An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Sunday, Block CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey launched an open source chat app called Bitchat, promising to deliver "secure" and "private" messaging without a centralized infrastructure. The app relies on Bluetooth and end-to-end encryption, unlike traditional messaging apps that rely on the internet. By being decentralized, Bitchat has potential for being a secure app in high-risk environments where the internet is monitored or inaccessible. According to Dorsey's white paper detailing the app's protocols and privacy mechanisms, Bitchat's system design "prioritizes" security.

But the claims that the app is secure, however, are already facing scrutiny by security researchers, given that the app and its code have not been reviewed or tested for security issues at all -- by Dorsey's own admission. Since launching, Dorsey has added a warning to Bitchat's GitHub page: "This software has not received external security review and may contain vulnerabilities and does not necessarily meet its stated security goals. Do not use it for production use, and do not rely on its security whatsoever until it has been reviewed." This warning now also appears on Bitchat's main GitHub project page but was not there at the time the app debuted.

As of Wednesday, Dorsey added: "Work in progress," next to the warning on GitHub. This latest disclaimer came after security researcher Alex Radocea found that it's possible to impersonate someone else and trick a person's contacts into thinking they are talking to the legitimate contact, as the researcher explained in a blog post. Radocea wrote that Bitchat has a "broken identity authentication/verification" system that allows an attacker to intercept someone's "identity key" and "peer id pair" -- essentially a digital handshake that is supposed to establish a trusted connection between two people using the app. Bitchat calls these "Favorite" contacts and marks them with a star icon. The goal of this feature is to allow two Bitchat users to interact, knowing that they are talking to the same person they talked to before.

After discovering that ChatGPT was falsely telling users that Soundslice could convert ASCII tablature into playable music, founder Adrian Holovaty decided to actually build the feature -- even though the app was never designed to support that format. TechCrunch reports: Soundslice is an app for teaching music, used by students and teachers. It's known for its video player synchronized to the music notations that guide users on how the notes should be played. It also offers a feature called "sheet music scanner" that allows users to upload an image of paper sheet music and, using AI, will automatically turn that into an interactive sheet, complete with notations. [Adrian Holovaty, founder of music-teaching platform Soundslice] carefully watches this feature's error logs to see what problems occur, where to add improvements, he said. That's where he started seeing the uploaded ChatGPT sessions.

They were creating a bunch of error logs. Instead of images of sheet music, these were images of words and a box of symbols known as ASCII tablature. That's a basic text-based system used for guitar notations that uses a regular keyboard. (There's no treble key, for instance, on your standard QWERTY keyboard.) The volume of these ChatGPT session images was not so onerous that it was costing his company money to store them and crushing his app's bandwidth, Holovaty said. He was baffled, he wrote in a blog post about the situation.

"Our scanning system wasn't intended to support this style of notation. Why, then, were we being bombarded with so many ASCII tab ChatGPT screenshots? I was mystified for weeks -- until I messed around with ChatGPT myself." That's how he saw ChatGPT telling people they could hear this music by opening a Soundslice account and uploading the image of the chat session. Only, they couldn't. Uploading those images wouldn't translate the ASCII tab into audio notes. He was struck with a new problem. "The main cost was reputational: New Soundslice users were going in with a false expectation. They'd been confidently told we would do something that we don't actually do," he described to TechCrunch.

He and his team discussed their options: Slap disclaimers all over the site about it -- "No, we can't turn a ChatGPT session into hearable music" -- or build that feature into the scanner, even though he had never before considered supporting that offbeat musical notation system. He opted to build the feature. "My feelings on this are conflicted. I'm happy to add a tool that helps people. But I feel like our hand was forced in a weird way. Should we really be developing features in response to misinformation?" he wrote.

Samsung on Wednesday unveiled three new foldable smartphones at a time when the company is facing increased competition from Chinese rivals such as Honor and Oppo, reports CNBC. The company's share of the global foldable phone market slipped to 45% in 2024, down from 54% a year earlier. Today's new devices include the ultra-thin Galaxy Z Fold 7, the clamshell-style Galaxy Z Flip 7, and the more affordable Flip 7 FE. Here's a breakdown of each: The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is super thin at a thickness of 8.9 millimeters (0.35 inches) closed and only 4.2 millimeters open. It's also much lighter than its predecessor, weighing 215 grams (7.62 ounces). These stats put the phone on par with both Honor's Magic V5 and the Oppo Find N5. The new Fold device has a 6.5-inch cover screen and an 8-inch main display when opened, making it bigger than its predecessor. It's also decked out with premium new cameras, featuring a 200-megapixel main lens, as well as a 10-megapixel telephoto sensor, 12-megapixel ultra-wide and two 10-megapixel front cameras on both the cover screen and on the main display.

Samsung's new Fold generation is, nevertheless, much more limited than other devices in the market when it comes to battery capacity. The Galaxy Z Fold 7 has a 4,400 milliampere-hour (mAh) battery -- far less than the 6,100 mAh power pack in Honor's Magic V5's or the Oppo Find N5's 5,600 mAh battery. Samsung says its device is capable of 24 hours of video playback.

Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip 7 is also thinner than its predecessor, coming in at 6.5 millimeters when opened flat. By contrast, the Galaxy Z Flip 6 has a depth of 6.9 millimeters when unfolded. The new phone has a 4.1-inch cover screen and a 6.9-inch main display. It comes with a 50-megapixel main camera and 12-megapixel ultra-wide sensor on the back and a 10-megapixel lens on the main display. It also has a bigger 4,300 mAh battery, which Samsung says supports 31 hours of video playtime on a single charge.

In addition to Flip 7, Samsung is also introducing a cheaper version of the phone, called the Galaxy Z Flip 7 FE, which is slightly smaller and thicker than its more premium counterpart. What about the AI features, you ask? They all include various AI-driven camera tools that can identify and suggest removal of unwanted people or objects in photos, and an audio eraser that filters out background noise in videos.

The Galaxy Z Flip 7 also integrates Gemini Live, allowing users to overlay the AI assistant during live video recordings -- for instance, to receive real-time outfit suggestions.

The Z Fold 7 starts at $1,999, and the Z Flip 7 starts at $1,099. Meanwhile, the Flip 7 FE is priced at $899.

OpenAI is close to releasing an AI-powered web browser that will challenge market-dominating Google Chrome, Reuters reported Wednesday. From the report: The browser is slated to launch in the coming weeks, three of the people said, and aims to use artificial intelligence to fundamentally change how consumers browse the web. It will give OpenAI more direct access to a cornerstone of Google's success: user data.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Researchers at Princeton University, Boston University and other institutes used machine learning to predict the strategic decisions of humans in various games. Their paper, published in Nature Human Behavior, shows that a deep neural network trained on human decisions could predict the strategic choices of players with high levels of accuracy. [...] Essentially, the team suggests that people behave more rationally while playing games that they perceive as easier. In contrast, when they are playing more complex games, people's choices could be influenced by various other factors, thus the "noise" affecting their behavior would increase.

As part of their future studies, the researchers would also like to shed more light on what makes a game "complex" or "easy." This could be achieved using the context-dependent noise parameter that they integrated into their model as a signature of "perceived difficulty." "Our analysis provides a robust model comparison across a wide range of candidate models of decision-making," said [Jian-Qiao Zhu, first author of the paper]. "We now have strong evidence that introducing context-dependence into the quantal response model significantly improves its ability to capture human strategic behavior. More specifically, we identified key factors in the game matrix that shape game complexity: considerations of efficiency, the arithmetic difficulty of computing payoff differences, and the depth of reasoning required to arrive at a rational solution."

The findings gathered as part of this recent study also highlight the "lightness" with which many people approach strategic decisions, which could make them vulnerable to parties looking to sway them towards making irrational decisions. Once they gather more insight into what factors make games and decision-making scenarios more challenging for people, Zhu and his colleagues hope to start devising new behavioral science interventions aimed at prompting people to make more rational decisions.

Meta has acquired a $3.5 billion stake in Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica, "a deal that increases the U.S. tech giant's financial commitment to the fast-growing smart glasses industry," reports Bloomberg. From the report: Meta's investment in the eyewear giant deepens the relationship between the two companies, which have partnered over the past several years to develop AI-powered smart glasses. Meta currently sells a pair of Ray-Ban glasses, first debuted in 2021, with built-in cameras and an AI assistant. Last month, it launched separate Oakley-branded glasses with EssilorLuxottica. EssilorLuxottica Chief Executive Officer Francesco Milleri said last year that Meta was interested in taking a stake the company, but that plan hadn't materialized until now.

The deal aligns with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's commitment to AI, which has become a top priority and major expense for the company. Smart glasses are a key part of that plan. While Meta has historically had to deliver its apps and services via smartphones created by competitors, glasses offer Meta a chance to build its own hardware and control its own distribution, Zuckerberg has said. The arrangement gives Meta the advantage of having more detailed manufacturing knowledge and global distribution networks, fundamental to turning its smart glasses into mass-market products. For EssilorLuxottica, the deal provides a deeper presence in the tech world, which would be helpful if Meta's futuristic bets pay off. Meta is also betting on the idea that people will one day work and play while wearing headsets or glasses.

Intel is laying off over 500 employees in Oregon as part of a broader restructuring plan expected to impact about 20% of its workforce. Bloomberg reports: The Oregon job reduction will hit facilities in Aloha and Hillsboro starting on July 15, Intel said in a regulatory filing. The layoffs are expected to eliminate about 529 employees on a permanent basis. The latest disclosure follows an announcement in California, where 107 employees were let go at Intel's Santa Clara headquarters.

Under new Chief Executive Officer Lip-Bu Tan, Intel embarked on a plan in April to slash jobs and reduce operating expenses. The company hasn't given a total figure for the cuts, but a person familiar with the matter has put the amount at more than a fifth of staff. In a statement, Intel said it was making the Oregon cuts to become "a leaner, faster and more efficient company."

"Removing organizational complexity and empowering our engineers will enable us to better serve the needs of our customers and strengthen our execution," the company said. "We are making these decisions based on careful consideration of what's needed to position our business for the future, and we will treat people with care and respect as we complete this important work."

SUSE has unveiled a new support package aimed at customers concerned about data sovereignty. From a report: Called "SUSE Sovereign Premium Support," the service geo-pins support to a given region rather than adopting the traditional follow-the-sun model, where support comes from whatever region is online. The latter approach could break sovereignty regulations or policies, as it might involve transferring data out of a region. Ensuring that support is available from a specific region is therefore crucial, particularly for European customers.

SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen told The Register: "Digital sovereignty has become a really hot topic in the last half year, and specifically in Europe, where companies feel an increasing need to get things done in-house, in-country, or in-region within Europe, with less dependency on non-European vendors and supply chains and people."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Trey had struggled with alcoholism for 15 years, eventually drinking heavily each night before quitting in December. But staying sober was a struggle for the 36-year-old first responder from Atlanta, who did not wish to use his real name due to professional concerns. Then he discovered Alterd, an AI-powered journaling app that invites users to "explore new dimensions" geared towards psychedelics and cannabis consumers, meditators, and alcohol drinkers. In April, using the app as a tripsitter -- a term for someone who soberly watches over another while they trip on psychedelics to provide reassurance and support -- he took a huge dose of 700 micrograms of LSD. (A typicalrecreational doseis considered to be 100 micrograms.) "I went from craving compulsions to feeling true freedom and not needing or wanting alcohol," he says.

He recently asked the app's "chat with your mind" function how he had become more wise through all his AI-assisted psychedelic trips. It responded: "I trust my own guidance now, not just external rules or what others think. I'm more creative, less trapped by fear, and I actually live by my values, not just talk about them. The way I see, reflect, and act in the world is clearer and more grounded every day." "It's almost like your own self that you're communicating with," says Trey, adding he's tripped with his AI chatbot about a dozen times since April. "It's like your best friend. It's kind of crazy." The article mentions several different chatbot tools and AI systems that are being used for psychedelic therapy.

ChatGPT: "Already, many millions of people are using ChatGPT on a daily basis, and the developments may have helped democratize access to psychotherapy-style guidance, albeit in a dubious Silicon Valley style with advice that is often flush with untruths," reports Wired. The general-purpose AI chatbot is being used for emotional support, intention-setting, and even real-time guidance during psychedelic trips. While not designed for therapy, it has been used informally as a trip companion, offering customized music playlists, safety reminders, and existential reflections. Experts caution that its lack of emotional nuance and clinical oversight poses significant risks during altered states.

Alterd: Alterd is a personalized AI journal app that serves as a reflective tool by analyzing a user's entries, moods, and behavior patterns. Its "mind chat" function acts like a digital subconscious, offering supportive insights while gently confronting negative habits like substance use. Users credit it with deepening self-awareness and maintaining sobriety, particularly in the context of psychedelic-assisted growth.

Mindbloom's AI Copilot: Integrated into Mindbloom's at-home ketamine therapy program, the AI copilot helps clients set pretrip intentions, process post-trip emotions, and stay grounded between sessions. It generates custom reflections and visual art based on voice journals, aiming to enhance the therapeutic journey even outside of human-guided sessions. The company plans to evolve the tool into a real-time, intelligent assistant capable of interacting more dynamically with users.

Orb AI/Shaman Concepts (Speculative): Conceptual "orb" interfaces imagine an AI-powered, shaman-like robot facilitating various aspects of psychedelic therapy, from intake to trip navigation. While still speculative, such designs hint at a future where AI plays a central, embodied role in guiding altered states. These ideas raise provocative ethical and safety questions about replacing human presence with machines in deeply vulnerable psychological contexts.

AI in Virtual Reality and Brain Modulation Systems: Researchers are exploring how AI could coordinate immersive virtual reality environments and brain-modulating devices to enhance psychedelic therapy. These systems would respond to real-time emotional and physiological signals, using haptic suits and VR to deepen and personalize the psychedelic experience. Though still in the conceptual phase, this approach represents the fusion of biotech, immersive tech, and AI in pursuit of therapeutic transformation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: For someone who says she is fighting AI bot scrapers just in her free time, Xe Iaso seems to be putting up an impressive fight. Since she launched it in January, Anubis, a "program is designed to help protect the small internet from the endless storm of requests that flood in from AI companies," has been downloaded nearly 200,000 times, and is being used by notable organizations including GNOME, the popular open-source desktop environment for Linux, FFmpeg, the open-source software project for handling video and other media, and UNESCO, the United Nations organization for educations, science, and culture. [...]

"Anubis is an uncaptcha," Iaso explains on her site. "It uses features of your browser to automate a lot of the work that a CAPTCHA would, and right now the main implementation is by having it run a bunch of cryptographic math with JavaScript to prove that you can run JavaScript in a way that can be validated on the server." Essentially, Anubis verifies that any visitor to a site is a human using a browser as opposed to a bot. One of the ways it does this is by making the browser do a type of cryptographic math with JavaScript or other subtle checks that browsers do by default but bots have to be explicitly programmed to do. This check is invisible to the user, and most browsers since 2022 are able to complete this test. In theory, bot scrapers could pretend to be users with browsers as well, but the additional computational cost of doing so on the scale of scraping the entire internet would be huge. This way, Anubis creates a computational cost that is prohibitively expensive for AI scrapers that are hitting millions and millions of sites, but marginal for an individual user who is just using the internet like a human.

Anubis is free, open source, lightweight, can be self-hosted, and can be implemented almost anywhere. It also appears to be a pretty good solution for what we've repeatedly reported is a widespread problem across the internet, which helps explain its popularity. But Iaso is still putting a lot of work into improving it and adding features. She told me she's working on a non cryptographic challenge so it taxes users' CPUs less, and also thinking about a version that doesn't require JavaScript, which some privacy-minded disable in their browsers. The biggest challenge in developing Anubis, Iaso said, is finding the balance. "The balance between figuring out how to block things without people being blocked, without affecting too many people with false positives," she said. "And also making sure that the people running the bots can't figure out what pattern they're hitting, while also letting people that are caught in the web be able to figure out what pattern they're hitting, so that they can contact the organization and get help. So that's like, you know, the standard, impossible scenario."

China "is pouring money into building an AI supply chain with as little reliance on the U.S. as possible," the Wall Street Journal noted this weekend.

But what does that look like? The New York Times visits Liangzhu, "the coder 'village' at the heart of China's AI frenzy... a quiet suburb of the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou... As China faces off with the United States over tech primacy, Hangzhou has become the centre of China's AI frenzy," with its proximity to tech companies like Alibaba and DeepSeek..." In Liangzhu, many engineers said they were killing time until they could create their own startups, waiting out noncompete agreements they had signed at bigger companies like ByteDance... But some said the government support for Hangzhou's tech scene had scared off some investors. Several company founders, who asked not to be named so they could discuss sensitive topics, said it was difficult for them to attract funds from foreign venture capital firms, frustrating their ambitions to grow outside China. The nightmare situation, they said, would be to end up like ByteDance, the Chinese parent of TikTok, whose executives have been questioned before Congress about the company's ties to the Chinese government. Founders described choosing between two paths for their companies' growth: Take government funding and tailor their product to the Chinese market, or raise enough money on their own to set up offices in a country like Singapore to pitch foreign investors. For most, the first was the only feasible option.

Another uncertainty is access to the advanced computer chips that power artificial intelligence systems. Washington has spent years trying to prevent Chinese companies from buying these chips, and Chinese companies like Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. are racing to produce their own. So far, the Chinese-made chips work well enough to help companies like ByteDance provide some of their AI services in China. Many Chinese companies have created stockpiles of Nvidia chips despite Washington's controls. But it is not clear how long that supply will last, or how quickly China's chipmakers can catch up to their American counterparts...

Liangzhu villagers have been hosting film nights. They had recently gathered to watch "The Matrix." Afterward, they decided the movie should be required viewing, Lin said. Its theme — people finding their way out of a vast system controlling society — provided spot-on inspiration. Aspiring founders in Liangzhu, even those who did not go to top universities, believe they could start the next world-changing tech company, said Felix Tao [a 36-year-old former Facebook and Alibaba employee.] "Many of them are super brave to make a choice to explore their own way, because in China that is not the common way to live your life."

"The China Film Foundation, a nonprofit fund under the Chinese government, plans to use AI to revitalize 100 kung fu classics including Police Story, Once Upon a Time in China and Fist of Fury, featuring Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Bruce Lee, respectively," reports the Los Angeles Times.

"The foundation said it will partner with businesses including Shanghai Canxing Culture & Media Co., which will license 100 Hong Kong films to AI companies to reintroduce those movies to younger audiences globally." The foundation said there are opportunities to use AI to tell those stories through animation, for example. There are plans to release an animated version of director John Woo's 1986 film A Better Tomorrow that uses AI to "reinterpret" Woo's "signature visual language," according to an English transcript of the announcement....

The project raised eyebrows among U.S. artists, many of whom are deeply wary of the use of AI in creative pursuits. The Directors Guild of America said AI is a creative tool that should only be used to enhance the creative storytelling process and "it should never be used retroactively to distort or destroy a filmmaker's artistic work... The DGA strongly opposes the use of AI or any other technology to mutilate a film or to alter a director's vision," the DGA said in a statement. "The Guild has a longstanding history of opposing such alterations on issues like colorization or sanitization of films to eliminate so-called 'objectionable content', or other changes that fundamentally alter a film's original style, meaning, and substance."

The project highlights widely divergent views on AI's potential to reshape entertainment as the two countries compete for dominance in the highly competitive AI space.... During the project's announcement, supporters touted the opportunity AI will bring to China to further its cultural message globally and generate new work for creatives. At the same time, they touted AI's disruption of the filmmaking process, saying the A Better Tomorrow remake was completed with just 30 people, significantly fewer than a typical animated project. China is a "more brutal society in that sense," said Eric Harwit, professor of Asian studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "If somebody loses their job because artificial intelligence is taking over, well, that's just the cost of China's moving forward.... You don't have those freestanding labor organizations, so they don't have that kind of clout to protest against the Chinese using artificial intelligence in a way that might reduce their job opportunities or lead to layoffs in the sector..."

The kung fu revitalization efforts will extend into other areas, including the creation of a martial arts video game.
The article also includes an interesting statistic. "Many people in China embrace AI, with 83% feeling confident that AI systems are designed to act in the best interest of society, much higher than the U.S. where it's 37%, according to a survey from the United Nations Development Program."

"A growing group of young, college-educated Americans are struggling to find work," reports the Minnesota Star Tribune, "as the unemployment rate for recent graduates outpaces overall unemployment for the first time in decades." While the national unemployment rate has hovered around 4% for months, the rate for 20-something degree holders is nearly 6%, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows. [And for young workers (ages 22 to 27) without a degree it's 6.9%.] The amount of time young workers report being unemployed is also on the rise.

Economists attribute some of the shift to normal post-pandemic cooling of labor market, which is making it harder for job-seekers of all ages to land a gig. But there's also widespread economic uncertainty causing employers to pull back on hiring and signs AI could replace entry-level positions....

Business schools nationwide were among the first to see the labor market shift in early 2023 as tech industry cuts bled into other sectors, said Maggie Tomas, Business Career Center executive director at Carlson. Tariffs and stock market volatility have only added to the uncertainty, she said. In 2022, when workers had their pick of jobs, 98% of full-time Carlson MBA graduates had a job offer in a field related to their degree within three months of graduation, according to the school. That number, which Tomas said is usually 90% or higher, dropped to 89% in 2023 and 83% in 2024.

Part of the challenge, she said, is recent graduates are now competing with more experienced workers who are re-entering the market amid layoffs and hiring freezes... After doing a lot of hiring in 2021 and 2022, Securian Financial in St. Paul is prioritizing internal hires, said Human Resources Director Leah Henrikson. Many entry-level roles have gone to current employees looking for a change, she said. "We are still looking externally, it's just the folks that we are looking for externally tend ... to fulfill a specific skill gap we may have at that moment in time," Henrikson said.

UPDATE (7/11/2025): A preliminary report from India's Air Accident Investigation Bureau has found that a pair of switches controlling fuel supply to the engines were set to "cutoff" and then returned to the "run" position, according to NPR. "But by then, the plane had begun to lose thrust and altitude. Both the engines appeared to relight, according to investigators, but only one of them was able to begin generating thrust." The report does not draw any further conclusions about why the switches were flipped, but it does suggest that investigators are focused on the actions of the plane's pilots. The report does not present any evidence of mechanical failures or of a possible bird strike, which could have incapacitated both engines at the same time.
Earlier Slashdot had reported that investigators of a deadly Boeing 787 crash "are studying possible dual engine failure as a scenario that prevented the Boeing Co. 787 jet from staying airborne," reports Bloomberg: Pilots from the airline reenacted the doomed aircraft's parameters in a flight simulator, including with the landing gear deployed and the wing flaps retracted, and found those settings alone didn't cause a crash, according to people familiar with the investigation. [Also, analysis of the wreckage "suggests the wing flaps and slats, which help an aircraft increase lift during takeoff, were extended correctly."]

The result, alongside the previous discovery that an emergency-power turbine deployed seconds before impact, has reinforced the focus on a technical failure as one possible cause, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic deliberations... [The turbine deploys "in the case of electrical failure," the article points out, and "was activated before the plane crashed, according to previous findings. That fan helps provide the aircraft with vital power, though it's far too small to generate any lift."]

Pilots who reviewed the footage have pointed to the fact that the landing gear was already partially tilted forward, suggesting the cockpit crew had initiated the retraction sequence of the wheels. At the same time, the landing-gear doors had not opened, which pilots say might mean that the aircraft experienced a loss of power or a hydraulic failure — again pointing to possible issues with the engines that provide the aircraft's electricity.

"California residents who lit illegal fireworks over the July 4 holiday may be in for a nasty surprise in the mail thanks to covert fire department operations," reports SFGate.

"A number of California cities, including Sacramento, have begun using drones to locate people shooting off illegal fireworks." From Wednesday to Saturday night, the Sacramento Fire Department's special fireworks task force patrolled the streets with unmarked cars and drones, focusing on neighborhoods where they've had prior complaints. Task force officers and the drones took photos of the illegal activity, and within 30 days the property owner where the fireworks were used could receive a fine in the mail...

This year, Sacramento upped the fine to $1,000 for the first firework, $2,500 for the second and $5,000 per firework after that. If you lit a firework on city property, such as a park or a school, the fine goes up to $10,000 each. There's no limit to how many fines you can be issued... This year, a number of cities across the state announced they would be using drones to find scofflaws, among them Indio, Riverside, Hemet, Brea and towns in Tulare County...

Fox40 reported on Saturday that around 60 citations were being prepared in Sacramento, with more likely on the way as fire officials review surveillance footage.
Last year for illegal fireworks, one Sacramento-area resident received a $100,000 fine.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the San Francisco Standard: About an hour into my meeting with the undisputed hackathon king of San Francisco, Rene Turcios asked if I wanted to smoke a joint with him. I politely declined, but his offer hardly surprised me. Turcios has built a reputation as a cannabis-loving former professional Yu-Gi-Oh! player who resells Labubus out of his Tenderloin apartment when he's not busy attending nearly every hackathon happening in the city. Since 2023, Turcios, 29, has attended more than 200 events, where he's won cash, software credits, and clout. "I'm always hustling," he said.

The craziest part: he doesn't even know how to code.

"Rene is the original vibe coder," said RJ Moscardon, a friend and fellow hacker who watched Turcios win second place at his first-ever hackathon at the AGI House mansion in Hillsborough. "All the engineers with prestigious degrees scoffed at him at first. But now they're all doing exactly the same thing...." Turcios was vibe coding long before the technique had a name — and was looked down upon by longtime hackers for using AI. But as Tiger Woods once said, "Winning takes care of everything...."

Instead of vigorously coding until the deadline, he finished his projects hours early by getting AI to do the technical work for him. "I didn't write a single line of code," Turcios said of his first hackathon where he prompted ChatGPT using plain English to generate a program that can convert any song into a lo-fi version. When the organizers announced Turcios had won second place, he screamed in celebration.... "I realized that I could compete with people who have degrees and fancy jobs...."

Turcios is now known for being able to build anything quickly. Businesses reach out to him to contract out projects that would take software engineering teams weeks — and he delivers in hours. He's even started running workshops to teach non-technical groups and experienced software engineers how to get the most out of AI for coding.
"He grew up in Missouri to parents who worked in an international circus, taming bears and lions..."

"A computer science degree used to be a golden ticket to the promised land of jobs," a college senior tells the New York Times. But "That's no longer the case."

The article notes that in the last three years there's been a 65% drop from companies seeking workers with two years of experience or less (according to an analysis by technology research/education organization CompTIA), with tech companies "relying more on AI for some aspects of coding, eliminating some entry-level work."

So what do college professors teach when AI "is coming fastest and most forcefully to computer science"? Computer science programs at universities across the country are now scrambling to understand the implications of the technological transformation, grappling with what to keep teaching in the AI era. Ideas range from less emphasis on mastering programming languages to focusing on hybrid courses designed to inject computing into every profession, as educators ponder what the tech jobs of the future will look like in an AI economy... Some educators now believe the discipline could broaden to become more like a liberal arts degree, with a greater emphasis on critical thinking and communication skills.

The National Science Foundation is funding a program, Level Up AI, to bring together university and community college educators and researchers to move toward a shared vision of the essentials of AI education. The 18-month project, run by the Computing Research Association, a research and education nonprofit, in partnership with New Mexico State University, is organising conferences and roundtables and producing white papers to share resources and best practices. The NSF-backed initiative was created because of "a sense of urgency that we need a lot more computing students — and more people — who know about AI in the workforce," said Mary Lou Maher, a computer scientist and a director of the Computing Research Association.

The future of computer science education, Maher said, is likely to focus less on coding and more on computational thinking and AI literacy. Computational thinking involves breaking down problems into smaller tasks, developing step-by-step solutions and using data to reach evidence-based conclusions. AI literacy is an understanding — at varying depths for students at different levels — of how AI works, how to use it responsibly and how it is affecting society. Nurturing informed skepticism, she said, should be a goal.
The article raises other possibilities. Experts also suggest the possibility of "a burst of technology democratization as chatbot-style tools are used by people in fields from medicine to marketing to create their own programs, tailored for their industry, fed by industry-specific data sets." Stanford CS professor Alex Aiken even argues that "The growth in software engineering jobs may decline, but the total number of people involved in programming will increase."

Last year, Carnegie Mellon actually endorsed using AI for its introductory CS courses. The dean of the school's undergraduate programs believes that coursework "should include instruction in the traditional basics of computing and AI principles, followed by plenty of hands-on experience designing software using the new tools."

"Some of our basic assumptions about the biological process of aging might be wrong," reports the New York Times — citing new research on a small Indigenous population in the Bolivian Amazon. [Alternate URL here.] Scientists have long believed that long-term, low-grade inflammation — also known as "inflammaging" — is a universal hallmark of getting older. But this new data raises the question of whether inflammation is directly linked to aging at all, or if it's linked to a person's lifestyle or environment instead. The study, which was published Monday, found that people in two nonindustrialized areas experienced a different kind of inflammation throughout their lives than more urban people — likely tied to infections from bacteria, viruses and parasites rather than the precursors of chronic disease. Their inflammation also didn't appear to increase with age.

Scientists compared inflammation signals in existing data sets from four distinct populations in Italy, Singapore, Bolivia and Malaysia; because they didn't collect the blood samples directly, they couldn't make exact apples-to-apples comparisons. But if validated in larger studies, the findings could suggest that diet, lifestyle and environment influence inflammation more than aging itself, said Alan Cohen, an author of the paper and an associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. "Inflammaging may not be a direct product of aging, but rather a response to industrialized conditions," he said, adding that this was a warning to experts like him that they might be overestimating its pervasiveness globally.

"How we understand inflammation and aging health is based almost entirely on research in high-income countries like the U.S.," said Thomas McDade, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University. But a broader look shows that there's much more global variation in aging than scientists previously thought, he added... McDade, who has previously studied inflammation in the Tsimane group, speculated that populations in nonindustrialized regions might be exposed to certain microbes in water, food, soil and domestic animals earlier in their lives, bolstering their immune response later in life.
More from The Independent: Chronic inflammation is thought to speed up the ageing process and contribute to various health conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, arthritis, cancer, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes... However, other experts shared a word of caution before jumping to conclusions from the study. Vishwa Deep Dixit, director of the Yale Center for Research on Aging, told the New York Times it's not surprising that people less exposed to pollution would see lower rates of chronic disease.
Aurelia Santoro, an associate professor at the University of Bologna, also cautioned about the results, according to the Times. "While they had lower rates of chronic disease, the two Indigenous populations tended to have life spans shorter than those of people in industrialized regions, meaning they may simply not have lived long enough to develop inflammaging, Santoro said."

And Bimal Desai, a professor of pharmacology who studies inflammation at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, told the Times that the study "sparks valuable discussion" but needs more follow-up "before we rewrite the inflammaging narrative."

Science Daily reports: Wild orcas across four continents have repeatedly floated fish and other prey to astonished swimmers and boaters, hinting that the ocean's top predator likes to make friends. Researchers cataloged 34 such gifts over 20 years, noting the whales often lingered expectantly — and sometimes tried again — after humans declined their offerings, suggesting a curious, relationship-building motive...

"Orcas often share food with each other — it's a prosocial activity and a way that they build relationships with each other," said study lead author Jared Towers, of Bay Cetology in British Columbia, Canada. "That they also share with humans may show their interest in relating to us as well."
The complete research was published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology. Its title? "Testing the Waters: Attempts by Wild Killer Whales (Orcinus orca) to Provision People (Homo sapiens)."

President Donald Trump's administration plans to restrict shipments of AI chips from the likes of Nvidia to Malaysia and Thailand, part of an effort to crack down on suspected semiconductor smuggling into China. Bloomberg: A draft rule from the Commerce Department seeks to prevent China -- to which the US has effectively banned sales of Nvidia's advanced AI processors -- from obtaining those components through intermediaries in the two Southeast Asian nations, according to people familiar with the matter. The rule is not yet finalized and could still change, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Officials plan to pair the Malaysia and Thailand controls with a formal rescission of global curbs from the so-called AI diffusion rule, the people said.