Science and Technology (old posts, page 223)
[$] Improved load balancing with machine learning
15 Years of OsmAnd
All these 15 years can be roughly divided into three stages. For the first five years, we built the very basic functionality—offline maps and navigation that just worked. Over the next five years, we transformed OsmAnd into a full-fledged application with plugins, extensive settings, and professional tools. We dedicated the third five-year period to deep internal work: completely rewriting and improving key components like the rendering engine and routing algorithms.Now, a new, fourth stage begins. We have reached functional maturity, and our main goal for the near future is to polish what we've already built. We will focus on stability, speed, and consolidation. User expectations are growing, and what was once considered normal must now be flawless.
(Thanks to Paul Wise).
Security updates for Tuesday
Musk-Trump battle erupts anew over GOP spending bill
Tuesday Telescope: A howling wolf in the night sky
Pay up or stop scraping: Cloudflare program charges bots for each crawl
Moonlight Peaks: your chance to live as a tiny vegan vampire
Dracula’s daughter seeks a more peaceful life making plant-based blood substitutes in this Stardew-Valley-inspired, gently creepy farming game
What if you were a tiny, vegan vampire? That’s the question posed by Moonlight Peaks, the gen Z-coded, achingly TikTok-ready supernatural life sim. Inspired by the popularity of “cosy games” such as Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, Moonlight Peaks drapes you in the cape of Dracula’s daughter, who has fled her father’s corpse-ridden home to start a new, peaceful life.
Soon, she settles among werewolves and witches in the supernatural farming town of Moonlight Peaks, where she grows crops and rears animals instead of subsisting on the blood of innocents. Both cosy and creepy, the game has you creating your own plant-based blood substitutes, befriending the town’s residents and fixing a whole host of problems left in daddy Dracula’s wake.
Moonlight Peaks is out on PC in 2026
Continue reading...DRAM spot prices doubled last week
Fears that DDR4 has hit the end of the road and the return of tariffs may be to blame
Spot prices for DRAM have doubled in the last week.…
Tech firms suggested placing trackers under offenders’ skin at meeting with justice secretary
Exclusive: Shabana Mahmood told companies she wanted ‘deeper collaboration’ to tackle prisons crisis
Tracking devices inserted under offenders’ skin, robots assigned to contain prisoners and driverless vehicles used to transport them were among the measures proposed by technology companies to ministers who are gathering ideas to tackle the crisis in the UK justice system.
The proposals were made at a meeting of more than two dozen tech companies in London last month, chaired by the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, minutes seen by the Guardian show. Amid an acute shortage of prison places and probation officers under severe strain, ministers told the companies they wanted ideas for using wearable technologies, behaviour monitoring and geolocation to create a “prison outside of prison”.
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