Technology

github.com/select/movies-delux…

As Meta races to recenter itself around artificial intelligence, the tech giant is mandating that more than 7,000 workers must move to new teams, and it’s radically changing some employees’ jobs. The Guardian has also learned that some of these reassigned employees will shift to two new teams: one building AI cloud infrastructure and another that’s building an internal AI agent codenamed Hatch.

Late last week, Meta employees received a notice that engineers had been “selected” for reassignment and would begin reporting to the cloud infrastructure and Hatch teams by the end of this week. Meta made a similar move last month when it reshuffled at least 1,000 engineers on to a new data labeling team called Applied AI, or AAI – at first giving them the option to volunteer, but later telling workers: “Transfers aren’t optional.”

“Our work, infrastructure and our products are fundamentally changing as a result of the continued acceleration of AI,” wrote Peter Hoose, vice-president of production engineering at Meta, in an internal post about the two new teams viewed by the Guardian. “The pace of what we are building is unprecedented, and these are exactly the kind of challenges that define what we do best.”

A Meta employee referenced last month’s reshuffle in a comment on Hoose’s announcement, writing: “Does ‘selected’ imply this is an [Applied AI]-style draft rather than a voluntary move?”

Further proof the Meta doesn't know what the Zuck it's doing. The rebrand has gone swimmingly, given all the time we spend in the legless metaverse.

Game 7 in the NBA playoffs: a chance to kick back, enjoy the drama of a winner-takes-all shootout between basketball’s big beasts, and … switch over from your regular TV provider to Amazon Prime? The excitement drains from the occasion at the first touch of the remote. Amazon no doubt imagined it had landed a real coup when the Eastern Conference semi-final series between Detroit and Cleveland extended to its maximum length, thereby handing the retail giant’s streaming arm, Prime Video, the right to air a Game 7 in the first season of its partnership with the NBA. In the event, Sunday’s game was a dud: a blowout win for the Cavs, playing on the road, that had all the electricity and charm of a stint in the doctor’s waiting room. Fortunately for viewers, Prime Video did its best to match the moment by producing a broadcast that was every bit as dull and juiceless as events on the court.

The pre-tipoff highlight was an interview with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, on the occasion of his coronation as this season’s MVP, in which the Oklahoma City star appeared to be speaking from a movie theater for some reason. Blake Griffin, the house beefcake on Prime Video’s studio set, chided ESPN insider Shams Charania for leaking this year’s MVP announcement hours earlier: “It’s Sunday, Shams – go to brunch, you nerd.” If Hillary had won and Shams had kept his trap shut, we’d all be at brunch! The game got under way, and things did not improve. During the half-time show, Dirk Nowitzki rambled Germanly about various topics, while fellow former MVP Steve Nash delivered lines like “That decisiveness in isolation is so important” with all the conviction of a hostage recording a ransom video. Host Taylor Rooks tried valiantly to compensate for the lack of chemistry on set by laughing at even the slightest hint of a joke from any of her panellists. Awkward laughter delivered over dead air on a platform it feels like a punishment to access: that’s the Prime Video NBA playoffs guarantee.

These have been a difficult debut playoffs for Prime as it muscles in on the broadcast territory once ruled by what the media analysts call “linear TV”. The feed dropped out for several minutes during overtime in the play-in game between the Hornets and the Heat; buffering, the nightmare we all thought we outlived in 2006, has plagued the stream in several games; and video has frequently been mistimed with audio, producing delays and mismatches. There’s primetime, which is when the bulk of these playoffs are taking place, and then there’s Prime Video time, which comes in around three seconds later. The audio itself in many games has often, in my experience at least, been strangely soft, requiring a trip all the way to the top of the volume scale to hear what the analysts and announcers are saying.

Intel ME and AMD PSP: The silicon layer nobody certifies

About cloud sovereignty and the often-ignored and unknown on-CPU management engine running below the OS and BIOS.

The article is quite long; it explains how CPUs run firmware that can include remote management over the network, and can be running even when the OS is not. They can be vulnerable to supply chain attacks and firmware replacements. Because it's on hardware, the firmware with open security vulnerabilities is often not updated.

Regarding cloud, the French SecNumCloud is a framework for cloud infrastructure security requirements. It doesn't cover these hardware attack vectors specifically but may mitigate risks through surrounding practices and isolation.

In conclusion, even a cloud provider that meets SecNumCloud must be asked whether and how they manage CPU management engine attack vectors.

AI is, as it stands, not economically viable for anybody involved other than the construction firms, NVIDIA, and the surrounding hardware companies benefitting from the irrational exuberance of a data center buildout that doesn’t appear to be happening at the speed we believed.

Every AI startup loses millions or billions of dollars a year, and nobody appears to have worked out a way to stop hemorrhaging cash. Hyperscalers have invested over $800 billion in the last three years, with plans to add another $700 billion or so in 2026 and another $1 trillion in 2027, meaning that they need to make at least three trillion dollars in AI specific revenue just to break even, and $6 trillion or more for AI to be anything other than a wash. I went into detail about this (albeit at a lower, pre-2026/2027 capex number) in a premium piece last year.

To give you some context, Microsoft made $281 billion, Meta $200 billion, Amazon $716 billion, and Google $402.8 billion in revenue in their most-recent fiscal years for every single product combined, for a total of $1.599 trillion. None of them will talk about their actual AI revenues. Yes, yes, I know Microsoft said that it had $37 billion in AI revenue run rate ($3.08 billion a month or so) and Amazon had $15 billion, or around $1.25 billion a month, but both of these are snapshots of single months that are meant to make it sound like they’re going to make that much in a year but in the end, you don’t actually know anything about how much money they’ve made from AI.

The terms "blindingly obvious," "logical consequence," and "that is not how it works" appear nowhere in the government handbook of internet legislation. In particular, the discovery that imposing age access controls on websites has pushed users to VPNs has come as a huge surprise to legislators in the UK, the EU, Canada, and Australia. Nobody here knows how old VPN users are, be they kids unwilling to lose access or adults unwilling to disgorge personally identifying data to who knows what.

As they recover from this shocking discovery, these fine people are looking at ways to control VPNs, whether by adding age verification here too or by some magical "digital age of consent" technology that somehow evades the paradox that demanding more personal information in the name of safety itself reduces safety. Yet here, as in so many ways, the rest of the world is lagging behind America – more specifically, the great state of Utah, which has just enacted an anti-VPN law.

This law makes it compulsory for any site that the state says needs age verification – porn, basically – to impose those checks on anyone physically in Utah whether or not they are using any VPN. Those would be the same VPNs whose sole purpose is to prevent the geolocation of their users. Which would seem, and is, another paradox.

I'd not go online without a VPN. There's absolutely no reason my ISP needs my browsing history. And at about $6/month, it's not exactly breaking the bank.

What I'd not use is any VPN provider that sponsors YouTube content. A free VPN has to make their money from somewhere.

cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/4133762

A researcher known as "Nightmare-Eclipse" recently released YellowKey, a security vulnerability that allegedly enables a full bypass of BitLocker's full-volume encryption. The researcher described YellowKey as one of the most "insane" flaws they have ever encountered and has also accused Microsoft of potentially embedding a legitimate backdoor in BitLocker's data protection system.

To no-one's surprise

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1127117/shl0ms-famous-prankster-on-x-twitter-baited-ai-haters-by-posting-a-real-painting-by-mone

Comments

• Hacker News;
• Reddit.

Context

The painting is one of the 250 oil paintings in the renowned French Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s Water Lilies series in which he depicted scenes from his home flower garden over the final 31 years of his life.

As the post went viral, many of the critics began deleting their replies, but @SHL0MS and other users such as @Jediwolf took screenshots of some of the best replies before they disappeared.

Individual replies

Critics, however, were eager to point out all kinds of “obvious” details that show why the “AI” Monet can’t hold a candle to a genuine Monet. One person even took the time to write out an 850-word breakdown of the AI work’s shortcomings.

“I’m disappointed I have to even point it out,” writes @egg_oni. “There is no cohesion to the depth and color choices. The reflection of the tree bleeds into the lilypads with no regard for spatial depth or contrast. The background lilypad-algae amalgam is egregiously vague, like most AI art.”

“The reflection in AI art is just noise splattered right,” writes @jordoxx. “Monet actually understood how light behaves on water.”

“The choice of color in places e.g. the purple around the lily pads sticks out to me as decidedly worse than most Monet,” writes @0xchiefyeti. “I get a sense that the artist failed to connect their eyes to the brush/palette […]”

“No frame, no sense of the threshold between subject and object, just colors,” writes @robertjett_.

“I would say that the allegedly real one here is superior in the sense that it carries, and conveys more information than the artificial one,” writes @artprograce. “The dark cold reflection of the trees triggers my attention. They strike me as slightly off, too dirty, and too pronounced to be natural.”

“I’m no artist but a real Monet actually looks like a real place…” writes @amaldorai. “the further back you get in this picture the less it looks like anything at all.”

“Depth, contrast, and cohesion are the most obvious,” writes @para_dim3. “There’s also no clear focal point.”

“It feels less lively,” writes @AzuriSplashes. “It lacks the texture, the rugged edges, the folds, the crevices and creases and bevels and topology of plastic arts. The fine, calculated highlights. The AI version is granulated pixelation, and it looks that way, it lacks the mess of humanity.”

“The fact that it looks like s**t and is s**t,” writes @RDL0013 in a since-deleted reply. “Slop. Doesn’t look anywhere near like a Monet. Looks exactly like somebody trying to replicate style and achieving like 20% of it. Not as vibrant as Monet’s typical choice of colors. Looks dull.”

“There’s no coherent composition,” writes @HundtRichard. “The eye is drawn to the 1/3rd from bottom, 1/3rd from left region and there’s nothing really to focus on. The lilly’s contrast is too low and the negative space around it too cluttered. The surface texture in the water regions are too vertical.”

“[T]here is no consistency in colour choice,” writes @Polymind_. “The view looks obscured perspective wise and feels like there is too much detail in the AI version, which if I am thinking correctly comes back again to the colours being so distinct and contrasty.”

“As an amateur art enjoyer, the only criticism I can offer is that the AI generated image does not make me feel anything,” writes @ThrosturTh. “It does not conjure emotion, thought or wonder. It’s just a colorful wallpaper pattern. If you look up ‘monet painting’ in Google images, you feel something.”

“There’s a certain harshness, no soft blending of colors, no depth, no symbiosis of the elements,” writes @JesTer396.

“The AI seems to be unable to distinguish plant reflections and submerged plants, for one,” writes @DavyRogue27930. “It’s combining tokens from the two randomly and the result is an incoherent muddle of inconsistently saturated greens.”

“Spatial coherence,” writes @enfilmigult. “The phony gen-AI pic isn’t getting it right and the reflections look like they’re growing out of the water. You look at the painting and instantly see the angle of the water surface. Also those lily pads are hideous, looks like someone drew on them.”

“Because it’s crap. That simple,” writes @nightingale9181. “This ain’t no painting. No talent to it. AI needs to go.”

“I present you with my eye lines, thickness denotes how quickly my eye moved,” writes @KEMOS4BE in a since deleted post, which included helpful illustrations. “One has a sensible, meandering composition that fits the subject.”

People are pointing out that results of this experiment are in line with what studies have shown about how people perceive art differently in light of how it was produced. The famous 2004 Kruger study into something called the effort heuristic found that people liked and valued artworks more if they believe they took more time and effort to create.

There is also a natural human bias against AI. A 2024 study published in Nature found that while people generally prefer AI-generated artworks over human-made ones when they didn’t know they were AI-generated, they preferred AI art less after finding out that AI was behind it.

The Post.

TL;DR: Between May 2025 and May 2026, Waymo’s recall-scope count of autonomous cabs rose from 1,212 vehicles to 3,791 vehicles.

That is more than a 3x increase in the Waymo fleet size in roughly one year, a major acceleration that dwarfs Tesla's faltering Robotaxi rollout.

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/47681770

A solar-powered drone has been lost at sea after a record-breaking flight lasting eight days between late April and early May. The crash also marks the untimely demise of the pioneering aircraft Solar Impulse 2, which previously performed the world’s first solar-powered crossings of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans before becoming an uncrewed test platform for US military missions.

The carbon-fiber aircraft could perform such feats of aeronautical endurance while running solely on renewable energy and batteries because of a 236-foot (72-meter) wingspan—comparable to a Boeing 747 jumbo jet’s wings—covered with more than 17,000 solar cells. The company Skydweller Aero purchased and modified the original Solar Impulse 2 aircraft to become a test platform for “perpetual uncrewed flight” with the capability of carrying up to 800 pounds (363 kilograms) of payload.

Skydweller Aero was conducting test flights for maritime patrol mission scenarios with the US military, and the company also holds contracts with the Navy and Air Force. So the Skydweller drone was operating in that capacity when it took off on its final flight in the early morning hours of April 26.

In 2026, people are going offline as much as possible—I think, in large part, to reclaim this feeling of preciousness around life. They’re chaining their phones to their walls, starting movements to touch grass, and creating entire product lines around reducing phone usage. In the face of a hostile internet, abstinence has become the mainstream accepted response. We crave the spontaneity we know to be in the physical world.

I don’t blame them. The Internet looks quite grim these days. Dead internet theory, stating that the internet is being overtaken and, eventually, will only be inhabited by bots, is entering mainstream discourse as AI social accounts multiply and compete for what flavor of slop comes after Italian brainrot. People are arguing with fake people, and creators have to clarify that they didn’t use AI to make the work they share. Culture commentators are writing about the death of the open internet as people retreat into dark forests, private spaces like group chats that are hidden from the web.

The Internet has lost its innocence, and logging on feels like fighting for survival.

But every once in a while, we still encounter something meaningful that makes it all worth it. Something heartwarming, genuine, inspiring, or joyful that justifies all the hours scrolling and a lifetime chained to our devices. Earnestness shines through even in “content” manufactured for spread.

If dead internet theory posits that the internet will eventually become only bots, alive internet theory proclaims we will never let the open internet die. We will always find a way to look for each other, to answer a call for help, to share a laugh and an argument right after one another. If there’s one trait of the human race that every apocalypse movie agrees on, it’s our will to survive.

We still have hope for the Internet because deep down, we still believe in each other.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1122224/nuclear-power-plants-far-more-popular-than-ai-data-centers-for-local-areas

Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor.

These results, from a March 2-18 Gallup survey, represent the first time Gallup has asked about data center construction, a topic that has met fierce opposition from local residents in many parts of the country. These data centers house computing equipment that helps power AI technology used by businesses, universities and other institutions. The centers cover large areas of land, require extensive amounts of electricity to operate and need substantial water to cool the equipment, raising concerns about their impact on the environment and local electric bills.

The data center question parallels the wording Gallup uses to ask about local nuclear power plant construction. In the same March survey, 53% of Americans say they oppose building a nuclear energy plant in their area, far less than the 71% opposed to data center construction. Since Gallup first asked the nuclear power plant question in 2001, the high point in opposition has been 63%.

Usually, I have a spare Pixel on hand to test things out with, but the power button broke off of my 2XL.

Anyway, I've had a 10a for a couple of weeks now after my 9a was stolen, and I'm finding it really difficult to get jazzed about starting from scratch.

As such, this seems like the perfect time to say "fuck it, I'm giving GrapheneOS a try."

So, my questions are:

• Does my eSIM remain intact on the device?

• How do I get apps without Google Play?

• Can I still attach a Gmail account for notifications without going all in?

• What about contacts and message history?

• Is there a good way to get my password keychain transferred?

• What is the status of NFC payments?

This whole experience has been hell (I last had to set up from scratch with my 2XL, and as I'm on a 10a now, seems like that was eight years ago), but it's not even done, and I have no interest in finishing.

This said, as a homeless single guy, having a phone is important, and while I've rooted some lesser phones in the past via ADB, I have no margin for error here.

ETA: Without NFC, it can't be done. My physical card was canceled because my phone was stolen, so my only form of payment is NFC. That's a shame.

Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders don’t agree on much. But both think that AI is a disaster for the working class. The Vermont senator recently wrote that “AI oligarchs do not want to just replace specific jobs. They want to replace workers.” Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, made similar comments last week: Silicon Valley does “not care about the little guy,” he said in a podcast episode titled “Stopping the AI Oligarchs From Stealing Humanity.” This emergent “Bernie-to-Bannon” coalition points to the growing bipartisan anxiety over AI. In polls, the United States ranks among the countries most concerned about AI. America is both the world’s foremost developer of AI and its chief hater.

Recently, Maine passed the country’s first statewide data-center moratorium (though the bill was vetoed by the governor). Nationally, a record number of proposed projects were canceled in the first quarter of this year following local pushback. Meanwhile, in extreme cases, concerns about AI appear to be tipping into violence. In April, someone shot 13 rounds at an Indianapolis councilman’s house and left a note under his doormat: “NO DATA CENTERS,” it read. Days later, a man threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s home before heading to OpenAI’s headquarters, where he allegedly threatened to burn down the building and kill anyone inside. (The man has since pleaded not guilty to several charges, including attempted murder.) Social-media posts applauding the attack racked up thousands of likes: “I hope that Molotov is okay!” wrote one commenter.

All of this may be only the start. The AI industry has spent recent years warning of a jobless future. So far, narratives about labor displacement have been largely speculation. While a smattering of tech executives have attributed job cuts to AI, many analysts have accused these CEOs of “AI-washing”—essentially, using the technology as a scapegoat for roles they would have eliminated regardless. If anything, AI has mostly been a financial boon for the country, buoying the stock market and driving growth. But that could all change, of course. Imagine the uproar if jobs across the economy truly start disappearing en masse.

A few weeks ago, I found myself in one of the rare situations in which I was mindlessly doom-scrolling on LinkedIn just to exclusively see one post after another that contained no actual information and not a single sentence that would have lacked any more substance if you replaced every noun in it with a different noun. There were thought leaders leading no thoughts, founders founding nothing of actual value, strategists describing strategies that amounted to “be visible” and “ship fast”, and an alarming number of self-described AI experts whose expertise appeared to consist entirely of having a ChatGPT or Claude subscription and the willingness to write about it in seventeen-paragraph posts.

There is a word for this kind of communication, one the philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously employed back in 1986, when he wrote a short essay called On Bullshit. Frankfurt’s central observation, which has aged terrifyingly well, is that the bullshitter is not the same as the liar, because the liar at least respects the truth enough to try to hide it, but the bullshitter does not care whether what they are saying is true or false. The truth-value of the statement is simply not part of their concern. The bullshitter is optimising for a different objective, usually appearing competent, appearing confident, or appearing to be the right kind of person to be in the room. And precisely because the bullshitter is indifferent to truth, Frankfurt argued, they are a greater threat to honest discourse than any liar. Twenty years on, that essay reads like a pre-mortem on the modern internet and, in parts, modern society.

TLDR: Since Tesla’s June 2025 robotaxi launch, Tesla has built a 39-vehicle unsupervised fleet, while Waymo has a newly disclosed 3,791-vehicle U.S. fleet. So Tesla appears to be on pace to catch up with Waymo’s autonomous fleet size by the year 2111.

LOL!

Oh, joy.

Google’s I/O conference is next week, and we expect to hear a lot about the company’s AI endeavors. The company says there’s so much to talk about that it’s spilling the Android beans a little early, and yes, a lot of AI is involved. In the coming months, Google will roll out more smartphone AI features under the Gemini Intelligence banner, bringing more automation and customization to your phone.

App automation will be a major element of Android going forward, Google says. Automation for apps is expanding after Google began testing it earlier in 2026 with DoorDash and Uber on Pixel and Samsung phones. It was a very frustrating experience at launch, but Google says it has spent the intervening months fine-tuning the system.

Google promises that Android will be able to handle more complex automations across apps. For example, the robot could find a course syllabus in Gmail and then hop to a shopping app to add the necessary books to your shopping cart. Google also suggests taking a picture of a travel brochure and telling Gemini to book something similar in the Expedia app.

I've yet to find a reason I'd want my apps talking to each other, let alone unsupervised.

But the more basic issue is that agentic "AI" isn't fit for purpose.

So, I have a follow-up appointment for how my dentures are fitting. Would it be cool to just say "appointment at 1 p.m. at this location in two weeks" and have it arrange the rideshares so I don't need to remember anything?

Sure, it would. Kinda creepy, but cool nonetheless. A couple of issues here:

• I generally use Lyft, and outside of trips to the airport, I've learned that booking in advance is always far more expensive than the spot price (YMMV). Atop this, I usually get a beg notification offer by looking into pricing about 15 minutes before my planned need to book. Put it all together, and I can end up paying fully 75% more than I needed to. That's the last thing I want Gemini automating for me.

• It's a fucking medical appointment. Divining when I'll need to be picked up is a fool's errand, no matter what I blocked out for it in my calendar. Unless you plan on closing down a bar, this applies similarly.

So, I'll get the guaranteed highest price with no flexibility for reality, and this is an improvement?

And you want me to use this to book larger travel plans? Highest airfare, highest hotel rate? Reservations at a Michelin restaurant because we happen to have traveled there for our anniversary, but between the outrageous airfare and usurious hotel rate, ain't no one got the money for a $120 steak.

For years, Emrah Bayraktar did just about anything he could to make money: Cleaned cars. Worked a night-shift in a warehouse. Made sandwiches at a Subway during the day.

When he wasn't eking out a living with part-time work, 25-year-old Bayraktar from Antwerp, Belgium would take out his iPhone and edit long interviews of influencers into snippets and post them to Instagram. Pop star-turned-Arizona State University professor will.i.am teaches “The Agentic Self” at his headquarters in Los Angeles, Calif., on Jan. 14, 2026.

"And then one random night, I saw a notification saying that I earned $12, I was like OK cool," Bayraktar said. "Then two weeks later, I made two-and-a-half thousand dollars, and I thought, 'Maybe I could just quit my jobs and go all-in on this.'"

And he did, earning a cut every time someone bought something from a link he placed in the video clip.

He became so skilled at editing the short videos that he now runs a network of 40,000 freelance clippers and has a YouTube channel where he teaches people how to become clippers, directing them to websites where, instead of getting paid for so-called affiliate link purchases, clippers are paid per view they generate.

Amazon employees are using an internal AI tool to automate non-essential tasks in a bid to show managers they are using the technology more frequently.

The Seattle-based group has started to widely deploy its in-house “MeshClaw” product in recent weeks, allowing employees to create AI agents that can connect to workplace software and carry out tasks on a user’s behalf, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Some employees said colleagues were using the software to automate additional, unnecessary AI activity to increase their consumption of tokens—units of data processed by models.

They said the move reflected pressure to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 percent of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking AI token consumption on internal leader boards.

“There is just so much pressure to use these tools,” one Amazon employee told the FT. “Some people are just using MeshClaw to maximize their token usage.”