Technology

In his own words, buried in a GitHub comment thread that exploded into nearly a thousand replies before the whole thing got shut down, he admitted the feature he was pushing was: "hilariously pointless and ineffective" at actually verifying anyone's age. Then he argued it should be implemented anyway...

• Full Report— PDF;
• Overview of all demand-related policy measures that have been announced by governments since the start of the crisis.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44516936

The account is an example of how artificial intelligence is being used to push political agendas in wartime

MAGA has been swooning over photos of a blonde U.S. Army soldier, walking defiantly alongside President Donald Trump to carry out the America First agenda. But there’s just one problem — she’s AI.

Images most likely generated by artificial intelligence depicted Jessica Foster wearing heels on a U.S. warship in the Strait of Hormuz, posing for selfies with Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and giving a speech at the president’s “Board of Peace” event earlier this year.

The account, which has since been taken down, gained more than one million followers since its mysterious creator started posting on it four months ago, The Washington Post reports.

A jury has found Elon Musk liable for misleading investors by deliberately driving down Twitter's stock price in the tumultuous months leading up to his 2022 acquisition of the social media company for $44 billion. But it absolved him of some fraud allegations, finding that he did not "scheme" to mislead investors.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.wtf/post/39780317

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.wtf/post/39686444

Per the very first reply on their thread discussing it in their forums, which I linked directly to for the post title:

We'll NEVER require any verification or identification from the user.

However, what's gonna happen should the attempts to age-gate the XDG portal screw over alt-init distros like Artix too? My guess is maybe they start blocking regions which force age gating like Arch Linux 32 is doing.

Research.

The technology, called Fragile Object Grasping with Tactile Sensing (FORTE), combines advanced tactile sensing with soft robotics.

The breakthrough could improve robot performance when a light touch is needed, such as in health care and manufacturing.

EDIT: This happened back in 2025. Will leave as I’m sure I’m not the only one that didn’t know, but I saw it on hacker news and didn’t realize it was a year old. My bad.

In an odd approach to trying to improve customer tech support, HP allegedly implemented mandatory, 15-minute wait times for people calling the vendor for help with their computers and printers in certain geographies.

Callers from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, and Italy were met with the forced holding periods, The Register reported on Thursday. The publication cited internal communications it saw from February 18 that reportedly said the wait times aimed to “influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve, as a faster way to address their support question. This involves inserting a message of high call volumes, to expect a delay in connecting to an agent and offering digital self-solve solutions as an alternative.”

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/43738524

Rust security maintainers contend Nadim Kobeissi's vulnerability claims are too much Since February, cryptographer Nadim Kobeissi has been trying to get code fixes applied to Rust cryptography libraries to address what he says are critical bugs. For his efforts, he's been dismissed, ignored, and banned from Rust security channels.…

The co-founder of Super Micro Computer and two others were charged with diverting $2.5 billion worth of servers with Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips to China

“I've been asked several times, are we still considering being in Israel? We are 100% in Israel. We are 100% behind the families there. We are 100% in the Middle East,” said Jensen Huang, as Nvidia moved to reassure employees and investors that the war in the region has not altered its long-term commitment.

Nvidia has significantly expanded its presence in Israel since its $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox Technologies in 2019, which established a major hub for the company in the country.

Today, Nvidia employs around 6,000 people in Israel, and the country plays a central role in the development of several of its key technologies, including advanced chips and networking systems.

The company is also planning a major new campus in Kiryat Tivon, expected to employ up to 10,000 workers. Announcing the project last year, Huang said: “Israel is home to some of the world’s most brilliant technologists and has become NVIDIA’s second home.

Thus, the war in the Middle East reveals itself for what it truly is: a global operation of financial and social engineering. Whilst bombs fall on targets in Iran and factions clash in the Middle Eastern theatre, in New York, Washington and London the foundations are being laid for the greatest monetary revolution since the days of Nixon and the closure of the gold exchange standard: the transition to a programmable digital Dollar, made “necessary” by the crisis that the bombings themselves are helping to create. The war-induced recession will serve exactly the same monetary function as the “pandemic”: forcing the issue to legitimise the further monetisation of the debt upon which the criminal merry-go-round of Western capitalism is built.

...

The question cui prodest? has never been so urgent. The answer, concealed behind the smoke of bombs, the sizzle of algorithms, and the din of propaganda, is clearer than ever: it benefits a bankrupt system which, rather than admit its parasitic obsolescence, is ready to bury the world beneath its rubble.

We are already, and will become, the cannon fodder of this mechanism. Today, this deception is paid for with the blood and freedom of everyone – within and beyond the empire’s borders.

Research.

Researchers have developed a new kind of nanoelectronic device that could dramatically cut the energy consumed by artificial intelligence hardware by mimicking the human brain.

The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, developed a form of hafnium oxide that acts as a highly stable, low‑energy ‘memristor’ — a component designed to mimic the efficient way neurons are connected in the brain.

• 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.