Ilia's Corner

Apple iPhone 17 ships hardware memory safety that just works

Your exploit-mitigation checklist shrank overnight. Apple’s A19 chip turns Arm Memory Tagging Extension from a debug-only curiosity into a production, always-on guard that catches buffer overflows and use-after-free bugs before they become zero-days. If you ship iOS apps or write native code, re-compile with the new flags and watch crash logs for the “bad-actor” tag that now self-documents memory violations—no instrumentation, no perf hit, no excuses.

reddit_tech · 4 min read

Google quietly admits the open web is ‘already in rapid decline’

Lawyers let the quiet part slip: Google sees the searchable web shrinking while AI slurps content. Translation—SEO traffic is becoming a zero-sum cage match and your documentation site could be training someone else’s model. Time to double down on newsletters, RSS feeds, and direct community channels you actually own.

reddit · 3 min read

Spotify users pocket $55 k selling their own listening data

A 10 k-user cohort just proved personal data has cash value by shipping anonymized Spotify logs to Solo AI through Vana’s “Unwrapped” collective. If you maintain an app, think about the new revenue lane: let power users export (and monetize) their own telemetry instead of hoarding it behind a paywall.

reddit · 2 min read

TwinMind raises $6 M to be your always-on "second brain"

Forget meeting bots—TwinMind passively ingests your screen, audio, and keystrokes, then surfaces the exact doc, ticket, or conversation you need before you search. The pitch: no manual note-taking, no context loss when you switch projects. Worth a spin if you’ve ever reopened 47 tabs to reconstruct last week’s debug session.

reddit · 3 min read

Two Slice — a font that survives 2 px

UI designers rejoice: a bitmap typeface engineered to remain legible at two-pixel cap height. Perfect for status bars, wearables, or that retro LED panel you’re hacking together on a 128 × 32 OLED.

micro-displays

bitmap · 62 stars

LinHT open-source SDR ham transceiver

$500 and an FPGA turn you into a digital-radio pioneer. The first boot proves the board can tx/rx UHF while you stay in full control of the DSP chain—ideal for custom waveforms, satellite comms, or teaching yourself SDR without black-box firmware.

ham radio

C/Verilog · 48 stars

lexy — parser combinators without code-gen hell

C++17 header-only library that lets you craft readable parsers in-source, no ANTLR dance required. Ship self-contained binaries that parse config files or DSLs at compile time and shrug when teammates ask where the grammar file went.

parsing

C++17 · 26 stars

Johns Hopkins etches chips below 10 nm with new resist

The group replaced conventional photoresist with a metal-organic film, enabling patterning at scales current EUV struggles to hit affordably. If you’re in semiconductor R&D, watch for foundry partners licensing the process—it could extend Moore’s roadmap without jumping to expensive High-NA EUV.

materials-science · Johns Hopkins · 5 min read

486Tang puts a DOS PC in your wallet

The ao486 core now runs on a $40 Sipeed Tang Console, giving you a pocket 486 with VGA, IDE, and PS/2. Flash FreeDOS and you’ve got a retro dev station for BIOS tinkering, demoscene experiments, or proving to the interns that yes, 33 MHz can be fun.

FPGA · nand2mario · 4 min read