@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-06-25 22:16:25
Barclays will block crypto purchases made with credit cards starting June 27, citing volatility and lack of consumer protections, following other UK lenders (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)
https://www.theblock.co/post/359619/barcl…
@servelan@newsie.social2025-06-23 14:58:02
"Trump demanded that energy producers keep down oil prices following US military strikes on Iran"
Trump Warns Against Rising Oil Prices Following Iran Attack | Financial Post
https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/trump-warns-against-rising-oil-prices-following-iran-attack
@cdarwin@c.im2025-07-24 23:26:26
Fresh from intimidating ABC and CBS with meritless lawsuits,
Donald Trumpis suing Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal reporters who broke the story of a lewd birthday message for Jeffrey Epstein.
But, unlike with the frivolous allegations against the big broadcasters,
there’s clearly a fact of the matter here:
an authentic letter either exists or it does not;
-- and there is plenty to be revealed in the process of finding out.
Trump’s time-proven …
@seeingwithsound@mas.to2025-06-24 11:21:53
Poster No 857: Plastic changes in the occipital regions during pitch perception associate with blindness onset age; "Specifically, the primary visual cortex remains engaged in pitch processing tasks following late blindness." https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15641972
@berlinbuzzwords@floss.social2025-05-23 14:00:11
Join Andrew Musselman and Trevor Grant as they present the latest developments in Mahout's new quantum compute layer, Qumat. They will provide an overview of the project, explain why Qumat was developed, and demonstrate its current capabilities. They will also present a demo of Qumat in action and conclude with calls to action for researchers and engineers who are interested in using and contributing to the project.
Learn more:
@arXiv_astrophSR_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-06-25 09:43:00
Role of non-thermal processes in the quiescent and active millimeter spectrum of a young M-dwarf
Atul Mohan, Peter H. Hauschildt, Birgit Fuhrmeister, Surajit Mondal, Vladimir Airapetian, Sven Wedemeyer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19779
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-07-25 10:57:58
Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-06-23 17:40:53
Filing: Elon Musk's lawyers say he "does not use a computer" after OpenAI accused Musk of not complying with the discovery process in his lawsuit against OpenAI (Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-computer-sam-altman/
@cdarwin@c.im2025-06-20 17:30:34
Swalwell: You were promised lower prices on day one. How many of you are feeling those lower prices?
You were promised an end to all wars on day one. How many of you have seen an end to those wars?
Donald Trump is 0 for 150. He made those promises on day one—and now we’re on day 150.
https://
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-07-24 10:22:15
Indie open gaming marketplace Itch.io abruptly deindexes NSFW content from its browse and search pages after payment processors raised concerns, following Steam (Jess Weatherbed/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/712890/itch-removes-adult-nsfw…
