While most of the community spent the spring arguing about generics, a different RFC slipped into PHP 8.6 with almost none of the attention it deserved. No long Twitter threads. No blog posts dissecting the implications. Just a quiet vote that closed on the third of June with 33 in favour, one against, and four abstaining, from a list of names that includes the Composer author, the FrankenPHP creator, and a healthy chunk of the people who actually maintain the async libraries you depend on. That RFC is the Polling API, authored by Jakub Zelenka as part of his ongoing stream evolution work. I want to make the case that it is the most consequential thing to land in PHP in years, and that the reason nobody is talking about it is exactly the reason it matters. The problem you have been quietly working around If you have ever written anything that needs to watch more than one socket at a time, you have met stream_select() . It is the only I/O multiplexing primitive PHP has shipped for most of its life, and it is built on the select() system call from 1983. It works. It also carries a set of limitations that every async library author has had to engineer around. The first is the file descriptor ceiling. The current implementation caps out at around 1024 descriptors on most systems, which is fine until the moment it very much is not. The second is the complexity. select() is O(n): it scans every descriptor you hand it on every single call, so performance degrades as you add connections. The third is that it gives you no access to the mechanisms the rest of the world has been using for two decades. There is no epoll on Linux, no kqueue on BSD or macOS, no event ports on Solaris. There is no edge-triggered mode and no one-shot mode. This is why every serious async runtime reaches past select() . Node, Nginx, Go's net package, Rust's Tokio: they all sit on epoll or kqueue, because that is the foundation high-concurrency networking is built on. PHP was the last major runtime w

TL;DR: We launched Tarotas, a tarot reading app, in five languages (Czech, Slovak, Polish, English, German) on a single domain. Each market behaved completely differently. Here is what the data showed us about multi-locale growth. When we started building Tarotas at Inithouse, the plan seemed straightforward: one product, five languages, one domain. Czech as the base, then Slovak, Polish, English, and German. Same cards, same readings, same UI. Just translated. What we did not expect: each locale acts like a separate product. The setup Tarotas is a tarot card app where you draw a card and read a calm, generic interpretation. No fortune telling, no sign-ups, no paywall. 78 cards across five languages, all on tarotas.com with language detection. We built it in Lovable and deployed it in under two weeks. The multi-language part took another week: content generation for 78 cards times 5 languages, plus locale-specific meta tags and URL structures. What the data told us The Czech and Slovak markets responded first. That was expected: our studio is based in Prague, our existing portfolio (products like zivafotka.cz and magicalsong.com ) already had traction in CZ/SK. But the interesting part was the divergence. CZ/SK users stayed longer. Session duration in Czech and Slovak was noticeably higher than in other locales. Users explored multiple cards, came back for second readings. The "reflection" positioning landed well in these markets, likely because tarot has a quiet cultural niche in Central Europe: not mainstream, but not fringe either. Polish users bounced faster but shared more. The PL locale had higher bounce rates but showed a different signal: social referrals. Polish users who did engage were more likely to share readings. The tarot community in Poland leans more social: Facebook groups, Instagram stories, TikTok readings. Our product caught some of that energy. German users barely showed up. DE was our weakest locale by far. German-language search demand for ta

When I started learning web development, I discovered that creating a webpage is more than making it look good. It is also important to make websites accessible and easy for everyone to use. Two concepts that helped me improve my website were semantic HTML and web accessibility. Semantic HTML means using HTML elements according to their purpose instead of using generic elements for everything. Semantic elements such as , , , , , and make the structure of a webpage clear. They improve readability, help search engines understand the content, and make websites easier for people using screen readers. Before (Non-Semantic HTML) My Website Welcome to my website. After (Semantic HTML) <h1>My Website</h1> Welcome to my website. The semantic version is much easier to understand because each element clearly describes its purpose. During my accessibility audit, I found several improvements that made my website more user-friendly. The first issue was that images needed descriptive alternative text. I added meaningful alt attributes so screen readers can describe the images to users who cannot see them. The second improvement was the heading hierarchy. I used one for the page title and organized the remaining sections with headings. This creates a logical structure that is easier to navigate. The third improvement involved descriptive links. Instead of using vague text, I changed links to clearly describe where they lead. For example, I used "Visit GitHub" instead of a generic phrase. I also ensured that the HTML document included the lang="en" attribute and that all form fields had properly associated elements. These small changes improve accessibility and usability for everyone. Working with semantic HTML and accessibility has shown me that building websites is not only about appearance but also about creating experiences that everyone can use. As I continue learning web development, I will continue applying these best practices in all my projects. My Portfolio Portfolio Websi

The Argentina v. France final of the 2022 Men’s World Cup in Qatar was shaping up to be one of the most epic games in soccer history. With just 12 minutes remaining in the extra time added to the game to break a tie, the referee had a critical decision to make—and fast. Lionel Messi,…

Here’s a problem you probably didn’t solve in school: You’re an ambitious young plumber from Brooklyn in a world inhabited by violent human-size mushrooms called Goombas. The love of your life has been kidnapped, so you embark on a quest to rescue her, venturing through stretches of pipe-filled and monster-­ridden terrain where your only means…

Brian Sietsema has a favorite word. It’s somewhat surprising that he can choose just one. He’s the person spellers rely on to confirm pronunciations and answer questions about the roots of the words they’re given at the Scripps National Spelling Bee—arguably the world’s most prestigious competition of its kind. The story of how the word…

The national conversation about the value of education is currently dominated by speculation about the risks and positive potential of AI. Whatever your own perspective on that debate, I hope you’ll be glad to know that MIT is also working on a deeply important but comparatively old-fashioned challenge: American high school students’ startlingly uneven access…

Right now, MIT alumni and friends are voicing their support for: America’s scientific and technological leadership Merit-based admissions and affordable education Advances that increase US health, security, and prosperity Our community is standing up for MIT and its mission to serve the nation and the world. And we need you to join us at this…

Our hands are the nimblest parts of our bodies, coordinating 34 muscles, 27 joints, and over 100 tendons and ligaments to perform countless nuanced movements and gestures. So far, robots have been notoriously bad at mimicking that dexterity, in part because researchers struggle to capture what is actually going on under our skin in order…

With an adaptable fastener designed at CSAIL, pitching a tent or adjusting the cast for a broken bone could be almost as easy as zipping your coat. The researchers, led by associate professor Stefanie Mueller, were inspired by an abandoned prototype for a three-sided zipper that William Freeman, PhD ’92 (now an MIT professor), patented…

A technology developed by Professor Sangeeta Bhatia, SM ’93, PhD ’97, and colleagues could offer new hope to the thousands of Americans with chronic liver disease who are waiting for an organ transplant or not strong enough to tolerate one. The liver is involved in regulating blood clotting, removing bacteria from the bloodstream, metabolizing drugs,…

MIT engineers have found the first direct evidence that plant seeds can sense sounds in nature: Rice submerged in shallow water germinated 30% to 40% more quickly when exposed to vibrations from water dripping on the surface. They think other types of seeds may respond similarly. When a raindrop hits a puddle’s surface or the…

With a test being developed at MIT, diagnosing pneumonia and other lung conditions could someday be as easy as breathing into a tube. The test, dubbed PlasmoSniff, is a portable, chip-scale sensor that traps and detects biomarkers, synthetic compounds indicating disease. The idea is that a person would first breathe in nanoparticles that are specially…

The best robot vacuums are the ones you barely have to think about, and the Roborock Saros 20 fits that description well. It’s why it’s one of our favorite robovac / mop hybrids, and thanks to Prime Day, you can get it on sale at Amazon and Roborock for $1,359.99 ($240 off), a new low […]

The Meta Quest 3S VR headset with 128GB of storage is $296.79 (about $53 off) at Amazon. This is Meta’s entry-level VR headset, which launched back in 2024 for $299.99 before getting a price increase this year to $349.99. So it’s not exactly the most exciting deal, but it’s about as good as you’re likely […]

In Mexico, WhatsApp isn't a channel — it's the channel. It's where customers ask for prices, book appointments, and decide whether to buy from you or from the competitor who answered faster. And that last part is the problem: most small and medium businesses lose customers simply because nobody replied in time — after hours, during a rush, or while the owner was busy doing the actual work. At Proxxa , the AI automation agency I run in Mexico City, this is the single most common pain we solve. So I want to walk through how I built a production-grade WhatsApp AI assistant that answers, qualifies, and books 24/7 — using Claude and n8n, with no third-party chatbot platform in the middle. Why the WhatsApp Cloud API directly (no BSP) A lot of guides will tell you that you need a BSP (Business Solution Provider) to use the WhatsApp Business API. You don't. Meta's Cloud API is hosted by Meta itself and you can build on it directly. Skipping the BSP means no per-seat middleman tax, full control over the logic, and the client owns their own number and data. The stack n8n (self-hosted on a small VPS via Docker) as the orchestration layer. Claude (Haiku) as the intelligence layer — fast and cheap enough to answer every message. Postgres for conversation memory, a knowledge base, and a lightweight CRM. WhatsApp Cloud API for the messaging. Gemini for transcribing voice notes. The pattern that made it powerful: meta-blocks Instead of bolting on a separate "agent framework," I let Claude emit small structured blocks inside its answer, which a parsing node extracts and strips before sending — to schedule an appointment, escalate to a human, capture a lead, or generate a payment link. The user only ever sees clean text; the system reacts to the blocks. This kept the whole thing debuggable and predictable. With that pattern, the assistant handles eleven capabilities: natural-language conversation, per-customer memory, Google Calendar booking, vision (it reads a photo a customer sends

Yochai is a Socratic AI "chevruta" or learning guide, powered by a foundational library of 1,000+ primary sources from the Jewish canon, (and a knowledge graph of 2.5M entities, and 16M entity relationships, 375,000 searchable passages, and 17,000 canonical concepts that we developed around our own ontology). Yochai, uniquely, takes you directly to the sources and pushes you to discover and articulate your own insights about them. we open sourced our knowledge graph so others can build on our fo

Between Prime Day deal and the screen-free technology, the Yoto Player is a great gift you can get the kids in your life without any guilt.

Promo video comes as more US police departments fly drones as first responders.