Technology

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1016822

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Ukraine now makes more drones than any democracy in the world, and wealthy nations in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East are lining up to buy them. But when I asked the CEO of Rheinmetall what that could mean for his business model, he bristled. “Who is the biggest drone producer in Ukraine?” Papperger demanded. I listed the ones that I had visited in Kyiv two weeks earlier, Fire Point and Skyfall, which make hundreds of thousands of drones a month for the Ukrainian armed forces. “It’s Ukrainian housewives,” Papperger said of their factories. “They have 3-D printers in the kitchen, and they produce parts for drones,” he said. “This is not innovation.”

As one of the biggest gunsmiths in the world, Papperger knows a lot about the state of the art in defense. His empire encompasses 180 factories (including eight in the United States) producing not only tanks and artillery but warships, missiles, high-end drones, anti-aircraft batteries, and fuselages for fighter jets such as the F-35. The company that he leads plays such an outsize role in the defense of NATO and Ukraine that the Russians put Papperger on a target list for assassination in 2024.

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Most drones are too cheap to move the needle toward NATO’s gargantuan spending targets.

Among the few exceptions is the $20 billion contract that the Pentagon signed this month with Anduril, an American defense-technology company founded in 2017. That amount of money “could probably buy all the drones Ukraine produces,” Oleksandr Kamyshin, the official who oversees Ukraine’s weapons industry, told me. But as a general rule, Western militaries tend to give the biggest contracts to established manufacturers.

With the start of the war in Iran, Rheinmetall told investors that it expects sales to grow this year by at least 40 percent. Its market value now stands at roughly $80 billion, far higher than Germany’s biggest carmakers, including Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz. Last month, the company was already in talks to sell weapons worth 80 billion euros, adding to a backlog of orders that is expected to top 135 billion euros by the end of 2026. “This would be the highest order intake ever,” Papperger said. “But everybody knows that this is not enough. We need at the end of the day 400, 500, or more—600 billion!”

These drone wolf packs are designed for urban combat and help Chinese soldiers clear areas without risking themselves. I think I read something about a Torment Nexus in there too...

These drone wolf packs are designed for urban combat and help Chinese soldiers clear areas without risking themselves. I think I read something about a Torment Nexus in there too...

The CEOs of Visa, Mastercard, PayPal Holdings and Stripe received letters Thursday from Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson, who demanded they not discriminate against customers based on political or religious grounds.

The FTC threatened enforcement action if customers are denied services for those reasons.

Any act to “deplatform customers or deny them access to financial products or services” may violate the Federal Trade Commission Act and “could lead to an FTC investigation and potential enforcement action,” the agency said in a Thursday press release. The FTC didn’t cite any specific infractions by the companies.

The commission is typically made up of five members, but has just two at the moment. President Donald Trump last fired two of the Democrats who sat on the commission.

Yekaterina Chudnovsky, online biographies say, is a mother-of-four who “enjoys spending time with her family and teaching them the importance of giving back and helping others”. They add that Ukrainian-born Chudnovsky, known as Katie, finds sanctuary in walks on the beach.

In interviews, Chudnovsky has spoken warmly about her commitment to philanthropy, her dedication to support cancer research and her work as a lawyer for an unnamed global technology firm. Pornography is never mentioned.

Now, it may become unavoidable. After the death of Chudnovsky’s husband, Leonid Radvinsky, from cancer last week at the age of 43, she is now understood to have a controlling interest through a family trust in the London-based adult content site, OnlyFans.

Chudnovsky is set to have a crucial role in deciding what happens to the business that made her husband a billionaire before he turned 40. The family stake is valued at about $5.5bn (£4.1bn).

Chudnovsky’s views on pornography will determine the site’s future business model, and whether it continues to generate huge sums of money by taking a 20% cut from the earnings of about 4 million content creators globally, a large proportion of whom generate money for the business by undressing and performing explicit content on the platform.

OnlyFans has tried to position itself as one of Britain’s greatest tech success stories, preferring to be seen as a social media platform than as an adult business. It employs only 42 people, and yet managed to generate $7.2bn in 2024.

Research.

• Hacker News.

White House App Found Tracking Users' Exact Location Every 4.5 Minutes via Third-Party Server on top of the rest.

Remember when Elon Musk told advertisers to “go fuck” themselves and then sued them for the crime of taking his advice? A federal judge has now dismissed that lawsuit — with prejudice — confirming what anyone with a passing familiarity with antitrust law already knew: companies deciding they don’t want their brands plastered next to extremist content aren’t engaged in an illegal conspiracy. They’re just making basic (probably pretty smart) business decisions.

When X Corp filed this case back in August of 2024, we walked through in great detail why the legal theory was fundamentally broken. Not broken in a “they pleaded it badly” kind of way, but broken in a “this theory does not describe an antitrust violation no matter how many drugs you’re taking or how convinced you are that the world owes you advertising dollars” kind of way. Judge Jane Boyle of the Northern District of Texas has now agreed, and the key section of her ruling is worth reading in full...

Using CRISPR-Cas9, scientists engineered a yeast to produce the nutrient feed. Farmers could have it in two years.

Distributed Denial of Secrets— Mastodon, Bluesky.

Hackers connected to the Iranian government accessed FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email and posted materials — including photos and documents — taken from his account, a person familiar with the breach confirmed to CNN.

The hackers have published a series of photos of Patel from before he became FBI director that they claim were stolen from his personal email account. A source familiar with the incident confirmed the images’ authenticity.

The stolen emails appear to date from around 2011 to 2022 and appear to include personal, business and travel correspondence that Patel had with various contacts, according to a preliminary CNN review of the files with the help of an independent cybersecurity researcher.

The Trump administration's newly launched White House App is under scrutiny after a software developer claimed to have found embedded code that tracks users' precise GPS coordinates every 4.5 minutes and automatically syncs them to a third-party server. The claim, posted on 28 March 2026 by the X account @Thereallo1026, has drawn nearly 260,000 views and prompted questions about data collection practices in government-operated applications.

The post included what appeared to be decompiled source code from the app, revealing what the user described as OneSignal's 'full GPS pipeline compiled in.' According to the post, the code showed the app 'polling your location every 4.5 minutes, syncing your exact coordinates to a third-party server.' The White House has not publicly responded to the specific technical claims.

The ARC Prize organization designs benchmarks which are specifically crafted to demonstrate tasks that humans complete easily, but are difficult for AIs like LLMs, "Reasoning" models, and Agentic frameworks.

ARC-AGI-3 is the first fully interactive benchmark in the ARC-AGI series. ARC-AGI-3 represents hundreds of original turn-based environments, each handcrafted by a team of human game designers. There are no instructions, no rules, and no stated goals. To succeed, an AI agent must explore each environment on its own, figure out how it works, discover what winning looks like, and carry what it learns forward across increasingly difficult levels.

Previous ARC-AGI benchmarks predicted and tracked major AI breakthroughs, from reasoning models to coding agents. ARC-AGI-3 points to what's next: the gap between AI that can follow instructions and AI that can genuinely explore, learn, and adapt in unfamiliar situations.

You can try the tasks yourself here: https://arcprize.org/arc-agi/3

Here is the current leaderboard for ARC-AGI 3, using state of the art models

• OpenAI GPT-5.4 High - 0.3% success rate at $5.2K
• Google Gemini 3.1 Pro - 0.2% success rate at $2.2K
• Anthropic Opus 4.6 Max - 0.2% success rate at $8.9K
• xAI Grok 4.20 Reasoning - 0.0% success rate $3.8K.

(Logarithmic cost on the horizontal axis. Note that the vertical scale goes from 0% to 3% in this graph. If human scores were included, they would be at 100%, at the cost of approximately $250.)

https://arcprize.org/leaderboard

Technical report: https://arcprize.org/media/ARC_AGI_3_Technical_Report.pdf

In order for an environment to be included in ARC-AGI-3, it needs to pass the minimum “easy for humans” threshold. Each environment was attempted by 10 people. Only environments that could be fully solved by at least two human participants (independently) were considered for inclusion in the public, semi-private and fully-private sets. Many environments were solved by six or more people. As a reminder, an environment is considered solved only if the test taker was able to complete all levels, upon seeing the environment for the very first time. As such, all ARC-AGI-3 environments are verified to be 100% solvable by humans with no prior task-specific training