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OpenAI's Secret Social Network Project: A Play for X and Meta?

2025-04-15

OpenAI's Secret Social Network Project: A Play for X and Meta?

OpenAI is reportedly developing a social network similar to X, according to multiple sources. The project, still in its early stages, features a prototype incorporating ChatGPT's image generation capabilities and a social feed. CEO Sam Altman has been privately seeking external feedback. It remains unclear whether the network will be a standalone app or integrated into ChatGPT. This move intensifies Altman's rivalry with Elon Musk and positions OpenAI in direct competition with Meta's AI social plans. A key advantage could be access to unique real-time data for AI model training.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech Social Network

Never Suspend a Thread in Your Own Process!

2025-04-15

Never Suspend a Thread in Your Own Process!

A customer encountered a long-standing, low-frequency hang: their UI thread called into the kernel and simply hung. The kernel dump couldn't show a user-mode stack trace because the stack had been paged out. Investigation revealed a watchdog thread periodically suspending the UI thread to capture stack traces, but this time it hung for over five hours. The root cause: a deadlock. The watchdog thread, attempting to get a stack trace, needed a function table lock, but the UI thread was suspended, holding the lock. The article emphasizes never suspending a thread within its own process, as it risks deadlocks due to resource contention. To suspend a thread and capture its stack, do so from another process to avoid deadlocks.

(devblogs.microsoft.com)

Development thread suspension deadlock

Full-Featured Logic Programming in Clojure: Clolog

2025-04-15

Full-Featured Logic Programming in Clojure: Clolog

Clolog embeds full-featured logic programming (Prolog) in/callable from Clojure, supporting calls to and from Clojure. Inspired by LogLisp, Lisp Machine Prolog, and Allegro Prolog, it adds several enhancements. Emphasis is on expressive power and execution transparency, supporting rapid prototyping, proof-of-concept development, and outer-loop reasoning (it's not blazing fast, yet). Clojure-based, Lispy syntax provides built-in predicates and operators for negation, conditionals, variable binding, and access to Clojure values.

(github.com)

Development

Gemini's New Video Generation Model: Veo 2

2025-04-15

Gemini's New Video Generation Model: Veo 2

Gemini Advanced users can now generate and share videos using Veo 2, Google's state-of-the-art video generation model. Transform text prompts into dynamic videos, easily shareable to platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Veo 2, also accessible through Google Labs' Whisk, produces high-resolution, detailed videos with cinematic realism. Simply describe your scene, and let Gemini bring your vision to life.

(blog.google)

AI

Android Auto-Reboot Security Feature Rolling Out Silently

2025-04-15

Android Auto-Reboot Security Feature Rolling Out Silently

Google is quietly rolling out a significant security update to all Android devices via Play Services 25.14. This update includes a feature that automatically restarts a locked device after three consecutive days of inactivity. This enhances security by preventing unauthorized access. The update also brings other improvements like improved settings screens and better connectivity with cars and wearables. Released on April 14th, the update may take a week or more to reach all devices. This auto-reboot mirrors Apple's 'Inactivity Reboot' in iOS 18.1, which raised concerns among law enforcement due to increased difficulty accessing data.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech Auto-Reboot

eBPF Verifier's Security Dilemma: A Novel Isolated Execution Environment

2025-04-15

eBPF, a foundational technology in the Linux kernel, faces security vulnerabilities and complexity challenges in its verifier. Researchers propose a paradigm shift: defining BPF programs as kernel-mode applications requiring dedicated isolation. A novel execution environment is designed to isolate BPF programs, enhancing eBPF's security and scalability. This research delves into the Linux v6.16 eBPF verifier, revealing security properties, capability dilemmas, and correctness dilemmas within its full-path analysis. A hybrid security framework combining verification and isolation is proposed, pointing towards a more secure future for eBPF.

(ebpf.foundation)

Development

Nokia Deploys First 4G Network on the Moon: A Giant Leap for Lunar Economy

2025-04-15

Nokia Deploys First 4G Network on the Moon: A Giant Leap for Lunar Economy

Nokia, in collaboration with NASA and Intuitive Machines, successfully deployed the first 4G cellular network on the Moon. Integrated onto the IM-2 lander, 'Athena', the network supports lunar exploration missions, including a rover and a hopper searching for water ice. This deployment showcases the adaptability of commercial technology in extreme environments, laying the groundwork for a future lunar economy and representing a significant leap in space communication. While the first cellular call failed due to solar panel orientation issues, data transmission was successful. Future 5G capabilities are expected to further propel lunar exploration and economic development.

(spectrum.ieee.org)

Tech

React Server Components: Untangling Frontend Data Fetching

2025-04-15

This article explores how React Server Components solve the complexities of frontend data fetching. Traditional REST APIs struggle to keep up with evolving UI needs, leading to either data redundancy or insufficient data. The author proposes a BFF (Backend for Frontend) approach, introducing the ViewModel concept to the backend, allowing the server to directly return the specific data each component requires. By decomposing ViewModel functions into smaller units and leveraging JSX, a tight coupling between components and data loading logic is achieved, resulting in an efficient and maintainable frontend architecture. This method is similar in spirit to Async XHP, seamlessly integrating data fetching and UI rendering, but avoids the limitations of traditional XHP in highly interactive applications.

(overreacted.io)

Development Data Fetching

Beyond Alphabetical Order: The Weird and Wonderful Ways Ecologists Determine Authorship

2025-04-15

Beyond Alphabetical Order: The Weird and Wonderful Ways Ecologists Determine Authorship

This blog post explores unconventional methods for determining authorship order in ecology and evolutionary biology papers. From alphabetization to basketball skills, even coin flips, rock-paper-scissors, and bake-offs have been used. The author compiled numerous examples, including croquet matches, random number generators, geographical location, practical considerations, game theory, and dice rolls to decide authorship order. A brownie bake-off stands out as the most unusual and entertaining example. The post also highlights a retracted paper due to authorship disputes, along with examples using code and other innovative approaches. The lighthearted tone reveals the creativity and challenges researchers face when ordering authors.

(dynamicecology.wordpress.com)

Misc Academic Publishing Authorship Order

Fighting Back Against AI Music Theft: Poisoning the Well with Adversarial Noise

2025-04-15

Fighting Back Against AI Music Theft: Poisoning the Well with Adversarial Noise

Benn Jordan's latest video proposes a novel way to combat generative AI music services that steal music for their datasets: adversarial noise poisoning attacks. This technique uses specially crafted noise to disrupt the AI's learning process, making it unable to accurately learn from the poisoned data. While currently requiring high-end GPUs and substantial computing power, its effectiveness proves its potential, and more efficient methods may be developed in the future. This raises important questions about AI music copyright and data security, offering musicians a potential new defense against unauthorized use of their work.

(cdm.link)

AI Adversarial Noise

Zuckerberg's Crazy Idea: Resetting Facebook Friendships

2025-04-15

Zuckerberg's Crazy Idea: Resetting Facebook Friendships

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg proposed a "crazy" plan in 2022 to reset all Facebook users' friend connections. This plan was revealed during an antitrust trial. Fearing Facebook's declining cultural relevance, Zuckerberg suggested wiping all users' friend lists, forcing them to rebuild their networks. This sparked internal debate and ultimately wasn't implemented. The incident highlights Facebook's evolution into a broader content discovery and entertainment platform, and the antitrust lawsuit against Meta alleging it maintained its monopoly by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp.

(www.businessinsider.com)

Tech

A Curious Adventure in Implementing RNG and Cosine in Purely Functional Nix

2025-04-15

A Curious Adventure in Implementing RNG and Cosine in Purely Functional Nix

This post details the author's experience implementing a random number generator and a cosine function within NixOS, a Linux distribution built on the Nix language. The purely functional nature of Nix presents challenges when working with system randomness and standard mathematical functions. The author explores various approaches, including using Nix's `runCommandLocal` and custom infinite list implementations, ultimately overcoming caching and function-call quirks to achieve the goal. The journey highlights Nix's flexibility and power, but also exposes some limitations of its features.

(unnamed.website)

Development

MeshCore: A Lightweight LoRa Mesh Networking Library

2025-04-15

MeshCore: A Lightweight LoRa Mesh Networking Library

MeshCore is a lightweight, portable C++ library enabling multi-hop packet routing for embedded projects using LoRa and other packet radios. Designed for resilient, decentralized networks operating without internet access, it supports various LoRa devices and offers pre-built binaries for easy flashing via tools like Adafruit ESPTool. MeshCore balances simplicity and scalability, providing functionality similar to Meshtastic and Reticulum but with a focus on embedded applications. Ideal for off-grid communication, emergency response, and IoT deployments.

(github.com)

Development Mesh Networking

Resonate: A Low-Latency, Low-Memory, Low-Cost Spectral Analysis Algorithm

2025-04-15

Resonate is a low-latency, low-memory footprint, and low-computational-cost algorithm for evaluating perceptually relevant spectral information from audio (and other) signals. It builds on a resonator model using Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) to accumulate signal contributions around resonant frequencies. Its compact iterative formulation allows for efficient updates with minimal arithmetic operations per sample, requiring no buffering. Resonate computes real-time perceptually relevant spectral content estimates; memory and per-sample computational complexity scale linearly with the number of resonators, independent of input sample count. Open-source implementations in Python, C++, and Swift are available, along with demonstration apps.

(alexandrefrancois.org)

Development

Apple Cuts Max TLS Certificate Lifetime to 47 Days: Automation is Key

2025-04-15

Apple Cuts Max TLS Certificate Lifetime to 47 Days: Automation is Key

Apple is gradually reducing the maximum lifetime of TLS certificates to 47 days, a move aimed at enhancing security and driving the adoption of automated certificate lifecycle management. This change stems from the CA/B Forum's years-long trend of shortening certificate lifetimes and the unreliability of existing certificate revocation systems (CRLs and OCSP). While the change becomes fully effective on March 15, 2029, Apple anticipates that shorter certificate lifetimes will necessitate the use of automation, mitigating service disruptions caused by expired or revoked certificates. Certificate authorities like DigiCert offer various automation solutions to help organizations adapt to this change.

(www.digicert.com)

Tech TLS certificates certificate lifetime

Wrongful Deportation: 19-Year-Old Sent to El Salvador's Super-Prison

2025-04-15

Wrongful Deportation: 19-Year-Old Sent to El Salvador's Super-Prison

Nineteen-year-old Merwil Gutiérrez, a Venezuelan asylum seeker, was apprehended in New York by ICE agents who admitted he wasn't their target but deported him anyway. He was sent to El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison, despite his family's claims of no gang ties or criminal record. The incident highlights concerns over ICE procedures and human rights in El Salvador, sparking outrage and calls for his return. This case underscores the harsh realities of US immigration policies and the plight of asylum seekers.

(www.newsweek.com)

Misc

Columbia Student Arrested by ICE During Citizenship Interview

2025-04-15

Columbia Student Arrested by ICE During Citizenship Interview

Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University philosophy student, was abducted by ICE agents during a US citizenship interview in Vermont. The agents, masked and hooded, took him away in an unmarked car. Mahdawi, a green card holder and outspoken advocate for Palestinians, was reportedly arrested in retaliation for his activism. A judge has issued a temporary restraining order preventing his removal from Vermont or deportation. Mahdawi, a committed Buddhist, previously appeared on 60 Minutes discussing student protests against Israel's response to Hamas's October 7th attack, stating that fighting for Palestinian freedom and against antisemitism must go hand-in-hand.

(dailynous.com)

Misc

LightlyTrain: Faster Model Training, No Labels Needed

2025-04-15

LightlyTrain: Faster Model Training, No Labels Needed

LightlyTrain brings self-supervised pretraining to real-world computer vision pipelines. It leverages your unlabeled data to drastically reduce labeling costs and accelerate model deployment. Easily integrate it into existing workflows; just a few lines of code are needed to pretrain models on your unlabeled image and video data using various architectures supported by libraries like Torchvision, Ultralytics, and TIMM. Scalable to millions of images, LightlyTrain significantly improves model performance for both small and large datasets, enabling you to export models for fine-tuning or inference. No self-supervised learning expertise is required.

(github.com)

Development model pretraining self-supervised learning

Chroma: Simulating Color Blindness for Enhanced Game Accessibility

2025-04-15

Chroma: Simulating Color Blindness for Enhanced Game Accessibility

Chroma is a tool designed to simulate various types of color blindness, aiding game developers and accessibility teams in testing game experiences for color-blind users. It simulates three major types: Protanopia, Deuteranopia, and Tritanopia, offering high performance, accuracy, and an easy-to-use interface. Chroma works on top of any game, regardless of engine, providing real-time simulation, easy screenshotting, and customizable settings. A known issue during CMake build involves an outdated CPPWinRT library; using Visual Studio 2022 or installing the Microsoft.Windows.CppWinRT NuGet package is recommended.

(github.com)

Development color blindness simulation

WWII and the Rise of US Tech Supremacy: A Tale of Two Science Advisors

2025-04-15

WWII and the Rise of US Tech Supremacy: A Tale of Two Science Advisors

Before WWII, the US lagged behind Britain in science and engineering. Post-war, however, the US surged ahead, dominating for 85 years. This dramatic shift stemmed from contrasting approaches by their science advisors. Britain's Lindemann focused on military labs, while Bush, in the US, empowered university labs with massive government funding. This US university-industry-government partnership fueled innovation hubs like Silicon Valley, establishing its technological dominance. Britain's centralized model, conversely, hampered its post-war growth. However, with dwindling US government support for university research, its long reign may be ending.

(steveblank.com)

Tech Science Policy

SourceHut Fights Back Against Aggressive LLM Scraping

2025-04-15

SourceHut, a platform dedicated to serving open-source software, is actively fighting back against aggressive data scraping by large language models (LLMs). They argue that LLM companies are not entitled to their users' data and have explicitly stated they will not make data-sharing arrangements with any company, even if paid. SourceHut has deployed Anubis to protect its services and updated its terms of service to strictly limit data scraping, permitting only uses such as search engine indexing, open-access research, and archiving. They emphasize that the data belongs to their users and their responsibility is to ensure the data is used in the best interests of their users, not for commercial profit or training LLM models.

(sourcehut.org)

Development

Don't Argue with Toddlers (or Their Adult Equivalents)

2025-04-15

Don't Argue with Toddlers (or Their Adult Equivalents)

This article argues that many apparent arguments are not genuine exchanges of ideas, but rather displays of power, attention-seeking behaviors, or playful sparring. True arguments aim for insight and a conclusion. The author suggests that a willingness to change one's own mind is crucial; if you're not changing your perspective, you're likely not engaging in a real argument. Instead of trying to win, focus on asking open-ended questions like, "What information might change your mind?" The piece concludes that deeply held beliefs tied to identity are often resistant to change through argument.

(seths.blog)

Misc rationality

PgDog: A Clever Postgres Proxy for Sharding

2025-04-15

PgDog is a network proxy that intercepts all communication between Postgres clients and servers, understands SQL to infer query destinations, and requires no application code changes. It parses SQL queries, extracts sharding keys, uses Postgres's built-in partitioning hash function, and routes queries to the correct database shard. The article details how PgDog handles simple and extended protocols, cross-shard queries, and distributed COPY operations, ultimately enabling Postgres sharding and linearly scaling data ingestion speed.

(pgdog.dev)

Development

Rust: A Double-Edged Sword of Efficiency and Challenges

2025-04-15

Rust: A Double-Edged Sword of Efficiency and Challenges

The author shares their experience of spending two years using Rust to write the backend of a B2B SaaS product. Rust boasts exceptional performance, excellent tooling, type safety, and robust error handling. However, the module system and build performance present challenges. While the borrow checker is powerful, it has a steep learning curve. Asynchronous programming, though complex, offers high performance. Overall, the Rust experience is positive, but requires careful consideration of trade-offs.

(borretti.me)

Development

The Secret History of DNA: A Tale of Theft, Arrogance, and Scientific Breakthrough

2025-04-15

The Secret History of DNA: A Tale of Theft, Arrogance, and Scientific Breakthrough

This article unveils the untold story behind the discovery of DNA's double helix structure. A young, arrogant James Watson's encounter with Maurice Wilkins at a conference in Naples set the stage for his journey, but this wasn't a straightforward scientific quest. The narrative exposes power struggles, scientific theft, and blatant sexism. Howard Markel's book details Watson's unjust treatment of Rosalind Franklin and Wilkins's sharing of Franklin's crucial X-ray photograph without her permission. Franklin's groundbreaking contributions were long ignored, only gaining recognition posthumously. This is not merely a science story, but a dramatic tale of ethical conflicts, prompting reflection on honesty and fairness in scientific research.

(nautil.us)

Tech DNA double helix scientific history

US Tariffs: A Doomed Economic Gamble

2025-04-15

On April 2nd, 2025, the US president announced hefty new tariffs on imports, aiming to revive American manufacturing. However, a 15-year manufacturing veteran argues this policy is fundamentally flawed. High labor costs, a weak industrial supply chain, lack of crucial expertise, insufficient infrastructure, and policy uncertainty will likely backfire, harming the US economy. The author advocates for improving worker skills, building infrastructure, addressing social issues, and implementing gradual, targeted policies instead of blanket tariffs.

(www.molsonhart.com)

Tech

CT Scans: Weighing the Tiny Cancer Risk Against Significant Diagnostic Benefits

2025-04-15

CT Scans: Weighing the Tiny Cancer Risk Against Significant Diagnostic Benefits

A new study suggests that while CT scans slightly increase cancer risk (approximately 0.1%), the benefits in disease diagnosis and treatment far outweigh this risk. Experts advise that when a doctor recommends a CT scan, patients should proceed, as the potential benefits in diagnosing illness far outweigh the small added cancer risk. However, the study also notes the increase in CT scan use in recent years and suggests doctors should more carefully weigh risks and benefits, considering diagnostic algorithms and alternative imaging technologies like ultrasound and MRI, and involving patients in the decision-making process.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech

Google Ditches ccTLDs for Global Search

2025-04-15

Google is redirecting all its country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) versions (like google.fr, google.co.uk) to Google.com. This change, rolling out gradually over the coming months, is due to Google's improved ability to provide localized search results globally. While users shouldn't experience major disruptions, they might need to re-login or adjust search settings. The core search functionality remains unchanged.

(searchengineland.com)

Tech ccTLD

Lolita at 70: A Literary Exploration of Voyeurism and Self-Reflection

2025-04-15

Lolita at 70: A Literary Exploration of Voyeurism and Self-Reflection

Claire Messud's essay in the LARB Quarterly delves into the enduring controversy surrounding Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita on its 70th anniversary. The piece revisits the initial scandal and ongoing critiques, exploring the depiction of child abuse and the complex readerly experience. Messud argues that Lolita transcends simple 'problematic' status, serving as a profound exploration of human nature and a challenge to readers' habits and moral responsibilities. By referencing real-life cases, the essay connects the novel's plot to actual instances of child sexual abuse, prompting self-reflection. Ultimately, Messud advocates for a critical engagement with Lolita, viewing it as an exploration of humanity, not a justification of crime.

(lareviewofbooks.org)

Misc Nabokov Lolita

Whistleblower Alleges DOGE Team Exfiltrated Sensitive Labor Data

2025-04-15

Whistleblower Alleges DOGE Team Exfiltrated Sensitive Labor Data

A whistleblower has revealed details of how the DOGE team may have accessed and exfiltrated sensitive labor data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The whistleblower alleges that after gaining access to NLRB systems, the DOGE team obtained substantial data, including union information, ongoing legal cases, and corporate secrets. They allegedly attempted to cover their tracks by disabling monitoring tools and manually deleting access records. Evidence presented includes a large data exfiltration event, suspicious login attempts from a Russian IP address, and a project named "NxGenBdoorExtract," potentially designed to extract data from the NLRB's internal system. This incident raises serious concerns about data security and privacy, with experts warning of potential harm to unions, employees, and businesses.

(www.npr.org)

Tech government data breach

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