Technology

The second-generation Blade battery can charge from 10-70% in just about five minutes and from 10-97% in under 10 minutes. More impressively, the company showcased the battery charging flawlessly from 20-97% at -22°F (-30°C) in just about 12 minutes, only around three minutes slower than it charges in normal temperatures.

New U.S laws designed to protect minors are pulling millions of adult Americans into mandatory age-verification gates to access online content, leading to backlash from users and criticism from privacy advocates that a free and open internet is at stake. Roughly half of U.S. states have enacted or are advancing laws requiring platforms — including adult content sites, online gaming services, and social media apps — to block underage users, forcing companies to screen everyone who approaches these digital gates.

OpenAI claims it has accomplished what Anthropic couldn’t: securing a Pentagon contract that won’t cross professed red lines against dragnet domestic spying and the use of artificial intelligence to order lethal military strikes. Just don’t expect any proof.

The Foundation sees this as a contradiction to the EU’s own interoperability goals. Although XLSX is standardized as OOXML according to ISO/IEC 29500, Microsoft’s implementations often deviate from the specifications. Furthermore, features often change undocumented, which complicates compatibility with open-source software such as LibreOffice.

Denouncing this machinery is a historic task. It is not merely a matter of solidarity with the Palestinian people, although that solidarity is urgent and non-negotiable.

Reddit.

Implementation of the White House’s return-to-office directive will be aided by the tech firm Palantir. It remains unclear why a spy-tech company should be tasked with things like “employee seat assignments.”

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/60387297

United States customs officers conducted a record number of searches of electronic devices last year of people travelling to the U.S., and a recent update to its directives adds new devices such as smart watches, SIM cards and flash drives to the list of things subject to search.

Reddit.

Your daily reminder that by supporting Big Tech, you are contributing to the insane wealth disparity.

Hacker News.

Over the past few weeks, several US banks have pulled off from lending to Oracle for expanding its AI data centres, as per a report.

https://archive.ph/gx01C

As of today, about half of all U.S. states have some form of age verification law around. Nine of those were passed in 2025 alone, covering everything from adult content sites to social media platforms to app stores.

Planet Labs, one of the world’s leading commercial satellite imaging companies, said Friday it is placing a hold on releasing imagery of some parts of the Middle East as a regional war enters its second week.

This is awesome.

It is worth noting that both the hardware and software of Fairphone is heavily dependent on a Chinese company T2Mobile.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool flagged the essay as “18% AI written.” The culprit? Using the word “devoid.” When the word was swapped out for “without,” the score magically dropped to 0%.

Hacker News.

Meta’s approach to user privacy is under renewed scrutiny following a Swedish report that employees of a Meta subcontractor have watched footage captured by Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses showing sensitive user content.

Norway’s Forbrukerrådet consumer council is taking aim at the creeping enshittification of modern life in a 100-page report – and a splendid four-minute video which we highly recommend.

Outside OpenAI’s headquarters, a handful of people gathered on Monday holding pieces of colorful chalk. They got down on their knees and started writing messages on the sidewalk. Stand for liberty. Please no legal mass surveillance. Change the contract please.

The core thesis of this paper is that the AI community needs to stop treating autonomous agents as just another text generation problem and start building comprehensive infrastructure to support closed loop learning. The authors argue that achieving reliable agentic behavior requires a full stack ecosystem that unifies data synthesis with sandboxed execution and specialized reinforcement learning. To prove this point they introduce the Agentic Learning Ecosystem which consists of an RL framework called ROLL alongside a sandbox manager named ROCK and an agent interface known as iFlow CLI. They believe that isolating models in static training environments is a dead end for solving complex real world workflows.

Akurat potwierdziłem autentyczność tego konta w rozmowie z właścicielem DSI.

Source

Source

Elon Musk’s xAI has lost its bid for a preliminary injunction that would have temporarily blocked California from enforcing a law that requires AI firms to publicly share information about their training data.

Liberty has costs, but it’s worth it.

Earlier this week, PCWorld published a roundup of Windows 12 rumors translated from PCWelt that does not meet our editorial standards. We’re deeply embarrassed by it, and I personally apologize that the article was published. It should not have been, but we’re keeping the article live (with an editor’s note at the top) so it remains in the public record.

Hacker News. - We introduce a new measure of AI displacement risk, observed exposure, that combines theoretical LLM capability and real-world usage data, weighting automated (rather than augmentative) and work-related uses more heavily - AI is far from reaching its theoretical capability: actual coverage remains a fraction of what’s feasible - Occupations with higher observed exposure are projected by the BLS to grow less through 2034 - Workers in the most exposed professions are more likely to be older, female, more educated, and higher-paid - We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022, though we find suggestive evidence that hiring of younger workers has slowed in exposed occupations

Lobsters.

Samsung disabling bootloader unlock and what Google is doing with Android reminded me that Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame exists. And also that FSF’s LibrePhone project exists, but not much progress has been seen from that.

Crossposted from https://lemmy.world/post/43905111

https://social.coop/@cwebber/116178050263113242

“Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future” is a new report from Forbrukerrådet. The report itself is a light read: it’s in English, and while it is 100 pages long [PDF], it is in fact enjoyable and even amusing – we laughed quite a few times when reading it. For one thing, it contains a surprising number of puns and the occasional starred-out swearword, such as “Do androids dream of electric s*.” A stodgy bureaucratic report this is not.

The guy replying to me is (as far as I can tell) the sole owner and moderator of .wtf, which is the instance I’ve been using up until this point. I kinda already knew they allowed AI slop, as there’s nothing in the rules that says otherwise, but this interaction really sealed my decision. “Hey, person who makes music. If you don’t like another musician using the fascist plagiarism machine, how about you offer to create art for them? After all, if people simply donated their time and effort, maybe they wouldn’t have to resort to pissing in the face of their fellow artists of a different medium. Think about it." Also, I think you can donate to the instance in crypto?

This post provides arguments, asks questions, and documents some examples of Anthropic’s leadership being misleading and deceptive, holding contradictory positions that consistently shift in OpenAI’s direction, lobbying to kill and water down regulation so helpful that employees of all major AI companies speak out to support it, and violating the fundamental promise the company was founded on. It also shares a few previously unreported details on Anthropic leadership’s promises and efforts.

A new organization launched to fight public corruption is suing President Trump and his attorney general, accusing them of flouting the law when they blessed the sale of TikTok’s U.S. assets to White House allies.