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Businesses

Challenging UPS and FedEx, Amazon Opens Its Shipping Network to All Businesses (geekwire.com) 79

Posted by EditorDavid from the boxes-with-smiles dept.
This week Amazon opened up its parcel shipping, fulfillment, and distribution "to businesses of all types and sizes." Any business can now ship, store, and deliver "using the same supply chain that supports Amazon," according to Monday's announcement of "Amazon Supply Chain Services."

The move sent shares of UPS and FedEx "tumbling" Monday writes GeekWire. And though both stocks bounced back as the week went on, GeekWire sees this as the latest example of Amazon "turning its internal capabilities into products and services for sale..."

"Amazon had already surpassed both carriers to become the nation's largest parcel shipper by volume, according to parcel-analytics firm ShipMatrix." Initial customers include Procter & Gamble, which is using Amazon's freight network to transport raw materials; 3M, which is using it to move products to distribution centers; Lands' End, which is fulfilling orders across sales channels from Amazon's warehouses; and American Eagle Outfitters, which is using Amazon's parcel service for last-mile delivery. The service can fulfill orders placed through platforms that compete with Amazon's own marketplace, including Walmart, Shopify, TikTok, and others... Peter Larsen, vice president of Amazon Supply Chain Services, compared the launch to the origins of Amazon's cloud business...

In addition to putting Amazon in competition with existing players in the logistics industry, the move also raises questions about data privacy. Amazon has faced accusations of using nonpublic seller data to compete against merchants on its marketplace, which it has denied. Larsen told the Wall Street Journal that the company prohibits using supply chain customer data for its own marketplace decisions, noting that hundreds of thousands of Amazon sellers already trust the company to fulfill orders placed on rival platforms.
The article notes that in his annual shareholder letter Amazon's CEO "said the company is also exploring selling its custom AI chips and robotics to outside customers."
AI

Claude Code Leak Reveals a 'Stealth' Mode for GenAI Code Contributions - and a 'Frustration Words' Regex (pcworld.com) 38

Posted by EditorDavid from the under-the-hood dept.
That leak of Claude Code's source code "revealed all kinds of juicy details," writes PC World.

The more than 500,000 lines of code included:

- An 'undercover mode' for Claude that allows it to make 'stealth' contributions to public code bases
- An 'always-on' agent for Claude Code
- A Tamagotchi-style 'Buddy' for Claude

"But one of the stranger bits discovered in the leak is that Claude Code is actively watching our chat messages for words and phrases — including f-bombs and other curses — that serve as signs of user frustration." Specifically, Claude Code includes a file called "userPromptKeywords.ts" with a simple pattern-matching tool called regex, which sweeps each and every message submitted to Claude for certain text matches. In this particular case, the regex pattern is watching for "wtf," "wth," "omfg," "dumbass," "horrible," "awful," "piece of — -" (insert your favorite four-letter word for that one), "f — you," "screw this," "this sucks," and several other colorful metaphors... While the Claude Code leak revealed the existence of the "frustration words" regex, it doesn't give any indication of why Claude Code is scouring messages for these words or what it's doing with them.

Comment Re:Slashdot method (Score 3, Interesting) 39

by FunkSoulBrother (#66040680) Attached to: Digg Relaunch Fails

SA has its history but the people who are left grew the fuck up and are by and large decent people. Seriously.

When I was in college I really admired Slashdot's anonymous posting / dedication to free speech, but at some point you learn the ironic Nazis are just real Nazis always feeling around to see how far they can push their limits.

With age and wisdom I'm convinced a paywall + relative freedom to ban paying users is the way to go. At least if people want to burn their venture capital money (or their personal money) to run bot or humans with an agenda on your site, they are paying handsomely for the privilege.

Comment Re:Slashdot method (Score 5, Informative) 39

by FunkSoulBrother (#66039912) Attached to: Digg Relaunch Fails

This is actually the answer though. SomethingAwful (for whatever you think of it) charges $10 since forever and its provided money for the site and for the most part kept out spam and bots. Combine that with human moderators who have the authority to ban people (or robots) if they pay that and start acting like a piece of shit anyway, and you walk away with a decent online community.
Portables (Apple)

Apple MacBook Neo Beats Every Single x86 PC CPU For Single-Core Performance (notebookcheck.net) 329

Posted by BeauHD from the would-you-look-at-that dept.
Early benchmarks show the A18 Pro-powered MacBook Neo beating every current x86 CPU in single-core Cinebench performance, including chips from Intel and AMD. Notebookcheck reports: We have performed a couple of benchmarks and were particularly impressed by the single-core performance. Not in the short Geekbench test, but in Cinebench 2024, where a single-core test takes about 10 minutes. The A18 Pro consumes between 3.5-4 Watts in this scenario and scores 147 points. This means it is faster than every other x86 processor in our database, including the two desktop processors Intel Core Ultra 9 285K & AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D. This also means the MacBook Neo beats every modern mobile processor from AMD, Intel and also Qualcomm, even though the upcoming Snapdragon X2 chips should be a bit faster. The A18 Pro is also slightly faster than Apple's own M3 generation in this scenario. Further reading: ASUS Executive Says MacBook Neo is 'Shock' to PC Industry
Oracle

OpenAI Is Walking Away From Expanding Its Stargate Data Center With Oracle (cnbc.com) 41

Posted by BeauHD from the logical-decisions dept.
OpenAI is reportedly backing away from expanding its AI data center partnership with Oracle because newer generations of Nvidia GPUs may arrive before the facility is even operational. CNBC reports: Artificial intelligence chips are getting upgraded more quickly than data centers can be built, a market reality that exposes a key risk to the AI trade and Oracle's debt-fueled expansion. OpenAI is no longer planning to expand its partnership with Oracle in Abilene, Texas, home to the Stargate data center, because it wants clusters with newer generations of Nvidia graphics processing units, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The current Abilene site is expected to use Nvidia's Blackwell processors, and the power isn't projected to come online for a year. By then, OpenAI is hoping to have expanded access to Nvidia's next-generation chips in bigger clusters elsewhere, said the person, who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. In a post on X, Oracle called the reports "false and incorrect." However, it only said existing projects are on track and didn't address expansion plans.

CNBC notes: "Oracle secured the site, ordered the hardware, and spent billions of dollars on construction and staff, with the expectation of going bigger."

Comment Re:First Hand Experience? (Score 1) 167

I rode a few while on a trip to Phoenix and it was way better than the average Lyft or Uber ride I've taken.

It drove defensively, I got to choose my own music and climate control, I didn't have an driver tapping on their phone to plan out new rides, or high, or bragging about how they've been driving since 5am, or complaining about how they've been driving since 5am.

This is coming from someone who is typically pretty skeptical of big tech bullshit and a fan of labor. I still use the cashier when there is a self checkout, etc. But the tech here is so good that its going to destroy all of those uber drivers (assuming it can sort of handle weather -- I can't speak to that)
Programming

Stack Overflow Went From 200,000 Monthly Questions To Nearly Zero (stackexchange.com) 125

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Stack Overflow's monthly question volume has collapsed to about 300 -- levels not seen since the site launched in 2009, according to data from the Stack Overflow Data Explorer that tracks the platform's activity over its sixteen-year history.

Questions peaked around 2014 at roughly 200,000 per month, then began a gradual decline that accelerated dramatically after ChatGPT's November 2022 launch. By May 2025, monthly questions had fallen to early-2009 levels, and the latest data through early 2026 shows the collapse has only continued -- the line now sits near the bottom of the chart, barely registering.

The decline predates LLMs. Questions began dropping around 2014 when Stack Overflow improved moderator efficiency and closed questions more aggressively. In mid-2021, Prosus acquired Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion. The founders, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, exited before the terminal decline became apparent. ChatGPT accelerated what was already underway. The chatbot answers programming questions faster, draws on Stack Overflow's own corpus for training data, and doesn't close questions for being duplicates.
AI

'AI Can't Think' (theverge.com) 289

Posted by BeauHD from the language-doesn't-equal-intelligence dept.
In an essay published in The Verge, Benjamin Riley argues that today's AI boom is built on a fundamental misunderstanding: language modeling is not the same as intelligence. "The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language -- and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own," writes Riley. A user shares: The article goes on to point out that we use language to communicate. We use it to create metaphors to describe our reasoning. That people who have lost their language ability can still show reasoning. That human beings create knowledge when they become dissatisfied with the current metaphor. Einstein's theory of relativity was not based on scientific research. He developed it as thought experiment because he was dissatisfied with the existing metaphor. It quotes someone who said, "common sense is a collection of dead metaphors." And that AI, at best, can rearrange those dead metaphors in interesting ways. But it will never be dissatisfied with the data it has or an existing metaphor.

A different critique (PDF) has pointed out that even as a language model AI is flawed by its reliance on the internet. The languages used on the internet are unrepresentative of the languages in the world. And other languages contain unique descriptions/metaphors that are not found on the internet. My metaphor for what was discussed was the descriptions of the kinds of snow that exist in Inuit languages that describe qualities nowhere found in European languages. If those metaphors aren't found on the internet, AI will never be able create them.

This does not mean that AI isn't useful. But it is not remotely human intelligence. That is just a poor metaphor. We need a better one. Benjamin Riley is the founder of Cognitive Resonance, a new venture to improve understanding of human cognition and generative AI.

Comment Re:Excellent (Score 1) 50

by FunkSoulBrother (#65756092) Attached to: Amazon Says It Will Cut 14,000 Corporate Roles To Remove Layers

I'm legitimately "Steve" at a much smaller tech company. I also do product management (lol) and QA (a cursory check before the customers really QA it for us).

I will never get any help, the only answer is to build out a magical LLM automation at the same time as responding to a flood of emails/tickets/meetings/calls.

I've learned not to ask for help as that turns into a homework assignment with due dates.

At least I still have a well paying tech job in 2025, until the house of cards collapses.

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