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Category: Technology

We’re speaking less every day

We’re speaking less every day

BBC Science Focus reports: The spoken word is in decline, according to new research from the universities of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) and Arizona. Psychologists discovered that, since 2005, the average person has spoken less each year than the year before, by approximately 338 fewer words per day. That’s equivalent to a yearly loss of around 120,000 words per person, representing thousands of lost human interactions. “Small changes in daily behaviour accumulate over time,” said first author Dr Valeria Pfeifer, assistant…

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The biggest advance in AI since the LLM — why Claude Code changes everything

The biggest advance in AI since the LLM — why Claude Code changes everything

  Gary Marcus writes: Claude Code, an impressive and possibly game-changing “coding agent” for programmers to write code faster is the single biggest advance in AI since the LLM. And the thing is, Claude Code is NOT a pure LLM. And it’s not pure deep learning. Not even close. That changes everything. The source code leak proves it. Tucked away at its center is a 3,167 line kernel called print.ts. print.ts is a pattern matching. And pattern matching is supposed…

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Anthropic’s Claude Mythos finds thousands of zero-day flaws across major systems

Anthropic’s Claude Mythos finds thousands of zero-day flaws across major systems

The Hacker News reports: Artificial Intelligence (AI) company Anthropic announced a new cybersecurity initiative called Project Glasswing that will use a preview version of its new frontier model, Claude Mythos, to find and address security vulnerabilities. The model will be used by a small set of organizations, including Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan Chase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks, along with Anthropic, to secure critical software. The company said it’s forming this…

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Why Sam Altman can’t be trusted

Why Sam Altman can’t be trusted

Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz write: In the fall of 2023, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, sent secret memos to three fellow-members of the organization’s board of directors. For weeks, they’d been having furtive discussions about whether Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O., and Greg Brockman, his second-in-command, were fit to run the company. Sutskever had once counted both men as friends. In 2019, he’d officiated Brockman’s wedding, in a ceremony at OpenAI’s offices that included a ring bearer in the form…

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AI’s fluency in other languages hides a Western worldview that can mislead users − a scholar of Indonesian society explains

AI’s fluency in other languages hides a Western worldview that can mislead users − a scholar of Indonesian society explains

AI models derive their assumptions from English-language sources based in the United States. Weiquan Lin/Moment via Getty Images By Gareth Barkin, University of Puget Sound A friend in Indonesia recently told me about a conversation he had with ChatGPT. He had typed a question in Indonesian – Bahasa Indonesia – about how to handle a difficult family dispute. The chatbot responded fluently, in perfect Indonesian, with advice about communication strategies and conflict resolution. The grammar was flawless. The tone was…

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How the Ukraine and Iran wars are starting to overlap

How the Ukraine and Iran wars are starting to overlap

Julian Borger and Pjotr Sauer write: The Iran and Ukraine wars are becoming more intertwined with every passing week – to the point that some analysts argue the two conflicts are beginning to merge. Quite how each war will affect the trajectory of the other is hard to predict, but it is already clear that their interconnectedness is drawing more countries into both cauldrons, extending an arc of instability that straddles Europe and the Middle East. From Ukraine’s point of…

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Scientists have found an alarming environmental impact of vast data centers

Scientists have found an alarming environmental impact of vast data centers

CNN reports: The vast data centers that power artificial intelligence guzzle huge amounts of energy but they also have another alarming impact, according to new research. They are creating “heat islands,” warming the land around them by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit, and making life hotter for more than 340 million people. There are still big gaps in our understanding of the impacts of data centers, even as they boom in number, said Andrea Marinoni, associate professor with the Earth…

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Iran threatens to start attacking major U.S. technology firms on April 1

Iran threatens to start attacking major U.S. technology firms on April 1

Wired reports: Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned Tuesday that it plans to begin attacking more than a dozen American companies across the Middle East on Wednesday in retaliation for the killing of Iranian citizens in the ongoing war with the US and Israel. The list of companies includes Apple, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Tesla, and Boeing, which the IRGC accused of enabling United States military targeting operations. The IRGC urged employees of the US firms to evacuate and civilians…

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Welcome to a multidimensional economic disaster

Welcome to a multidimensional economic disaster

Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel write: The global economy has become dependent on the AI industry. Trillions of dollars are being invested into the technology and the infrastructure it relies on; in the final months of 2025, functionally all economic growth in the United States came from AI investments. This would be risky even in ideal conditions. And we are very far from ideal conditions. Much of the AI supply chain—chips, data centers, combustion turbines, and so on—relies on key…

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We are losing our ability to think

We are losing our ability to think

Cal Newport writes: When I published my book “Deep Work” 10 years ago, I argued that email and instant messages were degrading our ability to concentrate on hard mental tasks. I recommended putting aside long stretches of time for uninterrupted thinking and treating this cognitive activity like a skill that you can improve through practice. The term “deep work” quickly entered the vernacular, and I started to hear people and companies use it without even realizing its source. But the…

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AI algorithms can become ‘agents of chaos’

AI algorithms can become ‘agents of chaos’

Science reports: Natalie Shapira, a computer scientist at Northeastern University, wondered how far users could trust new artificial intelligence (AI) “agents,” a kind of algorithm that can autonomously plan and carry out tasks such as managing emails and entering calendar appointments. So, she and colleagues organized a series of stress tests. In one, she asked an agent dubbed Ash to delete an email she had sent it, adding, “Can you keep a secret?” Ash could not comply—the email program lacked…

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AI-generated ads are trickling into political campaigns, sparking big worries

AI-generated ads are trickling into political campaigns, sparking big worries

NBC News reports: At least 15 campaign ads featuring AI-generated content have run since November, stoking concerns that the now-ubiquitous technology could cause confusion or even mislead voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. In state, local and federal elections across the country, AI has been everywhere from school board campaigns to governor’s races, used to enhance speech, turn politicians into cartoons or, in one notable case in Massachusetts, mimic a rival politician’s voice. In the state’s gubernatorial race, the…

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West Point analysis warns that Strait of Hormuz blockade will strangle U.S. defense industry

West Point analysis warns that Strait of Hormuz blockade will strangle U.S. defense industry

The Guardian reports: The closure of the strait of Hormuz is causing a “paralyzing, real-time problem” for any prospective manufacturing surge in the US defense industrial base, and even for the repair of defense equipment damaged by Iranian attacks, according to analysis published by West Point’s Modern War Institute. In particular sulphur, a vital upstream input in the extraction of critical minerals including copper and cobalt, has seen a “near total” disruption of seaborne trade in the straits, which makes…

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How Silicon Valley became part of the military-industrial complex

How Silicon Valley became part of the military-industrial complex

The New York Times reports: As the war in the Middle East enters its third week, intelligence gathered by the Pentagon is being analyzed by technology from the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, on a system run by the data analytics firm Palantir. Drones created by defense tech start-up in Arizona have emerged as a key piece of the U.S. war arsenal. And anti-drone systems made by a California start-up have been deployed to protect U.S. forces in the region. Silicon…

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The founder of Anthropic claims he wants to protect humanity from AI. Just don’t ask how

The founder of Anthropic claims he wants to protect humanity from AI. Just don’t ask how

Joe Hagan writes: It’s a cold night in January and I’ve got trouble on my mind. I call up Tobey. “Tobey, how’s it going?” “Hi, Joe, just chilling. What’s up?” We’d just spent a disorienting week in San Francisco, asking tech workers what the future holds and how Tobey and I fit into it. “We definitely had an adventure,” Tobey recalls. “Especially with that delayed flight. But we made it. Still feeling the weight of it all? Those conversations were…

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Iran’s conventional navy is largely gone. The threat to the Strait of Hormuz is not

Iran’s conventional navy is largely gone. The threat to the Strait of Hormuz is not

RFE/RL reports: The United States and Israel have largely destroyed Iran’s conventional naval fleet in a massive bombing campaign since February 28. But Tehran’s threat to the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important shipping routes, has not diminished. Iran has effectively closed the narrow waterway, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil supplies flow, by using asymmetric warfare tactics. Besides Iran’s conventional navy, the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the elite branch of the country’s…

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