1. Why travellers are obsessed with foreign supermarkets (www.bbc.com)

From Tokyo egg sandwiches to Greek dairy aisles, supermarket aisles are becoming one of travel's most revealing and beloved experiences.

Foreign supermarkets offer a unique glimpse into local culture, showcasing everything from specialty snacks to regional ingredients. Discover why travelers are increasingly seeking out these everyday shopping experiences during their adventures.

4. Citizen Devs: Everyone is an engineer now (www.massdriver.cloud)

Half your company is already routing around IT. The citizen developer has been around since Lotus 1-2-3, and guardrails are the only control ops has left.

Many employees are bypassing traditional IT processes to create their own solutions, a trend that’s been around for decades. With citizen developers on the rise, understanding the balance between innovation and control is crucial for organizations.

5. I Spent Twenty Years Becoming Good at the Wrong Game (savvynormie.com)

In February 2024, I defended my second dissertation and earned the highest academic degree Russia awards. By June, I knew I wanted out. Out of this kind of r...

After achieving a significant academic milestone, the author reflects on their realization that years of dedication to a certain path were misguided. The piece examines the tension between societal expectations and personal fulfillment.

8. Optimizing Things in the USSR (chris-said.io)

A review of Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford

Red Plenty offers a fascinating look at the complexities of economic planning in the Soviet Union, blending history and fiction to illustrate the challenges of optimizing resources in a centrally planned economy. This review delves into Spufford’s unique narrative style and the insights it provides into a pivotal era.

9. Double-double: 31 digits of precision without leaving the FPU (marekfiser.com)

If you ever need more precision than what 15 decimal digits of the double format can offer, there is a neat trick: glue two doubles together and treat them as one number. This gives you ~31 decimal digits for roughly 9x the cost of a plain double in a real kernel (4-12x per isolated operation). With no heap allocation and no dependencies, this puts it almost exactly halfway between a double and an arbitrary-precision library perf-wise. This post explains the error-free transformations that make it work, measures it against MPFR, and shows where the trick runs out of steam.

Combining two doubles can yield about 31 decimal digits of precision, offering a cost-effective alternative to arbitrary-precision libraries. This method avoids heap allocation and dependencies, making it a practical solution for high-precision calculations in real kernels.

10. Canonical Backs New Project to Translate Large C Codebases into Safe Rust (linuxiac.com)

Canonical is funding research into automated C-to-Rust translation, with AppArmor and snap-confine serving as real-world case studies.

Canonical is investing in research aimed at automating the translation of large C codebases into Rust, using AppArmor and snap-confine as practical examples to highlight the project’s potential benefits. This initiative could enhance software safety and maintainability in critical systems.

12. Slack Code (www.salesforce.com)

AI coding is now a team sport. Introducing Slack Code, where teams and AI agents write, review, and ship code together in the open in a dedicated code channel.

Slack Code allows teams to collaborate with AI agents in real-time to write, review, and deploy code within a dedicated channel, enhancing the coding process and teamwork. Discover how this new feature transforms coding into a collaborative effort.

14. Universality of Gradient Descent Neural Network Training (arxiv.org)

It has been observed that design choices of neural networks are often crucial for their successful optimization. In this article, we therefore discuss the question if it is always possible to redesign a neural network so that it trains well with gradient descent. This yields the following universality result: If, for a given network, there is any algorithm that can find good network weights for a classification task, then there exists an extension of this network that reproduces these weights and the corresponding forward output by mere gradient descent training. The construction is not intended for practical computations, but it provides some orientation on the possibilities of meta-learning and related approaches.

The article discusses how the design of neural networks significantly impacts their optimization through gradient descent. It presents a universality result suggesting that any network capable of being optimized by a specific algorithm can be extended to ensure effective training with gradient descent.

15. The Defense-Tech Bubble Is Headed for Consolidation (foxandlion.pub)

Investor Jordan Blashek argues the defense-tech bubble will burst within 18 months, forcing mergers, recaps, and acquisitions across the sector.

Jordan Blashek predicts that the defense-tech sector is on the brink of a significant downturn, which could lead to a wave of mergers and acquisitions. His insights shed light on the potential shifts in investment and corporate strategies in this niche market.

22. What's missing to have reproducible builds on PyPI (snarky.ca)

While writing the section of my 2026 Python Packaging Council (PPC) nomination on secure supply chain, I realized that one thing related to having a secure supply chain that we lack is a defined way to perform reproducible builds. The reason I like the idea of making reproducible builds work

The piece discusses the current gap in establishing reproducible builds for Python packages on PyPI, highlighting its importance for a secure software supply chain. It also reflects on the author’s insights while preparing for a nomination to the Python Packaging Council.

26. URL shortener links stored in your ATProto PDS (atpr.to)

AT Protocol URL shortener β€” links stored in your own PDS.

AT Protocol now allows users to store URL shortener links directly in their personal data stores (PDS), giving them more control over their shared content. This feature emphasizes privacy and ownership in link management.

27. Show HN: sce (Simple Console Editor) (github.com)

sce -- minimalist console editor (no highlighting, no plugins, no modes, no Emacs) - volution/simple-console-editor

sce is a straightforward console editor designed for users who prefer simplicity, featuring no highlighting, plugins, or modes. It’s a minimalistic tool for those who want to edit text without distractions or complexity.

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