Daily Archives: 2025-06-18

Source: Ars Technica

Critics have long warned that Donald Trump's pro-cryptocurrency push as president, coupled with his links to his family's growing crypto empire, creates substantial conflicts of interest that must be probed.

But so far, nothing has stopped Trump's family from seemingly benefiting from the presidency while expanding their empire. And now, Trump is rushing regulation through Congress that many Democrats fear could create his biggest conflict of interest yet.

On Tuesday, the Senate passed the GENIUS Act, a bill that will regulate stablecoins in the US, establishing guardrails and consumer protections that may spur wider crypto adoption nationwide. Unlike more volatile forms of cryptocurrency—like Trump's controversial memecoin—stablecoins' value can be pegged to the US dollar. The crypto industry is hoping the House of Representatives will quickly send the bill to Trump's desk, which Trump has demanded happen by August.

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Source: Ars Technica

Former Cloudflare executive John Graham-Cumming recently announced that he launched a website, lowbackgroundsteel.ai, that treats pre-AI, human-created content like a precious commodity—a time capsule of organic creative expression from a time before machines joined the conversation. "The idea is to point to sources of text, images and video that were created prior to the explosion of AI-generated content," Graham-Cumming wrote on his blog last week. The reason? To preserve what made non-AI media uniquely human.

The archive name comes from a scientific phenomenon from the Cold War era. After nuclear weapons testing began in 1945, atmospheric radiation contaminated new steel production worldwide. For decades, scientists needing radiation-free metal for sensitive instruments had to salvage steel from pre-war shipwrecks. Scientists called this steel "low-background steel." Graham-Cumming sees a parallel with today's web, where AI-generated content increasingly mingles with human-created material and contaminates it.

With the advent of generative AI models like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion in 2022, it has become far more difficult for researchers to ensure that media found on the Internet was created by humans without using AI tools. ChatGPT in particular triggered an avalanche of AI-generated text across the web, forcing at least one research project to shut down entirely.

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Source: Hack a Day

For quite some time now, Marlin has been the firmware of choice for any kind of custom 3D printer, with only Klipper offering some serious competition in the open-source world. [Liam Powell] aims to introduce some more variety with the development of Prunt, a 3D printer control board and firmware stack.

Smooth motion control is Prunt’s biggest advantage: Klipper and Marlin use trapezoidal (three-phase) motion profiles, which aim for acceleration changes with physically impossible rapidity, leading to vibrations and ringing on prints. By contrast, Prunt uses a more physically realistic 31-phase motion profile. This lets the user independently adjust velocity, acceleration, jerk, snap, and crackle (the increasingly higher-order derivatives of position with respect to time) to reduce vibration and create smoother prints. To avoid sharp accelerations, Prunt can also turn corners into 15-degree Bézier curves.

The focus on smooth motion isn’t just a software feature; the Prunt control board uses hardware timers to control step generation, rather than the CPU. This avoids the timing issues which Klipper sometimes faces, and avoids slowing other parts of the program down. The board also seems to have a particular focus on avoiding electrical damage. It can detect short circuits in the heaters, thermistors, fans, and endstops, and can cut power and give the user a warning when one occurs. If the board somehow experiences a serious electrical fault, the USB port is isolated to prevent damage to the host computer. The firmware’s source is available on GitHub.

If you’re more interested in well-established programs, we’ve given a quick introduction to Klipper in the past. We’ve also seen people develop their own firmware for the Bambu Lab X1.