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Submission + - Claude Code Source Leaked

Submitted by Grady Martin
Grady Martin writes: A security researcher has leaked a complete repository of source code for Anthropic's flagship command-line tool. The file listing was exposed via a Node Package Manager (npm) mapping, with every target publicly accessible on a Cloudflare R2 storage bucket.

$ du -hs .
35M .
$ find -type f | sed 's/^.*\.//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -bVr
1332 ts
552 tsx
18 js

Submission + - AI Data Centers Can Warm Surrounding Areas By Up To 9.1C (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Andrea Marinoni at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues saw that the amount of energy needed to run a data centre had been steadily increasing of late and was likely to “explode” in the coming years, so wanted to quantify the impact. The researchers took satellite measurements of land surface temperatures over the past 20 years and cross-referenced them against the geographical coordinates of more than 8400 AI data centres. Recognizing that surface temperature could be affected by other factors, the researchers chose to focus their investigation on data centers located away from densely populated areas.

They discovered that land surface temperatures increased by an average of 2C (3.6F) in the months after an AI data center started operations. In the most extreme cases, the increase in temperature was 9.1C (16.4F). The effect wasn’t limited to the immediate surroundings of the data centres: the team found increased temperatures up to 10 kilometers away. Seven kilometers away, there was only a 30 percent reduction in the intensity. “The results we had were quite surprising,” says Marinoni. “This could become a huge problem.”

Using population data, the researchers estimate that more than 340 million people live within 10 kilometers of data centers, so live in a place that is warmer than it would be if the data centre hadn’t been built there. Marinoni says that areas including the Bajío region in Mexico and the Aragon province in Spain saw a 2C (3.6F) temperature increase in the 20 years between 2004 and 2024 that couldn’t otherwise be explained.

Submission + - Microsoft Copilot is now injecting ads into pull requests on GitHub, GitLab (neowin.net)

Submitted by darwinmac
darwinmac writes: Neowin reports that on GitHub, Microsoft appears to be injecting ads into pull requests generated by Copilot. There are now thousands of pull requests containing the phrase, "Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast."

A quick cursory search of that phrase on GitHub reveals this is not an isolated incident. The exact same promotional text appears in over 11,000 different pull requests across thousands of repos on GitHub. Even merge requests on GitLab are not safe from the injection.

At first, you might think the ads are coming from Raycasts Copilot extension, which lets you start and track Copilot coding agent tasks, kick off Copilot jobs, monitor progress, and manage pull requests from within the Raycast launcher using prompts. But the ads appear to be tied to Microsofts Copilot coding agent tips rather than Raycast itself. Neowin adds:

If you look at the raw markdown of the affected pull requests, there is a hidden HTML comment, START COPILOT CODING AGENT TIPS, placed just before the ad tip. This suggests Microsoft is using the comment to insert a tip that points back to its own developer ecosystem or partner integrations.

There is a growing push for monetization in generative AI, as labs and platforms try to cover the massive costs of inference computing.

With an over $400 billion gap between the money invested in AI data centers and the actual revenue these products generate, Silicon Valley slowly returned to the tested and trusted playbook: advertising.

Ads on generative AI platforms are already proving lucrative. Just weeks after launching ads for Free and Go tier users, OpenAI says its ChatGPT ad business hit a $100 million annualized run rate. The company now plans to expand the ads to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and roll out a self-serve ad platform for businesses.

Comment Drama (Score 4, Interesting) 10

by Grady Martin (#65816219) Attached to: Pebble Goes Fully Open Source

This piqued my interest, so I looked into it.

In summary, there seems to be a bit of drama regarding governance of this project. The dust has yet to settle, and the person currently attempting to position himself as BDFL is the same person who previously sold off the company for $23 million. Meanwhile, the community version that emerged from those ashes nickel-and-dimes for things like weather reports and “a warm fuzzy feeling”?

I think I'll wait and see.

Submission + - Could satellite-beaming planes and airships make SpaceX's Starlink obsolete? (space.com)

Submitted by ZipNada
ZipNada writes: A new generation of stratospheric balloons and high-altitude uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) could soon connect the world's unconnected with high-speed internet at a fraction of the prices commanded by operators of satellite megaconstellations such as SpaceX's Starlink.

High-altitude platform stations, or HAPS, have been around for a while, but the technology hasn't fully taken off yet. Google spent 10 years trying to develop balloons that would hover in the stratosphere above remote rural areas and beam internet to residents but abandoned that project, called Loon, in 2021, concluding that it couldn't be made sustainable.

Four years later, companies such as World Mobile Stratospheric and Sceye say they are on the verge of making internet-beaming from the stratosphere, the layer of Earth's atmosphere roughly 6 miles to 31 miles (10 to 50 kilometers) above the planet, a reality. Moreover, they claim that their offerings will be better and cheaper than that of satellite megaconstellations in low Earth orbit (LEO), which too have been developed with the promise of connecting the world's unconnected.

Submission + - An ancient planet smashed into Earth. We now know its origin (dw.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Space scientists are largely agreed that about 4.5 billion years ago, Earth, then a hot ball of molten iron and other elements, was hit by another Mars-sized protoplanet. This hypothetical world is called Theia, named for a titaness of Greek mythology.

Theia was completely destroyed by this impact, but likely lives on beneath our feet, as fragments from this doomed world fused with the early Earth.

Comment Re:...but Trump Says (Score 3, Interesting) 70

by Grady Martin (#65712048) Attached to: Renewables Overtake Coal As World's Biggest Source of Electricity

One thing that ChatGPT does well is fact-checking.

Could someone living in Pennsylvania theoretically reduce property taxes by 15% by "upgrading" an oil furnace to a coal one?

That’s a really interesting and creative idea — but no, someone living in Pennsylvania could not reduce their property taxes by 15% by switching from oil to coal heating.

It then delves into minutae of Pennsylvanian tax law, a furnace's impact on assessed property value, and how not even coal refuse (as opposed to ordinary coal) could affect property tax.

Perhaps your grandmother miscommunicated or was even deceived or misled. Are you able to provide any more details?

Submission + - China Is Sending Its World-Beating Auto Industry Into a Tailspin (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: On the outskirts of this city of 21 million, a showroom in a shopping mall offers extraordinary deals on new cars. Visitors can choose from some 5,000 vehicles. Locally made Audis are 50% off. A seven-seater SUV from China’s FAW is about $22,300, more than 60% below its sticker price. These deals – offered by a company called Zcar, which says it buys in bulk from automakers and dealerships – are only possible because China has too many cars. Years of subsidies and other government policies have aimed to make China a global automotive power and the world’s electric-vehicle leader. Domestic automakers have achieved those goals and more – and that’s the problem.

China has more domestic brands making more cars than the world’s biggest car market can absorb because the industry is striving to hit production targets influenced by government policy, instead of consumer demand, a Reuters examination has found. That makes turning a profit nearly impossible for almost all automakers here, industry executives say. Chinese electric vehicles start at less than $10,000; in the U.S., automakers offer just a few under $35,000. Most Chinese dealers can’t make money, either, according to an industry survey published last month, because their lots are jammed with excess inventory. Dealers have responded by slashing prices. Some retailers register and insure unsold cars in bulk, a maneuver that allows automakers to record them as sold while helping dealers to qualify for factory rebates and bonuses from manufacturers.

Unwanted vehicles get dumped onto gray-market traders like Zcar. Some surface on TikTok-style social-media sites in fire sales. Others are rebranded as "used" – even though their odometers show no mileage – and shipped overseas. Some wind up abandoned in weedy car graveyards. These unusual practices are symptoms of a vastly oversupplied market – and point to a potential shakeout mirroring turmoil in China’s property market and solar industry, according to many industry figures and analysts. They stem from government policies that prioritize boosting sales and market share – in service of larger goals for employment and economic growth – over profitability and sustainable competition. Local governments offer cheap land and subsidies to automakers in exchange for production and tax-revenue commitments, multiplying overcapacity across the country.

Submission + - Shared genetic mechanisms underpin social life in bees and humans, study suggest (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: In social species, there is individual variation in sociability—some individuals are highly social and well-connected within their society, whereas others prefer less social interaction. This variation can be driven by many factors, including mood, social status, previous experience, and genetics. However, the genetic and molecular mechanisms that influence sociability are poorly understood.

Sociability is a complex characteristic, controlled by many genes, but these shared genomic features suggest there are ancient molecular building blocks of social life that have been conserved through millions of years of evolution, even if humans and bees evolved social life independently, the authors say.

The authors add, "It is a central feature of all societies that group members often engage with one another, but vary in their tendency to do so. Combining automated monitoring of social interactions, DNA sequencing, and brain transcriptomics in honey bee colonies, we identified evolutionarily conserved molecular roots of sociability shared across phylogenetically distinct species, including humans."

Submission + - Color-changing organogel stretches 46 times its size and self-heals (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Scientists from Taiwan have developed a new material that can stretch up to 4,600% of its original length before breaking. Even if it does break, gently pressing the pieces together at room temperature allows it to heal, fully restoring its shape and stretchability within 10 minutes.

Comment Second Only to Arch (Score 2, Interesting) 9

by Grady Martin (#65664450) Attached to: Fedora Linux 43 Beta Released

I have used Fedora on my work machine for three years, having chosen it because my organization deploys our web application to dnf/yum servers: I figured it might be nice to explore a new distro, while simultaneously learning package-management skills that could come in handy for our project.

The latter did end up proving valuable. I even upgraded our method for installing out-of-band software to better fit first-party tooling and infrastructure. I am grateful for those skills. However, the joy of exploring a new distro, on the other hand, immediately butted heads with...

... Fedora's pattern of cleaning out older components.

Waking up to a notification that software you use on a daily basis is no longer available due to invalid rationale like some perceived bitrot is infuriating. Stability is an even bigger issue on Fedora; I am currently unable to run Blender, for example, because Fedora has shipped what amounts a buggy version. My illuminated keyboard is also permanently dark, wget2 fails to replace wget, etc. I have a running list of a couple dozen more issues.

Fedora users are beta testers who work for free for Red Hat. Do not put yourself in that situation.

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