Maya Posch

At first glance, trying to play chess against a large language model (LLM) seems like a daft idea, as its weighted nodes have, at most, been trained on some chess-adjacent texts. It has no concept of board state, stratagems, or even whatever a ‘rook’ or ‘knight’ piece is. This daftness is indeed demonstrated by [Dynomight]

Formerly known as Unidentified Flying Objects, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) is a category of observations that are exactly what the UAP label suggests. This topic concerns the US military very much, as a big part of national security involves knowing everything that appears in the skies. This is the reason for the development of a new sensor suite by the Pentagon called GREMLIN. Recently, a new report has provided more details about what this system actually does.

On today’s installment of UE1 vacuum tube computer construction, we join [David Lovett] once more on the Usagi Electric farm, as he determines just how much work remains before the project ca…

As impractical as most overclocking of computers is these days, there is still a lot of fun to be had along the way. Case in point being [Pieter-Jan Plaisier]’s recent liquid nitrogen-aided overclocking of an unsuspecting Raspberry Pi 5 and its BCM2712 SoC. Previous OCing attempts with air cooling by [Pieter] had left things off at a paltry 3 GHz from the default 2.4 GHz, with the power management IC (PMIC) circuitry on the SBC turning out to be the main limiting factor.

Who doesn’t like dial-up internet? Even if those who survived the dial-up years are happy to be on broadband, and those who are still on dial-up wish that they weren’t, there’s definitely a nostalgic factor to the experience. Yet recreating the experience can be a hassle, with signing up for a dial-up ISP or jumping through many (POTS) hoops to get a dial-up server up and running. An easier way is demonstrated by [Minh Danh] with a Viking DLE-200B telephone line simulator in a recent blog post.

Recently China’s new CHIEF hypergravity facility came online to begin research projects after beginning construction in 2018. Standing for Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Exper…

After 22 years of development, FreeCAD has at long last reached the milestone of version 1.0. On this momentous occasion, it’s good to remember what a version 1.0 is supposed to mean, as also…

The SR-71 with its blended wing body design. (Photo by Tech. Sgt. Michael Haggerty, US Air Force, 1988) Ask someone to picture an airplane and they’re likely to think of what is essentially a tube with wings and a stabilizing tail tacked onto one end of said tube. Yet it is also no secret that the lift produced by such a tube is rather poor, even if they’re straightforward for loading cargo (static and self-loading) into them and for deciding where to put in windows. Over the decades a number of alternative airplane designs have been developed, with some of them also ending up being produced. Here most people are probably quite familiar with the US Air Force’s B-2 Spirit bomber and its characteristic flying wing design, while blended wing body (BWB) maintains a somewhat distinctive fuselage, as with for example the B-1 Lancer.

Magnetic skyrmions are an interesting example of solitons that occurs in ferromagnetic materials with conceivable solutions in electronics, assuming they can be created and moved at will. The creation and moving of such skyrmions has now been demonstrated by [Yubin Ji] et al. with a research article in Advanced Materials. This first ever achievement by these researchers of the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) was more power efficient than previously demonstrated manipulation of magnetic skyrmions in thicker (3D) materials.