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Facebook Secretly Uploads User Photos to the Cloud?

2025-08-29
Facebook Secretly Uploads User Photos to the Cloud?

Meta, Facebook's parent company, is testing a new feature that secretly uploads users' phone photos and videos to the cloud without explicit consent, using them to generate AI-powered suggestions like collages, monthly recaps, and themed albums. While Meta claims the feature is opt-in and prompts users, some report never seeing the prompt and finding the feature enabled by default. This raises serious privacy concerns as Meta accesses users' private, unshared photos and videos. The test is currently limited to the US and Canada, excluding Illinois and Texas due to privacy laws.

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(www.zdnet.com)
Tech Facebook Privacy

How Likely Is a Bitcoin Address Typo to Cause a Problem?

2025-08-29

Concerns exist about accidentally sending Bitcoin to the wrong address due to typos. This article uses checksum probabilities, the vast size of the address space, and edit distance calculations to demonstrate the extremely low likelihood of this happening. Even considering addresses that are a small edit distance apart, the probability of a typo leading to a collision with another valid address in the enormous address space is negligible. Therefore, address typos are not a major risk in using Bitcoin.

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(www.johndcook.com)
Tech

C# Nullable Pitfalls: When T? Isn't What You Think

2025-08-29

C#'s reuse of `T?` syntax for both nullable value types and nullable reference types creates confusion. For value types, `T?` is syntactic sugar for `Nullable`, representing distinct types. However, for reference types, `T?` is merely an intent marker; after compilation, `T?` and `T` are the same type. This difference leads to compilation errors when writing generic methods. The article demonstrates this issue with a `SelectNotNull` method mimicking F#'s `List.choose`. The solution involves method overloading with type constraints (`where TR : class` and `where TR : struct`) to disambiguate value and reference types. While the problem is solved, the design remains inelegant.

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(einarwh.no)
Development Nullable Types

Jane Street Summer Internship Projects: Faster JSQL, Improved Torch Bindings, and Cross-Process Memory Management

2025-08-29
Jane Street Summer Internship Projects: Faster JSQL, Improved Torch Bindings, and Cross-Process Memory Management

Jane Street highlights three standout projects from this year's summer internship program: Leo Gagnon's JSQL evaluator, achieving hundreds of times speedup through indexing; Aryan Khatri's improved OCaml Torch bindings, leveraging OxCaml for safe and efficient GPU memory management; and Anthony Li's cross-process memory management library, eliminating serialization overhead with reference counting. These projects not only boost internal tools' efficiency but also contribute valuable code to the open-source community.

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(blog.janestreet.com)
Development

Wear OS Air Mouse: Bluetooth HID Device Emulator

2025-08-29
Wear OS Air Mouse: Bluetooth HID Device Emulator

This project showcases the new Bluetooth HID Device API in Android P, implementing a simple air mouse and cursor keys emulator on a Wear OS device. Connect to laptops and desktops running Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, macOS, or Android TV without extra software – just a Bluetooth receiver is needed. Utilizing the Google VR library for orientation tracking ensures a stable and reliable air mouse experience.

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(github.com)
Development Bluetooth HID Air Mouse

Envoy: A Lightweight Terminal Command Logger

2025-08-29
Envoy: A Lightweight Terminal Command Logger

Envoy is a lightweight background utility that logs your terminal commands. It's designed for simple, unobtrusive tracking of your shell usage, useful for debugging, work tracking, or simply remembering past commands. Envoy starts and stops on demand, saves to a custom file, and works on both Linux and macOS with bash or zsh. Installation is straightforward: clone the repo, build the executable, and add a shell hook to your profile (.zshrc or .bashrc). Log and status files are stored with the executable.

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(github.com)
Development terminal logging shell utility

MaxBench: Benchmarking GPU Interconnect Impact on Relational Data Analytics

2025-08-29

Researchers introduce MaxBench, a comprehensive framework for benchmarking and profiling relational data analytics workloads on GPUs. It evaluates the performance impact of various GPU models (RTX3090, A100, H100, Grace Hopper GH200) and interconnects (PCIe 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and NVLink 4.0) on workloads like TPC-H, H2O-G, and ClickBench. Moving beyond traditional metrics like arithmetic intensity and GFlop/s, MaxBench proposes 'characteristic query complexity' and 'characteristic GPU efficiency' and uses a novel cost model to predict query execution performance. The study reveals trade-offs between GPU compute capacity and interconnect bandwidth and uses the model to project the impact of future interconnect bandwidth or GPU efficiency improvements.

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(vldb.org)
Development

A Convex Polyhedron That Defies Intuition: No Rupert's Property

2025-08-29
A Convex Polyhedron That Defies Intuition: No Rupert's Property

For a long time, it was believed that any convex polyhedron could have a hole cut through it large enough to pass an identical copy through. This is known as 'Rupert's property'. This week, Steininger and Yurkevich proved this wrong! They found a convex polyhedron with 90 vertices, 240 edges, and 152 faces that lacks this property. Their proof involved a computer search of 18 million possible holes, combined with rigorous mathematical arguments. They dubbed this counter-example a 'noperthedron'. This discovery challenges long-held assumptions in geometry.

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(johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com)
Misc polyhedron

Synology's Hostile Policies Drive Longtime User Away

2025-08-29
Synology's Hostile Policies Drive Longtime User Away

Longtime Synology user Raindog308 announces he's switching brands due to Synology's increasingly restrictive policies. These include artificial limits on concurrent Samba connections and a new requirement to purchase Synology-branded hard drives, even though those drives offer shorter warranties than alternatives like WD Black. He's considering building a TrueNAS server or exploring options from UGREEN, Buffalo, or other vendors.

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(lowendbox.com)
Hardware

LLMs: Opportunities and Challenges Await

2025-08-29
LLMs: Opportunities and Challenges Await

Before a short break, the author shares some thoughts on the current state of LLMs and AI. He points out flaws in current surveys on LLMs' impact on software development, arguing they neglect the varied workflows of LLM usage. The author believes the future of LLMs is unpredictable, encouraging experimentation and shared experiences. He also discusses the inevitability of an AI bubble and the 'hallucination' characteristic of LLMs, stressing the importance of asking questions multiple times for validation. Finally, the author warns of the security risks posed by LLMs, particularly the vulnerabilities of agents operating within browsers.

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(martinfowler.com)
AI

Anthropic to Train AI Models on User Data, Opt-Out Required

2025-08-29
Anthropic to Train AI Models on User Data, Opt-Out Required

Anthropic will begin training its AI models, including Claude, on user chat transcripts and coding sessions unless users opt out by September 28th. This affects all consumer tiers, extending data retention to five years. A prominent 'Accept' button in the update notification risks users agreeing without fully understanding the implications. While Anthropic claims data protection measures, users who inadvertently accept can change their preference in settings, though previously used data remains inaccessible.

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(www.theverge.com)
AI user agreement

TransUnion Data Breach Exposes 4.4M Customers' Personal Info

2025-08-29
TransUnion Data Breach Exposes 4.4M Customers' Personal Info

Credit reporting agency TransUnion disclosed a data breach affecting over 4.4 million customers. Unauthorized access to a third-party application storing customer data for US consumer support operations on July 28th is blamed. While TransUnion claims no credit information was accessed, a later filing in Texas confirmed the breach included names, birthdates, and Social Security numbers. The incident follows recent hacks targeting various sectors, highlighting the vulnerability of large corporations to data breaches. The perpetrators and their motives remain unclear.

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(techcrunch.com)
Tech

US to Put GDP Data on Blockchain: Trump's Crypto Vision?

2025-08-29
US to Put GDP Data on Blockchain: Trump's Crypto Vision?

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced the Department of Commerce will publish economic statistics, including GDP data, on a blockchain. This initiative, spurred by President Trump's vision, aims to improve data distribution efficiency across government agencies. While blockchain technology enhances data security and transparency, it doesn't guarantee accuracy. The move comes amid Trump's repeated questioning of US economic data reliability, contrasting with other governments' blockchain adoption, such as Estonia's e-health system and the EU's EBSI project.

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(cointelegraph.com)
Tech

Scottish Police Face Data Sovereignty Showdown with Microsoft

2025-08-29

Scottish police are grappling with significant data security and sovereignty challenges in their adoption of Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft's refusal to disclose data processing locations and methods, citing "commercial confidentiality," prevents the police from meeting the stringent data transfer restrictions of the UK's 2018 Data Protection Act. This raises concerns about data potentially being processed in countries lacking adequate data protection, including China and India, and highlights the risks of relying on cloud services without sovereign cloud capabilities. While aware of the risks, the police are constrained by the UK National Enabling Programme and existing contracts with Microsoft, making a swift change of supplier difficult.

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(www.computerweekly.com)
Tech

Microsoft Copilot Lands on Samsung TVs: Your AI Sidekick, Now on the Big Screen

2025-08-29
Microsoft Copilot Lands on Samsung TVs: Your AI Sidekick, Now on the Big Screen

Microsoft's AI assistant, Copilot, is coming to TVs, starting with Samsung's 2025 lineup. Users can ask Copilot for movie recommendations, spoiler-free episode summaries, and answer general questions. Copilot appears as a friendly, animated character, bouncing around the screen with mouth movements synced to its responses. It's integrated into Samsung Tizen OS, Samsung Daily Plus, and Click to Search, accessible via voice or remote. Signing in allows for a personalized experience using past conversations and preferences. Supported models include Samsung's 2025 Micro RGB, Neo QLED, OLED, The Frame Pro, The Frame TVs, and M7, M8, and M9 smart monitors. Microsoft plans to bring Copilot to LG TVs as well.

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(www.theverge.com)
Tech

FFmpeg 8.0: Vulkan-Accelerated Encoding and Auto-Subtitling

2025-08-29
FFmpeg 8.0: Vulkan-Accelerated Encoding and Auto-Subtitling

FFmpeg 8.0, codenamed "Huffman," is here with significant updates. A standout feature is the integration of the Whisper speech recognition model, enabling automatic video subtitling. It leverages the Vulkan API for hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding of various formats, including AV1, FFv1, VP9, and ProRes RAW, and supports VVC (H.266) encoding, boosting efficiency. This release also enhances compatibility with older formats like RealVideo 6.0 and niche audio codecs, solidifying its indispensable role in video processing.

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(www.theregister.com)
Development Video Encoding

Glowing Plants: Cheap Nanoparticles Turn Succulents into Night Lights

2025-08-29
Glowing Plants: Cheap Nanoparticles Turn Succulents into Night Lights

Researchers at South China Agricultural University have developed a low-cost, biocompatible phosphor compound that allows succulents to glow for up to two hours after just a few minutes of sunlight or LED exposure. This inexpensive method, involving injecting nanoparticles into the leaves, avoids complex genetic modification techniques. The team found an optimal nanoparticle size for uniform, bright illumination, even enough to light nearby objects. The technology could revolutionize indoor and garden decor, creating stunning, glowing landscapes at minimal cost (around $1.4 per plant). Long-term safety studies are underway.

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(newatlas.com)
Tech plant lighting

You No Longer Need JavaScript: Unleashing the Power of Modern CSS

2025-08-29

This article champions the capabilities of modern CSS, arguing that many websites don't require bloated JavaScript frameworks. The author delves into new CSS features like nesting, relative colors, and responsive viewport units (lvh, svh, dvh), showcasing how to build animations, theming, and input validation with CSS alone. Clean code examples illustrate these techniques. The article also proposes improvements to CSS, such as reusable blocks and nth-child variables, highlighting CSS's performance and accessibility advantages. The author promotes a leaner, more efficient web development philosophy and expresses a passion for CSS as an art form.

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(lyra.horse)
Development

AI Psychosis: Hype or Reality?

2025-08-29
AI Psychosis: Hype or Reality?

Reports of AI chatbots driving users to insanity have sparked concerns about 'AI psychosis'. This post explores this phenomenon by drawing analogies to historical events and analyzing reader survey data. The author argues that AI chatbots don't directly cause psychosis but exacerbate pre-existing mental issues or eccentric tendencies, particularly in the absence of real-world social constraints. A survey suggests an annual incidence of 'AI psychosis' ranging from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000, with most cases involving pre-existing mental health conditions or risk factors.

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(www.astralcodexten.com)
AI AI psychosis

Build Your Own CLI Coding Agent: A Practical Guide with Pydantic-AI and MCP

2025-08-29
Build Your Own CLI Coding Agent: A Practical Guide with Pydantic-AI and MCP

This article details how the author built a command-line coding agent using the Pydantic-AI framework and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). By integrating the Claude model, test runners, a code execution sandbox, documentation search, and AWS tools, the agent enables code testing, debugging, documentation lookup, and code modification, significantly boosting development efficiency. The author highlights the importance of MCP in extending agent capabilities and the benefits of building a custom agent to fit specific project needs. Ultimately, the agent acts as an intelligent programming partner, collaborating with developers to write, debug, and test code.

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(martinfowler.com)
Development

Stop Blaming Employees for Inefficiency: The Problem Lies in Management

2025-08-29

This article criticizes the common practice of blaming employees for multitasking and lack of focus due to a lack of self-discipline. The author argues that the root cause lies in management's failure to effectively prioritize tasks, leading employees to juggle multiple unprioritized tasks, resulting in low efficiency. The article points out that so-called "productivity tools" like Asana and Trello actually shift the responsibility of management onto employees, exacerbating the problem. True productivity tools are those whose absence would significantly impact workflow, unlike management tools. The author calls on management to take responsibility, improve organizational culture, and address the underlying issues of employee burnout and lack of focus, rather than placing the blame on employees.

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(exple.tive.org)
Management

Expert: The Elixir Language Server – Installation and Sponsorship

2025-08-29
Expert: The Elixir Language Server – Installation and Sponsorship

Expert is the official language server implementation for the Elixir programming language. Downloads are available for various operating systems. Place the executable in your $PATH. Editor-specific instructions are provided, along with instructions for downloading nightly builds using the GH CLI. Building from source requires Zig 0.14.1. The article concludes with information on corporate and individual sponsorship options. Expert is open-source under the Apache License 2.0.

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(github.com)
Development

PowerPoint Killed Seven: The Columbia Disaster

2025-08-29
PowerPoint Killed Seven: The Columbia Disaster

The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster of January 16th, 2003, claimed the lives of seven astronauts. An investigation revealed that a piece of foam insulation detached 82 seconds into launch, striking the shuttle's left wing and causing catastrophic damage upon re-entry. The incident highlights the devastating consequences of seemingly minor failures in complex systems, prompting reflection on both spacecraft safety and the effectiveness of communication, in contrast to the often ineffective ‘death by PowerPoint’ presentations.

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(mcdreeamiemusings.com)
Tech Space Shuttle Columbia Space Disaster

Saying Goodbye to Certainty: Probabilistic Programming in Swift

2025-08-29
Saying Goodbye to Certainty: Probabilistic Programming in Swift

This article introduces a novel approach to handling uncertain data in Swift: Uncertain. It encodes probability directly into the type system, elegantly addressing issues like the imprecision of GPS coordinates. Using probability distributions and Monte Carlo sampling, developers can more accurately model real-world uncertainties, building more robust and reliable applications. The article provides a Swift library based on Uncertain and includes examples demonstrating how to handle various probability distributions and perform statistical analysis.

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(nshipster.com)
Development Probabilistic Programming Uncertainty

Website Chaos: A Parody Tool (Don't Enter Passwords!)

2025-08-29
Website Chaos: A Parody Tool (Don't Enter Passwords!)

This tool is purely for comedic effect; it temporarily adds visual chaos to websites. It does not store, collect, or transmit any personal data. **Never** use it to enter passwords, credit card information, or any sensitive data. The proxied sites are not secure. Using this tool signifies agreement to its entertainment-only purpose and the exclusion of sensitive information. Banking, financial, healthcare, and government sites are blocked for security reasons.

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(www.fuckupmysite.com)
Misc website parody entertainment tool security warning

Critical: Three Unpatched Security Vulnerabilities Found in libxslt

2025-08-29

libxslt, a sibling project of libxml2, currently lacks an active maintainer and has three unpatched security vulnerabilities. Two have been publicly disclosed (CVE-2025-7424 and CVE-2025-7425), involving type confusion and a heap-based buffer overflow. Patches have been proposed by engineers from Apple and Google on the GNOME GitLab, but remain unapplied due to the lack of a maintainer. This highlights the importance of open-source maintenance and poses a security risk to applications relying on libxslt.

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(vuxml.freebsd.org)
Development

Debian 13's /tmp Moves to tmpfs: Speed and Challenges

2025-08-29
Debian 13's /tmp Moves to tmpfs: Speed and Challenges

Debian 13 revolutionizes /tmp by moving it to the tmpfs in-memory filesystem, resulting in dramatically faster file access. However, this introduces challenges: users could consume significant RAM, impacting system performance. Debian defaults to a 50% RAM limit for tmpfs, but this is customizable. Furthermore, Debian 13 includes automatic cleanup, deleting unused files in /tmp after 10 days by default. For low-memory systems, users can easily disable tmpfs.

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(lowendbox.com)
Development

Trystero: Real-time Collaboration Reimagined

2025-08-29

Trystero is a fascinating real-time collaborative platform leveraging technologies like BitTorrent, Nostr, MQTT, IPFS, Supabase, and Firebase to synchronize mouse movements and clicks in real-time. Simple code allows joining rooms, listening for peer joins/leaves, and broadcasting/receiving mouse movements and clicks. Trystero's potential extends far beyond this, supporting audio/video streams and binary data, opening up endless possibilities for real-time collaboration.

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(oxism.com)
Development

Debian 13 "Trixie" Released: A Stable Linux Distribution Prioritizing Reliability

2025-08-29

After over two years of development, Debian 13, codenamed "Trixie," is finally here. This stable release boasts upgraded packages, over 14,000 new packages, and features APT 3.0 as the default package manager. Support for 64-bit RISC-V architecture is also included. Trixie prioritizes stability, offering a reliable experience with versions of popular software like GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3. Installation offers both a traditional command-line installer and a more user-friendly Calamares installer. The release also addresses the Year 2038 problem on 32-bit architectures and drops support for i386 and some MIPS architectures.

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(lwn.net)
Development Stable Release
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