Technology

A directory created by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has exposed the Social Security numbers of a number of US healthcare providers.

The Trump administration introduced a new Medicare portal as part of plans to modernize US healthcare technology.

However, a database that was part of the directory was left publicly accessible, and exposed providers’ names and Social Security numbers.

A 10-month Commerce Department probe concluded Meta could view all WhatsApp messages in unencrypted form

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Basing costs on token consumption, whether it's for code suggestion, generation, or AI debugging, makes as much sense – less, even – than paying programmers per keystroke in and character out. That's even dafter than the lines of code per month metric for coder goodness, a concept so dumb it makes Juicero's backers look like Warren Buffett. There is no concept of usable work actually done, no sense that inefficiencies are rewarded, and no easy way to relate the price paid to the actual cost of production. But it's simple to understand and looks like any other prepayment limited use subscription model. Oddly, nobody seems minded to improve on this.

There are virtually no other metrics. You can measure tokens per second for a benchmark test case. You can measure the ratio of tokens out to tokens in, although it's not clearer why. At least with arguably comparable service models like cloud computing, you know what you're getting when you buy so much compute, memory, storage, and connectivity. You still have to watch automation or mismanagement, and Bill Shock still works at AWS, but you have a chance of linking results to costs. Good luck with LLM-based services, let alone AI agents.

Add this lack of value metrics to the ridiculous returns on investments the AI industry needs to show to make good on its promises, and we have a recipe for mounting TIBS inflation.

Vendors have an addiction to making everything a subscription, then frog-boiling subscribers, especially when they can incorporate an effective monopoly. Imagine the lock-in where an org has deskilled its code production humans and become reliant on a particular AI code gen chain.

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If AI does result in deskilling the tech workforce and recapturing the engine of IT creation, it will be as if the mainframe era came at the end of semiconductor evolution, rather than the beginning. All that can be said about the evolutionary driver that will move things on is that it has yet to be invented, despite fifty years of looking.

Wine 11 is different. This isn't just another yearly release with a few hundred bug fixes and some compatibility tweaks. It represents a huge number of changes and bug fixes. However, it also ships with NTSYNC support, which is a feature that has been years in the making and rewrites how Wine handles one of the most performance-sensitive operations in modern gaming. On top of that, the WoW64 architecture overhaul is finally complete, the Wayland driver has grown up a lot, and there's a big list of smaller improvements that collectively make this feel like an all-new project.

Since most router makers use overseas manufacturing, it's unclear which manufacturers would actually be clear to continue selling their products.

Recently we’ve seen sweeping attempts to censor the internet. The UK’s “Online Safety Act” imposes sweeping restrictions on speech and expression. It’s disguised a child safety measure, but its true purpose is (avowedly!) intentional control over “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”. And similar trends threaten the US, especially as lawmakers race to more aggressively categorize more speech as broadly harmful.

A common response to these restrictions has been to dismiss them as unenforceable: that’s not how the internet works, governments are foolish for thinking they can do this, and you can just use a VPN to get around crude attempts at content blocking.

But this “just use a workaround” dismissal is a dangerous, reductive mistake. Even if you can easily defeat an attempt to impose a restriction right now, you can’t take that for granted.

From the article: Researchers investigating Discord’s age-verification checks say they discovered an exposed frontend belonging to Persona, the identity-verification vendor used by Discord. It revealed a far more expansive surveillance and financial intelligence stack than a simple “teen safety” tool.

Researchers' findings (sound warning): https://vmfunc.re/blog/persona

Palantir Technologies Inc. announced Tuesday it has relocated its headquarters from Denver, Colorado, to Miami, Florida. The company offered no explanation for the decision, issuing only a brief statement: “We have moved our headquarters to Miami, Florida.”

Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and others, Palantir is a data analytics and software firm known for its work with government agencies, including the CIA, the Department of Defense, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Its platforms, such as Palantir Gotham and Foundry, are widely used for intelligence analysis, law enforcement, and military operations.

Palantir’s co-founder, Peter Thiel, is also a prominent supporter of President Donald Trump and a long-time associate of Vice President JD Vance — who worked for a venture capital firm co-founded by Thiel out of college and later launched his own venture fund, with Thiel as an early financial backer.

Users who aren’t verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won’t be able to speak in Discord’s livestream-like “stage” channels, and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/59369446

"The average AI-generated pull request has 10.83 issues compared with 6.45 for human code, report claims."

"Besides having 1.7x more issues on general, AI-generated pull requests also had 1.4x more critical issues and 1.7x more major issues, so they're not just minor niggles."

"The tech also introduced 1.76x fewer spelling errors and 1.32x fewer testability issues."

I don't think they actually linked to the source report, which is here: https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/state-of-ai-vs-human-code-generation-report

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39485524

"The era of Windows as an agentic OS is here, whether we like it or not."