Cover Image
At the opening ceremony of the Yangtze River Culture and Art Season in Wuhan on September 12, drones formed the pattern of finless porpoises. (via)
San Francisco’s Crazy AI Ads
Last week’s issue mentioned a billboard in San Francisco with a riddle pointing to an AI company’s website.
I originally thought this was an isolated case, but this week I read a report and realized I was wrong.
The city of San Francisco has gone crazy for AI, with AI ads everywhere. In comparison, the AI craze in China seems quiet.
San Francisco is right next to Silicon Valley, and most of the major AI companies in the United States are located in this area. Stanford University is also nearby.
Over the past two years, the AI concept has fueled a continuous surge in the US stock market, creating countless wealthy individuals. San Francisco is the most fanatical storm center, with capital and talent pouring in relentlessly.
Standing on the street, AI billboards top every skyscraper.
The first image above has a billboard that reads, “AI customer support even your mother will like.” Have they run out of other advertising slogans?
You drive on the highway, and the roadsides are also filled with AI ads.
Waiting at a bus stop, you also see AI ads, one of which says, “Stop Hiring Humans.”
It’s not just AI companies that are advertising; even companies unrelated to AI are doing it.
The ad above is for Postman, an API testing tool, which shouldn’t have anything to do with AI.
However, the ad reads, “Is your API ready for AI?” The implication is that you can use it for testing—it’s riding the trend.
These pervasive AI ads are not from a sci-fi movie; they are what San Francisco looks like right now.
The sheer number of these ads is partly due to genuine business opportunities, but a larger reason is that AI companies have too much money. They’ve attracted a constant stream of venture capital and can raise money in the stock market. Capital urgently needs to see results.
So, these companies frantically advertise. The more exposure they get, the higher their market share and company valuation will be, which in turn attracts more capital.
This is called a bubble economy. As long as it hasn’t burst, you keep blowing, as big as you can, and you’ll be rewarded.
But for an ordinary person, being bombarded and surrounded by these ads every day is somewhat absurd. AI, as a new technology, is meant to increase work efficiency and liberate humanity. Yet now, it’s become like a religion, preaching to you and demanding your worship. People seem to have become its subordinates, living in a world constructed by AI.
Technology Trends
- The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), one of the world’s largest open-source software organizations, recently changed its logo from a feather to something resembling a leaf.
The word “Apache” originally refers to a Native American tribe, and the feather was a symbol of that tribe. Some criticized this symbol as stereotypical and inappropriate for modern times.
So, the change was made to a leaf-like symbol, which is more neutral and also metaphorically represents the resilience, openness, and responsibility of open-source software.
- Wind turbine blades are huge, making land transport very inconvenient.
An American company decided to build a plane specifically for transporting wind turbine blades.
The entire fuselage (including the nose) is used for the blade, and the cockpit has been moved to the top of the aircraft.
Loading and unloading the blade requires opening the entire rear cabin of the plane, sliding it in like a toothpick, which is quite spectacular.
- How tall can a sunflower grow?
A farmer in Indiana, USA, cultivated the world’s tallest sunflower, measuring 10.9 meters from base to flower tip.
One of the biggest difficulties with this feat is that if the sunflower grows too tall, the stem can’t support the flower head, so a support frame must be used. The farmer built a three-story support frame.
It’s actually amazing how a small seedling can grow so large in just one year.
- True random numbers require hardware generation and are not cheap.
A foreign research team recently proved that Micro-LED light beads can be used as a random number generator.
They found that the intensity fluctuation of the electromagnetic waves emitted by the LED (the number of photons per unit time) is random, and the random number generation rate is high.
Since LED light beads are very cheap, if this discovery proves to be practical, the problem of random number generation might be solved.
- Octopuses have eight arms. One study found that the front four arms are used for exploration, and the back four are used for locomotion.
This is somewhat similar to the division of labor between the upper and lower limbs in humans and could be a reference for the design of multi-legged robots.
Articles
- You Probably Don’t Need a High-End CPU (English)
This article presents several reasons why buying a high-end CPU with more than 8 cores may be a waste for the average user.
A beginner’s C language tutorial introducing how to compile a program using the make command.
- Removing Redundant Truth Checks (English)
ESLint has a rule that reports an error if a conditional statement is always true or false, as the check is redundant.
TypeScript 5.6 has now also introduced this rule, which reports an error by default.
- CSS
cos()andsin()(English)
This article explains how to use CSS trigonometric functions to create circular layouts.
- The HTTP OPTIONS Method (English)
Besides the commonly used HTTP methods like GET and POST, there is the less common OPTIONS method. This article introduces its usage.
The article argues that it is no longer necessary to install two operating systems for dual-booting and that switching to virtual machines is a better alternative.
- The Amazing Soviet Maps (English)
The level of detail in Soviet maps is incredible. Their published foreign maps would mark the height of bridges above the water, their load-bearing capacity, and their main building materials, as well as the width, flow direction, and depth of rivers, and the tree species in forests.
It remains unclear how they obtained this information and why they included it in publicly published maps.
Tools
A Windows application that can make the Windows desktop look like a Mac desktop, while also integrating workspaces and a tiling window manager. See the introduction article.
An open-source web scraping viewer tool. Users input a URL, and it automatically scrapes and displays the webpage.
A terminal tool for viewing OpenAPI specification files.
A cross-platform command-line program that can restrict local HTTP/HTTPs requests, only allowing requests from a whitelist.
An open-source error monitoring platform.
A login platform based on the Nuxt framework, supporting the OAuth2.0 protocol and various login methods, including email, username, phone, verification code, and social media. (@CaoMeiYouRen submission)
A cross-platform graphical interface wrapper for the Neovim editor, with many features pre-configured.
A self-hosted file sharing service where only administrators can upload.
A very simple JS library that uses Ajax to give regular multi-page websites the “partial update” effect of a single-page application.
AI Related
An SSH-based AI client that allows you to use large AI models after logging into a server via SSH. (@aicu-icu submission)
A free tool to convert PDF files into an explanatory video, complete with animations and voiceover. (@icaohongyuan submission)
This library allows connecting to an MCP server using the MQTT protocol, making it convenient for AI to directly operate IoT devices. (@ysfscream submission)
An open-source frontend application that generates website UI using natural language, similar to V0/Lovable.
Resources
This company’s official website is designed to look like an operating system desktop; it even displays a screensaver if left inactive for too long.
A photographer took a picture of every single personal item she owns (books, clothes, medicine, etc.) and put them on a website, totaling 12,795 photos.
She wants to show people not to underestimate the number of things they own.
An English-language Big Data textbook from ETH Zurich, available for free reading.
Images
- ChatGPT Impostors
ChatGPT is one of the most popular AI applications. Its logo is a rounded hexagon composed of six chains.
However, if you search for “ChatGPT” on the Apple App Store, you’ll see countless impostors.
Above are the icons of various impostors, with the genuine ChatGPT among them.
The names of the fakes also try to sound like ChatGPT, such as ChatBot, AI Bot, Open Chat AI, and so on.
Can you spot the real one among the fakes?
San Francisco is the startup capital of the US, with countless venture-backed companies. Naturally, many companies also fail.
This has spawned a business where people specifically buy up the office furniture of failed companies and resell it at a discount.
The acquired office furniture is stacked in large warehouses, and interested buyers go there to pick out what they want.
Many big Silicon Valley companies, such as Pinterest, Google, and Facebook, also sell their surplus office furniture here after layoffs.
These second-hand office furniture pieces are often name brands, now sold at half price, so business is good.
Because the US stock market has been a major bull market in recent years, a record amount of venture capital has poured into startups, and a large portion of that money was spent on office furniture. As more and more companies fail, the endless supply of used office furniture keeps coming in, and the good days for second-hand furniture seem to be ahead.
Excerpts
One hundred and forty million years ago, the interior of Australia was a closed inland sea. Later, the seawater dried up, and it became an arid, desolate desert.
Because the inland terrain is 15 meters lower than the coast, there have been historical proposals to refill the water and restore the inland “Mediterranean Sea.”
However, Australia does not have enough fresh water, and the evaporation in the interior is greater than the rainfall, so this plan could not be realized.
In the 21st century, with advancements in engineering capabilities, the plan has been proposed again, suggesting the construction of a 600-kilometer pipeline to bring seawater inland.
Solar panels (Australia is extremely rich in solar energy) would be laid along the pipeline, generating electricity to power the pumps that would continuously pump water inland.
If an inland lake were to form, the rainfall would increase, completely changing the current arid and water-scarce situation. Furthermore, it could establish a shipping industry, create new coastal cities, and boost economic and immigration potential.
However, many people oppose this plan. Introducing seawater would completely salinize the inland soil, making it impossible to farm. Also, the construction cost of the pipeline is enormous, with a preliminary estimate of over 200 billion yuan.
Australians are still weighing whether to pursue this crazy plan. In recent years, as global temperatures rise, the interior becomes hotter and less habitable each year. Support for the idea is now growing; spending hundreds of billions to build a sea is, after all, the only possible way to change the inland climate.
Quotes
With AI, code is no longer precious.
– Boris Cherny, Product Lead for Claude Code
Museums today use a lot of electronic screens, but I don’t take my son to a museum to look at screens; otherwise, he could just use a tablet at home.
A career is like a pie-eating contest where the prize for winning is that you have to eat more pie.
Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on whether you enjoy the work.
– Jason Lengstorf, US Frontend Engineer
Many people, especially new engineers, mistakenly believe that using complex tools and languages will lead to stronger, more innovative products.
The opposite is true. The most effective components are simple, predictable, boring, and mature technologies. They provide the foundation we need to develop complex projects further.
You are not building an interesting bridge; you are building a solid bridge that people will confidently walk across later.
– “Choose Boring and Flexible Technology”
Technology Enthusiast Weekly (Issue 367): Several Creative Uses for Nano Banana
This records worth sharing technology content every week, published on Friday. ([Notice] Next week is the National Day holiday, the weekly will be taking a break.)
This magazine is open source, and contributions are welcome on GitHub Issues. There is also a “Who’s Hiring” service for posting programmer job openings. For collaboration, please contact via email (yifeng.ruan@gmail.com).
Cover Image
Hong Kong held the “Victoria Harbour Maritime Carnival,” showcasing four large inflatable puppet sculptures along the Victoria Harbour shoreline. This is a photo of the inflatable puppets being transported. (via)
Several Creative Uses for Nano Banana
Last month, Google released the image model Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (project name Nano Banana).
Google calls it the “most advanced image generation and editing model” currently available.
After trying it out, I feel it is indeed very powerful and is free to use. You can start using it by opening the official website (image below).
(Note: If you cannot access the official website, there are also third-party websites in the weekly discussion section that connect to the official API, but most require a fee.)
Netizens have discovered various amazing uses for this model, and some have even collected them into an Awesome repository.
I have selected a few very practical examples from this repository to share with everyone. It should be noted that I think other image models can also do these things, and everyone is welcome to try them out.
(1) Portrait Processing
The most common task for image models is certainly portrait processing. Let’s first upload a personal photo.
Then, we ask the model to convert it into a passport photo with the following prompt:
Please generate a 1-inch ID photo for the person in the photo, requiring a white background, professional attire, open eyes, and a smile.
This effect is somewhat astonishing. It means that the person’s expression, hairstyle, makeup, clothing, and posture can all be changed.
Below is an example of changing the person’s expression to have them turn their side face towards the camera and smile.
Changing the person’s posture, “Change the person in the second image below to the posture in the first image.”
Photo studios might be in danger in the future, as portrait photos, travel photos, and group photos can all be entrusted to AI.
(2) Architecture Processing
Another use for image models is for home decoration. If you want to see home decoration renderings, just let the AI generate them. Changing decor colors and furniture is a small case.
Here is a more challenging example: uploading a floor plan and asking it to become a 3D model rendering.
Extracting an architectural model from a photo is also quite magical.
(3) Packaging Processing
Next, we ask the model to change the packaging of an item: “Affix the comic image from Figure 2 onto the packaging box from Figure 1, and generate a professional product photo.”
Book covers and software packaging boxes can be generated in the same way.
(4) Map Processing
Another large market for image models is map applications (geographic information), but a way to monetize it has not yet been found. Below is an innovative use case.
Upload a map with an arrow marking your selected location, and ask the model to “Generate the scene seen along the red arrow.”
It can even generate a real-world scene at the red arrow location from a topographic contour map.
Technology Trends
An American company has launched a supersonic chef’s knife.
It has a button on the handle, which, when pressed, puts the blade into ultrasonic mode.
According to the description, when ultrasonic waves are turned on, the blade vibrates more than 40,000 times per second, making the knife much sharper than it actually is and saving up to 50% of the effort required for cutting vegetables.
In some cases, placing it on food allows it to automatically cut the food using the waves generated by the vibrations.
This knife has a built-in battery, so it comes with a matching knife charger.
Circuit boards are the foundation of electronic products.
A foreign netizen, in order to demonstrate that circuit boards are not highly complex products, specially made a clay circuit board.
They posted photos of the entire process online, first collecting mud, then flattening it.
Carving out the circuit on it, and then firing it.
Finally, after installing copper wires and electronic components, the circuit board is complete.
According to the AI report by renowned analyst Mary Meeker, if AI-related positions are excluded from the IT industry, the number of employed people in the US IT industry has been flat or declining for many years.
In the image above, the blue line represents the total employment in the IT industry, and the green line represents the employment with AI positions excluded. The peak in the middle occurred during the pandemic.
This means that while the IT industry itself has been expanding, all job growth has occurred in the AI sector.
Articles
- Beyond Sandbox (English)
How to safely run third-party code on a webpage? Google proposes a brand new solution: SafeContentFrame.
It is a JS library that loads third-party code onto a separate domain, googleusercontent.com, and then inserts it into the current webpage using an iframe, thereby providing maximum isolation.
Offline use functionality has not yet become popular. The author believes that offline use is equivalent to building a distributed system, which faces complex synchronization issues and is difficult to implement correctly.
- Elasticsearch Was Never a Database (English)
Elasticsearch is currently a mainstream search service. Can it be used as a primary database? This article tells you that it cannot, as it was not designed for use as a database.
A simple introductory tutorial, guiding you step-by-step to write a Python script to extract a transcript from audio using the Whisper model.
- Avoid using @ts-ignore (English)
TypeScript’s @ts-ignore annotation is used to suppress all errors on the next line. The author argues it should not be used, preferring to switch to the @ts-expect-error annotation or the any type instead.
The author discovered that Apple has added an unpublicized CSS property to the Safari browser, allowing web elements to display a “liquid glass” effect.
A beginner’s tutorial teaching you 5 tips to shorten boot time by adjusting systemd settings.
Tools
A tool to display GPU running information, with a built-in Web management panel, supporting various brands including Nvidia/AMD/Intel/Apple.
There is also an online GPU performance testing website Volume Shader BM. (@BOS1980 submission)
A terminal tool for monitoring network traffic, which displays detailed connection information, cross-platform.
A self-hosted dashboard that lists local ports occupied by various services. When combined with a Compose file, it can start/stop Docker containers. See the introduction article.
A Docker container that scans the current network and graphically displays network node information.
A terminal-based file manager, supporting Linux and Mac.
There is another similar terminal file manager called Yazi.
A client-side auxiliary Bash script for the inner network penetration tool frp, simplifying the creation and management of tunnels. (@openapphub submission)
Open-source task management software, supporting Web/mobile/desktop platforms, and can be deployed with Docker. (@CaryTrivett submission)
A PostgreSQL/MySQL database backup tool written by a netizen, which can automatically backup, encrypt, and compress databases, and upload the backup files to Tencent Cloud COS or Alibaba Cloud OSS. (@iKeepLearn submission)
A command-line tool collection that enables 1000+ CLI tools with one click, cross-platform, and supports AI features. (@Zhengqbbb submission)
AI Related
A personal voice companion that generates a podcast-like “daily briefing” for listening, with content including daily news, interests, personal calendar, and emails.
It is the startup product from the core developers of NotebookLM after they left Google. It is currently free to use. See the introduction article.
An open-source Chrome extension previously introduced in the weekly, whose functionality has now been extended to perform browser automation using AI. (@buttercannfly submission)
A Python script that automatically changes the Windows wallpaper to the Bing daily wallpaper and adds a “word of the day” to the wallpaper, with the AI generating the word explanation and example sentences. (@klemperer submission)
A fine-tuned model based on the open-source Index-TTS speech synthesis model from Bilibili, which improves the prosody and naturalness of the voice. (@asr-pub submission)
A terminal-based smart coding assistant (Code Agent), which can be seen as an open-source Claude Code. (@xierenyuan submission)
A Web-based AI video subtitle editing tool that can automatically convert video speech to text and generate subtitles. Try the Demo. (@x007xyz submission)
A management tool for MCP services that connects to various MCP servers and has a built-in Web management panel. (@whillhill submission)
Resources
An online English book that features 99 selected small physics experiments from Dutch secondary schools, covering various fields (force, light, magnetism, waves, etc.).
A series of npm package poisoning incidents have recently been exposed. This repository collects various npm security measures, divided into two main parts: for users and for publishers.
Images
- Electric Vehicle Principle
An image circulating online illustrating the principle of an electric vehicle.
There is a small circle inside a square. What is the relationship between the radius of the small circle and the side length of the square?
This problem seems quite difficult. The answer is 4/33 of the side length of the square.
Excerpts
Based on my observations, the way senior and junior programmers in a company use AI is different.
Senior programmers do not fully trust the output of AI; they only use AI to accelerate projects. They generally review and refactor the code generated by AI, and they approach AI’s architectural decisions with skepticism.
Junior programmers are more inclined to skip reviewing and refactoring, fully accepting the AI’s output, which leads to “house of cards” code: it seems to work, but it collapses as soon as it’s put into use.
I don’t know if AI will replace programmers in the future, but at the current stage, AI coding cannot solve 100% of software problems, but it can solve 70%. This is equivalent to AI being able to reduce the workload of senior programmers by 70%.
The remaining 30% still requires the programmer’s experience and expertise, and it is precisely this 30% that junior programmers lack.
Therefore, it may sound counter-intuitive: AI is more helpful to senior programmers than to junior programmers, and is more likely to generate work results.
AI at the current stage is more like a very motivated junior programmer in the team, capable of writing code quickly, but requiring constant supervision and correction. The more you know, the better you can guide it.
Therefore, the correct use of AI is for senior programmers to use it to accelerate what they already know how to do, and for junior programmers to use it to learn what they should be doing.
Quotes
AI will expand until most of the sun’s energy is used for computation.
– Elon Musk’s latest interview
I think Mars can be self-sufficient within 30 years. Every two years, the planets align, and you can depart for Mars. So, there are about 10 to 15 Mars departure windows within 30 years.
With each launch, the tonnage of cargo transported to Mars will increase exponentially. Thus, we can make Mars self-sufficient within 30 years.
– Elon Musk’s latest interview
A new job is quietly emerging in the software industry called “Vibe Coding cleanup,” which specializes in solving the problems caused by “Vibe Coding.” This is the greatest irony of the AI era: humans are hired to clean up AI’s trash.
– “Vibe Coding Cleanup as a Service”
An AI bubble is very possible, but for a company like Meta, the greater risk is hesitation.
If we end up wasting hundreds of billions on AI, it’s obviously very unfortunate, but I actually think the risk of missing out on AI is higher. For us, the risk is not being too aggressive, but not being aggressive enough.
Today’s computers are responders: you ask it to do something, and it does it. The next phase of computers is the agent. It’s like a little person in a box who starts predicting what you want. It doesn’t just help you; it guides you through vast amounts of information, like having a little partner in the box.
– Steve Jobs, 1984 interview