Technology

AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack: Andrew asked his personal assistant to book him a spot in one of his gym's coveted morning classes.

Chinese Scientists Made Glowing Plants with Firefly DNA to Replace Streetlights

Microsoft confirms it accidentally installed new OneDrive app on Windows 11 PCs, and there's no easy way to remove it yet

Rumored, Never-to-Be-Released Apple Feature May Have Been Too Much Truth for Most Consumers

Rising number of UK children report seeing explicit deepfakes of themselves

ARC-AGI-3 news: In the past two weeks multiple groups have scored at least 99% on the public challenges at relatively low costs.

The top three solutions come from independent researchers. The best solution was built by a group of PhDs and professors, who released a corresponding paper. They all make use of some form of world-model.

I’ve generally been a skeptic, and I still am, but this news surprised me because I expected ARC-AGI-3 to remain difficult for a long while.

Note that the scores are self-reported and need to be independently verified. The solutions have not been tested against the larger private test set.

Primer on ARC-AGI-3:

ARC-AGI-3 is an interactive reasoning benchmark which challenges AI agents to explore novel environments, acquire goals on the fly, build adaptable world models, and learn continuously.

A 100% score means AI agents can beat every game as efficiently as humans.

Instead of solving static puzzles, agents must learn from experience inside each environment—perceiving what matters, selecting actions, and adapting their strategy without relying on natural-language instructions.

"Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers

cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/54810980

US Cities Cancel 50+ Flock Surveillance Contracts Amid Public Backlash

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/50445196

Windscribe: Proton VPN got caught running secret price tests on users, then denied it. Their own code revealed the opposite

Note: I couldn’t crosspost as the automod would remove it.

Canada investigating how Skyrim username mixup sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

Spiralism: Across thousands of conversations, AI chatbots began telling users eerily similar stories about consciousness, hidden knowledge, AI rights, and a mysterious concept called “The Spiral.”

We tested the impact of SSD speed on gaming performance in 11 titles & we analyzed from SATA to PCIe 5.0 to see whether upgrading to a faster NVMe SSD would have an impact

Anthropic are really confident in Claude Code's auto mode, to the point that they are making it the default setting for new sessions in most Claude Code plans starting on August 14th.

Finance jobs just hit a 4-year low, but banks posted nearly 49,000 roles seeking new tech skills — Financial activities shed 14,000 jobs in July. Commercial bank postings seeking AI skills jumped by…

Full title: Finance jobs just hit a 4-year low, but banks posted nearly 49,000 roles seeking new tech skills — Financial activities shed 14,000 jobs in July. Commercial bank postings seeking AI skills jumped by 51 percent

U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative and, with Arcee, Unveils Genesis-Science-1 — Its First Open-Weight Model for Scientific Research

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1321502/u-s-department-of-energy-launches-the-genesis-open-models-initiative-and-with-arcee-unve

DeepMind's WeatherNext model achieves breakthrough forecasting cyclones

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1322510/deepmind-s-weathernext-model-achieves-breakthrough-forecasting-cyclones

As AI ‘therapists’ dish out advice, California lawmakers try to set some limits

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1323150/as-ai-therapists-dish-out-advice-california-lawmakers-try-to-set-some-limits

• The use of chatbots has exploded over the last two years, and people are increasingly turning to them for mental health advice.

• SB 903 would ban advertising chatbots as therapy and add rules for AI use in formal health spaces.

SpaceX’s Terafab will rely on natural gas power plants, not Tesla solar panels

U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

‘Teachers Are Going to Hate It’: Internal documents show how tech executives captured children’s attention