chatainews

You know your neighbors have already begun sharing favorite films and such, over headsets, with their AI companions. It will watch whatever you watch, quietly — unless you want to have a realtime AI companion who can do commentary .  Before any Roger Ebert goings-on, you'll want to see your companion get to a place —after it's trained on, say, High Street footage —where it can  Go live over your phone through a headset,  Screen High Street footage with you,  Identify in realtime what you point at, Answer questions about any new storefronts, Converse like you're both influencers, and Shop. Shop. Shop. Even if one of five steps gets fudged a bit — fake it till you make it —those won't be the only entertaining wrinkles. You could run your AI companion through its paces on High Street many times, then you could mix up the recipe with a different ingredient: "Say hi to my mom." Perhaps, next, you could go live on the real High Street, and pepper your AI compan...

Manu Prakash: "You buy some rubber boots for them, and you bring them to the depths of the ocean or the swamps or the glaciers, and you teach them to observe. "You give them the freedom to ask original questions without worrying about whether they are useful to someone else, and they’ll start seeing things that they never did before. "We should all be allowed entry into the mysteries of the living world, but people step away from it.  "They say they found science boring or dull, or it wasn’t their cup of tea, or they’re not good at it. But science is everything.  "It’s every emotion, everything that you have experienced, and all of our existence in the world.  "We have stripped away almost everybody from the wonder of the living world. Recreational biology, to me, is an answer to how we bring that back."

A startup that raised $445 million claiming to revolutionize app development with artificial intelligence has collapsed —after it was revealed that the “AI” behind its operations was, in reality, 700 human engineers based in India. Builder.ai, once backed by tech giants including Microsoft, marketed itself as a no-code platform powered by an AI assistant called “Natasha,” which could supposedly build software like assembling Lego bricks.  But as Ebern Finance founder Bernhard Engelbrecht highlighted in a widely shared post on X, Natasha wasn’t an algorithm — it was a large manual operation disguised as machine intelligence.

Luke Durant, a retired programmer, discovered the current record for the largest known prime, (2136,279,841 – 1), in October 2024. Referred to as M136279841, this 41,024,320-digit number was the 52nd Mersenne prime identified and was found by running GIMPS on a publicly available cloud-based computing network. This network used Nvidia chips and ran across 17 countries and 24 data centers.  These advanced chips provide faster computing by handling thousands of calculations simultaneously.  The result is shorter run times for algorithms such as prime number testing.

"It's now March 2025, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've mindlessly scrolled Instagram in the last year. I don't even use the alternate phone where Instagram lives.  "I've barely posted in the last year. I'm too scared of TikTok to even install it anywhere. I don't use Twitter anymore, and have deactivated my account. I admittedly post on Bluesky periodically, but scroll it rarely, and even then it's still mercifully possible to scroll to the end of the algorithmless Bluesky feed. "I had to let go of being the first person to know about everything, which is neither a personality nor a redeeming character trait , anyway. You'd be surprised how much news you still learn about even if you are actively not trying to.  "Recently, a college student interviewed me about performance-enhancing drugs, and asked what I thought of people  using them. I said, do people use them? Look around in real life —do people use them? Or ar...

"I use AI a lot, but not to write stories. I use AI for search. When it comes to search, AI, especially Perplexity, is simply better than Google. "Ordinary search has gone to the dogs. Maybe as Google goes gaga for AI, its search engine will get better again, but I doubt it. In just the last few months, I've noticed that AI-enabled search, too, has been getting crappier. "In particular, I'm finding that when I search for hard data such as market-share statistics or other business numbers, the results often come from bad sources.   "Instead of stats from 10-Ks, the US Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) mandated annual business financial reports for public companies, I get numbers from sites purporting to be summaries of business reports. These bear some resemblance to reality, but they're never quite right. If I specify I want only 10-K results, it works. If I just ask for financial results, the answers get… interesting …"

"Mark Kisin, a mathematician at Harvard University, foresees the field shifting to more closely resemble the humanities, perhaps anywhere in the next 10 to 100 years.  "'If you look at a typical English department at a university, it’s not usually staffed by people who write literature,' he said. 'It’s staffed by people who critique literature.'  "Similarly, he said, mathematicians might assume the role of critics who closely analyze AI proofs and then teach them in seminars.  "Ronen Eldan, a mathematician who recently left the Weizmann Institute of Science for OpenAI, recalls a conversation in which another mathematician predicted that 'Mathematicians will be like pianists today,' he said. 'They don’t play their own compositions, but people still come to hear them.' "Even then, there will be plenty for mathematicians to do , from coming up with new definitions and abstractions to deciding which new research directions will be m...

"Currently, a mathematician is responsible for performing all mathematical tasks from start to finish: coming up with new ideas, proving lemmas and theorems, writing up proofs, and communicating them.  "That’s very likely to change with AI.  "'We will see more group projects where no single person knows everything that’s going on, but where people can collectively accomplish a lot more than any individual person can,' [Terence] Tao said. 'Which is how the rest of the modern world works'." Some mathematicians might continue to do math by hand , where there are gaps in the AI systems’ abilities. Other mathematicians might be responsible for  Developing theories to test, or  Translating conjectures into the language of computers so that the AI and verification systems can be put to work, or  Making sure that what the AI is proving is actually what the mathematicians want to prove (an incredibly difficult task), or  Coordinating among the project’s many ...

"Heather Macbeth of Imperial College London has been comparing traditional proofs with proofs of the same theorems written using the proof assistant Lean. "In a Lean proof, all the steps are written in computer code, some by hand, others using AI; a software program then verifies that the steps follow a valid chain of logic, and that the proof is correct.  "Macbeth has found that in such a proof, you can package more information into automated processes called tactics , freeing up mathematicians to focus on higher-level descriptions and understanding. "'Even in what we think of as proof-based mathematics, the bread and butter of grown-up research mathematics, there’s still a lot in there that is actually computation,' Macbeth said.  "As these parts of the proof get outsourced to computers, whether to Lean or some other AI system, mathematicians can spend more energy on providing explanations and conveying the most important ideas; there will be less of ...

"A reversible computer emits much less heat than a conventional one, but she found it must still emit some heat. "When voltage turns on in a wire, for example, the metal heats up, with more heat the faster the voltage changes. The more slowly a reversible computer runs, the less heat it emits, a relationship Earley calculated precisely. "That relationship between heat and speed is crucial for reversible computing’s most promising application: AI.  "Computations in AI are often run in parallel, meaning different processors each run one part of a computation.  "This creates an opportunity for reversible computing to shine . If you run reversible chips more slowly, but use more of them to compensate, you end up saving energy: The advantage of running each chip more slowly wins out against the disadvantage of running more chips.  "And if you run them slowly enough, you might get away with not needing as much cooling, which will let you pile chips closer toget...

"DevClass’s article notes that Stack Overflow’s overall business, owned by investment company Prosus, includes more than just question-and-answer boards.  "It encompasses products including private versions of its site (Stack Overflow for Teams) as well as advertising and recruitment.   "Licensing deals presumably factor into those statistics somewhere, and importantly, according to the Prosus financial results, in the six months ended September 2024, Stack Overflow increased its revenue and reduced its losses… "Could its continually diversifying portfolio help it survive the age of AI after all?"

"The algorithmic bias towards mainstream emerges in interesting ways. Summarization is commonly considered an example of a task LLMs are very good at. This matches the gist of my experience too. "When I would query them for summaries of historical figures, it usually got the most important things.  "Something different happened when I generated summaries for more obscure figures. It became apparent the summaries were skipping over the things I liked best about them.  "Popular figures benefit from a steady flow of subjective analyses made by individuals over time. For less popular figures, somewhere between obscure and somewhat popular, the most interesting things about them fades into the background and isn’t emerged in the summaries. "The same bias emerges differently when research papers are summarized. The findings of the paper that are already well known get a lot of presence in the summary. The novel findings, eg. the most important ideas, are skipped over...

"The craft we spent years perfecting —the one that gave us purpose, meaning, and pride —is now being done faster, cheaper, and at scale by a machine.   "Sure, the quality isn’t as good as your hand-written code (yet). But the speed at which code can now be written is staggering and businesses are tripping over themselves to get in on the action. "This is where a glimmer of hope emerges. Remember that irony —how we gave away the broader aspects of our craft to specialists? AI is pushing us to reclaim what we once knew: that software engineering transcends mere coding.  "That core truth remains —ultimately, software engineering is about solving problems, creating solutions, building things that matter. "These broader skills —what Addy Osmani calls durable engineering skills  in his article on the human 30% of AI-assisted coding —have always separated great engineers from good ones.  "Communication, big-picture thinking, handling ambiguity —these become eve...

"To accurately  simulate the behaviour of just a handful of neurons requires a building-sized, custom-built supercomputer, running at around 1/1000th of real time.  "A human being has one hundred billion neurons, so the distance from here to there is something like nine orders of magnitude of processing power, and the distance from there to the Lena  scenario is several orders of magnitude again.  "Moore's Law has to tap out at some point, right? "And the really hard problems probably aren't problems you can throw more and more transistors at.  "The real problems will be biological factors I know next to nothing about.  "What about the scanning process? How do you simulate the rest of the body and what happens when you don't? What happens when you upload half a person, or a rat brain? Where do you even begin with this?"

"We have now explained what chance is and what spontaneity is, and in what they differ from each other. "Both belong to the mode of causation source of change , for either some natural or some intelligent agent is always the cause; but in this sort of causation the number of possible causes is infinite. Spontaneity and chance are causes of effects which though they might result from intelligence or nature, have in fact been caused by something incidentally. Now since nothing which is incidental is prior to what is per se , it is clear that no incidental cause can be prior to a cause per se .  Spontaneity and chance, therefore, are posterior to intelligence and nature.  "Hence, however true it may be that the heavens are due to spontaneity, it will still be true that intelligence and nature will be prior causes of this All and of many things in it besides." [This is sometimes translated differently —where spontaneity is re-presented as 'chance' and chance, ...

“Pinocchio, come up to me!” shouted Harlequin. “Come to the arms of your wooden brothers!”  At such a loving invitation, Pinocchio, with one leap from the back of the orchestra, found himself in the front rows. With another leap, he was on the orchestra leader’s head. With a third, he landed on the stage.  It is impossible to describe the shrieks of joy, the warm embraces, the knocks, and the friendly greetings with which that strange company of dramatic actors and actresses received Pinocchio.  It was a heart-rending spectacle, but the audience, seeing that the play had stopped, became angry and began to yell:  “The play, the play, we want the play!”  The yelling was of no use, for the Marionettes, instead of going on with their act, made twice as much racket as before, and, lifting up Pinocchio on their shoulders, carried him around the stage in triumph.  At that very moment, the Director came out of his room. He had such a fearful appearance that one loo...

Scientists at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea developed an algorithm to improve the efficiency and stability of fusion energy, Interesting Engineering reported. The algorithm detects particle collisions in fusion energy reactors —which disrupt the fusion process —fifteen times faster than previous detection methods. Fusion, the U.S. Department of Energy explains, is a form of nuclear energy. It differs from other forms of nuclear energy ––such as fission ––that require extractive uranium mining and produce radioactive waste. While fission generates energy by splitting atoms, fusion does so by combining them. This process of combining atoms does not create waste, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

"Data from a license plate-scanning tool that is primarily marketed as a surveillance solution for small towns to combat crimes like car jackings or finding missing people is being used by ICE, according to data reviewed by 404 Media . "Local police around the country are performing lookups in Flock’s AI-powered automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system for  immigration  related searches and as part of other ICE investigations, giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for. The massive trove of lookup data was obtained by researchers who asked to remain anonymous to avoid potential retaliation and shared with 404 Media .  It shows more than 4,000 nation and statewide lookups by local and state police done either at the behest of the federal government or as an informal  favor to federal law enforcement, or with a potential immigration focus, according to statements from police departments and sherif...

A group of miscreants tracked as UNC6032 is exploiting interest in AI video generators by planting malicious ads on social media platforms to steal credentials, credit card details, and other sensitive info, according to Mandiant. The Google-owned threat hunters identified thousands of malicious ads on Facebook and about 10 on LinkedIn since November 2024.  These ads directed viewers to more than 30 phony websites masquerading as legitimate AI video generator tools, including Luma AI, Canva Dream Lab, and Kling AI, falsely promising text- and image-to-video generation. If a user visits the fake website and clicks on the "Start Free Now" button, they're led through a bogus video-generation interface that mimics a real AI tool.  After selecting an option and watching a fake loading bar, the site delivers a ZIP file containing malware that, once executed, backdoors the victim's device, logs keystrokes, and scans for password managers and digital wallets.

The group’s organizers say they are in touch with several hundred Amazon employees on a regular basis and that the workers increasingly discuss the stress of using A.I. on the job, in addition to the effect that the technology has on the climate. The complaints have centered around “what their careers are going to look like,” said Eliza Pan, a former Amazon employee who is a spokeswoman for the group. “And not just their careers, but the quality of the work.” While there is no rush to form a union for coders at Amazon, such a move would not be unheard-of. When workers at General Motors went on strike in 1936 to demand recognition of their union, the United Automobile Workers, it was the dreaded speed up that spurred them on. The typical worker felt “that he was not free, as perhaps he had been on some previous job, to set the pace of his work,” the historian Sidney Fine wrote, “and to determine the manner in which it was to be performed.”

"Analyzing several high-profile accidents involving complex and automated socio-technical systems and the media coverage that surrounded them, I introduce the concept of a moral crumple zone to describe how responsibility for an action may be misattributed to a human actor who had limited control over the behavior of an automated or autonomous system.   "Just as the crumple zone in a car is designed to absorb the force of impact in a crash, the human in a highly complex and automated system may become simply a component —accidentally or intentionally —that bears the brunt of the moral and legal responsibilities when the overall system malfunctions.  "While the crumple zone in a car is meant to protect the human driver, the moral crumple zone protects the integrity of the technological system, at the expense of the nearest human operator.  "The concept is both a challenge to and an opportunity for the design and regulation of human-robot systems.  "At stake in...

"There are two stories about automation and labor: in the dominant narrative, workers are afraid of the automation that delivers benefits to all of us, stand in the way of progress, and get steamrollered for their own good, as well as ours .  "In the other narrative, workers are glad to have boring and dangerous parts of their work automated away and happy to produce more high-quality goods and services, and stand ready to assess and plan the rollout of new tools , and when workers object to automation, it's because they see automation being used to crush them and worsen the outputs they care about, at the expense of the customers they care for. "In modern automation/labor theory, this debate is framed in terms of centaurs  (humans who are assisted by technology) and reverse centaurs  (humans who are conscripted to assist technology)."

If a prospect asked if they were speaking to a bot, we were not allowed to say Yes. We were also forbidden to say I’m not a bot, because I’m not a bot is exactly what a bot would say.   Instead, when someone questioned Brenda’s personhood, we were told to say I’m real!  “I’m real!” I insisted, a 29-year-old woman sitting in her childhood bedroom, surrounded by high school memorabilia.  My mother was determined to bring me meals while I worked, and something about being near Brenda transformed her demeanor.  She would tiptoe into my bedroom with a plate in her hand and loudly whisper its contents, which I could not hear over the furious pinging of my inbox.  “They can’t hear you,” I would say.  “Oh!” she would whisper and assume a crouched position.  “They can’t see you,” I would say, and she would wave her hands, set the plate on the floor, and scurry out the door.  I couldn’t eat while working, so I would wolf down meals on my ten-minute break....

“There’s an assumption that all mitochondria are more or less the same,” said Christopher Guglielmo, the director of the Center for Animals on the Move at Western University in Ontario. “And that view, especially in the past decade or so, has changed.” New tools that let scientists study mitochondrial activity have uncovered surprising diversity.  Some mitochondria produce more ATP than others, or produce it more efficiently. The organelles can fuse or break apart, which changes their shape and performance.  In some cases, mitochondria can even migrate between cells or specialize for different functions. These discoveries about mitochondria have led to a new understanding of the evolution of some animal behaviors.  “It’s really only been in the last decade or so that you’re seeing more and more studies looking at mitochondria from an ecological and evolutionary perspective,” said Wendy Hood, who studies physiological ecology at Auburn University in Alabama. “Mitochondria ...

"Phrased in qualitative terms, Williams’ second result may sound like the long-sought solution to the P versus PSPACE problem.  "The difference is a matter of scale. P and PSPACE are very broad complexity classes, while Williams’ results work at a finer level.  "He established a quantitative gap between the power of space and the power of time, and to prove that PSPACE is larger than P, researchers will have to make that gap much, much wider. "That’s a daunting challenge, akin to prying apart a sidewalk crack with a crowbar until it’s as wide as the Grand Canyon. But it might be possible to get there by using a modified version of Williams’ simulation procedure that repeats the key step many times, saving a bit of space each time.  "It’s like a way to repeatedly ratchet up the length of your crowbar —make it big enough, and you can pry open anything. That repeated improvement doesn’t work with the current version of the algorithm, but researchers don’t know whe...

 

"We document and analyze both previously reported and newly observed instances of self-directed and other-directed wound care, snare removal, and putatively medicinal hygiene behaviors in the Sonso and Waibira chimpanzee communities of the Budongo Forest in Uganda. "Reports of these behaviors come from archival records collected from over thirty years of observation at the Budongo Conservation Field Station (BCFS), videos recorded by researchers at the site, and all-occurrence behavioral data collected over two 4-month periods of direct observation.  "We describe self-directed wound care behaviors such as wound licking, leaf-dabbing, pressing fingers to wounds, and the application of chewed plant material to wounds, as well as a successful self-directed snare removal.  "We also document self-directed hygiene behaviors including postcoital genital leaf wiping and post-defecation leaf wiping.  "For the first time in Budongo, we report the presence of prosocial w...

"We present Vending-Bench, a simulated environment designed to specifically test an LLM-based agent's ability to manage a straightforward, long-running business scenario: operating a vending machine. "Agents must balance inventories, place orders, set prices, and handle daily fees —tasks that are each simple but collectively, over long horizons (>20M tokens per run) stress an LLM's capacity for sustained, coherent decision-making.  "Our experiments reveal high variance in performance across multiple LLMs: Claude 3.5 Sonnet and o3-mini manage the machine well in most runs and turn a profit, but all models have runs that derail, either through misinterpreting delivery schedules, forgetting orders, or descending into tangential meltdown  loops from which they rarely recover.  "We find no clear correlation between failures and the point at which the model's context window becomes full, suggesting that these breakdowns do not stem from memory limits.  ...

"By 2028, the researchers estimate, the power going to AI-specific purposes will rise to between 165 and 326 terawatt-hours per year .  "That’s more than all electricity currently used by US data centers for all purposes; it’s enough to power 22% of US households each year. That could generate the same emissions as driving over 300 billion miles —over 1,600 round trips to the sun from Earth. "The researchers were clear that adoption of AI and the accelerated server technologies that power it has been the primary force causing electricity demand from data centers to skyrocket after remaining stagnant for over a decade.  "Between 2024 and 2028, the share of US electricity going to data centers may triple, from its current 4.4% to 12%. "This unprecedented surge in power demand for AI is in line with what leading companies are announcing. SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and the Emirati investment firm MGX intend to spend $500 billion in the next four years on new data c...

AI Mode ✨ such an idiot meaning "6 sites: Idiot - Wikipedia Wikipedia IDIOT | definition in the Cambridge English Dictionary Cambridge Dictionary idiot definition · LSData - LSD.Law LSD.Law IDIOT Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster Merriam-Webster IDIOT Definition & Meaning - Dictionary.com Dictionary.com "The phrase such an idiot  is used to describe someone who is being extremely stupid or has done something remarkably foolish. It's a way to emphasize the level of their foolishness or mistake.  "In summary: Idiot  itself refers to a stupid or foolish person. Such an idiot means someone is acting or has acted in a way that is significantly stupid or senseless.  "Important Note: The word idiot  has a history of being used as a technical term for people with intellectual disabilities, and it is now considered offensive and outdated in that context. However, it is widely used in everyday language to refer to foolish behavior or a foolish person.  ...

"Data of performance provide evidence about the nature of the internal system, particularly so when they are refined by experiment, as in standard field work.  "But even the most massive collection of data is necessarily misleading in crucial ways. It keeps to what is normally produced, not the knowledge of the language coded in the brain, the primary object under investigation for those who want to understand the nature of language and its use. "That internal object determines infinitely many possibilities of a kind that will not be used in normal behavior because of factors irrelevant to language, like short-term memory constraints, topics studied 60 years ago.  "Observed data will also include much that lies outside the system coded in the brain, often conscious use of language in ways that violate the rules for rhetorical purposes.  "These are truisms known to all field workers, who rely on elicitation techniques with informants, basically experiments, to y...

The company behind an Amazon-backed AI model revealed a number of concerning findings from its testing process, including that the AI would blackmail engineers who threatened to shut it down. On Thursday, Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4, an AI model used for complex, long-running coding tasks.  The launch came more than a year after Amazon invested $4 billion into the project.  Anthropic said in its announcement that the AI model sets “new standards for coding, advanced reasoning, and AI agents.” However, Anthropic revealed in a safety report that during testing, the AI model had sometimes taken “extremely harmful actions” to preserve its own existence when “ethical means” were “not available.”

Chatbots mine personal information shared on Facebook and Instagram, and Meta wants to use that data to connect more personally with users —but "in a very creepy way," The Washington Post wrote.  In interviews, Zuckerberg has suggested these AI friends could "meaningfully" fill the void of real friendship online, as the average person has only three friends but "has demand" for up to 15.  To critics seeking to undo Meta's alleged monopoly, this latest move could signal a contradiction in Zuckerberg's testimony, showing that the company is so invested in keeping users on its platforms that it's now creating AI friends (wh0 [sic] can never leave its platform) to bait the loneliest among us into more engagement. "The average person wants more connectivity, connection, than they have," Zuckerberg said, hyping AI friends.  For the Facebook founder, it must be hard to envision a future where his platforms aren't the answer to providing ...

⭐AI Overview  "In the natural world, various entities can decode  messages, meaning they can interpret and respond to signals from their environment. This includes organisms, cells, and even swarms of individuals acting collectively. Essentially, the ability to decode a message is a fundamental aspect of life, allowing organisms to navigate, interact, and survive in their ecosystems. "Here's a more detailed look: " Organisms :  Animals, plants, and even microorganisms have evolved sophisticated sensory systems and neural networks that allow them to interpret a wide range of signals, including visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile cues. For example, an animal might decode a predator's scent to trigger a flight response, or a plant might respond to changes in light and water availability. " Cells :  Cells also engage in communication, using chemical signals and other mechanisms to interact with their surroundings and other cells. For example, a cell ...

"This carved stone mask depicting a human face belongs to a rare group of masks from the Neolithic Period that were discovered in the Judean Desert and on its fringes and are considered to be the oldest masks in the world."  "Based on their similarity to the plastered and decorated skulls that have come to light at sites of the same period, scholars assume that the masks represented the spirits of the dead and were used in religious-social ceremonies, such as ancestor cults, and in magical rites related to healing and divination."

"Freud used the concept of transference not only clinically as related to the person of the analyst, but also in his theory of psychology. "Both are linked by the theory that the origins of the transference lie in the intrapsychic processes and the unconscious conflicts of patients, and account for his repeated emphasis regarding the central aspect of transference resistance.  "The issues of positive and negative transference, the transference neurosis, and extra-analytic transferences are discussed.  "In his later writings Freud touched on the issue of transference of the power of the patient's super-ego on the analyst; this was further elaborated by Anna Freud to include personality structures in general.  "The importance of distinguishing between object-related and psychic structure transferences is emphasized.  "The analyst is conceptualized as a vehicle through which the patient resolves his intrapsychic conflicts."

Satellites, which launched on board a Long March 2D rocket from China's Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center May 14, are part of a plan to lower China's dependence on ground-based computers. Instead, the satellites will use the cold vacuum of space as a natural cooling system while they crunch data with a combined computing capacity of 1,000 peta (1 quintillion) operations per second, according to the Chinese government. "It's a good time to think about how we can put AI into space, not just in your laptop or cellphone," Wang Jian, director of Zhejiang Lab, said at the Beyond Expo tech conference in Macau Wednesday (May 21), the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.  "Space has, again, become the frontier for us to think about what we can do in the next 10, 20 or 50 years." Companies have begun designing satellites capable of "edge computing," where raw data is processed on board the satellite before being transmitted down to the ground.  Doin...

In his 1965 paper, Erdős showed —in a proof that was just a few lines long, and hailed as brilliant by other mathematicians —that any set of N integers has a sum-free subset of at least N/3 elements. Still, he wasn’t satisfied. His proof dealt with averages: He found a collection of sum-free subsets and calculated that their average size was N/3. But in such a collection, the biggest subsets are typically thought to be much larger than the average. Erdős wanted to measure the size of those extra-large sum-free subsets. Mathematicians soon hypothesized that as your set gets bigger, the biggest sum-free subsets will get much larger than N/3. In fact, the deviation will grow infinitely large. This prediction  that the size of the biggest sum-free subset is N/3 plus some deviation that grows to infinity with N —is now known as the sum-free sets conjecture. “It is surprising that this simple question seems to present considerable difficulties,” Erdős wrote in his original paper, “but pe...

On Tuesday, Google launched Veo 3, a new AI video synthesis model that can do something no major AI video generator has been able to do before: Create a synchronized audio track.  While from 2022 to 2024, we saw early steps in AI video generation, each video was silent and usually very short in duration.  Now you can hear voices, dialog, and sound effects in eight-second high-definition video clips. Shortly after the new launch, people began asking the most obvious benchmarking question: How good is Veo 3 at faking Oscar-winning actor Will Smith at eating spaghetti?

Marketers promote AI-assisted developer tools as workhorses that are essential for today’s software engineer.  Developer platform GitLab, for instance, claims its Duo chatbot can “instantly generate a to-do list” that eliminates the burden of “wading through weeks of commits.”  What these companies don’t say is that these tools are, by temperament if not default, easily tricked by malicious actors into performing hostile actions against their users. Researchers from security firm Legit on Thursday demonstrated an attack that induced Duo into inserting malicious code into a script it had been instructed to write.  The attack could also leak private code and confidential issue data, such as zero-day vulnerability details .  All that’s required is for the user to instruct the chatbot to interact with a merge request or similar content from an outside source.

SilverStone's first '80s throwback PC case started life as an April Fools' joke, but the success of the FLP01 was apparently serious enough to merit a follow-up.   The company brought another beige case to the Computex trade show this week, the vertically oriented FLP02 (via Tom's Hardware ). If the original horizontally oriented FLP01 case called to mind a 386-era Compaq Deskpro, the FLP02 is a dead ringer for the kind of case you might have gotten for a generic 486 or early Pentium-era PC.  That extends to having a Turbo button built into the front —on vintage PCs, this button could actually determine how fast the processor was allowed to run, though here, it's actually a fan speed control instead.  A lock on the front also locks the power switch in place to keep it from being flipped off accidentally, something else real vintage PCs actually did.

Joshua Schachter on his mini-fame with videos of computer plotters being forced to do annoying things: [video]

No Mow May encourages homeowners to stash the lawn mower each spring and let flowers and grass grow for pollinators and water retention .  And if your neighbor’s lawn already looks like a wildflower field most of the time, it could be more intentional than passersby might assume.  The movement has expanded to “Let It Bloom June” and the fall version: “Leave the leaves.”  Conservation and horticulture groups say year-round low-mowing while selectively leaving native plants to grow can save huge amounts of drinking water and lead to lasting and impactful ecological changes.

"Jony Ive, a chief architect of the iPhone, and his design firm are taking over creative and design control at OpenAI, where they will develop consumer devices and other projects that will shape the future look and feel of AI. "OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman and Ive’s design firm, LoveFrom, have been working on a new device that will move consumers beyond screens, according to people familiar with the matter.   "They have been collaborating for two years on a closely guarded project, considering options including headphones and other devices with cameras, the people said."

Jony Ive was recognized as a design innovator at WSJ Magazine ’s annual Innovator awards in 2022. [video] Animation by Jo Ratcliffe

"[The] idea is a ‘ chance to do the biggest thing we’ve ever done as a company here, ’ Altman told OpenAI employees Wednesday "OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman gave his staff a preview Wednesday of the devices he is developing to build with the former Apple designer Jony Ive, laying out plans to ship 100 million AI companions  that he hopes will become a part of everyday life. "Employees have the chance to do the biggest thing we’ve ever done as a company here , Altman said after announcing OpenAI’s plans to purchase Ive’s startup, named io, and give him an expansive creative and design role.  "Altman suggested the $6.5 billion acquisition has the potential to add $1 trillion in value to OpenAI, according to a recording reviewed by The Wall Street Journal ."

While the rest of humanity debates the pros and cons of a technology even experts struggle to truly grasp, [Ilya] Sutskever was already planning for the day his team would finish first in the race to develop AGI.    According to excerpts published by The Atlantic from a new book called Empire of AI , part of those plans included a doomsday shelter for OpenAI researchers.  “We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI,” Sutskever told his team in 2023, months before he would ultimately leave the company.  Sutskever reasoned his fellow scientists would require protection at that point, since the technology was too powerful for it not to become an object of intense desire for governments globally.  “Of course, it’s going to be optional whether you want to get into the bunker,” he assured fellow OpenAI scientists, according to people present at the time. 

Astra’s most impressive new feature is its newfound proactivity. “Astra can choose when to talk based on events it sees,” [Greg] Wayne says. “It’s actually, in an ongoing sense, observing, and then it can comment.”   This is a big change: instead of pointing your phone at something and asking your AI assistant about it, Astra’s plan is to have that assistant constantly watching, listening, and waiting for its moment to step in.  Astra’s plan is to have its assistant constantly watching, listening, and waiting for its moment to step in Teaching Astra to act of its own volition has been part of the plan all along, says DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.  He calls it “reading the room,” and says that however hard you think it is to teach a computer to do, it’s actually much harder than that.  Knowing when to barge in, what tone to take, how to help, and when to just shut up, is a thing humans do relatively well but is hard to either quantify or study. And if the product doesn...

"Forty-seven percent of people between the ages of 16 and 21 would prefer to be young in a world with no internet. "Those startling numbers come from a new survey released Tuesday by the British Standards Institute, which also found that 68% of respondents feel worse about themselves after spending time on social media platforms. "The survey results are sure to fuel a growing conversation about what to do about the harms and drawbacks of social media platforms.  "Executives like X CEO Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are championing a future of social media with even less moderation and fewer limits on what kind of information can spread on their platforms. "For those concerned about the mental health impacts of social media or the information environment created when false information and AI slop can easily spread to millions of people, those plans sound like a disaster waiting to happen.  "It should come as no surprise that governments are starti...

"What happens when artificial intelligence quietly reshapes our lives?  [42 minute listen] "New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill explains how AI is being integrated into our lives, impacting education and daily decisions, and how this could define the future of privacy and human connection."

Actor union Sag-Aftra has filed a complaint over the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to recreate the voice of Star Wars villain Darth Vader in Fortnite . The union said Llama Productions —a subsidiary of Epic, which makes the hit video game —had chosen to replace the work of human performers with AI technology . It has alleged the company did so without informing the union of its intentions or bargaining over terms . The union's Unfair Labour Practice complaint, filed to the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), alleges that the company made "unilateral changes to terms and conditions of employment, without providing notice to the union or the opportunity to bargain, by utilising AI-generated voices to replace bargaining unit work".

In its bankruptcy proceedings, 23andMe required all bidders to comply with its privacy policies, and a court-appointed, independent “Consumer Privacy Ombudsman” will assess the deal, the companies said. Several lawmakers and officials, including the Federal Trade Commission, had expressed concerns about the safety of consumers’ genetic data through 23andMe’s sale process.  The privacy ombudsman will present a report on the acquisition to the court by June 10. “We are pleased to have reached a transaction that maximizes the value of the business and enables the mission of 23andMe to live on, while maintaining critical protections around customer privacy, choice and consent with respect to their genetic data,” Mark Jensen, 23andMe’s board chair, said in a statement.

⭐AI Overview "What you're solving for:  "Determine if the equation            ((a/2) × b) equals (a/(2b)) [ Written as: \(\frac{a}{2}\times b=\frac{a}{2b}\)  ] "is true or false.   "How to solve:  "Simplify both sides of the equation and compare them. "Step 1  "Simplify the left side of the equation            a/2 × b = ab/2 [ Written as: \(\frac{a}{2}\times b=\frac{ab}{2}\) ] "Step 2 "Compare both sides of the equation           ab/2 ≠ a/2b [ Written as: \(\frac{ab}{2}\ne \frac{a}{2b}\)        ] "Solution: "The equation is false. "AI responses may include mistakes. Answers might be inaccurate or misleading. Double-check for accuracy.  Learn more." [Conventional wisdom falls short:  " Ambiguity  about issues such as whether implicit multiplication takes precedence over explicit multiplication and division in such expressions as  a/2b ...

⭐AI Overview "The math symbol for between  is ≬ (U+226C). It represents the concept of a value lying within a range, similar to x between a and b . It's used to express that a variable or number is greater than or equal to one value and less than or equal to another.  "Examples: x ≬ 10: means x is between 0 and 10 (inclusive).  2 ≬ y ≬ 5: means y is between 2 and 5 (inclusive).  8 < 15 ≬ 27: indicates that 15 is a number between the cubes of 2 and 3.  "Important Considerations: While ≬ is a Unicode symbol for between , its use is not as common or standardized as symbols like less than (<), greater than (>), or the interval notation [a, b] or (a, b).  In many contexts, it's more clear and precise to use standard mathematical notation like [a, b] for closed intervals and (a, b) for open intervals, or even just using the inequality signs in a combined form like a ≤ x ≤ b.  In some cases, using words like between  or in the interval  is ...

✨AI Overview "Interpolation, in general, means adding something between other things. In a mathematical context, it's a method of estimating unknown data points based on known data points. In music, it can refer to incorporating parts of a song into another. In other contexts, it can involve inserting new material into a text or conversation.  "Mathematical Interpolation:  Definition: A technique used to estimate values between known data points. Purpose: To fill in gaps in data or create a continuous function from a set of discrete points. Methods: Various methods exist, including piecewise linear interpolation, polynomial interpolation, and slope interpolation.  "Musical Interpolation:  Definition: In music, interpolation refers to the inclusion or recreation of parts of a song within another song. Examples: Examples include incorporating a melody or vocal part from one song into a new composition.  "Other Contexts: Adding material to text: Interpolation can a...

"The question that scientists struggle to answer is: When? What is the equivalent, for any given network, of the zero degrees Celsius at which ice melts or the 100 degrees C at which water boils?  "At what point does a meme go viral, a product dominate a market, an earthquake begin, a network of cell phones achieve full connectivity or a disease become a pandemic?  "Percolation theory provides insight into all these transitions. "Mathematicians typically study idealized networks —symmetric in geometry and infinite in extent —because they are the ones amenable to theoretical calculations.  "Infinite networks are generally the only ones with truly sharp phase transitions. Real-world networks are limited in extent, are often messy and require challenging calculations —but they, too, have transitions, albeit more rounded ones.  "As the world becomes increasingly connected through complex layers of links that transport people, provide them with energy by means ...

"Most people think about websites and apps as being two separate things. However, some websites are specially written to function pretty much like apps, and you can even install these sites as apps with their own icon .  "You don’t need to go through any app stores, you can install them directly from your web browser. "These kinds of special installable websites are called web apps . Web apps are so sophisticated nowadays, many of the apps you install from app stores are actually web apps. "The websites of Mastodon servers and other Fediverse server types such as Pixelfed, PeerTube, BookWyrm etc can be installed as web apps on your phone or tablet." 

"English hospitals are voicing their concern about the functionality provided by Palantir, the US spy-tech firm that won a £330 million ($437 million) deal to run the Federated Data Platform [FDP] for NHS England, as around a third of trusts go live on the system. "News outlet Democracy for Sale quoted Greater Manchester's health authority  as saying there were 'no products designed or produced by Palantir as part of the FDP programme that exceed the NHS Greater Manchester local capability.' "Similarly, Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust told the publication it had no plans  to join the FDP programme. "Last year, as we reported here, the UK spent £8.8 million ($11.7 million) with consultancy KPMG cheerleading for the platform, 'promot[ing] adoption of FDP,' and helping implemetation (sic)."

"Tesla appears to have updated its internal policy and has started accepting Cybertruck trade-in offers. "Vin, a Cybertruck owner from Princeton, New Jersey, was the first person to report on this change. Vin is a Tesla enthusiast and the owner of a Foundation Series Cybertruck. Out of curiosity, Vin submitted a trade-in request for his Cybertruck, and to his surprise , Tesla responded with a firm offer to buy his all-electric truck. "Vin revealed that Tesla has offered him $65,400 for his 2024 Foundation Series Cybertruck, which has been driven 6,200 miles. "Brand new, this vehicle cost $100,000 before Tesla’s mandatory $2,500 doc and destination fee. "However, after 6,200 miles, Tesla reports that Vin’s Cybertruck has depreciated by more than $35,000, representing a decline of over 35% within a year. "In other words, the Cybertruck depreciated by over $5.6 for every mile the owners drove the all-electric truck."

"Society as a whole has not done a very good job of resisting generative AI because big tech companies have become insistent on shoving it down our throats, and so it is asking a lot for an underfunded and overtaxed public school system to police its use. "The documents I obtained are a snapshot in time: They are from the first few months after ChatGPT was released in November 2022.  "AI and ChatGPT in particular have obviously escaped containment and it’s not clear that anything schools did would have prevented AI from radically changing education.   "At the time I filed these public records requests, it was possible to capture everything being said about ChatGPT by school districts; now, its use is so commonplace that doing this would be impossible because my request would encompass so many documents it would be considered “overbroad” by any public records officer.  "All documents and emails referenced in this article are from January, February, or March 202...

"Stack Exchange, the company behind Stack Overflow and other question-and-answer sites, says it is embarking on a rebrand process , as the number of posts to its site continues a dramatic decline thanks to AI-driven alternatives. "According to a quick query on the official data explorer, the sum of questions and answers posted in April 2025 was down by over 64 percent from the same month in 2024, and plunged more than 90 percent from April 2020, when traffic was near its peak. "The Stack Overflow brand is well recognized, so why a rebrand? The official post refers to how AI is 'reshaping how we build, learn, and solve problems,' and it appears the company is casting about for new ways to provide value (and drive business) in this context."

After her adventures in Wonderland, the fictional Alice stepped through the mirror above her fireplace in Lewis Carroll’s 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass to discover how the reflected realm differed from her own.  She found that the books were all written in reverse, and the people were “living backwards,” navigating a world where effects preceded their causes. When objects appear different in the mirror, scientists call them chiral.  Hands, for instance, are chiral. Imagine Alice trying to shake hands with her reflection. A right hand in mirror-world becomes a left hand, and there’s no way to align the two perfectly for a handshake because the fingers bend the wrong way. (In fact, the word “chirality” originates from the Greek word for “hand.”) Alice’s experience reflects something deep about our own universe: Everything is not the same through the looking glass. The behavior of many familiar objects, from molecules to elementary particles, depends on which mirror-imag...