hours of developer capacity, never plan 100 hours of feature work. Always leave a 20% buffer specifically for unplanned tasks. If no fires start, you can pull from the backlog. If fires do start, your deadline isn't destroyed. 3. Track the "Ghost" Tickets The worst kind of unplanned work is the kind that h