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Introduction: The Need for Modern Web/AppSec Training The cybersecurity landscape is evolving at a breakneck pace, but the tools we use to train the next generation of defenders are stuck in the past. Most web/appsec learning platforms still focus on basic, textbook vulnerabilities —XSS popups, simple SQL injection, or trivial IDORs. These labs are like teaching someone to swim in a kiddie pool; they might grasp the concept, but they’re ill-prepared for the open ocean of modern web applications . The gap isn’t just in depth—it’s in relevance . Real-world apps today are complex, API-driven, and riddled with subtle, pattern-based vulnerabilities that don’t fit into neat, isolated lessons. Consider this: a developer misconfigures a GraphQL endpoint, exposing an entire database. Or an API leaks sensitive data because of a flawed rate-limiting mechanism. These aren’t edge cases—they’re common mistakes in modern apps. Yet, most training platforms ignore them, leaving learners to either stumble upon these issues in the wild or remain oblivious. The result? A workforce of security professionals who can theoretically exploit a vulnerability but struggle to identify or fix it in a real-world context . The problem isn’t just outdated content—it’s the lack of ethical, hands-on practice environments . Many aspiring security professionals resort to illegal or gray-area practices to gain experience, risking legal consequences and ethical dilemmas. What’s needed is a platform that simulates real-world scenarios without crossing ethical boundaries, one that teaches not just how to exploit but also why vulnerabilities occur and how to fix them . Here’s the core issue: modern apps are systems, not isolated components . A vulnerability in one part—say, a file upload feature—can cascade into a full account takeover if combined with a session management flaw. Most labs fail to teach this interconnectedness , leaving learners with a fragmented understanding. A practical platform must brid

Originally published on bckinfo.com How to Install VMware ESXi: Step-by-Step Bare-Metal Setup Guide Table of Contents ESXi vs. VMware Workstation: Which One Do You Need Hardware Compatibility Check Downloading the ESXi Installer Creating a Bootable USB Installer BIOS/UEFI Preparation Installing ESXi: Step by Step Configuring the Management Network Accessing the vSphere Host Client Creating Your First Virtual Machine Post-Installation Checklist Common Issues and Quick Fixes Closing Notes If you've read our complete guide to VMware virtualization , you already know ESXi is the bare-metal hypervisor underneath vSphere. This guide is the hands-on counterpart — installing ESXi directly on physical server hardware, from hardware compatibility checks through booting your first virtual machine. ESXi vs. VMware Workstation: Which One Do You Need Before starting, it's worth confirming you actually want ESXi and not VMware Workstation. They solve different problems: VMware Workstation is a Type-2 hypervisor — it installs on top of an existing OS (Windows, Linux, macOS via Fusion). Good for running a VM or two on a laptop or desktop you also use for everything else. If that's your case, our guide on installing VMware Workstation on CentOS Stream 10 is the right starting point instead. ESXi is a Type-1, bare-metal hypervisor — it installs directly on the hardware with no host OS underneath it. This is the right choice for a dedicated server running multiple VMs, a home lab, or anything that needs to scale beyond "a VM running alongside my desktop." The rest of this guide assumes you're installing on dedicated hardware that won't run anything else. Hardware Compatibility Check This is the step most worth not skipping. ESXi has a defined Hardware Compatibility List (HCL), and installing on unlisted hardware is the single biggest source of installation failures and post-install driver issues. Check your exact server model and component list (NIC, storage controller) against VMware'

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Google has released A2UI v0.9, a framework-agnostic standard for AI agents to declare user interface intent across multiple platforms without arbitrary code. The update emphasizes alignment with existing design systems. It includes a new SDK for Python, improved error handling, and various transport methods. Migration guidance and evolution specifications are also provided. By Daniel Curtis

leetcode.com Problem Statement Given the root of a binary tree, return its preorder traversal. Preorder Traversal follows: Root ↓ Left ↓ Right Brute Force Intuition In an interview, you can explain it like this: Visit the current node first, then recursively traverse the left subtree followed by the right subtree. Recursion naturally follows the preorder sequence. Complexity Time Complexity: O(N) Space Complexity: O(H) Where: N = Number of Nodes H = Height of Tree Recursive Code class Solution { public List < Integer > preorderTraversal ( TreeNode root ) { List < Integer > ans = new ArrayList <>(); preorder ( root , ans ); return ans ; } private void preorder ( TreeNode root , List < Integer > ans ) { if ( root == null ) return ; ans . add ( root . val ); preorder ( root . left , ans ); preorder ( root . right , ans ); } } Moving Towards the Optimal Iterative Approach Instead of recursion, we can use a stack. Since preorder visits: Root ↓ Left ↓ Right we should process the root immediately. To ensure the left subtree is processed first, push the right child before the left child . Pattern Recognition Whenever you see: Preorder Traversal Simulate Recursion Think: Stack Key Observation Stack follows: LIFO To visit: Left First push: Right First ↓ Left Second so that left is popped first. Optimal Java Solution class Solution { public List < Integer > preorderTraversal ( TreeNode root ) { List < Integer > ans = new ArrayList <>(); if ( root == null ) return ans ; Stack < TreeNode > st = new Stack <>(); st . push ( root ); while (! st . isEmpty ()) { TreeNode node = st . pop (); ans . add ( node . val ); if ( node . right != null ) st . push ( node . right ); if ( node . left != null ) st . push ( node . left ); } return ans ; } } Dry Run 1 / \ 2 3 / \ 4 5 Stack: 1 Visit: 1 Push: 3 2 Visit: 2 Push: 5 4 Traversal: 1 ↓ 2 ↓ 4 ↓ 5 ↓ 3 Answer: [1,2,4,5,3] Why Stack Works? A stack processes the most recently added node first. By pushing: Right Child ↓ Left Child the left child

สวัสดีครับเพื่อนๆ! 👋 วันนี้จะมาเล่าเรื่องน่าตื่นเต้นให้ฟังนะเพื่อนๆ สำหรับใครที่เป็นสาย SvelteKit เตรียมตัวอัปเดตความรู้ใหม่กันได้เลย เพราะตอนนี้เขามีของเล่นใหม่ที่กำลังอยู่ในช่วงทดลองใช้งาน แต่บอกเลยว่าว้าวมาก! เราไปดูกันดีกว่าว่ามันคืออะไร... 📡 Remote function คืออะไร เป็น function ตัวใหม่ ✨ (ที่คาดว่าจะเป็น new way to implement สำหรับ Sveltekit 3.0) เอาไว้ใช้สื่อสารพูดคุยกันระหว่างฝั่ง client และ server ของ Sveltekit นั่นเอง 💬 ความเจ๋งคือเราสามารถเรียกใช้มันจากมุมไหนของ Sveltekit ก็ได้ 🌍 ไม่จำเป็นต้องจำกัดแค่ฝั่ง server หรือ client แต่จุดสำคัญคือ การทำงานของมันจะเกิดขึ้นที่ฝั่ง server เสมอ 👍 นั่นหมายความว่ามันสามารถทะลุทะลวงไปดึงข้อมูลหรือโมดูลที่เป็น server-only ได้สบายๆ เช่น ตัวแปร environment ที่เราประกาศไว้ หรือพวกฐานข้อมูลต่างๆ ก็ดึงมาได้ชิลๆ เลย 😎 เวลาจะใช้งาน เราจะต้องใช้ท่าการ await แบบใหม่ของ Sveltekit ⏳ ที่ช่วยให้คุณโหลดหรือดึงข้อมูลแบบ promise มาใช้ใน component ของคุณได้ทันที 🚀 ⚠️ หมายเหตุ: ตอนนี้ทั้ง await และ remote function ยังอยู่ในช่วงทดลองใช้งาน 🧪 (experimental) นั่นแปลว่า syntax บางอย่างอาจจะมีการปรับเปลี่ยนหรือบินหายไปบ้างในอนาคต 🥲 แต่แกนหลัก (core functional) ของมันก็จะยังทำงานได้ตามที่เราคาดหวังแน่นอน ถ้าใครคันไม้คันมืออยากลองของใหม่ตอนนี้ สามารถไปเปิดโหมด experimental ได้ที่ไฟล์ svelte.config.js(.ts) ตามโค้ดด้านล่างนี้เลย 👇 svelte.config.js(.ts) /** @type {import('@sveltejs/kit').Config} */ const config = { kit : { experimental : { remoteFunctions : true } }, compilerOptions : { experimental : { async : true } } }; export default config ; 🏃‍♂️ Let get started!! เราสามารถเริ่มใช้ remote function ได้ง่ายๆ ผ่านการสร้างไฟล์นามสกุล .remote.js หรือ .remote.ts 📝 ซึ่งตอนนี้มี function ให้เราหยิบมาเล่นทั้งหมด 4 ตัวด้วยกันคือ: query (ที่เราจะมาพูดถึงกันในบทความนี้) form command prerender หลักการทำงานเบื้องหลังคือ เวลาที่เรา import ตัว remote function ไปใช้ในฝั่ง client มันจะถูกแอบแปลงร่างเป็นโค้ดที่หุ้มด้วย fetch ในช่วง build time 🏗️ นั่นหมายความว่าระบบจะใจดีสร้างเส้น HTTP endpoint ให้เราแบบอัตโนมัติ ✨ ด้วยเหตุนี้เราเลยเอาไฟล์ .remote.js หรือ .remote.

If you ask any senior backend engineer or database administrator how to instantly make a slow, disk-bound application faster, their first answer is almost always: "Put it in memory." But why is memory so preferred, and how do modern architectures utilize RAM to achieve sub-millisecond latencies? We're seeing a massive revival of RAM disks and in-memory architectures. Let's explore why computer experts are increasingly treating RAM like a hard drive. 1. The Physics of Storage: Why RAM Wins To understand the shift towards in-memory architectures, we have to look at the numbers. Hard Disk Drives (HDDs): Mechanical spinning disks. Seek times are around 2-5 milliseconds . Solid State Drives (SSDs): Flash memory. Seek times are around 0.1 milliseconds (100 microseconds) . RAM (Random Access Memory): Volatile silicon. Access times are around 100 nanoseconds . RAM is roughly 1,000 times faster than an SSD and 10,000 to 50,000 times faster than an HDD. When you have a high-throughput system serving millions of requests per second, waiting for a disk to seek is an eternity. 2. In-Memory Databases: Redis and Memcached The most common implementation of this principle in modern backends is the In-Memory Database . How They Work Instead of writing every transaction to an SSD, systems like Redis and Memcached store the entire dataset directly in RAM. This bypasses the OS file system cache, disk I/O bottlenecks, and complex B-tree traversals required by traditional relational databases like PostgreSQL or MySQL. The Trade-off: Durability RAM is volatile. If the server loses power, all data is gone. So how do in-memory databases survive crashes? Snapshots (RDB in Redis): Periodically dumping the entire memory state to disk. Append-Only Files (AOF in Redis): Logging every write operation to a disk sequentially. Sequential writes to disk are significantly faster than random writes. This hybrid approach gives you the read/write speed of RAM with a "good enough" durability guarantee for

Todo projeto que envolve autenticação via telefone acaba esbarrando no mesmo problema chato: como testar isso de verdade? Você não pode ficar digitando seu próprio número toda vez que roda um fluxo de cadastro. Definitivamente não deveria pedir para os colegas de equipe cederem o deles. E a maioria dos pipelines de CI não tem uma pessoa sentada ali, pronta para ler uma mensagem de texto e digitar o código num formulário. É uma daquelas coisas que parecem pequenas até você estar três sprints dentro de um projeto com 2FA via SMS e perceber que a cobertura de teste desse fluxo inteiro é "testei uma vez, manualmente, antes do almoço". Por Que a Verificação por Telefone É Complicada de Testar A maioria dos fluxos de autenticação de um stack típico é fácil de automatizar. Verificação por e-mail, dá para interceptar com uma caixa de entrada de teste ou um serviço de captura de e-mails. Tokens de sessão, dá para mockar. Redefinição de senha, você controla o loop inteiro. O SMS quebra esse padrão porque o código precisa sair completamente do seu sistema, ser entregue por uma rede de telecomunicação real e voltar antes que o teste possa continuar. Essa ida e volta introduz vários pontos de falha que não têm nada a ver com o seu código: atrasos de operadora, filtros de spam, peculiaridades de entrega por região, limites de taxa. Se você já viu um pipeline de CI falhar numa etapa de verificação por telefone e depois passar numa nova tentativa sem nenhuma mudança de código, é quase sempre por causa disso. O instinto de muitas equipes é pegar um número público gratuito de um dos vários sites de "receber SMS online" para checagens manuais rápidas. Isso funciona bem para uma verificação pontual. Mas desmorona rápido quando você tenta automatizar, porque esses números são compartilhados potencialmente por milhares de outras pessoas usando o mesmo pool. Códigos podem se perder numa caixa de entrada lotada, o próprio número pode já estar bloqueado pela plataforma que você está testand

A government customer of NSO Group used the company's Pegasus spyware to hack into the phone of a European politician, who at the time was serving on an EU committee tasked with investigating the spyware industry.

“It is a direct attack on the rule of law,” says one European Parliament member of the new findings from Citizen Lab.

I recently built a free online image processing tool that runs entirely in the browser. No uploads, no servers, no sign-ups. Here's how it works under the hood. https://img.aixiaot.com The Problem Most online image tools require uploading your photos to someone else's server. This raises privacy concerns and limits file sizes. I wanted to build something that processes everything locally. Tech Stack - Next.js for the frontend - TensorFlow.js + Real-ESRGAN for AI upscaling - @imgly/background-removal for AI background removal - Tesseract.js for OCR - Canvas API for compression, resizing, format conversion Features • AI Background Removal - one click, works for portraits, products, animals • Image Compression - reduce file size up to 96% • Format Conversion - JPG, PNG, WebP • ID Photo Maker - passport and visa photos with customizable backgrounds • AI Image Upscaler - 2x to 8x with Real-ESRGAN • OCR - extract text from images, 20+ languages • Image Resizer - enlarge or shrink Architecture All processing happens client-side using WebAssembly and the Canvas API. When you upload an image, it never leaves your device. The AI models (background removal, upscaling) run locally in your browser using TensorFlow.js and ONNX Runtime Web. Open Source The entire project is open source under AGPL v3. You can find it on GitHub: https://github.com/haizeigh/ai-image-tools Try It https://img.aixiaot.com I'd love to hear your feedback! What features would you add?

Seven days of flow. Fixed a peer identity binding issue in py-libp2p, automated my Neovim lockfile merges, and added a massive batch of notes on xv6 and Category Theory. 10 commits and a solid PR in the works. TL;DR I managed to hit a perfect seven-day streak this week, balancing some deep-dive p2p networking work with necessary maintenance on my local environment. The highlight was opening a PR in py-libp2p to tighten up how PeerRecords are handled in the Kademlia DHT. On the side, I spent time automating the annoying parts of my Neovim config and dumping a fresh batch of notes into my knowledge base. 10 commits, 204 lines added, and a much cleaner workflow to show for it. What I Built Neovim Configuration & CI I’m a firm believer that your editor should work for you, not the other way around. My nvim repo saw a lot of action this week—9 commits in total—but most of it was under-the-hood maintenance. I’ve been leaning on Lua to keep things snappy, and this week was about ensuring my plugin ecosystem doesn't rot. I pushed several updates to keep plugins at their latest versions, but the real "quality of life" improvement was adding a chore to auto-resolve lazy-lock.json merge conflicts. If you’ve ever worked on your Neovim config across multiple machines, you know the headache of the lockfile drifting. I set up a flow to prioritize incoming changes, which saves me from manually triaging JSON diffs every time I pull from dev . It’s a small tweak, but it removes a recurring friction point in my daily flow. I also spent time cleaning up the root of the config, with about 37 additions and 33 deletions—refactoring is a constant process when you live in your terminal. The Knowledge Base I also put some serious time into main-notes . I’m currently going deep on a few different subjects, and I use this repo as my "second brain." I added 167 lines of new material across 13 files, covering a pretty diverse range of topics: xv6 (the re-implementation of Unix V6), Category Theo

Spent the week deep-diving into my dev-publish tool, focusing on durability and orchestrator resilience. 21 commits across two repos, with a massive cleanup of the publishing logic and some much-needed architecture documentation. TL;DR There is a specific kind of satisfaction that comes from taking a tool you use every day and finally giving it the "production-grade" treatment it deserves. This week was exactly that. I spent most of my time in the guts of dev-publish , moving past the "it works on my machine" phase and into "it works even if the world is on fire" territory. With 21 commits and over 11,000 lines of code churn, I focused on making the publishing orchestrator resilient and the state durable. What I Built The star of the show this week was dev-publish . If you’ve ever tried to automate cross-platform technical writing, you know that the edge cases are where the real pain lives. I pushed 16 commits here, touching about 45 files. The diff was pretty wild: +6,926 additions and -4,289 deletions. That net positive tells part of the story, but the deletions represent me ripping out brittle logic that just wasn't cutting it. Hardening the Orchestrator The biggest win was a massive fix to make the publish state durable and the orchestrator resilient. In the previous iteration, if a network request to an API (like Dev.to) failed halfway through a multi-platform push, the state was... let's just say "vague." I spent a lot of time in src ensuring that the orchestrator can now pick up where it left off. I also documented the published-flag semantics and re-run resilience in the README. It sounds like a small thing, but knowing that a re-run won't accidentally double-post your article is a huge weight off my mind. I also spent some time on the "boring but important" stuff. I normalized how tags are handled to make them safer across different platforms and implemented a much stricter resolution for cover images. If a local image is required but missing, the tool now

Spanlens is an open-source (MIT) LLM observability platform that lets developers monitor every call their application makes to OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Mistral, OpenRouter, Azure OpenAI, or a local Ollama model. Integration takes one line: swap your client's baseURL to the Spanlens proxy, or run "npx @spanlens /cli init" and the wizard rewrites your code automatically. From that moment, every request is recorded with its model, token counts, latency, cost, and full prompt and response body, with streaming responses reconstructed automatically. The dashboard turns that raw log into operational insight. Cost tracking breaks spend down per request, per model, and per end user, and parses prompt-cache tokens separately so you see real cache savings rather than sticker price. Agent tracing visualizes multi-step workflows as Gantt waterfalls and node-and-edge graphs, highlighting the critical path so you can find the slowest dependency chain in a fan-out. Anomaly detection flags 3-sigma deviations in latency, cost, or error rate against a rolling 7-day baseline with root-cause hints. Alerts on budget, error rate, and p95 latency are delivered to Email, Slack, or Discord. Spanlens goes beyond passive logging. A regex-based PII and prompt-injection scanner inspects request and response bodies and can block injections at the proxy. The savings engine spots calls that match a cheaper model's profile (for example, a gpt-4o call that looks like a classification task) and estimates the monthly saving from switching. Prompt versioning with A/B experiments compares versions on latency, cost, and error rate using Welch's t-test for statistical significance, and an LLM-as-judge evaluation framework (judge with OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini) scores outputs against rubric anchors, with human agreement measured by Pearson r or Cohen's kappa. Reusable datasets power offline evals and regression checks.

One question I get surprisingly often is: "How do you manage thousands of AI prompts without losing track of them?" The answer is simple. I don't treat prompts as conversations. I treat them as reusable software assets. Over the years, I've created prompt libraries across multiple AI projects, books, research initiatives, and client work. That means managing well over 10,000 prompts covering everything from Python development and AI agents to content generation and workflow automation. If you're still storing prompts in random ChatGPT conversations, you're making life much harder than it needs to be. Here's the system that works for me. Stop Thinking of Prompts as Temporary Most people write a prompt, get an answer, and move on. That's fine for casual use. But builders rarely solve the same problem only once. If you find yourself writing: API documentation SQL queries FastAPI endpoints Docker configurations Code reviews Git commit messages ...you're probably solving recurring problems. Recurring problems deserve reusable prompts. My Folder Structure Instead of organizing prompts by AI tool, I organize them by purpose. For example: AI-Prompts/ │ ├── Python/ │ ├── FastAPI │ ├── Django │ ├── Flask │ └── Automation │ ├── JavaScript/ │ ├── React │ ├── Node.js │ └── TypeScript │ ├── DevOps/ │ ├── Docker │ ├── Kubernetes │ └── GitHub Actions │ ├── AI/ │ ├── RAG │ ├── Agents │ ├── MCP │ └── Prompt Engineering │ └── Documentation/ This mirrors how software projects are organized. Finding a prompt takes seconds. Every Prompt Has Metadata A prompt isn't just text. It's documentation. Each prompt in my library includes: Category: Purpose: Model: Input: Expected Output: Version: Last Updated: For example: Category: FastAPI Purpose: Generate CRUD endpoints Model: GPT-4o Expected Output: Production-ready FastAPI code Six months later, I know exactly why that prompt exists. I Version My Prompts Developers version code. Why not prompts? For example: FastAPI_CRUD_v1.md FastAPI_CRUD_v

Base64 image data URIs are one of those web techniques that look like a magic shortcut the first time you use them. Instead of referencing an external file: <img src= "/logo.png" alt= "Logo" > you can put the image bytes directly in the document as text: <img src= "data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUg..." alt= "Logo" > That can be useful. It can also make a page slower, harder to cache, and more annoying to maintain. Here is the practical rule: inline images as Base64 when self-containment matters more than caching. Keep normal image files when the browser should be able to cache, resize, lazy-load, or optimize them independently. What a Base64 image actually is An image file is binary data. Base64 rewrites that binary data as plain text using a limited character set. To make the browser treat the text as an image, you wrap it in a data URI: data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUg... The first part tells the browser the MIME type. The second part tells it the data is Base64 encoded. The long tail is the image itself. Base64 is not compression. It is not encryption. It is just a text representation of the same bytes. When inlining an image is worth it 1. Tiny icons and UI assets For very small images, removing an extra HTTP request can be worth the extra bytes. This is especially true for small icons, logos, placeholders, simple UI sprites, or tiny transparent PNGs. Modern HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 make extra requests cheaper than they used to be, so this is not an automatic win. But for a one-off tiny asset inside a small page or widget, a data URI can still be a clean choice. 2. Single-file deliverables Sometimes the point is not raw page speed. Sometimes you need one file that carries everything with it: an HTML report an email template a CodePen or demo snippet a CMS block where you cannot upload assets a test fixture that should not depend on external hosting In those cases, Base64 is useful because the image travels with the HTML, CSS, JSON, or JavaScript.

For decades, developers were judged by one thing: How much code they could write. The best programmers wrote faster. Debugged faster. Built faster. That era is ending. The next generation of developers won't spend most of their time writing code. They'll spend it directing AI. Welcome to the age of the AI Orchestrator. The Evolution of Software Development Software development has always evolved. First, developers wrote machine code. Then came assembly. Then high-level languages. Then frameworks. Then cloud platforms. Then DevOps. Each evolution removed repetitive work and let developers focus on bigger problems. AI is simply the next step. But this time, it isn't replacing a tool. It's becoming a teammate. Coding Is Becoming a Smaller Part of the Job Building software isn't just writing code. A typical project includes: Understanding requirements Researching documentation Designing architecture Writing code Reviewing code Debugging Testing Writing documentation Deploying applications Monitoring production Fixing incidents Only one of those is coding. Everything else is coordination and decision-making. That's where AI is changing the game. From Programmer to Orchestrator Think about how modern teams work. A tech lead rarely writes every line of code. Instead, they: Assign work. Review solutions. Provide feedback. Make architectural decisions. Remove blockers. Developers are beginning to work with AI in much the same way. Instead of writing every function, they'll: Define the goal. Provide the right context. Choose the right tools. Review AI-generated code. Run tests. Improve weak areas. Approve the final result. The value shifts from typing code to guiding its creation. What Does an AI Orchestrator Do? An AI orchestrator doesn't ask one question and accept one answer. They manage a workflow. For example: Break a large project into smaller tasks. Give each AI the context it needs. Decide when to retrieve documentation. Decide when to search the codebase. Ask AI to g

Introduction In large-scale Unity development, GC Alloc can quietly become a real problem. At first, nothing looks wrong. But as the project grows and you add more enemies, UI, master data, events, states, notifications, logs, and other systems, small allocations that happen every frame begin to pile up. LINQ is especially convenient. var aliveEnemies = enemies . Where ( x => x . IsAlive ) . OrderBy ( x => x . DistanceToPlayer ) . ToList (); It is readable. But if this kind of code runs every frame, it can become a source of both GC Alloc and CPU overhead. Unity's official documentation also recommends reducing frequent managed heap allocations as much as possible, ideally getting close to 0 bytes per frame. https://docs.unity3d.com/2022.3/Documentation/Manual/performance-garbage-collection-best-practices.html For general GC Alloc best practices, this article refers to the Unity 2022.3 documentation, because the general guidance still applies. Unity 6-specific GC behavior is covered later using the Unity 6.0 documentation. This article assumes Unity 6.0 as the minimum Unity version and explains how to choose between regular LINQ and ZLinq in production code. Unity 6.0 uses the Roslyn C# compiler, and its C# language version is C# 9.0. However, some C# 9 features, such as init-only setters, are not supported. https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.0/Documentation/Manual/csharp-compiler.html The short version The point of this article is not to ban LINQ completely. Do not use LINQ in hot paths just because it is readable. Do not assume ZLinq solves everything just because you introduced it. Those are the two main ideas. A rough guideline looks like this: Area Guideline Editor extensions, build scripts, debug code Regular LINQ is usually fine Startup, loading, initialization LINQ can be fine, but measure when data size is large Update / LateUpdate / FixedUpdate Avoid LINQ by default Code that is not per-frame but still called frequently Consider ZLinq Code that materializes res

At the beginning of June I started a “ Claude withdrawal ” challenge. The plan was to run MiniMax 3 for a month, to see if I can get the same level of quality, but at 5x less the price. Until then, Claude Code was my main driver, with MiniMax on the backup, for when I was running out of quota, or sometimes for code review. The monthly bill for Claude was $100 on the Max plan, whereas for MiniMax I would pay $20 for the Token plan. All in all, it seemed like an interesting experiment. Then, half way through the challenge, Grok came into the picture. I got a very interesting offer at $35 for 3 months, then $35/month. But Grok has something neither Claude, nor MiniMax can give me out of the shelf: video and image generations. The only unknown was if switching from Claude Code to Grok will still maintain the same coding power. So I instantly took the offer, and did whatever I had to do to understand if this was the right path. And here comes the “whatever I had to do”, in plain technical terms. Switching from Claude Code to Grok – the Actual Steps The switch itself was interesting because I didn’t want to lose the Claude Code interface. I like the harness. The way it works with my codebase, the commands, the flow. So I used a helper called cliproxyapi . It’s a small proxy that sits between the Claude Code client and whatever model you point it at. You run it locally, tell it to forward requests to Grok’s API instead of Anthropic’s. Then you launch Claude Code the same way you always do, but it talks to Grok under the hood. Here’s how it goes in practice. Step 1: Install the proxy. I used brew to install it, I’m on a Mac, and also because I wanted to have it started as a service. Step 2: Set two environment variables. One is the target API base URL, for Grok that’s something like https://api.x.ai . The other is your API key. "env" : { "ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL" : "http://localhost:8317" , "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY" : "cliproxy-local-key" } , Notice how we use “cliproxy-local-key”, be

I spent the last while building the HMRC integration for TapTax , a Making Tax Digital (MTD) app for UK sole traders. MTD is the UK government's programme that pushes tax filing out of paper and spreadsheets and into software talking directly to HMRC's APIs. I have integrated with a fair few third-party APIs. Stripe, Plaid-style banking, the usual. HMRC is its own animal. Some of it is genuinely well designed, some of it caught me completely off guard, and a couple of things cost me a full day each before the penny dropped. So here are the five things that surprised me most. Each one is the surprise, then the fix, with a short snippet from our actual TypeScript backend. Not tax advice, just engineering notes from someone who has now stepped on the rakes so you do not have to. 1. The API version lives in the Accept header, and getting it wrong is a 406 Most APIs version in the URL: /v2/thing . HMRC versions through content negotiation. You ask for a version in the Accept header, like application/vnd.hmrc.5.0+json , and if you ask for a version that endpoint does not serve, you get a 406 Not Acceptable . No helpful "did you mean v3" message. Just 406. The part that bit me: different endpoints are on completely different versions at the same time. Obligations is on v3.0, the self-employment cumulative summary is on v5.0, calculations are on v8.0, ITSA status is on v2.0. There is no single "current" version to pin. The fix was to make the version a required argument on the request wrapper so you can never forget it, and set it per call: // src/services/hmrcApi.ts const headers = { Authorization : `Bearer ${ accessToken } ` , Accept : `application/vnd.hmrc. ${ apiVersion } +json` , // e.g. "5.0" ... hmrcConfig . getFraudHeaders ( req ), }; One more trap: versions get withdrawn. Obligations used to answer on v2.0; that now returns a 404, not a 406, so it looks like a missing resource rather than a stale version. When an HMRC call 404s, check the version before you go hunt