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«Интеграция с телефонией» — фраза, за которой может стоять что угодно. От «раз в сутки подтягиваем список звонков» до «менеджер разговаривает с клиентом во вкладке браузера, а карточка клиента открылась сама, ещё до того как он сказал „алло“».

Мы делаем FARA CRM и прошли этот путь целиком: сначала перенесли рабочий модуль Asterisk, потом привели к одному контракту облачные АТС, потом сделали трубку прямо в браузере — а под конец обнаружили, что без собственного TURN-релея половина этой красоты «то соединяется, то нет». И добавили релей в поставку.

В статье — три вещи:

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

In a disrupted job market people are turning to heritage crafts such as bookbinding, metalwork and boatbuilding

It’s a bleak moment for young people entering the workforce for the first time. For decades, a university degree seemed to promise a stable career – but entry-level white-collar jobs across almost all sectors are being disrupted by AI. Budding accountants, software engineers and junior lawyers increasingly find themselves displaced by cheap automation.

Even creative fields are struggling against AI tech that can produce artwork, lengthy prose or complex design briefs in seconds.

Какое-то время назад я выкладывал статью на Хабр про свое obsidian хранилище.

Я получил хороший фидбэк и некоторые идеи. Также я понял, что довольно большая часть моего obsidian нуждается в оптимизации и структуризации. В итоге нашел свободный выходной, чтобы немного перестроить хранилище. Я все это сделал и тут расскажу, как теперь выглядит мой obsidian.

Кроме простой структуризации и удаления лишнего, я также провел некоторые махинации над кодом dataviewjs своей библиотеки книг и доделал свою домашнюю страницу, добавив интеграцию со своей основной библиотекой и поработав на css составляющей. В общем-то были еще некоторые изменения, но об этом всем будет далее.

Дизайн-токены — источник истины для визуальных свойств вашей дизайн-системы: цвета, типографика, отступы и так далее. Вместо того чтобы задавать основной цвет отдельно в CSS-стилях и отдельно в дизайне, вы задаёте его один раз в Figma и распространяете оттуда.

13 сентября — День программиста. Специально для всех хабравчан мы в агентстве Найт Стрит разработали новый выездной формат квест-комнаты, который можно провести в большой переговорной вашего офиса.

Когда стационарные квест-комнаты были на пике популярности, мы придумали способ сделать их мобильными. «Начинку» оставили прежней: загадки и задания, декорации и персонажи, сценарий и взаимодействие со всем, что вокруг.

Ко Дню программиста для HR-специалистов и внутрикомов IT-компаний мы подготовили выездную квест-комнату «Комната Анонима».

Привет, Хабр! Обычно материалы о разработке агентов посвящены успешному успеху: «Мы выбрали лучшую модель, собрали агента, подключили инструменты — и все заработало». Но недавно мне попался отчет о создании ИИ-агента Shippy, где авторы честно рассказали о сложностях проекта и ограничении технологии ИИ. Предлагаю разобрать, как же удалось их преодолеть.

Спойлер: главная проблема даже не в том, что модель плохо работает с API, файлами или последовательностями действий, а в том, что от нее требовали поведения, для которого вероятностная модель плохо подходит: помнить множество правил, надежно выполнять детерминированные операции и самостоятельно контролировать корректность собственных действий. Как только эту строгую часть выделили в отдельный слой, дело пошло на лад.

Проблема общего знания. Часть 1

Задача о дне рождения Шерил

Несколько лет назад эта логическая задача с Сингапурской математической олимпиады стала невероятно популярной в интернете и поставила в тупик миллионы людей по всему миру. Сможем ли мы ее решить? Вот условие:

Альберт и Бернард дружат с Шерил и хотят узнать, когда у нее день рождения. Шерил дает им список из 10 возможных дат:

15 мая, 17 июня, 14 июля, 14 августа

16 мая, 18 июня, 16 июля, 15 августа

19 мая, 17 августа

Затем Шерил по отдельности сообщает Альберту месяц своего рождения, а Бернарду - число. После этого происходит следующий разговор.

Альберт: Я не знаю, когда у Шерил день рождения, но знаю, что Бернард тоже этого не знает.

Бернард: Сначала я не знал, когда у Шерил день рождения, но теперь знаю.

Альберт: Тогда теперь и я знаю, когда у Шерил день рождения.

Когда у Шерил день рождения? Попробуйте решить задачу самостоятельно, прежде чем читать дальше. Десятки тысяч людей в интернете уже справились с ней, и я уверен, что, хорошенько поразмыслив, вы тоже сможете ее решить. Уделите ей достаточно времени и внимания - задача того стоит.

Ratko Mladic was one of the most notorious figures of a war that killed over 100,000 people in the 1990s. He commanded his troops to "scorch the brains" of the Bosnian Muslims and boasted of being a "Serbian God."

(Image credit: Peter Dejong)

Вспомните себя в те времена, когда вы только знакомились с информационными технологиями. Что вы чувствовали, начиная работать с XML, JSON, TOML, YAML и другими языками разметки?

Лично мне поначалу было крайне сложно работать с HTML, особенно без подсветки. Позже пришлось разбираться с кавычками и скобками JSON, которые виделись мне сущим кошмаром. Впоследствии я осознал гениальность этих языков, но осадочек остался. Поэтому время от времени я возвращался к мысли о создании понятной для человека языка Универсальной Нотации Объектов. И получилось. Познакомьтесь, пожалуйста, это UNO — и ваше участие в его развитии будет весьма полезно.

Как появился UNO

Однажды мне потребовалось завести небольшие структурированные описания некоторых сущностей в обычных текстовых файликах. Предполагалось, что их будут заполнять и обычные люди, не знакомые с IT. Что ставило под сомнение выполнимость задачи. Сдаваться? Да ни в коем случае, вызов принят. Тем более, задача воспринималась как тренировка мышления.

This week’s settlement without liability was pragmatic, but it doesn’t change the inevitability of further lawsuits around the world

Not many people would count paying $18bn they didn’t expect to when they woke up that morning as a victory. Yet for Meta, the owners of Facebook and Instagram, the agreement with 52 US attorneys general to settle claims that it designed its products to be addictive to children, and misled people about their safety, could be described as a win of sorts.

Meta denies wrongdoing, and the amount it plans to pay will be spread over a decade. Some of it is contingent on other big tech firms not named in its case coughing up too. The cash is chump change for Meta, which made around $60bn in profit last year. More damaging to the tech giant in the long run could be the agreement to unwind some of the mechanics it has spent two decades perfecting to keep us on its platforms.

Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World’s Favourite App

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Привет, Хабр!

Мой сервер, как и любой другой регулярно получает свою порцию фонового мусора. Сканеры, переборщики .env, искатели чужих веб-шеллов, вялые флуды. Обычно на это не смотришь: защита ест, логи скучные. Но в этот раз первая же строчка лога не сошлась сама с собой, и разбор в итоге вывел не на «очередной кривой флудер», а на структурный сдвиг, который прямо сейчас тихо ломает целый класс сетевого софта — от middlebox'ов до анализаторов трафика.

Bag, camera and pipe belonging to 86-year-old are latest relics uncovered as glaciers melt due to global heating

An 86-year-old mountaineer has been reunited with his backpack and climbing equipment after the kit emerged from a melting glacier in Austria – more than 60 years after he was forced to leave them there.

Items including an ice axe, camera and a pipe dating from the 1950s or 1960s were discovered on the Sulztalferner glacier in Austria’s Tyrol region, at an altitude of 2,955 metres (9,700ft) above sea level, by a hiker in July.

Affordability is the top political problem of the moment, and lawmakers in both parties have increasingly blamed large investors for buying up housing, hospitals, and other staples families can’t do without, while jacking up prices and degrading quality. 

Earlier this year, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), who has backed bills on both fronts, turned his attention to childcare. The ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee sent sweeping document requests to KinderCare Learning Companies and Learning Care Group, the two largest private-equity-owned childcare companies in the country, seeking information like board minutes, subsidy totals, staffing ratios, dividend records, and the investment memos the firms wrote when they bought in. Private equity, Merkley said in announcing the requests, has increasingly prioritized “investor profits over the well-being of the families and communities that depend on these services.”

The federal inquiry follows several years of national childcare advocacy groups warning that private equity, an industry known for acquiring businesses for quick-turnaround sales, should be kept far away from kids.

In 2022, Elliot Haspel, a progressive childcare expert, wrote in the New Republic that private-equity owned childcare chains “ultimately answer to investors or shareholders first, parents second.” Citing their record in nursing homes, where acquisitions have been associated with declines in quality, Haspel wrote that there’s “little reason to think that early care and education would be magically exempt from these sideways influences.” In 2024 the Open Markets Institute, the National Women’s Law Center, and Community Change put out a report contending that private equity-owned centers would not only seek to soak up public funding, but stall reforms limiting their reach long enough to capture local market share, until they could argue they’d become too embedded to remove without harming families. 

Since then, lawmakers in at least five states — Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania — have introduced or passed bills that write ownership structure into childcare policy, cap what large for-profit chains can draw from state grants, or attach strings to public dollars that apply to those providers alone. The coalition of national groups published model state legislation of its own this past February, built partly on those state experiments. 

But a forthcoming paper reviewed by Vox from two leading national researchers focused on the economics of childcare — Jessica Brown at the University of South Carolina and Chris Herbst of Arizona State University — complicates the case that has been building against the private-equity owned centers. In the country’s first systematic, descriptive look at how far private equity has actually spread through American childcare, the scholars found no smoking guns. 

Private equity is not sweeping the childcare sector, the researchers report. Its share of the childcare workforce stopped growing around 2010 and has hovered near 10 percent ever since. It isn’t everywhere, either — three-quarters of private-equity childcare centers sit in just 5 percent of US counties, clustered around Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver, Atlanta, and northern Virginia. Nor do the centers look uniformly distressed. They have been operating for 18 years on average, longer than other chains — and between 2021 and 2024, while non-private-equity providers cut staff, these programs added workers. 

“Given what we see,” Brown told me, “private equity is not the reason that childcare is unaffordable.” 

Herbst agreed: “You know, we jokingly at one point said we’re gonna call our paper, ‘Much Ado About Nothing.’” 

This is not to say the researchers have no further questions. Their work explores the recent past, but their findings are not causal, so they couldn’t say specifically what happened when private equity took the centers over. And their data also couldn’t confirm what the chains pay their teachers, or what benefits they offer. Critics have guessed both ways — that they squeeze wages for profit, or that their size allows them to pay more than a small provider could offer and muscle out competitors. 

An important question is what actually separates private equity-owned chains from other large childcare companies. Herbst and Brown found that on price, private-equity chains operate not so differently from large competitors that aren’t investor-owned. They are less likely to take public subsidies (70 percent do) than other large chains (78 percent), but are more likely to hold their state’s top quality rating. Large chains, private-equity-owned or not, tend to locate in wealthier areas with more college-educated families. Private-equity providers, though, seem distinctly drawn to states with looser staffing rules and to counties with the tightest childcare markets in the country.

If anything in the findings gives Herbst pause, it’s the geography. “It may not be that they are rendering low-quality care,” he said. “They may be rendering very high-quality care, but inaccessible to a large number of families because of where they are doing business.”

How this study came to be

Despite the amount of national attention, very little research has existed on private equity and childcare up to this point. 

“People were sort of copying and pasting evidence from these other domains like nursing homes and hospitals, extrapolating results from these other sectors to childcare, and we were skeptical about this,” Herbst said.

While they were gathering information, new international evidence did come out — a working paper on Dutch childcare, which found that private-equity centers charged more and had fewer regulatory violations overall, but more staffing-related violations. The Netherlands sets its childcare rules nationally, though, which makes the findings harder to apply in the US, where staffing ratios and teacher qualifications are set state by state.

Nobody had done a deep US analysis before, largely because it’s expensive. With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Brown and Herbst had to stitch together at least seven sources, including two proprietary databases costly enough to be out of reach for most researchers even with a grant — one tracking every business in the country year by year since 1997, the other tracking private equity deals. Then they merged all of it against state licensing records, accreditation files, and an original survey they fielded themselves in three states.

“It took an extraordinary amount of resources — both monetary and labor — to put our datasets together,” Herbst said. The lack of quality national data on childcare providers broadly has been a major barrier for researchers, and leaves the terms of the debate often set by interest groups. No federal survey tracks what providers charge, and most states don’t collect it either. Brown and Herbst could compare prices in only two states, the ones that require providers to report them as a condition of licensing. 

Why is private equity interested in childcare?

One of the main questions looming over the conversation is that, broadly speaking, childcare is a low-margin business — so why is private equity involved at all?

“My answer right now is they’re not interested in childcare writ large,” said Herbst. “They’re interested in childcare in very select communities.” 

The classic private-equity playbook is to buy a company, raise its value through expansion, consolidation, or cost-cutting, and sell within three to seven years. This is the model that ran through Toys ‘R’ Us, Payless, and a long line of local newspapers, and helped earn the industry a reputation for loading businesses with unmanageable debt they couldn’t carry. 

But not every private-equity strategy is a short-term flip. Over the past decade Blackstone, KKR, and Carlyle have all raised long-hold funds designed to keep companies for 15 years or more. It’s a small slice of the industry, but both childcare companies now under Senate scrutiny fit that longer pattern, with Partners Group having held KinderCare since 2015 and still controlling roughly 69 percent of it after an IPO, and American Securities having owned Learning Care Group since 2014.

A representative from KinderCare did not return a request for comment, but in an interview, Brian Gutman, the senior vice president of public policy at Learning Care Group, told me that yes, their investors want to see a profit and “be a sustainable company.” Something like childcare, he said, is “a long-term play, not a short-term play” because the costs that matter most can’t be recovered inside a short window. Refurnishing a single school might run $100,000 to $300,000, and a firm looking to exit in three years would have to push that into tuition, which wouldn’t be feasible. He put the company’s reinvestment at more than $1 billion dollars.

Merkley’s letter tells a different side of that story. In 2018 Learning Care Group borrowed to pay its owners at least $636 million, and now carries roughly $5.50 in debt for every dollar it earns. In other words, the money went out the door to the owners, but the loan stayed on the company’s books, and the interest is serviced out of the same tuition that pays teachers.

Asked how that squared with the long-term picture he described, Gutman did not address the 2018 payout or the debt load. He said that under American Securities’ ownership Learning Care has spent more than $1 billion on capital expenditures and maintenance — building upgrades, safety systems, classroom technology, not counting acquisitions — and that the company’s average wage growth has outpaced its own tuition increases, inflation, and national wage growth in each of the past three fiscal years.

What private capital buys, he says, is scale. The clearest example is cameras: Before the pandemic, Learning Care put livestreaming cameras in classrooms near military bases so deployed parents could watch their kids during the day. When Covid hit and parents couldn’t come inside, the company put one in every classroom across the chain, meaning tens of thousands of cameras. It’s the kind of investment he said families appreciate and an operator with two or three buildings can’t afford. Access to capital, he argued, is what made it possible.

The right target?

I reached out to Merkley’s office to learn more about their federal investigation and a staffer told me that it had been prompted by the number of concerning stories his team had been seeing in the media. KinderCare is also headquartered in Merkley’s home state of Oregon, though they said their inquiry wasn’t driven by complaints from his local constituents specifically.

The staffer said they hope to get their report out by the end of the year, but acknowledged that “a lot of the [companies]’ responses have been lackluster” so far. “Legislation is definitely something my boss is thinking about,” they added, but said they are waiting to hash out details until their probe is finalized. 

Gutman said Learning Care responded to Merkley’s request, but sees the focus on private equity as a bit of a scapegoat, or red herring. The company isn’t opposed to new regulation, he said, including more transparency about investors, decision-making, and wages. His objection is to rules that sort providers by who owns them. “Where there’s a need for enhanced regulation,” he said, “that’s a need for the sector, not a need for a couple of actors within the sector.”

He said that plenty of large childcare operators, like family-owned regional chains and big nonprofits, aren’t private-equity backed, and that ownership structure doesn’t reliably predict behavior. He cited a venture-capital-backed Montessori chain in Colorado that closed its five locations abruptly. Because the bills moving through statehouses key on private equity ownership specifically, a company like that one wouldn’t trigger regulation.

Haspel said he’s fine with legislation that targets large for-profit chains more broadly, but emphasized that the focus on institutional investors will only become more important as the conversation around universal childcare picks up momentum in the United States. “I don’t think the focus is a red herring…[private equity] presents some real threats potentially if you have bad actors that are attracted by the increased public funding,” he said. He pointed to England, where the competition regulator just launched an investigation last month to examine whether private-equity ownership is serving families or driving up childcare costs. Provisional findings are due early next year. 

Gutman said Learning Care Group will fight being cut out of public programs. Some of the state proposals would restrict which providers can access grants or participate in state pre-K, and Gutman argued that in much of the country there isn’t a backup. About 85 percent of the company’s families live within a 10-minute drive of their center, he said. “If we’re the only game in town, and we can’t access a grant program that helps us pay teachers better, I’m not sure who that serves,” Gutman said.

Brown and Herbst’s own immediate recommendation is more public information. More states could collect prices at licensing, they argue, and make wage and staff turnover data easier for researchers to find which in turn would help generate more targeted policy fixes. “I think in some ways people are trying to look for an easy solution,” Brown said, “but the thing is there is no easy solution in childcare.”

This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

Update, August 27, 11 am ET: This article was originally published on August 27 and has been updated to include more details about the study funders.

From quiet acts of generosity and life-changing gigs to singing for a professional puppeteer, Dolly Parton has had a profound impact on readers’ lives
• Photo gallery: fans pay tribute to Dolly Parton

I had the opportunity to meet her when I volunteered to work the Country Music Awards in the late 70s. Me and three other kids had Dolly all to ourselves for about 20 minutes. I remember with disbelief how she took several unhurried minutes with each of us and gave us her undivided attention for that time. She had no reason to do this. She was just as genuine as they come. Her philanthropy was exceptional. Her talent speaks for itself. I miss her already. Larry Lipman, Tennessee

Earth’s shadow will appear to be a reddish ‘blood moon’ due to the way sunlight is scattered by the atmosphere

A near total lunar eclipse will be visible across large swathes of North and South America on Thursday night with millions of people expected to be able to see one of nature’s marvels.

Lunar eclipses occur when Earth moves between the sun and the moon and its shadow is cast on to the lunar surface. In Thursday night’s event 96% of the moon will be darkened by the Earth’s shadow at its peak moment.

Полгода назад я решил не кастомизировать очередной Armbian под конкретную плату, а собрать полноценную ОС: свой build-движок уровня Cargo, свою оболочку на QML поверх вложенного Wayland-композитора — и универсальность как главную ставку: одна система для одноплатников, планшетов и ПК. Первая плата — Orange Pi Zero 3W.

В статье — архитектура, где различия между устройствами живут в данных, а не в коде движка; реальный прогон сборки образа с точными цифрами по каждой из 14 стадий; и то, что обычно не показывают в анонсах — три production-краша с разобранными причинами (SIGSEGV в движке QML, AppArmor против snap-песочницы, macOS tar, портящий Wayland-модуль) и три находки первой живой загрузки на настоящем железе.

Регулярно слышу этот вопрос в разных формулировках. Индикатор сети мигает, когда ничего не открыто. Антивирус молчит, но кажется, что молчит зря. Или человек увидел в диспетчере задач незнакомое имя процесса и теперь не знает, что с этим делать.

Ответ на такой вопрос получается за десять минут стандартными средствами системы, без специальных программ и без переустановки. Показываю порядок действий и то, как отличать нормальное от ненормального — потому что вторая часть обычно оказывается сложнее первой.

Недавно на Хабре был выложен перевод большого интервью Маска о роботах и ИИ, которое он дал The Economist.

Его прогноз на 2036 год можно уложить в три строки: ИИ превзойдёт суммарный человеческий интеллект, армии человекоподобных роботов начнут производить товары и услуги в изобилии, а деньги потеряют значение.

Когда я читал его, меня не покидало ощущение того, что он многое не договаривает и избегает некоторых важнейших тем. Давайте же разберёмся в том, где он не прав.

Gold collection known as Treasure of Villena, worth at least €1.7m, is target of ‘very well planned’ raid

Thieves in Spain have raided the Treasure of Villena – a stunning collection of bronze age gold artefacts that has been described as the most important prehistoric trove in Europe – in the latest high-profile smash-and-grab heist on the continent.

The raid on Thursday morning of the 66 mostly gold objects in the Spanish town of Villena lasted just minutes, officials said.