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Google Hit with $425M Verdict for Privacy Violations

2025-09-06

Google Hit with $425M Verdict for Privacy Violations

A federal jury has ordered Google to pay $425.7 million for illegally tracking users' smartphones over nearly a decade. The class-action lawsuit covered approximately 98 million devices in the US, resulting in roughly $4 per device in damages. Google denies wrongdoing and plans to appeal. Plaintiffs argued Google used the collected data for targeted advertising, generating billions in profit. While significantly less than the $30 billion+ sought, the plaintiffs celebrated the verdict as a win for privacy.

(apnews.com)

Tech

5000-Year-Old Database: More Reliable Than Modern Ones?

2025-09-06

A picture of a 5000-year-old Sumerian database sparked the author's reflection on the upper limit of date storage in databases. The image shows a database from 3100 BC recording accounts of malt and barley, boasting reliability far exceeding modern databases. Tests revealed that MySQL can't store dates before 4713 BC, while PostgreSQL and SQLite can. This prompted the author to ponder how to store even older dates, such as museum artifact records, suggesting solutions like using epoch timestamps or custom systems.

(avi.im)

Development

AI Chatbots: Privacy Concerns Mirror Online Tracking, But Worse

2025-09-06

AI Chatbots: Privacy Concerns Mirror Online Tracking, But Worse

AI chatbots present even greater privacy risks than online tracking. Conversations reveal intimate details, including thought processes and communication styles, vulnerable to commercial and ideological manipulation. Unlike search engines, AI chatbots are more persuasive and can lead users into delusional spirals. While DuckDuckGo offers Duck.ai for protected conversations, the industry largely lacks privacy safeguards, with data breaches rampant. The article urges Congress to quickly legislate to protect user privacy, preventing a repeat of online tracking's history and the unchecked proliferation of AI surveillance.

(gabrielweinberg.com)

Tech privacy legislation

Listen Labs' Viral Growth Hack: A Tale of AI Collaboration and Optimization

2025-09-06

Listen Labs' Viral Growth Hack: A Tale of AI Collaboration and Optimization

Listen Labs launched a viral marketing campaign with a cryptic billboard in San Francisco, leading to a complex optimization puzzle: simulating the entrance selection of Berlin's Berghain nightclub. This puzzle attracted 30,000 engineers, unexpectedly creating a massive distributed computing experiment. The author and his AI partner, Claude, participated, progressing from simple greedy algorithms to a Lagrangian multiplier-based RBCR algorithm, achieving impressive results. However, they also experienced the failure of deep learning models, ultimately learning that in problems with clear mathematical structure, simple principled algorithms often outperform complex machine learning models. The story showcases the immense potential of AI-assisted programming and the perfect blend of human insight and AI execution.

(www.nibzard.com)

Startup viral marketing

996 Work Culture: A Debate on Efficiency vs. Well-being

2025-09-06

996 Work Culture: A Debate on Efficiency vs. Well-being

This article reflects on the prevalent "996" work culture (9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week) in the tech industry. The author uses personal experience to argue that while loving work and occasional late nights are fine, this shouldn't be the foundation of company culture. Long hours negatively impact personal life and don't guarantee efficiency, often leading to burnout and reduced productivity. The author advocates for prioritizing employee well-being and avoiding the use of "996" as a measure of success.

(lucumr.pocoo.org)

Startup

Massive Security Flaw Exposes Burger King, Popeyes, and Tim Hortons' Global Systems

2025-09-06

Massive Security Flaw Exposes Burger King, Popeyes, and Tim Hortons' Global Systems

Security researchers discovered critical vulnerabilities in the global ordering systems of Restaurant Brands International (RBI), impacting Burger King, Popeyes, and Tim Hortons. Attackers could access data from every store without authentication, including employee information, internal IDs, configuration details, and thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of customer voice recordings containing personally identifiable information (PII). The vulnerabilities stemmed from easily exploitable APIs allowing unauthorized user registration and admin access. RBI responded swiftly to patch the vulnerabilities after the report.

(bobdahacker.com)

Tech

Taming the AI Beast: A Disciplined Approach to Collaborative Software Development

2025-09-06

Taming the AI Beast: A Disciplined Approach to Collaborative Software Development

This article presents a structured methodology for collaborative AI software development, addressing common pitfalls like code bloat, architectural drift, and context dilution through systematic constraints. The four-stage process involves AI configuration, collaborative planning, systematic implementation, and data-driven iteration. Each stage incorporates systematic constraints and validation checkpoints, emphasizing empirical data over assumptions. The core strategy is decomposing large tasks into small, manageable components, querying the AI with focused, specific requests, and enforcing code quality and architectural consistency via strict guidelines (e.g., max 150 lines per file) and performance benchmarking. A tool, `project_extract.py`, aids project management. A DiscordJS bot example showcases its application.

(github.com)

Development

Massive European Paper Mill Exposed: Over 1500 Fake Research Papers Discovered

2025-09-06

Massive European Paper Mill Exposed: Over 1500 Fake Research Papers Discovered

An investigation uncovered a vast network of Ukrainian companies, potentially Europe's largest paper mill, churning out fake or low-quality research papers and selling authorships. Researchers traced over 60 suspicious email domains linked to 1517 published papers, involving over 4500 researchers from 460 universities across 46 countries. The papers exhibited hallmarks of paper mills: fabricated data, plagiarism, irrelevant citations, and peer review manipulation. While the mill claims to offer legitimate services, website wording suggests papers are produced to order or authorships are sold. This highlights the urgent need to combat academic paper mills.

(www.nature.com)

Tech fake research paper mill

Visual Look Up on Apple Silicon Macs: A Power and Energy Analysis

2025-09-06

Visual Look Up on Apple Silicon Macs: A Power and Energy Analysis

This study analyzes the power and energy consumption of a single Visual Look Up (VLU) on Apple silicon Macs using Powermetrics and LogUI. Results show that the CPU performs the vast majority of the work (93%), with the GPU and Neural Engine (ANE) contributing only 4.6% and 2.2% respectively. While the ANE contributes to performance improvements during model execution, its overall energy consumption is low. The conclusion is that VLU, despite its impressive functionality, is not particularly demanding on the hardware.

(eclecticlight.co)

Hardware Visual Look Up Power Efficiency

GitHub Copilot Backlash: Developers Fleeing to Alternatives

2025-09-06

GitHub Copilot Backlash: Developers Fleeing to Alternatives

Despite boasting 20 million users, Microsoft's GitHub Copilot AI code assistant is facing a major backlash from developers. Widespread complaints cite forced bundling, potential license violations, and questionable code quality. Numerous developers are requesting Copilot's disablement on GitHub, with many migrating to alternatives like Codeberg. Microsoft's aggressive Copilot integration and disregard for user feedback are accelerating this exodus. Developers express concerns about Copilot infringing on their rights and raising code quality and copyright issues, highlighting the importance of user experience and respecting open-source principles in AI tool deployment.

(www.theregister.com)

Development

Building LLMs from Scratch: Vectors, Matrices, and High-Dimensional Spaces

2025-09-06

Building LLMs from Scratch: Vectors, Matrices, and High-Dimensional Spaces

This article, the second in a three-part series, demystifies the workings of Large Language Models (LLMs) for technically inclined readers with limited AI expertise. Building on part 19 of a series based on Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)", it explains the use of vectors, matrices, and high-dimensional spaces (vocab space and embedding space) within LLMs. The author argues that understanding LLM inference requires only high-school level math, while training requires more advanced mathematics. The article details how vectors represent meaning in high-dimensional spaces and how matrix multiplication projects between these spaces, connecting this to linear layers in neural networks.

(www.gilesthomas.com)

AI Vectors Matrices

US-Funded International Broadcasters Under Threat

2025-09-06

US-Funded International Broadcasters Under Threat

For decades, the U.S. government has funded international broadcasters, providing news and information to authoritarian countries and countering censorship. However, a new appointee in the Trump administration is attempting to defund and dismantle these outlets, leading to legal battles. This move not only threatens the survival of these broadcasters but also allows countries like China and Russia to fill the information void with their propaganda, posing a threat to U.S. national security. The cuts also jeopardize America's efforts to combat censorship and disinformation globally.

(www.theatlantic.com)

Tech international broadcasting

Tesla's FSD: From Full Self-Driving to Advanced Driver-Assistance System

2025-09-06

Tesla's long-standing promise of unsupervised autonomous driving with its Full Self-Driving (FSD) capability remains unfulfilled. Tesla has quietly redefined FSD, downgrading it from fully autonomous driving to an "advanced driver-assistance system," no longer promising unsupervised self-driving. This shift is linked to Elon Musk's massive stock option bonus package, which hinges on the number of Tesla FSD subscribers. While seemingly tying Musk's reward to FSD delivery, the new definition allows even the current version—requiring constant driver supervision—to easily meet the criteria. This raises concerns about Tesla's misleading marketing and bait-and-switch tactics, highlighting the massive gap between its promises and the reality of its autonomous driving technology.

(electrek.co)

Tech

Optimizing UTF-8 Decoding with a Lookup Table: Branchless Approach

2025-09-06

Optimizing UTF-8 Decoding with a Lookup Table: Branchless Approach

This article explores optimizing UTF-8 decoding by using a lookup table to avoid branch prediction overhead. The author details creating a 256-byte lookup table that maps the lead byte of a UTF-8 sequence to its length. This replaces branching with simple array access, improving decoding efficiency. While adding a 256-byte memory cost, this approach can significantly boost performance in many scenarios.

(nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com)

Development Decoding Lookup Table

Sparrow: Idiomatic C++20 APIs for Apache Arrow

2025-09-06

Sparrow: Idiomatic C++20 APIs for Apache Arrow

Sparrow is a C++20 implementation of the Apache Arrow columnar format, offering idiomatic APIs and easy conversion from/to the C interface. It supports various compilers and is installable via mamba/conda. Sparrow provides flexible data initialization and access methods, enabling seamless integration with other libraries. You can easily read Arrow data structures from external libraries and convert them to Sparrow structures, and vice versa. Documentation is under development. This project is funded through a collaboration between ArcticDB, Bloomberg, and QuantStack.

(github.com)

Development

Open Source Power Plays: Rug Pulls, Forks, and the Shifting Sands of Control

2025-09-06

At the 2025 Open Source Summit Europe, Dawn Foster dissected the complex power dynamics in open-source software development. Large cloud providers often hold significant sway, potentially leveraging this power to the detriment of smaller companies. One tactic, 'rug pulls,' involves companies re-licensing software to restrict competitor profitability, often leading to 'forks' – community-driven project branches to regain control. The presentation analyzed case studies like Elasticsearch, Terraform, and Redis, comparing contributor composition changes before and after forks. The importance of neutral governance and a diverse contributor base emerged as key themes. Foster highlighted that while forking offers a means for maintainers and contributors to combat power imbalances, projects should prioritize neutral governance and broad contributor participation to mitigate the risk of rug pulls.

(lwn.net)

Development forking

Paris Fights Heatwaves with Innovative River-Based Cooling

2025-09-06

Paris Fights Heatwaves with Innovative River-Based Cooling

Facing increasingly severe summer heat waves, Paris is aggressively developing an innovative system that uses the Seine River water to cool buildings. This system transfers heat from buildings to the river water through heat exchangers, maintaining high cooling efficiency even when the river water is warm in summer, reaching up to 15 times the efficiency of conventional air conditioning in winter. However, with rising summer temperatures, the system faces new challenges. How to further improve cooling capacity while protecting the environment has become a crucial issue for Paris to address.

(www.wired.com)

Tech urban cooling

Google Kills Cloud Support for 1st and 2nd Gen Nest Thermostats: Smart Home Reliability Crisis?

2025-09-06

Google Kills Cloud Support for 1st and 2nd Gen Nest Thermostats: Smart Home Reliability Crisis?

Google's announcement to end cloud support for its 1st and 2nd generation Nest thermostats has sparked concerns among users. While the thermostats will continue to function locally, control via the Nest or Home apps, and integration with smart home platforms like Hubitat, will be lost. Many users face the prospect of replacing numerous thermostats. Alternatives suggested include locally controlled Zigbee/Z-wave thermostats or Ecobee thermostats (used with Home Assistant) for improved reliability and future compatibility. However, even newer Nest models with Matter support have limited functionality, raising questions about the long-term reliability of smart home devices and prompting a wider discussion on planned obsolescence.

(community.hubitat.com)

Hardware Cloud Dependency Nest thermostat device compatibility

Rendering the Impossible: Introducing Meschers

2025-09-06

Representing impossible objects – geometric constructions perceivable but not physically realizable – has been a challenge in computer graphics. Existing methods, like cutting or bending, disrupt geometry, hindering downstream processing. This paper introduces Meschers, a novel mesh representation based on discrete exterior calculus. Instead of 3D vertex positions, Meschers store 2D screen-space positions and per-edge depth differences, allowing representation of Escher-like impossibilities. This enables standard geometry processing operations like smoothing, heat diffusion, and geodesic distance queries, as well as inverse rendering, deforming possible shapes into impossible ones. Meschers offer new avenues for understanding human visual perception and expanding computer graphics capabilities.

(anadodik.github.io)

Development impossible objects geometry processing

Unreal Engine Startup Optimization: The 38,000 Tooltip Secret

2025-09-06

Unreal Engine Startup Optimization: The 38,000 Tooltip Secret

Slow Unreal Engine startup times? A developer discovered the engine creates a whopping 38,000 tooltips, consuming significant resources and time. Most of these tooltips are never actually displayed. A simple code change delays tooltip creation until needed, dramatically improving startup speed without impacting runtime performance. This optimization shaved off 2-5 seconds of startup time in debug builds and reduced memory usage.

(larstofus.com)

Development

Columbia University Tests AI Debate Tool, Sparks Controversy

2025-09-06

Columbia University Tests AI Debate Tool, Sparks Controversy

Columbia University is testing Sway, an AI debate program designed to facilitate more productive discussions among students on sensitive topics like abortion, racism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the tool has been used by over 3,000 students from more than 30 colleges. However, the initiative has sparked controversy within Columbia, with some arguing that it fails to address root issues, potentially obscuring political and historical contexts and even being used to censor student viewpoints. Concerns regarding data privacy and the application of AI in education have also been raised.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech

Microsoft's Free Microsoft 365 for College Students: A Generosity Boost for AI Education?

2025-09-06

Microsoft's Free Microsoft 365 for College Students: A Generosity Boost for AI Education?

Microsoft is giving away free Microsoft 365 Personal subscriptions to all US college students for a year, including access to Office apps and the Copilot AI assistant. A 50% discount follows for renewal. This generous offer, announced at the White House's AI Education Task Force meeting, is part of Microsoft's broader commitment to AI education, including $1.25 million in educator grants and free LinkedIn Learning AI courses. This move could significantly boost student productivity and AI literacy.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech

Massive Offshore Aquifer Discovered in the North Atlantic: A Potential Game Changer for Global Water Security?

2025-09-06

Massive Offshore Aquifer Discovered in the North Atlantic: A Potential Game Changer for Global Water Security?

Expedition 501, a multinational research project, has unearthed a massive freshwater aquifer under the North Atlantic seabed, potentially holding enough water to supply New York City for 800 years. Building on a serendipitous discovery in 1976, the expedition extracted tens of thousands of liters of water samples for analysis of their origin and usability. This discovery offers a potential solution to the growing global water crisis, but also raises challenges concerning ownership, sustainable extraction, and the impact on marine ecosystems. Further research will determine the water's age and suitability for consumption.

(apnews.com)

Tech freshwater resources

Anthropic Pays $1.5B to Settle Copyright Lawsuit

2025-09-06

Anthropic Pays $1.5B to Settle Copyright Lawsuit

AI firm Anthropic has agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement in a class-action lawsuit brought by authors over the use of copyrighted books to train its AI model, Claude. This marks the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history. While a judge previously ruled Anthropic's use of the books was “exceedingly transformative” and thus fair use, the settlement focuses on the company's acquisition of millions of pirated books from sites like Library Genesis. The settlement avoids a trial where Anthropic faced potential liability for copyright infringement. This landmark case highlights the ongoing legal battles surrounding AI training data and sets a precedent for future AI companies.

(deadline.com)

AI data copyright

Natron Energy's Collapse: $1.4B NC Factory Project Scrapped, 1000+ Jobs Lost

2025-09-06

Natron Energy's Collapse: $1.4B NC Factory Project Scrapped, 1000+ Jobs Lost

California battery maker Natron Energy, which last year announced a $1.4 billion factory in North Carolina, has ceased operations, resulting in the loss of over 95 jobs and scuttling plans for 1,000+ jobs in Edgecombe County. The company's failure to secure sufficient funding or sales led to the closure of its facilities in Michigan and California. This setback is a blow to North Carolina's economic development efforts, highlighting the inherent risks in large-scale industrial projects.

(www.wral.com)

Tech battery manufacturing job losses

Apertus: A Fully Open, Multilingual LLM

2025-09-06

Apertus: A Fully Open, Multilingual LLM

Apertus is a fully open, multilingual large language model with 70B and 8B parameters, supporting over 1000 languages and long context. Trained on 15T tokens of fully compliant, open data, it achieves performance comparable to closed-source models. Apertus uses a novel xIELU activation function and the AdEMAMix optimizer, undergoing supervised fine-tuning and QRPO alignment. Its weights, data, and training details are publicly available, respecting data owner opt-out consent and avoiding memorization of training data. Integrated into the transformers library, Apertus supports various deployment methods. While powerful, users should be aware of potential inaccuracies and biases in its output.

(huggingface.co)

AI

64KB Minimalism: Japanese Demoscener 0b5vr's GLSL Techno Live Set

2025-09-06

64KB Minimalism: Japanese Demoscener 0b5vr's GLSL Techno Live Set

Japanese demoscener 0b5vr stunned Revision 2023 with his 64KB GLSL Techno live set, "0b5vr GLSL Techno Live Set." This wasn't a simple recording; it's a masterful blend of techno demos, live coding, and 64K intros. Working solo for a year, 0b5vr built the engine, a live coding environment, composed the music, and created the visuals. The interview details the struggles and joys of the creation process, offering unique insights into demoscene culture, live music performance, and the state of the Japanese demoscene. He even explains why even non-programmers can appreciate his work, showcasing the inclusivity and artistry of the demoscene.

(6octaves.com)

Game Live Coding

LA Highway Guardrail Thefts Surge: AI Surveillance Offers a Potential Solution

2025-09-06

LA Highway Guardrail Thefts Surge: AI Surveillance Offers a Potential Solution

A surge in guardrail thefts on Los Angeles freeways is jeopardizing public safety. Over the past two years, repairs have cost over $62,000. Thieves target aluminum guardrails due to rising aluminum prices and ease of resale at scrap yards. Caltrans' attempts to deter theft by welding bolts have failed, leading them to consider fiberglass composite materials. Beyond guardrails, copper wire and cable theft also plagues the city, disrupting essential infrastructure like power and transit. AI surveillance systems are being deployed in some areas to detect and predict suspicious activity, offering a new approach to combating metal theft.

(laist.com)

Tech metal theft infrastructure security

Gym Class VR: Hiring Founding UX Design Engineer

2025-09-06

Gym Class VR: Hiring Founding UX Design Engineer

Gym Class, Meta Quest's top-rated social VR game with millions of downloads and a 4.9-star rating, seeks a founding UX Design Engineer. You'll own the development of their upcoming mobile web app (embedded in native) and web surfaces within their flagship VR experience. This full-stack role demands expertise in Figma, React/Node/CSS, and a commitment to performance and accessibility. It's a high-impact opportunity for a designer-engineer who thrives in startups, values speed and polish, and wants to build for a highly engaged social audience. Backed by top-tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator, Gym Class is rapidly expanding into new sports categories after securing a licensing deal with the NBA.

(www.ycombinator.com)

Game VR Game UX Design Engineer

Retro Robot Collection: A Treasure Trove for Robot Enthusiasts

2025-09-06

This website showcases a meticulously curated collection of robots from a passionate enthusiast. It features educational robots, Tomy toy robots, Omnibots, and a wide variety of other robotic creations, all neatly categorized for easy browsing. The last update date (January 14, 2008) hints at a time capsule of robotic history, offering a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of robotics.

(www.theoldrobots.com)

Misc robot collection retro robots

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