Tootfinder

"You can tell what happened — Google promised iNaturalist free money if they would just do something, anything, that had some generative AI in it. iNaturalist forgot why people contribute at all, and took the cash."
(Original title: Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage)

Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage
iNaturalist is a website that crowdsources pictures of plants and animals to help identify species. Its tagline is “A Community for Naturalists.” iNaturalist is administered by its own small charit…

It is wild that Nest Hub, which is supposed to be able to work as an alarm clock, is completely impossible to interact with if Internet stops working. Even wilder: If an alarm is set and it goes off while there is no Internet, there is NO WAY TO TURN IT OFF. You literally have to unplug the bugger to get it to stop. Incredibly incompetent design from Google.

Ugh, stupid Google Maps. I'm trying to get to the knife store in Richmond, and it says to make a sharp left on Cutting Blvd. If I could do that, I wouldn't *need* my knife sharpened.

News companies have been warned of a “devastating impact” on online audiences
as search results are replaced by AI summaries,
after a new study claimed it caused up to 80% fewer clickthroughs.
https://www.thegu…

PRACtical: Subarray-Level Counter Update and Bank-Level Recovery Isolation for Efficient PRAC Rowhammer Mitigation
Ravan Nazaraliyev, Saber Ganjisaffar, Nurlan Nazaraliyev, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18581

PRACtical: Subarray-Level Counter Update and Bank-Level Recovery Isolation for Efficient PRAC Rowhammer Mitigation
As DRAM density increases, Rowhammer becomes more severe due to heightened charge leakage, reducing the number of activations needed to induce bit flips. The DDR5 standard addresses this threat with in-DRAM per-row activation counters (PRAC) and the Alert Back-Off (ABO) signal to trigger mitigation. However, PRAC adds performance overhead by incrementing counters during the precharge phase, and recovery refreshes stalls the entire memory channel, even if only one bank is under attack. We prop…

iCloud Private Relay: Google blockiert temporär Zugriffe von Apple-Geräten
Wer Apples IP-Verschleierungsdienst verwendet, bekommt gelegentlich Ärger mit Google-Diensten. Ruft man diese zu häufig oder zu schnell auf, wird geblockt.

Warum ich seit kurzem meine Lesezeichen wieder auf Vordermann bringe (nachdem Google als Suchmaschine längst raus ist)...
« Don’t bother asking Google if a product is worth it; it will likely recommend buying whatever you show interest in—even if the product doesn’t exist. »
https://housefresh.com/beware-of…

Beware of the Google AI salesman and its cronies
Exposing the overly salesy AI Overviews that will push you to buy bad products and exploring the system making it possible.

I wonder if one day someone can explain to me why Google thinks the fact that I am in a foreign country means I immediately am fluent in that country's language, and prefer it over English or my native language. I mean, there's an Accept-Language header, I think it's older than Google.

My #CenturyLink DSL Internet is down... except for one computer where I'd previously configured DNS to use Google's Public DNS. I'm assuming this is somehow key to why it still works. I've tried to reproduce this onto another computer, but no luck so far.

Google Cloud has competed well against AWS in AI, attracting business from The Browser Company, Safe Superintelligence, Thinking Machines Lab, and OpenAI (Kevin McLaughlin/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-finds-crack-amazons-c…

Google Finds a Crack in Amazon’s Cloud Dominance
Earlier this year, when The Browser Company was looking for a cloud provider to power the artificial intelligence features in a web browser it was developing, the startup’s leaders asked Amazon Web Services if it could handle the work. Winning this business was important to AWS. The Browser ...