I’ve been in Munich, Germany, for the Munich Creative Business Week, where I’ve participated in building this wonderful installation with SintesiLabs to bring people together and help communities. I will write something about the nice letters, each one made with 14 segments of led strips.
No matter how good a software developer you are, there can always be someone who is a better hacker than you. This news about traffic lights hacked in a Silicon Valley city is funny and scaring at the same time.
Sometimes data in a specific context can be used in a different situation and bring unexpected results. These guys at the Mellon Carnegie University have discovered that WiFi signals distortions, caused by obstacles, can be mapped with the DensePose model, an AI model that recognize person poses in photos. This coupling let them recognize people presence and their pose just with WiFi signals.
I have a Kindle. Saurabh Khawasé posted it’s story about jailbreaking a Kindle. He added a script that shows data on the lock screen instead of the kindle pictures. Data are grabbed with a sh script from Internet and assembled in a nice HTML dashboard, then transformed to a PNG and presented on the screen. Very nice. Very clever.
Max Bernstein shows a different approx to search engine, instead of searching keywords in texts, he uses embeddings to calculate the distance from the user query to the articles to be searched. He builds a search engine from scratch and should be useful to understand concepts like embeddings and distance between texts.
There is the Pet Hack Contest on the Hackaday site.
I’ve found the DIYR.dev site, the acronym DIYR stands for “Do It Yourself Revolution”, and they design things, products combining simplicity and longevity with ethics and aesthetics (this is what they say). I like the site and especially some products like their speaker.
This old site from a school in Brescia (Italy) has a good text explaining the accelerometer sensor in detail.
I’m starting to search material on AI Agents, so I’m reading things about frameworks that try to simplify the process of creating agents. I’m also looking around to find something to test those agents. With n8n the tool and data could be self hosted (see github). Another tool is Voiceflow.
Read this “The Recurring Cycle of ‘Developer Replacement’ Hype” article from the blog of Danilo Alonso, that critiques recurring claims that new technologies (like NoCode, the cloud, offshoring, and now AI) will replace software developers. But historically, these shifts haven’t eliminated developers but they’ve transformed their roles into more specialized, higher-paying positions (e.g., NoCode experts, DevOps engineers, AI orchestrators). So… writing code is not the most valuable skill but system architecture is. AI may accelerate code generation, but it can’t design robust systems, understand business context, or prevent poor architectural decisions. Thus, AI elevates the importance of experienced developers rather than replacing them.
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