This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
posted in Technology
Silicon Valley Splits Over Closing the Borders to Chinese A.I.
www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/technology/open-source-silicon-valley-china.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3VA.g2FM.mBXVEKMSFiss
www.nytimes.comSilicon Valley Splits Over Closing the Borders to Chinese A.I. (Gift Article)Anthropic and OpenAI are clashing with the rest of the tech industry over whether “open-source” models from China should be freely available or restricted.posted in Technology
Apple Introduces Leasing Program for iPhones and Other Devices
www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/technology/apple-leasing-program.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3lA.Vn7-.EtHuo9eE2cCj
www.nytimes.comApple Introduces Leasing Program for iPhones and Other Devices (Gift Article)The program is an effort to make products more affordable as artificial intelligence sends some component prices soaring.posted in Technology
New Mexico Court Orders Meta to Pay to Establish $567 Million Fund to Abate Harms to Youth
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1319748/court-orders-instagram-and-facebook-s-meta-to-pay-567m-to-address-kids-mental-health-onl
www.techpolicy.press/new-mexico-court-orders-meta-to-establish-567-million-fund-to-abate-harms-to-youth/On Thursday, the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe, New Mexico issued a decision in the remedies phase of State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms Inc. The court found Meta’s platforms created a public nuisance by contributing to the youth mental health crisis and by facilitating child sexual exploitation. It ordered a range of remedies, including the creation of a $567 million abatement fund to finance various measures intended to address the harms to the public.
Tech Policy PressNew Mexico Court Orders Meta to Pay to Establish $567 Million Fund to Abate Harms to YouthThe court found Meta's platforms created a public nuisance by contributing to the youth mental health crisis and by facilitating child sexual exploitation.posted in Technology
$1 billion of iPhone 18 Pro chips 'on the shelves awaiting packaging' due to DRAM shortages — memory shortages reportedly put a wrinkle in Apple's launch plans
www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/usd1-billion-of-iphone-18-pro-chips-on-the-shelves-awaiting-packaging-due-to-dram-shortages-memory-shortages-reportedly-put-a-wrinkle-in-apples-launch-plans
Tom's Hardware$1 billion of iPhone 18 Pro chips 'on the shelves awaiting packaging' due to DRAM shortages — memory shortages reportedly put a wrinkle in Apple's launch plansApple has the wafers ready to go. It's just waiting on DRAM like everyone else.posted in Technology
Study Says AI Coding Tools Make You 19% Slower — And Nobody Saw It Coming
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chat-to.dev/post?id=N3ZVWGN4NkdxL0ltV3R2a2VpYXVZUT09
chat-to.devStudy Says AI Coding Tools Make You 19% Slower — And Nobody Saw It ComingA controlled study by [METR](https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown) took experienced open source developers, people who already knew their repositories inside out, and measured how long they took to resolve real GitHub issues with and without an AI assistant. The result was the opposite of what everyone expected: they were about 19% slower when using AI. The most interesting detail isn't even that number, it's that before starting each task the developers themselves predicted they'd be faster with the tool. Expectation and reality collided head on, and that alone says a lot about how we tend to judge these tools day to day.
It's worth separating two phases we usually lump together as one thing. Writing code and debugging code are different cognitive tasks, and AI helps far more with the first than with the second. Typing out boilerplate, generating a simple function, scaffolding a component, AI handles that fast and well. The problem shows up later, when something breaks. A [posted in Technology
This A.I. Just Created Viruses Not Found in Nature
www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/science/ai-viruses-bacteria-arc.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3VA.urhg.3YLDIvzML-r_
www.nytimes.comThis A.I. Just Created Viruses Not Found in Nature (Gift Article)Scientists trained artificial intelligence on libraries of DNA and then asked the model to create recipes for viral genomes. Sixteen of them were viable, yielding new viruses.posted in Technology
I think the internet is broken, and it's broken at it's core
I think AI won’t save us here, our base is broken. The internet is kind of shattered, most of the pages on the wild have broken and even wrong links. Divs doings the work of buttons, the semantics are totally lost. This, at least for me, feels like a good view point on what we can fix first, and with luck have a better internet.
All feedback is welcome.
jeferson.me/blog/2026/08/07/internet-is-ugly/
jeferson.meThe Internet is UglyThe internet is ugly, benchmarks score the checklist but miss the brokenness, div-buttons, dead links, dead emails, and the pages AI will learn from.posted in Technology
Hands On with the Anbernic RG SP; The Game Boy Advance SP Reimagined
gardinerbryant.com/hands-on-with-the-anbernic-rg-sp/
The Bryant ReviewHands On with the Anbernic RG SP; The Game Boy Advance SP ReimaginedAnbernic finally delivers the Game Boy Advance SP that nostalgia always imagined.posted in Technology
Disney Earnings Buoyed By ‘Toy Story 5’, Theme Parks, Streaming Profit; Books $100M Tariff Refund
deadline.com/2026/08/disney-earnings-toy-story-5-streaming-theme-parks-1237017656/
DeadlineDisney Earnings Buoyed By ‘Toy Story 5’, Theme Parks, Streaming ProfitDisney’s Josh D’Amaro stepped out with upbeat numbers and some news in his first full quarter as CEO. posted in Technology
Meta fined $567m in largest child safety ruling against social media giant
www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd7lz3wr2rlo
www.bbc.comMeta told to pay another $567m in New Mexico child safety lawsuitA New Mexico judge ordered the Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp parent company to pay another $567m for the way it has harmed children.posted in Technology
Hello, Lemmy! 👋
I’m Limsus, a technology enthusiast who enjoys discussing AI, privacy, open source, cloud computing, productivity, and the latest developments in tech.
Excited to be part of the Lemmy community. Let’s build something great together.
posted in Technology
Investors want ‘real proof’ AI spending is paying off, new report suggests - National | Globalnews.ca
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/68987038
globalnews.ca/news/12011708/ai-spending-investing-fidelity/What, investors are beginning to think that maybe AI is more hype than substance? A really expensive way of doing not much of anything?
Didn’t this also happen with the dot.com meltdown? A few good ways to productively use it, a lot of ways to wastefully use it.
You would think they would have learned.
The truth is, AI should not stand for Artificial Intelligence, it is in reality Algorithmic Intelligence. Same computer processing, except that it is thousands of computers in a single chip all processing the data at the same time, with each computer doing the same math (a*b+c) but each simultaneous computation uses different input numbers. Great for doing massive simultaneous calculations, but certainly not ‘revolutionary’. Instead of one computer doing one program taking a thousand cycles, a thousand computers doing the same program taking one cycle. What IS revolutionary are the algorithms that are being developed, and the applications these massive calculator arrays are being used for. Some will bear fruit, most will not.
Let’s take a ‘for example’.
Weather predictions for the next day. You start with a given set of data, then run your predictive algorithm a thousand times, each with a slightly different set of possible future data points. One of them is probably the most accurate. The problem is to decide which one. The second problem is that it takes a week to do all the thousand runs. You can have a 95% accurate prediction in one week for what the weather is going to be tomorrow. See the problem?
But with the newest AI chips, you can do the thousand different scenarios at the same time. Also, you can calculate a probability for each scenario at the same time. The scenario with the highest probability is the most likely. Then you check the actual weather, feed it back to the system, and it gets better at calculating the probabilities for the correct scenario. You get tomorrows weather today, and the system gets better and better at calculating the probabilities. This is a useful application.
Second condition. In a lottery, you can use this same server to predict all of the potential combinations of numbers, before the next draw. Except that the probability of any one combination being drawn is, well, still equal. There is just no way the system can get better at selecting the correct random number. The selection of which combination to use is still random, from equal probabilities. You can calculate what all the potential outcomes can be, but this tells you nothing if they are all equally likely. So it tells you nothing. A completely wasteful application.
Yet there are far more companies trying to use ‘AI’ to do the second condition than for the first condition. After investing a fortune in hardware, they still have the same accuracy in decision making as before.
Global NewsInvestors want ‘real proof’ AI spending is paying off, new report suggests - National | Globalnews.caA new report from Fidelity suggests financial advisors are increasingly looking for evidence that AI investments are translating into strong financial results.posted in Technology
Trump’s Truth Social Hit by Humiliating Exodus [Down 40% in one year]
cross-posted from: sh.itjust.works/post/64681779
www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-truth-social-hit-by-humiliating-exodus-of-daily-active-users/Active users of President Donald Trump’s social media platform have dropped like flies.
Trump’s Truth Social site, where he threatens other countries and posts self-aggrandizing AI slop, has experienced a dramatic drop in daily active users of its mobile app since last July, according to the Financial Times.
The outlet, citing estimates from the digital market intelligence company SimilarWeb, reported that the mobile site’s daily active users have plummeted from 436,000 in July 2025 to only 261,000 one year later.
The Daily BeastTrump’s Truth Social Hit by Humiliating ExodusPeople have left the president’s personal social media site in droves.posted in Technology
Why Normal People Aren’t Using AI Agents
www.wired.com/story/why-normal-people-arent-using-ai-agents/
WIREDWhy Normal People Aren’t Using AI AgentsThe tech industry is realizing it needs to build agents based on what regular consumers want, not just what its AI models can do.posted in Technology
EU AI Act Content Labelling: Fake Around and Find Out
reprodev.com/eu-ai-act-content-labelling-fake-around-and-find-out/
ReproDevEU AI Act Content Labelling: Fake Around and Find OutA personal teardown of EU AI Act Article 50 labelling rules, C2PA metadata stripping, Penelope Cruz, ad parallels and digital trust in 2026posted in Technology
Unions Can Save Tech Workers and Tech Work
jacobin.com/2026/08/uc-upte-tech-workers-union
jacobin.comUnions Can Save Tech Workers and Tech WorkTwo University of California tech workers explain their unionization process — and how unions can help recapture the original promise of tech being used to better people’s lives rather than make the worst people in the world ever richer.posted in Technology
AI-assisted staging draws boos at the Richard Wagner festival in Germany
apnews.com/article/germany-bayreuth-wagner-festival-ai-f4300cdc0be195dabdadfa6d2ab4254c
AP NewsAI-assisted staging draws boos at the Richard Wagner festival in GermanyAn experiment with artificial intelligence at the annual Richard Wagner festival in the German town of Bayreuth has drawn boos from the audience after producing a staging that appeared to leave some spectators confused.posted in Technology
Scientists Sound Alarm on AI-Generated Biological Viruses Amid Unregulated Industry
cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/70021
www.commondreams.org/news/ai-creating-viruses
Common DreamsScientists Sound Alarm on AI-Generated Biological Viruses Amid Unregulated Industry | Common Dreams"The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not," a pair of researchers said.posted in Technology
Danish pupils will have to orally defend essays in attempt to combat AI cheating /// Government introduces several measures, including monitoring of computers, for pupils aged 16 to 19
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1318794/danish-pupils-will-have-to-orally-defend-essays-in-attempt-to-combat-ai-cheating-governm
uvm.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/2026/august/260806-ny-strakspakke-mod-ai-snyd-paa-gymnasierne/posted in Technology
Walmart accused of collecting customers' voiceprints
www.courthousenews.com/walmart-accused-of-collecting-customers-voiceprints/
Courthouse News ServiceWalmart accused of collecting customers' voiceprintsA group of Walmart customers say the supermarket retained their biometrics, running afoul of Illinois data privacy laws. 