Boulder Future Salon

"How functional programming shaped (and twisted) frontend development." If it seems like ideas in React and Redux resemble ideas from the "functional languages paradigm" in languages like Haskell, it's not your imagination. Some choice quotes: "There's a strange irony at the heart of modern web development. The web was born from documents, hyperlinks, and a cascading stylesheet language. It was always messy, mutable, and gloriously side-effectful. Yet over the past decade, our most influential frontend tools have been shaped by engineers chasing functional programming purity: immutability, determinism, and the elimination of side effects." "The web is fundamentally side-effectful. CSS cascades globally by design. Styles defined in one place affect elements everywhere, creating emergent patterns through specificity and inheritance. The DOM is a giant mutable tree that browsers optimize obsessively; changing it directly is fast and predictable. User interactions arrive asynchronously and unpredictably: clicks, scrolls, form submissions, network requests, resize events. There's no pure function that captures 'user intent.'" "This messiness is not accidental. It's how the web scales across billions of devices, remains backwards-compatible across decades, and allows disparate systems to interoperate. The browser is an open platform with escape hatches everywhere. You can style anything, hook into any event, manipulate any node. That flexibility and that refusal to enforce rigid abstractions is the web's superpower." "Functional programming revolves around a few core principles: functions should be pure (same inputs yields same outputs, no side effects), data should be immutable, and state changes should be explicit and traceable. These ideas produce code that's easier to reason about, test, and parallelize, in the right context of course." "CSS was designed to be global. Styles cascade, inherit, and compose across boundaries. This enables tiny stylesheets to control huge documents, and lets teams share design systems across applications. But to functional programmers, global scope is dangerous. It creates implicit dependencies and unpredictable outcomes." "React introduced synthetic events to normalize browser inconsistencies and integrate events into its rendering lifecycle. Instead of attaching listeners directly to DOM nodes, React uses event delegation. It listens at the root, then routes events to handlers through its own system." "This feels elegant from a functional perspective. Events become data flowing through your component tree. You don't touch the DOM directly. Everything stays inside React's controlled universe." "But native browser events already work. They bubble, they capture, they're well-specified. The browser has spent decades optimizing event dispatch." "The logical extreme of 'UI as a pure function of state' is client-side rendering: the server sends an empty HTML shell, JavaScript boots up, and the app renders entirely in the browser. From a functional perspective, this is clean. Your app is a deterministic function that takes initial state and produces a DOM tree." "From a web perspective, it's a disaster. The browser sits idle while JavaScript parses, executes, and manually constructs the DOM. Users see blank screens. Screen readers get empty documents. Search engines see nothing. Progressive rendering which is one of the browser's most powerful features, goes unused." "The industry noticed. Server-side rendering came back. But because the mental model was still 'JavaScript owns the DOM,' ..."

It is alleged (by The Citizen Lab, at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto), that Israel is using AI to create online "influence operations" aimed at "regime change" in Iran, starting with a deepfake of IDF air strikes on Evin Prison in Tehran.

MEMS lidar. "Five years ago, Eric Aguilar was fed up." "He had worked on lidar and other sensors for years at Tesla and Google X, but the technology always seemed too expensive and, more importantly, unreliable. He replaced the lidar sensors when they broke -- which was all too often, and seemingly at random -- and developed complex calibration methods and maintenance routines just to keep them functioning and the cars drivable." "So, when he reached the end of his rope, he invented a more robust technology -- what he calls the 'most powerful micromachine ever made.'" "Aguilar and his team at startup Omnitron Sensors developed new micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) technology that he claims can produce more force per unit area than any other." Allegedly replacing conventional lidar with this MEMS technology, it will be more robust to road vibrations, thermal cycles, and rain.

"New research by LayerX shows how a single weaponized URL, without any malicious page content, is enough to let an attacker steal any sensitive data that has been exposed in Perplexity's Comet AI browser." "For example, if the user asked Comet to rewrite an email or schedule an appointment, the email content and meeting metadata can be exfiltrated to the attacker." "An attacker only needs to get a user to open a crafted link, which can be sent via email, an extension, or a malicious site, and sensitive Comet data can be exposed, extracted, and exfiltrated." It's only been days since I found out Perplexity's Comet AI browser exists. The Comet browser is supposed to turn your browser into an AI agent that can take actions on the internet on your behalf.

The claim is being made that the government of the Caribbean island of Anguilla now gets 47% of its income from registrations of .ai domains. Honorable mention in the comments section: .io (Indian Ocean), .fm (Federated States of Micronesia), and .tk (Tokelau).

The claim is being made that at JPMorgan, the shift to agentic AI "favors those who work directly with clients -- a private banker with a roster of rich investors, traders who cater to hedge fund and pension managers, or investment bankers with relationships with Fortune 500 CEOs, for instance." "Those at risk of having to find new roles include operations and support staff who mainly deal in rote processes like setting up accounts, fraud detection or settling trades."

"AOL's dial-up internet service is shutting down Tuesday, ending one of the web's first mainstream access points." By "Tuesday", they mean September 30th, so it's already shut down by the time you read this. End of an era.

According to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll, more US adults agree with the statement, "Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track." For self-identified Democrats, between March of 2024 and September of 2025, the percent that agree went from 12% to 28%. For self-identified Republicans, the percent that agree went from 28% to 31%. For self-identified independents, the percent that agree went from 18% to 25%. Overall, for all US adults, the percent that agree went from 20% to 30%. (PBS said 19, NPR said 20. The Marist survey results document said 6% strongly agree + 13% agree, which, if I am capable of doing arithmetic, is 19%.) The poll was conducted September 22nd through September 26th, 2025, which is after the high-profile assassination of Charlie Kirk.

ImageTextEdit lets you "edit text in images with AI magic." Now whenever you see people with signs (protesters, for example), you won't be able to trust that the signs actually say what they look like they say. Not that you could trust images before, but thanks to this you can trust them even less. ;)

"Orbiting the Hénon Attractor." This is from 2022 but I just encountered it today. It is a system of equations that generates fractal images, but these, unlike looking like a Mandelbrot or Julia set or somesuch, remind me of the rings of Saturn or the cloud formations of Jupiter or Saturn.

xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, is making an alternative to Wikipedia called Grokipedia.

An aircraft that can reduce fuel burn by over 60% by using "laminar-flow aerodynamics" (as well as other technologies like "precision all-carbon-fiber composites") has been produced, or so it is claimed, by an aerospace startup company, Otto Aerospace, which announced its first fleet customer will be Flexjet, although deliveries won't begin until 2030.

"Tilly Norwood is an AI-generated actor whose creator claims she may soon be represented by talent agents." Alrighty then. I watched the AI-generated comedy sketch, AI Commissioner ... uh, comedy? It was a sketch. Is Hollywood getting disrupted? What do you say?

"A study involving more than nine million pregnancies reported that children whose mothers had gestational diabetes during pregnancy had a higher chance of developing attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism than did children whose mothers didn't have the condition." "The study, presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes in Vienna, is under review at a peer-reviewed journal. It is not the first to link gestational diabetes to neurodevelopmental disorders in children, but it is one of the largest. Researchers pooled results from 48 studies across 20 countries, finding that children born to people with gestational diabetes had lower IQ scores, a 36% higher risk of ADHD and a 56% higher risk of autism spectrum disorders. Estimates suggest the prevalence of autism in the general population is one in 127 people and 3-10% of children and teenagers have ADHD." "The latest results mirror those of another meta-analysis, published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal in June, which included 56 million mother-child pairs and found that all types of diabetes in pregnancy, including type 1, type 2 and gestational diabetes, increase the risk of the baby developing ADHD and autism. But none of these studies has been able to show that diabetes during pregnancy causes these conditions." Note: Not acetaminophen (paracetamol).

Setsum is an order agnostic, additive, subtractive checksum. (An algorithmic curiosity for you.) At first that sounded impossible, but it's actually simple when you look under the hood. It takes a traditional cryptographic hash function, breaks the output into fixed-size integers (32-bit integers, for example), and then adds or subtracts those integers modulo a prime number. (They give an example here with 29 used as the prime number, but the largest prime number that fits in a 32-bit integer is 4,294,967,291.) Order doesn't matter, you can remove items, and you can combine setsums, but "setsum can tell you if states diverged, but not where. To narrow things down, you can split your data into smaller chunks and compare those. Build this into a hierarchical structure and you're basically back to something like a Merkle tree." "You can remove items that never existed. This might or might not be a problem depending on your use case. Given that you're only maintaining 256 bits of state, it's a reasonable tradeoff." "There's no history tracking. You can't tell when or how states diverged, just that they did."

A variant of the infamous Petya/NotPetya ransomeware virus has been discovered that is capable of bypassing UEFI Secure Boot on outdated systems. Petya in 2016 encrypted the hard drives of Windows (NTFS) computers and demanded Bitcoin payment. In 2017, a variant was made that targeted a Ukrainian tax filing program. It infected Ukrainian banks, electricity companies, and all kinds of Ukrainian companies before it escaped to the rest of the world. It pretended to demand payment but actually just wiped the hard disks; there was no way to pay and actually get the data back. It is thought to have been created by the Russian GRU specifically to cyberattack Ukraine. It was named NotPetya to distinguish it from the original Petya. The new variant is being called HybridPetya. It exploits a vulnerability in old versions of UEFI Secure Boot. UEFI stands for "Unified Extensible Firmware Interface" and the "Secure Boot" portion of the specification specifies a procedure for digitally signing the operating system (or more specifically, the OS boot loader), and not allowing the computer to boot up if the digital signature check fails.