🎓 Why 38% of Stanford Students Now Identify as Disabled
The article offers a nuanced look at how evolving mental health narratives and risk-averse academic cultures are reshaping the meaning of disability and fairness in higher education.
A Reason analysis explores the surge in disability claims at elite U.S. universities, revealing that 38% of Stanford students now report some form of disability, mainly related to ADHD, anxiety, or other mental health challenges. The article argues that relaxed diagnostic practices and online self-diagnosis culture have blurred distinctions between real impairment and academic stress. It also notes that many students integrate these labels into their personal identity, potentially fueling overdiagnosis and increased accommodation demands.
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🌐 Time to Free JavaScript (2024)
This open appeal encapsulates the developer community’s push against corporate gatekeeping of core technologies and the tension between intellectual property law and open-source innovation.
An open letter challenges Oracle’s control of the ‘JavaScript’ trademark, arguing it no longer qualifies for protection since the company hasn’t enforced or used it in decades. The authors emphasize that JavaScript has evolved into a globally maintained open standard, urging Oracle to relinquish the trademark or face legal cancellation proceedings.
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💼 Microsoft Halves AI Sales Targets After Missed Quotas
This marks a cooling phase in corporate AI adoption—customers are demanding tangible value before buying into autonomous AI tools, signaling a maturing market beyond the initial hype cycle.
Microsoft has reduced its AI product sales targets by 50% following widespread underperformance by sales teams. Despite heavy promotion of AI ‘agents’ across Microsoft 365 and Azure, enterprise adoption has lagged expectations. The company’s Foundry AI growth goals were cut from 50% to around 25%, signaling a more cautious approach to AI monetization.
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💾 RAM Prices Skyrocket—Even Samsung Won’t Sell to Itself
A sharp reminder that even vertically integrated giants aren’t immune to global component shortages—AI infrastructure demand is rewriting semiconductor market dynamics.
Driven by the AI hardware boom, RAM prices have surged so high that Samsung Semiconductor reportedly declined to sell memory chips at favorable terms to Samsung Electronics. The internal dispute underscores how intense demand from data centers is distorting supply chains. Analysts expect elevated prices to persist through 2027, affecting smartphones, PCs, and servers alike.
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🧭 Ignoring the Spotlight: Lessons from a Staff Engineer
A compelling reflection on quiet leadership in tech—arguing that real impact often stems from patience, domain mastery, and systems thinking instead of chasing executive visibility.
A Senior Staff Engineer at Google shares why he avoids high-visibility projects in favor of long-term system stewardship. By focusing on stable infrastructure and sustained innovation within the same domain, he achieves deeper impact than fleeting high-profile initiatives. His perspective reframes influence in engineering as the product of consistency and craftsmanship rather than attention.
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🧩 Super-flat ASTs: Rethinking Compiler Memory Efficiency
An excellent deep dive into compiler design for engineers seeking to squeeze more performance out of their parsing pipelines.
This article details strategies for optimizing Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) structures in compilers through techniques like pointer compression, string interning, and flat memory layouts. The final ‘super-flat’ design, implemented in Rust, dramatically reduces memory consumption while improving parsing speed on large codebases. Benchmarks and code examples illustrate the real-world performance gains of each stage.
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🧱 PGlite – PostgreSQL Reimagined for WebAssembly
A cutting-edge example of how WebAssembly is transforming database architecture by bringing full SQL engines into the browser and edge environments.
PGlite is a lightweight, embeddable PostgreSQL implementation running entirely in WebAssembly, supporting local execution with reactive data handling and real-time sync. It enables developers to build fully client-side applications with persistent state and no server dependency.
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🤖 SWI-Prolog 10.0.0: Modern Logic Programming Evolved
A milestone update that cements SWI-Prolog’s place as a forward-looking logic programming platform bridging classic AI with web and cross-platform development.
The SWI-Prolog 10.0.0 release introduces performance improvements, expanded Unicode compliance, enhanced debugging tools, and full support for Windows and WebAssembly. It also debuts the Epilog GUI framework, modernizing the user experience while retaining backward compatibility for developers.
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