Technology

There’s been a Russian youth uprising, with tens of thousands of kids writing to say they want to emigrate because Roblox has been blocked.

Paywall Bypass Link: https://archive.is/3G4fp

Grok has repeatedly misidentified video of the Bondi Beach shooting and the hero who disarmed a gunman.

“the medium is silica crystal, similar to optical cable, it’s highly durable. It’s also capacious: The technology can store up to 360 TB of data on a 5-inch glass platter.”

for your enjoyment

One of the issues with “age verification” is that an effect of the suggested technologies is that they ultimatively take control of your computer. In the suggested form, they require elements that are not controlled by you, the user. It is like replacing the lock to your home’s main door, for which YOU (and only you) have the keys, with an electronic, remotely controlled lock, controlled by goverments, which can lock out at any time.

Thousands of contracts and documents outline the contours of DHS’s surveillance capabilities: geolocation, facial recognition, DNA testing, eye scans, spyware, licence plate cameras, credit reports and more. AI tools cross-reference datasets, while mobile apps give field agents information at their fingertips.

Over the past four years, I’ve significantly reduced my social media footprint. There are countless reasons for this, all of which are beyond the scope of this article, but the point I want to make is this: despite my growing apathy and downright hostility towards social platforms, I’ve found YouTube to be an oasis of sorts.

In a small room in San Diego last week, a man in a black leather jacket explained to me how to save the world from destruction by AI. Max Tegmark, a notable figure in the AI-safety movement, believes that “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, could precipitate the end of human life. I was in town for NeurIPS, one of the largest AI-research conferences, and Tegmark had invited me, along with five other journalists, to a briefing on an AI-safety index that he would release the next day. No company scored better than a C+.

It’s wild just how much they’re trying to shove AI down our throats.

A new analysis using twelve months of COTSI data, published in the journal Science, shows that verifying fake accounts for use in the US and UK is almost as cheap as in Russia, while Japan and Australia have high prices due to SIM costs and photo ID rules.  

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255335

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/13181

[…]How have the copywriters been faring, in a world awash in cheap AI text generators and wracked with AI adoption mania in executive circles? As always, we turn to the workers themselves. And once again, the stories they have to tell are unhappy ones. These are accounts of gutted departments, dried up work, lost jobs, and closed businesses. I’ve heard from copywriters who now fear losing their apartments, one who turned to sex work, and others, who, to their chagrin, have been forced to use AI themselves.

Companies tend to be rather picky about who gets to poke around inside their products. Manufacturers sometimes even take steps that prevent consumers from repairing their device when it breaks, or modifying it with third-party products.

Author Thread- Follow Up

Self-hosting anything that is deemed “content” openly on the web in 2025 is a battle of attrition between you and forces who are able to buy tens of thousands of proxies to ruin your service for data they can resell.

Dozens of government websites have fallen victim to a PDF-based SEO scam, while others have been hijacked to sell sex toys.

Doordash announcement.

Quilter, which has raised more than $40 million from investors including Benchmark, Index Ventures, and Coatue, used its physics-driven AI to automate the design of a two-board computer system that booted successfully on its first attempt, requiring no costly revisions. The project, internally dubbed “Project Speedrun,” required just 38.5 hours of human labor compared to the 428 hours that professional PCB designers quoted for the same task.

The first thing I saw this morning when I opened X was an AI-generated trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom stood in a shapeless void alongside Captain America and Reed Richards. It was obvious slop but it was also close in tone and feel of the last five years of Disney’s Marvel movies. As media empires consolidate, nostalgia intensifies, and AI tools spread, Disney’s blockbusters feel more like an excuse to slam recognizable characters together in a contextless morass.

Reddit has filed a High Court challenge alleging that Australia’s social media restrictions are being applied to the company inaccurately.

Brave has introduced a new AI browsing feature that leverages Leo, its privacy-respecting AI assistant, to perform automated tasks for the user.

OpenAI.