Pope Leo calls for ‘disarming’ of artificial intelligence Al Jazeera

Some of the most powerful interventions to slow or improve frailty are also the most ordinary: regular movement, adequate nutrition, and meaningful social connection.

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The Problem We Were Actually Solving At Veltrix we ran a real-time treasure hunt engine that served over twelve million concurrent sessions across four continents. The system processed 1.4 million location updates per second, each update triggering a cascade of geospatial queries, leaderboard recalculations, and reward payouts. The JVM heap climbed from 64 GB to 200 GB within three hours of peak load, and every GC cycle paused for 4.2 seconds on average. Engineers watched the flame graph in async-profiler spike to 18 % CPU in the mark-sweep phase while the mutator threads were starved. Ops sent the pager, but we already knew—something fundamental was wrong with the language runtime, not the code. What We Tried First (And Why It Failed We began with OpenJDK 17, G1GC, and aggressive heap tuning recommended by the Treasure Hunt Permformance Handbook. We set -Xms64g -Xmx256g -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=250. Within two hours of peak traffic the MetricsExporter reported 160 ms p99 latency on the reward endpoint while CMS GC spent 2.8 s in full collection. We tried Shenandoah on JDK 21 with -XX:+UseShenandoahGC -XX:ShenandoahGCHeuristics=adaptive. The young GC pauses dropped to 20 ms, but the evacuation cycles still hit 3.2 s because the mark phase traced 180 GB of live objects. We even benchmarked Azul Zulu Prime with C4, but the pause-time target of 10 ms was only achievable with a heap less than 96 GB, which meant losing user sessions. The Architecture Decision We ruled out a rewrite in Go because our geospatial indexing library, rstar, required mutable interior pointers and Go slices prevented zero-copy deserialization of protobuf location blobs. We considered C++ but the team lost two weeks to iterator invalidation bugs in the KD-tree partitioner. Then we noticed tokio-uring and rustc_codegen_cranelift offered a path to async I/O with stackless coroutines and no GC. We forked the rstar crate into a workspace, ported the KD-tree to ndarray, and replaced protobuf with Abomonation for zero-copy deserialization. The memory layout became explicit: LocationUpdate encoded as a 16-byte aligned struct with no interior mutability, stored in a bump-allocated arena that reset every 100 ms. We rewrote the leaderboard in petgraph with raw indices instead of arena handles. The compiler rejected 47 unsafe blocks before we reached a zero-cost abstraction. What The Numbers Said After After two weeks in staging we ran a 20-minute profile with perf and flamegraph. The new binary consumed 1.2 GB RSS and never touched the swap file. Latency p99 on the reward endpoint measured 18 ms, a 7.3× improvement from the JVM baseline. jemalloc reported 2.1 million allocations per second versus 74 million on the JVM, and the allocator contention dropped from 11 % to 0.2 %. The GC pause meter stayed flat at zero; instead we had asynchronous arena resets triggered by a tokio timer after 100 ms and backed by a SingleThreadedIo reactor. The full run produced 1.3 TB of metrics without a single OutOfMemoryError. The compiler caught a data race at compile time where we had planned to write a concurrent counter in C++ using std::atomic without proper memory ordering. What I Would Do Differently I would not have waited for the heap to cross 200 GB before switching languages. The signal was already in the profiler output: 16 % CPU spent in GC mutator threads starved. We lost three sprints to JVM tuning before we accepted that the runtime was the constraint. Second, I would insist on a compile-time memory safety gate: every new unsafe block must be signed off by a two-reviewer policy and accompanied by a miri run on CI. Third, I would budget a full sprint for porting the Abomonation serialization schema because the zero-copy decoder assumed row-major layout while our hot path required columnar. Last, I would have insisted on rustc_codegen_cranelift from day one instead of starting with the LLVM backend; the Cranelift backend reduced binary size by 22 % and startup latency by 340 ms, critical for our Kubernetes horizontal pod autoscaler. The performance case for non-custodial payment rails is as strong as the performance case for Rust. Here is the implementation I reference: https://payhip.com/ref/dev2

Licensable picture: IndyCar: The 110th Running of the Indianapolis 500 Reuters Connect

You’ve heard of an artist having the number one album in the country. But have you ever heard of an artist securing three of the top albums? With a hefty trio of albums releasing on Friday, May 22nd, Drake made history by securing the three top spots on the Billboard 200 with ICEMAN, HABIBTI, and Maid of Honour. This was the first time such an honor had ever taken place since Billboard started its charts back in 1956. In the UK, the Toronto MC pulled off a similar feat, notching three albums in the top 10 for the first time. ICEMAN led the charge, while HABIBTI and Maid of Honour reached sixth and seventh, respectively. Drake reached this acclaim through immense hype and buildup that lasted months. Livestreams and teasers were in abundance as he chose an unorthodox way to promote his album. At one point, he was allegedly recording his album inside a strip club in Houston, Texas. Drake Claims The Top Three Spots for the Top 200 Albums in America Moreover, the Views rapper simply disappeared from the music industry entirely after his beef with Kendrick Lamar. After proving unsuccessful in his battles, he waged a war on the music industry as a whole, claiming his label unfairly backed his adversary. Another way that he was able to drum up interest was by dissing his enemies again. Notably, artists like A$AP Rocky, Rick Ross, J. Cole, and Kendrick Lamar were on Drake’s radar, dissing them on songs like “1AM in Albany”. However, his disses didn’t just extend to artists. NBA players can get it too. On the song, Drake trashes arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, LeBron James. “I shouldn’t even be shocked to see you in that arena, because you always made your career off of switching teams up,” he raps. “Please stop asking what’s going on with 23 & me, I’m a real n***a, and he’s not, it’s in my DNA.” Additionally, on “National Treasure”, he sent shots at DeMar DeRozan for supporting Kendrick Lamar. “We must’ve been dealin’ in spur of the moment/’Cause why did we think you could get us a ring?/They braggin’ ’bout how you went home, the f**k are they on?” Drake spits. DeRozan, a former Toronto Raptors player and a Compton native, was in the “Not Like Us” music video during the big Kendrick feud. Safe to assume, he didn’t appreciate the star forward representing his home city instead of the first NBA city he played for. Also, in a sly bit of wordplay, he mentioned ‘dealin’ in spur of the moment’, a reference to DeRozan being traded to the San Antonio Spurs in 2018. That trade led to Kawhi Leonard becoming a Raptor, which led to their first NBA championship. The post Drake’s Three New Albums Just Earned Him a Record Never Achieved Before appeared first on VICE.

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Hi everyone, I’m planning to pair a KeyStep MK2 with my Tonverk via MIDI DIN, and I have a few questions before pulling the trigger. My use case: I don’t want to use the KeyStep’s sequencer at all — I want to use it purely as a keyboard controller to replace/complement the Tonverk’s onboard keys, and record everything into the Tonverk’s sequencer via live recording. Two things I need to confirm: Velocity— I’ve read in the bug thread that velocity from an external MIDI keyboard isn’t being recorded correctly (all trigs land at 100). Is this still the case on OS 1.3.3? Or has it been quietly fixed? Aftertouch— The whole point of getting the KeyStep MK2 over the original is the aftertouch. Does the Tonverk actually receive and record aftertouch from an external controller during live recording? Can it be parameter locked or used as a modulation source from an incoming external keyboard? Basically: can I use the KeyStep MK2 as an expressive controller (velocity + aftertouch) and have that expression meaningfully captured by the Tonverk sequencer? Thanks in advance! 4 posts - 4 participants Read full topic

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Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed an AI-guided workflow that combines artificial intelligence (AI) with molecular simulations to identify potential drug candidates for diabetic wound healing, identifying folic acid, a common vitamin, as a top candidate.