Technology

With OpenAI’s memory upgrade, ChatGPT can recall everything you’ve ever shared with it, indefinitely. Similarly, Google has opened the context window with “Infini-attention,” letting large language models (LLMs) reference infinite inputs with zero memory loss. And in consumer-facing tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, this means persistent, personalized memory across conversations, unless you manually intervene.

The New York Times filed a copyright lawsuit against Perplexity, joining other publishers using legal action as leverage to force AI companies into licensing deals that compensate content creators.

Bonus video of Swiss-German in the wild included. If you think German sounds harsh, you'll love the Zuerich dialect. At least it's all done in sing-song fashion, as is called for.

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Utah passed a law allowing balcony solar, which is already extremely popular in Germany. Over 30 states are working on bills to do the same, and once there are 5 states, the market is expected to entice competition. The technology of plug in solar has already proven to be perfectly safe at wattages as low as 800 watts per household, and the 1200 watt limit in Utah appears to be just as safe and diminimus.

OpenAI may soon be forced to explain why it deleted a pair of controversial datasets composed of pirated books, and the stakes could not be higher.

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Ah, yes ... back to the scare tactics that the only use of a VPN is to access CSAM.

My only question is, "What took them so long?"

Salary and remuneration will be commensurate with experience and aligned with industry standards. You will be employed as an independent contractor

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/38470875

In my search for good keyboard that support AMOLED mode, I found out about FlorisBoard which looks perfect to me. It even supports Halmak Keyboard Layout, which I didn't expect to find at any Android Keyboard.

We recently looked at Tiny vinyl, a new miniature vinyl single format developed through a collaboration between a toy industry veteran and the world’s largest vinyl record manufacturer. The 4-inch singles are pressed in a process nearly identical to standard 12-inch LPs or 7-inch singles, except everything is smaller. They have a standard-size spindle hole and play at 33⅓ RPM, and they hold up to four minutes of music per side.

I wanted to share this and really wasn't sure what community was best. Tech seemed closest...

TL;DR: Mozilla is killing localization on Support Mozilla, overwriting articles written by humans with machine generated translations. Although Mozilla knows that their AI doesn’t localize or adhere to style guides, Mozilla is going live with it anyway. I thank locale leaders and localizers for their tireless efforts. Locale leaders seem to be obviated by AI, and Mozilla has nothing to say about it.

Remember when high-performance computing always seemed to be about x86? Exactly a decade ago, almost nine in ten supercomputers in the TOP500 (a list of the beefiest machines maintained twice yearly by academics) were Intel-based. Today, it's down to 57 percent.

Whether I like it or not, the first line of my obituary will probably be that I was the founding editor of Gawker.com, the flagship site of Gawker Media, a sprawling blog network that was put out of business by Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan in 2016. Nick Denton and I started Gawker in 2002 and I left in late 2003 to go to New York Magazine, so I missed some of Gawker’s greatest hits and biggest misses, but the early ‘00s were what I now think of as the heyday of blogging. (Talking Points Memo was started in 2000.)

Black Friday seems to get longer with every passing year, but even when a day becomes a week (or several) it still signals the holiday shopping season is in full gear with Christmas looming a month in the distance. As the trees go up, decorations adorn every facet of our communities, and Christmas music begins to feel inescapable, many people are wondering what to buy for their friends and loved ones — and it’s not uncommon for some those gifts to end up being some hyped-up tech product.

Cars used to be entirely mechanical objects. With hard work and expertise, basically any old vehicle could be restored and operated: On YouTube, you can watch a man drive a 1931 Alvis to McDonald’s. But the car itself was stuck in time. If the automaker added a feature to the following year’s model, you just didn’t get it. Things have changed. My Model 3 has few dials or buttons; nearly every feature is routed through the giant central touch screen. It’s not just Tesla: Many new cars—and especially electric cars—are now stuffed with software, receiving over-the-air updates to fix bugs, tweak performance, or add new functionality.

Malaysia plans to ban social media for users under the age of 16 starting from next year, joining a growing list of countries choosing to limit access to digital platforms due to concerns about child safety.

Poland’s Ministry of Digital Affairs is working on legislation that could require all government bodies to provide RSS or Atom channels on their websites. If adopted, the regulation would place Poland among the first EU countries to introduce such a legal mandate.

The average American now holds onto their smartphone for 29 months, according to a recent survey by Reviews.org, and that cycle is getting longer. The average was around 22 months in 2016.

Starting Friday, X users were able to use a new “about this account” feature to see what country accounts were based in. And for many “America First” posters, this revealed an inconvenient truth, as reported by The Daily Beast.

If you’ve been around, you might’ve noticed that our relationships with programs have changed.

Seven years since our first top 200 common passwords list, we’ve witnessed how credential trends have changed — and what has remained the same. Each year, we rediscover people’s tendency to opt for weak passwords that prioritize convenience over security.

Yeah, that'll happen.

When the Trump administration gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to a massive database of information about Medicaid recipients in June 2025, privacy and medical justice advocates sounded the alarm. They warned that the move could trigger all kinds of public health and human rights harms.

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In December 2020, when the FTC filed its case, I predicted that the government would lose due to its shoddy market definition. At that time, TikTok already had 800 million users, and the entire consumer internet was remaking itself around the company’s innovations. Citing internal company documents that Platformer had obtained, I noted that after TikTok was banned in India, Instagram use surged — clear evidence that the companies were and remain close rivals.

Eugen Rochko, CEO and founder of decentralized social network Mastodon, is stepping down after nearly a decade at the helm and walking away with a sizable exit payment.

Tech companies have become such a central part of the Irish economy that we’re now alarmingly reliant on the income they bring, even if the benefits are rarely felt by the average citizen. Since the mid-2010s, the relocation of intellectual property assets by companies like Apple to Ireland has grossly distorted its GDP — to the extent that Ireland is often left out of EU GDP calculations to avoid skewing the data. This kind of “economic froth,” as named by Cliff Taylor in a 2023 Irish Times article, creates an unhealthy reliance on America’s continued offshore manufacturing of products like tech and pharma — a situation that is now under serious risk as the Department of Finance forecasts that the Trump administration’s mooted tariffs could cost Ireland €18 billion in lost trade.

Mastodon’s creator, Eugen Rochko, is stepping down as CEO of the open source, decentralized social network and X rival as part of the organization’s transition to a nonprofit structure, announced at the beginning of the year. The change is Mastodon’s most significant leadership overhaul to date, and one designed to ensure Mastodon’s longevity.

Took down lazysoci.al too 🥺

https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/

After stepping down as Amazon’s CEO four years ago, Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder and former chief executive of the online shopping company, is going to be a CEO again. This time, Bezos has appointed himself co-CEO of an AI startup called Project Prometheus, the New York Times reported, citing anonymous sources.

When then Tropical Storm Melissa was churning south of Haiti, Philippe Papin, a National Hurricane Center (NHC) meteorologist, had confidence it was about to grow into a monster hurricane.

WhatsApp is close to rolling out third-party chat support across the European Union, as part its compliance with the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA)...

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First, they came for the editors. And I was an editor, so I was fucked.

The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms.

Falling in love with A.I. is no longer science fiction. A recent study found that one in five American adults has had an intimate encounter with a chatbot; on Reddit, r/MyBoyfriendisAI has more than 85,000 members championing human-A.I. connections, with many sharing giddy recollections of the day their chatbot proposed marriage.

VPN company CyberGhost just sent Cloudflare a bogus DMCA takedown demand, claiming that our article about their last bogus copyright takedown demand, somehow violates their copyright.

Worth noting ... the feds are coming for archival sites.