594: Smart Contracts for Dumb People

Malicious NPM packages are sneaking into codebases while FFmpeg devs prove old-school assembly skills can still smoke the competition. Plus, a rare bee species takes on Zuck's AI dreams.

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• Oops, Apple approved another illegal streaming app — A ‘productivity app’ that streams pirated movies seems to have slipped past Apple’s review process — and it’s far from the first one to do it.
• Why Avoiding Technical Debt Might Be Your Biggest Mistake — In this post, I’ll argue that technical debt isn’t inherently bad — it’s unmanaged technical debt that causes problems. Programmers who refuse to incur any technical debt pay a high price, using up one of a company’s most valuable resources: present time!
• Hundreds of code libraries posted to NPM try to install malware on dev machines — The malicious packages have names that are similar to legitimate ones for the Puppeteer and Bignum.js code libraries
• FFmpeg devs boast of up to 94x performance boost after implementing handwritten AVX-512 assembly code — The developers have created an optimized code path using the AVX-512 instruction set to accelerate specific functions within the FFmpeg multimedia processing library. By leveraging AVX-512, they were able to achieve significant performance improvements — from three to 94 times faster — compared to standard implementations. AVX-512 enables processing large chunks of data in parallel using 512-bit registers, which can handle up to 16 single-precision FLOPS or 8 double-precision FLOPS in one operation. This optimization is ideal for compute-heavy tasks in general, but in the case of video and image processing in particular.
• Regulators reject power deal for nuclear Amazon datacenters — Amazon has hit a roadblock in its plans for nuclear-powered US datacenters. Federal regulators rejected a deal that would let it draw more power from a Susquehanna plant to supply new bit barns next to the site, on the grounds this would set a precedent which may affect grid reliability and increase energy costs.
• Meta’s nuclear datacenter plan reportedly stung by bees — CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told employees at an all-hands meeting that the discovery of a rare species of bees on the prospective build site had contributed to the cancellation of the datacenter project, according to The Financial Times.
• AI's energy appetite has Taiwan reconsidering nuclear option — The global surge in AI is placing unprecedented pressure on energy resources, with chipmakers such as TSMC consuming vast amounts of electricity to meet growing demand for advanced silicon. In response, Taiwan's government is signaling a potential shift in its longstanding opposition to nuclear energy to address its mounting power needs.
• Mike's Poll says it all. — Let’s celebrate Election Day by voting to “settle” a classic debate.