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Zurich University's Secret AI Experiment on r/changemyview Sparks Outrage

2025-04-27

A four-month-long, undisclosed AI experiment conducted by the University of Zurich on the popular subreddit r/changemyview has sparked controversy. Researchers used dozens of AI-generated accounts to post comments designed to influence users' opinions, violating the subreddit's rules. The experiment employed fabricated personal anecdotes to bolster arguments, leading to accusations of manipulation. While the researchers claim the study holds significant social importance, moderators argue the non-consensual psychological manipulation is unacceptable. The incident highlights the ethical concerns surrounding AI and the importance of informed consent.

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(simonwillison.net)
AI online experiment opinion manipulation

Pipe Organs: A Giant Box of Whistles

2025-04-27
Pipe Organs: A Giant Box of Whistles

At its core, a pipe organ is a giant box of whistles. Each pipe sits atop a hollow windchest filled with compressed air from bellows or a blower. Each stop on the console represents a set of pipes (a rank) of a particular tone color, with a different pipe for every note. Pulling a stop activates a slider under those pipes, making them sound-sources. The windchest also has valves (pallets) mechanically linked to the keyboard. These control airflow; even with a stop engaged, no sound occurs until a key activates its pallet, releasing compressed air into the pipe. This creates the sound. Every pipe organ is unique, custom-built to the buyer's specifications, considering sound types, room size, aesthetics, and budget.

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(www.pipedreams.org)
Misc musical instrument acoustics

AI Code Generation: More Hype Than Substance?

2025-04-27

This article critiques the limitations of AI code generation tools. The author argues that while AI-generated code might look plausible, it's fraught with hidden dangers. AI simply predicts patterns in language to generate code, lacking true engineering thinking and understanding of runtime environments. This results in code that is hard to understand, debug, and reuse. In contrast, modular programming, referencing excellent open-source projects and documentation, are more helpful in writing high-quality code. Ultimately, the author points out that the core of software engineering lies in thinking and understanding, not just writing code.

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(www.doliver.org)
Development

iOS Zero-Day: Denial-of-Service via Darwin Notifications

2025-04-27

A security researcher discovered a critical iOS vulnerability allowing malicious apps to execute denial-of-service attacks, even causing system reboots, by sending Darwin notifications. Exploiting a lack of sender verification in the Darwin notification mechanism, the researcher created an app, "VeryEvilNotify," triggering a "Restore in Progress" loop, forcing restarts. Apple patched this in iOS 18.3 by introducing restricted entitlements for sensitive notifications.

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(rambo.codes)
Development denial-of-service

The Real Value of a Business Founder

2025-04-27

Many non-technical founders struggle to find technical co-founders. This article argues it's not a lack of engineers, but an overvaluation of the business founder's contribution. They often overestimate the importance of their idea and underestimate the difficulty of technical execution. The author suggests business founders should focus on building and expanding their customer network and demonstrating market demand, such as securing a large pre-order list or letters of intent. By validating market demand, rather than relying on the product itself, they can attract technical co-founders and increase their chances of success.

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(verdikapuku.com)
Startup Technical Co-founder

FPU Emulation Revival for NetBSD's i486SX

2025-04-27
FPU Emulation Revival for NetBSD's i486SX

This retro-computing project brings back x87 Floating-Point Unit (FPU) emulation to NetBSD's kernel, specifically for legacy 486SX processors lacking hardware FPUs. It reinstates the `MATH_EMULATE` option in NetBSD 10.x and later, reversing changes that removed this functionality. While many x87 instructions are emulated, some like `fyl2xp1`, `fxtract`, `fpatan`, and `fsqrt` remain unsupported. The project is a work in progress and may contain bugs; use at your own risk. Users need to compile the kernel themselves.

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(github.com)
Development FPU emulation

Yemeni Houthis' Sophisticated Air Defenses: A Growing Threat to US Drones and Aircraft

2025-04-27
Yemeni Houthis' Sophisticated Air Defenses: A Growing Threat to US Drones and Aircraft

The Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have demonstrated a surprisingly effective air defense capability, evidenced by the increasing number of downed US MQ-9 Reaper drones. While the exact scope of their arsenal remains unclear, it includes Iranian-supplied surface-to-air missiles like the enigmatic "358" loitering munition, the Barq-1/2, and repurposed Soviet air-to-air missiles such as the Thaqib series. The US response involves increased air strikes using B-2 stealth bombers, highlighting the seriousness of the threat. The significant loss of MQ-9s raises questions about the drone's vulnerability in future conflicts and the need for improved self-defense systems. The Houthis' innovative adaptation of existing technology presents a significant challenge to US military operations.

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(www.twz.com)
Tech Yemen Conflict Houthi Rebels Air Defense

arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaboration

2025-04-27
arXivLabs: Experimental Projects with Community Collaboration

arXivLabs is a framework enabling collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Individuals and organizations involved embrace arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only partners with those who share them. Have an idea to enhance the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

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(arxiv.org)
Development

OpenBSD 7.7 Installation Quickstart

2025-04-27

OpenBSD 7.7 installation varies depending on your hardware architecture. This document provides a brief overview of installation methods for different architectures (amd64, arm64, i386, etc.), including installation from CD, USB, or network. For dual-boot setups, consult the corresponding INSTALL.* files. Additionally, the document briefly touches upon the OpenBSD ports system; newcomers are encouraged to refer to the relevant documentation.

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(www.openbsd.org)
Development Installation System Administration

Internet-in-a-Box: Bringing Quality Education to Remote Areas

2025-04-27

Internet-in-a-Box is an innovative project aiming to provide high-quality educational resources to remote areas. It downloads content packs in various languages from online libraries like Kiwix, OER2Go, and Archive.org, including learning videos, radio episodes, and educational apps. Users can select resources tailored to their needs, such as learning videos from YouTube and Vimeo, and almost 40 powerful apps for teachers and students, optionally with a complete LMS like Kolibri, Moodle, Nextcloud, Sugarizer, or WordPress. This project significantly enhances access to educational resources in remote areas, bridging the digital divide.

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(internet-in-a-box.org)
Tech educational resources

Lawyer Used AI to Generate a Court Brief. It Was a Disaster.

2025-04-27
Lawyer Used AI to Generate a Court Brief. It Was a Disaster.

Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, is embroiled in legal battles due to his staunch support of Donald Trump's election lies. His lawyer, Christopher Kachouroff, is now facing disciplinary action for submitting a court brief riddled with errors – nearly thirty, including fabricated legal citations – generated by AI. Judge Nina Wang is demanding an explanation from Kachouroff and co-counsel Jennifer DeMaster, threatening disciplinary action if they fail to provide a satisfactory account of this egregious professional lapse. The incident highlights the perils of using generative AI in legal contexts and underscores the critical need for rigorous fact-checking of all legal documents.

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(gizmodo.com)
Misc

Boosting Ruby Ractor Performance: Tackling the `object_id` Bottleneck

2025-04-27

Ruby's Ractor concurrency model suffers from performance limitations due to global locks. This post dives deep into a performance bottleneck caused by the `object_id` method, stemming from historical design choices and improvements to garbage collection. By optimizing `object_id`'s implementation, storing it directly within objects instead of using a global hash table lookup, the author significantly improves Ractor performance, resulting in a two-fold speed increase in JSON benchmarks. While challenges remain, such as handling special object types, this work represents a crucial step towards making Ractors truly parallel.

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(byroot.github.io)
Development

Abuse of Copyright Takedown Notices: A Threat to Free Speech

2025-04-27

The Lumen Database reveals a massive wave of abusive copyright takedown notices, used not only against copyright infringement but also to suppress free speech and legitimate reporting. Many notices lack justification, containing false accusations targeting news articles, government information, and business disputes. Some attempt to silence dissent through legal threats, challenging platforms like Google. This raises concerns about internet freedom of speech and access to information, highlighting the dilemma faced by platforms in handling takedown requests.

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(torrentfreak.com)
Tech

Microsoft Copilot Flops: Only 20 Million Weekly Users Compared to ChatGPT's 400 Million

2025-04-27
Microsoft Copilot Flops: Only 20 Million Weekly Users Compared to ChatGPT's 400 Million

Microsoft's ambitious AI assistant, Copilot, is struggling to gain traction, boasting a mere 20 million weekly users compared to ChatGPT's staggering 400 million. Despite significant investment and integration into various applications like Office and Edge, along with premium subscriptions and dedicated hardware, Copilot's user engagement remains disappointingly low. This raises concerns about Microsoft's AI strategy, especially considering the company's high hopes for Copilot and substantial resource allocation. The underwhelming performance mirrors Intel's struggles in the AI hardware market, highlighting the intense competition and uncertain user demand in the AI landscape.

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(www.xda-developers.com)
Tech

Trump's Shifting Tariffs Weaken US Customs Enforcement

2025-04-27
Trump's Shifting Tariffs Weaken US Customs Enforcement

President Trump's fluctuating tariff policies have overwhelmed US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), significantly hindering their efforts to combat forced labor. The agency's staff, responsible for both tariff enforcement and forced labor prevention, are stretched thin, leading to a dramatic decrease in the number of reviewed shipments suspected of forced labor ties. The uncertainty surrounding tariffs also incentivizes tariff evasion, further complicating enforcement. While the administration maintains that forced labor enforcement remains a priority, the reality is that the inconsistent policies have significantly weakened US enforcement capabilities.

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(timesofsandiego.com)
Tech forced labor

Were Earth's Ancient Oceans Green?

2025-04-27
Were Earth's Ancient Oceans Green?

A new study published in Nature Geoscience challenges our understanding of Earth's oceans. Researchers suggest that billions of years ago, the oceans were green, not blue! High iron dissolution from continental rocks led to iron-rich oceans, making green light dominant underwater. Early cyanobacteria adapted by evolving pigments that absorbed green light, resulting in a green ocean. This research reveals a fascinating chapter in Earth's history and hints at the possibility of future ocean color shifts.

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(newatlas.com)
Tech Earth Science Ocean Cyanobacteria

Walmart Goes All-In on Ultra-Fast EV Charging: 5,200+ Stores to Become Charging Hubs

2025-04-27
Walmart Goes All-In on Ultra-Fast EV Charging: 5,200+ Stores to Become Charging Hubs

Walmart, the world's largest retailer, has announced a major push into ultra-fast DC fast-charging EV infrastructure, aiming to install thousands of chargers across its 5,200+ US stores by 2030. This strategic move leverages Walmart's extensive network and addresses the growing demand for convenient EV charging. Utilizing 400kW chargers from Alpitronic and ABB, supporting both NACS and CCS1 connectors, and integrated into the Walmart app, this network promises a significant impact on the US EV charging landscape, particularly benefiting apartment dwellers who lack home charging options.

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(evchargingstations.com)
Tech EV charging fast charging infrastructure

DeepMind Workers Seek Unionization Over AI Ethics Concerns

2025-04-27
DeepMind Workers Seek Unionization Over AI Ethics Concerns

Around 300 London-based Google DeepMind employees are reportedly seeking to unionize with the Communication Workers Union, citing concerns over Google's removal of a pledge against using AI for weapons or surveillance, and its work with the Israeli military, including a $1.2 billion cloud contract. Employees feel “duped” by these actions, with at least five having resigned. This unionization effort highlights growing ethical concerns among tech workers.

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(techcrunch.com)
Tech

AI Productivity Explosion: Are We Ready for the Decision Bottleneck?

2025-04-27
AI Productivity Explosion: Are We Ready for the Decision Bottleneck?

AI is exponentially scaling the production side of knowledge work, but our decision-making tools and rituals remain stuck in the past. This creates bottlenecks in everything from code reviews to roadmapping. AI excels at production, but humans are left with a massive backlog of tasks to evaluate, approve, or modify. This leads to decreased job satisfaction and, more importantly, existing tools can't handle the surge in work generated by AI. We need to redesign workflows, focusing on high-velocity decision-making rather than production, or we'll drown in AI-generated tasks.

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(worksonmymachine.substack.com)
AI Decision Making

snapDOM: Blazing Fast, High-Fidelity DOM Capture

2025-04-27
snapDOM: Blazing Fast, High-Fidelity DOM Capture

snapDOM is a high-fidelity DOM capture tool developed for Zumly, a framework for smooth zoom-based view transitions. It converts any HTML element into a scalable SVG image, preserving styles, fonts, backgrounds, shadow DOM, and pseudo-elements. Benchmarks show snapDOM dramatically outperforms competitors like modern-screenshot and html2canvas, especially with larger DOM structures. It's lightweight, dependency-free, and offers exports to SVG, PNG, JPG, WebP, and canvas. Ideal for capturing full-page views, modals, and complex layouts.

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(github.com)
Development DOM capture

Logchef: A Lightweight, High-Performance Log Analytics Platform

2025-04-27
Logchef: A Lightweight, High-Performance Log Analytics Platform

Logchef is a lightweight, powerful log analytics platform built on ClickHouse for high-performance log storage and querying. It runs as a single binary, offering an intuitive interface for exploring log data. Features include schema-agnostic log exploration, flexible query options (simple search and full ClickHouse SQL), high performance, and team-based access control. Deployable via a single Docker Compose command, Logchef is ideal for development teams needing a robust and scalable logging solution.

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(github.com)
Development log analytics

Context Collapse in Performance Reviews: Why Your Calibration Meetings Are Failing

2025-04-27
Context Collapse in Performance Reviews: Why Your Calibration Meetings Are Failing

This article explores the phenomenon of 'context collapse' in performance reviews, where different managers interpret the same work differently, leading to unfair assessments and potential loss of talent. It analyzes various contributing factors, including domain-specific blind spots, technology bias, visibility bias, manager advocacy, anchoring bias, inconsistent rating scales, time constraints, and differing emphasis on growth vs. impact. Solutions are proposed, such as domain-specific calibrations, cross-functional pre-reviews, engineer co-authorship of performance narratives, standardized achievement formats, dedicated recognition tracks, continuous calibration, and decoupling feedback from evaluation. Ultimately, the article calls for rethinking the performance review system entirely, aiming for a fairer, more holistic process that accurately reflects engineers' contributions and prevents the loss of valuable talent.

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(www.oldschoolburke.com)
Development talent management

The Unexpected Creativity Hack: Reading Obituaries

2025-04-27
The Unexpected Creativity Hack: Reading Obituaries

Boost your creativity by reading obituaries! This article argues that exploring the diverse lives detailed in obituaries exposes you to distant ideas, sparking associations that lead to unexpected breakthroughs. Research shows creativity thrives on connecting disparate concepts, and obituaries offer a unique source of cross-disciplinary inspiration. The author illustrates this with examples, encouraging readers to delve into the details, seek deeper connections, and unlock their creative potential. It's not just about facts, but asking 'why?' and finding distant connections to your own life.

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(thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
Misc obituaries association

Lucy Spacecraft Successfully Flies Past Asteroid Donaldjohanson

2025-04-27
Lucy Spacecraft Successfully Flies Past Asteroid Donaldjohanson

NASA's Lucy spacecraft has successfully completed a flyby of the main-belt asteroid Donaldjohanson and has phoned home confirming its good health. Closest approach occurred at 1:51 pm EDT on Sunday. The spacecraft is now transmitting collected data, a process expected to take up to a week. This data will help scientists better understand this relatively young asteroid and prepare for the mission's primary objective: observing Jupiter's Trojan asteroids starting in 2027.

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(science.nasa.gov)
Tech Lucy spacecraft

NASA's People Graph: A Graph Database Revolution in Talent Management

2025-04-27
NASA's People Graph: A Graph Database Revolution in Talent Management

NASA is revolutionizing its people analytics with a groundbreaking People Graph, leveraging graph databases and large language models (LLMs). This system overcomes the limitations of traditional relational databases by connecting employees, projects, and skills in a dynamic network. Built using Memgraph and powered by Ollama LLM for skill extraction and chatbot queries, the graph allows for real-time queries on expert discovery, project similarity, and skill gap analysis via Cypher and a chatbot interface. Currently boasting 27K nodes and 230K edges, NASA plans to scale this to over 500,000 nodes and millions of edges, transforming how they manage talent and plan for future projects.

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(memgraph.com)
Tech Knowledge Graph Talent Management

Wii Homebrew Channel Source Code Archived Due to Copyright Infringement

2025-04-27
Wii Homebrew Channel Source Code Archived Due to Copyright Infringement

The source code repository for the Wii Homebrew Channel has been archived and will no longer accept contributions. This is due to the discovery that libogc, a crucial library upon which the Homebrew Channel depends, contains significant portions of code stolen from Nintendo's SDK and the open-source RTOS RTEMS. The developers of libogc have refused to address the copyright infringement. This revelation exposes a long-standing issue of copyright violations within the Wii homebrew community, prompting reflection on ethical software development practices. The source code is now publicly released, but developers state they cannot guarantee its legality and that it has only been tested under the Dolphin emulator.

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(github.com)
Development

Your Phone Might Be Tracked: Unmasking IMSI Catchers

2025-04-27
Your Phone Might Be Tracked: Unmasking IMSI Catchers

Have you ever wondered if your phone's information is being stolen while you're on a moving train using Zoom? This article reveals a long-standing security vulnerability: IMSI catchers. They exploit flaws in GSM, UMTS, and LTE protocols to obtain users' International Mobile Subscriber Identities (IMSIs), enabling tracking and identification. While 5G's NR protocol offers improvements, vulnerabilities persist. The article details the principles and workings of active and passive IMSI catchers, explores security advancements and potential risks in 5G networks, and suggests methods to mitigate risks.

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(zetier.com)
Tech 5G security

OpenBenches' Address Conundrum: Geolocating 40,000 Benches Elegantly

2025-04-27
OpenBenches' Address Conundrum: Geolocating 40,000 Benches Elegantly

OpenBenches, a crowdsourced database of nearly 40,000 memorial benches, faces a challenge: converting latitude/longitude coordinates into human-readable addresses. Many benches lack formal addresses, residing in parks, etc. Existing geocoding APIs provide overly detailed or irrelevant information. The author explores using multiple APIs and Points of Interest (POIs) for automated address generation, but encounters issues with language localization, address formatting inconsistencies, and POI accuracy. Balancing address precision with user-friendliness and internationalization remains a key challenge.

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(shkspr.mobi)
Development geolocation address resolution
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