Technology

• In an internal all-hands, Google DeepMind leaders addressed staff concerns about Pentagon work.
• Leaders said there was a "robust process" to ensure the contracts align with Google's AI principles.
• At the same time, leaders said Google was pursuing more contracts in areas like cybersecurity and biosecurity.

Just as it says in the title. All these companies offering 'privacy' and 'security' services when they can't even keep their own shit secure. At the end of the day, the only chance we have at keeping private and secure is by handling our own data and avoiding all these companies entirely, and hope they all eventually disappear in bankruptcy hell.

Funny how this company is also a 'sponsor' for Have I Been Pwned, yet they are evidently just using that to market themselves to privacy conscious people by having their brand on the site.

These companies never cease to amaze me, and this causes me to trust Have I Been Pwned a bit less in terms of their marketed philosophy vs what they actually are.

I'm just ranting here, because I'm getting increasingly tired of all this shit. Sorry for that.

• Fast Nuclear Buildout: The Trump administration is rapidly rewriting rules to support the development of nuclear power plants.
• Aligning With Industry: Staffers from DOGE are revamping rules in ways to ease regulations and provide financial breaks for industry.
• “No Longer Independent”: Nuclear Regulatory Commission veterans say the administration is limiting oversight in dangerous ways.

• Lobsters;
• Hacker News.

In a move clearly designed to strengthen its position among developers, OpenAI has acquired Python tool maker Astral. The house of Altman expects the deal to strengthen the ecosystem for its Codex programming agent.

Since its founding in 2022 by Charlie Marsh, Astral has won over a substantial portion of the Python community with Rust-based tools like uv (package and project manager), Ruff (linting and formatting), and ty (type checker) that outperform Python-based tools like pip.

Data gathered by Chartbeat and shared by Axios reveals that, over the past year, Google Search traffic to publishers across the broader web have fallen drastically, and proportionally more so for smaller websites. Referral traffic from Google apparently fell by 60% for “small publishers,” while “medium publishers” (those with between 10,000-100,000 daily pageviews) saw a drop of 47%. “Large publishers,” meanwhile, saw a 22% drop. That last category would be any site getting over 100,000 daily pageviews.

It’s not just Google Search either. While Search traffic dropped by 34%, traffic from Google Discover has also fallen by 15% over the past year, the report found.

You'll use AI and like it too - if you work for PwC. Paul Griggs, US chief executive of the global professional services giant, has made clear there is no room at the corporation for AI skeptics.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Griggs indicated that anyone who believed they had the "opportunity to opt out" of AI is "not going to be here that long," and warned senior staff not "paranoid about being AI-first" will be replaced by others who are more comfortable with the tech.