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Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify Shopify are moving from React Native back to separate Swift and Kotlin codebases for their native apps, for the exact reason you would expect: We decided to switch from native to React Native in 2020 for three reasons: Stop bui...

A URL is a technical thing: a hostname, a path, a port, an origin, some query parameters, etc. But a link is a cultural thing: an invitation, a citation, a gift, a shortcut, a connection. All from a simple idea: here’s a thing that points to another thing, off you go! We’ve ...

AI is already causing harms, there are are many real risks, but constant focus on absurd end-of-the-world fantasies has made the situation worse

AI-generated work can look finished without being understood. That uncertainty erodes trust, slows reviews, and leaves colleagues doing the missing work.

min-release-age, minimum-release-age, -Zmin-publish-age, cooldown.

The Greek letter β (beta) and the German letter ß (eszett) look similar, especially in some fonts. Now suppose an OCR program sees some character that could be a beta or could be an eszett. It could calculate some kind of distance between between the pixel pattern of the character and the pixel patterns of […]

The post Bayesian OCR first appeared on John D. Cook.

For years, I've had a test-card at the start of my slides. Before I start my talk, I can immediately see if the aspect ratio is wrong, colours are off, or any other visual issues with the presentation. A few years ago I was invited to give a talk and was assured that the venue was set up for audio as well as video. I dutifully filled my slides with with demo videos containing sound. None of…

It was 22 years ago this week, on Semptember 8, 2003, that the Recording Industry Association of America started suing individuals for pirating MP3 files. One of the people caught up in a lawsuit was a 12-year-old honors student who

The post When the RIAA sued a 12-year-old for MP3 piracy appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Matt Mullenweg takes an involuntary leave of absence from Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Let’s hope he uses his time away thoughtfully.

A recent resignation tweet from an Anthropic researcher has everyone talking about the AI apocalypse again. Among other things, he said: The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Many people found it hard to believe that A...

It's random, really.

The post What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The transhuman future vs. the AGI future.

"For safety, don't click suspicious links" Meanwhile, most organization's login flow redirects through: # This is a real example, but I've changed the names to avoid pointing fingers https://www.[name of company].com/squawk/ https://login.[name of company].com/ https://...

Today, we're releasing a demo of WeWorm, the first zero-click worm to spread through WeChat calls across iOS and Android. [...]

The victim does not need to answer the call, or interact with their phone at all. Even if they do answer, they hear nothing, and the exploit still succeeds. [...]

Working with AI, our team found the bug and wrote the first remote code execution (RCE) exploit in about two days. Building the worm took one more week.

A worm at this scale used to be the kind of thing that took a larger team months. AI can already do most of the work here. Our team provided the judgment about what to target and how to test it safely.

— Calif Research, WeWorm

Tags: ai-security-research, ai, llms, security, generative-ai

Tool: .blend URL Viewer I'm continuing to have a lot of fun with GPT-6 Astra and Blender (see my TIL). As a big fan of the Imperial Fabergé Easter eggs, I've always thought it would be fun to make some new ones that celebrate popular culture. Yesterday I decided to t...

A belated writeup of a project I did in 2018, to scale the puzzle game 2048 down to a smaller board where it could be exhaustively analysed, and learn from the results.

Pushing for transparency

This was so casually uttered by LG executives in their sales pitch to advertising companies. We own the glass. What they mean is, they own your tv. They own everything on it. You may have paid for the box, but they own the glass. They can run anything they want on it, and...

I believe the time has come

I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The...