Lab-grown diamonds disrupt natural diamond industry
Lab-grown diamonds, indistinguishable and far cheaper, have cut natural diamonds’ sales share at Canadian retailer Livia Diamonds from nearly 100% in 2018 to 3-4% today.
Two-carat synthetic stones cost ~$3,500 versus $35,000 for natural; ethical concerns about forced labor and conflict diamonds boost lab-grown appeal among millennials and Gen Z.
Experts highlight natural diamonds’ geological uniqueness versus uniform lab-grown stones offering customizable specs.
Canadian diamond mines face shutdowns from falling prices; Burgundy Diamond Mines suspended operations due to “sub-economic” conditions after 26% price drop in two years.
The industry contraction combines shifting values, tech disruption, and economic fallout for northern mining communities.Open Sauce: Bay Area maker event with YouTube creators
Open Sauce mixes Maker Faire hands-on spirit with prominent tech and engineering YouTubers, showcasing hundreds of diverse maker projects from mad science to vintage tech.
Highlights include a walking coffee table with cooler, Apollo-era hardware restoration, and interactive booths like Meshtastic and ADSBee.
NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick attended, discussing his plans to build a homelab managing ISS photography datasets.
The event fosters community engagement, hands-on mentorship (e.g., beginner soldering), and new platforms complementing YouTube for maker content.
Hosts blend humor and technical depth, making the event both playful and substantive, with plans to grow through 2026.Rust GPU project unifies GPU programming across platforms
Christian Legnitto showcases a Rust-based demo where a single Rust codebase compiles to run on all major GPU backends: NVIDIA CUDA, Vulkan GPUs, Apple Metal, DirectX 12, WebGPU, plus CPU fallback.
The approach eschews specialized shader languages, compiling Rust kernels to SPIR-V or PTX intermediates, leveraging Rust’s strong typing, pattern matching, and no_std support for OS-less environments.
Conditional compilation handles platform differences; unit testing GPU kernels on CPU streamlines development cycles.
Current limitations include fragmented tooling, separate compilers, and variable APIs, but potential benefits are breaking vendor lock-in and ergonomic cross-platform GPU coding.
The article invites discussion on abstraction trade-offs, vendor ecosystems, and compiler evolution in GPU programming.Factors behind Yahoo’s decline
Yahoo faltered due to diffuse strategy lacking core focus across search, media, advertising, and tech, compounded by missed strategic acquisitions like Google and Facebook.
Leadership instability and changing executives caused inconsistent strategy and poor execution, slowing innovation and adaptation.
Competitive pressure from Google’s search dominance and Facebook’s rise diverted users and ad revenue.
Financial challenges included declining ad revenues and ineffective acquisitions.
Culture emphasized cost-cutting and branding over growth, stifling potential acquisitions; some insiders doubt Google or Facebook would have thrived as Yahoo subsidiaries.
The narrative intertwines technical evolution, corporate culture, and strategic lessons on focus and execution.Privilege escalation in Microsoft Copilot’s Python sandbox
A vulnerability in Microsoft Copilot Enterprise’s April 2025 live Python sandbox enabled root code execution inside a miniconda container via path hijacking of an unqualified pgrep command.
The sandbox runs Jupyter Notebook backend code as an ubuntu user with limited privileges; a root-run script used pgrep without absolute path, allowing insertion of a malicious pgrep script in a writable directory earlier in $PATH.
Exploit gave root in-container access but no network or breakout capabilities; sandbox isolation remained effective as defense in depth.
Microsoft patched the flaw, rated moderate severity, and credited researchers without bounty.
Further research revealed access to Microsoft’s Responsible AI Operations control panel, with related findings presented at BlackHat USA 2025.
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