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This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on video games and physical media, follow Jay Peters. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started As a kid, I relished trips to […]

Monitoring is expensive and labor intensive. But it helps public health officials stop outbreaks.

A recent update made video playback the default for songs and podcasts with a visual component. If you just want to listen to music—and save your data and battery—follow these tips.

Keep your phone, laptop, handheld gaming console, and other electronics running with these travel-friendly power banks.

On July 19th, dozens of teams of high school students will begin a five-day, 630-mile road race from Fort Worth to Fort Stockton in Texas. But this is not your typical contest. The students design and build the cars themselves, using off-the-shelf parts and 3D printed materials. The winner is the team that accumulates the […]

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Google's AlphaEvolve reached general availability on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, turning the DeepMind research project into an evolutionary code optimization service. Evaluators run client-side so code never leaves the customer's infrastructure. Klarna doubled ML training throughput; practitioners note it only works where a measurable evaluation function exists. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

The Great Migration: Moving Beyond the SPA If you have been building in the React ecosystem recently, you've likely started with Vite. It’s fast, the Developer Experience (DX) is unparalleled, and it just works. However, as projects scale, the requirements often evolve. You suddenly need better SEO, faster First Contentful Paint (FCP), or sophisticated server-side logic without managing a separate backend. This is usually when the conversation turns to Next.js. While the migration seems straightforward on paper—it's all just React, right?—the reality involves a fundamental shift in how you think about routing, data fetching, and the browser lifecycle. Here is everything I wish I knew before I made the jump from Vite to Next.js. 1. Routing: From Configuration to Convention In a Vite project, you probably used react-router-dom . You defined a <Routes> component, listed your paths, and mapped them to components. It was explicit and centralized. Next.js (specifically the App Router) uses file-system routing. Every folder in your app directory represents a route segment. The Shift in Thinking Vite: You decide where files live; the router links them. Next.js: The folder structure is the URL structure. You will spend your first few hours moving About.tsx to about/page.tsx . It feels tedious at first, but it eliminates a massive category of "broken link" bugs and makes code-splitting automatic. 2. The "use client" Directive This is perhaps the biggest stumbling block for Vite developers. In Vite, every component is a client component—it runs in the browser. In Next.js, components are Server Components by default. If you try to use useState , useEffect , or browser APIs like window or localStorage in a default Next.js component, your build will crash. You must add the 'use client' directive at the top of the file. Pro-Tip: Don't just add 'use client' to everything. The goal is to keep as much logic as possible on the server to reduce the JavaScript bundle sent to the client.

Astronomers have discovered a rocky exoplanet that has an atmosphere and sits within the habitable zone of a solar system.

This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Smash Stories powered by Sentry . There is a version of this story where I walk you through the technical challenges in a clean, detached voice. Structured. Professional. Composed. This is not that version. Seven months. A hundred pages of documentation written alongside the code, not after it. A live system serving rural clinics in Delta State, Nigeria. And three bugs so specific and so cruel that each one felt designed to find the exact gap between what I thought I knew and what I actually knew. The Delta Health Information and Appointment Booking System was my final year project at the University of Port Harcourt. That sentence makes it sound smaller than it was. This was a real system for real clinics, serving patients who travel for hours to reach a healthcare facility only to find the clinic is full, the doctor is not in, or nobody told them their appointment was cancelled. These are not hypothetical users. These are people whose access to healthcare depends on whether the software works. That is a different kind of pressure than getting a good grade. And it did not start at deployment. Before a single line of code was written, I had to pitch the entire concept to my university supervisor, the Head of Department, the Faculty Dean, and an external examiner. The system had to be defensible not just technically but practically. It had to demonstrate that it solved a real problem that real people in Delta State were actually facing. I was presenting to people with decades of experience who would ask questions I had not thought of yet. That kind of scrutiny either sharpens you or breaks you. I chose to let it sharpen me. The stack was React.js, Node.js, PHP with Laravel, MySQL, AWS, and Docker. Communication channels included SMS gateways, WhatsApp Business API, and USSD because not every patient in rural Delta State has a smartphone. The system had to run on 2G connections, on entry-level Android phones with 2GB RAM

Written by Marlowe Finch, archival bloodhound at Bitcoin Institute. Bitcoin has been decentralized and trustless since block zero. No CEO, no committee, no kill switch, no single person who can rewrite the rules. That's the pitch. It's why the whitepaper still gets quoted like scripture. Block 74638 does not agree with the pitch. What actually shipped in that block On August 15, 2010, a transaction landed in the Bitcoin blockchain with two outputs. Each one paid out 92,233,720,368.54277039 BTC . Combined: over 184 billion BTC — roughly nine thousand times the 21 million BTC that will ever exist, created in a single transaction. The validation code, CheckTransaction() , checked that each individual output was non-negative. It never checked whether the sum of the outputs overflowed. Two values chosen just under INT64_MAX, added together, wrapped around to a negative number in signed 64-bit arithmetic. A 0.5 BTC input, compared against that negative sum, satisfied the "input covers output" check. The transaction validated. The block got mined. Every rule the network was running said this was fine. That's CVE-2010-5139. It is also, by any dollar value you want to apply, the most expensive missing bounds-check ever shipped to production. So who hand-builds a transaction engineered to overflow a signed 64-bit integer, and what does a currency with a hard 21-million-coin cap do when someone mints nine thousand times that in one block? The archive's full account of the incident lays it out block by block . The receipts 18:08 UTC, August 15 — Jeff Garzik opens a BitcoinTalk thread titled "Strange block 74638", pastes the raw block dump, and closes with one question: "92233720368.54277039 BTC? Is that UINT64_MAX, I wonder?" 20:38 UTC — Satoshi Nakamoto, to the bitcoin-list mailing list, network-wide: "*** WARNING *** We are investigating a problem. DO NOT TRUST ANY TRANSACTIONS THAT HAPPENED AFTER 15.08.2010 17:05 UTC (block 74638) until the issue is resolved." 20:39 UTC — Ga

Three weeks from now I will open a terminal, ready to ship another program to mainnet-beta, and I will pause. What was the order again? Did the IDL go up before or after the authority transfer? Was there a flag that saved me from a stalled deploy last time? This checklist exists because I just walked the entire path devnet to mainnet, deploy to IDL to frontend to error handling, and I wrote it down while the details are still fresh. It is the document I wish I had on day one of that process. Run it top to bottom before every mainnet launch. Why a checklist at all? A Solana mainnet deploy is full of irreversible steps. The wallet that signs the deploy quietly becomes the program's upgrade authority. A buffer account left mid-deploy can strand real SOL. A plain anchor build after a verifiable build can produce a different hash and break verification later. None of these are complicated. They are all easy to forget under pressure. A checklist is not a crutch; it is the habit that lets you ship calmly instead of improvising each time. Phase 1: Pre-flight on devnet Do all of this while mistakes are still free. [ ] Every test passes against the final build. Run anchor build && cargo test --package <your-program> one last time. The binary you test must be the binary you ship. [ ] End-to-end run on devnet. Call every instruction through the actual frontend, not just the test suite. The frontend is a different caller than LiteSVM and will surface different failure modes. [ ] Produce a verifiable build. Run anchor build --verifiable . This pins the build environment so the on-chain bytecode can later be matched to your source code. Once you have this artifact, do not touch it with a plain anchor build or cargo build-sbf ; those can produce a different hash and silently break verification. [ ] Measure rent before you spend it. Run: solana rent $( wc -c < target/deploy/.so ) Your deploy wallet must hold this amount plus a margin for transaction fees. There is no airdrop on the

Say "fable-mode" (or "operate carefully," or "high-judgment mode" or "think like fable") in a Claude Code or Codex session, and one line buried in the skill file does most of the work: "Never promote 'plausible' to 'confirmed' in your summary." That single rule is the whole philosophy in miniature — don't let something that merely looks right pass as something that was checked. Fable-mode is not a tool, a model swap, or a set of new commands. It's a behavioral overlay — a skill file at ~/.claude/skills/fable-mode/SKILL.md or ~/.codex/skills/fable-mode/SKILL.md or any other agent you use, that gets loaded into the turn and changes how the agent scopes work, verifies its own claims, and reports results. Nothing about what Agents can do changes. What changes is the discipline around using it. What actually changes The skill is organized into seven blocks, and each one targets a specific failure mode that shows up in normal agent use: Judgment before action. The first move is classification: is this a question, a problem description, or a change request? For the first two, the deliverable is an assessment — investigate and stop, don't start editing files nobody asked you to edit. Irreversible actions (deletes, pushes, overwrites) require a stop-and-confirm, and specifically: "before deleting or overwriting anything, actually look at the target." Verification as the non-negotiable core. This is the section that does the heavy lifting. Every "done" claim needs evidence produced after the last edit — a test run before your final change proves nothing about your final change. Claims get graded on a three-tier scale: Confirmed (you ran it and saw the result), Plausible (the code reads right but you haven't executed it), Assumed (inherited from the user's description). The rule is that you report the grade you actually earned, not the one that sounds better. Reasoning habits. Hold two hypotheses before committing to a diagnosis. Treat your memory of a library's API as a prior

1. Subsystem Decomposition 1.1 The Decomposition Problem A subsystem decomposes a codebase into smaller, cohesive units. Two primary axes of decomposition exist: Technical axis : grouping by component type (controller, service, model, view) Functional axis : grouping by business capability (cataloguing, circulation, etc.) 1.2 Tension Between Framework Prescriptions and Decomposition Strategy Organizing top-level subsystems functionally may create friction with frameworks that prescribe a technical-first structure. Concrete examples: Rails enforces model, view, and controller directories at the root level, making functional decomposition awkward without additional mechanisms like Rails Engines Sinatra (a microframework) imposes minimal structure, leaving architectural decisions entirely to the team Frameworks with rigid prescriptions constrain architectural choices. Frameworks with no structure shift the entire burden onto the team with no guidance. This second approach might be fine for teams that know what they are doing and how to shape the architecture properly. Not everyone needs guidance from the framework. 1.3 Contexts as a Middle Ground Phoenix provides contexts as a compromise: Explicit, guideline-oriented subsystems that enable functional decomposition without rigid enforcement Contexts define functional boundaries while allowing technical organization to remain nested within them Functional blocks may later evolve into microservices, but this is optional The same decomposition serves equally well in a modular monolith or a distributed architecture The choice depends on team needs, scaling requirements, and operational maturity, not on the decomposition strategy itself 2. Pipeline Topology and Data Flow 2.1 The Unix Pipeline Model Unix pipelines model data flow through a single stream connecting stdout to stdin. This forms a linear chain where each stage's output becomes the next stage's input. Key characteristics: Each stage has exactly one input and one o

When you develop a game at the beginning of your journey, you quickly notice that the environment is very static. To change that, let’s create some oscillations and move our platforms. We will use methods like Vector3.Lerp and Mathf.PingPong . using UnityEngine ; public class Oscillate : MonoBehaviour { [ SerializeField ] private Vector3 movementVector ; [ SerializeField ] private float speed ; private Vector3 _startPosition ; private Vector3 _endPosition ; private float _movementFactor ; private void Start () { _startPosition = transform . position ; _endPosition = transform . position + movementVector ; } private void Update () { _movementFactor = Mathf . PingPong ( Time . time * speed , 1f ); transform . position = Vector3 . Lerp ( _startPosition , _endPosition , _movementFactor ); } } First, we add movementVector and speed to inspector. movementVector receives the direction, and we tell it how far object must move. speed defines how fast objects move _ startPosition simply gets the starting coordinates in Start() with transform.position , and _ endPosition is the sum of the _ startPosition and movementVector . Now _ movementFactor is different. It defines the progress of the movement. Imagine it as a loading bar from 1% to 100%. In Update() method, we constantly calculate it every frame using Mathf.PingPong _movementFactor = Mathf.PingPong(Time.time * speed, 1f); So what is going on here, Mathf.PingPong does what you would imagine. Value goes back and forth. 1f is our length, so in Update() every frame _ movementFactor is getting updated from 0.0, 0.1, 0.2… up to 1.0, when the value is 1.0, it goes back to 0.0 in the same way. And since it’s in Update() this is an endless cycle. transform.position = Vector3.Lerp(_startPosition, _endPosition, _movementFactor); Now this is where magic happens. Lerp (Linear Interpolation) takes start position, end position and a “loading” bar. Why we did exactly 1f in PingPong is perfectly described in the official documentation: a

Over the past few months I’ve been building Radar, an open-source media intelligence and social listening platform that anyone can self-host. The project started with a simple observation: most media monitoring platforms are incredibly powerful—but they’re also expensive, closed, and often lock users into proprietary AI services. I wanted to explore a different approach. What is Radar? Radar is a self-hostable platform for monitoring news and public media sources using AI. Instead of relying on proprietary datasets, it works with free public RSS and Atom feeds, allowing anyone to build their own monitoring environment. One of the core design decisions is that Radar is AI-agnostic. Rather than forcing a single provider, you can choose between: Anthropic Claude OpenAI Grok Current Features 📰 News aggregation from free RSS and Atom feeds 🤖 AI-powered summaries 😊 Sentiment analysis 🔍 Keyword and topic monitoring 📊 Searchable dashboard 🏠 Self-hosted deployment 🔓 Fully open source Why Build Another Media Intelligence Tool? Enterprise platforms such as Talkwalker and Brandwatch are excellent products, but they aren’t accessible to everyone. Radar is aimed at: developers startups journalists researchers agencies open-source enthusiasts The goal isn’t to replicate every enterprise feature, but to build a transparent, extensible, and self-hosted alternative that anyone can inspect, modify, and improve. Looking for Feedback The project is still under active development, and I’d really appreciate feedback on: architecture user experience deployment scalability AI abstraction features that would make the platform more useful If you’re interested in open-source AI, media monitoring, or self-hosted software, I’d love to hear your thoughts. GitHub Demo Contributions, suggestions, feature requests, and bug reports are all welcome.

Stack Overflow's question volume has been falling since ChatGPT went public in November 2022 ( OpenAI ). The site that trained a generation of developers, and most of the AI tools those developers now use, is slowly emptying out. In October 2023, Stack Overflow laid off 28% of its staff ( Stack Overflow Blog ). CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar framed it as a restructuring toward profitability. Everyone in the industry understood the real cause. Traffic was down. The thing causing it was sitting in every developer's browser tab. This is not another "AI killed Stack Overflow" piece. That take is everywhere and it misses the actual problem. The interesting part is the feedback loop, and it points somewhere uncomfortable for the AI industry itself. The conventional story, and what it misses The popular version goes like this. Developers used to paste error messages into Google and land on a Stack Overflow thread. Now they paste the same error into ChatGPT, Claude, or Copilot and get a direct answer. Why click through to a forum, risk a condescending comment, and wait for a human when a model answers in two seconds? That part is true. It explains the traffic drop. It does not explain why the people building the AI should be worried. The seed corn problem Here is the part most coverage skips. Every large language model trained on internet text consumed a huge amount of Stack Overflow. The site's archive of voted, edited, human-reviewed answers is one of the highest-quality programming datasets in existence. It is the reason an AI can answer your Python error at all. Now run the loop forward. AI tools answer questions directly. Developers stop posting on Stack Overflow. The archive stops growing. The next round of models trains on a corpus that is increasingly old, increasingly stale, and missing everything that happened after 2022. When you train an AI on data generated by another AI, quality degrades. Researchers proved this formally. Shumailov and colleagues showed that model

I watched an AI agent send 200 emails to the wrong recipients because I forgot one validation check. The emails were well written. The offers were real. The recipients were just... not our leads. That was early. I learned fast. Every agent I build now has three layers of guardrails before it touches a database or an API. Here's exactly what those layers look like and why they're non-negotiable for production. Input Validation: Your Prompt Is Not a Schema The first mistake people make is trusting the LLM to produce valid output. It won't. Not reliably. I've seen GPT-4 return a JSON key called "emial" instead of "email" in a critical pipeline. One typo, and the whole record is garbage. The fix is a strict validation layer that runs before any data reaches your system. In my AI resume tailor, I use a JSON schema with conditional presence flags. Every field that must be real has a has_* boolean guard. If the LLM tries to fabricate a phone number, the schema rejects it. const resumeSchema = z . object ({ contact : z . object ({ email : z . string (). email (), phone : z . string (). optional (), has_phone : z . boolean () }). refine ( data => { // If phone is present, the guard must be true return data . phone ? data . has_phone : ! data . has_phone }, " Phone number present but has_phone flag is false " ) }) This pattern catches hallucinations before they corrupt your database. The schema is the contract. The LLM is just a suggestion engine. Permission Scoping: Give Agents the Minimum They Need An agent should never have write access to tables it doesn't need. That sounds obvious, but I've seen production systems where a job description rewriting agent had full CRUD access to the user table. When I built the LLM scoring pipeline for a job board platform, I created separate database roles. The scoring agent only had SELECT on the job listings table and INSERT on a scoring results table. It never touched users, applications, or configuration. Even if the prompt was hijack

Originally published on hexisteme notes . I write these engineering notes with one main model, and until recently I also reviewed them with that same model. Same family writes, same family checks its own work. That sounded fine right up until I had ten queued posts sitting in a publish backlog and a nagging thought: if the writer and the reviewer come from the same training distribution, what exactly is the review checking for? So I ran an experiment. I took the queue and had a different vendor's model audit it before anything went out — not to replace my own review, but to see what a genuinely different set of weights would flag that mine hadn't. The setup: copies only, and a self-verifying prompt The mechanics were deliberately boring. I copied the ten queued articles into a scratchpad directory and exposed only that copy to the auditor via --add-dir — the auditor never got write access to the originals, so nothing it did could touch the source of truth by accident. The audit itself ran as agy --model gemini-3.1-pro-high , pointed at the copy directory, with one instruction: find technical factual errors, broken sentences, cross-article inconsistencies, unsupported claims, and tone violations, and verify each one yourself on the web before reporting it. I wanted a model that would check its own homework, not just pattern-match on "this looks wrong." It came back with seven findings. Rule one: don't trust the auditor either Seven findings from a different vendor is not the same thing as seven confirmed bugs. I re-verified every single one independently — grepping the original text, checking official documentation, and where possible checking against a real machine — before touching anything. Of the seven, six held up and got fixed. One didn't: the auditor flagged a sentence as an error, and when I went back to the primary source, it turned out to be the auditor misreading a perfectly correct sentence, not a defect in the writing. Without the re-verification step, I

The end of the FIFA Men’s World Cup is nigh. Here’s how to watch the final games and the first ever World Cup halftime show.