TLDR 2025-03-26

Technical debt can bankrupt software teams — of time, energy, and ability to innovate.

What are the true causes of technical debt?

How much is it costing you?

Can it be overcome?

In this video, Prof. Rainer Koschke from the University of Bremen and Paul Lambert from the Qt Group look at the causes of software erosion (AKA tech debt) - and what you can do about it.

Learn how to identify technical debt, understand its impact, and keep your codebase sustainable.

Watch the talk now →

OpenAI has updated GPT-4o to generate more realistic images. GPT-4o has now replaced DALL-E 3 as the default image generation model in ChatGPT. The updated image generation abilities are now available to ChatGPT Free, Plus, Team, and Pro users. OpenAI used a group of human trainers, who labeled training data for the model, to improve the model's abilities, enabling it to generate more accurately rendered and useful images and follow human directions more closely. An example image generated by the updated model is available in the article.

Google has introduced an experimental version of Gemini 2.5 Pro, which marks a sizable advancement in AI capabilities. The Gemini 2.5 models are designed to 'think' through problems, an approach that improves accuracy and performance. Google aims to embed these reasoning capabilities across all Gemini models to enable them to tackle complex challenges and support sophisticated context-aware agents. Gemini 2.5 Pro demonstrates strong reasoning and coding proficiencies, with leading scores on common coding, math, and science benchmarks.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has installed a key component of its SPARC demonstration reactor called the cryostat base. The milestone signifies a transition into a new stage of the project that involves building the actual tokamak itself. SPARC is expected to come online in 2027 - if it works as anticipated, it could be the first tokamak to produce more power than it takes to run. Three other major pieces of the tokamak will be installed simultaneously later this year or early next year - it will take several months after that to ensure all of the pieces work together as planned.

Julian Kelly, Google Quantum AI's director of hardware, says that the technology is only five years away from running practical applications that can't be calculated on modern computers. The technology will be able to do cutting-edge physics and potentially generate new kinds of data. Google's most advanced quantum computer has 105 qubits - experts say 1 million or more qubits will be needed for useful applications. Quantum technology has been in the spotlight recently as Google announced a breakthrough in error correction and Microsoft revealed a new quantum computing chip.

Somebody added malicious code to the tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action a week ago, making the compromised action leak secrets to build logs. The attack was possible because it's common practice to refer to tags in a GitHub Actions workflow - changing a tag can make an action run different code the next time it runs. Specifying a git commit ID instead creates a reference that will run the same code every time. This post presents a script that enables you to check whether there are any mutable references within your GitHub Actions workflows.

Aggressive AI web crawlers are increasingly overloading community-maintained infrastructure, essentially causing persistent distributed denial-of-service attacks on vital public resources. Some open source projects now see as much as 97% of their traffic coming from AI companies' bots. This is dramatically increasing bandwidth costs and service instability and burdening maintainers. New defensive tools have emerged to protect websites from unwanted AI crawlers as prominent industry players have shown little incentive to adopt more cooperative practices.

WikiTok is an infinite controlling Wikipedia built on Bun, React, and TypeScript. The app was created using Claude through Cursor, which did a vast majority of the work. The developer gave it the specs they wanted and prompted away. This post details the lessons that the developer learned while building the app and after it went viral.

The 4 Day Week Foundation is urging tech businesses to sign up for a six-month trial from June 30 in the UK. There will be a six-week workshop and training that starts on May 22. Hundreds of British companies have already shown that a four-day, 32-hour working week with no loss of pay can be a win-win for workers and employers. The results of the upcoming pilot will be reviewed by researchers at the University of Sussex and Newcastle University.

A screenshot of the Messages app in iOS 19 shows an interface heavily inspired by visionOS, with glass-like elements, depth, and shadows.

This article takes a look at the robots Nvidia unveiled at a recent weeklong AI conference - it includes photos and videos of a variety of machines.

56% of Gen Zs and 43% of millennials find social media content more relevant than traditional TV shows and movies.

For the world to benefit from your work, you have to make it known.

Multiple companies with logos on 11x's website were not actual customers and at least one is threatening legal action over this.

YouTube accounted for 11.6% of all TV use in the US in February.