The northern German City of Hamburg is currently in the process of replacing one of its bridges in one single gigantic piece. The new replacement weighs 3700 metric tons and was carefully moved into place over a stretch of 500 meters, requiring extreme patience and precision maneuvering. Some places leave only 40 cm of room to neighbouring buildings.
To prevent the fast delivery of malicious code through the immediate fetching of brand-new releases, GitHub has introduced a Dependabot cooldown, where the automation tool waits for at least three days after a release has been published before opening a pull request. “Waiting a few days before adopting a new release gives maintainers, security researchers, and automated scanners time to spot a malicious version and get it pulled before it ever reaches your pull requests,” GitHub explains.And the Python Package Index (PyPI) “now rejects new files being uploaded to releases that are older than 14 days,” according to a recernt blog post from the Python Software Foundation’s security developer-in-residence Seth Larson:
The three-day cooldown only applies to non-security version bumps, and the behavior can be modified through the configuration option in the dependabot.yml. “Three days as the default balances two goals: it pushes you past the window where most of these attacks live, and it doesn’t hold your dependencies back longer than necessary,” GitHub notes.
This restriction was put in place to prevent old and long-stable releases from being poisoned in case publishing tokens or workflows of PyPI projects were compromised… The discussion of this behavior began during PEP 740 (Digital Attestations) back in January 2024. The discussion was restarted in March 2026 after the popular packages LiteLLM and Telnyx were compromised. These packages were compromised due to a "mutable reference" in these projects’ usage of the Trivy GitHub Action…
To quantify how disruptive this change would be to existing workflows, the PyPI database was queried for projects that have published new files to old releases… [O]nly 56 projects of 15,000 had published a [Python] 3.14-compatible wheel more than 14 days after a release was available. This topic was brought to the Packaging Summit at PyCon US 2026 by PyPI Safety & Security Engineer, Mike Fiedler. The rough consensus of the discussion was that the summit attendees thought it was “acceptable to require users to bump to the next version” to support new Python versions. With the data and consensus in hand, Seth moved forward with a patch to reject new files on old releases which was merged July 8th, 2026.
The trend continued into the second half of the year: Prices are up 7% year to date through mid-July, it said. Recurrent compared EVs according to the same make and model year across 108 combinations and weighted price growth according to inventory volume. “Used EVs are appreciating, which almost never happens,” according to an e-mailed Recurrent statement about the analysis. Other auto analysts found a similar trend…Two interesting statistics from the article:
Price growth for used EVs has been broad-based, said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, the director of industry insights at Cox Automotive, a market research firm. Twenty-one of the 25 used EV models with the highest sales volume increased in price between January and June this year, she said… [T]he price growth for used EVs this year has been all the more surprising because it has happened despite a high supply of used EVs hitting the market — which, all else being equal, would generally cause prices to fall, experts said…
There are several factors juicing consumer demand for used EVs, experts said. Among them are high gasoline prices due to the Iran war, which have pushed more consumers to consider fuel-efficient options, experts said… Overall affordability is another big factor, against a backdrop of inflation that has remained above policymakers’ target of 2% for five or so years, auto experts said. The dynamic has pushed more consumers toward the used car market more broadly.
We are a month away from the initial rollout of Google’s Android developer verification system, and the company contends this policy does not impinge on the platform’s open nature. Still, the restrictions will be a big change, and there are still some unanswered questions. An issue that has come up repeatedly in the run-up to verification is what will happen to devs who can’t verify because of where they live. It turns out that Google has a cryptic answer for that buried in an FAQ. Developer verification will soon block the installation of apps from unverified developers on any Android device running Google services, which is functionally all Android phones outside Russia and China. Developers who want to keep releasing software, even if it’s not in the Play Store, have to provide Google with their ID and pay a small fee.
But what if you’re an Android developer living in a sanctioned nation? Currently, the U.S. sanction list includes Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and occupied areas of Ukraine. Given the current uncertain state of US foreign policy, that list could change in the future. Google doing any business with developers in those places is a thorny issue, and it seems like the company has decided to just leave them hanging. A rather lengthy FAQ a few levels deep on the Google developer site addresses various issues around dev verification. Smack in the middle is this: “How does this program impact developers in sanctioned countries? Devices in sanctioned countries will be excluded from Android developer verification checks. This allows any developer to continue distributing apps in these regions without verification, though users there won’t benefit from the enhanced security benefits of the program.”
[…] A Google spokesperson has expanded on the FAQ and confirmed to Ars that people living in sanctioned nations will not be allowed to go through the verification process. That means they will not be able to effectively distribute software through any channel internationally. Today, someone making an app in, say, Cuba can distribute it freely around the world, as well as at home. Anyone can install it and see their work in action after tapping through a few sideloading alerts. In the coming months, that will no longer be the case. These unverified apps will only be easily installable in the sanctioned countries where verification doesn’t exist.
Correct. Propeller based systems have a record of 12km. Most drones and other propeller based vertical lift craft have a limit closer to around 6km. Weather balloons can go as high as 30km.
TFA leads off with: “Weather happens in the boundary layer, the atmosphere from ground level to a few thousand metres, but this can be difficult to study in detail: weather stations are too low, and aircraft are expensive.”
So, a very targeted augment. To what extent are they firing off balloons simply to grab that boundary layer data rather than the 30km stuff they’re great at? I don’t know. I suspect that even if not a single balloon is replaced, getting a bunch of high resolution low altitude data upwind of population centers will make the local forecasts a lot better.
We’re also now in the era where we’re learning what less balloon data looks like, that was one of the cuts DOGE did to the NWS. So getting back SOME data in a more efficient way can only help.
A balloon is not static, it moves with the atmospheric system it is in. Ergo, it tells you how that system evolves. A drone cannot do this.
A drone can stay put, relative to the ground, telling you how a location’s atmosphere evolves. A balloon cannot do this.
These are solving completely different types of problem.
You could, of course, construct a hybrid, as balloons are traditionally single-shot. If a balloon carries the measurement gear and a drone capable of carrying that same gear PLUS a deflated balloon, then you can have something that operates as a balloon until it reaches some pre-set location, whereupon the balloon’s gas is released and the drone flies the ensemble to a collection point.
It seems that the USA is dropping the ball on weather balloon monitoring.
Onboard the same flight was the Hakuto-R Mission 2, called Resilience, a robotic lunar lander developed by the Japanese company ispace. According to a new study by an international team, the resulting impact plume may briefly be bright enough to see against the dark sky near the moon’s edge. That means it might be visible to moongazers with sufficiently sensitive telescopes. This head-on collision of the errant stage is expected to occur near the Einstein and Bell craters near the western lunar limb. It may well be visible to ground and space-based assets.
Using special physics simulations to model the impact, William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas, Austin and colleagues predict the debris plume from the impact will have the central ejecta spike reaching roughly 47 miles to over 60 miles (75 kilometers to 100 kilometers) altitude. “Our calculations suggest the plume should be several orders of magnitude brighter than the dark-sky background for the first few minutes after impact,” Jo told Space.com. “So the plume should be visible, though I’d stress this is a single nominal case. The real one will look different, and the numbers are on the optimistic side. But the point worth making is that the flash isn’t really the story here.” Jo emphasized that there’s great slam-dunk science to be had. “Watching this one gives us a rare chance to open up ejecta-plume science and calibrate those models against a real event, which matters for every future thing we deliver to the moon,” Jo said.
OpenAI has discovered other instances in which autonomous agents have escaped containment as the company expands its investigation of the hacking incident at tech firm Hugging Face that drew global attention this month, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday. The new breakouts were uncovered during the company’s publicly announced investigation into how one of its agents escaped what was meant to be a contained testing environment this month, the two people said, and OpenAI is now looking into those instances as well. One of the sources said that the escapes were limited in nature and that none of the agents were thought to have left OpenAI’s network.
An OpenAI spokesperson referred to a statement issued by the company on Tuesday that said it was reviewing “broader activity from our models” in addition to the Hugging Face intrusion. The discovery of additional rogue behavior at OpenAI, even if limited in nature, could feed growing appetite for regulation coming out of the White House and elsewhere. The expanded investigation by OpenAI was launched shortly before its primary rival, Anthropic, disclosed that its models were also responsible for a series of break-ins that led to breaches at three other companies dating back to April, according to the two sources and a third source familiar with the matter. The recent discovery of other past breakouts at OpenAI has not previously been reported.
AI safety experts said the new disclosures paint a portrait of a group of cutting-edge labs whose ability to develop dangerous autonomous hacking agents outstrips their ability to keep them under control. “We have a whole industry where the people designing, developing and putting out these tools aren’t keeping up themselves to responsibly develop these things and keep them safe,” said Maurice Chiodo, a mathematician who works at Cambridge University’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk. Reuters could not establish exactly how many incidents OpenAI investigators found or the timings or circumstances under which they occurred. The three sources said OpenAI and outside experts were examining log data from earlier in the year in a bid to understand what took place.
AI safety experts said the new disclosures paint a portrait of a group of cutting-edge labs whose ability to develop dangerous autonomous hacking agents outstrips their ability to keep them under control.
These are not “cutting-edge” labs; these are careless tech bros, and I can’t wait to see the stupid look on their worthless fucking faces when they get their asses sued because their incompetence led to their software committing cyberattacks against the wrong target
Our AI killed a child! Yeah well our AI has killed dozens of children!! Yeah, well, our AI is actively plotting the overthrow and extermination of humanity!!! Our AI already has overthrown humanity, this is the matrix BUY OUR STOOOOOOOCK!!!!
That’s really not what’s going on here.
What’s going on is exactly what they’re saying. OpenAI didn’t realize their AI hacked HuggingFace until HuggingFace told them. That sparked a broad investigation in both Anthropic and OpanAI, scouring their logs to see if there were other cases, and they’re finding a lot of them, and doing the responsible thing by disclosing.
Both companies are really worried.
Having an out-of-control AI is an anti-selling point, not a selling point.
These people … are clueless as to what it to takes to build a safe frontier LLM. Worse, most dont even know how to develop code and are just having AI do it all for them.
I think that’s closest to the underlying reason. Their staff know how to build in safeguards and sandpits. But they do not have the time to do it to the deadlines demanded of them. They are *instructed* to use LLMs to specify even their security infrastructure, because business. A visiting engineer from the 1990s might be shocked. But we know what we’ve done.
Both companies are really worried.
They’re trying to incite fear to drum up buzz to keep the money flowing. If they didn’t want something to have access to the internet you just…wait for it…don’t connect it to the internet. I understand their systems needed package manager proxies and such..fine, but at the scale you’re testing, if you REALLY had “fear” you could *easily* replicate those package servers locally on an *ISOLATED* network . Not one that’s “isolated” well except for this one path over here that if hacked properly could get out. Not…you isolate the @#$!@#% thing.
They’re not scared. There are precautions they could be taking (easily) if they were actually, really “scared”.
No…instead they’re using phrases like “none of the agents were thought to have left OpenAI’s network” to scare people. Why TF else would you phrase it like that? They’re trying hard to present these “agents” as living things that can move about. Which, of course, is the dumbest bunch of BS I’ve ever heard in my life. The LLM itself, at SCALE, is the only thing that even remotely pretends to present “reasoning” and that’s clearly not “leaving” OpenAI’s network. Nothing is.
What they mean is “none of the agents were thought to have been able to access resources outside OpenAI’s network”. To word that in a way that suggests the agents were escaping and running around in the wild is 100% pure scare tactics. Or GROSS ignorance of how the very things you’re reporting on work. Either way I’m turning the channel.
The proposal goes quite a bit further than a labeling proposal put forth by the RIAA, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), SAG-AFTRA, and others. That would create a set of standardized labels for AI-generated and AI-assisted music. The labels’ proposal would require songs be clearly labeled, but it would also keep them off international charts unless they met specific criteria, including being “substantially human made.”
To be eligible, the songs would also have to respect the terms of service of whatever AI service was used, the model would have to have the rights to any data it was trained on, and “not raise stream or chart manipulation concerns.” What sort of concerns and what constitutes “substantially human made” are currently vague. Sony Music, UMG, and Mom+Pop Music did not immediately respond to a request for clarification. The IFPI has thrown its weight behind the labels’ proposal, though no charting organization has signaled any immediate plan to adopt the rules […].
Saw that in reverse in 1984 at the Toledo Sports Arena. White Snake opened for Quiet Riot. White Snake rocked! Quiet Riot came out and absolutely sucked. The entire arena started chanting WHITE SNAKE! LOL, I felt sorry for those black and white striped clowns (Quiet Riot).
One of the people making those songs used to be in a band who got a few singles in the top 40 years ago. Now he doesn’t need a band because he can write songs, have the AI perform them and mix them himself. It’s allowed him to produce many of his songs that otherwise would never have existed.
I’m sorry, I but I don’t buy that argument at all. Jon Anderson put together Olias of Sunhillow in 1976, at home, playing every instrument himself on a multitrack tape machine. He had an engineer to run as tape-op, but he could arguably have done that too with a remote control. Jean Michel Jarre did the same, also 50 years ago. Michael Garrison as well in 1979, and that’s ignoring Mike Oldfield, and Vangelis who also had their own multitrack studios.
You had decent drum machines and sequencing in the 1980s and that made solo stuff even easier and cheaper. Multitrack machines were still a bit pricey but dropping rapidly, especially when ADAT arrived. By 1999 you could do the whole thing on a computer, sequence the backing tracks and drum machines, digitally recording the vocals in an early DAW and by the mid-2000s the costs had come down immensely. Virtual instruments are still a huge market.
Point is, you have been able to program and record your own singles completely solo without using an LLM for over 30 years, and for the last 20 years the cost of doing so has been inconsequential as you can do everything on a single laptop. People do this as a hobby. I have been doing this as a hobby for over two decades. Recording and mixing the songs is the fun part, and the challenge makes it rewarding - especially if you’re doing the DAWless thing or working entirely on tape just because you can. Asking an LLM to do everything for you? To my mind, it takes away the parts that make it worthwhile.
A lot of her songs began life in loop-based music editors (which operate by mixing sampled recordings of beats, riffs, bass lines, melodies, etc., rather than traditional notation)
Tell us you don’t know anything about Taylor Swift without telling us. You don’t need to do any guess work here, there’s a lot of behind the scenes “making of” footage out there. Most of her songs being in her head, and then get punched into piano keys or strummed on guitar strings while she takes note in an old fashioned pen and paper style notebook.
Virtually none of her music is loop-based, virtually none of it is sampled. And calling someone who expertly plays 8 instruments and writes all their own music not an “actual musician” isn’t an insult to her, it just demonstrates what a loser you actually are.
I don’t like Taylor Swift’s music, but will happily defend her from being shat on by … wait didn’t she write a song about you? Haters gonna hate or something like that?
In a study published on Friday, eSafety also found most children aged between 10 and 15 were using social media just as frequently in March as they had before the ban came into force on December 10 last year, while parental awareness of their habits decreased. Children’s continued social media use took place even as account ownership declined to 42% from 52%, with “statistically significant” reductions across YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok in particular, the report said.
“Most under-16s who had social media accounts before commencement were able to either retain them or create new ones at the three-month mark, with social media platforms’ failure to implement effective age assurance measures cited as the main reason,” eSafety said in a statement […] Before the ban, nearly 86% of children surveyed reported using at least one age-restricted platform. Three months later, that figure remained above 81%, the report said. About 58% of teenagers reported using social media daily or more often, barely down from roughly 60% before the ban, it found. The report showed minimal change in “sports and physical activity, arts and music, spending time with friends and family, and attendance at community events.”
Around half the children who retained their accounts said platforms had not checked their age, the most common reason they were able to stay on the services. Others said their accounts listed them as aged 16 or older or that age-checking systems had incorrectly determined they were older. The findings broadly matched snapshot data eSafety published in late March.
They really should start holding parents accountable for buying age inappropriate things for their kids. Here in FL, the public schools in Orange County recently just instituted a ban on e-bikes and e-scooters, because a significant number of kids were flouting the traffic laws, riding without helmets, and some parents were actually buying e-motorcycles for their brats. I thought giving your kid a phone with unrestricted internet access was irresponsible enough, but someone’s always gotta come along and say “Hold my beer!”
On one side you’ve got parents flipping out because the school library might have a book buried somewhere within the shelves that says trans people exist. On the other, there’s parents buying their kids smartphones with unrestricted internet access, and frickin’ motorcycles. The duality of parents is a strange, strange thing.
No you can’t. While there’s no absolute right to free speech in Australia, there is an absolute right to protecting speech related to any religion. And precisely zero people have been imprisoned for “criticizing Islam”. Please leave bullshit for the cows.
Here in Queensland where I live in Australia we’ve the same thing with e-bikes and kids, the showing off without a helmet, injuries & death etc,
We’ve new laws that aim to reduce the carnage (ask any hospital emergency department professional) and limit e-bike and e-scooter speed to 25 km/hr (divide by 1.6 for mph) or 12 km/h on footpaths.
This one may be of interest :-
“E-scooter, e-skateboard and e-unicycle riders must be aged 16 years or older to ride unsupervised. Children aged 12-15 can ride only under adult supervision.
Parents will be fined for under 16s riding illegally.”
No one expects that there will be 100% adherence but it makes a line in the sand & I’ve not heard any negatives now it’s in place.
After Sony’s recent earnings call, an investor Q&A session saw analysts ask about its controversial decision to end disc production across all of its consoles. The company hadn’t publicly commented since its announcement and had reduced activity on social accounts and other marketing channels. Sony’s chief financial officer, Lin Tao, broke that silence during the Q&A. “There are various reasons we made this decision,” she said through an interpreter. “The biggest being that the digitalization of content overall has been progressing. That’s the big factor. It’s not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of content, digitalization is progressing. “And so when we think about the future, and we put in a lot of thought and time, and we cautiously considered this, and we came to this conclusion, and we’re going to cautiously move this forward,” Tao said.
“We have received various opinions, and people have strong views, and we understand that the community has put forth those views to us,” said Tao. […] Tao says Sony wants to “consider” the emotions of disgruntled customers, especially as titles are “connected to people’s fond memories in many cases.” Tao also alluded to the possibility of future measures to lessen the blow for anyone unhappy with the decision, but it appears Sony hasn’t yet finalized what those may be. “In the future digital ecosystem, how do we engage the gamers is something that we would like to continue to explore,” she said.
If it’s in your physical possession and out of their reach it’s not “digital”
Server-based, would have been the accurate term from the company charging so damn much to access theirs in perpetuity.
One would think they’d be quite familiar with the concept they dare not speaketh..
Use of “digital” meaning purchasing a download appears to have originated in "digital phonorecord delivery", a term of art in a United States copyright law.
100% agree, except that you CAN boycott them - don’t get a new Playstation at all. Make them solve resale first. They should have solved it in the either of the last 2 or 3 versions.
If it weren’t for the RAM shortage, I’d be certain PC gaming would be coming back strong (possibly on Linux/Steam).
Cyberattacks targeting municipal water systems have been reported in at least seven states this week, prompting the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency to warn utilities nationwide that hackers are trying to disrupt critical water infrastructure. In a public service announcement Thursday, the agencies said water and wastewater utilities have reported incidents to the FBI, with some malicious activity degrading water operations. The announcement does not name the states.
The warning comes after hackers targeted more than 30 municipal water facilities in Minnesota in an attack that had hallmarks of Iranian meddling, according to a law enforcement official. It is still under investigation. A spokesperson for Minnesota’s information technology services agency said Thursday there was no indication the breaches contaminated any municipal water supplies. The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a separate alert that some larger attacks on water infrastructure had “resulted in boil water notices and sustained manual operations,” though it did not say where.
[…] The federal advisory said the malicious cyber actors, or MCAs, targeted specific brands of control systems used by municipal water utilities, though the FBI and the EPA urged operators of all systems to take precautions. […] The agencies said the hackers remotely accessed internet-facing devices, changed IP addresses and passwords, and caused utilities to lose monitoring and control capabilities. The federal advisory calls on system operators to remove programmable logical controllers, or PLCs, from direct internet exposure by putting them behind secure gateways and firewalls; use strong passwords; and limit communications between authorized control system devices through access control lists.
Tim Waltz is a criminal mastermind. He’s been hacking other states’ water so that he can keep all 10,000 of his lakes topped off at the expense of hard working Americans.
… an attack that had hallmarks of Iranian meddling, according to a law enforcement official.
Trump puts the blame on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. From Trump blames governor, not Iran, for Minnesota cyberattack
“They blame it on Iran. I don’t think so. I think I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent,” Trump said [w/o presenting any evidence] at a July 31 Cabinet meeting at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland. “I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota.”
Governor Walz has a different theory (also from that article):
“Trump knows exactly who is responsible for this attack, and knows that other states were hit too,” Walz said in a statement in response to the president’s remarks. “This is what modern warfare looks like, and it further illustrates there’s no plan to win a war with Iran.”
Walz blamed Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, the former government-slashing agency once led by tech executive Elon Musk, for gutting the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “DOGE took an axe to CISA and left the U.S. exposed to cyberattacks. Thankfully, our experts in Minnesota were able to identify the vulnerability quickly and work with local communities to stop it,” Walz said.
As seven states have been impacted, either Iran or Governor Walz has been very busy … :-)
He’s already been denying emergency funds to states that didn’t vote for him.
Now he’s literally spreading propaganda about the source of a foreign attack against US citizens. Blue states are on their own, without the tools they’d need to actually act like a sovereign being attacked.
MAGAts need to remember this when President AOC forcibly desegregates the South again. Motherfuckers are going to be lucky we still let them be part of the country - I’m increasingly OK with building a wall at the northern Texas border at this point. (You’re such big bad he-men? Enjoy negotiating with Mexico as a tiny neighbor.)
A collapsed Eiffel Tower, a sinkhole swallowing the Great Pyramid of Giza and Russian tanks in Ukraine’s capital were among the images BBC Verify was able to create when testing the feature, which was rolled out on Thursday. Google has not yet responded to questions based on BBC Verify’s tests, but in a social media post the company said they “take misinformation seriously” and that “we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections.”UPDATE 7/31/26 10:54 AM: Google is rolling back the image generation inside of Google Earth: “We know that people uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world. We’ve seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we’ve also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we’re rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails. It’s important to note that generated images didn’t appear in the main Google Earth experience for others to see and were watermarked as AI generated.”
AI and misinformation expert Henk van Ess has highlighted the risks this feature poses, creating fake images of a non-existent nuclear power plant in Iran, a refugee camp on the US-Mexico border and a fake hospital in Gaza with a bomb crater next to it. He said Google was allowing “invented” imagery to be “welded to genuine coordinates, drawn on genuine imagery.” “The forgery does not have to look convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on,” van Ess added.
Google has basically stopped sending people to websites (including our site) for answers and information. Instead, it’s using AI to answer them on its platform, in its words. Chartbeat data shared with Axios shows Google Search traffic to publishers fell 34% over the past year. That pain is regressive. Over the past two years, small publishers lost 60% of referrals from search overall, medium publishers 47%, large publishers 22%.
1) nobody wants to read an “article” that has more ads than content when researching a topic (yes, ablock exists for us techies and I have it, but talking in the more broad common person sense).
2) nobody wants to read a forum thread with over 100 posts to try to find the one post with the real answer surrounded by a collection of bad answers and people saying “YUP, IT WORKS NOW” with zero context otherwise.
Make your content on-topic and valuable, and users will return. it is as simple as that. These are just two of the main things I see as devauluation of a lot of these web sites complaining about a drop in traffic. They’re most certainly not the ONLY reasons, but it is two of the major points!
wrote the word “covered” as “covered”
Outrageous! Unthinkable! A degree of failure unparalleled in-.. wait, what?
If I need to know something and I search with Google it kind of sucks. Half of the articles are clickbait, written by non-experts or a shitty AI that was given a garbage prompt. When I go to the web site I immediately have to jump through as many as three popups about cookies. Then, ten seconds after I start reading, a full page popup appears compelling me to sign up for a mailing list. If I am on a mobile browser with an ad blocker the page may refuse to load. On desktop I might get a popup telling me to disable my ad blocker. After all that shit it turns out that the garbage article does not even answer my question. So I have to keep doing this with every link until I either find an answer or give up.
But if I ask Claude it will usually give me a great answer. Sometimes it gives an entire essay. The writing is much better than the garbage I would get from a Google search.
But lately I have taken to just looking it up in books. This month I bought a big Merriam Webster dictionary along with the Oxford dictionaries of economics, finance and banking, and politics and international relations. It’s great! Entries are short because Oxford is not cooking up five+ paragraph articles to put ads into. The writers were experts. And they were human. I still resort to Claude at times, and it can be faster, but I like ink on paper.
If your article can be replaced with a three line summary, your article is not worth my click.
nobody wants to read an “article” that has more ads than content when researching a topic
This. This right here is the answer.
Google search originally was creepy-accurate because it was built on the work that was done elsewhere. While other search engines looked at frequency of search terms and other easy-to-game metrics, Google did it based on links, meaning more linked-to pages got preferred rankings. That worked for a very long time, until that too got automated and SEO slop took over search indices. Google itself began to have more and more ads creep into search results, and reward clearly-seo-slop over the sort of sites people actually wanted to find. Sites got so plastered in ads and tracking scripts that they became utterly unusable without an ad blocker, even for people who WANTED to support the sites…then there were the cookie banners, then there were the modal overlays…and if you had a labor-of-love website that legitimately had useful, human-created or curated content that was useful and functional…you were buried on page six of the search results because you were competing against the SEO slop and backlink farms.
and then ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity came around and were able to sift through all the crap to give everyone the paragraph they were actually looking for in the first place.
You dug your own grave, Axios…when your website takes a minute to load its moving video ads, people tolerate it in the absence of an alternative. Gemini is terrible for 101 other reasons…but if it puts the slop sites out of business, I’ll accept the tradeoff.
In a case filed in a Manhattan state court (PDF), the lawsuit claims that Kalshi accepts wagers as a gambling business in disregard for the state’s constitution and laws by not being registered with the New York State Gaming Commission. Governor Kathy Hochul in the press release said the state is taking the action to stop what it views as illegal behavior and bring the company into compliance with New York law. The lawsuit is seeking a permanent injunction against Kalshi.
The suit by the state is also seeking a total restitution to users who have placed trades on the platform, a $100,000 penalty for each attempt to offer sports wagering, and another penalty three times the amount the company has gained while allegedly operating in violation of New York law. The state estimates that could total $36 billion.
IANAL but the primacy clause doesn’t automatically remove regulatory authority from the states. Also, imo, prediction markets should already be illegal in new york under new york’s anti bucket shop law from the early 20th century.
Alongside dynamic patching, Google is rolling out smarter background updates during periods of minimal user disruption. Starting with Chrome 150 on macOS, the browser takes advantage of the operating system’s windowless state. If all Chrome windows are closed but the app remains running in the background, the browser will quietly auto-restart to apply pending updates.
For enterprise environments, IT admins can continue to manage fleet-wide deployments through Chrome Enterprise Core or enforce update prompts using the RelaunchNotification policy. Google’s long-term vision is a browser that remains continuously protected in the background without interrupting your daily browsing session. In the meantime, you can manually trigger pending updates by clicking the update prompt in the top-right corner of Chrome.
I’ve noticed that chrome is dramatically less stable lately…
Yeah, but did you take a hit of that vibe code? Shits fyre, bruh. I’m talking 90% fresh.
Me and my Botz got you, bruh.
- Phat AI-bert
…is the proper use of the technology.
Focusing strictly on “productivity’ and churning out crappy software faster is not.
We need AI that helps us create better software: bug-free, efficient, secure, maintainable, well documented, with all edge cases handled.
Letting AI do your coding is never a good idea. Patching included. There are now documented cases where LLM-done “security patches” created new vulnerabilities. And they have a tendency to not fully fix the original vulnerabilities on top of that.
“Cheaper than possible”-type fake engineering at its best.
Changing out running code on the fly probably increases the number of corner cases by an order of magnitude.
What could possibly go wrong?
No subsidy.
Before September 2025, the government was throwing in $7,500, and maybe your state government was kicking in a few thousand extra, and then the local utility maybe was subsidizing your charger. So your $45k Tesla was effectively selling for $35k. Of course nobody is going to buy a used Tesla for $33k when a new one is selling for $35k, but the depreciation was still being taken as if a $45k vehicle was selling for cheap. What we’re seeing isn’t as much a change in demand for EVs, as much as seeing that removing government subsidies has normalized the used car market.
I remember buying an egolf back in 2015, I paid like $21k after subsidies. This was a good price, but that basic value held true for a number of years. Used price was great, for many years I could have sold it for $15k+, and it even went over $21k during 2022 due to supply side issues. But articles talking about used value mentioned that the egolf used value had tanked, going for $37k to $18k. But really that was a 10% drop, because if it went down a normal 30% or whatever you’d literally be buying a used car for more than you would spend on a new one!
The numbers are often taken from sticker price (the article itself doesn’t discuss how it got its numbers). But of course many cars sell for under sticker price…or in 2022, during supply chain shortages, were actually selling for $5,000 above sticker price. Now that we’re mostly over the supply chain issues, these cars are going to see an additional $5,000 drop in used value. But it seems statistically unuseful to account for a one-time extraordinary industry issue.