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My Zero to Blockchain Engineer journey — Week 2 update Last week I announced I was teaching myself blockchain engineering from zero. This week I went deep into Cyfrin Updraft — and I have to be honest, it changed how I think about learning Web3. Here's everything I covered, what surprised me, and why I think this platform is the best free resource for anyone serious about becoming a blockchain developer. What I covered this week I'm currently 45% through the Blockchain Basics course on Cyfrin Updraft. Here's exactly what the lessons covered: Section 1 — What Is A Blockchain? This section answered the question properly — not in a surface-level way, but by starting with the problem blockchain solves. The lesson on centralized control hit differently. Think about it in a Nigerian context — banks freezing accounts, payment processors blocking transactions, elections where results can't be independently verified. These aren't hypothetical problems. They're things we live with. Blockchain's answer: a shared ledger where truth is verified by math, not by a middleman. That framing made everything click for me. Key lessons I completed: What Is A Blockchain — centralized problems vs decentralized solutions History Of Blockchain — from the double-spend problem to Bitcoin to Ethereum Benefits Of Blockchain — permissionless, immutable, credibly neutral Use Cases — DeFi, cross-border payments, DAOs, digital ownership Many Many Chains — L1s, L2s, Mainnets vs Testnets The Oracle Problem — why smart contracts can't access real-world data alone The Purpose Of Smart Contracts — math-based promises vs trust-based agreements What Is The EVM — Ethereum's computation engine explained simply Benefits Of Smart Contracts — decentralization, immutability, transparency Section 2 — Sending Transactions This is where things got hands-on — and where Cyfrin pulled ahead of every other platform I've tried. Key lessons: What Is A Wallet — your public address as a digital mailbox Setting Up A Wallet

**🙄 فى كتاب chapter الصدمة دي هي بالظبط اللي حسيت بيها وأنا بقرأ أول “operating system: three easy Pieces “ ‘OSTEP’. 🖤اهلا بيكم ! يارب تكونوا بخير 💯 حابه اشارك معاكم رحلتى مع قراءة الكتاب ونستفيد منه سوا قبل ما نعرف هو !!!! ولا لا OS is virtual machine 🤔 !!!!دا يعنى ايه ووظيفته ايه OS تعالوا الاول نعرف ال موجودة فى الكمبيوتر ولا لا ؟؟؟؟ RAM وال CPUزى ال HARDWARE وهل هو قطعة ::هنبدأ من الاخر موجود على الكمبيوتر SW هو عبارة عن HW يسيدى مش قطعة OSال .على الجهازINSTALL ولازم يبقى ووظيفته ايه؟؟؟ OS طب يعنى ايه ‘OS’ اختصار “OPERATING SYSTEM”. .“يعنى نظام تشغيل “ .👁‍🗨👁‍🗨 تعالوا نعرف معنى ” نظام تشغيل” ونفسرها نظام تشغيل يعنى مسئول عن 1_ “HWالنظام “من غيره مش هيبقى فيه نظام خصوصا لقطع ال . يعنى بناخد منه الاذن للعمليات HW ببعضه وكمان بيدير ال HWيعنى هو بيربط ال 👏 . (Order)من الاخر بيخلق “النظام” 2_.”التشغيل “هو المسئول عن تشغيل البرامج Learn about Medium’s values هو اللي بيتحكم في دورة حياة البرنامج بالكامل؛هو اللي بيبدأ تشغيله في الذاكرة،OSيعني الـ وبيحدد هو محتاج إيه من إمكانيات الجهاز عشان يشتغل بكفاءة وبيفضل مراقبه ويحميه طول ما هوشغال ، ولحد ما تقفليه بنفسك 🌹 .ويقوم هو بتنظيف الذاكرة وتوفير المساحة لغيره 🧐::وظيفته بقا بيخلي البرنامج يشتغل بسهولة:1️⃣ لأنه بيخلق للبرنامج بيئة وهمية مريحة، وبيخفي عنه كل التعقيدات والأسلاك بتاعة الهاردوير عشان يشتغل بسلاسة 2️⃣: بيسمح للبرامج إنها تشارك الذاكرة بين كل البرامج بالعدل RAM بيشتغل كعسكري مرور بيوزع مساحة الـ . وبيحمي كل برنامج في مساحته الخاصة 3️⃣: بيمكن البرامج إنها تتعامل مع الأجهزة بيعمل كـ “وسيط” أو مترجم بيوصل كود البرنامج بالقطع الحقيقية (زي الشاشة أو الهارد) .عشان ينفذ أوامره فوراً بيعمل التلات حاجات دول إزاي في نفس الوقت وبمنتهى السلاسة؟ ؟؟؟OS طب الـ بيعملهم يسيدى عن طريق أكبر خدعة سحرية في عالم الكمبيوتروهي الـ Virtualization👌 كنت حابة جداً أكلمكم المرة دي عن خدعة الـ “Virtualization” 💎 😌👁👁اللي اتكلمنا عليها في العنوان، بس لقيت البوست هيبقى طويل أوي عليكم ✔🔥!!وعشان متعبكمش معايا.. هنخليها للبوست الجاي إن شاء الله 💯✅!!بيعمل الخدعة دي إزاي OSاستنوا البوست الجاى عشان نعرف الـ 💋.دمتم بخير **

Introduction Linux is the backbone of modern infrastructure. From cloud servers and firewalls to SIEM platforms and security tools, Linux runs silently behind most enterprise environments. For a Security Operations Center (SOC) analyst, understanding Linux is not optional — it is a core skill. One of the most critical security mechanisms in Linux is its file permission and ownership model. Attackers abuse permissions to execute malware, hide persistence, escalate privileges, and erase evidence. SOC analysts rely on permission analysis to detect anomalies, investigate incidents, and build accurate timelines. Become a Medium member This article covers Linux File Permissions and Ownership in deep detail from a SOC analyst’s perspective. It is designed to take you from absolute beginner to security-aware professional, with real-world examples, attack scenarios, and investigation insights. Why Linux File Permissions Matter in SOC In SOC operations, analysts constantly deal with: Authentication logs System logs Application logs Scripts and binaries Configuration files Evidence files during incident response Every one of these objects is protected by Linux permissions. From a SOC perspective: Incorrect permissions = security risk Permission changes = potential indicator of compromise Executable permissions = possible malware Ownership changes = possible log tampering Understanding permissions allows SOC analysts to: Detect unauthorized access Identify privilege escalation Spot malware execution Preserve forensic evidence Reconstruct attacker activity Understanding Linux File Permission Basics Linux follows a Discretionary Access Control (DAC) model. This means: The owner of a file controls who can access it Permissions define what actions are allowed Every file and directory in Linux has: A type Permissions An owner (user) A group These attributes decide: Who can read the file Who can modify it Who can execute it Viewing Permissions Using ls -l The most common command to i

I'm a Computer Science student about to start my 4th semester this September in Pakistan. My long-term goals are: - Maintain a high GPA because I want to pursue a fully funded Master's abroad. - Eventually work at a top tech company (FAANG or similar). - Become a genuinely good software engineer rather than just someone who can build projects. A bit about me: I actually enjoy programming. I like logic, problem-solving, debugging, and understanding how things work under the hood. My initial plan for the rest of this year (August–December) was to focus on: - Java - Spring Boot - Backend development - LeetCode and DSA - SQL - System Design (starting with the basics) - Building projects and putting them on GitHub However, my brother (he's also studying CS) has a very different opinion. He's heavily into AI, automations, AI agents, and vibe coding. He told me that spending so much time learning to code deeply is becoming less valuable because AI can already generate entire applications. He even mentioned one of his friends vibe-coded a complex website with AI that was supposedly extremely secure and feature-rich. His argument is that I should focus more on AI workflows and automation instead of traditional software engineering. My opinion is a little different. I feel like AI is an amazing tool, but someone still has to understand: - Architecture - System Design - Databases - Security - Scalability - Performance - Debugging - Clean code - Software engineering principles My thinking is that AI can generate code, but it can't replace understanding why the code works or making good engineering decisions. Now I'm questioning whether I'm becoming outdated before I've even started. So I'd really appreciate advice from people already working in the industry. Some questions I'd love honest answers to: If you were a 4th-semester CS student in 2026, what would you spend the next 4–6 months learning? Is investing heavily in Java, Spring Boot, DSA, and backend development still wort

Do you have 2 minutes? Let's find out together. Before you continue, one small note... This first article isn't about Java, SQL, or coding tutorials. Today is simply about introducing myself, sharing why I decided to start this blog, and telling you what you can expect from the journey ahead. The technical content begins from the next article. Now, let me introduce myself. Hello! I'm Kumudhasri. Today isn't my birthday. It's not New Year's Day. I didn't receive a job offer today. There isn't a special milestone to celebrate. In fact, today is just an ordinary Sunday. But then I asked myself, "Why wait for a special day when I can make today special by taking the first step?" I've never believed in waiting for the perfect time to start. There will always be another Monday, another month, or another excuse. For me, the right time isn't tomorrow. "The right time is right now." So, this is where my journey begins. I'm not someone with an extraordinary story, years of experience, impressive achievements, or exceptional skills. I'm simply a recent B.Tech graduate trying to become a Java Full Stack Developer. Like many people starting out, I'm learning one concept at a time, solving problems, building projects, making mistakes, and figuring things out as I go. Some days I'll make progress. Some days I'll feel stuck. And I'm okay with both. Why am I starting this blog? I'm not writing because I'm an expert. I'm writing because I'm a learner. This blog is my way of documenting everything I learn—not just the wins, but also the mistakes, the confusion, and the lessons that come from working through them. I want this blog to keep me accountable. I want a place where I can organize my thoughts, track my progress, and understand how far I've come. Most importantly, I want my future self to look back at these posts and remember what the beginning looked like. What can you expect from this blog? If you decide to follow this journey, here's what you'll find: SQL challenges and what

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

Here's How One Engineer Is Walking on It I want to be upfront about what this post is and isn't. It isn't a list of five things you should do to stay relevant in the age of AI. I've read plenty of those, and I've tried to write one myself more than once. Every time, it came out sounding like advice I didn't actually have the standing to give. So this is the other kind of post — a description of how one person is muddling through, written precisely because I don't have the playbook. The ground moved under me The moment it became real for me was working with Claude Code on an internal project. I came in expecting to do what I've always done: tell the tool, in fine detail, how to accomplish a thing. Instead I found myself describing what I wanted and why , and handing off the details. The shift was quiet, almost embarrassingly small in the moment, and yet it kept nagging at me afterward. I've lived through paradigm shifts before. Web 2.0. Mobile. Each one had its share of "I need to go do the cool new thing for clients." But those were fundamentally about learning a new tool. This one feels different to me. It isn't asking me to learn a new framework. It's asking me to re-evaluate my place in the market and what my job even is. I work as a consultant who helps clients understand and adopt emerging technology, which means I don't get to sit this out in some established niche. The ground is moving, and I'm standing on it. The part I can't resolve Here's the scariest thing, and I'd rather say it plainly than tuck it away: after nearly thirty years of building precise, complex systems, I don't know whether all that experience is an advantage or a trap. I'd love to tell you that three decades of deconstructing hard problems gives me a head start on structuring intent for an AI. Some days I believe that. Other days I wonder whether my deterministic instincts — the habits that made me good at this — are exactly the reflexes I now have to unlearn. I genuinely can't tell yet. B

By the end of this article, you'll know: what Kimi K3 actually is, the architecture, the scale, and what changed from the K2 family how to run it today, free in the browser, through the API, or wired into Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, and RooCode which exact model ID and settings unlock the full 1 million token context how K3 stacks up on price and benchmarks against DeepSeek V4, Qwen3.7 Max, GLM-5.2, and its own sibling K2.7 Code whether switching today makes sense, or whether you should wait Kimi K3 just dropped, and Moonshot means business Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 16, 2026, timed just ahead of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. The Beijing lab, backed by Alibaba, has spent the past 18 months watching DeepSeek erode its market position. K3 is the comeback attempt, and the early numbers back it up. The headline result: K3 debuted at number one on Arena.ai's Frontend Code Arena with a score of 1,679, ahead of Claude Fable 5 at 1,631 and GPT-5.6 Sol at 1,618. Its predecessor, K2.6, sat 18th on that same board. That's a 17 spot jump in one release, and it's independently measured, not a number Moonshot invented itself. This isn't Moonshot's first time in Western production stacks either. Cursor built its Composer 2 model starting from a Kimi K2.5 base. DoorDash's CTO has said the company routes lower level work to Kimi K2.6. Thinking Machines used K2.5 to help generate early post-training data for Inkling, its own model released just a day before K3. So when a new Kimi flagship lands, it lands somewhere developers already have skin in the game. For developers, the practical story matters more than the leaderboard. K3 is open weight, speaks the OpenAI SDK, and drops into tools you already use. It's also, for the first time in Kimi's history, priced like a frontier model instead of a budget one. That changes the calculus on when it's actually worth reaching for. What Kimi K3 actually is K3 is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 2.8 tr

A video-to-prompt tool looks simple from the outside: upload a clip, wait a moment, and copy the result. The hard part is not generating text. It is preserving enough of the source video's structure that the prompt remains useful when another model interprets it. I learned this while working on a small video analysis workflow. Early versions produced fluent paragraphs, but they often dropped a camera move, merged two events, or placed dialogue in the wrong shot. The output sounded good and still failed as a production prompt. The fix was to stop treating the result as one block of prose. Start with an intermediate representation I now treat the prompt as the last stage of a compiler. The video is first converted into a structured record, and only then rendered for a specific video model. A minimal record might look like this: { "duration_seconds" : 12.4 , "shots" : [ { "start" : 0.0 , "end" : 3.8 , "subject" : "a cyclist waiting at a red light" , "action" : "looks over the left shoulder" , "camera" : { "shot_size" : "medium" , "movement" : "slow push-in" , "angle" : "eye level" }, "dialogue" : null } ] } This structure is deliberately boring. That is useful. A typed record makes missing data visible and gives you something concrete to validate before you ask a language model to write polished prose. Normalize the input first Video files arrive with different frame rates, codecs, orientations, and audio layouts. Links from social platforms add another layer of inconsistency. If every downstream stage has to understand every input format, failures become difficult to reproduce. The ingestion stage should produce a canonical package: a timestamped frame stream at a known sampling rate a normalized audio track basic metadata such as duration, aspect ratio, and frame rate a stable internal time base Keep the original timestamps. Rounding everything to whole seconds is tempting, but it causes trouble in short clips where several actions happen in quick succession. Detect

I set out to deploy a fine-tuned LLM fully offline, on a mid-range Android phone, answering medical questions in Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Nigerian Pidgin. No internet connection required, because that's the reality for a lot of the people this was meant to help. The model worked. Getting there broke three times, in three completely different ways, and left me with one problem I still haven't solved. The setup I fine-tuned unsloth/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct , Unsloth's 4-bit-optimized derivative of Meta's Llama 3.2 3B, in two stages: QLoRA supervised fine-tuning on a curated dataset of 3,917 medical question-answer pairs across the four languages, followed by direct preference optimization (DPO) to sharpen response quality. SFT converged to a loss of 1.099. DPO landed a reward margin of 18.40. Then I merged to 16-bit and tried to convert to GGUF, the format llama.cpp needs to run the model on-device. That's where things started breaking. Crash 1: the tokenizer that thought it was someone else First conversion attempt. Model loads. First inference call. Instant crash: terminating due to uncaught exception of type std::out_of_range: unordered_map::at: key not found Turns out the conversion had written tokenizer.ggml.model = "llama" into the GGUF file. That field tells the runtime which tokenizer code path to use, and "llama" routes to SentencePiece. Llama 3.2 doesn't use SentencePiece. It uses BPE. The runtime was trying to read BPE tokens through a SentencePiece parser, and predictably, it found nothing where it expected something. Fix: manually set the field to "gpt2" , which routes to the correct BPE path. Crash 2: the tokenizer that couldn't decide what it was Fixed crash 1, tried again. New failure, before the model even finished converting: TypeError: Llama 3 must be converted with BpeVocab followed, after the code's fallback path kicked in, by: ValueError: Cannot instantiate this tokenizer from a slow version This one took longer to trace. Unsloth's saved tokenizer_c

How machine learning supports aircraft maintenance using operational data. Key Takeaways Predictive maintenance estimates component health before failure. Data quality determines model performance. Explainable models support maintenance decisions. Human review remains part of every maintenance action. Model performance requires continuous validation. Introduction Aircraft produce large volumes of operational data. Machine learning converts this data into maintenance support inspection planning and fault detection. What Is Predictive Maintenance? Predictive maintenance estimates the condition of aircraft components using historical and real-time data. The goal is to identify early signs of degradation before a failure affects operations. Traditional maintenance often follows fixed inspection intervals. Data-driven maintenance adds condition-based recommendations using operational evidence. Data Sources Model quality depends on reliable data. Common sources include: Engine sensor readings Flight data recorder information Maintenance records Aircraft utilization history Environmental conditions Component replacement history Incomplete or inaccurate data reduces prediction accuracy. Machine Learning Workflow A typical workflow includes: Collect operational and maintenance data. Remove errors and missing values. Create features from sensor measurements. Train the prediction model. Validate performance using unseen data. Monitor prediction accuracy after deployment. Retrain the model as new data becomes available. Model Selection Different problems require different algorithms. Common choices include: Random Forest XGBoost LightGBM Support Vector Machine Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Transformer-based time-series models Model selection depends on the prediction task, dataset size, and operational requirements. Engineering Challenges Data Quality Sensor failures, missing records, and inconsistent maintenance logs reduce model reliability. Class Imbalance Aircraft failures

Recap. Part 1 framed the supervision problem. Part 2 architected the four-model system on AWS and counted the hardware. Part 3 put the gate on the page in fifteen lines of PyTorch. Now the question that decides whether any of it mattered: does the gate actually earn its keep - and what would it cost to know? This is the close. A verification design, the stability instrumentation that separates a real evaluation from a lucky one, and the FinOps reality that is the reason this whole series is a blueprint instead of a benchmark. SDAR makes two claims, not one It's tempting to reduce the paper to a single number. The reported gains over plain GRPO are real and worth stating - their numbers, not mine : roughly +9.4% on ALFWorld, +7.0% on Search-QA, +10.2% on WebShop accuracy. But the headline percentage is the less interesting claim. The one that matters is the second: SDAR avoids the training instability that naive GRPO+OPSD falls into . The whole point of the gate Part 3 was to keep the teacher's noisy rejections from destabilizing training. So a verification that only measures final task success has tested half the paper. You have to measure stability too - and most reproductions don't. That two-pronged claim dictates the experiment. The verification: three arms, not two You cannot prove SDAR's thesis with a before/after. You need three training runs, identical except for the supervision: Arm What it is What it proves A. GRPO Plain agentic RL, no teacher The baseline the +9.4% is measured against B. Naive GRPO+OPSD Teacher distillation, no gate The instability SDAR claims to fix C. SDAR Gated distillation Part 3 Beats A on score and beats B on stability Drop arm B and you can show SDAR beats GRPO, but you've quietly deleted the paper's actual contribution - there's no evidence the gate did anything a plain teacher wouldn't. Arm B is the expensive arm nobody wants to run and the one that makes the result credible. Metrics that actually test the claim Metric What it mea

As a developer, I got a bit scared and fed-up of blindly merging massive pull requests and losing context on my own codebase, so I built FluencyLoop . https://github.com/baokhang83/fluencyloop It is an open-source, local-first workflow plugin for Claude Code and Codex that ensures your code and your codebase fluency are produced together. Instead of letting an agent dump raw code, it tracks your technical familiarity locally and pauses to explain complex architectural choices or rejected alternatives only on topics you do not know yet. It also produces documentation and tracks the decisions it makes along the way. Try it out ! It feels really good to get the AI caring for my understanding 🤣

Part 6 (finale) of Retrieval-Augmented Self-Recall. Code: RE-call . Part 5: the gap threshold that didn't transfer . I fine-tuned the embedder on my own domain expecting a win. I measured it properly, on held-out queries. The improvement was exactly zero. Δ+0.00 MRR. Δ+0.00 nDCG@10. Not "small". Not "within noise". Zero. It's also the result I wanted, which takes some explaining. That's the first half of this post. The second half is how the whole engine ships, so an agent can actually use it. The fine-tune that did nothing After Part 5, the natural next question: if calibrating the threshold helps, would a better embedding help more? So I fine-tuned one on my domain. The setup: all-MiniLM-L6-v2 , OnlineContrastiveLoss on query/gold-chunk pairs, trained on the 14-document corpus. The result: Model Test MRR Test nDCG@10 Base 1.00 1.00 + Fine-tuned 1.00 1.00 Δ +0.00 +0.00 Zero lift. And that is the correct outcome, not a failed experiment. Here's the reasoning, because it's the whole point. The base model already scores a perfect MRR and nDCG@10 on this corpus. There is no headroom left to recover. The only ways to manufacture a "gain" from here would be dishonest ones: evaluate on the training set (and measure memorization, not retrieval), or artificially cripple the baseline so fine-tuning has something to fix. Reporting +0.00 is the honest read, and the honest read is that off-the-shelf embeddings already saturate this corpus. But the full result is more nuanced, and more useful. On a harder , opaque-jargon corpus — one where the base model genuinely struggles to map queries to the right chunks — the same fine-tuning gave +0.24 MRR . So the real conclusion isn't "fine-tuning doesn't work." It's: Fine-tuning helps when the base model doesn't already cover your vocabulary. When it does, you get nothing. Know which regime you're in before you spend the GPU hours. That's the value of a null result. "+0.00" told me my corpus was already well-covered by a general-purpose

Big Howdy, I'm so tired of hearing all the hype about AI. Don't get me wrong, I think AI is pretty cool and I use it all the time for various tasks throughout the day, but I hate AI marketing. What do I mean by that? Whenever there is any hype, advertising, or corporate shilling about AI, it's always vague. Talks about agents, multi-agent systems, RAG pipelines, etc. are everywhere, and yet the specifics are always just out of reach. Even when I try to dig into deeper technical articles, the handwaving usually begins almost immediately. Several architecture diagrams and acronyms later, I still do not have a much better idea of what is actually happening (although I'm not really looking hard enough). I’m going to fix that. For myself, at least. First Stop: RAG My first target is RAG. It's been out for quite a while now and I've been hearing about it for forever. It also sounds like enough progress has been made that the problem has effectively been solved. Best practices have been established and it's pretty commonplace now, so it's a great place to start. But what is RAG? RAG stands for Retrieval-Augmented Generation , which is... not a helpful name if you are just learning about this for the first time like I am. However, if you use AI at all, you've already been using a form of it without even knowing it. RAG is simply a pattern: Retrieve relevant external information. Add that information to the AI model’s working context. Generate an answer grounded in it. That's it. When you use an AI assistant and it goes and searches the internet for relevant information to give you an answer, that's a form of RAG. That doesn't mean your AI assistant is a RAG system, but it can perform RAG functions. But this STILL sounds a bit hand-wavy to me. How does this work in real life? The Part I Kept Missing Context windows are massive these days, but I have seen technical documents that are literally more than 3,000 pages long and full of dense technical information. Even if one tec

You don't need to know anything about Go to read this. The game is just the fixed yardstick. The story is a hardware benchmark: the same program, the same problem, the same settings — only the machine changed, from a 2017 GPU cluster to a single 2026 graphics card. That makes it a rare clean measurement of one decade of progress. What "solving" means here There are two very different things a computer can do with a board game. It can play it well — that's what AlphaGo did. Or it can solve it: mathematically prove the outcome under perfect play from both sides, leaving no doubt. Solving is the hard one. You explore an enormous tree of "if I play here, they play there…" move sequences until you have an airtight proof. Each node in that tree is one position examined. The target here is a single 7x7 opening called JA . In 2023, a NeurIPS paper ( Game Solving with Online Fine-Tuning , Wu et al.) proved its verdict — the attacker cannot win — using a cluster of twelve GTX 1080Ti GPUs running 384 parallel workers. The solver is guided by a neural network that estimates how hard each branch is, and crucially that network is fine-tuned online — it keeps learning during the solve. I rebuilt that exact solver (same code, same problem, same initial model, same search settings) and ran it on one RTX 5090 . It reached the identical proof . Everything but the hardware was held fixed, so the two runs line up as a generation-vs-generation benchmark — and it doubled as a full shakedown of the new Blackwell workstation. The numbers 1x RTX 5090 (2026) 12x GTX 1080Ti (2017) ratio Worker slots 24 384 1/16 the parallelism Per-slot throughput 284 nodes/s 141 nodes/s 2.01x faster Search work to proof 1.01B nodes 1.73B nodes 0.59x (41% less work) Avg work per sub-job 4,189 nodes 6,136 nodes shallower proofs Live model updates 4,007 208 19.3x more Wall-clock time 41.4 h 8.9 h 4.64x slower Verdict loss (proven) loss identical The single card finished slower in wall-clock time (41 h vs 9 h) — b

I was tired of buzzword-heavy AI projects and marginally impactful demos. Surely we can do something more inspiring with these LLMs than build another chatbot? For me, the answer is physical AI: the moment all those breakthroughs finally reach into the real world, in robots that see, move, and figure things out for themselves. I think it is the most exciting frontier in tech right now. It is also genuinely hard to break into, because it is not one field. It is about five of them stacked on top of each other: electronics, mechanics, programming, data, and AI. Eight months ago I started my own robotics journey from scratch, and I was completely overwhelmed. How do you get from blinking an LED to a humanoid that does your dishes? There are thousands of scattered tutorials out there, with no sense of what comes first, or what any of it is building toward. So I decided to build the map. Stealing the best idea from my favorite games: If you have ever played a factory-building or strategy game like Satisfactory or Civ Six, you know the feeling. You start with almost nothing, and you unlock new tech one satisfying step at a time. Those games are proof that we will happily spend hours mastering an intimidatingly complex system, as long as it is laid out as a clear tree of unlocks. So why not point that same instinct at learning something real? That is exactly what a tech tree is: a structured, visual path where each node is a skill and each connection is a prerequisite. You start at Curiosity on the far left and work your way right, through electronics, mechanics, code, data, and AI, all the way toward autonomous robots and humanoids. The idea is simple: turn gaming time into learning time. What the tree actually is Every node on the tree is a skill to learn, and the star-shaped nodes are hands-on projects where theory finally meets a soldering iron. Nodes are color-coded by discipline, so you can see at a glance whether you are in electronics, mechanics, programming, data s

Just getting this concept is like money in the bank! I'm too excited for words! At age 67, I have never coded a thing in my life. All of the sudden in 2026, I find that I've become a "vibe" coder with the help of Grok and Gemini. Both in segregated project silos are acting as my PMs and doing a damn fine job of it. As CEO of a brand new company, I'm taking on the entire scope of development for The Avinoam Group, LLC. My business partner Eyal and I have a very cool vision for what we intend to accomplish. And while it is beyond the scope of this post, only 2 crazy non-dev guys would be this bold, with all due respect to the young guns here on DEV. Our core principles incorporate transparency and authenticity. I can think of no better business idea as 4 separate cornerstones (we have 4 separate projects) than the brilliant concept-commitment to #build in public. So, I'm looking forward to telling everyone what we're doing and how we're doing it. We have nothing to hide except a little "secret sauce" that we can't really talk about without shooting ourselves in the foot. Other than that, I want to "show & tell" just like when I was in kindergarten in 1964 and brought "Meet The Beatles" in to Miss Shreiner's class and all the little kids danced! Right now, I'm reading how to get the most out of DEV and being here. At my age, I like to give back. What can an old geezer whose never coded before offer? My life experience and business knowledge. For example, we are developing freepaycalc (Google it if you want) to help devs, makers and freelancers plug the leaks in their "money buckets." and how to kill off that dreaded "scope creep" that so many independent consultants and contractors get trapped in. I don't want this post to be too long. I just wanted to reinforce the value of building in public. If you want to punch through each and every challenge of a complex project, then why not tell brilliant dev colleagues what you're up to? Whatever problem you're facing has a so

How I went from toggling a single GPIO pin to deploying intelligent, low-power firmware on the edge — and the lessons that shaped me along the way. The first program I ever ran on a microcontroller did exactly one thing: it blinked an LED. No operating system. No framework. No safety net. Just my code, a register, and a clock ticking a few million times a second. When that LED finally blinked at the rate I intended — not too fast, not stuck on — I felt something I hadn't felt writing software before. On a bare-metal system, nothing happens unless you make it happen. There's no runtime quietly cleaning up after you. That mix of total control and total responsibility is what pulled me into embedded systems, and it's the same thread that eventually led me to running machine learning models on the edge. This is the story of that journey — from a single blinking pin to intelligent devices that sense, decide, and act on their own. The Bare-Metal Beginning Bare-metal firmware is where you learn what a computer actually is. When you write to a memory-mapped register to toggle a GPIO, or configure a UART peripheral one bit at a time, there's no abstraction hiding the hardware from you. You read the datasheet. You read the reference manual. You get the clock configuration wrong, and nothing works — no error message, just silence. Then you fix it, and suddenly bytes are streaming out of a pin at exactly the baud rate you configured. Most of my early growth happened writing low-level peripheral drivers — UART, SPI, I2C, GPIO, ADC — on ARM Cortex-M platforms. These are the unglamorous building blocks, but they teach you the discipline embedded work demands: Every byte and every milliwatt matters. On a resource-constrained MCU, you don't get to be careless with memory or power. Timing is a first-class citizen. An interrupt that fires 50 microseconds late can break the whole system. The hardware is always right. If your code and the oscilloscope disagree, the oscilloscope wins. Th

Originally published on tamiz.pro . Introduction Over-the-air (OTA) updates are a critical component of modern software ecosystems, yet they introduce complexity through network instability, device fragmentation, and rollback challenges. Meanwhile, AI agents are emerging as powerful tools for autonomous workflow orchestration. This article explores how to architect resilient developer workflows by integrating AI-driven decision-making with OTA update management systems. The Chaos of OTA Updates OTA updates face three primary challenges: Unreliable Network Context : Mobile devices frequently lose connectivity during updates Device State Fragmentation : Managing compatibility across 1000+ device configurations Rollback Complexity : Traditional systems lack real-time failure detection Traditional solutions rely on retries and checksum validation, but these fail to address root causes like partial updates on low-memory devices or race conditions during state transitions. AI Agent Innovation Framework AI agents introduce three transformative capabilities: Predictive Update Scheduling # Pseudocode for AI-driven update scheduling agent . observe ( network_quality , battery_level , device_usage ) recommendation = neural_net . predict ( update_success_probability ) if recommendation . confidence > 0.9 : schedule_update () elif recommendation . alternative : queue_deferred_update () Dynamic Rollback Orchestration AI agents can implement context-aware rollback strategies: Immediate rollback for critical OS failures Graceful deferral for non-essential app updates Predictive rollback based on anomaly detection in system metrics Device State Pattern Recognition Machine learning models analyze historical update data to: Predict failure patterns across device models Optimize binary delivery sequencing Automatically generate compatibility matrices Architectural Implementation A resilient workflow combines: graph TD A[OTA Coordinator] --> B[AI Agent Orchestration Layer] B --> C[Updat