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Look inside almost any modern connected device -- a smartphone, a smartwatch, a Wi-Fi thermostat, a battery-powered sensor node -- and you will find a processor core designed by ARM. It is one of the most successful engineering ideas in computing history. And here is the strange part: ARM has never manufactured a single one of those chips. It does not own a factory. It sells blueprints. A three-person project in Cambridge The story starts at Acorn Computers in Cambridge, England, in the early 1980s. Acorn had built the BBC Micro, a hugely popular educational computer in the UK, and it needed a faster processor for its next machine. The commercial chips available at the time were disappointing, so a tiny team decided to design their own. The acronym everyone knows today originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine . Sophie Wilson designed the instruction set and wrote the simulator; Steve Furber led the physical chip design. RISC -- Reduced Instruction Set Computing -- was the key bet. Instead of piling on complex instructions, they kept the instruction set small and simple, which made the chip easier to build, cheaper, and remarkably power-efficient. The first silicon, the ARM1, was fabricated by VLSI Technology and delivered to Acorn on 26 April 1985. When the team powered it on, it simply worked -- first try. For anyone who has designed hardware, that is almost unheard of; new processors normally need several rounds of revisions to shake out design errors. A famous piece of Acorn lore is that the early ARM chips drew so little current they could keep running on leakage alone after the power was disconnected. From a British computer to the whole world Acorn the computer company faded, but the processor design did not. In 1990 the ARM team was spun out into a separate joint venture, and the acronym was quietly re-expanded to Advanced RISC Machines . The new company made a decision that defined its future: it would not build chips. It would license the designs and let oth

In today's mobile-first world, users expect authentication to be both secure and effortless. Typing passwords every time an app is opened not only impacts the user experience but also introduces security risks if passwords are weak or reused. Biometric authentication solves this problem by allowing users to verify their identity using Fingerprint , Face ID , Touch ID , Iris Scanner , or even their device's PIN/Password . If you're building a React Native application, @sbaiahmed1/react-native-biometrics is one of the most comprehensive biometric libraries available. Beyond simple authentication prompts, it offers hardware-backed cryptographic key management, biometric enrollment detection, device integrity checks, StrongBox support, and compatibility with both the React Native New Architecture and Expo. In this article, we'll explore everything this library offers and learn how to integrate biometric authentication into a React Native application. Why Biometric Authentication? Traditional authentication methods come with several drawbacks: Passwords are easy to forget. Weak passwords are vulnerable to attacks. OTP-based logins can be slow and frustrating. Users often abandon apps with poor login experiences. Biometric authentication addresses these challenges by providing: 🔒 Enhanced security ⚡ Faster authentication 😊 Better user experience 📱 Native platform support 🔑 Secure fallback using device credentials Whether you're building a banking app, healthcare platform, enterprise application, or e-commerce app, biometric authentication has become an expected feature. Installation Install the package using npm: npm install @ sbaiahmed1 /react-native-biometric s or with Yarn: yarn add @ sbaiahmed1 /react-native-biometric s For iOS: cd ios pod install Platform Configuration Before using biometric authentication, configure the required permissions for both Android and iOS. Android Open your android/app/src/main/AndroidManifest.xml file and add the following permissions: <

In response to a public records request, HUD has withheld documents about DOGE’s use of AI—in part by citing a privilege that doesn’t exist.

LLM Evaluation System Prompts Scored Rubrics Runtime Guardrails: A Practical Guide for Production Learn how to evaluate LLM outputs in production using system prompts, scored rubrics, and runtime guardrails to prevent hallucinations and ensure quality. TL;DR: To evaluate LLM outputs in production, combine system prompts that define evaluation criteria, scored rubrics using LLM-as-a-judge for dimensions like correctness and relevance, and runtime guardrails that filter or flag unsafe outputs. This approach scales better than human review, adapts via prompt changes, and catches failures that status codes miss, as seen in the Air Canada chatbot case. Why Production LLM Evaluation Demands More Than Status Codes A 200 status code only confirms the server processed the request—it says nothing about whether the generated text is factual, safe, or useful. The Air Canada chatbot that invented a non-existent bereavement discount returned perfectly valid HTTP responses, yet the hallucinated policy led to a tribunal ruling against the airline. Production evaluation must therefore separate operational health (latency, error rates) from output quality (correctness, relevance, harmlessness). Consider a typical API call that succeeds operationally but fails qualitatively: import requests response = requests . post ( " https://api.example.com/v1/chat " , json = { " model " : " gpt-4o " , " messages " : [{ " role " : " user " , " content " : " What is Air Canada ' s bereavement policy? " }]}, headers = { " Authorization " : " Bearer $KEY " } ) print ( response . status_code ) # 200 print ( response . json ()[ " choices " ][ 0 ][ " message " ][ " content " ]) # Output: "Air Canada offers full refunds for bereavement-related cancellations..." A 200 status code and a well-formed JSON body mask a completely fabricated policy. To catch this, you need a separate evaluation layer that scores the output against a rubric. LLM-as-a-judge is a common approach, using a second model to assess the

New study confirms 2024 "momentum flux theory" on how angular momentum of water flows drives rotation.

A dozen state attorneys general are trying to block the $110 billion merger of Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery they warn would raise movie prices and crush cable TV distributors. The states - California, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington - filed suit on Monday, arguing […]

Despite a complete lack of evidence, everyone from Russia to Israel and Iran is being blamed for Lindsey Graham’s death.

Despite a complete lack of evidence, everyone from Russia to Israel and Iran is being blamed for Lindsey Graham’s death.

Described as the “feel-good movie of white-boy summer” by one extremist, the movie Citizen Vigilante has been hailed by the far-right as a way to convert moderates to their cause.

Ask most people to name the chip that started modern electronics and they will say the microprocessor. But there is a quieter hero inside almost everything you own that beeps, blinks, or connects to the internet: the microcontroller. And the first one you could actually buy shipped in 1974 as the Texas Instruments TMS1000. Microprocessor vs. microcontroller The distinction matters. A microprocessor, like Intel's famous 4004, is just the processing core. To build anything useful with it you still have to wire up separate memory chips, input/output controllers, and support logic on a circuit board. A microcontroller collapses all of that onto a single piece of silicon: the CPU, the ROM that holds your program, the RAM that holds your data, and the I/O pins that talk to the outside world, all in one package. That is exactly what the TMS1000 did. Designed by Texas Instruments engineers Gary Boone and Michael Cochran, it was a 4-bit device using a Harvard architecture, meaning it kept program memory and data memory in separate spaces so it could fetch an instruction and read data at the same time. One chip in, one chip out, and you had a complete tiny computer dedicated to a single job. Cheap enough to put in everything The genius of the TMS1000 was not raw power, it was economics. In 1974 you could buy the chips in volume for around two dollars each. By 1979, Texas Instruments was selling roughly 26 million of them every year. That price point changed what engineers could build. Suddenly it made sense to drop a small, programmable brain into products that never would have justified a full computer. You have almost certainly held one. The TMS1000 family ran the Speak & Spell, the Big Trak programmable toy vehicle, and the electronic memory game Simon, along with countless calculators, microwave ovens, and appliances. Each one was doing the same fundamental thing an IoT node does today: read some inputs, run a fixed program, drive some outputs. Why this still matters for

If you’ve ever struggled with CALCULATE() or wondered why SUMX() behaves differently from SUM() , this guide is for you. DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) is the language that powers Power BI , Analysis Services , and Power Pivot — enabling dynamic calculations, filtering, and time intelligence. Below is a categorized cheat sheet of essential DAX functions , plus examples showing how to use each in real-world Power BI scenarios. Filtering & Context These functions control how filters are applied and evaluated in your calculations. Function Example Description CALCULATE() CALCULATE(SUM(Sales[Amount]), Region[Name] = "Nairobi") Changes filter context to calculate total sales for Nairobi. FILTER() FILTER(Sales, Sales[Amount] > 10000) Returns a table filtered by condition. ALL() CALCULATE(SUM(Sales[Amount]), ALL(Region)) Ignores filters on Region. REMOVEFILTERS() CALCULATE(SUM(Sales[Amount]), REMOVEFILTERS(Region)) Removes filters from Region. VALUES() VALUES(Customer[City]) Returns unique list of cities. SELECTEDVALUE() SELECTEDVALUE(Product[Category], "All") Returns selected category or “All” if none. TREATAS() TREATAS(VALUES(Temp[City]), Customer[City]) Applies one table’s values as filters on another. KEEPFILTERS() CALCULATE(SUM(Sales[Amount]), KEEPFILTERS(Product[Category] = "Electronics")) Keeps existing filters and adds new ones. ALLSELECTED() CALCULATE(SUM(Sales[Amount]), ALLSELECTED(Region)) Respects user selections in visuals. ALLEXCEPT() CALCULATE(SUM(Sales[Amount]), ALLEXCEPT(Sales, Sales[Year])) Removes all filters except Year. Aggregation Summarize or aggregate data across rows or columns. Function Example Description SUM() SUM(Sales[Amount]) Adds all sales amounts. AVERAGE() AVERAGE(Sales[Amount]) Calculates mean value. COUNT() COUNT(Customer[ID]) Counts non-blank entries. COUNTROWS() COUNTROWS(Sales) Counts rows in a table. DISTINCTCOUNT() DISTINCTCOUNT(Customer[ID]) Counts unique customers. MIN() MIN(Sales[Amount]) Finds smallest sale. MAX() MAX(Sales[Amo

OrbitLens Ace → ace.orbitlens.io A busy quarter is easy to stage. Code that's still there in two years isn't. Pick any metric a team has ever used to judge people, and someone has quietly figured out how to move it without doing the underlying thing. Lines of code rewarded typing, so people typed. Commit counts rewarded committing, so commits got smaller and more frequent. Velocity rewarded closed points, and points drifted upward until a "3" meant nothing. DORA measured how often you deploy, so teams shipped trivial changes just to move it. Even churn — the number the "code health" tools lean on — is something you can lower on purpose, which means you can manage the number instead of the mess underneath it. None of that requires dishonest engineers. It's Goodhart's law doing what it always does. Every one of those numbers is a measure of activity , and activity is cheap to produce. Once you're paid for activity, the fastest way to get paid more is to produce more of it — not more of whatever the activity was supposed to be a sign of. So the question worth asking isn't which activity metric is least bad. It's whether a git history contains anything at all that you can't move just by being busier. It turns out there's one. And it's not because we were clever — it's because of what the thing is actually made of. What lasts isn't something you do Take everything a person wrote, wait a while, and ask a smaller question than "did they work hard." Ask whether the specific lines are still there. Not reverted, not rewritten, not quietly swallowed by someone else's refactor. Still holding weight at HEAD. That's survival. We read it with time-decayed git blame : a line's weight fades month by month unless the line keeps existing, and it counts for more once other people have built on top of it instead of leaving it as a private island. Survival that others have built on is what we call gravity — the structural pull that outlives the person who created it. Try to game it and w

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield had been seeking documents from Paramount related to its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. Rayfield also asked a state circuit court judge to delay the closing of the deal by 60 days so that his office could review the documents. But according to Deadline and Variety, he's now dropped his […]

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb will head the UAP Science Advisory Council established by the White House, the Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and "the intelligence community." The Council will provide scientific reports and advice to the UAP Governing Board, in an effort to "resolve the nature of UAP," or […]

It's unclear how the planet avoided its star's bloated red giant stage.

Adapted from an appendix of my MS thesis. Markov Chain Monte Carlo Almost as soon as computers were invented, they were used for simulation. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) was invested as Los Alamos, Metropolis et al (1953) simulated a liquid in equilibrium with its gas phase. Their tour de force was the realization that they did not need to simulate the exact dynamics, they only needed to simulate some Markov chain with the same equilibrium distribution. The Metropolis algorithm was widely used by chemists and physicists, but was not widely known among statisticians until after 1990. Hastings (1970) generalized the Metropolis algorithm, and simulations following his scheme are said to use the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm [1]. A special case of the MH algorithm was introduced by Geman et al (1984) discussing optimization to find the posterior mode rather than simulation. Algorithms following their scheme are said to use the Gibbs sampler. It took some time for the spatial statistics community to understand that the Gibbs sampler simulated the posterior distribution, thus enabling full Bayesian inference of all kinds. Gelfand et al (1990) made the wider Bayesian community aware of the Gibbs sampler, and then it was rapidly realized that most Bayesian inference could be done using MCMC, whereas very little could be done without MCMC. Green (1995) generalized the MH algorithm as much as it could be generalized [1]. Theoretical Foundations A sequence X 1 ​ , X 2 ​ , … of random elements of some set is a Markov chain if the conditional distribution of X n + 1 ​ given X 1 ​ , … , X n ​ depends on X n ​ only. The set in which the X i ​ take values is called the state space of the Markov chain. A Markov chain has stationary transition probabilities if the conditional distribution of X n + 1 ​ given X n ​ does not depend on n . This is the main kind of Markov chain of interest in MCMC. The joint distribution of a Markov chain is determined by the following [1]. The ma

Reinforcement learning uses error information to adjust control algorithms.

Every camera-equipped connected device you build today, from a smart doorbell to an ESP32-CAM streaming frames over Wi-Fi to a factory machine-vision rig, is a descendant of one clunky, toaster-sized prototype: the first digital camera , built at Eastman Kodak in December 1975. It weighed about 8 pounds, took 23 seconds to capture a single 0.01-megapixel black-and-white image, and recorded that image to a cassette tape. It looked like a science-fair project, but it proved a radical idea that underpins the entire IoT sensing industry: an image could be captured, digitized, and stored as data with no film at all. An engineer, a side project, and a CCD The camera was built by a 24-year-old Kodak engineer named Steven Sasson . His manager had handed him a loose assignment: could the newly invented charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensor be used to build a camera with no moving film? The CCD, developed at Bell Labs in 1969, converts light falling on an array of tiny capacitors into electrical charge, pixel by pixel. Sasson took a Fairchild 100-by-100-pixel CCD, bolted it to a lens from a Super 8 movie camera, added a digitizer, and wired the output to a portable cassette recorder. The result captured just 0.01 megapixels, a grid of 10,000 pixels. To view a photo, Sasson's team built a custom playback rig that read the tape and painted the image onto a television screen. That first image, a Kodak lab technician, took 23 seconds to write to tape and several more to display. Crude, yes, but it was the first fully electronic, filmless photograph. Why Kodak shelved the future Here is the twist that every embedded engineer should remember. Kodak owned the patent on the first digital camera, but the company made its money selling film, chemicals, and photo paper. Executives saw a filmless camera as a threat to that business, so the project was quietly set aside. Kodak did file the patent in 1978 and collected licensing revenue for decades, but it never led the digital transiti

The Earth may not be that massive, but it still distorts space-time.

Meta is in breach of the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), a preliminary investigation has found, over the "addictive" design of Instagram and Facebook. It's likely to be forced to redesign both apps and could face a fine of up to $12 billion. The European Commission said Meta "did not adequately assess the risks of […]