Algorithms & Logic — Posts

32 posts on "Algorithms & Logic" by Shlomo Strauss — bilingual writing on technology, science, and business.

• Power Grid Anomalies Expose Transnational Crypto Laundering — A Chinese crime syndicate's hidden Bitcoin mining and money-laundering operation was dismantled after algorithms detected power grid anomalies.
• The impending collapse of GoPro and its technological legacy — Facing financial struggles and fierce competition, GoPro nears the end of its path while leaving a lasting legacy in digital image stabilization.
• Google uses AI and Wolbachia bacteria to fight deadly mosquitoes — Google combats deadly diseases by releasing millions of AI-sorted, bacteria-infected male mosquitoes designed to crash local mosquito populations.
• An autonomous AI system turns bug reports into deployed code — A newly developed AI reporting tool analyzes user feedback to automatically provide tech support, write code, and deploy software updates.
• An AI-native game engine is taking aim at Epic and Unity's duopoly — Immense, a new game engine built by a former Epic director, uses parallel AI agents to handle physics, lighting, and audio — and could disrupt the…
• Amazon Challenges Starlink in the Race for In-Flight Wi-Fi — Amazon's new satellite internet solution for airplanes promises double the speed of Starlink and a significantly faster installation time.
• Google's TurboQuant Algorithm Cuts AI Memory Needs by 8x — Google's open-source TurboQuant algorithm uses polar coordinates to compress AI memory requirements by eightfold without losing accuracy.
• China approved a commercial brain implant for paralysis — the West is — While technologies like Neuralink await lengthy FDA approval, China has commercially cleared an invasive brain implant that restores movement to paralyzed
• Building a low-latency cloud infrastructure for algorithmic trading — A hands-on account of architecting a high-security, GPU-capable cloud server with 0.3 ms latency and cross-continental database replication for a private…
• Google's AI game demo wiped billions off gaming stocks — but is the — Google's Project Genie demo triggered a sharp sell-off in major gaming stocks, but the real AI threat to the industry likely comes from code-generation…
• How an RCE attack turned a Linux server into a zombie botnet node — A port-scanning alert exposed a Linux server infected via RCE with Gafgyt malware — a firsthand account of the attack, the investigation, and the…
• A single server ran for four months to break the pi calculation — StorageReview set a new pi digit record using a single Dell server equipped with 384 CPU cores, 1.5 TB of RAM, and 2.5 PB of Micron SSDs serving as swap…
• Biological mini-brains as computers: inside FinalSpark's experiment — Swiss startup FinalSpark grows human brain cells on electrodes and trains them with dopamine to perform computing tasks at roughly one-millionth the…
• Using AI to generate a sequence diagram from real production code — By connecting a GitHub repository to Google's Firebase Studio and Mermaid, the author generated a detailed sequence diagram that maps a web scraper's full
• Breaking a CPU overclocking record with liquid helium — From quartz oscillators to liquid-helium cooling at near absolute zero, this post explains the physics behind pushing a CPU past 9 GHz to set a world…
• Belgian traffic lights turn green on demand using drivers' smartphone — Over 200,000 Belgian drivers use an app that communicates with smart traffic lights at 230 intersections, offering an early glimpse of fully synchronized…
• Where true randomness comes from and why it matters for encryption — A practical look at true versus pseudo-random number generation, the hardware and software methods behind it, and the real-world consequences of getting…
• How Android phones became a global earthquake detection network — Google's Android earthquake system used phone accelerometers to detect over 11,000 quakes between 2021 and 2024, sending warnings up to 60 seconds before…
• Laminar flow and the Reynolds number: the physics behind a tap that — A look at laminar versus turbulent flow, the dimensionless Reynolds number that marks the boundary between them, and why it matters in pipelines, blood…
• Google's patent puts 3D face recognition directly under the display — A newly filed Google patent describes an under-display 3D face recognition system that could rival Apple's Face ID while eliminating the need for a notch…
• An AI model links different fingerprints from the same person — Trained on 60,000 prints from a government database, an AI model matched different fingers belonging to the same person with 77% accuracy, challenging…
• What a pasta machine reveals about how neural networks see images — A pasta machine splitting one image into smaller copies turns out to be a surprisingly clear model for how convolutional filters and AI image generation…
• Working code is not the same as well-written code — An 1890 pencil sharpener illustrates why finishing a task is not enough — how you do it matters just as much as whether you do it.
• 20,000 people in one building: what a Chinese megablock reveals about — Using a Chinese residential megacomplex and a bacterial growth thought experiment, the post illustrates how exponential population growth can overtake us…
• Automating SEO for thousands of products with AI and Make — A Make automation pipeline using ChatGPT or Claude rewrites product titles and descriptions at scale, updating thousands of store listings in one click…
• A candle timer as a mechanical if statement — A candle-and-ring switch shows how code constructs like loops and conditionals map directly onto physical mechanisms, making abstract programming logic…
• Your router's Wi-Fi signals can map your movements through walls — Researchers trained a model on paired Wi-Fi signals and camera footage, enabling human presence and movement detection through walls without any camera.
• Google's quantum computer completed 47 years of computation in six — A look at Google's 2023 quantum computer, the extreme cooling it requires to operate, and the global race for quantum supremacy.
• Why humanoid robots are shaped like us — the software reason matters — Beyond market expectations and mobility advantages, the deepest reason for humanoid robot design lies in how their software is trained on human movement…
• Inside Elon Musk's GPU cluster: how large language models are trained — A step-by-step breakdown of how language models learn — using Musk's massive GPU cluster as a starting point to explain forward passes, loss calculation,…
• Why skipping in a video is never instant: the role of key frames — Video compression stores only the differences between frames, so seeking relies on periodically saved full images called key frames — which is why…
• Why an external hard drive is not a real backup — On World Backup Day, a practical case for Google Photos cloud storage over external HDDs, including how Google's compression algorithm can shrink photo…