A curated reading feed of engineering blogs I follow — from teams building real systems at scale.
A quieter lane for machining, CAD/CAM, process planning, toolpaths, tolerancing, DFM, and Industry 4.0.
Context Search
Ranked by recency by default. Add a concept query to surface related context.
Discover how Airbnb prioritizes user privacy while building a more connected community, empowering guests to engage socially, connect confidently, and maintain control of their personal data.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, throughput
A production-tested approach for moving a large-scale metrics pipeline from StatsD to OpenTelemetry and Prometheus.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, scaling
We’re sharing insights into Meta’s Capacity Efficiency Program, where we’ve built an AI agent platform that helps automate finding and fixing performance issues throughout our infrastructure. By leveraging encoded domain expertise across a unified, standardized tool interface these agents help save power and free up engineers’ time away from addressing performance issues to innovating on [...] Read More... The post Capacity Efficiency at Meta: How Unified AI Agents Optimize Performance at Hyperscale appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via resilience
We’re sharing lessons learned from Meta’s post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration to help other organizations strengthen their resilience as industry transitions to post-quantum cryptography standards. We’re proposing the idea of PQC Migration Levels to help teams within organizations manage the complexity of PQC migration for their various use cases. By outlining Meta’s approach to this work [...] Read More... The post Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration at Meta: Framework, Lessons, and Takeaways appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: benchmarking data via evaluation
Generative AI
Trespassing on system messages. The post What’s up with window message <CODE>0x0091</CODE>? We’re getting it with unexpected parameters appeared first on The Old New Thing.
General Science
Useful angle: implementation detail via debugging
Maybe it didn't really exit. The post Why is there a long delay between a thread exiting and the <CODE>WaitForSingleObject</CODE> returning? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: production lessons via outage
Not a direct line to Bill Gates's office. The post Why was there a red telephone at every receptionist desk? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: benchmarking data via experiment
Education Innovation
Excerpt In complex, long-running agentic systems, maintaining alignment and coherent reasoning between agents requires careful design. In this second article of our series, we explore these challenges and the mechanisms we built to keep teams of agents working productively over long time spans. We present a range of complementary techniques that balance the conflicting requirements…
Useful angle: implementation detail via algorithm
Taking advantage of special characteristics of the array. The post Finding a duplicated item in an array of <VAR>N</VAR> integers in the range 1 to <VAR>N</VAR> − 1 appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: implementation detail via implementation
Waiting for the waiting thread to acknowledge the change. The post How do you add or remove a handle from an active <CODE>WaitForMultipleObjects</CODE>?, part 2 appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, latency
At Meta, WebRTC powers real-time audio and video across various platforms. But forking a large open-source project like WebRTC within our monorepo presents unique challenges – over time, an internal fork can drift behind upstream, cutting itself off from community upgrades. We’re sharing how we escaped this “forking trap” – from building a dual-stack architecture [...] Read More... The post Escaping the Fork: How Meta Modernized WebRTC Across 50+ Use Cases appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via parallel
You can't, but you can cooperate with the other thread. The post How do you add or remove a handle from an active <CODE>WaitForMultipleObjects</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: computational geometry and graphics via surface
Generative AI
Generative AI
AWS Useful angle: systems performance via performance, scaling
In this post, we demonstrate how you can build a scalable, multi-tenant configuration service using the tagged storage pattern, an architectural approach that uses key prefixes (like tenant_config_ or param_config_) to automatically route configuration requests to the most appropriate AWS storage service. This pattern maintains strict tenant isolation and supports real-time, zero-downtime configuration updates through event-driven architecture, alleviating the cache staleness problem.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via incident
As AI increases developer speed and productivity it also increases the need for safeguards. On this episode of the Meta Tech Podcast, Pascal Hartig sits down with Ishwari and Joe from Meta’s Configurations team to discuss how Meta makes config rollouts safe at scale. Listen in to learn about canarying and progressive rollouts, the health checks [...] Read More... The post Trust But Canary: Configuration Safety at Scale appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
You can't, but you can arrange for the waiter to do it for you. The post How do you add or remove a handle from an active <CODE>MsgWaitForMultipleObjects</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: implementation detail via implementation, internals
The permanently ineligible list. The post Were there any Windows 3.1 programs that were so incompatible with Windows 95 that there was no point trying to patch them? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
AWS Useful angle: systems performance via latency
In this post, we walk through the new installation experience, demonstrate three deployment methods (console, CLI, and Terraform), and show how features like multi-instance-type deployment and native node affinity give you fine-grained control over inference scheduling
AI agents are transforming the way we build — and even how we think of ourselves as software developers. Both... The post Let’s Talk Agentic Development: Spotify x Anthropic Live appeared first on Spotify Engineering.
Useful angle: architecture depth via design choices
AI coding assistants are powerful but only as good as their understanding of your codebase. When we pointed AI agents at one of Meta’s large-scale data processing pipelines – spanning four repositories, three languages, and over 4,100 files – we quickly found that they weren’t making useful edits quickly enough. We fixed this by building [...] Read More... The post How Meta Used AI to Map Tribal Knowledge in Large-Scale Data Pipelines appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
If the compiler is complaining about things you didn't write, find out who wrote them. The post Learning to read C++ compiler errors: Illegal use of <TT>-></TT> when there is no <TT>-></TT> in sight appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via cache
File copying is not a fundamental operation, nor is it even detectable at the file system layer. The post How can I use <CODE>ReadDirectoryChangesW</CODE> to know when someone is copying a file out of the directory? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via reliability
Generative AI
From defensive end to cloud security engineer, meet Jonathan Woodard.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, throughput
This is the second post in the Ranking Engineer Agent blog series exploring the autonomous AI capabilities accelerating Meta’s Ads Ranking innovation. The previous post introduced Ranking Engineer Agent’s ML exploration capability, which autonomously designs, executes, and analyzes ranking model experiments. This post covers how to optimize the low-level infrastructure that makes those models run [...] Read More... The post KernelEvolve: How Meta’s Ranking Engineer Agent Optimizes AI Infrastructure appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: implementation detail via pipeline
By turning compaction into a layered, adaptive pipeline and strengthening our monitoring and controls, we made Magic Pocket more resilient to workload changes.
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via memory
Tempting but misleading. The post Why doesn’t the system let you declare your own messages to have the same semantics as <CODE>WM_<WBR>COPYDATA</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
AWS Useful angle: systems performance via scaling
This post describes a solution that uses fixed camera networks to monitor operational environments in near real-time, detecting potential safety hazards while capturing object floor projections and their relationships to floor markings. While we illustrate the approach through distribution center deployment examples, the underlying architecture applies broadly across industries. We explore the architectural decisions, strategies for scaling to hundreds of sites, reducing site onboarding time, synthetic data generation using generative AI tools like GLIGEN, and other critical technical hurdles we overcame.
What are we reading about here? The post The cover of <I>C++: The Programming Language</I> raises questions not answered by the cover appeared first on The Old New Thing.
AWS Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via resilience, recovery
In this blog post, we take a building blocks approach. Starting with the tools like AWS Backup to protect your data, we then add protection for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) compute using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS). Finally, we show how to use the full capabilities of AWS to restore your entire workload—data, infrastructure, networking, and configuration, using Arpio disaster recovery automation.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via availability
The Problem: Legacy Tooling and Its Limitations Currently, Slack utilizes a hybrid approach to network measurement, incorporating both internal (such as traffic between AWS Availability Zones) and external (monitoring traffic from the public internet into Slack’s infrastructure) solutions. These tools comprise a combination of commercial SaaS offerings and custom-built network testing solutions developed by our…
Useful angle: benchmarking data via evaluation
Algorithms & Theory
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, latency
Meta continues to lead the industry in utilizing groundbreaking AI Recommendation Systems (RecSys) to deliver better experiences for people, and better results for advertisers. To reach the next frontier of performance, we are scaling Meta’s Ads Recommender runtime models to LLM-scale & complexity to further a deeper understanding of people’s interests and intent. This increase [...] Read More... The post Meta Adaptive Ranking Model: Bending the Inference Scaling Curve to Serve LLM-Scale Models for Ads appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
It was going to be like that when I got here. The post Before you check if an update caused your problem, check that it wasn’t a problem before the update appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Algorithms & Theory
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Meta is continuing its long-term roadmap to help the construction industry leverage AI to produce high-quality and more sustainable concrete mixes, as well as those exclusively produced in the United States. Concurrent with the 2026 American Concrete Institute (ACI) Spring Convention, Meta is releasing a new AI model for designing concrete mixes – Bayesian Optimization [...] Read More... The post AI for American-Produced Cement and Concrete appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
AWS Useful angle: systems performance via throughput, scaling
In this post, you will learn how Aigen modernized its machine learning (ML) pipeline with Amazon SageMaker AI to overcome industry-wide agricultural robotics challenges and scale sustainable farming. This post focuses on the strategies and architecture patterns that enabled Aigen to modernize its pipeline across hundreds of distributed edge solar robots and showcase the significant business outcomes unlocked through this transformation. By adopting automated data labeling and human-in-the-loop validation, Aigen increased image labeling throughput by 20x while reducing image labeling costs by 22.5x.
Why is this even a question? The post A question about the maximimum number of values in a registry key raises questions about the question appeared first on The Old New Thing.
You can steal them from your owner. The post What if a dialog wants to intercept its own message loop? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
AWS Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
In this post, we demonstrate how to architect AWS systems that enable AI agents to iterate rapidly through design patterns for both system architecture and code base structure. We first examine the architectural problems that limit agentic development today. We then walk through system architecture patterns that support rapid experimentation, followed by codebase patterns that help AI agents understand, modify, and validate your applications with confidence.
Because it opted out. The post Why doesn’t <CODE>WM_<WBR>ENTERIDLE</CODE> work if the dialog box is a <CODE>MessageBox</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Monorepos will continue to grow as products evolve, but growth doesn’t have to mean friction.
The dialog box lets you change how it waits. The post How can I change a dialog box’s message loop to do a <CODE>MsgWaitForMultipleObjects</CODE> instead of <CODE>GetMessage</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Algorithms & Theory
How Airbnb built forecasting models resilient enough to survive a global pandemic and whatever shock comes next.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Algorithms & Theory
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via recovery
A very primitive version of recovery. The post Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older version appeared first on The Old New Thing.
AWS Useful angle: systems performance via performance
In this post, we look at how Generali is using Amazon EKS Auto Mode and its integration with other AWS services to enhance performance while reducing operational overhead, optimizing costs, and enhancing security.
You'll have to ask nicely. The post How can I make sure the anti-malware software doesn’t terminate my custom service? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Wrapping things up. The post Windows stack limit checking retrospective: arm64, also known as AArch64 appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Introduction 🔔 At Slack, notifications are how teams stay in the loop, but they can also become overwhelming when not designed with intention. Our goal was to make staying informed feel effortless. We set out to rebuild one of Slack’s most complicated systems from the ground up by bringing calm, consistency, and clarity to the…
Reaching the modern day. The post Windows stack limit checking retrospective: amd64, also known as x86-64 appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
How a complex, large-scale migration to an in-house observability platform led to superior tooling, consistent data, and a fundamental reset of the developer experience.
Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
How we built a destination recommendation model that helps users spark inspiration and narrow down choices to make journeys smoother.
AWS Useful angle: systems performance via performance
In this post, you'll learn how AWS DevOps Agent integrates with your existing observability stack to provide intelligent, automated responses to system events.
Useful angle: computational geometry and graphics via surface
Friend bubbles in Facebook Reels highlight Reels your friends have liked or reacted to, helping you discover new content and making it easier to connect over shared interests. This article explains the technical architecture behind friend bubbles, including how machine learning estimates relationship strength and ranks content your friends have interacted with to create more [...] Read More... The post Friend Bubbles: Enhancing Social Discovery on Facebook Reels appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via memory
Double the size, double the fun. The post Windows stack limit checking retrospective: Alpha AXP appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: benchmarking data via experiment
Meta’s Ranking Engineer Agent (REA) autonomously executes key steps across the end-to-end machine learning (ML) lifecycle for ads ranking models. This post covers REA’s ML experimentation capabilities: autonomously generating hypotheses, launching training jobs, debugging failures, and iterating on results. Future posts will cover additional REA capabilities. REA reduces the need for manual intervention. It manages [...] Read More... The post Ranking Engineer Agent (REA): The Autonomous AI Agent Accelerating Meta’s Ads Ranking Innovation appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Health & Bioscience
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
We used DSPy to turn prompt engineering for our relevance judge into a measurable, automated optimization loop, improving task performance, cost, and how reliably it works in production.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Health & Bioscience
Appeasing the invisible return address predictor. The post Windows stack limit checking retrospective: x86-32 also known as i386, second try appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via benchmark
Education Innovation
Doing the math backwards. The post Windows stack limit checking retrospective: PowerPC appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Even seemingly simple engineering tasks — like updating an API — can become monumental undertakings when you’re dealing with millions of lines of code and thousands of engineers, especially if the changes are security-related. Nowhere is this more apparent than in mobile security, where a single class of vulnerability can be replicated across hundreds of [...] Read More... The post Patch Me If You Can: AI Codemods for Secure-by-Default Android Apps appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via memory, cache
Optimizing out the unnecessary probes comes with its own complexity. The post Windows stack limit checking retrospective: MIPS appeared first on The Old New Thing.
What if we could identify interesting listening moments from your year, and tell you a story about them? The post Inside the Archive: The Tech Behind Your 2025 Wrapped Highlights appeared first on Spotify Engineering.
One of the weirdest calling conventions you'll see. The post Windows stack limit checking retrospective: x86-32, also known as i386 appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via resilience
Climate & Sustainability
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via resilience
Climate & Sustainability
Generative AI
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via memory
Don't take steps that are too large. The post How do compilers ensure that large stack allocations do not skip over the guard page? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: implementation detail via implementation, pipeline
Uber is setting a new standard for design systems by using the Figma Console MCP to shatter the manual documentation bottleneck. By letting AI agents pull directly from design data, weeks of spec writing turns into minutes of automated precision.
Oh, this old thing? The post A snappy answer when asked about dressing casually at IBM appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Learn how we rebuilt our Ads personalization model with Transformer-based sequential encoders and HeteroMoE to better capture user intent, boost targeting accuracy, and scale intelligent ads delivery across the platform.
Useful angle: optimization techniques via improved
We’re sharing the technical details behind how Advanced Browsing Protection (ABP) in Messenger protects the privacy of the links clicked on within chats while still warning people about malicious links. We hope that this post has helped to illuminate some of the engineering challenges and infrastructure components involved for providing this feature for our users. [...] Read More... The post How Advanced Browsing Protection Works in Messenger appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Think fast, no pressure. The post The fine print giveth and the bold print taketh away: The countdown timer appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Look for the conflicting definitions to see where they are coming from. The post Learning to read C++ compiler errors: Ambiguous overloaded operator appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Natural Language Processing
Climate & Sustainability
Useful angle: systems performance via scaling
It's already gone. If you need more information, you should have been remembering it. The post When <CODE>ReadDirectoryChangesW</CODE> reports that a deletion occurred, how can I learn more about the deleted thing? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Perhaps it's because you dispatched it. The post The mystery of the posted message that was dispatched before reaching the main message loop appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via throughput
Uber’s Payment Account Batch Processing system handles over 30 financial update operations per second for hot accounts with sub-second batching and strict consistency. Learn how we built it without using special hardware or software.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Generative AI
Useful angle: systems performance via scaling
How we changed our Observability as Code alert review process and cut development cycles from weeks to minutes.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Of course, anything can happen if you break the rules. The post Aha, I found a counterexample to the documentation that says that <CODE>QueryPerformanceCounter</CODE> never fails appeared first on The Old New Thing.
AWS Useful angle: systems performance via performance
In this post, we discuss how following the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) and AWS Well-Architected Framework can help reduce these risks through proper implementation of AWS guidance and best practices while taking into consideration the practical challenges organizations face in implementing these best practices, including resource constraints, evaluating trade-offs and competing business priorities.
Just some useless trivia. The post Just for fun: A survey of write protect notches on floppy disks and other media appeared first on The Old New Thing.
You get notifications that might not make sense. The post What sort of horrible things happen if my dialog has a non-button with the control ID of <CODE>IDCANCEL</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time, reliability
FFmpeg is truly a multi-tool for media processing. As an industry-standard tool it supports a wide variety of audio and video codecs and container formats. It can also orchestrate complex chains of filters for media editing and manipulation. For the people who use our apps, FFmpeg plays an important role in enabling new video experiences [...] Read More... The post FFmpeg at Meta: Media Processing at Scale appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Meta recognizes the long-term benefits of jemalloc, a high-performance memory allocator, in its software infrastructure. We are renewing focus on jemalloc, aiming to reduce maintenance needs and modernize the codebase while continuing to evolve the allocator to adapt to the latest hardware and workloads. We are committed to continuing to develop jemalloc development with the [...] Read More... The post Investing in Infrastructure: Meta’s Renewed Commitment to jemalloc appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: systems performance via scaling
Useful angle: systems performance via latency
Aditya Challapally leads post-training research and infrastructure for Copilot agent capabilities that process millions of multimodal interactions. This post builds on the diagnostics from Diagnosing instability in production-scale agent reinforcement learning with the engineering and algorithmic interventions we developed to get the best results out of post training at scale. Post-training multimodal agents at scale […] The post Engineering and algorithmic interventions for multimodal post-training at Microsoft scale appeared first on Engineering@Microsoft.
Making sure it triggers when you need it, and not when you don't. The post Intercepting messages inside <CODE>IsDialogMessage</CODE>, fine-tuning the message filter appeared first on The Old New Thing.
AWS Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
Santander faced a significant technical challenge in managing an infrastructure that processes billions of daily transactions across more than 200 critical systems. The solution emerged through an innovative platform engineering initiative called Catalyst, which transformed the bank's cloud infrastructure and development management. This post analyzes the main cases, benefits, and results obtained with this initiative.
How we train Dash's search ranking models with a mix of human and LLM-assisted labeling.
Using an IsDialogMessage extension point. The post Intercepting messages inside <CODE>IsDialogMessage</CODE>, installing the message filter appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via recovery
Learn how Uber’s new Superuser Guardrails turn risky manual commands into peer-reviewed, machine-validated changes, and how to apply this pattern to your own systems.
AWS Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
This post describes why ProGlove chose a account-per-tenant approach for our serverless SaaS architecture and how it changes the operational model. It covers the challenges you need to anticipate around automation, observability and cost. We will also discuss how the approach can affect other operational models in different environments like an enterprise context.
Useful angle: implementation detail via algorithm
How Airbnb is adapting ranking for our map interface.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, latency
How we completely rearchitected Mussel, our storage engine for derived data, and lessons learned from the migration from Mussel V1 to V2.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, latency
How Airbnb hardened Mussel, our key-value store, with smarter traffic controls to stay fast and reliable during traffic spikes.
Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
How Airbnb rolled out 20+ locally relevant payment methods worldwide in just 14 months
Useful angle: benchmarking data via measurement, evaluation
2025 was a big year for research at Airbnb, as we made significant progress toward our mission to use AI, data science, and machine learning to become the best travel and living platform.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via incident, reliability
How Airbnb ships dynamic config changes safely and reliably
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via parallel
Anna Sulkina has always been a traveler, and we’re lucky her travels have brought her to Airbnb. Anna is a Senior Director of Engineering, and she’s responsible for Application & Cloud infrastructure.
Process the message before you let IsDialogMessage see it. The post Intercepting messages before <CODE>IsDialogMessage</CODE> can process them appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, latency
We are open-sourcing the initial version of RCCLX – an enhanced version of RCCL that we developed and tested on Meta’s internal workloads. RCCLX is fully integrated with Torchcomms and aims to empower researchers and developers to accelerate innovation, regardless of their chosen backend. Communication patterns for AI models are constantly evolving, as are hardware [...] Read More... The post RCCLX: Innovating GPU Communications on AMD Platforms appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Intercepting the flow in your message loop. The post Customizing the ways the dialog manager dismisses itself: Isolating the Close pathway appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Sniffing the synchronous keyboard state is still not precise enough. The post Customizing the ways the dialog manager dismisses itself: Detecting the ESC key, second (failed) attempt appeared first on The Old New Thing.
The pocket reference guide for 2026/2027. The post The 2026/2027 Seattle Symphony subscription season at a glance appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Sniffing the asynchronous keyboard state. The post Customizing the ways the dialog manager dismisses itself: Detecting the ESC key, first (failed) attempt appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
When we kicked this off, we weren’t trying to ship an “AI feature.” We were trying to fix a structural... The post Our Multi-Agent Architecture for Smarter Advertising appeared first on Spotify Engineering.
Summarizing the flow. The post Exploring the signals the dialog manager uses for dismissing a dialog appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via latency
Uber’s 10PB, 16K-dataset Hive monolith for the Delivery business had huge limitations. See how we transformed it into a secure, scalable, decentralized platform with zero downtime and saved more than 1PB along the way. #BigData #DataSecurity
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via memory
I guess it could, but why bother? The post Could <CODE>WriteProcessMemory</CODE> be made faster by avoiding the intermediate buffer? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: computational geometry and graphics via geometric
Machine Perception
Final build, final, final, final 2, ship this one. The post Microspeak: Escrow appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Is it really a trick when reading the file is the purpose of the program? The post It rather involved being on the other side of the airtight hatchway: Tricking(?) a program into reading files appeared first on The Old New Thing.
See if it matches the scan code. The post How can I distinguish between the numeric keypad 0 and the top-row 0 in the <CODE>WM_<WBR>CHAR</CODE> message? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via scaling
Making products like Dropbox Dash accessible to individuals and businesses means tackling new challenges around efficiency and resource use.
Check whether it is an extended key. The post How can I distinguish between the numeric keypad 0 and the top-row 0 in the <CODE>WM_<WBR>KEYDOWN</CODE> message? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via latency, capacity
Discover how Uber built and automated a global rate-limiting system that protects millions of RPCs per second, improving reliability, reducing latency, and simplifying operations across our service mesh.
Useful angle: optimization techniques via optimized
When we launched the Microsoft Learn Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server in June 2025, our goal was simple: make it effortless for AI agents to use trusted, up-to-date Microsoft Learn documentation. GitHub Copilot and other agents are increasingly common, and they need to be able to ground responses just like humans with browsers do. Learn […] The post How we built the Microsoft Learn MCP Server appeared first on Engineering@Microsoft.
Useful angle: systems performance via scaling
WHAT IT IS The rise of agentic software development means code is being written, reviewed, and shipped faster than ever before across the entire industry. It also means that testing frameworks need to evolve for this rapidly changing landscape. Faster development demands faster testing that can catch bugs as they land in a codebase, without [...] Read More... The post The Death of Traditional Testing: Agentic Development Broke a 50-Year-Old Field, JiTTesting Can Revive It appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
From Claude Code to Cursor, we're big adopters of AI coding tools at Dropbox. The early results have been promising, but there are still a lot of open questions about how to work with these tools most effectively and where they can have the most impact. To push this conversation forward, we hosted an executive roundtable at our San Francisco studio. Here's how it went.
You can prevent the item from becoming hot-tracked. The post How do I suppress the hover effects when I put a Win32 common controls ListView in single-click mode? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via throughput, capacity
Algorithms & Theory
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization
Asking nicely, and asking a lot of people. The post How did Windows 95 get permission to put the Weezer video <I>Buddy Holly</I> on the CD? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Climate & Sustainability
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, latency
We’re sharing details of the role backend aggregation (BAG) plays in building Meta’s gigawatt-scale AI clusters like Prometheus. BAG allows us to seamlessly connect thousands of GPUs across multiple data centers and regions. Our BAG implementation is connecting two different network fabrics – Disaggregated Schedule Fabric (DSF) and Non-Scheduled Fabric (NSF). Once it’s complete our AI [...] Read More... The post Building Prometheus: How Backend Aggregation Enables Gigawatt-Scale AI Clusters appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
It's your one chance to make amends. The post What should I do if a wait call reports <CODE>WAIT_<WBR>ABANDONED</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
In Part 2, we will peek under the hood at the tooling that makes the Spotify release process possible. The post How We Release the Spotify App: A Look Under the Hood (Part 2) appeared first on Spotify Engineering.
Preventing the resize cursor from appearing. The post How can I prevent the user from changing the widths of ListView columns in version 5 of the common controls?, part 2 appeared first on The Old New Thing.
AWS Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
In this post, we share how Convera used Amazon Verified Permissions to build a fine-grained authorization model for their API platform.
Deny changes to the width. The post How can I prevent the user from changing the widths of ListView columns in version 5 of the common controls? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
Uber processes trillions of Kafka messages per day on a push-based consumer proxy in real time. Read this blog to learn about the thinking behind open source uForwarder before applying it to your use cases.
Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
Education Innovation
We’re sharing a novel approach to enabling cross-device passkey authentication for devices with inaccessible displays (like XR devices). Our approach bypasses the use of QR codes and enables cross-device authentication without the need for an on-device display, while still complying with all trust and proximity requirements. This approach builds on work done by the FIDO [...] Read More... The post No Display? No Problem: Cross-Device Passkey Authentication for XR Devices appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
AWS Useful angle: systems performance via latency
In this post, we explore how the Amazon Key team used Amazon EventBridge to modernize their architecture, transforming a tightly coupled monolithic system into a resilient, event-driven solution. We explore the technical challenges we faced, our implementation approach, and the architectural patterns that helped us achieve improved reliability and scalability. The post covers our solutions for managing event schemas at scale, handling multiple service integrations efficiently, and building an extensible architecture that accommodates future growth.
Useful angle: optimization techniques via optimization
Algorithms & Theory
Betting classical music. The post Super Bowl LX creates an opportunity for symphonic friendly wagering appeared first on The Old New Thing.
You can ask the header to be non-resizing. The post How can I prevent the user from changing the widths of ListView columns? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Generative AI
A little trivia. The post Some small stories about the giant satellite dish antenna that was behind Microsoft Building 11 appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Are you even compiling the correct file? The post Studying compiler error messages closely: Input file paths appeared first on The Old New Thing.
AWS Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via recovery
This post explores the architectural patterns, challenges, and best practices for building cross-partition failover, covering network connectivity, authentication, and governance. By understanding these constraints, you can design resilient cloud-native applications that balance regulatory compliance with operational continuity.
The story of Airbnb’s Head Economist for Policy and Director of Data Science involves geology, co-teaching with a Nobel Prize winner, and CSI. (No, not the hit TV franchise.)
The case of "Bring your own SAFEARRAY." The post Why not store the <CODE>SAFEARRAY</CODE> reference count as a hidden allocation next to the <CODE>SAFEARRAY</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
AWS Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
As organizations accelerate cloud adoption, meeting digital sovereignty requirements has become essential to build trust with customers and regulators worldwide. The challenge isn’t whether to adopt the cloud—it’s how to do so while meeting sovereignty requirements, using a multidisciplinary approach. Even though requirements vary by geography, organizations commonly address them through technical and operational controls […]
AWS Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
In this post, we explore how Artera used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop and scale their AI-powered prostate cancer test, accelerating time to results and enabling personalized treatment recommendations for patients.
Find a way to take ownership. The post How can I retain access to the data in a <CODE>SAFEARRAY</CODE> after my method returns? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Uber prioritizes a reliable data lake, which is distributed across on-premise and cloud environments. This multi-region setup presents challenges for ensuring reliable and timely data access due to limited network bandwidth and the need for seamless data availability, particularly for disaster recovery. Uber uses the Hive Sync service, which uses Apache HadoopⓇ Ditscp (Distributed Copy) for data replication. However, with Uber’s Data Lake exceeding 350 PB, Distcp’s limitations became apparent. This blog explores the optimizations made to Distcp to enhance its performance and meet Uber’s growing data replication and disaster recovery needs across its distributed infrastructure.
Useful angle: computational geometry and graphics via surface
On January 28, 2026, Hugging Face announced that they have upstreamed the Post-Training Toolkit into TRL as a first-party integration, making these diagnostics directly usable in production RL and agent post-training pipelines. This enables closed-loop monitoring and control patterns that are increasingly necessary for long-running and continuously adapted agent systems. Documentation @ https://huggingface.co/docs/trl/main/en/ptt_integration. Overview In […] The post Diagnosing instability in production-scale agent reinforcement learning appeared first on Engineering@Microsoft.
Useful angle: optimization techniques via optimization
Engineering VP Josh Clemm deep-dives into how we think about knowledge graphs, indexes, MCP, and prompt optimization using tools like DSPy.
You have to use the original pointer, but even that won't be good enough. The post Why did I lose the data even though I called <CODE>SafeArrayAddRef</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, scaling
Generative AI
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, scaling
Generative AI
WhatsApp has adopted and rolled out a new layer of security for users – built with Rust – as part of its effort to harden defenses against malware threats. WhatsApp’s experience creating and distributing our media consistency library in Rust to billions of devices and browsers proves Rust is production ready at a global scale. [...] Read More... The post Rust at Scale: An Added Layer of Security for WhatsApp appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: implementation detail via implementation
The concerns when adding a feature to an existing API. The post A digression on the design and implementation of <CODE>SafeArrayAddRef</CODE> and extending APIs in general appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Two ways of preserving the data. The post What’s the difference between <CODE>SafeArrayAccessData</CODE> and <CODE>SafeArrayAddRef</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Algorithms & Theory
You can wrap it in an IDisposable. The post C++ has <CODE>scope_exit</CODE> for running code at scope exit. C# says “We have <CODE>scope_exit</CODE> at home.” appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Generative AI
TL;DR Established in 2022 as a way to help support the great open source ecosystem projects that Spotify... The post Congratulations to the recipients of the 2025 Spotify FOSS Fund appeared first on Spotify Engineering.
It doesn't do much, but it saves typing. The post A simple helper function for attaching a progress handler to a Windows Runtime IAsyncActionWithProgress or IAsyncOperationWithProgress appeared first on The Old New Thing.
You are replacing the window procedure, not the dialog procedure. The post On the proper usage of a custom Win32 dialog class appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Dealing with emergencies. The post Microspeak: On fire, putting out fires appeared first on The Old New Thing.
An old flag from 16-bit Windows. The post What was the secret sauce that allows for a faster restart of Windows 95 if you hold the shift key? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
An old flag from 16-bit Windows. The post What was the secret sauce that allows for a faster restart of Windows 95 if you hold the shift key? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
The tab index number is an authoring concept, not a runtime concept. The post How can I get the tab index number from a dialog box control? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
Check out this deep dive into how Uber runs Apache Hudi™ at extreme scale—handling trillions of records, petabytes of data, and high-concurrency table services across regions.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Health & Bioscience
Useful angle: implementation detail via implementation
The strings are an implementation detail. The post When programs assume that the system will never change, episode 4: Stealing strings appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: computational geometry and graphics via surface
We’ve improved personalized video recommendations on Facebook Reels by moving beyond metrics such as likes and watch time and directly leveraging user feedback. Our new User True Interest Survey (UTIS) model, now helps surface more niche, high-quality content and boosts engagement, retention, and satisfaction. We’re doubling down on personalization, tackling challenges like sparse user data [...] Read More... The post Adapting the Facebook Reels RecSys AI Model Based on User Feedback appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Finding all the clipping parents. The post Clipping the focus item when looking for its on-screen location, part 3 appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: benchmarking data via evaluation
Algorithms & Theory
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Generative AI
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Quantum
Finding the correct clipping parent. The post Clipping the focus item when looking for its on-screen location, part 2 appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via latency
🧠 Overload in stateful databases isn’t one-dimensional. See how we built an intelligent load manager that sheds smarter, adapts to diverse signals, and stays fair under pressure. Even better, this approach led to a ~70% reduction in P99 latency.
AWS Useful angle: systems performance via performance, scaling
This blog post examines how Salesforce, operating one of the world's largest Kubernetes deployments, successfully migrated from Cluster Autoscaler to Karpenter across their fleet of 1,000 plus Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) clusters.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Build a large enough website with a large enough codebase, and you’ll eventually find that CSS presents challenges at scale. It’s no different at Meta, which is why we open-sourced StyleX, a solution for CSS at scale. StyleX combines the ergonomics of CSS-in-JS with the performance of static CSS. It allows atomic styling of components [...] Read More... The post CSS at Scale With StyleX appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: optimization techniques via improved
Climate & Sustainability
Preventing the cursor from pointing to nothing. The post Clipping the focus item when looking for its on-screen location appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Looking at child objects. The post Using Active Accessibility to find out where the focus item is appeared first on The Old New Thing.
It's old and rather simple, but we like simple. The post Using Active Accessibility to find out where the Windows caret is appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Airbnb's Code of conduct for Open Source.
Airbnb's Code of conduct for Open Source.
You'll have go to a larger scope. The post How can I find out where the Windows caret is? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
The technical and practical rationale for a clear separation between these domains. The post Why We Use Separate Tech Stacks for Personalization and Experimentation appeared first on Spotify Engineering.
Useful angle: production lessons via operational
Managing a global corporate network at Uber’s scale can feel a bit like running an ultra-marathon. There are long stretches of smooth sailing, but you’re always preparing for the unexpected mountain pass or sudden change in weather. For years, our engineering teams have navigated this terrain with a traditional, monolithic monitoring system. We knew we needed to switch to a modern pair of carbon-fiber running shoes. This meant a complete overhaul: a journey to replace our legacy system with a cloud-native observability platform built for speed, flexibility, and endurance on an open-source stack.
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via memory
Could do with a little less rotating. The post Swapping two blocks of memory that reside inside a larger block, in constant memory, refinement appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via memory
Applying the rotation trick to our new problem. The post How can you swap two non-adjacent blocks of memory using only forward iterators? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via memory
A different algorithm, employing a different kind of cleverness. The post How can you swap two adjacent blocks of memory using only forward iterators? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via memory
A variation on the constant-memory rotation. The post Swapping two blocks of memory that reside inside a larger block, in constant memory appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Another year gets relegated to history. The post 2025 year-end link clearance appeared first on The Old New Thing.
The recurring problem of synchronous resumption. The post Understanding and mitigating a stack overflow in our task sequencer appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: computational geometry and graphics via rendering
Choosing the color-key and other brief discussions. The post Additional notes on color-keyed overlays as a way of doing smooth video rendering appeared first on The Old New Thing.
You could blow me over. The post The Gävle Goat (Gävlebocken) succumbs in 2025 to a new menace appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via memory
You can register for a memory notification. The post How can I detect that the system is running low on memory? Or that my job is running low on memory? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via memory
You have to find new ways of going faster. The post Why are we worried about memory access semantics? Full barriers should be enough for anybody appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Checking those validity dates. The post Reading the fine print, episode 4: Holiday promotions appeared first on The Old New Thing.
The struggle for null termination. The post Why is the last letter of my string not making it to the clipboard? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Understanding the difference between keys and characters for accelerators. The post Why does my <KBD>Ctrl</KBD>+<KBD>M</KBD> accelerator key activate when I press the <KBD>Enter</KBD> key? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
So transfer them to his office, or so it seems. The post When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates appeared first on The Old New Thing.
The destructor serves as the "finally". The post All the other cool languages have <CODE>try</CODE>…<CODE>finally</CODE>. C++ says “We have <CODE>try</CODE>…<CODE>finally</CODE> at home.” appeared first on The Old New Thing.
The 2025 Typed Python Survey, conducted by contributors from JetBrains, Meta, and the broader Python typing community, offers a comprehensive look at the current state of Python’s type system and developer tooling. With 1,241 responses (a 15% increase from last year), the survey captures the evolving sentiment, challenges, and opportunities around Python typing in the [...] Read More... The post Python Typing Survey 2025: Code Quality and Flexibility As Top Reasons for Typing Adoption appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via incident
Incident investigation can be a daunting task in today’s digital landscape, where large-scale systems comprise numerous interconnected components and dependencies DrP is a root cause analysis (RCA) platform, designed by Meta, to programmatically automate the investigation process, significantly reducing the mean time to resolve (MTTR) for incidents and alleviating on-call toil Today, DrP is used [...] Read More... The post DrP: Meta’s Root Cause Analysis Platform at Scale appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
It's a placeholder because the shortcut is to an MSI application. The post A shortcut gives me a weird path for a program shortcut that doesn’t point to the executable, so what is it? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via reliability, resilience
Year in Review
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
The feature store is a critical part of how we rank and retrieve the right context across your work.
Stick to Unicode and you'll be fine. The post Concluding thoughts on our deep dive into Windows clipboard text conversion appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Uber powers billion-scale vector search with OpenSearch. Discover the innovative optimizations we designed to boost search efficiency, scalability, and reliability for massive datasets.
Working out the implications. The post Deducing the consequences of Windows clipboard text formats on UTF-8 appeared first on The Old New Thing.
We’re going behind the scenes of the Meta Ray-Ban Display, Meta’s most advanced AI glasses yet. In a previous episode we met the team behind the Meta Neural Band, the EMG wristband packaged with the Ray-Ban Display. Now we’re delving into the glasses themselves. Kenan and Emanuel, from Meta’s Wearables org, join Pascal Hartig on [...] Read More... The post How We Built Meta Ray-Ban Display: From Zero to Polish appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Something is forcing it down an alternate path. The post Why is the Windows clipboard taking the scenic route when converting from <CODE>CF_<WBR>TEXT</CODE> to <CODE>CF_<WBR>OEMTEXT</CODE>? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Discover how Uber uses OpenSearch™’s streaming ingestion architecture for powerful search, and learn about our contributions to a pull-based ingestion framework in the OpenSearch project.
Useful angle: systems performance via scaling
Algorithms & Theory
Meta’s secure-by-default frameworks wrap potentially unsafe OS and third-party functions, making security the default while preserving developer speed and usability. These frameworks are designed to closely mirror existing APIs, rely on public and stable interfaces, and maximize developer adoption by minimizing friction and complexity. Generative AI and automation accelerate the adoption of secure frameworks at [...] Read More... The post How AI Is Transforming the Adoption of Secure-by-Default Mobile Frameworks appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Apparently, not a bowl of crickets. The post Misunderstanding what the Cricket Celebration Bowl is appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: implementation detail via algorithm
When the journey is not half of the fun. The post The Windows clipboard automatic text conversion algorithm is path-dependent appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
By co-designing the new OCI™ AmpereOne-M® A4 instances, Uber has moved beyond adapting to existing hardware and is now shaping the next generation of compute, optimized for its real-world workloads.
Who goes first? The post Resolving an ambiguity in the Windows clipboard automated text conversion table appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Who goes first? The post Resolving an ambiguity in the Windows clipboard automated text conversion table appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via capacity
Conferences & Events
If they don't match, then the 8-bit strings are basically broken already. The post Studying the various locale mismatch scenarios in Windows clipboard text format synthesis appeared first on The Old New Thing.
AWS Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via recovery
In this post, we walk through building a generative AI–powered troubleshooting assistant for Kubernetes. The goal is to give engineers a faster, self-service way to diagnose and resolve cluster issues, cut down Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), and reduce the cycles experts spend finding the root cause of issues in complex distributed systems.
If they don't match, then the 8-bit strings are basically broken already. The post Studying the various locale mismatch scenarios in Windows clipboard text format synthesis appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, latency
Learn how Uber moved from batch to streaming ingestion with IngestionNext, reducing data latency and unlocking real-time analytics across its petabyte-scale data lake.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Generative AI
AWS Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
BASF Agricultural Solutions combines innovative products and digital tools with practical farmer knowledge. This post explores how Amazon Managed Blockchain can drive a positive change in the agricultural industry by tokenizing food and cotton value chains for traceability, climate action, and circularity.
Getting it from a place that might have been obvious in the past, but maybe not today. The post How does Windows synthesize the <CODE>CF_<WBR>LOCALE</CODE> clipboard format? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
The system we built to ensure our AI agents produce predictable, trustworthy code. The post Background Coding Agents: Predictable Results Through Strong Feedback Loops (Honk, Part 3) appeared first on Spotify Engineering.
Let's ask the locale. The post How does Windows synthesize <CODE>CF_<WBR>UNICODETEXT</CODE> from <CODE>CF_<WBR>TEXT</CODE> and vice versa? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via latency
Discover how Uber used Apache Pinot™ to build a real-time index on its massive inventory of billions of items to power search use cases, internal tools, and operational workflows.
AWS Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
Have you ever wondered what it is really like to be a woman in tech at one of the world's leading cloud companies? Or maybe you are curious about how diverse perspectives drive innovation beyond the buzzwords? Today, we are providing an insider's perspective on the role of a solutions architect (SA) at Amazon Web Services (AWS). However, this is not a typical corporate success story. We are three women who have navigated challenges, celebrated wins, and found our unique paths in the world of cloud architecture, and we want to share our real stories with you.
Starting with the easy case, or at least it looks easy. The post How does Windows synthesize <CODE>CF_<WBR>OEMTEXT</CODE> from <CODE>CF_<WBR>TEXT</CODE> and vice versa? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
You'll have to trick yourself before anybody notices, which may not be possible. The post How can my process read its own standard output? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via scaling
Generative AI
You can't. You'll have to do it before the process starts. The post How can I read the standard output of an already-running process? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via reliability
Dive into the implementation, automation and failover logic that made MySQL® Group Replication viable at Uber scale.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, benchmark
Machine Intelligence
Request the directory security attributes that correspond to your proposed operation. The post How do I check whether the user has permission to create files in a directory? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
Discover how treating AI agents as collaborators, not automation, transforms engineering workflows and accelerates complex projects The post The Interaction Changes Everything: Treating AI Agents as Collaborators, Not Automation appeared first on Engineering@Microsoft.
The large obstacles. The post Microspeak: Big rocks appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via reliability, availability
At Uber, high availability is non-negotiable. Learn how we’ve adopted MySQL® Group Replication in single-primary mode to achieve a less than 10 second failover time and massively improve reliability and write availability during failures.
Useful angle: implementation detail via pipeline
Slack’s Security Engineering team is responsible for protecting Slack’s core infrastructure and services. Our security event ingestion pipeline handles billions of events per day from a diverse array of data sources. Reviewing alerts produced by our security detection system is our primary responsibility during on-call shifts. We’re going to show you how we’re using AI…
Remembering some old APIs. The post How do I get my edit control text to be autoselected when I choose it to be the default focus in my dialog? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
You can ask for its handle and mark it read-only. The post How can I have a Win32 drop-down combo box with a read-only edit control? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
If you want to host UI, use a real window (possibly hidden). The post Message-only windows are for messaging, not as a convenient victim for hosting UI appeared first on The Old New Thing.
The Dropbox Intern Program is thoughtfully designed to cultivate growth, spark innovation, and build lasting connections.
AWS Useful angle: systems performance via performance
In this post, we demonstrate how to utilize AWS Network Firewall to secure an Amazon EVS environment, using a centralized inspection architecture across an EVS cluster, VPCs, on-premises data centers and the internet. We walk through the implementation steps to deploy this architecture using AWS Network Firewall and AWS Transit Gateway.
The translation team sets the deadline. The post At what point in the Windows development cycle is it too late to change the text of a translatable string? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Challenge accepted. The post The apocryphal origins of the Hot Dog Stand color scheme appeared first on The Old New Thing.
You've far exceeded the design goals and have even exceeded the expressive ability of a float. The post Why does XAML break down when I have an element that is half a billion pixels tall? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
We explore context engineering for background coding agents and what makes a good migration prompt. The post Background Coding Agents: Context Engineering (Honk, Part 2) appeared first on Spotify Engineering.
How does Uber Eats power search across billions of stores, dishes, and grocery items? We built a next-gen semantic search platform that understands meaning, not just keywords—handling typos, synonyms, and multiple languages.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
We’re introducing Zoomer, Meta’s comprehensive, automated debugging and optimization platform for AI. Zoomer works across all of our training and inference workloads at Meta and provides deep performance insights that enable energy savings, workflow acceleration, and efficiency gains in our AI infrastructure. Zoomer has delivered training time reductions, and significant QPS improvements, making it the [...] Read More... The post Zoomer: Powering AI Performance at Meta’s Scale Through Intelligent Debugging and Optimization appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, latency
Algorithms & Theory
I don't see it. The post Maybe somebody can explain to me how weak references solve the ODR problem appeared first on The Old New Thing.
We’re excited to share another advancement in the security of your conversations on Messenger: the launch of key transparency verification for end-to-end encrypted chats. This new feature enables an additional level of assurance that only you — and the people you’re communicating with — can see or listen to what is sent, and that no [...] Read More... The post Key Transparency Comes to Messenger appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
The access violation exceptions will continue until commit improves. The post In the commit-on-demand pattern, what happens if an access violation straddles multiple pages? appeared first on The Old New Thing.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Dig into Ceilometer, Uber’s adaptive benchmarking framework for ensuring system performance and reliability at scale. Learn how it automates performance testing while providing production-like insights and continuous validation.
AWS Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
In this post, we'll explore a reference architecture that helps enterprises govern their Amazon Bedrock implementations using Amazon API Gateway. This pattern enables key capabilities like authorization controls, usage quotas, and real-time response streaming. We'll examine the architecture, provide deployment steps, and discuss potential enhancements to help you implement AI governance at scale.
AWS Useful angle: systems performance via performance
At re:Invent 2025, we introduce one new lens and two significant updates to the AWS Well-Architected Lenses specifically focused on AI workloads: the Responsible AI Lens, the Machine Learning (ML) Lens, and the Generative AI Lens. Together, these lenses provide comprehensive guidance for organizations at different stages of their AI journey, whether you're just starting to experiment with machine learning or already deploying complex AI applications at scale.
AWS Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
We are delighted to announce an update to the AWS Well-Architected Generative AI Lens. This update features several new sections of the Well-Architected Generative AI Lens, including new best practices, advanced scenario guidance, and improved preambles on responsible AI, data architecture, and agentic workflows.
AWS Useful angle: systems performance via performance
We are excited to announce the updated AWS Well-Architected Machine Learning Lens, now enhanced with the latest capabilities and best practices for building machine learning (ML) workloads on AWS.
Background A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) is a document that outlines how well a product aligns with accessibility (a11y) standards. Its primary purpose is to inform customers about a product’s a11y features, enabling them to make informed decisions before purchasing software. At Slack, we conducted a VPAT by a third party a11y vendor in…
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
Algorithms & Theory
Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
We’ve released Ax 1.0, an open-source platform that uses machine learning to automatically guide complex, resource-intensive experimentation. Ax is used at scale across Meta to improve AI models, tune production infrastructure, and accelerate advances in ML and even hardware design. Our accompanying paper, “Ax: A Platform for Adaptive Experimentation” explains Ax’s architecture, methodology, and how it [...] Read More... The post Efficient Optimization With Ax, an Open Platform for Adaptive Experimentation appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
AWS Useful angle: systems performance via scaling
In this post, we show you how to build a priority-based message processing system using Amazon MQ for priority queuing, Amazon DynamoDB for data persistence, and AWS App Runner for serverless compute. We demonstrate how to implement application-level delays that high-priority messages can bypass, create real-time UIs with WebSocket connections, and configure dual-layer retry mechanisms for maximum reliability.
Useful angle: benchmarking data via experiment
Generative AI
How does Uber forecast earnings for drivers? Our latest deep dive explores the probabilistic prediction models behind earnings insights in the Driver app, from dynamic heatmaps to trends and alerts.
Connecting Africa and the World We’re excited to share the completion of the core 2Africa infrastructure, the world’s longest open access subsea cable system. 2Africa is a landmark subsea cable system that sets a new standard for global connectivity. This project is the result of years of collaboration, innovation, and a shared vision to connect [...] Read More... The post Announcing the Completion of the Core 2Africa System: Building the Future of Connectivity Together appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Building effective, agentic AI isn’t just about adding more; it’s about helping the model focus on what matters most.
We’re sharing how we’ve enabled Dolby Vision and ambient viewing environment (amve) on the Instagram iOS app to enhance the video viewing experience. HDR videos created on iPhones contain unique Dolby Vision and amve metadata that we needed to support end-to-end Instagram for iOS is now the first Meta app to support Dolby Vision video, [...] Read More... The post Enhancing HDR on Instagram for iOS With Dolby Vision appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Most people have heard of open-source software. But have you heard about open hardware? And did you know open source can have a positive impact on the environment? On this episode of the Meta Tech Podcast, Pascal Hartig sits down with Dharmesh and Lisa to talk about all things open hardware, and Meta’s biggest announcements [...] Read More... The post Open Source Is Good for the Environment appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
AWS Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
Are you ready to maximize your Well-Architected and Cloud Optimization learning and networking time at re:Invent 2025? We have put together this comprehensive guide to help you plan your schedule and make the most of the Well-Architected and cloud optimization sessions available this year. These sessions will deliver the practical guidance your teams need to lead strategic cloud initiatives, design next-generation architectures, optimize costs, or secure AI-powered systems.
Climate & Sustainability
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
Learn how Uber powers real-time, petabyte-scale I/O observability for its data lake powering 2 million compute jobs.
Shuffle has always been one of Spotify’s most-used features, and also one of the most misunderstood. For... The post Shuffle: Making Random Feel More Human appeared first on Spotify Engineering.
Useful angle: optimization techniques via optimization
Algorithms & Theory
Useful angle: systems performance via throughput, capacity
Algorithms & Theory
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
StyleX is Meta’s styling system for large-scale applications. It combines the ergonomics of CSS-in-JS with the performance of static CSS, generating collision-free atomic CSS while allowing for expressive, type-safe style authoring. StyleX was open sourced at the end of 2023 and has since become the standard styling system across Meta products like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, [...] Read More... The post StyleX: A Styling Library for CSS at Scale appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
We’re sharing details about Meta’s Generative Ads Recommendation Model (GEM), a new foundation model that delivers increased ad performance and advertiser ROI by enhancing other ads recommendation models’ ability to serve relevant ads. GEM’s novel architecture allows it to scale with an increasing number of parameters while consistently generating more precise predictions efficiently. GEM propagates [...] Read More... The post Meta’s Generative Ads Model (GEM): The Central Brain Accelerating Ads Recommendation AI Innovation appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: systems performance via capacity
Algorithms & Theory
Thousands of merged AI-generated pull requests and the future of large-scale software maintenance. The post 1,500+ PRs Later: Spotify’s Journey with Our Background Coding Agent (Part 1) appeared first on Spotify Engineering.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, benchmark
Data Mining & Modeling
Useful angle: implementation detail via pipeline
We manage the build pipeline that delivers Quip and Slack Canvas’s backend. A year ago, we were chasing exciting ideas to help engineers ship better code, faster. But we had one huge problem: builds took 60 minutes. With a build that slow, the whole pipeline gets less agile, and feedback doesn’t come to engineers until…
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time, reliability
By building zone failure resilience into Apache Pinot™, Uber strengthened reliability for real-time analytics, sped up release cycles, and created a foundation for future failure recovery. Now queries and ingestion stay strong, even when zones go dark.
Useful angle: systems performance via benchmark
Climate & Sustainability
How Airbnb combines GraphQL infra, product context, and LLMs to generate and maintain convincing, type-safe mock data using a new directive.
How Airbnb combines GraphQL infra, product context, and LLMs to generate and maintain convincing, type-safe mock data using a new directive.
Useful angle: systems performance via scaling
At Meta, we use invisible watermarking for a variety of content provenance use cases on our platforms. Invisible watermarking serves a number of use cases, including detecting AI-generated videos, verifying who posted a video first, and identifying the source and tools used to create a video. We’re sharing how we overcame the challenges of scaling [...] Read More... The post Video Invisible Watermarking at Scale appeared first on Engineering at Meta.
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via bandwidth
General Science
Climate & Sustainability
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via reliability
How do you safely ship thousands of ML models without slowing teams down? At Uber, we’ve built guardrails that catch issues early, prevent rollbacks, and raise the bar on reliability. Discover how safety became a measurable standard across our ML ecosystem.
Generative AI
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
Generative AI
Generative AI
Last year, I wrote a blog post titled Advancing Our Chef Infrastructure, where we explored the evolution of our Chef infrastructure over the years. We talked about the shift from a single Chef stack to a multi-stack model, and the challenges that came with it – from updating how we handle cookbook uploads to navigating…
Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
Dropbox welcomes Mobius Labs to advance Dash’s multimodal AI, integrating Aana’s efficient architecture to enhance photo and video understanding at Dropbox scale.
Useful angle: implementation detail via debugging
Uber’s ML platform Michelangelo now supports Integrated Gradients, enabling scalable, interpretable deep model explainability across TensorFlow™ and PyTorch™. Learn how this powers trust, debugging, and decision-making throughout the ML life cycle.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Climate & Sustainability
AWS Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
This post was co-written with Frederic Haase and Julian Blau with BASF Digital Farming GmbH. At xarvio – BASF Digital Farming, our mission is to empower farmers around the world with cutting-edge digital agronomic decision-making tools. Central to this mission is our crop optimization platform, xarvio FIELD MANAGER, which delivers actionable insights through a range […]
Useful angle: systems performance via scaling
Quantum
Learn how Half-Quadratic Quantization (HQQ) makes it easy to compress large AI models without sacrificing accuracy—no calibration data required.
Harnessing the power of LLMs, Uber AI Solutions developed a system to reduce data labeling audits by 80%. Learn how the system detects labeling errors, boosting data quality.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
Generative AI
General Science
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
Useful angle: systems performance via capacity
Algorithms & Theory
General Science
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
The next chapter of real-time analytics at Uber. Uncover how Uber restructured its Apache Pinot™ query architecture to unlock a ton of new features, redefining the capabilities of a mature OLAP platform.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Generative AI
Useful angle: computational geometry and graphics via rendering
Generative AI
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via reliability
It’s mid 2023 and we’ve identified some opportunities to improve our reliability. Fast forward to January 2025. Customer impact hours are reduced from the peak by 90% and continuing to trend downward. We’re a year and half into the Deploy Safety Program at Slack, improving the way we deploy, uplifting our safety culture and continuing…
Machine Intelligence
Cadence Workflow is now part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation®. This milestone strengthens our commitment to open source and ensures continued investment in the project’s future.
Generative AI
Building Dropbox Dash taught us that in the foundation-model era, AI evaluations matter just as much as model training.
Follow Uber’s journey of standardizing mobile analytics. We unified event instrumentation, collected consistent metadata, and provided sampled event coverage to reduce dev effort and deliver quality, cross-platform insights.
AWS Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
The global real-time payments market is experiencing significant growth. According to Fortune Business Insights, the market was valued at USD 24.91 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to USD 284.49 billion by 2032, with a CAGR of 35.4%. Similarly, Grand View Research reports that the global mobile payment market, valued at USD 88.50 […]
Useful angle: gpu and graphics pipeline via gpu
Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Algorithms & Theory
AWS Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via resilience
Generative AI agents in production environments demand resilience strategies that go beyond traditional software patterns. AI agents make autonomous decisions, consume substantial computational resources, and interact with external systems in unpredictable ways. These characteristics create failure modes that conventional resilience approaches might not address. This post presents a framework for AI agent resilience risk analysis […]
Useful angle: systems performance via benchmark
Generative AI
Discover how Uber migrated 2M daily Apache Spark™ jobs to Spark 3.3 with automation and safe shadow testing, achieving over $4M in savings.
Generative AI
Useful angle: systems performance via benchmark
Generative AI
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Generative AI
TL;DR Spotify’s experimentation platform, Confidence, scaled product decision-making across hundreds of... The post Beyond Winning: Spotify’s Experiments with Learning Framework appeared first on Spotify Engineering.
Useful angle: systems performance via scaling
AWS Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
In this post, we explore how Metagenomi built a scalable database and search solution for over 1 billion protein vectors using LanceDB and Amazon S3. The solution enables rapid enzyme discovery by transforming proteins into vector embeddings and implementing a serverless architecture that combines AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, and Amazon S3 for efficient nearest neighbor searches.
Useful angle: optimization techniques via optimization
Machine Intelligence
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via incident
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time, availability
Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization
Uber’s Policy Simulator tool enhances the safety and predictability of IAM policy changes by allowing policy authors to preview the impact of their modifications prior to deployment, ensuring deterministic outcomes after policy change deployment.
Useful angle: computational geometry and graphics via mesh
A more powerful engine and a simpler API for our data-oriented mesh
By: Jack Dai, Howard Ho, Loc Dinh, Stepan Goncharov, Ted Tenedorio, and Thomas Bao At Airbnb, we recently completed migrating our largest repo, the JVM monorepo, to Bazel. This repo contains tens of millions of lines of Java, Kotlin, and Scala code that power the vast array of backend services and data pipelines behind airbnb.com. Migration in numbers […]
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via reliability
Algorithms & Theory
Useful angle: benchmarking data via experiment
Education Innovation
Useful angle: systems performance via scaling
Generative AI
Useful angle: systems performance via latency, throughput
Generative AI
Useful angle: systems performance via scaling, benchmark
Health & Bioscience
Starlark meets Cadence. We’re excited to announce the open-source release of Starlark Worker, a powerful integration between Cadence workflow orchestration and the Starlark scripting language to simplify workflow execution.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
General Science
Go behind the scenes of how Uber powers batch data replication at scale using HiveSync to keep its data lake consistent, reliable, and performant.
As cyberattacks evolve to unprecedented levels of sophistication and speed, the time gap between breach detection and response has never been more critical. Traditional security approaches often operate reactively, identifying compromises only after damage has occurred. This delay grants attackers a tactical advantage, forcing security teams to focus on damage assessment and remediation rather than…
Discover how Uber controls the blast radius of large-scale commits with cross-cutting service deployment orchestration. As Uber embraces fully automated continuous deployment, strong safety practices are more critical than ever.
Useful angle: benchmarking data via evaluation
Education Innovation
Useful angle: gpu and graphics pipeline via gpu
How our engineers designed a custom liquid cooling system for high-powered GPU servers to tackle the rising thermal demands of AI workloads.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via reliability
Generative AI
AWS Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
In this post, we explore an efficient approach to managing encryption keys in a multi-tenant SaaS environment through centralization, addressing challenges like key proliferation, rising costs, and operational complexity across multiple AWS accounts and services. We demonstrate how implementing a centralized key management strategy using a single AWS KMS key per tenant can maintain security and compliance while reducing operational overhead as organizations scale.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
Generative AI
Useful angle: systems performance via throughput, capacity
Algorithms & Theory
AWS Useful angle: systems performance via capacity
In this post, we explore how CommSec, Australia's leading online broker, transitioned from a multicloud environment to AWS as their sole cloud provider while implementing Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC) zonal shift to maintain high availability and operational resilience. The consolidation resulted in significant benefits including 25% base capacity reduction, two times faster deployments, and improved failover capabilities through ARC zonal shift, enabling CommSec to continue serving millions of customers while meeting strict regulatory requirements.
How Dropbox approached AI adoption not just as a tool for automation, but as a catalyst for rethinking the entire software development lifecycle.
Generative AI
AWS Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
This two-part series shows how Karrot developed a new feature platform, which consists of three main components: feature serving, a stream ingestion pipeline, and a batch ingestion pipeline. This post starts by presenting our motivation, our requirements, and the solution architecture, focusing on feature serving.
AWS Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
This two-part series shows how Karrot developed a new feature platform, which consists of three main components: feature serving, a stream ingestion pipeline, and a batch ingestion pipeline. This post covers the process of collecting features in real-time and batch ingestion into an online store, and the technical approaches for stable operation.
AWS Useful angle: systems performance via performance
In this post, we demonstrate how to deploy the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B model using AWS DLCs for vLLMs on Amazon EKS, showcasing how these purpose-built containers simplify deployment of this powerful open source inference engine. This solution can help you solve the complex infrastructure challenges of deploying LLMs while maintaining performance and cost-efficiency.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Generative AI
How Airbnb upgrades tens of thousands of pods on dozens of Kubernetes clusters to new Istio versions
How Airbnb upgrades tens of thousands of pods on dozens of Kubernetes clusters to new Istio versions
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via availability
How to achieve high availability with distributed database on Kubernetes.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
New techniques we’re using at Airbnb to improve and maintain performance of SwiftUI features at scale
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
New techniques we’re using at Airbnb to improve and maintain performance of SwiftUI features at scale
Comprehensive Load Testing with Load Generator, Dependency Mocker, Traffic Collector, and More
Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Generative AI
Useful angle: implementation detail via pipeline
General Science
AWS Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
As cloud spending continues to surge, organizations must focus on strategic cloud optimization to maximize business value. This blog post explores key insights from MIT Technology Review's publication on cloud optimization, highlighting the importance of viewing optimization as a continuous process that encompasses all six AWS Well-Architected pillars.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, capacity
Machine Intelligence
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Generative AI
Generative AI
AWS Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
In this post, you’ll learn how Zapier has built their serverless architecture focusing on three key aspects: using Lambda functions to build isolated Zaps, operating over a hundred thousand Lambda functions through Zapier's control plane infrastructure, and enhancing security posture while reducing maintenance efforts by introducing automated function upgrades and cleanup workflows into their platform architecture.
AWS Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via resilience, recovery
In this post, we discuss HashiCorp’s journey from manual, stress-inducing failover procedures to a streamlined, confident approach that fundamentally changed how they deliver on their enterprise-grade resilience promises.
Useful angle: implementation detail via implementation, pipeline
Generative AI
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Generative AI
AWS Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
In this post, we show you how to implement comprehensive monitoring for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) workloads using AWS managed services. This solution demonstrates building an EKS platform that combines flexible compute options with enterprise-grade observability using AWS native services and OpenTelemetry.
Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
Hardware & Architecture
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Data Mining & Modeling
Useful angle: benchmarking data via experiment
Microsoft’s AI-powered code review assistant has transformed pull request workflows by automating routine checks, suggesting improvements, and enabling conversational Q&A, leading to faster PR completion, improved code quality, and enhanced developer onboarding. Its seamless integration and customizability have driven widespread adoption within Microsoft The post Enhancing Code Quality at Scale with AI-Powered Code Reviews appeared first on Engineering@Microsoft.
We developed features to help teams limit their security risks and respond more effectively to potential threats or breaches.
Useful angle: systems performance via benchmark
Algorithms & Theory
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, benchmark
Generative AI
Useful angle: architecture depth via architecture
This generation represents our most efficient, capable, and scalable architecture yet—and it’ll help us as we continue to build AI products like Dropbox Dash.
Useful angle: implementation detail via implementation, algorithm
Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via availability
Algorithms & Theory
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, benchmark
Data Mining & Modeling
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Algorithms & Theory
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via resilience
Climate & Sustainability
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via real time
Generative AI
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, scaling
Quantum
Useful angle: architecture depth via constraints
Algorithms & Theory
Climate & Sustainability
A look into how Airbnb uses speech recognition, intent detection, and language models to understand users and assist agents more effectively.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Generative AI
Our multimedia retrieval features allow users to find images, video, and audio just as easily as they find documents.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Algorithms & Theory
Useful angle: systems performance via performance, benchmark
Climate & Sustainability
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Data Mining & Modeling
Algorithms & Theory
Generative AI
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via incident
On April 16, Spotify experienced an outage that affected users worldwide. Here is what happened and what we... The post Incident Report: Spotify Outage on April 16, 2025 appeared first on Spotify Engineering.
General Science
Generative AI
Generative AI
Generative AI
Generative AI
General Science
Algorithms & Theory
Quantum
Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization
Useful angle: systems performance via scaling
Health & Bioscience
Useful angle: implementation detail via pipeline
In the world of DevOps and Developer Experience (DevXP), speed and efficiency can make a big difference on an engineer’s day-to-day tasks. Today, we’ll dive into how Slack’s DevXP team took some existing tools and used them to optimize an end-to-end (E2E) testing pipeline. This lowered build times and reduced redundant processes, saving both time…
Climate & Sustainability
General Science
Useful angle: systems performance via benchmark
Generative AI
How Airbnb migrated nearly 3.5K Enzyme test files to React Testing Library in just 6 weeks using automation and LLMs
Our journey in applying embedding-based retrieval techniques to build an accurate and scalable candidate retrieval system for Airbnb Homes search
Algorithms & Theory
General Science
Algorithms & Theory
Health & Bioscience
Machine Intelligence
Useful angle: computational geometry and graphics via surface
Many don’t know that “Slack” is in fact a backronym—it stands for “Searchable Log of all Communication and Knowledge”. And these days, it’s not just a searchable log: with Slack AI, Slack is now an intelligent log, leveraging the latest in generative AI to securely surface powerful, time-saving insights. We built Slack AI from the…
Generative AI
Mobile Systems
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
For developers, the emphasis on building intelligence into apps has never been clearer. Over the next three years, 92% of companies plan on investing in AI to achieve business outcomes like enhancing productivity and delivering better customer service. At Microsoft, developers and engineers are pushing the boundaries of AI at scale, crafting applications that harness […] The post How Microsoft Engineers Build AI: Learn about scalable RAG-enabled AI Apps appeared first on Engineering@Microsoft.
Useful angle: computational geometry and graphics via geometry
Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization
Generative AI
Algorithms & Theory
Generative AI
Algorithms & Theory
Generative AI
Useful angle: memory and parallelism via parallel
Distributed Systems & Parallel Computing
Sound & Accoustics
At Slack, customer love is our first priority and accessibility is a core tenet of customer trust. We have our own Slack Accessibility Standards that product teams follow to guarantee their features are compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Our dedicated accessibility team supports developers in following these guidelines throughout the development process. We…
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via reliability
Microsoft One Engineering System (1ES) team shares a sample for building Ready-To-Code Dev Box environments pre-configured with the necessary tools, repositories, and settings, ensuring consistency and reliability across teams. The post Dev Box Ready-To-Code Dev Box images template appeared first on Engineering@Microsoft.
In April 2021, GitHub announced changes to their security token format that significantly enhanced security. The improvement leveraged two straightforward techniques: a fixed signature in the generated token and a checksum – both of which are highly effective in eliminating false positives (noise) and false negatives (missed findings). Microsoft also implements these techniques widely in […] The post Common annotated security keys appeared first on Engineering@Microsoft.
Useful angle: real-time and reliable systems via reliability
Learn about how Microsoft's 1ES organization developed an internal service called "1ES Hosted Pools" to manage Microsoft's diverse Engineering system infrastructure and how it helped make significant improvements to productivity, cost savings, and security. This solution will soon be available as a third-party offering named "Managed DevOps Pools". The post Managed DevOps Pools – The Origin Story appeared first on Engineering@Microsoft.
Celebrate the Global Accessibility Awareness Day GAAD by taking actionable and easy steps to build accessibility into your development life-cycle! Learn how tools like Accessibility Insights & Visual Studio can help find accessibility issues in development. The post Developing with Accessibility in Mind at Microsoft appeared first on Engineering@Microsoft.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
This is a follow-up to our previous coverage of Dev Drive and copy-on-write (CoW) linking. See our previous articles from May 24, 2023, October 13, 2023, and November 2, 2023. Dev Drive was released in Windows 11 in October, 2023, and will be part of Windows Server 2025 this fall. Server 2025 and Windows 11 […] The post Copy-on-Write performance and debugging appeared first on Engineering@Microsoft.
My name is Bob Tabor and I’m a member of Microsoft’s Skilling organization. We create documentation and training content about Azure, developer tooling and languages, AI, Windows and much more hosted at Microsoft Learn. Our organization also develops and maintains the content publishing platform, the content hosting platform, the interactivity, and popular sites like Microsoft […] The post How we built “Ask Learn”, the RAG-based knowledge service appeared first on Engineering@Microsoft.
Useful angle: systems performance via performance
Microsoft has employed Azure Load Testing to enhance the reliability of Microsoft Fabric and Azure Synapse, ensuring they can handle high loads. Azure Synapse integrates various data analytics technologies, while Microsoft Fabric offers a full enterprise analytics solution. Through rigorous daily and weekly load testing, involving complex scenarios and extensive data sizes, Microsoft aims to identify and rectify potential issues, ensuring optimal performance. This testing, integrated within their development pipelines, supports continuous improvement, leverages Azure's scalability, and utilizes Power BI for detailed reporting, ultimately enhancing service reliability and user experience. The post Enhancing reliability in Microsoft Fabric and Azure Synapse through load testing appeared first on Engineering@Microsoft.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Designed for a wide variety of manufacturing tasks, including large components, complex geometries, and... The post GROB Systems Debuts Versatile 5-Axis Portal Milling Machining Center appeared first on Practical Machinist.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Walter offers the new TC180 Supreme blind-hole tap and the TC280 Supreme through-hole tap for... The post Walter Introduces the TC180 Supreme Blind-Hole Tap and the TC280 Supreme Through-Hole Tap appeared first on Practical Machinist.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
KYOCERA announces the launch of the TW Series Thread Whirling Tools, a new... The post KYOCERA Launches TW Series Thread Whirling Tools for High Production Precision Machining appeared first on Practical Machinist.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Designed for demanding machining, the high-pressure coolant through the JETI M-Clamp system delivers longer tool life, superior chip control, and... The post Jetstream Tooling® M-Clamp Toolholders for Large Inserts appeared first on Practical Machinist.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
We're back on the Seal Cap project and this time we're tackling the grooving operations — the cuts that make this part actually... The post Seal Cap Part 4: Why I Avoided the Groove Cycle for These Oil Grooves appeared first on Practical Machinist.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Pat, Cameron, and Brad catch up on what’s been going on in their shops—from current projects and production challenges to the reality of keeping work on track... The post How Much Work Do You Need Before Going Full-Time? appeared first on Practical Machinist.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
The sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) surfactant is widely used in various applications, such as household products (e.g., shampoos, toothpaste, detergents, and cleaning products) and food manufacturing (e.g., emulsifiers). To investigate its properties via computer simulation, various models have been developed, including coarse-grained (CG) models that are suitable for capturing a surfactant's self-assembly and fundamental properties for aqueous systems with a surfactant, such as surface tension. Here, we present a CG model for SDS/water systems for many-body dissipative particle dynamics (MDPD),
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Process capability indices such as $C_{pk}$ are widely used for manufacturing decisions, yet are typically applied via deterministic thresholding of finite-sample estimates, ignoring uncertainty and leading to unstable outcomes near the capability boundary. This paper reformulates capability approval as a decision-risk calibration problem, quantifying the probability of misclassification under finite-sample variability. We propose an uncertainty-aware hybrid framework that combines a statistically grounded baseline with a data-driven residual learner, where the baseline provides an interpretab
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
The re-solidification of amorphous solids after mechanically driven yielding from a nonequilibrium state is a fundamental soft matter science problem of broad relevance in materials science, with implications for material strength, processing, and printing-based additive manufacturing. We present a microscopic statistical mechanical theory that predicts in a unified manner the coupled time evolutions of structural and stress recovery following shear cessation from a mechanically prepared nonequilibrium state. The approach is built on recent advances in understanding activated dynamics in Brown
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Optical character recognition (OCR) has advanced rapidly with the rise of vision-language models, yet evaluation has remained concentrated on a small cluster of high- and mid-resource scripts. We introduce GlotOCR Bench, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating OCR generalization across 100+ Unicode scripts. Our benchmark comprises clean and degraded image variants rendered from real multilingual texts. Images are rendered using fonts from the Google Fonts repository, shaped with HarfBuzz and rasterized with FreeType, supporting both LTR and RTL scripts. Samples of rendered images were manually re
Useful angle: Useful for CAD/CAM workflows, feature semantics, and downstream CNC automation.
For decades, computational chemistry has faced a tug-of-war between accuracy and speed. Ab initio methods like density functional theory (DFT) provide high... For decades, computational chemistry has faced a tug-of-war between accuracy and speed. Ab initio methods like density functional theory (DFT) provide high fidelity but are computationally expensive, limiting researchers to systems of a few hundred atoms. Conversely, classical force fields are fast but often lack the chemical accuracy required for complex bond-breaking or transition-state analysis. Source
Useful angle: Useful for CAD/CAM workflows, feature semantics, and downstream CNC automation.
Slender magnetic elements provide a versatile platform for programmable shape-morphing under remote magnetic actuation. However, a general and physically interpretable framework for the inverse design of a `magneto-elastica' under prescribed boundary conditions remains lacking. In this work, we develop an explicit analytical formulation for the inverse design of a magneto-elastica based on the integral form of the moment equilibrium equations. This approach yields direct constraints on the admissible curvature and rotation fields, enabling a systematic characterization of the feasible design s
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Neuromorphic photonics is emerging as a powerful platform for fast and efficient optical information processing and sensing. However, future brain-inspired photonic systems require compact and scalable light sources, capable of generating the neuro-mimetic optical signals needed for their operation. This work demonstrates a single-stack laser that delivers optical and electrical neural-like spiking emission under solitary operation. Termed the Neuron Surface-Emitting Laser (NeuronSEL), this compact, multi-junction Vertical-Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) exhibits non-linear Negative Diff
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Fast grasping is critical for mobile robots in logistics, manufacturing, and service applications. Existing methods face fundamental challenges in impact stabilization under high-speed motion, real-time whole-body coordination, and generalization across diverse objects and scenarios, limited by fixed bases, simple grippers, or slow tactile response capabilities. We propose \textbf{FastGrasp}, a learning-based framework that integrates grasp guidance, whole-body control, and tactile feedback for mobile fast grasping. Our two-stage reinforcement learning strategy first generates diverse grasp ca
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Laser material processing has emerged as a versatile and indispensable tool in various industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, and materials science. However, the interaction of a lasers with surfaces is highly dependent on a large number of factors, including properties of the laser source such as pulse duration, wavelength and pulse form, as well as properties of the material such as surface roughness, heat capacity and thermal conductivity. Therefore, the optimization of laser texturing processes in regards to specific target geometries while maintaining texture quality and process
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
The reproduction of automobile components through additive manufacturing presents significant geometric challenges, as many automotive parts feature complex, organically shaped surfaces that are difficult to fabricate accurately using conventional 3D printing approaches without wasteful support structures. Multi-axis Digital Light Processing (DLP) 3D printing addresses this by orienting a robotic arm to cure resin layers at varying angles and positions, enabling the fabrication of geometries that fixed-axis systems cannot reliably reproduce. However, this flexibility introduces a key challenge
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Monitoring binomial proportions across multiple independent streams is a critical challenge in Statistical Process Control (SPC), with applications from manufacturing to cybersecurity. While EWMA charts offer sensitivity to small shifts, existing implementations rely on asymptotic variance approximations that fail during early-phase monitoring. We introduce a Cumulative Standardized Binomial EWMA (CSB-EWMA) chart that overcomes this limitation by deriving the exact time-varying variance of the EWMA statistic for binary multiple-stream data, enabling adaptive control limits that ensure statisti
Useful angle: Useful for CAD/CAM workflows, feature semantics, and downstream CNC automation.
Recent semantic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods primarily rely on 2D foundation models, often yielding ambiguous boundaries and limited support for structured urban semantics. While city models such as CityGML encode hierarchically organized semantics together with building geometry, these labels cannot be directly mapped to Gaussian primitives. We present GS4City, a hierarchical semantic Gaussian Splatting method that incorporates city-model priors for urban scene understanding. GS4City derives reliable image-aligned masks from Level of Detail (LoD) 3 CityGML models via two-pass raycasti
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Superconducting quantum computing is advancing toward the thousand- and even million-qubit regime, making wafer-scale fabrication an essential pathway for achieving large-scale, cost-effective quantum processors. This manufacturing paradigm imposes new requirements on quantum-chip electronic design automation (Q-EDA): design tools must not only generate layouts (GDSII files) that satisfy quantum-circuit physical constraints but also ensure that the design data can be seamlessly converted into a complete set of manufacturing files executable by a wafer foundry, thereby enabling reliable transla
Useful angle: Useful for large CAD assembly rendering, tessellation, and review performance.
Main purpose of this work is to introduce a general technique of projection of the Voronoi tessellation of the weight lattice $A_n^\ast$ and apply it for the lattice $A_4^\ast$. The projection of the Voronoi tessellation of the weight lattice $A_4^\ast$ produces a totally different tiling scheme than the tiling obtained from the Voronoi cell projection of the lattice $A_4$. The 2D faces of the Voronoi cell of the lattice $A_4^\ast$ are of two types: regular hexagons and squares in 4-dimensions but project into two types of hexagons and two types of rhombuses with edges of two lengths in propor
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Large-scale LLM training is increasingly susceptible to hardware defects stemming from manufacturing escapes and silicon aging. These defects manifest as Silent Data Corruption (SDC) that perturb gradients and parameters throughout the training process. We present LLM-PRISM, a methodology to characterize LLM pre-training resilience to hardware faults. LLM-PRISM couples RTL-level GPU fault simulation with a stochastic injection engine embedded in Megatron-LM. Through 7,664 training runs across FP16, BF16, and FP8 regimes, we analyze how fault type, rate, and numeric format govern resilience. We
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
In Document Understanding, the challenge of reconstructing damaged, occluded, or incomplete text remains a critical yet unexplored problem. Subsequent document understanding tasks can benefit from a document reconstruction process. In response, this paper presents a novel unified pipeline combining state-of-the-art Optical Character Recognition (OCR), advanced image analysis, masked language modeling, and diffusion-based models to restore and reconstruct text while preserving visual integrity. We create a synthetic dataset of 30{,}078 degraded document images that simulates diverse document de
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
If you’re getting into machining, figuring out what tools you actually need can feel overwhelming fast. In this video, Pat breaks down the hand tools he recommends every machinist should have... The post The Hand Tools I Recommend for New Machinists appeared first on Practical Machinist.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Multi-task visual anomaly detection is critical for car-related manufacturing quality assessment. However, existing methods remain task-specific, hindered by the absence of a unified benchmark for multi-task evaluation. To fill in this gap, We present the CAD Dataset, a large-scale and comprehensive benchmark designed for car-related multi-task visual anomaly detection. The dataset contains over 100 images crossing 7 vehicle domains and 3 tasks, providing models a comprehensive view for car-related anomaly detection. It is the first car-related anomaly dataset specialized for multi-task lear
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing (TVAM) requires projection patterns that achieve high in-part fidelity while suppressing unintended exposure outside the target. We present a scale-invariant projection optimization framework (SiPO) that decouples projection shape from absolute dose scaling. The method formulates projection design as a linear-fractional program based on normalized conformity and spillage metrics, which is converted into a linear program via the Charnes-Cooper transformation. Two practical deterministic cases are introduced for process control: minimizing dose spill
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Darija, the Moroccan Arabic dialect, is rich in visual content yet lacks specialized Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools. This paper introduces AtlasOCR, the first open-source Darija OCR model built by fine-tuning a 3B parameter Vision Language Model (VLM). We detail our comprehensive approach, from curating a unique Darija-specific dataset leveraging both synthetic generation with our OCRSmith library and carefully sourced real-world data, to implementing efficient fine-tuning strategies. We utilize QLoRA and Unsloth for parameter-efficient training of Qwen2.5-VL 3B and present comprehe
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Surface finish… everyone talks about it—but what actually controls it? In this episode of The Lathe Lab, Luke runs a real-world experiment to break it down. Using... The post What Happens to Surface Finish When You Crank the Feed? appeared first on Practical Machinist.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
For many experienced CNC programmers, toolpath editing has always been a tug‑of‑war between precision and time. You know exactly what needs to change: a handful of passes trimmed back, a feedrate tweak in a tight corner, or a quick correction … The post EverPath Technology: Toolpath Editing Without Starting Over appeared first on mastercam.com.
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Character recognition is the fundamental part of an optical character recognition (OCR) system. Word recognition, sentence transcription, document digitization, and language processing are some of the higher-order activities that can be done accurately through character recognition. Nonetheless, recognizing handwritten Bangla characters is not an easy task because they are written in different styles with inconsistent stroke patterns and a high degree of visual character resemblance. The datasets available are usually limited in intra-class and inequitable in class distribution. We have constr
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Maintenance procedures in manufacturing facilities are often documented as flowcharts in static PDFs or scanned images. They encode procedural knowledge essential for asset lifecycle management, yet inaccessible to modern operator support systems. Vision-language models, the dominant paradigm for image understanding, struggle to reconstruct connection topology from such diagrams. We present FlowExtract, a pipeline for extracting directed graphs from ISO 5807-standardized flowcharts. The system separates element detection from connectivity reconstruction, using YOLOv8 and EasyOCR for standard d
Useful angle: Useful for large CAD assembly rendering, tessellation, and review performance.
Language models operate on discrete tokens but compute in continuous vector spaces, inducing a Voronoi tessellation over the representation manifold. We study this tessellation empirically on Qwen3.5-4B-Base, making two contributions. First, using float32 margin recomputation to resolve bfloat16 quantization artifacts, we validate Mabrok's (2026) linear scaling law of the expressibility gap with $R^2$ = 0.9997 - the strongest confirmation to date - and identify a mid-layer geometric ambiguity regime where margin geometry is anti-correlated with cross-entropy (layers 24-28, $ρ$ = -0.29) before
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Missing-person and child-safety investigations rely on heterogeneous case documents, including structured forms, bulletin-style posters, and narrative web profiles. Variations in layout, terminology, and data quality impede rapid triage, large-scale analysis, and search-planning workflows. This paper introduces the Guardian Parser Pack, an AI-driven parsing and normalization pipeline that transforms multi-source investigative documents into a unified, schema-compliant representation suitable for operational review and downstream spatial modeling. The proposed system integrates (i) multi-engine
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
The NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 and NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems, featuring NVIDIA Blackwell architecture, are rack-scale supercomputers. They’re designed with 18... The NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 and NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems, featuring NVIDIA Blackwell architecture, are rack-scale supercomputers. They’re designed with 18 tightly coupled compute trays, massive GPU fabrics, and high-bandwidth networking packaged as a unit. For AI architects and HPC platform operators, the challenge isn’t just racking and stacking hardware—it’s turning infrastructure into safe… Source
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Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing (TVAM) enables rapid, layerless biofabrication; however, its application to thermoreversible hydrogels is often compromised by complex chemical kinetics. In this study, we identify and characterize a recurrent printing artifact - termed the Pandoro effect - manifesting as a truncated-cone distortion caused by premature polymerization at the vial bottom and inhibition at the top. We demonstrate that this phenomenon originates from a vertical oxygen gradient driven by the thermal hysteresis of resin preparation: heating depletes dissolved oxygen, whi
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
The Character Error Rate (CER) is a key metric for evaluating the quality of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). However, this metric assumes that text has been perfectly parsed, which is often not the case. Under page-parsing errors, CER becomes undefined, limiting its use as a metric and making evaluating page-level OCR challenging, particularly when using data that do not share a labelling schema. We introduce the Character Error Vector (CEV), a bag-of-characters evaluator for OCR. The CEV can be decomposed into parsing and OCR, and interaction error components. This decomposability allows
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CoroMill Plura composite 2P350 directly... The post Sandvik Coromant Launches CoroMill® Plura Composite 2P350 Unrivalled Performance and Process Security appeared first on Practical Machinist.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
A parametric simulation tool for pixel sensors is presented. A realistic pixel response is simulated purely based on measurement input, without requiring detailed knowledge of the underlying manufacturing process. As such, it provides an efficient alternative to the use of Technology Computer-Aided Design simulations, which typically depend on proprietary process information. Due to its parametric approach, the package is fast and thus particularly useful for larger detector systems and high hit rate environments. This work presents measurements, simulation and its validation for the MALTA2 se
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Katrina (@WoolyBeetle1 on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok) represents a growing shift in modern manufacturing, where engineers are no longer limited to designing parts and handing them off for production. In her role as an engineer, in the industrial automation industry, Katrina takes ideas from concept to completion, building jigs and fixtures herself using the Tormach 1100M CNC mill. Her experience highlights how hands-on machining can shape better engineers while also offering a perspective on what it means to succeed as a woman in a traditionally male dominated field.
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We investigate the second volume moment of the zero cell $Z_o$ of a Poisson hyperplane tessellation with intensity $γ$ in the $d$-dimensional hyperbolic space. We focus on the phase transition at the critical intensity $γ_c^{(d)}$, the minimum value for which $Z_o$ is almost surely bounded. In the critical regime $γ=γ_c^{(d)}$, we show that the second volume moment of the restricted zero cell $Z_o \cap B_R$, where $B_R$ is a hyperbolic ball of radius $R$ centred at $o$, diverges in any dimension at the universal rate $R^3$ as $R \to \infty$. In the supercritical case $γ> γ_c^{(d)}$, we prove t
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Nonlinear optical (NLO) materials are essential for photonic technologies, yet discovering optimal NLO molecules requires balancing multiple competing objectives across vast chemical spaces. Previous work showed that Multi-Objective MAP-Elites (MOME) with grid-based archives discovers diverse, high-quality molecules for electro-optic applications. However, uniform grid partitioning wastes archive capacity on chemically infeasible regions while undersampling high-density areas. We apply MOME with Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation (CVT) archives whose cells are defined by learned embeddings from C
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We develop an asymptotic theory for strict minimum message length (SMML) estimators in regular parametric models with countable data spaces. We show that, asymptotically, the optimal SMML partition is induced by a weighted Fisher--Voronoi tessellation in parameter space, pulled back through the maximum likelihood estimator. We further show that each SMML codepoint is asymptotically a weighted average of the maximum likelihood estimates associated with observations in its cell. These results imply that the SMML estimator is consistent and converges at the usual parametric $n^{-1/2}$ rate under
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Cutting and packing problems are fundamental in manufacturing and logistics, as they aim to minimize waste and improve efficiency. The Cutting Stock Problem (CSP) concerns material cutting, whereas the Bin Packing Problem (BPP) concerns packing items into bins. Since the 1960s, these problems have been widely studied because of their industrial relevance and computational complexity. Over time, exact algorithms, often based on mixed-integer programming (MIP), have become able to solve increasingly large instances, often with hundreds of items, within minutes. In 2016, Delorme et al. showed tha
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The governance of frontier AI increasingly relies on controlling access to computational resources, yet the hardware-level mechanisms invoked by policy proposals remain largely unexamined from an engineering perspective. This paper bridges the gap between AI governance and computer engineering by proposing a taxonomy of 20 hardware-level governance mechanisms, organised by function (monitoring, verification, enforcement) and assessed for technical feasibility on a four-point scale from currently deployable to speculative. For each mechanism, we provide a technical description, a feasibility ra
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Production function estimates underpin the measurement of firm-level markups, allocative efficiency, and the productivity effects of policy interventions. Since Olley and Pakes (1996), every major proxy variable estimator has identified the production function through a first-order Markov assumption on unobserved productivity; I show that misspecification of this assumption generates persistent upward bias in the materials elasticity that propagates into overestimated markups and inflated treatment effects. I replace the Markov restriction with conditional independence across three intermediat
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School taught you how to run the machines. Nobody taught you how to survive the shop floor. Bev is a machinist and technologist at Conestoga College, and... The post Before You Walk Into Your First Shop, Watch This appeared first on Practical Machinist.
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Visualizing large 3D scientific datasets requires balancing performance and fidelity, but traditional tools often demand excessive technical expertise. We introduce UnrealVis, an Unreal Engine optimization laboratory for configuring and evaluating rendering techniques during interactive exploration. Following a review of 55 papers, we established a taxonomy of 22 optimization techniques across six families, implementing them through engine subsystems such as Nanite, Level of Detail(LOD) schemes, and culling. The system features an intuitive workflow with live telemetry and A/B comparisons for
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Boundary representation (B-rep) is the standard 3D modeling format in CAD systems, encoding both geometric primitives and topological connectivity. Despite its prevalence, deep generative modeling of valid B-rep structures remains challenging due to the intricate interplay between discrete topology and continuous geometry. In this paper, we propose HiDiGen, a hierarchical generation framework that decouples geometry modeling into two stages, each guided by explicitly modeled topological constraints. Specifically, our approach first establishes face-edge incidence relations to define a coherent
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Accurate document parsing requires both robust content recognition and a stable parser interface. In explicit Document Layout Analysis (DLA) pipelines, downstream parsers do not consume the full detector output. Instead, they operate on a retained and serialized set of layout instances. However, on dense pages with overlapping regions and ambiguous boundaries, unstable layout hypotheses can make the retained instance set inconsistent with its parser input order, leading to severe downstream parsing errors. To address this issue, we introduce a lightweight structural refinement stage between a
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Parametric boundary representation models (B-Reps) are the de facto standard in CAD, graphics, and robotics, yet converting them into valid meshes remains fragile. The difficulty originates from the unavoidable approximation of high-order surface and curve intersections to low-order primitives: the resulting geometric realization often fails to respect the exact topology encoded in the B-Rep, producing meshes with incorrect or missing adjacencies. Existing meshing pipelines address these inconsistencies through heuristic feature-merging and repair strategies that offer no topological guarantee
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REST APIs are widely used in industry, in all different kinds of domains. An example is Volkswagen AG, a German automobile manufacturer. Established testing approaches for REST APIs are time consuming, and require expertise from professional test engineers. Due to its cost and importance, in the scientific literature several approaches have been proposed to automatically test REST APIs. The open-source, search-based fuzzer EvoMaster is one of such tools proposed in the academic literature. However, how academic prototypes can be integrated in industry and have real impact to software engineeri
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Cutting rectangular items from stock sheets to satisfy demands while minimizing waste is a central manufacturing task. The Two-Dimensional Single Stock Size Cutting Stock Problem (2D-CSSP) generalizes bin packing by requiring multiple copies of each item type, which causes a strong combinatorial blow-up. We present a SAT-based framework where item types are expanded by demand, each copy has a sheet-assignment variable and non-overlap constraints are activated only for copies assigned to the same sheet. We also introduce an infeasible-orientation elimination rule that fixes rotation variables w
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Cutting rectangular items from stock sheets to satisfy demands while minimizing waste is a central manufacturing task. The Two-Dimensional Single Stock Size Cutting Stock Problem (2D-CSSP) generalizes bin packing by requiring multiple copies of each item type, which causes a strong combinatorial blow-up. We present a SAT-based framework where item types are expanded by demand, each copy has a sheet-assignment variable and non-overlap constraints are activated only for copies assigned to the same sheet. We also introduce an infeasible-orientation elimination rule that fixes rotation variables w
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
This transition represents a strategic step in strengthening... The post MC Machinery Systems Announces Transition of Canadian EDM & Machining Service to Ferro Technique appeared first on Practical Machinist.
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This unique technology uses a carbide blade to remove burrs from the front and... The post COFA Tooling Deburrs Through-Holes In a Single Pass – Including on Sloped or Elliptical Surfaces appeared first on Practical Machinist.
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What Would You Do Differently? Hard Lessons from Real Shop Owners... Running a machine shop is one thing. Running it well — that takes years of... The post What I Got WRONG Starting as a Machinist appeared first on Practical Machinist.
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Society 5.0 and Industry 5.0 call for human-centric technology integration, yet the concept lacks an operational definition that can be measured, optimized, or evaluated at the firm level. This paper addresses three gaps. First, existing models of human-AI complementarity treat the augmentation function phi(D) as exogenous -- dependent only on the stock of AI deployed -- ignoring that two firms with identical technology investments achieve radically different augmentation outcomes depending on how the workplace is organized around the human-AI interaction. Second, no multi-dimensional instrume
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Although self-supervised 3D anomaly detection assumes that acquiring high-precision point clouds is computationally expensive, in real manufacturing scenarios it is often feasible to collect a limited number of anomalous samples. Therefore, we study open-set supervised 3D anomaly detection, where the model is trained with only normal samples and a small number of known anomalous samples, aiming to identify unknown anomalies at test time. We present Open-Industry, a high-quality industrial dataset containing 15 categories, each with five real anomaly types collected from production lines. We fi
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This paper presents a specialized methodology for digitizing and segmenting mathematical documents from zbMATH Open, a comprehensive database of mathematical literature, to enhance machine processing capabilities. Currently, approximately 831,000 documents exist only in scanned volumes, which makes them not machine-processable. Furthermore, these scans often span multiple pages or share pages with other documents and incorporate diverse typesetting techniques, posing challenges for automated processing. To address these issues, we evaluate various Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools and
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Industrial disruption replanning demands multi-agent coordination under strict latency and communication budgets, where disruptions propagate through tightly coupled physical dependencies and rapidly invalidate baseline schedules and commitments. Existing coordination schemes often treat communication as either effectively free (broadcast-style escalation) or fixed in advance (hand-tuned neighborhoods), both of which are brittle once the disruption footprint extends beyond a local region. We present \CASCADE, a budgeted replanning mechanism that makes communication scope explicit and auditable
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is increasingly regarded as a foundational capability for modern vision-language models (VLMs), enabling them not only to read text in images but also to support downstream reasoning in real-world visual question answering (VQA). However, practical applications further require reliable text anchors, i.e., accurately grounding queried text to its corresponding spatial region. To systematically evaluate this capability, we introduce TextAnchor-Bench (TABench), a benchmark for fine-grained text-region grounding, which reveals that both general-purpose and OCR-s
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Digital Glass Forming (DGF) is a new manufacturing process for low-batch glass fabrication. The work zone temperature in DGF processes must be maintained in the glass's working range to ensure good fabrication. If the temperature is too low, the filament will not wet to the substrate or previously deposited material and, if the temperature is too high, the filament may disengage from the substrate or previously deposited material, or it may partially vaporize. In this work, a real-time temperature control system capable of synchronizing process parameter, thermal camera, and visual camera data
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The guys kick things off talking about the realities of repair and walk-in work, then get into quoting strategy — specifically what to do when a customer hands... The post When Your Programmers Are Stuck Running Machines appeared first on Practical Machinist.
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Spatial computing is moving from visualization to active collaboration, adding increasingly more GPU demands on XR hardware to render photorealistic,... Spatial computing is moving from visualization to active collaboration, adding increasingly more GPU demands on XR hardware to render photorealistic, physics-accurate, high-fidelity spatial content in real time. Meanwhile, developers have had to maintain separate codebases for every platform, each with different toolchains, SDKs, and streaming protocols. At NVIDIA GTC 2026, NVIDIA CloudXR 6.0… Source
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Modern manufacturing demands speed, accuracy, consistency, and confidence. In our recent webinar, Ryan Mermall, Sales Engineer at Mastercam, was joined by Lilian Barraud, President of BLUM-Novotest USA, to explore how CNC probing powered by BLUM hardware and fully integrated with Mastercam Probing, helps shops streamline setups, reduce … The post Probing with Confidence: Mastercam and BLUM Bring Precision, Automation, and Insight to the Shop Floor appeared first on mastercam.com.
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This paper introduces the L-ReLF (Low-Resource Lexical Framework), a novel, reproducible methodology for creating high-quality, structured lexical datasets for underserved languages. The lack of standardized terminology, exemplified by Moroccan Darija, poses a critical barrier to knowledge equity in platforms like Wikipedia, often forcing editors to rely on inconsistent, ad-hoc methods to create new words in their language. Our research details the technical pipeline developed to overcome these challenges. We systematically address the difficulties of working with low-resource data, including
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The fast pace of modern AI is rapidly transforming traditional industrial systems into vast, intelligent and potentially unmanned autonomous operational environments driven by AI-based solutions. These solutions leverage various forms of machine learning, reinforcement learning, and generative AI. The introduction of such smart capabilities has pushed the envelope in multiple industrial domains, enabling predictive maintenance, optimized performance, and streamlined workflows. These solutions are often deployed across the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and supported by the Edge-Fog-Cloud
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A dynamic 3D mesh is a key component in Virtual Reality applications. However, this type of content demands a significant processing resource for real-time rendering. To reduce processing requirements while preserving the user experience, adjusting the level of detail of 3D meshes based on viewing distance has been proposed. In this paper, we conduct an extensive subjective quality evaluation to investigate the effects of the level of detail and viewing distance on user perception of dynamic 3D meshes in a VR environment. Our evaluation results in a subjective dataset containing user ratings o
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Modern distributed systems integrate heterogeneous services, REST APIs with different schema versions, GraphQL endpoints, and IoT devices with proprietary payloads that suffer from persistent schema mismatches. Traditional static adapters require manual coding for every schema pair and cannot handle novel combinations at runtime. We present SAGAI-MID, a FastAPI-based middleware that uses large language models (LLMs) to dynamically detect and resolve schema mismatches at runtime. The system employs a five-layer pipeline: hybrid detection (structural diff plus LLM semantic analysis), dual resolu
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Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved breakthrough progress in general knowledge domains, yet adaptation to specialized scientific fields remains challenging due to multimodal representation shifts and the limited integration of domain-specific knowledge. To address the limitations of general-purpose VLMs when applied to solar physics image recognition, analysis, and reasoning, we propose JinWu Vision-Language (JW-VL), a fine-tuned foundation model tailored for solar physics. The model integrates multi-wavelength observational data from both space-based and ground-based telescopes, encom
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In today’s fast‑paced manufacturing environment, every second on the shop floor matters. Yet too often, tools still waste valuable cycle time cutting air by moving through material inefficiently, overloading cutters in one moment, and underutilizing them the next. There is a better way. … The post How Dynamic Motion Optimizes Tool Engagement Automatically appeared first on mastercam.com.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
With the emergence of data-driven approaches in science, there is growing interest in their application to manufacturing, particularly in surface precision engineering. However, generating large datasets required for model training is often impractical experimentally due to high costs and the time-intensive nature of measurements. High-fidelity synthetic datasets offer a viable alternative if they can be generated both efficiently and accurately. To address this challenge, this paper presents an efficient framework for generating accurate 3D surface topographies and roughness indicators in mil
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Efficient thermal management in high-power electronic devices requires cooling channel designs that provide high heat removal while satisfying strict spatial and manufacturing constraints. This study presents a two-stage hierarchical topology optimization framework for cooling channels based on the Moving Morphable Components (MMC) method. The optimization is performed sequentially: in the first stage, only wall components are optimized to establish the global flow network and insignificant components are removed; in the second stage, the global structure is fixed and fin components are optimi
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Parliamentary proceedings represent a rich yet challenging resource for computational analysis, particularly when preserved only as scanned historical documents. Existing efforts to transcribe Italian parliamentary speeches have relied on traditional Optical Character Recognition pipelines, resulting in transcription errors and limited semantic annotation. In this paper, we propose a pipeline based on Vision-Language Models for the automatic transcription, semantic segmentation, and entity linking of Italian parliamentary speeches. The pipeline employs a specialised OCR model to extract text w
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Optical character recognition remains critical infrastructure for document digitization, yet state-of-the-art performance is often restricted to well-resourced institutions by prohibitive computational barriers. End-to-end transformer architectures achieve strong accuracy but demand hundreds of GPU hours for domain adaptation, limiting accessibility for practitioners and digital humanities scholars. We present a modular detection-and-correction framework that achieves near-SOTA accuracy with single-GPU training. Our approach decouples lightweight visual character detection (domain-agnostic) fr
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
In dynamic manufacturing environments, disruptions such as machine breakdowns and new order arrivals continuously shift the optimal dispatching strategy, making adaptive rule selection essential. Existing LLM-powered Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) frameworks evolve toward a single elite rule that cannot meet this adaptability demand. To address this, we present DSevolve, an industrial scheduling framework that evolves a quality-diverse portfolio of dispatching rules offline and adaptively deploys them online with second-level response time. Multi-persona seeding and topology-aware evolutiona
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There are a lot of machine shops out there. Same machines. Same tools. Same capabilities. So why would someone choose your shop over the... The post What Makes a Machine Shop Stand Out? (The X Factor) appeared first on Practical Machinist.
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Buffer zones are essential in production systems to decouple sequential processes. In dense floor storage environments, such as space-constrained brownfield facilities, manual operation is increasingly challenged by severe labor shortages and rising operational costs. Automating these zones requires solving the Buffer Storage, Retrieval, and Reshuffling Problem (BSRRP). While previous work has addressed scenarios where the focus is limited to reshuffling and retrieving a fixed set of items, real-world manufacturing necessitates an adaptive approach that also incorporates arriving unit loads. T
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LLM-assisted modeling holds the potential to rapidly build executable Digital Twins of complex systems from only coarse descriptions and sensor data. However, resilience to LLM hallucination, human oversight, and real-time model adaptability remain challenging and often mutually conflicting requirements. We present three critical design principles for integrating resilience and oversight into such workflows, derived from insights gained through our work on FactoryFlow - an open-source LLM-assisted framework for building simulation-based Digital Twins of manufacturing systems. First, orthogonal
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As the demand for mass customization increases, manufacturing systems must become more flexible and adaptable to produce personalized products efficiently. Additive manufacturing (AM) enhances production adaptability by enabling on-demand fabrication of customized components directly from digital models, but its flexibility remains constrained by fixed equipment layouts. Integrating mobile robots addresses this limitation by allowing manufacturing resources to move and adapt to changing production requirements. Mobile AM Robots (MAMbots) combine AM with mobile robotics to produce and transport
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
First-time setups rarely fail due to insufficient operator skill. Delays occur when process confidence is low. Any ambiguity in setup documentation introduces decision points, and each clarification required increases setup time on the shop floor. One simple way to remove uncertainty and help … The post Level Up Your Setup Sheets with Mastercam Presentation Files appeared first on mastercam.com.
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Optical character recognition (OCR) and document understanding systems increasingly rely on large vision and vision-language models, yet evaluation remains centered on modern, Western, and institutional documents. This emphasis masks system behavior in historical and marginalized archives, where layout, typography, and material degradation shape interpretation. This study examines how OCR and document understanding systems are evaluated, with particular attention to Black historical newspapers. We review OCR and document understanding papers, as well as benchmark datasets, which are published
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In the last episode, Ron walked through the CAM side of dealing with pin pitch outside of travel. This time, he shows how he actually... The post Outside of Travel? This Is How We Ran It on Wire EDM appeared first on Practical Machinist.
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What a color‑coded workflow means for your daily programming For decades, CAM programmers have adapted to a reality that most people outside the shop floor never see: every toolpath type plays by its own rules. Each one comes with a different layout, … The post Meet the EverPath Technology Workflow: The Clear Way to Build Toolpaths appeared first on mastercam.com.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Simulation and modeling are essential in product development, integrated into the design and manufacturing process to enhance efficiency and quality. They are typically represented as complex nonlinear differential algebraic equations. The growing diversity of product requirements demands multi-task optimization, a key challenge in simulation modeling research. A dual physics-informed neural network architecture has been proposed to decouple constraints and objective functions in parametric differential algebraic equation optimization problems. Theoretical analysis shows that introducing a rel
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We consider the Voronoi tessellation associated to a stationary simple point process on $\mathbb{R}^d$ with finite and positive intensity. We introduce the Delaunay triangulation as its dual graph, i.e.~the graph with vertex set given by the point process and with edges between vertices whose Voronoi cells share a $(d-1)$-dimensional face. We also attach to each edge a random weight, called conductance. We provide sufficient conditions ensuring the integrability w.r.t. the Palm distribution of several quantities as weighted degrees and associated moments. These integrability properties are cru
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Industrial and medical systems are rapidly increasing the use of high-performance AI to improve worker productivity, human-machine interaction, and downtime... Industrial and medical systems are rapidly increasing the use of high-performance AI to improve worker productivity, human-machine interaction, and downtime management. From factory automation cells to autonomous mobile platforms to surgical rooms, operators are deploying increasingly complex generative AI models, more sensors, and higher‑fidelity data streams at the edge. Source
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“GC1240 is capable of machining stainless steel at higher cutting speeds in... The post Introducing GC1240: Indexable Stainless Steel Milling Grade with Nano Power Excellence appeared first on Practical Machinist.
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APOLLO moves manufacturing operations from reactive repairs to predictive maintenance... The post APOLLO: AI-Powered Predictive Condition Monitoring for Metrology Assets appeared first on Practical Machinist.
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The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) mission will require coronagraphs capable of suppressing starlight at the $\sim 10^{-10}$ contrast level to directly image exo-Earths. High contrast achromatic coronagraphic masks are the missing critical component to achieving this. Vortex coronagraphs, particularly scalar vortex designs with an achromatic focal plane mask, offer key advantages. While all vortex coronagraph varieties provide high throughput, a small inner working angle, and rejection of low-order aberrations, the scalar approach enables dual-polarization observation in a single optical p
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Optical character recognition (OCR) has evolved from line-level transcription to structured document parsing, requiring models to recover long-form sequences containing layout, tables, and formulas. Despite recent advances in vision-language models, most existing systems rely on autoregressive decoding, which introduces sequential latency and amplifies error propagation in long documents. In this work, we revisit document OCR from an inverse rendering perspective, arguing that left-to-right causal generation is an artifact of serialization rather than an intrinsic property of the task. Motivat
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Our team is preparing to have a strong appearance at MACH 2026, the UK’s premier manufacturing and engineering event, taking place 20–24 April 2026 at the NEC Birmingham. Visitors can find the Mastercam UK and Ireland teams at Stand … The post Mastercam UK and Ireland Team to Showcase at MACH 2026 appeared first on mastercam.com.
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Frontal polymerization (FP) enables rapid curing of thermosets via a self-sustaining thermal wave, but its propagation mechanism can shift dramatically depending on processing conditions. In this study, we investigate the effect of trigger direction and monomer viscosity - controlled via hold time - on the front velocity in frontal ring-opening metathesis polymerization (FROMP) of dicyclopentadiene (DCPD). Our experiments reveal that at low viscosities, bottom-triggered FP fronts propagate significantly faster, ~50% faster front speed compared to top-triggered ones, driven by buoyancy-enhanced
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Jared bought his first CNC machine in 2021. He had never machined anything in his life. No trade school, no mentor, no investors. He taught himself on... The post He Taught Himself CNC in 2021. Now He’s Doing Aerospace Work appeared first on Practical Machinist.
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Meet Rebecca Woflinger: Community Director at Toolpath, Co‑Owner of Mil‑Spec Manufacturing LLC., and Contributor to Practical Machinist. Wolfinger’s career in manufacturing did not begin with a job posting, it began with building a machine shop from the ground up. By mastering the business, the craft, and the realities of shop life, she has become a trusted … The post Building Community, Craft, and a Better Industry appeared first on mastercam.com.
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Cutting tool specialist Sandvik Coromant has announced the launch of... The post Introducing CoroMill® MR20: For Controlled Profile Milling with Unmatched Stability appeared first on Practical Machinist.
Useful angle: Useful for large CAD assembly rendering, tessellation, and review performance.
The ability to render scenes at adjustable fidelity from a single model, known as level of detail (LoD), is crucial for practical deployment of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Existing discrete LoD methods expose only a limited set of operating points, while concurrent continuous LoD approaches enable smoother scaling but often suffer noticeable quality degradation at full capacity, making LoD a costly design decision. We introduce Matryoshka Gaussian Splatting (MGS), a training framework that enables continuous LoD for standard 3DGS pipelines without sacrificing full-capacity rendering quality.
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Industrial laparoscopic graspers use multi-link rigid mechanisms manufactured to tight tolerances, resulting in high manufacturing and assembly costs. This work presents the design and proof-of-concept validation of a monolithic, fully compliant, bistable, laparoscopic grasper that eliminates the need for multiple rigid links, thereby reducing part count. The device integrates a compliant trigger and a compliant gripper end-effector, coupled via a control push-rod, to achieve stable grasping without continuous user input. The trigger mechanism is synthesized using a Two-Element Beam Constraint
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Applying micro-patterns to surfaces has been shown to impart useful physical properties such as drag reduction and hydrophobicity. However, current manufacturing techniques cannot produce micro-patterned surfaces at scale due to high-cost machinery and inefficient coverage techniques such as raster-scanning. In this work, we use multiple robots, each equipped with a patterning tool, to manufacture these surfaces. To allow these robots to coordinate during the patterning task, we use the ergodic control algorithm, which specifies coverage objectives using distributions. We demonstrate that robo
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
In Part 3 of the Seal Cap series, Marc tackles the finishing pass — where precision really counts. Building on the roughing and profiling work from... The post G-Code Finishing Pass Explained: Subroutines, Speed Clamps & More appeared first on Practical Machinist.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Founded in 2017, Yatri Motorcycles was created with a bold vision: to prove that electric vehicles could be manufactured entirely in Nepal. At a time when electric mobility represented only a small portion of the global automotive market, the company set out to demonstrate that sustainable transportation could be both practical and locally produced.
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have improved Document Layout Analysis (DLA), yet structural errors such as region merging, splitting, and omission remain persistent. Conventional overlap-based metrics (e.g., IoU, mAP) fail to capture such logical inconsistencies. To overcome this limitation, we propose Layout Error Detection (LED), a benchmark that evaluates structural reasoning in DLA predictions beyond surface-level accuracy. LED defines eight standardized error types (Missing, Hallucination, Size Error, Split, Merge, Overlap, Duplicate, an
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Hans Keisler from Motor Control Technology joins the podcast to talk about his path through the machining trade — from working at Lockheed to building his... The post From a Union Aerospace Shop to Running His Own Machine Shop appeared first on Practical Machinist.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
When you are programming a machine that supports both turning and milling but is not recognized as a Mill-Turn machine in Mastercam, you may run into a frustrating issue: your 3D turning tool does not appear in the correct position during simulation. It is a small detail, but it … The post Better Mill-Turn Simulation: How to Align 3D Turning Tools in Mastercam appeared first on mastercam.com.
Useful angle: Useful for CAD/CAM workflows, feature semantics, and downstream CNC automation.
Healthcare faces a structural demand–capacity crisis: a projected global shortfall of ~10 million clinicians by 2030, billions of diagnostic exams annually... Source
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
These new tooling products have been designed to increase productivity and... The post Dormer Pramet Launches New Products to Strengthen Turning and Milling Performance appeared first on Practical Machinist.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
CoroTurn Plus combines sensorized tooling with two levels of digital capability. Used with CoroPlus® Viewer, it... The post Live Turning Insight for Safer, Smarter Automation appeared first on Practical Machinist.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Compared to standard V- or D-shaped ISO inserts, the inserts with a... The post Walter Presents Four new Walter Lock (WL) Geometries for the W1011 and W1211 Copy Turning Systems appeared first on Practical Machinist.
Useful angle: Useful for large CAD assembly rendering, tessellation, and review performance.
Machine learning has been progressively generalised to operate within non-Euclidean domains, but geometrically accurate methods for learning on surfaces are still falling behind. The lack of closed-form Riemannian operators, the non-differentiability of their discrete counterparts, and poor parallelisation capabilities have been the main obstacles to the development of the field on meshes. A principled framework to compute the exponential map on Riemannian surfaces discretised as meshes is straightest geodesics, which also allows to trace geodesics and parallel-transport vectors as a by-produc
Useful angle: Useful for CAD/CAM workflows, feature semantics, and downstream CNC automation.
Physics forms the foundation of robotic simulation, enabling realistic modeling of motion and interaction. For tasks like locomotion and manipulation,... Physics forms the foundation of robotic simulation, enabling realistic modeling of motion and interaction. For tasks like locomotion and manipulation, simulators must handle complex dynamics such as contact forces and deformable objects. While most engines trade off speed for realism, Newton—a GPU-accelerated, open source simulator—is designed to do both. Newton 1.0 GA… Source
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
For decades, CNC programmers using CAM software have worked within a familiar reality: every toolpath type has its own interface. Quoting takes too long. Programming takes even longer. Bringing a new hire up to full speed can stretch across months. And the … The post Introducing EverPath Technology: A New Way to Program in Mastercam appeared first on mastercam.com.
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
We introduce a novel self-supervised learning framework that automatically learns representations from input computer-aided design (CAD) models for downstream tasks, including part classification, modeling segmentation, and machining feature recognition. To train our network, we construct a large-scale, unlabeled dataset of boundary representation (BRep) models. The success of our algorithm relies on two keycomponents. The first is a masked graph autoencoder that reconstructs randomly masked geometries and attributes of BReps for representation learning to enhance the generalization. The secon
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Scene Text Image Super-Resolution (STISR) aims to restore high-resolution details in low-resolution text images, which is crucial for both human readability and machine recognition. Existing methods, however, often depend on external Optical Character Recognition (OCR) models for textual priors or rely on complex multi-component architectures that are difficult to train and reproduce. In this paper, we introduce DualTSR, a unified end-to-end framework that addresses both issues. DualTSR employs a single multimodal transformer backbone trained with a dual diffusion objective. It simultaneously
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Document Layout analysis (DLA), is the process by which a page is parsed into meaningful elements, often using machine learning models. Typically, the quality of a model is judged using general object detection metrics such as IoU, F1 or mAP. However, these metrics are designed for images that are 2D projections of 3D space, not for the natively 2D imagery of printed media. This discrepancy can result in misleading or uninformative interpretation of model performance by the metrics. To encourage more robust, comparable, and nuanced DLA, we introduce: The Structural Semantic Unit (SSU) a relati
Useful angle: Useful for large CAD assembly rendering, tessellation, and review performance.
Probabilistic circuits (PCs) enable exact and tractable inference but employ data independent mixture weights that limit their ability to capture local geometry of the data manifold. We propose Voronoi tessellations (VT) as a natural way to incorporate geometric structure directly into the sum nodes of a PC. However, naïvely introducing such structure breaks tractability. We formalize this incompatibility and develop two complementary solutions: (1) an approximate inference framework that provides guaranteed lower and upper bounds for inference, and (2) a structural condition for VT under whic
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
The field of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) generation has made significant progress in recent years. Existing methods typically fall into two separate categorie: parametric CAD modeling and direct boundary representation (B-Rep) synthesis. In modern feature-based CAD systems, parametric modeling and B-Rep are inherently intertwined, as advanced parametric operations (e.g., fillet and chamfer) require explicit selection of B-Rep geometric primitives, and the B-Rep itself is derived from parametric operations. Consequently, this paradigm gap remains a critical factor limiting AI-driven CAD modelin
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
In a compact workshop in Ontario, Canada, Weymouth Machine Works is building a reputation for careful machining and mechanical craftsmanship. Founded by machinist Nick Weymouth, the shop focuses on precision components, machine repair, and specialized mechanical work for local industries and engineering teams.
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
An Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system constitutes a crucial element in an intelligent traffic management system. However, the detection of Bangla license plates remains challenging because of the complicated character scheme and uneven layouts. This paper presents a robust Bangla License Plate Recognition system that integrates a deep learning-based object detection model for license plate localization with Optical Character Recognition for text extraction. Multiple object detection architectures, including U-Net and several YOLO (You Only Look Once) variants, are compared for l
Useful angle: Useful for large CAD assembly rendering, tessellation, and review performance.
NVIDIA RTX ray tracing and AI-powered neural rendering technologies are redefining how games are made, enabling a new standard for visuals and performance. At... NVIDIA RTX ray tracing and AI-powered neural rendering technologies are redefining how games are made, enabling a new standard for visuals and performance. At GDC 2026, NVIDIA unveiled the latest path tracing innovations elevating visual fidelity, on-device AI models enabling players to interact with their favorite experiences in new ways, and enterprise solutions accelerating game development… Source
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Large-scale scientific collaborations, such as the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) at CERN, produce a vast and ever-growing corpus of internal documentation. Navigating this complex information landscape presents a significant challenge for both new and experienced researchers, hindering knowledge sharing and slowing down the pace of scientific discovery. To address this, we present a prototype of MITRA, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based system, designed to answer specific, context-aware questions about physics analyses. MITRA employs a novel, automated pipeline using Selenium for docum
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Roughing material efficiently is essential for any shop looking to maximize throughput, reduce machine wear, and keep production moving. OptiRough is an advanced roughing strategy powered by Dynamic Motion technology, which is designed to optimize cutting approaches. Most programmers already … The post Unlocking Faster Programming with OptiRough in 2.5-Axis Machining appeared first on mastercam.com.
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is crucial for document artificial intelligence and has recently received increasing attention, resulting in an influx of large-scale public DLA datasets. Existing work often combines data from various domains in recent public DLA datasets to improve the generalization of DLA. However, directly merging these datasets for training often results in suboptimal model performance, as it overlooks the different layout structures inherent to various domains. These variations include different labeling styles, document types, and languages. This paper introduces PromptDL
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Document Image Machine Translation (DIMT) seeks to translate text embedded in document images from one language to another by jointly modeling both textual content and page layout, bridging optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP). The DIMT 2025 Challenge advances research on end-to-end document image translation, a rapidly evolving area within multimodal document understanding. The competition features two tracks, OCR-free and OCR-based, each with two subtasks for small (less than 1B parameters) and large (greater than 1B parameters) models. Participants submi
Useful angle: Useful for large CAD assembly rendering, tessellation, and review performance.
(short version abstract, full in article)High-fidelity flow field reconstruction is important in fluid dynamics, but it is challenged by sparse and spatiotemporally incomplete sensor measurements, as well as failures of pre-deployed measurement points that can invalidate pre-trained reconstruction models. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) alleviate dependence on large labeled datasets by incorporating governing physics, yet sensor placement optimization, a key factor in reconstruction accuracy and robustness, remains underexplored. In this study, we propose a PINN with Voronoi-enhanced
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Surface roughness in Material Extrusion Additive Manufacturing varies across a part and is difficult to anticipate during process planning because it depends on both printing parameters and local surface inclination, which governs the staircase effect. A data-driven framework is presented to predict the arithmetic mean roughness (Ra) prior to fabrication using process parameters and surface angle. A structured experimental dataset was created using a three-level Box-Behnken design: 87 specimens were printed, each with multiple planar faces spanning different inclination angles, yielding 1566 R
Useful angle: Useful for large CAD assembly rendering, tessellation, and review performance.
The pursuit of geometrically frustrated lattices beyond conventional paradigms remains a central challenge in the design of quantum materials. Herein, we report the discovery of Cs3V9Te13 (CVT), a novel intermetallic compound that hosts a unique two-dimensional vanadium mosaic lattice, composed of an ordered tessellation of triangles, squares, and pentagons, bearing profound structural kinship with the celebrated kagome lattice. Remarkably, CVT exhibits behavior analogous to heavy fermion systems, characterized by a large Sommerfeld coefficient(γ = 425 mJ mol-1 K-2) and a coherent density-wave
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Constructing computer-aided design (CAD) models is labor-intensive but essential for engineering and manufacturing. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have inspired the LLM-based CAD generation by representing CAD as command sequences. But these methods struggle in practical scenarios because command sequence representation does not support entity selection (e.g. faces or edges), limiting its ability to support complex editing operations such as chamfer or fillet. Further, the discretization of a continuous variable during sketch and extrude operations may result in topological er
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Document intelligence requires accurate text extraction and reliable reasoning over document content. We introduce \textbf{DISCO}, a \emph{Document Intelligence Suite for COmparative Evaluation}, that evaluates optical character recognition (OCR) pipelines and vision-language models (VLMs) separately on parsing and question answering across diverse document types, including handwritten text, multilingual scripts, medical forms, infographics, and multi-page documents. Our evaluation shows that performance varies substantially across tasks and document characteristics, underscoring the need for
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Cutter-workpiece engagement (CWE) is the instantaneous contact geometry between the cutter and the in-process workpiece, playing a fundamental role in machining process simulation and directly affecting the prediction of cutting forces and process stability. The difficulty and challenge of CWE determination come from the complexity of continuously changing geometry, especially for multi-axis milling. To fulfill the requirement of generality -- for any cutter type, workpiece shape, or toolpath -- the research community has largely pursued two paths: geometrically exact solid modeling and approx
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Why Mastercam Copilot is built differently from generic AI tools — and why that matters on the shop floor. If you have spent any time with general-purpose AI tools, you know the drill: you ask a question, you get a plausible-sounding answer, … The post AI That Actually Knows Your Software appeared first on mastercam.com.
Useful angle: Useful for large CAD assembly rendering, tessellation, and review performance.
To make 6G a reality, the telecom industry must overcome a fundamental challenge: how to design, train, and validate AI-native networks that are too complex to... To make 6G a reality, the telecom industry must overcome a fundamental challenge: how to design, train, and validate AI-native networks that are too complex to be tested in the physical world. The NVIDIA Aerial Omniverse Digital Twin (AODT) solves this by enabling a continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD)-style workflow where Radio Access Network (RAN) software is trained… Source
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a critical but error-prone stage in digital humanities text pipelines. While OCR correction improves usability for downstream NLP tasks, common workflows often overwrite intermediate decisions, obscuring how textual transformations affect scholarly interpretation. We present a provenance-aware framework for OCR-corrected humanities corpora that records correction lineage at the span level, including edit type, correction source, confidence, and revision status. Using a pilot corpus of historical texts, we compare downstream named entity extraction across
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
While document layout analysis for Latin scripts has advanced significantly, driven by the advent of large multimodal models (LMMs), progress for the Khmer language remains constrained because of the scarcity of annotated training data. This gap is particularly acute for scene documents, where perspective distortions and complex backgrounds challenge traditional methods. Given the structural complexities of Khmer script, such as diacritics and multi-layer character stacking, existing Latin-based layout analysis models fail to accurately delineate semantic layout units, particularly for dense t
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Khmer is a low-resource language characterized by a complex script, presenting significant challenges for optical character recognition (OCR). While document printed text recognition has advanced because of available datasets, performance on other modalities, such as handwritten and scene text, remains limited by data scarcity. Training modality-specific models for each modality does not allow cross-modality transfer learning, from which modalities with limited data could otherwise benefit. Moreover, deploying many modality-specific models results in significant memory overhead and requires er
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Complex parts require more than a single operation. Features such as contours, chamfers, engraved details, and precision holes often demand multiple tooling strategies working together throughout the machining process. In the video below, watch a single component progress from a block of Ti-6Al-4V to a finished part through more than 10 machining applications, each supported […] The post Machining a Complex Part with Harvey Tool appeared first on Harvey Performance Company.
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Modern engineering design platforms excel at discipline-specific tasks such as CAD, CAM, and CAE, but often lack native systems engineering frameworks. This creates a disconnect where system-level requirements and architectures are managed separately from detailed component design, hindering holistic development and increasing integration risks. To address this, we present the conceptual framework for the GenAI Workbench, a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) environment that integrates systems engineering principles into the designer's workflow. Built on an open-source PLM platform, it est
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
The expansion of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) into multimodal domains has intensified the challenge for processing complex visual documents, such as financial reports. While page-level chunking and retrieval is a natural starting point, it creates a critical bottleneck: delivering entire pages to the generator introduces excessive extraneous context. This not only overloads the generator's attention mechanism but also dilutes the most salient evidence. Moreover, compressing these information-rich pages into a limited visual token budget further increases the risk of hallucinations. To
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Learning directly from boundary representations (B-reps) has significantly advanced 3D CAD analysis. However, state-of-the-art B-rep learning methods rely on absolute coordinates and normals to encode global context, making them highly sensitive to rotations. Our experiments reveal that models achieving over 95% accuracy on aligned benchmarks can collapse to as low as 10% under arbitrary $\mathbf{SO}(3)$ rotations. To address this, we introduce FoV-Net, the first B-rep learning framework that captures both local surface geometry and global structural context in a rotation-invariant manner. Eac
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Vision-language models (VLMs) can read text from images, but where does this optical character recognition (OCR) information enter the language processing stream? We investigate the OCR routing mechanism across three architecture families (Qwen3-VL, Phi-4, InternVL3.5) using causal interventions. By computing activation differences between original images and text-inpainted versions, we identify architecture-specific OCR bottlenecks whose dominant location depends on the vision-language integration strategy: DeepStack models (Qwen) show peak sensitivity at mid-depth (about 50%) for scene text,
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
We propose a masked self-supervised learning framework, called BRepMAE, for automatically extracting a valuable representation of the input computer-aided design (CAD) model to recognize its machining features. Representation learning is conducted on a large-scale, unlabeled CAD model dataset using the geometric Attributed Adjacency Graph (gAAG) representation, derived from the boundary representation (BRep). The self-supervised network is a masked graph autoencoder (MAE) that focuses on reconstructing geometries and attributes of BRep facets, rather than graph structures. After pre-training,
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
In modern manufacturing, accuracy is not a goal. It is a requirement. Every setup. Every tool change, and every cut must be right the first time. With Mastercam 2026.R2, we are raising the bar with powerful new probing enhancements that simplify setup, reduce manual steps, and bring a new level of intelligence … The post Mastercam 2026.R2 Probing: A Smarter, Faster Path to Precision appeared first on mastercam.com.
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Recent advancements in deep learning have actively addressed complex challenges within the Computer-Aided Design (CAD) domain.However, most existing approaches rely on task-specifi c models requiring structural modifi cations for new tasks, and they predominantly focus on point clouds or images rather than the industry-standard Boundary Representation (B-rep) format. To address these limitations, we propose BrepCoder, a unifi ed Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that performs diverse CAD tasks from B-rep inputs. By leveraging the code generation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Effective document intelligence models rely on large amounts of annotated training data. However, procuring sufficient and high-quality data poses significant challenges due to the labor-intensive and costly nature of data acquisition. Additionally, leveraging language models to annotate real documents raises concerns about data privacy. Synthetic document generation has emerged as a promising, privacy-preserving alternative. We propose DocDjinn, a novel framework for controllable synthetic document generation using Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that produces annotated documents from unlabeled
Useful angle: Useful for technical-drawing understanding, callout extraction, and document intelligence.
This essay offers a philosophical analysis of the field of AI safety based on recent technical reports, with particular focus on Anthropic's study on "agentic misalignment" in frontier language models. It examines the recurring anthropomorphism in the field: the tendency of researchers and developers to project categories such as "intention," "persona," and even "feelings" onto AI systems without adequate conceptual problematization. It argues that this anthropomorphism affects not only the interpretation of results, but also the very methodological construction of safety evaluations. Through
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
The boundary representation (B-rep) models a 3D solid as its explicit boundaries: trimmed corners, edges, and faces. Recovering B-rep representation from unstructured data is a challenging and valuable task of computer vision and graphics. Recent advances in deep learning have greatly improved the recovery of 3D shape geometry, but still depend on dense and clean point clouds and struggle to generalize to novel shapes. We propose B-rep Gaussian Splatting (BrepGaussian), a novel framework that learns 3D parametric representations from 2D images. We employ a Gaussian Splatting renderer with lear
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
The boundary representation (B-Rep) models a 3D solid as its explicit boundaries: trimmed corners, edges, and faces. Recovering B-Rep representation from unstructured data is a challenging and valuable task of computer vision and graphics. Recent advances in deep learning have greatly improved the recovery of 3D shape geometry, but still depend on dense and clean point clouds and struggle to generalize to novel shapes. We propose B-Rep Gaussian Splatting (BrepGaussian), a novel framework that learns 3D parametric representations from 2D images. We employ a Gaussian Splatting renderer with lear
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Optical character recognition (OCR) has advanced rapidly with deep learning and multimodal models, yet most methods focus on well-resourced scripts such as Latin and Chinese. Ethnic minority languages remain underexplored due to complex writing systems, scarce annotations, and diverse historical and modern forms, making generalization in low-resource or zero-shot settings challenging. To address these challenges, we present OmniOCR, a universal framework for ethnic minority scripts. OmniOCR introduces Dynamic Low-Rank Adaptation (Dynamic LoRA) to allocate model capacity across layers and scrip
Useful angle: Useful for technical-drawing understanding, callout extraction, and document intelligence.
Manufacturing automation in process planning, inspection planning, and digital-thread integration depends on a unified specification that binds the geometric features of a 3D CAD model to the geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) callouts, datum definitions, and surface requirements carried by the corresponding 2D engineering drawing. Although Model-Based Definition (MBD) allows such specifications to be embedded directly in 3D models, 2D drawings remain the primary carrier of manufacturing intent in automotive, aerospace, shipbuilding, and heavy-machinery industries. Correctly linking
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a fundamental task for digitizing information, serving as a critical bridge between visual data and textual understanding. While modern Vision-Language Models (VLM) have achieved high accuracy in this domain, they predominantly rely on autoregressive decoding, which becomes computationally expensive and slow for long documents as it requires a sequential forward pass for every generated token. We identify a key opportunity to overcome this bottleneck: unlike open-ended generation, OCR is a highly deterministic task where the visual input strictly dictates
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Designing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems for India requires balancing linguistic diversity, document heterogeneity, and deployment constraints. In this paper, we study two training strategies for building multilingual OCR systems with Vision-Language Models through the Chitrapathak series. We first follow a popular multimodal approach, pairing a generic vision encoder with a strong multilingual language model and training the system end-to-end for OCR. Alternatively, we explore fine-tuning an existing OCR model, despite not being trained for the target languages. Through extensive
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
There is plenty of debate about what a compact CNC mill can realistically handle. Instead of responding to speculation, Practical Machinist partnered with Tormach to put the Tormach 1500MX CNC mill through a structured, real world cutting evaluation. The goal was simple: document how the machine performs across a broad range of materials using consistent tooling, workholding, and test parameters.
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Kazakh is a Turkic language using the Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin scripts, making it unique in terms of optical character recognition (OCR). Work on OCR for low-resource Kazakh scripts is very scarce, and no OCR benchmarks or images exist for the Arabic and Latin scripts. We construct a synthetic OCR dataset of 7,219 images for all three scripts with font, color, and noise variations to imitate real OCR tasks. We evaluated three multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on a subset of the benchmark for OCR and language identification: Gemma-3-12B-it, Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, and Llama-3.2-11B-Vi
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Determining when each model-type works best In CNC programming, the model you start with shapes everything that follows — from toolpath precision to workflow efficiency. Mastercam provides programmers three primary model types to work with: solids, surfaces, and meshes. Each one brings … The post Understanding Solids, Surfaces, and Meshes in Mastercam appeared first on mastercam.com.
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Introducing up2parts: AI-enabled Add-on for Mastercam In most small-to-medium machine shops, the people doing the quoting and CAM programming are also your most experienced machinists. They are the ones who know the machines, understand the materials, and can look at a part … The post How AI-Powered Automation is Changing the Quoting Workflow for Machine Shops appeared first on mastercam.com.
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of eighteenth-century printed texts remains challenging due to degraded print quality, archaic glyphs, and non-standardized orthography. Although transformer-based OCR systems and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong aggregate accuracy, metrics such as Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER) provide limited insight into their reliability for scholarly use. We compare a dedicated OCR transformer (TrOCR) and a general-purpose Vision-Language Model (Qwen) on line-level historical English texts using length-weighted accuracy metrics and hypo
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
During our recent webinar, Senior Product Manager, Dave Conigliaro and Senior Applications Engineer, Jesse Trinque unveiled EverPath Technology: Mastercam’s next-gen, advanced toolpath platform engineered to maximize precision, boost performance, and enhance user control. As part of our ongoing commitment to innovation and … The post EverPath Technology – Early Adopter Program appeared first on mastercam.com.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
This project walks through the design and fabrication of a small wooden fly box using a CNC workflow that blends CAD, CAM, machining, and hands on finishing. Machined entirely on a Tormach xsTECH desktop router, the project shows how a compact CNC platform can handle detailed woodworking operations. While the end result is a simple accessory, the process highlights how planning and tool selection can make a small woodworking project into something more refined and repeatable.
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Boundary representation (B-rep) is the industry standard for computer-aided design (CAD). While deep learning shows promise in processing B-rep models, existing methods suffer from a representation gap: continuous approaches offer analytical precision but are visually abstract, whereas discrete methods provide intuitive clarity at the expense of geometric precision. To bridge this gap, we introduce Brep2Shape, a novel self-supervised pre-training method designed to align abstract boundary representations with intuitive shape representations. Our method employs a geometry-aware task where the m
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Drilling applications require careful consideration of material, production volume, and machine setup to ensure optimal hole quality, tool life, and cost. Harvey Performance Company offers drills in three primary substrates: carbide, cobalt, and high-speed steel (HSS). This guide breaks down the differences between the drilling substrate options and helps you choose the right tool for […] The post Drill Substrate Guide: HSS vs Cobalt vs Carbide appeared first on Harvey Performance Company.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
At Wasilla High School in Alaska, career and technical education is evolving beyond traditional woodworking to include CNC machining. Instructor Brian Cook has played a key role in that transition, bringing modern manufacturing tools into a program that historically focused on cabinetry and shop fundamentals.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
At Kennewick High School, in Washington state, instructor Josh Eerkes has helped reshape how students engage with career and technical education (CTE) by connecting classroom theory with real-world manufacturing. What began as a makerspace initiative has evolved into a comprehensive program centered on CNC machining, robotics, and problem solving.
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Boundary Representation (B-Rep) is the widely adopted standard in Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and manufacturing. However, generative modeling of B-Reps remains a formidable challenge due to their inherent heterogeneity as geometric cell complexes, which entangles topology with geometry across cells of varying orders (i.e., $k$-cells such as vertices, edges, faces). Previous methods typically rely on cascaded sequences to handle this hierarchy, which fails to fully exploit the geometric relationships between cells, such as adjacency and sharing, limiting context awareness and error recovery.
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Previous representation and generation approaches for the B-rep relied on graph-based representations that disentangle geometric and topological features through decoupled computational pipelines, thereby precluding the application of sequence-based generative frameworks, such as transformer architectures that have demonstrated remarkable performance. In this paper, we propose BrepARG, the first attempt to encode B-rep's geometry and topology into a holistic token sequence representation, enabling sequence-based B-rep generation with an autoregressive architecture. Specifically, BrepARG encode
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Previous representation and generation approaches for the B-rep relied on graph-based representations that disentangle geometric and topological features through decoupled computational pipelines, thereby precluding the application of sequence-based generative frameworks, such as transformer architectures that have demonstrated remarkable performance. In this paper, we propose BrepARG, the first attempt to encode B-rep's geometry and topology into a holistic token sequence representation, enabling sequence-based B-rep generation with an autoregressive architecture. Specifically, BrepARG encode
Useful angle: Useful for OCR, layout-aware document understanding, and drawing intelligence.
Computer-aided design (CAD) is vital to modern manufacturing, yet model creation remains labor-intensive and expertise-heavy. To enable non-experts to translate intuitive design intent into manufacturable artifacts, recent large language models-based text-to-CAD efforts focus on command sequences or script-based formats like CadQuery. However, these formats are kernel-dependent and lack universality for manufacturing. In contrast, the Standard for the Exchange of Product Data (STEP, ISO 10303) file is a widely adopted, neutral boundary representation (B-rep) format directly compatible with man
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Parker Medical is a Connecticut-based manufacturer focused on high voltage components used in medical imaging and diagnostic equipment. While the company name suggests a purely medical focus, its work extends into highly specialized electrical systems. Parker designs and produces high voltage cables, connectors, and assemblies used in CT scanners, MRI systems, and other diagnostic platforms where reliability is critical. Many of these components operate at extreme electrical loads, with some assemblies designed to handle up to 160,000 volts.
Useful angle: Useful for CAD/CAM workflows, feature semantics, and downstream CNC automation.
Generalist robot policies must operate across diverse tasks, embodiments, and environments, requiring scalable, repeatable simulation-based evaluation. Setting... Generalist robot policies must operate across diverse tasks, embodiments, and environments, requiring scalable, repeatable simulation-based evaluation. Setting up large-scale policy evaluations is tedious and manual. Without a systematic approach, developers need to build high-overhead custom infrastructure, yet task libraries remain limited in complexity and diversity. Source
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Rowley, Massachusetts, USA, and Weert, The Netherlands – Harvey Performance Company (“Harvey Performance” or the “company”), a leading provider of specialised cutting tools for precision machining applications, today announced that its leading North American End Mill brand, Helical Solutions, will be offered to European customers beginning in January 2026. Helical has earned a reputation in […] The post Harvey Performance Company Introduces Helical Solutions to Europe appeared first on Harvey Performance Company.
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Driven by breakthroughs in next-generation artificial intelligence, embodied intelligence is rapidly advancing into industrial manufacturing. In flexible manufacturing, industrial embodied intelligence faces three core challenges: accurate process modeling and monitoring under limited perception, dynamic balancing between flexible adaptation and high-precision control, and the integration of general-purpose skills with specialized industrial operations. Accordingly, this survey reviews existing work from three viewpoints: Industrial Eye, Industrial Hand, and Industrial Brain. At the perception
Useful angle: Useful for CAD/CAM workflows, feature semantics, and downstream CNC automation.
Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) are transforming the landscape of computational chemistry and materials science. MLIPs enable atomistic... Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) are transforming the landscape of computational chemistry and materials science. MLIPs enable atomistic simulations that combine the fidelity of computationally expensive quantum chemistry with the scaling power of AI. Yet, developers working at this intersection face a persistent challenge: a lack of robust, Pythonic toolbox for GPU… Source
Useful angle: Useful for CAD/CAM workflows, feature semantics, and downstream CNC automation.
Technology Computer-Aided Design (TCAD) simulations, encompassing both process and device simulations, are crucial for modern semiconductor manufacturing. They... Technology Computer-Aided Design (TCAD) simulations, encompassing both process and device simulations, are crucial for modern semiconductor manufacturing. They enable “virtual manufacturing,” allowing engineers to design, build, and test transistors and integrated circuits digitally before committing to the costly physical fabrication process. This approach significantly reduces development time… Source
Useful angle: Useful for large CAD assembly rendering, tessellation, and review performance.
The development of 5G and 6G requires high-fidelity radio channel modeling, but the ecosystem is highly fragmented. Link-level simulators, network-level... The development of 5G and 6G requires high-fidelity radio channel modeling, but the ecosystem is highly fragmented. Link-level simulators, network-level simulators, and AI training frameworks operate independently, often in different programming languages. If you are a researcher or an engineer trying to simulate the behavior of the key components of the physical layer of 5G or 6G systems… Source
Useful angle: Useful for CAD/CAM workflows, feature semantics, and downstream CNC automation.
Simulating large-scale quantum computers has become more difficult as the quality of quantum processing units (QPUs) improves. Validating the results is key to... Simulating large-scale quantum computers has become more difficult as the quality of quantum processing units (QPUs) improves. Validating the results is key to ensure that after the devices scale beyond what is classically simulable, we can still trust the outputs. Similarly, when generating large-scale datasets for various AI models that aim to aid in the operation of quantum processors… Source
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Logan Culver’s journey into reel making began long before he ever touched a CNC machine. His earliest memories on the water were with his grandfather, who introduced him to fishing at a young age. “I have been fishing with my grandfather since I was a really little kid and I really enjoyed it. It was always something I was passionate about,” Logan said. Those childhood moments grew into a lifelong obsession with chasing salmon and steelhead in the tributaries of western New York. That passion eventually guided him toward creating Tribs Reels, a one man operation where he designs, machines, and hand assembles premium centerpin reels.
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Parametric computer-aided design (CAD) modeling is fundamental to industrial design, but existing datasets often lack explicit geometric constraints and fine-grained functional semantics, limiting editable, constraint-compliant generation. We present HistCAD, a large-scale dataset featuring constraint-aware modeling sequences that compactly represent procedural operations while ensuring compatibility with native CAD software, encompassing five aligned modalities: modeling sequences, multi-view renderings, STEP-format B-reps, native parametric files, and textual annotations. We develop AM\(_\te
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
The boundary representation (B-Rep) is the standard data structure used in Computer-Aided Design (CAD) for defining solid models. Despite recent progress, directly generating B-Reps end-to-end with precise geometry and watertight topology remains a challenge. This paper presents AutoBrep, a novel Transformer model that autoregressively generates B-Reps with high quality and validity. AutoBrep employs a unified tokenization scheme that encodes both geometric and topological characteristics of a B-Rep model as a sequence of discrete tokens. Geometric primitives (i.e., surfaces and curves) are en
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Boundary representation (B-rep) is the de facto standard for CAD model representation in modern industrial design. The intricate coupling between geometric and topological elements in B-rep structures has forced existing generative methods to rely on cascaded multi-stage networks, resulting in error accumulation and computational inefficiency. We present BrepGPT, a single-stage autoregressive framework for B-rep generation. Our key innovation lies in the Voronoi Half-Patch (VHP) representation, which decomposes B-reps into unified local units by assigning geometry to nearest half-edges and sam
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
With the release of Micro 100’s 2025 Spring Catalog comes a new family of broaching tools, marking their debut within both the Micro 100 and Harvey Performance brands. Alongside this tooling launch are several differences in application methods and recommended running parameters. What is Broaching? Broaching, while performed in a lathe, is slightly different from […] The post Micro 100 Broaching Tools: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on Harvey Performance Company.
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
This paper presents a novel geometric representation for CAD Boundary Representation (B-Rep) based on volumetric distance functions, dubbed B-Rep Distance Functions (BR-DF). BR-DF encodes the surface mesh geometry of a CAD model as signed distance function (SDF). B-Rep vertices, edges, faces and their topology information are encoded as per-face unsigned distance functions (UDFs). An extension of the Marching Cubes algorithm converts BR-DF directly into watertight CAD B-Rep model (strictly speaking a faceted B-Rep model). A surprising characteristic of BR-DF is that this conversion process nev
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Have you ever wondered what really causes premature tool failure? The “Cutting Tool Counselor,” Don Grandt, is here to uncover the two biggest culprits: heat and vibration. In this episode of In The Loupe TV, Don explains how High Efficiency Machining (HEM) toolpaths are designed to combat both, helping you achieve smoother cuts, longer tool […] The post ITL TV: How HEM Toolpaths Tackle Heat and Vibration appeared first on Harvey Performance Company.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Tool coatings are added to protect against the forces that wear down cutting tools. They play a critical role in CNC machining by reducing heat generation and friction while enhancing overall tool performance. Below is an overview of Helical Solutions’ coating options, including which tool families they pair with, the applications they’re best suited for, […] The post The Key Differences Between Helical’s Tool Coatings appeared first on Harvey Performance Company.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
Have you ever wondered what really drives the success of High Efficiency Machining (HEM) toolpaths like Dynamic Milling, Adaptive Clearing, and Trochoidal Milling? The “Cutting Tool Counselor,” Don Grandt, is back to reveal the hidden key: Tool Engagement Angle (TEA). In this episode of In The Loupe TV, Don explains how optimizing TEA can help […] The post In the Loupe TV: Understanding Tool Engagement Angle appeared first on Harvey Performance Company.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
OneCNC CAD CAM does not depend on the internet. Benefits include secure file storage, freedom of usage, no internet connection required and your cad cam workflow will never stop due to internet issues.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
OneCNC CAD CAM does not depend on the internet. Benefits include secure file storage, freedom of usage, no internet connection required and your cad cam workflow will never stop due to internet issues.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
OneCNC CAD CAM does not depend on the internet. Benefits include secure file storage, freedom of usage, no internet connection required and your cad cam workflow will never stop due to internet issues.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
OneCNC CAD CAM does not depend on the internet. Benefits include secure file storage, freedom of usage, no internet connection required and your cad cam workflow will never stop due to internet issues.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
OneCNC CAD CAM does not depend on the internet. Benefits include secure file storage, freedom of usage, no internet connection required and your cad cam workflow will never stop due to internet issues.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
OneCNC CAD CAM does not depend on the internet. Benefits include secure file storage, freedom of usage, no internet connection required and your cad cam workflow will never stop due to internet issues.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
OneCNC CAD CAM does not depend on the internet. Benefits include secure file storage, freedom of usage, no internet connection required and your cad cam workflow will never stop due to internet issues.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
OneCNC CAD CAM does not depend on the internet. Benefits include secure file storage, freedom of usage, no internet connection required and your cad cam workflow will never stop due to internet issues.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
OneCNC CAD CAM does not depend on the internet. Benefits include secure file storage, freedom of usage, no internet connection required and your cad cam workflow will never stop due to internet issues.
Useful angle: Useful for shop-floor machining knowledge, setup decisions, and practical process constraints.
OneCNC CAD CAM does not depend on the internet. Benefits include secure file storage, freedom of usage, no internet connection required and your cad cam workflow will never stop due to internet issues.
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
XDE stands for the eXtended Data Exchange module provided by the open-source OpenCascade kernel for representing CAD assemblies and engineering metadata.
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Open Cascade is happy to present the next minor release of CAD Processor – one of the best solutions for preparation and simplification of 3D reference data, bridging the gap between complex engineering design ...
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Different applications require different representations: some applications use only simple geometric entities such as lines and arcs; others require sculptured curves and surfaces; manifold solids are often used for...
Useful angle: Useful for B-rep reasoning, machining feature extraction, and process-planning semantics.
Result of lighting, blending and some other color math on nonlinear sRGB values is clearly wrong, but still may be acceptable to some extent (until you look deeper in detail to realize why it is wrong). Therefore, for proper...
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